Everquest is due to celebrate its 12th anniversary in the next couple of days, with the return of all the usual events there. I’ll be covering that in a post once it actually starts, but in the EQ site post foreshadowing it, I also saw this rather interesting bit of news:
Grand events are afoot in EverQuest II starting later this month, where mysterious apparitions have been sighted! Portals through time have been appearing around Norrath, linking this age to an age before the Shattering. Journey through these portals to find the ancient heroes and villains of an age gone by. Reminisce about them. Then kill them and loot them for the really cool items they possess. There may be a connection between them; perhaps you should investigate them all…
Oho! The event is spilling over into EQ2. We’ve not seen any mention of it on the EQ2 site as yet, but it sounds rather intriguing. Perhaps Maltheas will finally get to meet his hero, the original Fippy Darkpaw! Who else might we meet? Suggestions in the comments, please!!!
From the left, we’ve got the Small Thurgadin Distillery, the raw reward from the Thurgadin Ice Brew quest. Then we have the Mechanized Thurgadin Distillery, and finally the Super Mechanized Thurgadin Distillery. Amazing what you can do with a little Ratonga tinkering know-how!
Three distilleries might be considered excessive by some.
The latter two are very nicely animated, and make a fine addition to any crafter’s corner.
It’s Brewday again in the land of Norrath, and Maltheas was all set for some adventure! He was wearing green anyway, but made sure to pick out his flying carpet from last years antics, and set his Bauble of Holidays Past to Shamrock. Grabbing Cheeves on the way out, they set off for the nearest entrance to the fabled Bar of Brell, conveniently situated just outside Qeynos in Antonica.
Warning: This adventure will be a massive spoiler for anyone who has not yet done the quest.
The entrance to the Bar of Brell in Antonica. Cheeves can barely contain his excitement.
OK, the Geminoid robot is (probably) nothing to do with Richard Garriott, though it does look rather like him in my opinion!
What does fill me with terror is that robots have developed facial-hair technology. A fine moustache, as everybody knows, renders you almost unstoppable. Such realistic robots could be amongst us, even now.
Episode 9 of the Claims of the Normal podcast is up, and I was once again dragged in to discuss many things, some of which I even had intelligent opinions on. You can find it over here.
We had quite a long discussion of Rift, by which I mean that I went on about it for about ten minutes until made to stop.
Osgard and Snorty pause for a quick picture with the Guardian Leaders in Sanctum
My dwarven pal, Osgard, has had many adventures across the MMO worlds, but perhaps his best known role was as a Dwarven Engineer in Warhammer Online. He also occasionally visits Azeroth in the form of a hunter. It seemed fitting then, to try to combine the two, and the result has worked fairly well so far.
Saboteur was an obvious base, granting him bombs and charges aplenty. While he rather misses his turrets and napalm, it does give him a good mixture of ranged options, and will eventually provide him with landmines. He hasn’t really bothered too much with the trap-side of Saboteur, as they seem a bit ineffective compared with his other options, but perhaps I should experiment with them a little more.
Many were the times in Warhammer that the only healing anyone in his group was likely to get was coming from Osgard’s barrel of Bugman’s Best, and he has continued this fine tradition of healer of last resort by taking just enough bard to give him two area heal-over-time abilities. They’re not particularly large, but they do hit rather a lot of people, so are good for generally keeping people topped up. Healing is typically rather scarce, so a rogue willing to help out with that is a useful fellow to have about!
As his tertiary class he has Ranger. That’s just for the pet, which you can get and upgrade without putting any points in. Having a snuffly friend willing to take agro off you is a major godsend when soloing, and Snorty does the job well. His damage output is negligible, but he’s right good at taunting.
It’ll be a bit indecipherable, I suspect, but here’s a picture of his Soul Tree for good measure. He has largely concentrated on choices that increase the effectiveness of his bombs and charges, though the Dexterity-boosting passive was a must-have also.
Osgard the Saboteur's Soul Tree
This isn’t actually much of a “Dark Moment in Character Building” compared with some of my previous entries in that series, as I suspect that a Saboteur/Bard, with unpointed Ranger, just for the pet, is probably pretty common. In fact I would not be at all surprised if over half of rogues have secondary bard and tertiary ranger, for the healing and pet, with a variety of primary class options, though I would imagine that works slightly less well with the melee souls.
At level 26, he’s well ahead of my other alts. Actually he’s rather farther ahead than I really want him to be, as he still has a great many things he wants to do in Silverwood (and Gloamwood too, which he’s almost finished the quests in), and I see this as something of a design flaw. There is no way that anyone would be anywhere near completing all Silverwood achievements by the time you outlevel the zone, and it feels a bit strange to have so many high level folks running around there also trying to get the various Colossal kills they need for achievements and the epic questline. We desperately need to be able to turn off xp gain, and this will become even more of a factor when the patch currently on the test server comes in to effect, increasing xp for Rifts and Invasions.
He’s not dabbled in PvP yet, partially because the last thing he needs is yet another source of xp. I really need to get around to that, but I keep putting it off, thinking that an xp-lock might be just around the corner. If one does materialise, I’ll be very tempted to start Osgard again. You know how I am with trying to do everything at as low a level as possible!
I’ll introduce you to more of my Rift alt-stable soon!
I’ve been playing Rift quite solidly for the last few days, but I fancied a change today. Been getting a little frustrated with the contribution system there, as I mentioned here. Having to run my stable of alts through exactly the same quests is also slightly wearing, so venturing in a land where there is little or no set track for advancement is rejuvenating. Off I trotted to the Fippy Darkpaw progression server!
With Rift running distraction, Zoltoon has not been out and about as much as I would like. Would that there were more gaming hours in the day! So it is that he is still level 10. I’m not unhappy with that though, partially due to my full set of even lower level alts, and I’m quite content with his general rate of progress when I play him.
There’s a particularly useful button on EQ’s character select screen called “Return Home”. If your character has been logged out for 6 hours or more, you can use it to return him to his home city. In Zoltoon’s case that is Ak’anon, on the other side of the world to Qeynos, where he is usually bound. This means he can pop back at the beginning of his session, should the need arise.
Today, I decided that I rather fancied having a little poke about in one of my old haunts. Steamfont’s Minotaur caves are just about perfect for a level 10 enchanter, provided care is taken to avoid its master, Meldrath the Malignant, and his rather terrifying Minotaur Hero. Back in the day, Steamfont would often see a minotaur train, with the Minotaur Hero or Minotaur Lord at its head, but I’ve not seen one yet, to my slight disappointment!
Zoltoon the enchanter braves Steamfont's Minotaur caves
Minotaurs are a great way of raising your Gem Choppers faction, the gnome warrior faction that is a bit of a pain to raise any other way if you don’t start popular enough to do their quests. They also possess a couple of rather useful bits of kit.
The Minotaur Axe, friend to all lowbie meleers.
The Minotaur axe is an exceptionally good weapon for its available level, let down only by not being magical, and thus unable to harm certain creatures. Zoltoon managed to pick one up for his brother, Dulcien the Paladin.
Minotaur horns are particularly useful to bards, as they may be wielded as an instrument, dramatically increasing the power of any wind based musical abilities. They proved elusive today though, and unfortunately, Zoltoon, ever the adventurous, travelled a little further than was entirely wise into the caves, and managed to get three minotaur slavers interested in devouring him simultaneously. Two minotaur slavers he can handle, with some cunning mesmerisation, but three is right out, so he gated out, sending him back to Qeynos. Revenge will have to wait until tomorrow!
