Hotbars, Furniture, and Lots of Dead Lizardmen

Lyriana made it almost through her 73rd level before finally joining a group in EQ2. The current state of Norrath is such that groups don't really seek you out at low levels, and that suited me well enough since I came to see the solo PVE. After my guild formed up a group to seek the Headless Horseman, not knowing that he was actually a contested epic encounter that we would not be able to attempt, we pondered whether there was something else we could do instead.

It turns out that, if you'd like to "Interact with the Flame of Love" in EQ2, you need five companions, so off we went to the Shard of Love.

Adapting to new roles


Above is a shot of Lyriana's hotbars. Without going into too many details, suffice it to say that there are a few buttons there. With a real tank, I don't need to worry about getting the enemy to turn away from me so I can use my flanking attacks, and I have more time to work on things like debuffs. (I also nominally have a health transfer skill, but it was very ineffective, perhaps that was in part because I've got something horrible like 9/350 healing skill, since I can't use that skill on myself.)

It isn't really a problem that my solo experience has done very little to prepare me for a group game that I'm not really pursuing in the first place, but I will concede that there is a bigger issue here for players who are actually hoping to make the jump to group content.

An Instance Full of Story and Furniture

The Shard of Love is a very story-heavy instance, which seeks to explain why the Goddess of Love has not returned to Norrath with the rest of the game's pantheon. The instance was actually added to the game in the most recent content patch, mid-way through the expansion cycle. SOE decided to completely sidestep the gear inflation issue that WoW's new content introduces by not dropping ANY stat-bearing gear anywhere in the instance.

Basically, your drops in the Shard are house furniture (including benches, braziers, and critters) and cosmetic outfit pieces. It's unclear how this decision is affecting the zone's longevity, but perhaps it's not a bad thing to have content in the game that most people will only do a few times.

Mentoring down to the land of Lizards
I also had the time to join the guildies on a visit to the Temple of Cazic-Thule over the weekend. The temple is a non-instanced zone full of group content for characters in their late 40's. Thanks to the game's mentoring system, we were all able to set our level down to an appropriate level to run through the zone with one of the lower level players in the guild.

Because I'd never been there before, I was actually able to rack up a significant amount of experience and AAxp from completing the local quests and killing the local named mobs. Unfortunately, this is one of the game's older quest areas, so there were a number of quests that took a really long time and a lot of killing to complete, even for a full, well-balanced group (including some mentored characters, who are generally more powerful than legitimate players of that level, simply because things don't scale down perfectly).

I don't know that this would be enough to get large numbers of players into the zone on a regular basis - the loot was pretty worthless, even for the level - but it's certainly enough to lure some more experienced players into the area from time to time to help their guildies out.

On the downside, there was a pesky dragon, Venekor, sitting smack in the middle of the courtyard inside aggro range of several quest targets. Apparently this guy, a level 55 x4 epic mob, would have been a pretty major problem at launch (when level 50 was the cap for players). Fortunately, he's not that big of a deal when you've got some level 80 characters in your party who can click "unmentor" and beat the dragon down.



We were a bit disappointed that he only dropped a bit of silver (some raid mobs will still drop their trophies if you outlevel them when you kill them), but at least there wasn't a dragon underfoot anymore. If nothing else, Lyriana can now say that she has taken part in killing a dragon in Everquest II. I'm glad I got to give it a shot the once, even if it isn't something I'll be doing on any regular basis.

Dungeon Backflagging and Involuntary Role-playing

If you look at the changes Blizzard has planned for patch 3.3 - gear will be reset for the second time in six months, and reputations will be heirloomed - it appears that they have decided that it is no longer realistic to expect characters to complete all the prior group content after they hit level 80.

You can't get out of gearing up entirely - there's a new random cross-server LFG system to help with it - but they clearly don't think that the backflagging efforts that Jaye is working on in EQ2 are realistic expectations for WoW players. For that matter, EQ2 itself has gone through and heirloomed many of its previously bind-on-pickup loot drops to help players gear their new alts without repeating old content on them.

Involuntary Role Playing
Whether it's sitting AFK watching your character travel, looking for groups, farming for cash to pay routine upkeep expenses, or grinding out levels and gear to catch up with your friends, there often seems to be something the player does not want to do standing in between them and the activity they actually want to be doing.

These activities are, in some ways, role playing; it actually does take your character time to get places, it actually does cost money to repair your gear, and a player who cannot defeat the Lich King's weakest lieutenants won't be very much good against the King himself. That is, however, little consolation when you sit down in front of your computer with maybe half an hour to spare before you really have to get to bed, and you find that precious time eaten up by the minutia of living in a virtual world.

Keen and Pete both lament the loss of role playing from the more recent entries in the genre. They're not wrong, but the answer is not as simple as telling players to go farm more. I'm starting a new job on Monday. The pay is good and the work is interesting, but the hours will almost certainly be longer. Spending more time simply is not an option for me.

Perhaps Keen is right, and the answer is simply that companies should aim lower, in the hopes of attracting a smaller niche crowd where everyone will be on the same page on these sorts of questions. There is limited evidence that the niche crowd is willing to settle for niche-level production values (see all the grousing about Darkfall's graphics, bugs, balance issues, and instability at that game's launch), but it does seem to be working out somewhat for Fallen Earth.

Then again, it does seem like everyone - solo, raid, crafter and PVP - has something to gain from sharing a single virtual roof, assuming that each aspect of the game is actually well designed, and not merely tacked on as a token hope to draw more subscribers. It would be sad to lose the diversity of our online communities, simply because we cannot agree on how hard the logistics should be.

Level 57 vs Level 75

I was struggling to find the time to visit LOTRO's latest retrial, so SOE helpfully decided to make my decision making easier by taking my EQ2 server down for most of the day yesterday. As a result, I spent the afternoon in Middle Earth and ended up hitting level 57 in Moria, before signing in to Norrath and hitting level 75 on my Dirge later in the evening. A few random observations from the extremely rapid flip-flop:

Variations on an Archetype
Allarond and Lyriana have a bit in common - both are melee characters who rely in part on life-draining special attacks to stay alive. On the other hand, Allarond is a Tolkien race (for obvious reasons), wears heavy armor, and specializes in hitting multiple targets at once. By contrast, Lyriana is a winged Fae with stealth, group buffs, and even some crowd control.

Probably the most jarring shift was due to LOTRO's combat pacing. Moria features increased use of healing mobs, who will heal themselves to full health if you do not interrupt them. The only problem is, you might be waiting for your current attack to finish, followed by an auto-attack, between the time when you push the interrupt button and the time when you actually attempt to interrupt the foe. Also, the Champion's interrupt requires a combo-point equivalent, which means you're screwed if the attack you are in the middle of using consumed all of your Fervour.

The bottom line is that, when fighting the healing foes, you need to hold DPS (with at least one Fervour point available) at the 45% mark so you can interrupt the enemy in time, even though this means that the last few percent until they try to heal happens very very slowly. It's a clunky mechanic that feels like you're exploiting the predictable AI (which doesn't know to trick you by trying or heal earlier or later). It's a somewhat jarring design that didn't matter as much before the increased emphasis on interrupts, and I can see why they're planning on changing it.

Travel
If you are in a guild with a guild hall, travel in EQ2 is much much easier than travel in LOTRO. You have one-click access to most of the zones in the game (some of them do require that you visit the local druid ring first), and usually some form of intra-zone travel once you arrive. Overall, I barely notice travel times in EQ2.

By contrast, Allarond is still working on his Moria quest deeds, and therefore has a very limited repertoire of "swift travel" points to work with. I have a racial teleport to Bree, a guild teleport to the border of the Shire, and the potential to get another teleport if I buy a house, but within Moria I am limited to a one-hour cooldown hearthstone-equivalent and whatever Invincible Goat routes I'm willing to sit AFK for.

During my session yesterday, I completed a quest deed that allows return swift-travel from the Dolven-View, the major settlement on the West side of the mines, with the 21st Hall, in the center of the mines. I'd previously unlocked the route going the other direction, but Moria quests have a bad habit of sending you back and forth between the two, and there was no quick way to make the return trip. Ironically, I actually prefer this system, where you have to work for the travel routes rather than having them handed out for free, to the WoW and EQ2 model, it just needs one more piece to the puzzle to make it a bit more workable.

Fortunately, Turbine is planning a revamp to the game's reputation system which may include more rep-based teleports - this could largely solve the problem.

Level Up-grades
Level 57 in LOTRO unlocks a new class trait slot, so I had to visit a bard in town to pick which of my unlocked options to fill that with. Otherwise, the level up was automatic - none of my skills need to be upgraded by hand.

By contrast, EQ2 has three whole crafting professions devoted to spell/skill upgrades for every time players level up. Lyriana has already maxxed the tradeskill that makes her upgrades, but the rare loam that she needs for current tier spells is massively expensive due to very high demand; half the classes in the game want a dozen "expert"-quality upgrades each from the same rare harvesting drop. The "journeyman" quality spells Lyriana can make with non-rare ingredients are, in many cases, inferior to the previous tier spells that I am supposedly upgrading from.

So, it was off to the Broker to buy Adept quality spells (which sit inbetween Journeyman and Expert), and, in some cases, delaying the use of my new skill ranks. I'll be slowly upgrading the spells on to Expert level as I obtain the loams to do so.

An extra juggling act
Overall, I'm not sure that I would deliberately set myself up to jump games like this on any regular basis. It's perhaps a bit too distracting to deal with the different combat paces and mechanics. That said, both games ultimately offer relatively comparable experiences.

In LOTRO, I was branching out from the 21st Hall and even formed an ad-hoc fellowship to deal with the bugs at Balin's camp (a quest which is really a bit too tough for its listed level). In EQ2 I paid my first visit to the main camp of the Order of Rime. Both experiences were high quality, fun content.

That's not a horrible choice to have to make.

Exploring EQ2's Night of the Dead

EQ2's Night of the Dead event is up and running. NOTD has been around for a few years now, but I've never seen it before, so it adds up to a lot of new content for me. In particular, NOTD features three solo instance - haunted houses and a new hedge maze - that feature some serious puzzle-solving. Some of these may have required a group in years past, but now they scale to the player's level and are tuned for a single player. I'm looking to run each of my characters through once for fun and profit.

Cosmetic Rewards
Most of the NOTD rewards appear to be cosmetic - things you need to make a haunted house in your player housing, perhaps, or costume pieces. They haven't quite given players the full set of world-building tools, but they've allowed for some pretty impressive decorating.

The other nice touch is that the new haunted hedge maze includes mini-bosses who drop heirloom cosmetic armor. You can get something like 3-4 random pieces of the black cosmetic plate armor set on each run-through, and they're all helpfully flagged with the heirloom tag so that you can run the dungeon on the character of your choice. I wish WoW would allow similar flexibility, but they have instead chosen to tie many of the more onerous meta achievement goals to cosmetic outfit pieces which would be a bit too shareable if they were heirlooms.


Unlike the infamous masks that spoiled the WoW expansion, EQ2's Halloween masks physically replace your head with the subject. In this case, the grizzled evil Overlord Lucan D'Lere, who looks kind of funny when you put his head atop a female fae.

The Contested Horseman
There's also the obligatory Headless Horseman boss. Like WoW's version, he drops halfway decent loot, and therefore has been highly in demand. Unlike WoW's Horseman, the EQ2 version is a contested, non-instanced boss on a 2-hour timer; first group to hit him by spamming AOE on his spawn point gets the loot.

This "contested" boss loot is a relatively bigger and more accepted part of EQ2's culture. That said, it was a bit disappointing to form up in a group with some of my guildies (Lyriana's first time EVER in a group, at level 73) in the hopes of paying the horseman a visit, only to find out that the spawns are basically monopolized by campers.

As with my criticisms of WoW's holiday achievements, I'm not convinced that limited time holiday festivities are really the place to put high pressure content - requirements that might be reasonable when the content is available year round are less reasonable when you've got a very narrow window to complete it; if nothing else, they could have mentioned in their advertising that the boss was a contested epic so that players would have known not to waste their time trying.

Blending Atmosphere and Gameplay
Ultimately, I'm really impressed with how they've implemented this holiday. The scaling content means that I'm able to do the content on various characters and actually collect half-decent exp, on top of cosmetic rewards. I'm not going to do every encounter every day on every eligible character, like Blizzard expects players to do with the daily Holiday bosses that have very rare drop mounts. But I am enjoying seeing all the sights once or twice; just enough seasonal flare to make the holiday memorable without having it dominate the month.

WoW Halloween Achievements Broken In New And Different Ways

This year, the problem is apparently that certain trick or treat buckets in Northrend are incorrectly flagging buckets elsewhere in the world as already looted. If you need the candy bucket achievement (because you did not complete it last year), and you loot the buckets in the "wrong" order, you will be prevented from completing it. Blizzard says they're working on it.

It's not quite the generic "content failed to reset from previous years" issue that has come up repeatedly, but it makes the case yet again that there are serious problems with tying a long-term achievement grind to time-limited events that change just enough every year to make sufficient scale testing nigh impossible.

On the plus side, this is one of those things that is no longer my problem.

Wrath Dungeon Reps Heirloomed, Nerfed To Ground

From the latest Patch 3.3 PTR Notes:

* The following reputations have been sped up by roughly 30%: Argent Crusade, Alliance Vanguard/Horde Expedition, Kirin Tor, Knights of the Ebon Blade, Sons of Hodir, Wyrmrest Accord
* Sons of Hodir quests now give more reputation overall.
* Top-level helm and shoulder faction-related enchants are now available as Bind-on-Account items that do not require any faction to use once purchased (they still require the appropriate faction level to purchase).
* Reputation commendations can now be purchased for 1 Emblem of Triumph each.

The former change makes sense now that the Emblem of Triumph is the standard dungeon loot; a new level 80 running 5-mans would otherwise have ilvl 245 triumph rewards before they can get at the ilvl 200 faction items.

The latter change relieves alts of the need to repeat the old dungeon rep grinds for best-in-slot enchants that cannot be obtained in other ways. Technically speaking, you still have to have done the rep grinds once per account, so you're only really crying right now if you re-grinded Sons of Hodir rep on alts for no other reason than access to the shoulder enchants.

EQ2 has actually taken the same approach with faction-based crafting recipes; you have to complete each rep grind once per account but the rep reward recipes are now heirlooms. It's as good a way as any to leave the bar for the rep grind high the first time around without really discouraging alt-o-holics. Still, it once again begs the question of whether there is a limit to how fast inflation can happen before players start writing off grinds in the first place to wait for the inevitable nerf.

Updated to add: Blue posts say that they will be working to allow heirloom items to transfer between characters of opposite factions on the same server, hopefully in time for patch 3.3. They are even considering allowing heirlooms to change servers, though that would require more infrastructure work. If nothing else, you could load up a throwaway character with enchants and heirlooms and then send it to another server for a single transfer fee, which is a pretty big change from the present.

Did Killing Speed Break The Quests Of Kunark?

The Rise of Kunark expansion has a mixed reaction among the EQ2 faithful. The expansion raised the level cap to 80, and has a reputation of being a solo quest grindfest. As an exclusively solo player who struggled to find enough leveling content in the 60's, an abundance of solo content sounded like exactly what I'd been waiting for. Instead, I've found that I would rather be working on alts because, frankly, the veterans are right - the quests do feel grindy. What went wrong?

It isn't the basics

In this picture, Lyriana is staring down some yeti-equivalents. She has a quest to kill 20 yetis, two quests to loot crystals that the yetis pick up because they're shiny, and one "writ" bounty quest to kill specifically the brown yetis for reputation and guild status (exp).

Elsewhere in the zone, there's a corner of the swamp with a quest to kill 8 carnivorous plants, a quest to collect 5 dragonflies corpses, 5 worm corpses, and 10 mushrooms, a quest to kill 10 dragon-lizards, and bounty quests for a dozen each of all of the above (plus some random crocodiles sunning themselves in the lake). You go in, you kill and loot everything that moves (plus a few extra if you have the correct bounty quests in your journal, so your guild can get the exp for it), return to town to turn in quests, and move on to the next adjacent area. You could put these quests in WoW or LOTRO and no one would think they were out of place.

In short, the problem with Kunark is not the quests themselves. Having been through 60+ levels of solo questing in EQ2 before I hit any problems, I know that the base game is not the problem. The travel system is fine. There are local rep grinds, but I'm doing pretty well in crafted gear (which is super cheap because the "rare" ore used to make it shares a node with a rare loam that half the classes in the game need for their expert-quality spells, driving supply of the ore through the roof) so I don't really mind that I'm not going to max out any of them.

So what, fundamentally, changed to shift the EQ2 solo experience from fun to grindy?


A quest-rep reward side by side with the crafted gear I've already got.

Tougher Mobs, More Quests
EQ2 features comparatively longer combat than WoW - where my WoW mage kills level-appropriate mobs in under 10 seconds, my EQ2 Dirge typically takes at least double that time now that she's decked out in that top end crafted gear. In fact, the time per mob jumps when you hit Kunark because the solo content was tuned for players who had good gear from when the level cap was still at 60. (They actually toned down the mobs in the first part of the expansion to ease the transition, which previously hit like a truck.)

My guess is that this longer combat does not play well with the increased quest density found in modern solo MMORPG's with faster-paced combat like LOTRO and WoW. The dirty little secret of the WoW-style quest is that you're actually grinding away at random mobs. The quest system hides that fact by carefully making sure that you finish and leave each location just before you start getting tired of it - the quest reward exp compensates you for your travel time as you change grinding spots every 10-20 kills.

With WoW's 10-second mob kills, you can stack half a dozen quests that collectively require 40+ kills in the same small area and still have players in and out inside of 15 minutes. Double or triple that time to account for EQ2's longer combat and suddenly players are looking at 30-45 minutes to finish killing a dozen of everything that moves in that one corner of the swamp.

Implications of combat time on quest design
I spent a chunk of last week creating a new EQ2 Wizard and questing him through the Commonlands, one of the oldest zones in the game for the 10-20 crowd. Much like old world content in Azeroth, it was entirely common for quests to send you running halfway across the zone to kill maybe 8-10 enemies in an area that has no other related quests before running all the way back.

In a game like WoW or LOTRO, I would hate that type of quest, because I'd be done with the killing in two minutes flat and therefore would be spending the vast majority of my time running to and from the questgiver. In EQ2, I'm fine with those quests, because the longer combat means that I'm still changing scenery often enough, but I'm spending roughly the same proportion of my time on combat versus travel as I would in WoW.

This, in turn, may be part of where the Kunark model causes problems for EQ2 vets. SOE appears to have balanced the exp curve with the assumption that players would be doing most of the quests to level. The problem is that suddenly you've got this 30 minute window in which you got some exp for spending the whole time killing mobs and then you got a ton of exp at the very end for basically the two minutes you spent going back and forth to the questgiver.

It's easy enough to skip one quest bonus if you'd really rather stay and grind in whatever random location. Once you're doubling or tripling up on quest bonuses in every single camp of mobs in the zone, attempting to level without doing the quests becomes painfully slow. If you're not careful, that can turn what SOUNDS like a player-friendly convenient pack of 2-3 overlapping quests into a lengthy grindfest. Moreover, you have to plan on doing most or all of the quests, which removes the occasionally illusionary feeling that you're doing what you want to instead of working down a narrow "on rails" checklist.

(Incidentally, I wonder if Warhammer's solo PVE has the same problem, since that game also features longer time per kill.)

The implication, ironically, may be that the part of WoW that EQ2 should be copying is The Barrens, not Northrend. Where WoW needs tightly constrained travel times to avoid overwhelming the short time spent in combat, EQ2 can afford to spread out more into a larger world. The game doesn't necessarily need more overall content per level than WoW offers, but it might benefit from a bit more geographic separation, with fewer overlapping quests that devolve into extended grinding sessions. It will be interesting to see whether the coming expansion to Odus - which doesn't sound like the largest of expansion continents - will allow the game the space it may need.


In the mean time, you'll find me in the Commonlands, working on my Lol-Kerra-Mage.