I know that on first glance the price for hiring and their upkeep cost seems prohibitive – 5P to hire and 50G an hour upkeep at level 80+ though it does scale with level – but it’s really not. In the month+ that they’ve been out I’ve pretty much had one up on all of my characters and I’ve still banked well over 200p just from selling loot to the merchant – not even trying to broker spells and such anymore. You’re much more likely to get a chest drop with a Merc since you’re technically in a group so you tend to get a lot more high value loot to sell.

So if you’re interested here’s a list of the various classes and where to find them:

• Qeynos Harbor :  Wizard, Paladin, Troubador, Swashbuckler, Templar, Monk
• Freeport: Warlock, Assassin, Brigand, Dirge, Inquisitor, Guardian
• Neriak: Shadowknight, Necromancer
• Gorowyn: Berserker, Defiler (no cure on abilities)
• Kelethin: Ranger, Warden
• Halas: Conjurer, Mystic

Classes no merc available: Beastlord, Bruiser, Fury, Coercer, Illusionist

In Qeynos they’re in Fish’s in Qeynos Harbor, easy enough to sneak in the backdoor if you’re evil. The only one that might prove a problem to hire is the Pally since he’s standing outside.

In Freeport they’re at the tavern in – I believe it’s East FP – it’s right on the water and there is a bell that drops you on the back porch. Again, easy enough to get into if you’re good and want to try one of those classes.

In Gorowyn they’re right up the first ramp from the lower level and of course the Sarnak don’t care about alignment as much.

In Halas they’re in one of the wooden roofed buildings – not the stone ones – that look like great halls and, much like Gorowyn, the guards will ignore you.

In Kelethin they’re in Josalyns Pub and, again, the guards here ignore you.

In Neriak they’re just past the first gate at the entrance from Darklight Woods. These are the two that will be toughest to get if you’re not evil since that gate is guarded by 2 level 85 epic x 2 raid mobs. It can be done if you have an evil friend that’s either a Conjurer with call of hero or has the call of veteran vet reward token. They just need to summon you to the area over by the forge and you should be able to hail them. Be careful though there is another x2 guard inside the tower that they’re standing outside of. If you need help getting to one of these try to hook up with Lore or myself and we’ll get someone over there to summon you.

The good news is that if you replace the merc with a different one for whatever reason they’ll be available in either Qeynos or Freeport depending on your alignment should you want to hire them back. This means you only have to do the whole sneak around thing once. If you do it at low enough level they’re even relatively cheap at 5s per hire at level 20. You could take a new character around and hire them all so that they’ll all be available as you level if you wanted. At higher levels this could be costly at 5p per hire but, as I said, you tend to make up the cash pretty quick (I know this probably won’t work for Reyder since he tends to squeeze every copper so hard that the guards have a warrant out for him for assault on Antonia’s likeness).

(Crossposted from Revellers.GnomeDepot.Net)

First, let me lay some groundwork.  Kendrick is the guild leader of a large raiding guild – a casual raiding guild, but still a raiding guild.  I’m the guild leader of a tiny friends-and-family casual guild.   While I led a few raids in EQ, I’ve yet to be on one in EQ2 in 5 years of playing, and I’m unlikely ever to be on one.  While I would enjoy doing the 12-man city raids, I have no interest in doing what it would take to turn my tiny guild into one large enough to do the 24-man raids, and I’m also not going to jump ship to a larger guild just to raid.  Besides – week nights the only night I stay up past 10:30 is the night I have a team game of Civ 4 with friends, and Saturday nights Sisca and I play D&D with those same friends.  I like my sleep too much to become a raider!  (For the record, I’m over 40 and I’ve been playing MMOs since EQ launched in ‘99)

As noted elsewhere on this blog, Sisca and I only recently reached 80, with his monk and druid, and my guardian.  Next highest in the guild is a 72 necromancer, followed by my 67 conjurer, and then a 62 berserker and a 60 wizard (who has been playing for about a month ).  Even ignoring time zones and varying work/D&D schedules, with those levels and classes we’re barely capable of grouping up for instances in, say, Tenebrous Tangle – we can’t yet do Kunark instances let alone TSO ones as a guild. 

I’m a hardcore-casual player – I play a lot of hours, I read blogs and the forums, I spend time figuring things out.  I play a guardian – I like being a tank, the guardian fits my image of Lore, and I’m a good tank.  If I was a min-maxer though I’d switch to the pally or the SK, as a guardian is best suited to raiding whilst they are more flexible in instances.    But, I also really don’t worry about ‘best’.   While I do choose AA’s that I think make sense for how I play, and my role, I don’t try to figure out what THE BEST setup is.  The alchemist had fallen behind in levels, so I went through a good chunk of the 60’s and 70’s using App1s and a handful of Adept 1s, getting App4s as he leveled – I certainly didn’t have Adept 3s, let alone Masters!    When we went to Kunark from LP at about 67 I was wearing the level 62 MC BP and legs, with a fairly random assortment of drops and quested gear for just about everything else, and frankly it stayed that way till we hit 78? and started doing the solo shard quests in Lavastorm….

I hear a couple consistent arguments against the RAs.  The first is simply that they are free, and you should have to ‘work’ for them.  I frankly admit that I don’t get that.  Firstly there IS a cost associated with them – the cost of 1) time waiting, 2) choices (which one do I get for which avatar) and 3) the cost of first acquiring the Adept 3.   Now, some say time is not a cost.  I would argue that in an online game, time is the only cost.  For anything.  Why don’t I raid?  First and foremost it comes down to time – I don’t have the time to build up a raiding guild, I don’t have the time to commit TO a raiding guild.   Why don’t I, and others, do more instances to ‘fish’ for those rare Master drops?  Time again!  It takes time to put together a good group, it takes time to run that instance, and it takes time, possibly weeks or months of it, to get ‘lucky’ on the drops.   That’s time I prefer spending other ways.  I love a good instance crawl!  I don’t love crawling the same instance night-after-night-after-night.   Any thing you or I do in a game is paid for with the coin of our time.  Our real life time.

The second argument is vaguely altruistic – I’m against it because it hurts the casual players! is the cry.  Strangely enough, I mostly hear this from people who aren’t casual players.   The truth is, it really doesn’t.  Yes, TSO was tuned around the assumption that the player base was Kunark geared, and with Adept 3s.  It’s thus not unlikely that Odus will be tuned around the assumption that the player base is in TSO gear (at least tier 1, possibly tier 2) and Masters.  You know what?  That’s nothing new.  It has always been that way.    Raiders shrug and move on, because they are in raid gear and fully Mastered.   That’s fine and fair enough  – and with the new way of doing raids moving forward, I in fact wonder if perhaps the ‘easy’ mode will be tuned without assuming full Masters and Shard two gear….  after all, part of the problem has always been tuning such that your average player could still do content while not boring your bleeding edge to death.

Here’s a key fact for my point of view though – when Odus releases it will be the first time I’ve ever been max level at the time an expansion was released to raise the level cap.   Amongst casual players happy about the addition of RAs, I suspect I’m not even unusual.  Maybe it will play out differently in that situation, I don’t know – what I do know is that I am used to each expansion being harder than the previous, with the expectation that I fully geared there, even though odds are I didn’t.   And somehow I always manage.  I’m not looking for Masters to give me an edge in Odus – I’m looking forward to them giving me an edge in older content!  I can’t do TSO and Kunark instances today – my hope is that with Masters my husband and I can, if not with both of us two boxing, then with our two other regularly-playing guildies when they finally catch up.

As to Odus?  Well, we’ll be in the beta and we’ll feedback about the concerns of the casual-players – the ones not in full tier 2 shard gear with a complete set of Masters, and hey, the devs might even listen.   Near as I can tell Rothgar is one of only a few who is a dedicated raider, amongst the others many seem to have playing experience that mirrors mine.   Failing that, well, there will be new spells, and new gear – if I level in TSO and Kunark to 85, and then venture into the first quests of Odus I suspect I’ll do just fine, and that would not exactly be a hardship.    There is still a ton of content in Norrath I have yet to complete!  And that is why, despite the arguments, I like the RAs.  Even ignoring the fact that I intend to use them for level-locked alts and my Ranger Down! barbie doll level 45ish ranger, not just (or even mainly) my main!

The first session we attended on Saturday was the premier of EverCracked, the Jace Hall documentary about the creation of EQ. I can strongly recommend that you grab a copy of this when it comes available it as hilarious as well as an interesting look at the people behind the game.

Next up was the Mechanics panel:

• There will be a major changes coming for ore/gems as well as tinkerers and transmuters, I believe this will be in GU53 but it may be after that. First of all they are changing which spells use what. The spells/combat arts will come from the gem nodes with the softmetal being used for Fighter/Scout and the gem being used for Priest Mage. The ore will now be used only for armor and weapon crafting and it’s not clear but I’m assuming that the loams will just be used for potions and tinkering. The other major change is that they’re moving the gem nodes onto their own spawn table so that they’re no longer sharing a spawn with the ore nodes – so if you harvest a gem another gem will spawn.
• After the change you’ll be able to be both a tinkerer and a transmuter on the same character. This is being done because Domino would like to move the majority of the adornment stuff to the transmuter and off of the various other tradeskillers. This will allow you to do adornments and tinkering no matter what your tradeskill class.
• The expansion will also see more tradeskill quests added, including more Far Seas quests. Domino also mentioned that she’s working on making the Odus tradeskill faction be more quest oriented than grindy as the Kunark faction was.
• No new spells will be added with the expansion you’ll just get upgrades to existing lines.
• Some spell effects, for example haste, are already approaching 100% so spells with those effects may get an additional effect added instead of just increasing the amount of haste.
• There won’t be a new AA tree but the Archetype and Class trees will be extended downward.
• The Class tree will be reorganized to look more like the Shadows tree from TSO to make it easier to extended and follow.
• Any new AA abilities will be innate and will trigger off of combos instead of requiring more room on your hotbar to use.
• Combining effects such as ranged crit and melee crit into just a crit effect. Along with this they are adjusting the crit multiplierers for the core job of the class. This will allow you to use a wider variety of weapons and armor as it will only have +Crit on it and your multiplier will make it appropriate for your class. In other words a piece of armor with +Crit on it will provide a bonus to both ranged and melee crit but a Ranger would get a bigger bonus to ranged while the Berserker will get the bonus to melee. This is especially helpful with jewelry.
• They would like to consolidate buffs where it makes sense, especially self only buffs. It doesn’t make sense for you to have to cast 3 different buffs on yourself when you could just cast one and be done with it. Standing around a buffing is NOT what they consider a fun part of the game.
• New items (and possibly retrofitted to older items as time permits) will have a rated value. This value will decrease as your level increases beyond the level of the item. This probably won’t play much of a factor until post level 50. This will encourage you to upgrade to newer gear as you level and it will also allow you to clearly see that a new piece of gear is better than your existing.

Class Balancing:
My notes are not as strong on this section for several reasons, mainly I was busy trying to follow what was going on and also, most of this stuff really only applies to raiders so I didn’t fully understand some of it as that’s not my interest.

Priest Balancing:

• Balance heals vs amount of health players have. Some of the heals are extremely weak for well geared players.
• Make sure every priest has the tools to do the job of main healer so that raids don’t feel they HAVE to have a plate healer.
• Evaluate the stun heals so that priests feel involved. These are useful spells that heal a large number of HP but stun the priest for a time basically taking them out of the fight. This isn’t fun so they want to come up with a different trade off that will keep the priest involved in the fight while still making them think about when to use the spell so they’re not just hitting it as fast as it refreshes.
• Improve heal over time for the druids. As it is on a raid the druid HoT sits behind the shamans ward and the clerics reactive heal so that by the time it actually triggers there is little for it to do. As such druids aren’t sought after for raid healers. What they’re looking at is saving the heal if the tick comes and the player isn’t damaged. Then on the next tick if the player is damaged they will get 2 ticks worth of healing. If the spell wears off without using all of its healing they’re looking at having that healing jump to another member of the group.

Rogue/Summoner:

• They want the rogue and summoner to work together for debuffing. The rogues will debuff melee while the summoners will debuff spells.
• They’re also looking at improving the scout pet for summoners so that they can actually stand in close to AoE mobs and survive long enough to be useful.
• Dumbfire pets ill be come a damage/debuff based attack spell and no longer a pet. I’m sure if you ask nicely you could get them to at least keep the pet spell effect for it but I don’t know

Bard/Chanter:

• Adjust key buffs to make group buffs raid wide so raids don’t feel the need to have multiple bards and enchanters just to keep each group buffed. This is part of trying to make all classes wanted on a raid, they need to free up spots for those other classes and not have 8 of 24 spots taken up by 2 archetypes.
• Also looking to allow limited casting of unique buffs (those you can only cast on 1 person at a time) being castable on 1 person per group on a raid.
• With these changes they’re also looking to balance support vs DPS. Again, this is trying to make all of the classes useful on a raid.

Fighter:

• Adjust taunt and hate gain.
• Consolidate block & deflection.
• Brawlers gain a clear advantage to the avoidance proxy buffs since they are the masters of avoidance.
• Improve the desireability of defensive stance.
• Balance defense and damage.

Sentinals Fate:

• There is a plan for the Mythical even though you’ll be outleveling it. They’re going to be adjusting effects so that you’ll want to use it even though there will be better weapons available. My take was that they’ll be adjusting it so that you’ll want to hang on to it for certain encounters.
• This will wrap up the Void story line and introduce a new villain
• It will also explain the change in the Erudites more fully.
• They will be adding to the Ratonga lore as well.
• The Hole will be coming back as a contested dungeon, the players seemed to really like this idea.
• There will also be a return of contested raid mobs, again the raiders really seemed to like this change.
]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/29/fan-faire-day-2-in-review/feed/ 3 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/26/fan-faire-day-1-in-review/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/26/fan-faire-day-1-in-review/#comments Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:59:52 +0000 Sisca http://www.gnomedepot.net/?p=136 We only managed to take in a couple of sessions today but, between them and the announcements from the keynote tonight there’s going to be a lot of new stuff coming for SoE games. I’m just going to go through my note book and give you the stuff that I remembered to write down along with some impressions.

The first session we made it to was a what’s in store for Legends of Norrath session. The big news was they’re coming out with a new expansion that will be the final part of the trilogy that started with the Ethernauts expansion. The goal of this trilogy was to provide some of the back story for what was going on in EQ2 with TSO so if you’re interested in the lore it might be worth it for you to play through the scenarios to get the story. They also mentioned that there would be 2 new loot cards, 1 each for EQ and EQ2. The EQ2 loot card will be a new frost themed mount that seemed to be on par stat wise with the mounts you can get from Lava. Looks wise it reminded me of the invite-a-friend horse but with a frost/ice skin. For EQ the loot card is a dragon illusion and they mean a real dragon – you know giant lizard with wings type of thing. I didn’t catch the stats but come on you can fly around as a dragon!

Next up was a session on how quests are built in EQ2. See Lore’s post below for most of the details. I will say that, having worked with Hero Engine – the engine being used in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – their design tool looked extremely flexible but it’s that flexibility that can allow the bugs to creep in. This is especially true the more complex the quest gets. They showed the dialog tree for the tradeskill tutorial and it looked like a plate of spaghetti with all of the interconnections between the nodes.

Next up was the EQ2 game mechanics session. Again Lore talks about that below but I’ll rehash my notes. First up they announced Achievements. As part of the achievement system they’re revamping the journal window to be side by side to allow a better display of information. They’re also revamping the Persona window so that they can show he info from achievements. Achievements will be things like kill 10,000 rats – much like the slayer quests of today which will be retroactively added to your achievements. There will also be exploration and tradeskill based achievements as well as potentially Class specific achievements such as heal 100 people. Achievements can also be “meta”. The example given was a test one called “Love the Humans but hate the Goblins” which you got if you completed both the “Hug 100 Humans” and the “Kill 100 Goblins” achievements. None of these will give you anything game changing. They’ll mostly be titles if anything though I do think they might consider adding a house item for some things. They did say that there are no plans for giving a buff like rewards such as you get from the Lore & Legend series. These are supposed to be about bragging rights and not something that you feel you need to do to make your character better. Oh, and I’ve heard several people mention that EQ2 isn’t WoW or that they stole this from WoW etc. Remember WoW took this from XBox Live and they did it for a reason, players love it. The good news is if it’s not your cup of tea there’s nothing that say you have to participate other than by accidently completing an achievement. Oh, and the best news is that these are per account not per character since the idea is to show the achievements of the player. This means that if you get the kill 10,000 orcs achievement you only have to do it once. So, yes, it’s possible you’ll see a level 1 running around with a title that indicates he’s slain every raid boss in Kunark but so what, the player behind that level 1 earned that title.

The second big announcement was the Auto-Mentoring system that Lore described below. The interesting part was the idea of putting together a group of people and all auto-mentoring down to say 30 and doing one of the lower level raids. Since level 80′s mentored down to 30 are going to be way over powered that group could do 2x raid encounters and possibly even 4x. This will allow you to complete those encounters at the appropriate level.

Bullet points that I gathered from the keynote tonight:

• At launch the Station Cash system only had about 5% of the players use it in both EQ and EQ2. Now about 20% of EQ players make use of it and 30% of EQ2 players.
• A new Station Cash feature will be the partnership with HP to deliver art prints of the in game artwork to your home. They plan on having the ability to buy prints of many of the current in game paintings in July and in the near future add the ability for you to get a print of your character as well.
• Another addition to Station Cash will be the ability to do an automated server transfer for $25. This should go live in 2 weeks.
• They should announce 4 Million registered users for FreeRealms next week.
• FreeRealms is adding full progression for both Demolition Derby and Race driver professions. This will include quests and equipment. Also adding the ability to customize your car so putting in garages as well.
• New soccer mini game is coming as well. It’s no FIFA but it looked like a decent arcade soccer game.
• FreeRealms TCG is adding a Card Creator system that will allow you to create a card featuring your avatar. You’ll then be able to get 10 copies of he physical card, each with a claim code, that you can give away to your friends so they can use your card in the digital game as well as the physical game.
• SW:G will be adding some user generated content as well. The Star Wars chronicle system will allow you to create player quests that feature the Iconic characters such as Luke and Vader.
• Everyone was expecting the EQ2 expansion was going to be Vellious, boy were we off base. Looks like it’s going to be Odus instead. Hopefully they’ve done something to improve lighting in Tox Forrest but other than that I’m looking forward to checking out Stonebrunt again. Wonder if The Hole is still there.

Any questions please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try and answer them.

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/26/fan-faire-day-1-in-review/feed/ 3 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/26/fan-faire-eq-2-edition/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/26/fan-faire-eq-2-edition/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:45:29 +0000 Loredena http://www.gnomedepot.net/?p=134 I attended two EQ2 sessions at Fan Faire so far today.  The first was on quest mechanics, the second on more-general game mechanics.   What was interesting in the first was watching the process of rewriting a quest — in this case, that really annoying open-the-gate quest in Thundering Steppes is being rewritten!  No longer must you know Halasian, nor come only during the day, to earn the right to come and go as you please.  Further, the story line makes more sense, AND does not require you to lower your faction with the centaurs!   Instead you’ll collect guard tower reports, find a box of coins (look under the sofa!) and kill a highwayman causing problems, all to make the road safer.     For how the quests themselves are built, I’m afraid you had to be there, or talk to someone better at conveying it then me.   suffice it to say that while flexible, the tool IS still by its nature limiting in what can be done.   There was one point of interest though — there is a desire within the dev team to add other ways of advancing/completing quests that is not so dependent upon kill-10-rat mechanics.  This will require rework of the tool, as well as some gameplay mechanics, but they seem to be keen to do something there.

From the game-play mechanics session came announcements of, yes, new mechanics!  Planned for LU 53 (which is targetted for September according to Brenlo):

1) auto-mentoring!  yes, you will be able to talk to someone in your home city and choose a x0 or x5 level to be mentored down to, automatically, so you can go out and complete those quests at the appropriate level without having to find someone to mentor.   So as not to discourage ‘real’ mentoring, you won’t get that 3 times increase in AA experience, but it otherwise will work the same way.  And, should you find someone to mentor while you are automentoring, you can end it, and switch to mentoring a player — they are hoping this will get more people out in the lower zones, but appropriately leveled.  Furthermore, they plan to add some missions (obtainable at level 80 only, sadly) which will require that you be at a specific level to complete them, thus utilizing the new system.

2) the current achievement system is being renamed to Alternate Advancement, or AA to make way for a brand new achievement system!  This will be account based, not character specific, as it is intended to be viewed as the achievements of a given player, not character — they compared it to XBox Live Achievements (and yes, I see the irony .  So, you will see achievements for things like kill 1000 goblins (which will retroactively play off the slayer counts) but also for exploration, completing a zone, crafting 100 tables or other similar items.    There will be meta achievements (so for instance, finish a zone, followed by finish an expansion) and achievements that are either cumulative across alts (the kill rats quests can be done by any combination of alts) or require something be done by multiple characters (get 3 to 80 for instance).  Having achievements be across the account gives the devs more freedom for class-specific achievements they said, as you were likely to have ONE character who could meet it.  They also didn’t want people to feel forced to get the achievement on every character.  Also, as part of this both the quest journal and the persona window will be revamped.

3) raid scaling — new raids (not existing ones, unfortunately) will be set up to have ‘tiers’ of difficulty, on a per encounter/boss mob level, that will be handled in a lore-appropriate fashion (not a popup select difficulty).   So, a smaller, inexperienced/undergeared guild could choose to take the zone, or just a specific encounter on ‘easy mode’ while the top teir well-geared guilds can opt for heroic/uberhard mode.   Rewards will scale accordingly, but this should both permit greater utilization of content (they want more people to see the zones and experience the lore) and the ability to work your way up as a guild through the difficulty level of a raid.

There were a lot of hints about forthcoming announcements as well, but nothing specific.

On a completely unrelated note, before the sessions I had an chance to talk to Kaitheel and tell him how much I love the live events.  He is very enthusiastic, happy to talk, and young     He did share a few tidbits though — Tinkerfest will be 9 days long, to include 2 weekends.   Nights of the Dead will likely be extended from last year’s 2 weeks to 2.5 weeks this year.  Also, having learned that players hate to have things removed, the Icy Keep will return at Frostfell! even though that dragon is likely to have shown up elsewhere in the meantime….

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/06/26/fan-faire-eq-2-edition/feed/ 1 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/24/ding/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/24/ding/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:53:43 +0000 Sisca http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/24/ding/ FINALLY!



Almost 4 1/2 years after launch and I’ve got my first max level character. In fact this is my first max level character in 10 years of playing MMO’s.

Even scarier is that the next day:



Acsis only took me almost 3 years to cap.

Shortly after that Lore also managed to ding 80, I’m not sure what her played time is but I did manage to snag a screen shot of her ding



I also managed to get Sisca to 80 in Alchemy over the weekend so now I just need to get Acsis 10 more levels of Tailoring and I’ll go from 10 years of no characters at any level cap to 2 characters with both tradeskills and adventuring levels capped.

We also started doing the daily quest for Void Shards and managed to get the first 2 pieces and by the end of the week we’ll have the third. I think our next goal is to get Lore’s mage caught up and I wouldn’t mind getting my ranger leveled so we have a scout class to give us some versatility. I’d also like to spend some time mentoring guildies to see if we can put together a group and maybe start in on some of the TSO instances. I also want to get the crafting epic done with Sisca and Acsis is about halfway through the harvesting cloak so he’d like to finish that off as well.

So still plenty left to do and I haven’t even started in on my other 12 alts

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2009/04/24/ding/feed/ 3 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/23/robot-wars/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/23/robot-wars/#comments Sun, 23 Nov 2008 16:42:23 +0000 Sisca
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http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/23/robot-wars/ Friday night Lore had to babysit a server upgrade so she wasn’t really going to be able to devote her full attention to gaming but she did want to get some play time in. We decided this would be a perfect opportunity to check out the new tradeskill instances from TSO. She could craft and if something needed her attention it wouldn’t be a big deal for her to stop for a few minutes.

Since she hadn’t really gotten any of her other tradeskillers through the introductory quest line in the Moors she brought along Serrenial, her 80 Provisioner. This matched up well with Sisca, 67 Alchemist (Sage line), and Acsis, 52 Tailor (Outfitter line), giving us coverage of all 3 of the base skill lines. So off we went to isle of Mara.

Apparently the Gnomes in Steamfont were having an issue and could use the help of some skilled crafters so Acsis fired up a portal and we headed off to see what we could do to help. When we arrived at Gnomeland Security we spent several minutes running around looking for someone to direct us before we realized that there was a new doorway that led to an underground research workshop. Zoning in there we saw this giant dragonbot on a rampage tearing up the place. Talking to the foreman revealed that they had built the dragonbot to help defeat the bot that had gone haywire and driven them out of Ak’Anon all those years ago but, again, something had gone wrong and he was malfunctioning. Not to worry though, they had a cunning plan! They would just build a bigger and more powerful bot to beat up the bot that they had built to beat up the first bot. Gnomish logic. Oh well they were willing pay good money, they were providing all the raws and I had a druid to get me the hell out if it all went horribly pear shaped.

The crafting part was fairly straightforward. There are 4 phases to the build, and if you do them one phase at a time you can watch the construction happen. Each phase need 3 each of 9 different items, 1 item per tradeskill class. So, even if you have a full group of 6 someone will still have to do combines for items outside of their primary skill set. With our little band of 3 that meant that 2/3rds of the combines were going to be outside our comfort zone. All of the items needed come from a special recipe book that they also provide so you really don’t need to bring anything. Though I would strongly recommend bringing any tradeskill stat boosting items you have, those out of class combines will really make you work for it.

A couple of hours later we had finally managed to get all of the pieces together and the gnomes went to work building their killer bot killer bot while we sat back and watched. Once he was completed he quickly waded in and actually attacked the other bot instead of turning on the gnomes like all their other creations.

Cue Robot Wars theme music



In case you were thinking of trying to take him out yourself

  Victory!

The good news is that once our guy had beaten the dracobot he just stood there and allowed us to loot. Awfully nice of him.



Each of us also got a token that we can collect and use to spend on various tradeskill focused items, including mounts that up your harvesting skills, at a merchant in Mara.

All in all it was an entertaining way to spend an evening and, for tradeskillers at least, it resulted in some nice rewards without actually having to kill a single mob. When you combine these quests with the dailies in the moors and the other various tradeskill focused items that were added with this expansion I think that all tradeskillers need to get together and buy Domino a really nice dinner at the next Fan Faire.

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/23/robot-wars/feed/ 2 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/20/the-shadow-of-odyssey/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/20/the-shadow-of-odyssey/#comments Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:23:19 +0000 Sisca
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http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/20/the-shadow-of-odyssey/ Fair warning, this is likely to ramble a bit.

Tuesday saw the release of the fifth EQ2 expansion – yes kids there are other MMO’s out there that don’t have War in the title anywhere and they’re still going strong. From all accounts the launch went pretty smooth, to be honest this has become expected from the EQ2 dev team so hats off to them for raising the bar.

Some initial impressions:

Logging in on Tuesday night I had to spend the first 30 minutes or so organizing my hotkeys since you now automatically get App1 versions of your level 50+ spells/combat arts just as you did pre level 50. Sisca was a few levels behind in the Alchemy thing so was missing all of the level 68+ CA’s and I had apparently missed some of the lower level ones as well. Acsis was also missing a good 10 levels worth of spells since my Sage was only level 61.

I ended up taking the long way to the new airship landing since I forgot that I could use the house item you get for the shiney collection quest from the world event to port you right to the landing pad in Sinking Sands. Once there I joined the throngs lined up, many riding their new bear mount, waiting for the boat…err airship. I was a little worried that the crowds were going to make the new area unplayable but I had forgotten about EQ2’s world zone instancing system and there were already 3 versions of Moors of Ykesha to choose from when our airship started to pull out. There were still plenty of people there but it never really impacted performance and I didn’t feel the frustration of 20 people camping every spawn. We were able to move through the zone and the tradeskill quest lines as fast as we wanted.

Last night I managed to finish off the first series of tradeskill oriented quests as well as a couple of the new tradeskill daily quests. The tradeskill quests require you to craft level 70 items which are a bit of a challenge at level 61 but I was able to get the 4th tier on every combine. I was a little worried about attempting this with a level 50ish crafter but then I realized that even if you only get the first tier of quality you can complete the quest it will just take more combines. The other worry is the fuel costs but the reward seems to be configured so that even if you only get the first tier and have 4 times the combines you’ll still get your fuel costs back. If you can do it in fewer combines you’ll net a bigger profit.

The so far the tradeskill daily quests almost seem like an exploit. The first was to collect 10 each of 2 different sea shells that were easy to get with little risk of getting in agro range of anything. Of the 2 I did last night the hardest was the mail pickup quest that required me to run to the 3 major “cities” of the zone and click a box. The other required me to harvest 6 berry baskets that were at most 1000 feet from the quest giver. Both of those netted me some faction and 25g, not very exciting quest wise but a quick 50g profit.

Speaking of profit after completing all of those quests I ended up about 4p ahead over 2 nights. Since we really just started playing in Kunark over the last week getting this kind of coin is new to me but if this keeps up I can see why they priced some of the guild hall amenities the way they did.

After 2 nights of running around I still haven’t found the starter for the adventuring quests or the new adventure dungeons though I have to admit I haven’t looked all that hard as I was focused on completing the tradeskill stuff. I’m trying to avoid looking it up but I may have to see if I can at least find a pointer to the quest starter.

Overall I’m really liking the expansion so far. It was kind of nice to be able to get tradeskill XP for doing something besides staring at a workstation for hours and I’m especially eager to try out the new tradeskill dungeons. The new adventure dungeons sound cool but I think I’d rather wait and put together a guild group to do those first instead of trying to 2box or duo them so they may have to wait a bit. Still it’s nice to have that kind of content sitting there and waiting for us.

I like the idea of the daily quests but I’m also glad that, unlike WoW, there isn’t anything that I feel I have to have that makes me feel forced to make sure I grind my dailies to get cash. Right now at least, I look at them as an option to pick up some extra cash now and then. What I’m curious about is what level you can start them and how the money scales. If I can pickup 25g a day with a level 20-40 character that’s going to make equipping them much easier. Of course that’s also going to make the economy for lower level items go haywire, or should I say more haywire since the prices for lower level items is already outrageous due to transmuting.

 

Technorati Tags: EQ2,EverQuest 2,The Shadow Odyssey,TSO
]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/11/20/the-shadow-of-odyssey/feed/ 0 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/10/24/haunted-homes-and-gardens/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/10/24/haunted-homes-and-gardens/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:26:23 +0000 Loredena http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/10/24/haunted-homes-and-gardens/ The Halloween event has started in EQ2 and Sisca, Lore, and Acis decided to kill things that go bump in the night. We first met up with goblin illusionists who made us look creepy; the fun part was, our look changed every time we zoned. His goblin friend suggested we pay a visit to Loping Plains, as a friend needed a meal, so off we went!

Here Acis and Lore as Vampire Twins — this one amused me greatly, since normally it is Sisca and Acsis who are mirror-twins.



The look changed again as we arrive in LP:


We grabbed the Nightmare rides to Sonborn cemetary


and headed in to meet this friend. We were accosted as we arrived — something bit my neck, and everything went black! I woke in the merchant shop, and went out to see if I could find out what was going on. I found a man in mourning and a priest dithering about trying to cleanse the man’s home — we agreed to go in and find the ritual book (the previous volunteer, with book, never returned) and perform the ceremony.

Sadly, I left my camera behind, so we’ll have to do without pictures from here-on unless Sisca remembered his.

The haunted house was actually pretty entertaining: get jumped by vampires, find a key; retrieve items for the ritual; get jumped by vampires and find another key. Repeat until all ghosts are seen (mom, 2 kids, baby), vampire-filled coffins are torched, and so on. When we were finally ready to perform the ceremony, the ghosts were successfully sent home, but we were accosted by the vampire sire. After chasing him from room to room we found ourselves in the basement. As he died, he mocked us, saying that he was not the source of the evil, and perhaps we should look in the mirror! Doing so, we were accosted by someone who looked remarkably like Sisca! Once he was properly put to rest, we explored again — the ghostly family had departed, but they left behind a toy chest containing a mask, which Sisca claimed (and taking the mask was itself a quest btw). We then went out to reassure the priest that the house was cleansed.

We actually ended up cleansing the house twice more, so that each of us could acquire a mask; we also discovered that starting with the 2nd time through, L&L books were scattered throughout the house, allowing us to pick up some of our missing ones. Each time we zoned in we acquired the cleansing quest anew, so we were able to get both quest rewards, as well as quest exp each time (though the AA was only for the first time). Still, there were enough named on the first round to get a fair bit of AA, and Sisca and Loredena both leveled during the runs through.  /edit to add:  The funniest part to me was that Sisca was the doppleganger all 3 times!

]]> http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/10/24/haunted-homes-and-gardens/feed/ 0 http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/10/10/guild-level-30-and-a-guild-hall/ http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/10/10/guild-level-30-and-a-guild-hall/#comments Sat, 11 Oct 2008 00:36:00 +0000 Loredena
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http://www.gnomedepot.net/2008/10/10/guild-level-30-and-a-guild-hall/ With the advent of guildhalls starting at guildlevel 30, The Revellers made a strong push to level the guild. Sisca and I are two of the only four active members right now, and we have the highest-level adventurers (and I have one of the two level 80 crafters). Everyone helped though — we ran alts and mains both through some of the lower-level heritage quests, everyone did the harvesting quest series for the guild construction, and we all did both adventuring and harvesting writs.

For the final push, Sisca, Acsis and Loredena (all 63/64 at the time) collected all 4 of the ‘kill Sentries in Tenebrous Tangle’ writs and headed topside. We could get there, kill 20 sentries, and head back to Qeynos for a fresh batch of writs in less then 10 minutes per cycle. Three or four rounds later, we dinged 30!



After a fair amount of discussion, it was decided to purchase our guild hall in N Qeynos. We considered Gorowyn as being accessible to good and evil alike, but since we are primarily Qeynos based, and I liked the ‘look’ of the Qeynos halls better, that’s where we settled. Sisca, as original guildleader, did the honors. We failed to get a ‘now purchasing’ screen shot though, sorry!

We’ve designated one room as a library, and other as the crafting area. Kennet, Reyder’s monk alterego, is busily experimenting with housing items before decorating the room he called dibs on. He has some unique ideas, so I’ll be sure to post screenshots once he progresses a bit more!

Technorati Tags: eq2,everquest 2,the Revellers,guild Halls

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