Last time, I mentioned that I had rerolled my Illusionist. Zogan the Ratonga has been grinding his way through the tier 3 zones since then with combat experience turned off, so that I can take the game a bit slower. Later on this slows things down too much, but in the 20s you still level at a reasonable pace through questing while having time to enjoy the story.
As Zogan approached 30, I was recruited by a guild, Aventura. So far they are pretty cool, and this weekend was a flurry of activity as I did some of my first group content with them.
Being in a guild is somewhat more important in EQ2 than in most other games. In addition to the usual things like a chat channel and guild bank, guilds in EQ2 have levels (up to 80, just like players) which open up an ever-expanding set of perks for their members. Most of these are based on Status, which is a sort of secondary currency which you earn from faction grinding and major quest lines. As you earn Status to spend on buying guild and faction rewards, it serves as experience for your guild. Some of the rewards include mounts — faster than those available for cash alone, or discounted from the cash price — bigger houses, housing decorations, and titles of nobility. Zogan is already thinking about moving out of his quaint little studio in the Baubbleshire…
This weekend, several of us from Aventura ran the Nektropos Castle instance to finish the Heritage quest (HQ) The Missing Mask. Heritage quests are those major quest lines I mentioned above. They are always long and require a group, but the reward is worth it: not only do you get lots of experience and status, but you also get a new version of a well known EQ1 item with excellent stats. And if you don’t want to use the item, you can convert it into a trophy to be displayed in your house.
The first HQ I did was Return of the Light, which I was able to solo until the end. That one consisted mostly of running around killing various named mobs, charging up a Lightstone so that its stats improved each time. For the last part, I went with a pickup group to the final battle, which involved waves of orcs followed by General Drull. All in all, it was pretty easy. The Missing Mask, not so much…
Nektropos Castle, as an instance, is exactly what it sounds like: a castle with multiple levels, towers in the corners, narrow hallways surrounding a big courtyard, and so forth. As any good dungeon should have, it has lots of “bosses” and a whole bunch of quests to finish. We did maybe half of the quests while we were there this time, and Zogan got two levels and four achievement points — not bad at all.
The Missing Mask is an example of annoying quest design, however. At one point, it requires you to kill a monster named Billy twice, once in the game room and once in the chapel, in that order. The problem is that he has multiple spawn points in the castle, so if he’s at the wrong one, you only have two choices: reset the instance (which you can do as often as you like, thankfully) or kill him and wait 20 minutes for him to possibly spawn somewhere else. It took probably an hour of instance resets to get both of these kills done.
Later on, you have to talk to a guy. The problem with this is that he despawns as soon as someone talks to him, and you have to wait five minutes for him to come back. So you either stand around for half an hour while each member of your group talks to him one at a time, or you try to time it so you all click him within the time window between the first person’s click and when he actually despawns. What fun… and by “fun”, I mean “annoyance”. We started at around 8pm, I think, and finished at 1:30. But we finished, at least.
This is also one of the first chances I’ve had to use the in-game voice chat in EQ2, and I’m impressed with it… it’s a lot smoother and nicer sounding than the WoW voice chat (which hardly anyone uses anyway), and has more features than the voice system Lord of the Rings. Only one thing about it annoys me: it lowers the game audio whenever anyone is talking, and there is no way to adjust or disable that. I have a separate headset specifically so that voice doesn’t interfere with game audio, so I hope they add a way to tweak this in the future.
Next: Zogan is in tier 4, finally, and he’s off to the Enchanted Lands to help the halflings, or to Zek to kill hundreds of orcs.
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