All The Colors Of The City

After I finished writing Monday's April Fool's post I thought I probably ought to log into EverQuest II to claim my free baby dragon and check out the Bristlebane Day content. I'm pretty much done with Nightingale for now, at least until they add some new content, and none of the other upcoming games I'm interested in are running tests right now, so it seemed like a good time to get back to what I was doing a couple of months ago - playing EQII.

Before I logged in I checked to see if anything new had been added to the holiday this year, which was when I found out there isn't just one holiday running, there are two. Well, three, if you count the Year of Darkpaw. Four, if there happens to be a City Festival on. (One of those runs for the first week of every month.) Or five, if there's a full moon, when the Moonlight Enchantments appear.

That's why it's not that unusual for holidays, anniversaries and live events to overlap in Norrath. There are just so many of them it's pretty much inevitable. Around this time of year we get Bristlebane Day, the April Fool analog, but also Beast'r, whose real-world counterpart is, I'm sure, readily apparent from the awkward pun.

I had a little trouble chasing down the exact details of what might have changed this year but as usual EQ2 Traders came to my rescue. From there I learned there is indeed something new this time. Quite a bit, in fact. As well as the expected new holiday crafting recipes and vendor items there's also a new quest.

A while ago I remember mentioning that in EQII these days, a new holiday "quest" generally just means a new collection with some framing dialog. Not so this time. This is a bona fide story quest that takes place in a brand-new dungeon. Okay, the dungeon itself is made up of re-purposed rooms from previous content and there are only three of them, but that's absolutely no criticism. It's an exemplary demonstration of how to re-use assets effectively to create enjoyable, new content.

I can say that now because I've finished it. The dungeon itself didn't take long - maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Getting a character ready to try it at all, though - that took me about four hours.

The very surprising thing about the new dungeon is that it requires a minimum level of 128 to enter. It's current expansion content in other words, which does seem odd for a holiday event. Usually these things scale.

I'd forgotten until I tried to enter the dungeon from a big book in the Commonlands that you have to click on. I didn't actually have a character that level. My nearest, the one I was playing, was my Berserker. At around three-quarters of the way into 127 he was close but not close enough.

I could have left it at that. It's only a holiday event after all and now it's been added it'll probably be in the rotation forever. I could have left it for next year. As I said, though, this happens to be a good moment for me to come back to EQII, something I've been wanting to do for a while, so I decided it was about time I knuckled down and got on with the Signature Quest from last December's Ballads of Zimara expansion.

Really, I ought to have finished it ages ago but I'd hit a patch with a lot of dungeon play and I hadn't been able to find the necessar couple of dog-free hours to beat down several bosses in a row. Last night, though, it was raining hard and Beryl was keeping her head down in case anyone suggested going outside. It seemed like an opportunity so I took it.

The dungeon I needed to finish turned out to be two dungeons linked together, both of them set in the final zone of the expansion, the Djinn stronghold, Vaashkaani. I was under the mistaken impression Vaashkaani was an open-world, city zone but while it might still be some kind of city, it's actually made up of several combat instances. 

The first took me about an hour to finish; the second double that, so a little over three hours in total, which is quite a run for me these days. Luckily, I had the invaluable EQ2i walkthroughs up for both. Without those I would probably have been there twice as long.

The fights, of which there were many, weren't all that hard. My Berserker is prety decently equipped for this kind of  entry-level endgame solo stuff, although there's still quite a lot more I could  - and should -do to toughen him up further. 

Having played EQII for so long now, it's interesting how these things change over time. A few years ago, most of the complaints from casuals like me revolved around time-to-kill on both regular mobs and bosses. It could take hours to grind through a solo instance, with each fight taking minutes and the bosses maybe a quarter of an hour.If you got a "kill ten" quest, and there were some, you could be there all morning.

Then there was a phase when just about everything seemed to drain your power or mana, making every fight take even longer. I remember going afk, leaving my Berserker on auto-attack and going to the kitchen to make myself a coffee because I had literally no buttons to press.

That was not a popular mechanic and I'm happy to say it's largely disappeared. What seems to have replaced it in BoZ is a cute little trick with Heroic Opportunities. 

As any who played EQII when it launched back in 2004 might remember, HOs were once a big part of the game. They are combination attacks that you can do solo or in a group. When the combo is complete they kick off powerful effects that either buff you or damage or debuff the mob.

I didn't much like them then because I was playing in groups much more than I do now and people were constantly yelling at each other, either demanding they complete the HO or complaining they had completed it when they shouldn't have. People were very fussy about the timing for some reason. It got on my nerves and I was glad when it largely fell into disuse.

Some people obviously remembered it more fondly than I did because there have been many requests for the system to be revamped and made useful again. A while ago that made its way to the top of the dev team's to-do list and now HOs are back in fashion.

In the instances I've just finshed there are several occasions when HOs are the only thing that will remove a boss's shield so you can actually hit them. Or you have to complete an HO to blow up some device that, if left unattended, will instantly kill you. There's no real logic to it but it's a lot better than seeing your mana disappear into a black hole. 

It's also a mechanic that requires a certain amount of attention and finesse, which is why I died a few times getting to grips with it. Once I had the method down, though, I thought it was fine. I certainly prefer it to having to chug mana potions, which cost a fortune for the good ones and which I never remembered to pack anyway, let alone the attritional auto-attack grindfest that comes when you run out of them.

The bosses in Vaashkaani also all have the ability to stifle, stun or fear, which would be extremely annoying if there weren't free augments available that negate all of those effects. I had to remember to swap the necessary augs in and out of my belt, the only item that has a slot that will hold them, but that wasn't hard to do - until I found out the hard way you can't change augs in a damaged item.

Eventually I got through the whole instance - both of them - and I have to say it was good fun. The level of challenge was just about right for me. I had to concentrate just enough to feel engaged and I got my timing wrong a couple of times but nothing went on so long it made me dread failure and another try plus I always made progress on each attempt so I could see a way to succeed.

It helped a lot that Vaashkaani is absolutely gorgeous. The screenshots give an impression of how colorful and vibrant it is but you have to imagine all those colors shifting and shimmering as the crystals pulse, clouds drift across the skylights, waterfalls pour down and foliage ripples in the breeze. Once again, you can really see why Darkpaw would like to get new players straight into the current content. The 2004-era graphics of the older zones, much though I love them, really do the game a disservice.

Under current mechanics, you get no meaningful xp for clearing zones. It all comes from quests. When I handed in mine I jumped straight from three-quarters of the way through 127 to five per cent into 128. Mission accomplished!

I also got a lot of drops from all the nameds but I wasn't very lucky with RNG. Most of the gear I got was for other classes. My alts will love it  - if they ever get this far. 

My Berserker didn't much mind not getting stuff he could wear. Everything that dropped was all 155 Resolve, which is mostly what he has now. He got it all from previous holiday events so he's very mildly overgeared for the content he's doing although not for much longer. According to the beta forums for the forthcoming GU 125, bosses in the next update drop 160 and 165 Resolve gear, which will be a nice upgrade.

As soon as I dinged 128, it was straight off to try the new holiday instance. It turned out to be a jolly romp with an amusing story, some good jokes and a lot of fighting. I won't rehash it all here but the gist is that Bristlebane tells you the story of a famous thief and sends you to three episodes from his life, wherein you take various roles, all of which pretty much consist of a massive fight that starts the moment you zone in. It's all action!

The drops were much the same level as the ones I got in the instances, which makes sense since 155 Resolve seems to be about par for current solo endgame gear. I was able to upgrade a couple of 145s I was still uisng so that was nice.

According to EQ2 Traders, if you do the instance three times, you get a silly hat. It's fast and fun so even I ought to be able to manage that before it all goes away in ten days or so. 

If I want the five new Beast'r eggs, though, I'll have to hurry. That event ends in just a few hours.

What am I doing here then?!

Fool Me Once...

April Fool's Day is far from being a favorite of mine but EverQuest II's take on the "holiday" has always been entertaining. Practical jokes sit a lot better in video games than in real life, I find.

They're very gentle jokes, too. I spent an entertaining hour or so this morning, completing the Tin Metal Protection questline, in which Norrath's Lord of Misrule, Fizzlethorpe Bristlebane, amuses himself mightily by sending you on a wild drakota chase (No actual drakota involved.)

It's a parody of a cliche with a meta-joke bundled in. It reminds me of those children's tales, where some hapless innocent tries to do someone a favor and ends up doing chores for everyone in town. Basically, every fetch quest, ever. 

The reward, the Tin Metal Helm of Protection, actually an inverted cooking pot, can't even be worn as a an appearance item. All you can do is place it in your house, where it looks like what it is - an upturned stewpot gone rusty. 

Until you activate its protective field, that is. Then it looks like this!

Did you leave the gas on again?

Given that I've done this quest at least three times before, you might think I'd have better things to do with my time but no, apparently, I do not. I put it down to the unwarranted enthusiasm that overtakes some of us when we either create a new character or, in this case, transfer an old one to a new server because, yes, it was little Mitsu who was making - and doing - all the running.

I already knew that all the NPCs who were sending me on scavenger hunts through Freeport were the god Bristlebane in disguise, so the reveal didn't come as a surprise. I had, however, forgotten that it leads on to a second quest, this time in a dungeon with proper fights and everything.

The follow-on quest is called Rescuing the Princess and I'm assuming I must have done it before, only I can't for the life of me remember when or with what character. As I was slaughtering Iksar cultists deep in a dungeon in the Emerald Jungle, with my own Iksar Shadowknight mercenary tanking them for me, I was trying recall when I might have done all of this before. Nothing came back to me at all.

The princess turns out to be none other than (Spoiler!) Firiona Vie, although at the very end (Double Spoiler!!), the elf-maiden is revealed to be one of Bristlebane's goblin flunkies in disguise. 

I told you to lay off the Elven wine, Fi.

Firiona Vie, as the Public Face of the EverQuest Franchise, turns up all over the place, of course. I've met her many times on many characters over the years. Even so, It's not something that happens so often I don't notice when it does, or fail to remember. I can be a bit of a Firiona fangirl at times so it surprises me I can't recall this particular excursion, all of which makes me wonder whether maybe I haven't done this quest before, after all.

That's one of the things about EQII and other aged mmorpgs that you either find endearing or infuriating; there's so much damn content now, it's near-impossible even to remember what you have and haven't done. Better that way than than the reverse, in my opinion, though I know not everyone agrees.

Whether I'd rescued the princess before or not, I had a good time doing it today. It gave me a chance to try out my new mercenary, Lord Valkiss Ssi`sh, the Shadowknight Freeport-aligned characters get for their ten-year Veteran award. Qeynosians and other goodie-goodies get the services of Lady Liae Croae, a Paladin, instead. I'd rather have had a pally for the buffs and healing but not so much I was going to try and sneak into Qeynos at Level 26 to claim her.

Mitsu isn't Level 26 any more, though; not after her adventures in mischief today. She's Level 30 now. Levels in EQII pass very quickly up to about the eighties or nineties. I wasn't even running any xp buffs. I'm in no hurry to level her up so I might need to think about toning the xp down a bit, not ancouraging it to flood in even faster.

Stand back, Valkiss! I think he's going to explode!

Fortunately that's something you can do very easily. You can divert some or all of your xp to AAs, which has the satisfying effect of making you more and more powerful while you stay at the same level, or you can switch xp off altogether. 

You can also mentor back down to enjoy any content you accidentally outlevelled, if you're one of those people who can't enjoy quests when they've gone grey. I'm never sure what difference it makes, really, although I do experience a spurious sense of satisfaction while one-shotting nominally at-level mobs under the influence of the auto-mentoring superhero effect. 

I'd probably enjoy most mmorpgs more if my character could one-shot everything, if I'm brutally honest. I know people say it gets boring but that's rarely been my experience. It's far more often been the long, attritional fights that have bored the chainmail pants off me. 

That might be why I've been so keen on the Overseer function ever since it was added to the game a few years ago. It offers all the interesting parts of questing (Storyline, travel, characters, rewards) without all that tedious combat. 

I like the holiday Overseer quests for another reason, too: they're very quick. Each step takes just half an hour. Sometimes the final stage might be bit longer. The whole thing can easily be done in a session or two. I'm in the middle of the Bristlebane Day Overseer questline as I put this post together and it's already updated twice as I write.

Collections are another combat-free way to progress your character in EQII. There's a new one for the Bristlebane holiday this year but it's packaged in an unusual way. 

If you're out foraging up holiday crafting mats from the Jester's Gardens, bushes that only spawn during the event, you'll pretty quickly find a discarded piece of equine equipment - or should that be bovine? If you inspect it, you'll receive the quest Saddle Up, which turns out to be not so much a quest as a collection.

The reward is a Bovoch plushie for your house. Or rather your garden. Who keeps a cow in the house?

What I have to decide now is whether I want to carry on with Mitsu or swap over to my regular characters on Skyfire. Low-mid level play is very addicting because the progress is so immediate and the rewards so frequent but having a new home to decorate is also a big attraction. I'd like Mitsu to start building a library of holiday crafting books but I need to remember to keep my archives up to date with everyone else. too.

I'm not intending to swap focus. I imagine Mitsu is set for a carefree life, pottering around her private island, doing the odd spot of decorating, popping out every so often for holidays and special events like this one. It's not practical to maintain a slew of max-level characters on multiple servers (Unless you're willing to dedicate yourself to the game like the much-missed Cloudrat) but it's eminently possible to keep multiple characters in play with a few hours here and there, now and then, so long as you set your goals appropriately.

Most importantly, it needs to be fun. And if you can't have fun on Bristlebane Day, when can you?

Just For One Day

While I'm a big fan of holidays in mmorpgs, April Fool's isn't one of my favorites. As a smallish child I enjoyed slipping a plastic fried egg onto my grandfather's plate as much as the next over-indulged brat and there were times in my adolescence when I may have convinced one of my more gullible peers that a class had been moved from one room to another when it really hadn't but by the time I got to college I was pretty much done with all that.

I am hugely fond of whimsy, though, and for some reason (probably because no-one likes to get the monthly figures and find a bunch of people cancelled their subs because they didn't see the funny side) when it comes to celebrating the day of fools, developers have tended more towards the twee than the twisted.

I'm also a major supporter of the concept of one-off and time-limited events, something that I know goes down about as well as a whoopee cushion at a wake in some quarters. I don't have a big problem with the fear of missing out so the added thrill of getting something that feels at least a little unique hugely outweighs the possibility I might forget all about it and wind up with nothing. 

For that reason I've always liked it when games make the effort to do something specifically for the day in question when a holiday rolls around. They don't do it all that often, preferring to let things run for a couple of weeks so everyone can fit it all into their schedule, which is fair enough, but it's nice to have an occasional "you had to be there" moment. 

EverQuest II has always kept back a few surprises just for the first of April, known as Bristlebane Day in Norrath. More often than not I do indeed forget all about it until it's too late but this year I happened to know there was a new quest coming and since I was just sitting here...

It's a companion piece to the longstanding Riddled Throughout The Land series that's offered by the sphinx, Imenand. I've done that one a few times. The rewards are all house pets in the form of twenty-sided dice, each of them named after either Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson. They were added to the game as a mark of respect to the creators of Dungeons and Dragons. If memory serves, I think the first of each may have been in memoriam for the D&D developers' deaths, which happened in consecutive years back in the twenty-aughts.

It was a nice gesture but the house pets themselves are kind of annoying so I was pleased to see that the new sphinx, Me-Theiz (Her quest is, of course, Riddle Me-Theiz. It's a pun. I think...) offers a plushie of herself for solving her riddles. Since the quest is new and the wiki hasn't been quite as instantaneous in its updates of late, I wasn't expecting there to be a walkthrough, so I worked the riddles out for myself. It wasn't too hard although the ones in New Halas and Whisperwind Isle took a bit of searching for.

As it happens, it turns out the deatails are on the wiki already but it's always nice to have done it without. And the sphinx looks perfect lounging around my Mara estate. If anyone wants one they'd better hurry. In a few hours, Me-Theiz will be gone, back to wherever it is sphinxes live, until this time next year, when I'm willing to bet she'll have come up with another set of riddles to add to this lot.

Over in Tyria there's something even more whimsical going on. As I've mentioned before, Guild Wars 2 has something of a checkered past where April Fool's events are concerned and for the last few years they've very much focused on the sillier aspects of the festival.

Last year we had the Invasion of the Giant Cats. This year the cats came back (can't believe I didn't use that as the title for the post) but this morning when I logged in to do my dialies I was offered a free Choya Champion. 

I thought it was going to be a mini but it turned out to be a disguise. Click it and you turn into a choya, complete with all the endearing (or annoying, depending on taste) animations and sound effects. 

I particularly enjoy the way whatever weapon you happen to be using doesn't scale to your new size. My elementalist's staff makes it look like she's carrying a jewelled lampost.

I spent quite a while running (or rolling) around as a cactus before I noticed there was also some kind of event associated with the illusion. If you go to Lion's Arch you'll find a Choya Sage who'll give you some highly disappointing rewards if you convince him you've done a whole lot of things you probably haven't.

I did find that funny. Like most Choya he doesn't really talk but he seems interested in whether you've spent most of your time doing Fractals, World vs World or slaying dragons, the last choice presumably suggesting you have an over-riding interest in the story.

At first I took it seriously, telling him I was a hero of the Mists but he seemed easy to convince so I tried him on the other two as well, even though the last time I saw the inside of a Fractal must have been over five years ago. Turns out he's really gullible. He'll believe whatever you tell him.

He doesn't have much to lose in taking your word for it. All he gives you are a few handfuls of vegetables. Something a little more substantial would have been nice. As Mrs Bhagpuss put it, "I wanted a hat or a handbag like Tinky Winky's". Choya do look like angry Teletubbies.

It's a fun little diversion all the same and there was quite a party atmosphere around the center of L.A. where it was all going on. The timescale for this one's not as tight as the sphinxes' riddles. The Choya Sage is going to be hanging out in Lion's Arch for five days.

After that it'll be Super Adventure Box, which itself began as an April Fool's event.

Whoopee, I guess.

When You Hear The Call

I've kind of fallen of the EverQuest II wagon these last few thanks to Valheim shouldering everything else to one side. It's niggling away at the back of my mind because I had a very loose plan of action for the winter and spring involving filling out the gaps in my Berserker's gear with drops from PQs and getting all the adornment slots filled and upgraded through crafting.

That's what I did last year and it was steady, satisfying gameplay. Nothing spectaular but gently enjoyable, a background hum of pleasure in the gaming day. 

It helped a lot that at the time I was regularly getting very nice upgrades from the Overseer system. Over the lifetime of the two EverQuest games there have been too many innovations and additions to remember, but only a handful of systemic changes that I'd consider to be fundamentally game-changing - AAs, mercenaries, flying mounts...

The Overseer mechanic is one of those. It made me in-game rich (by any previous standards I'd known, anyway) and better-equipped than I'd ever been before, in both games. I was really hoping the same would happen this year with a post-expansion new season but as yet we haven't had one. 

The good news is that one is definitely planned. Until it arrives there's not much incentive for me to keep up my previous routine, bashing out Overseer quests as though they were dailies. Which, I guess, they are.

Oh, I remember this one!

By dipping out to go play viking I've also missed the bus for this year's PQs. They'll still happen, of course, and people will still do them, but the feeding frenzy that was so compulsive back in January will have abated to a desultory trickle by now as most people who care will have found the drops they wanted.

I really love public quests in mmorpgs. I think they embody the spirit of what the genre was probably always meant to be better than just about anything. Certainly much more so than instanced dungeons or raids. 

To my way of thinking, the true meaning of "massively multiple" is scores of people, hundreds if the infrastructure can stand it, all engaged in the same activity at the same time in the same shared space. And it needs to be an open space into which anyone can wander by accident, not some by-appointment, only if your name is on the list instance.

Without a doubt that's the primary reason I've stuck with Guild Wars 2 all these years, even though at times it frustrates and annoys me as much as it entertains. The original vision, overhyped and oversold as it was, still comes closest to my idea of an ideal mmorpg. 

ArenaNet never managed to close the deal on the promises they made but luckily for all of us mmorpgs are so ferociously complex in their construction, so iceberg-weighted with unseen engines and ballast, that even when those who seek to control them want to make changes there's only so much they can do. You can put a hat on the cat but its still a cat for all that.

Not so sure about this, though...

 

For all the time and effort the developers invested in fractals and raids, GW2 remains at heart a sprawling, open-world game, where things happen and everyone joins in. Yes, your character has to be level 80 for a lot of them and yes you have to have bought the Path of Fire expansion, but even allowing for that there's a never-ending firework display of "events" in the parts of the game anyone can visit for free.

EQ2 doesn't have the advantage of being built that way but it has a good track record of inclusivity all the same. The mentoring system and the agnostic dungeons are both intentional attempts to get everyone playing together regardless of awkward barriers like levels. They're shaky in implementation but the ideas behind them are sound.

The team has stuck doggedly with Public Quests for many years now, even though they cause all kinds of problems. It's tempting to say the game was never built for that number of people to come together and fight giant monsters except apparently it was because I have screenshots of my characters doing it a decade and a half ago. We had dragon attacks when we put the wizard portals back up after the cataclysm and I'm pretty sure that was in the first year after the game came out.

I just bet you would.

No-one called them "Public Quests" back then. I think we called them "World Events". They didn't have the semi-formal structure that came later. You just heard something was happening and you turned up to see what it was. Now you get quests and achievements and guaranteed, personalized drops but it's really the same thing.

Over the years, EQ2 has bundled dozens, maybe hundreds of these things together to make a living world. Some, like the raising of the portals, happen only once. Others come around time after time, like old friends.

Norrath's calendar of holiday events, as I've often said, is second to none in the genre. This month sees one of the year's biggest flurries of activity on that front. Brew Day is winding down but even before it goes we'll have another event to enjoy. The Chronoportals open today.

As well as some very nice-looking new house items, including some excellent paintings, the drops from the Ancient Cyclops instance (the one that's a PQ in all but name) have been updated to make them useful for max levels. Another chance to upgrade some of those slots for a casual like me. There's also a new Overseer quest, something I'm very happy to see.

The chronoevent is a short one by Norrathian standards. It's only here for just over a week. It's just as well because two more are coming along right behind. The Beast'r Eggstravaganza and Bristlebane Day are both active on the Test Server right now.

I read the patch notes for both and they look great. Beast'r has five more egg pets to find and a title for finding them. And there's another new Overseer quest for Bristlebane. 

The trickster's feast also brings a new patchwork fight (yet another kind of unofficial PQ) to the dark side of Luclin. I haven't seen the loot table for that but historically the patchworks have been very generous when done at level so I'm hopeful my Berserker might get something he needs when he goes to try his luck. 

Everyone loves an egg pun.

There are also the inevitable new crafting books that I'll buy and never use and of course all the old quests and features from every other year are up again. 

I've spoken before about the misleading naming convention in Norrath that has events known as Brew or Bristlebane Day lasting for weeks but there is actually a proper Bristlebane Day. It is, of course, April the first and that's the one and only chance you'll have (this year) to match wits with a new riddle-setter. 

We already have the Sphinx but rumor is (if you can call something a rumor when its already happening on Test) they'll be joined this year by another question-setting entity for just that one day. That's definitely appointment gaming.

As well as the returning holidays, there's a major game update brewing. I'd say more about it but I don't know much. Or indeed anything. 

Well, I know what's in this thread. It's called Whispers of Tyranny and most of it probably isn't going to be for me, being raids and heroics. There's some solo content, though, and some quests but no mention of a new Overseer Season. 

There's a beta starting today but I won't be joining in with that. My days of beta-testing content for live games where I'm going to be playing that content just weeks later are over.

All of the above is also motivation for me to get myself organized and get back to logging in to EverQuest II at least often enough to see all that new stuff. Maybe to stick around and farm the drops I need if there really are some good ones I could use. 

And I need the push. It's getting to be all Valheim all the time around here and I'ma  little uncomfortable about it. Much though I've enjoyed being a viking these last few weeks it's good to be reminded other pantheons are available.

Let's Go Jumpin'

By the time you read this Bristlebane Day will most likely be over so don't go thinking you're getting a rabbit like mine. Not until next year, anyway.

I wasn't planning on getting one either but after my last post on the holiday I thought I should at least visit the vendor and pick up this year's new crafting book, so I could not make anything from it, just like I haven't made anything from any of the others I've bought every year. It's a tradition.

While I was there I took a look at all the things you can buy with Fool's Gold. A few odds and ends caught my eye but the one that really jumped out (boom-tish!) was the rabbit mount. It was three hundred FG, which seemed like a lot Then I checked how much was in my wallet and I already had a hundred or so. Maybe it was doable.

Holiday currencies in EverQuest II are generally easy to get. The various quests tend to offer them as one of the rewards but most holidays (probably all of them although I'm not about to go check) also have some form of repeatable content that gives currency every time.

For Frostfell, my preferred currency grind is the Icy Keep, a dungeon you can easily run solo or, better still, mentor down and do the Heroic version for better rewards. During Tinkerfest the cogs just lie around all over the place waiting to be picked up. Several festivals have associated races, which are always good for coins. Bristlebane brings out patchcraft mobs to kill so that's where I set my focus.

Are they even the same species?

To kill patchcrafts in 2020 you need a max level character or at least someone at the upper end of the level range. Three of the four zones where they spawn are in the current expansion: The Blinding, Aurelian Coast and Wracklands. The fourth, Obulus Frontier, is a little lower, the level cap for the Kunark Ascending expansion being 100. Still not a spot for tiddlers, though.

I'd already been killing the patchcraft zelniaks as I ran into them on my rounds because I once got a nice165 resolve cloak off one and I was hoping there might be more upgrades. (I can now say they also drop a belt and that both belt and cloak come in different versions with stats to suit casters, tanks or melee dps and quite possibly other roles, too). I knew where they spawned so I started keeping an eye out for them.

I doubled my coins to around two hundred in a couple of sessions. Each kill is actually three because the first zelniak spawns another zelniak when it dies and the second spawns a goblin. It's the goblin that drops the coins and he always drops three of them. That would mean one hundred goblins and three hundred kills in total for a rabbit, if you were starting from scratch.

Except that one of the perks of being an All Access member is double currency. I don't generally think much about it but on occasions like this it really comes into its own. I was getting six coins every time. Fifty spawns for a mount seems pretty reasonable.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a frickin' rabbit!

After four months of playing regularly my Berserker has become fairly powerful in solo content. I'm gradually working towards a goal of having all his gear at 165 resolve, at which point I will use the infusers I've been stockpiling to make him more powerful still. I've been exceptionally lucky in getting limited use recipes for adornments and I've started to make them and slot them. It's a work in progress. I anticipate it taking me most of the year, at which point the next expansion will drop and I'll have to start all over again.

Right now, though, I can mow through two-up-arrow zelniaks in seconds. It made harvesting them for coins very straightforward and quite enjoyable - other than having to wait for them to spawn, that is. I popped a tracking scroll so I could find them and cruised around at low level, swooping down on any I could find.

It took me maybe half an hour to get the final hundred coins I needed. Off to Freeport via that other invaluable membership perk, instant travel, and I had me a bunny. A very big bunny.

It looked fantastic but I was curious to see how practical it might be. Rabbits don't fly, not even in Norrath, so you can't slot a rabbit into the mount appearance slot and use a flying mount for stats. It's a Leaper, the second grade of mount (it goes Ground, Leaper, Glider, Flying), meaning it can jump long distances, but crucially, as I discovered when I tested it, it also negates falling damage and is steerable in the air.

In order to maintain air-speed velocity, a rabbit needs to wiggle its ears 43 times every second.

That makes it a very effective ride in The Blinding, where you can jump off the platform at the zone in and pretty much glide to anywhere else in the zone. If I'd thought about it I'd have bought the mount for one of my characters that doesn't have flying in Blood of Luclin zones yet. But I didn't. C'est la vie.

The other problem is that equipping the bunny makes for an enormous drop in stats. I was astonished just how enormous. My Berserker has a maxed-out mount, Level 20 with all the regular gear slots filled and some of the additional barding slots too. Changing to a Level 1 mount with no gear dropped his key stats by almost twenty per cent.

I'm leveling the bunny up a bit because I have no other mounts I want to level and even at eighty per cent effectiveness he can still do what he needs to do quickly enough.. Mostly, though, I think it's a mount to pull out for special occasions and screenshots.

I feel quite pleased with myself for taking the trouble to get it, all the same. I may play a lot of EQII at the moment but I don't play it the way I used to, when it was my main MMORPG. In those days I made the most of holidays and special events. I'd forgotten how satisfying that can be, especially when you get the thing you've been eyeing up.

Let's hope I remember when the next big event rolls around. There's the very short Beast'r event this weekend and then a holiday drought until mid-June. And who knows what we'll all be doing by then?

You've Been Fooling Me, Baby

Another week, another major holiday event in EverQuest II. This time it's Bristlebane Day, described by the wiki as "the annual live event that honors Fizzlethorpe Bristlebane and celebrates playful pranksters, tricksters, and good humor."

Fizzlethorpe Bristlebane is the trickster god of thieves and rogues. Every pantheon has to have one. His holiday has never been one of my favorites although it has its moments. I remember when the Ratical quest was added. That was fun. And I put some effort into getting a Horse of a Different Color, too.

It's become something of a cliché here, the way I link to unfeasibly lengthy lists of things to do on EQII holidays, but seriously, look at this. I wouldn't even call Bristlebane Day one of the really major dates in the calendar, either, although it's certain to be someone's favorite.

As I've observed before, EQII often employs a convention where a "day" lasts a week or two but I believe Bristlebane is unique in having an actual, single day when special things happen. That's April the first, of course. If you want to talk to the Sphinx or grab some shinies for the Prankster's Novelties collection, that's your moment.

Before and after, from the 27th of March until the 10th of April, the rest of the extensive program continues to play. Somewhat to my surprise, especially given what Kander was saying, there's no holiday-themed Overseer mission this time but there's no shortage of things to do.

Even though EQII has an excellent in-game calendar these days and although every character gets in-game mail announcing the event, I still hadn't noticed it was happening until a zelniak tried to kill me in The Blinding. 

It took me several moments to work out what was happening. There I was, like I am every day, happily trundling around the sands with my bunny and my pony and my trusty mercenary, gathering mushrooms and algae from bushes (just don't think about it), when suddenly something bit me. Hard.

Zelniaks are peculiar little goatlike creatures native to Luclin. We have them in original EverQuest, where they look a bit like zebras with sharp fangs, but over the intervening half-millennium they seem to have (d)evolved into cute, brightly orange, Shetland pony sized goofballs. They mill about in safe areas grazing and minding their own business and I tend to forget they're there.

Until they go psycho on me, that is. Once I'd adjusted to the situation I noticed two things: the zelniak was a two-up arrow heroic mob and it was even more colorful than usual. More significantly, when I killed it another one, different color, spawned instantly and began attacking me, too.

I killed that one and a goblin appeared, yelling some typical goblin nonsense. This was ringing no bells with me whatsoever. I had no clue what was going on but I was peripherally aware it must be related to some event or other. 

I killed the goblin and a small, wooden chest appeared. It was only when I opened it up and saw the Fool's Gold Coins within that I realised Bristlebane must be behind it all. Since then I've killed quite a few patchcraft zelniaks and their goblin keepers. I have the vaguest memory of these from previous years but really nothing's coming back to me even now.

I still wouldn't have gone out of my way to hunt the things down only I got jumped a few more times and something new happened. The fights are avoidable, by the way; patchcraft creatures are non-aggro until you get very close to them, then they match your character's level and attack, so if you don't want to bother with them you just have to practice social distancing. Only I kept forgetting and bumping into them by accident.

Each time it happened I finished off the trio of spawns and picked up my coins then went about my business. Until a metal chest dropped instead of a wooden one. Intrigued, I opened it and found inside a very decent upgrade to the cloak my Berserker was wearing. He had a nice level 155 Resolve item already but this was 165 and I don't see too many of those.

That does change things. I've been very slowly inching his gear up to 155 using the Overseer system but 165 items are still quite a rarity for me. If Bristlebane's handing them out then I'm killing every patchcraft zelniak I can find.

Since I'll also be piling up the holiday currency I guess I'd better go check out the vendors to see what they're selling and if I'm going to be there anyway I may as well pick up a couple, of the quests. There's a holiday dungeon that I'm not at all sure I've ever done, too, so I ought to go take a look at that...

Bristlebane's celebrations are followed immediately by Beast'r, which only lasts a few days, and then there's nothing on the calendar other than the regular city festivals and moonlight enchantments for nearly two whole months, until Oceansfull washes up in early June. It could seem like bad timing, what with all the enforced idleness going on, but luckily there's the spaghetti western themed Game Update to look forward to in April. 

That should tide us over for a while.

Fool's Gold: EQ2

I am not a fan of April's Fools Day. Not since I was about nine years old, anyway. Game developers, however, seem to love it. Or pretend to.

Every MMORPG you can think of will be paying some kind of service, lip or fan, to the Feast of Fools this weekend. Guild Wars 2 long ago locked the date to the inexplicably popular Super Adventure Box, which returned on Thursday.

I haven't bothered with it yet. I don't hate it. I liked it well enough when it was new. Probably seen enough of it now, though. I hear there are some new races. Might try those, I guess. I do like racing.

Over in EverQuest II we have a much more appealing prospect in Bristlebane Day. There really is a "day", too. The whole festival runs for a couple of weeks but there's a bunch of stuff that only happens on the First of April, including rabbit-catching, special harvests and the Sphinx questline.

Also, and this is one I always forget, it's the one chance in the year Beastlords get to tame a were-rabbit warder. Also a were-bear but who cares? Were-rabbit, dude!

I may jump on that later. You get the whole of the two weeks for that one, fortunately. I have a highish-level Beastlord although I never really got on with the class. Too much like hard work compared to the original EverQuest version. Still, were-rabbit...

A lot less fuss and an easy run is the new quest, handed out by Zruk the troll in Enchanted Lands. All Bristlebane quests begin in Enchanted Lands, presumably because Bristlebane Fizzlethorpe, God of Mischief, is a Halfling. Identifies as a halfling, maybe I should say. God, after all. Pretty much be what he wants.

I did the new quest right before this post. It took maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, most of which was me running around not knowing what I was looking for. I thought I'd do it the proper way, without looking anything up.

I was expecting it to be quick. On a max level character with unlimited Fast Travel via All Access membership, most movement-gated questing is trivial. Add in both Tracking (which I give my Berserker by way of the extremely cheap Scrolls of Tracking that I buy from the Cash Shop) and Track Harvestables, which I have by dint of being a maxed-out crafter, and there's not much that slows me down on a scavenger hunt.

Apart from being in the wrong place, looking for the wrong thing, that is. Turns out pretty much the entire Antonican seaboard is known as the Coldwind Coast and I was on the wrong side of the map. Plus the clovers aren't shinies as I thought they would be, nor are they drops form the Bristlbane holiday harvests, Jester's Gardens.

After ten minutes looking for the things I lost patience and googled the quest. That got me nowhere. No-one's written it up yet. It must have been tested, though, and EQII testers love to chat about what they're testing and how much it's annoying them, so I went to the forums to read the feedback.

Unfortunately for me the general opinion seemed to be that the quest worked pretty much just fine from the get-go, so no-one felt the need to walk through the steps. I finally had the brilliant idea of googling the item I was looking for, the Coldwind Clover. That took me to an EQII Maps link, where the location was marked.

I opened my map in-game to orient myself and guess what? There was a big, green quest highlight picking out the area where I was supposed to be searching. Could have saved myself a lot of time there if I'd looked but I thought they'd dropped that system a couple of years back in the interests of "immersion". Not for holiday fluff quests, evidently.

Once I'd got that sorted it was barely five minutes to do the whole thing. Clovers in Antonica, Vulriches in Kylong Plains, White Heather in Butcherblock.  Back to Zruk each time for a hand in and the next stage. Without Fast Travel I guess it would take maybe half an hour.

As I've said before, that Fast Travel perk is all but worth the monthly sub on its own. Which does beg the question of why I'm spending 90% of my EQ2 playtime at the moment on Kaladim, where All Access is mandatory but Fast Travel is disabled, along with every other innovation that happened after 2005. Also, no holiday events.

That's a post for another day. Today's all about the silly. Actually, now I come to think about it...

The reward for helping Zruk is a housepet. Like I need any more of those. Y'know what? I just had an idea. I think I'll start a zoo. I'm about fed up of all the creatures lurching and hopping and flapping about the halls of my Maj'Dul mansion. I just might round them all up in some kind of wildlife sanctuary somewhere. That Baubleshire Prestige Home I bought looks a bit like a park...

While I was in Enchanted Lands I did the race a couple of times. Got a hat. Then I went to Freeport and bought the new Bristlebane crafting book. Also last year's, which I seem to have missed. And a rubber chicken.

Playing on Kaladim, and also reading Wilhelm talking about his adventures in old Norrath and Middle Earth, it's finally coming home to me how unecessary my search for a new MMORPG to indulge my passion for meaningless leveling has been. It's not new games I need, it's just more characters in the ones I'm already playing.

I think I might treat myself to some more character slots.

Project Patchwork Pegasus : EQ2

The change of name and management from SOE to DBG has brought a lot of changes to the two EverQuest titles but one thing that has continued unabated is the long-established predilection of Sony Online Entertainment for experimenting with variant rulesets. It's an approach to curating MMORPGs that I have always endorsed wholeheartedly. I've even suggested that for any MMO to have two servers running under the same ruleset is a wasted opportunity.

Over the years I've done my best to taste all the flavors but even with the greatest goodwill and enthusiasm there are only so many hours in the day and you can only play so many characters. When Holly Longdale announced in her Producer's Letter back in May that two new servers would soon be available I read the rulesets and decided that I'd probably pass on the offer this time around.

Neither of the new servers looked especially appealing. The Isle of Refuge server, whose unique selling point is that almost all items that are flagged "Heirloom" on regular servers will be freely tradeable, seemed to me to be a re-run of EverQuest's Firiona Vie server minus the awkward (and quickly abandoned) "roleplaying" rules.

I played on Firiona Vie when it launched and for a few weeks afterwards. It was a unique and surreal experience. The RP rules included severe language restrictions that meant even characters of the same alignment couldn't communicate - dwarves and elves and gnomes had no common language for example.

The first few days seemed to consist mainly of language parties, where groups of characters of different races would sit in circles and spam each other in /say with repeated text in their own language. That's how you learned a language in  Norrath in those days.

The fact that almost the first thing players attempted to do on the RP server was nullify the very restrictions that had been implemented to encourage roleplaying foretold the story of Firiona Vie's future. Within a short time the only aspect of the ruleset that mattered was the free trading of just about everything, which in turn led to FV's status as the RMT capital of Norrath.

I'd remembered that Firiona Vie later fell into severe decline but it seems that's not the case. If it ever happened that decline has been reversed. I mentioned my belief in a comment to Wilhelm, who observed that FV sits at "Medium" on DBG's server status page, a level that puts it well above most servers for population.

Since I have a level 22 ranger there I took the trouble to log in and check. Using the very reliable benchmarks of /who in Plane of Knowledge, and the Guild Lobby, number of people in General Chat and number of Bazaar traders, all data points that can easily be compared between servers, I find that FV does indeed have a considerably higher population than Luclin/Stromm, my main server these days.

So, reports of Firiona Vie's failure seem to be apocryphal and it makes a lot more sense than I thought to see EQ2 attempting to replicate its comparative good health. Still doesn't make me want to play under that ruleset. When Isle of Refuge went live at the end of June I declined to attend the party.

The other server, which launched a couple of weeks later, looked if anything even less appealing. The server name, Race To Trakanon, is self-explanatory. This is the first of what Holly Longdale suggests may be a series of "Event" servers.

The server runs until the specified event is achieved, in this case the killing of the dragon Trakanon. There are set markers for players to achieve, which provide a variety of material rewards if hit, but soon after the dragon dies the server closes. At that point players get a free character move to the regular ruleset server of their choice and the server re-opens with a new target event.

This seems to me to be a good idea in principle. Over the years the various "Progression" servers for both games have tended to be seen by certain players and guilds as competetive "race to the top" environments. That hasn't always played well with the wishes and desires of the players who were looking to recreate the original Norrathian experiences of the past, or just to play through older content at a reasonable pace with a decent population around them.

Although I approve of the concept of Event servers, which should help to serve the needs of those conflicting communities, as someone who already plays far too many characters in far too many MMOs, much though I love that new server smell, the idea of starting yet another character on a server that won't exist in three months didn't really seem to make much sense. I was going to give this one a pass as well. And then I saw the sweetener.

Like Telwyn I couldn't resist the lure of a free flying mount for every character on my account. That really is a proper incentive. The mount itself isn't just a pegasus, something I have never owned, but a rainbow-hued patchwork pegasus. The patchwork versions of creatures, which appeared a few years back as part of the Bristlebane Day festivities, have always been one of my favorite looks.

What's more, the bar for obtaining this highly-desirable mount has been set exceptionally low. All you need to do is get to Level 10. Even under the slower xp rates and restrictions of the RTT server, that's no more than a couple of decent sessions.

It's very smart marketing. The server requires an All Access account to play on, which effectively makes it a Subscription-only option. Chances are most people playing there right now already had such an account but each of these "AA Only" additions to the game takes it further in the direction DBG clearly intends to go - back to a Subscription service with a generous free trial.

I've spent several hours playing on RTT very happily. Very happily indeed, actually. I forgot just how much fun starting a genuine new character with no access to the accrued wealth of high levels on the same account can be.

Right before I began writing this post my ratonga bruiser dinged ten and the free mount was mine. I could stop there, mission achieved, but I'm not going to do that. I'm having far too much fun.

I chose to begin in Qeynos because even after all these years there's still a great deal of content in Queen Antonia Bayle's capital that I have never experienced. I could have written three more posts already on new quests, new instances and new events that I've found, all of which I've never seen before.

When the time comes for my new bruiser to move home I'll be excited all over again for whatever comes next but it's not the event for which the server is named that's doing it for me. I'll never see Trakanon fall, not unless I watch it on YouTube. No, it's that starting over yet again has made me realize just how much there is still to see even after a dozen years of heavy play. That's been the real "event" for me.

Bounce! Bounce! Everybody Bounce! : EQ2, Rift,GW2

Spring is here - Everybody Bounce!

Over in Telaria there's a little fenced-off plot where you can jump up and down like toddlers at a three-year old's birthday party. See those water-filled balloons pop! For added ridiculosity, bounce on your unfeasibly gigantic horrorshow mount alongside half a raid force in full war armor.

Bouncing is srs bzns

I did that last year and it wasn't much fun. TAGN and his Saturday Adventure Group made a much better fist of it than I did. I gave up after a couple of tries. There were some rewards I wouldn't have minded getting but nothing really grabbed me. As far as mounts go in Telaria, I like the two-tailed cats and...well, I like the two-tailed cats.

You Are Here

Over in Tyria they have the Super Adventure Box. Well, we all know about that. The whole Internet knows about it. We recently had the unexpected pleasure of a friend from EQ/EQ2 joining us in GW2 and knowing his propensity for throwing himself off high places I guessed this would be his kind of thing so we ran through the first world again the other night, without the training wheels this time. It was fun but a little does go a long way and again there's nothing in the rewards on offer that does much for me.

And so to Norrath. In a little oasis just off the beach in Sinking Sands stands Princess Evelynn Fadia and she has a game for you to play. It's called the Bristlebane Bounce. What you have to do is "Race around the Croc Hunter Camp gathering shiny baubles by propelling yourself through the air with Bristlebane Bouncers".

Maybe I should run up the top of the cliffs and jump down...

The baubles hang high in the air. Really high. Scattered among them are fish. Yes, fish. Where Bristlebane's involved it's best not to ask too many questions. Like why is a Princess running a carnival stall? The important thing is this: if you hit a fish in mid-air it bounces you higher still. All the best baubles, the gold ones, are way up at the top. Going to need a good fish slap to grab them.

I'm not sure if this is new to Bristlebane Day (Bristlebane fortnight, more like) this year but I can't remember doing it before. I noticed Mrs Bhagpuss bouncing there the other day and I'd been meaning to give it a go. I finally got to it this morning.

Would make a fine coat

There's something about EQ2 mini-games that just works for me. Some mini-games I've played in Rift and LotRO seem earnest, plodding, even dour. GW2 mini-games, contrarily, aren't mini at all. The regular jumping puzzles and the S.A.B. are full-on games in their own right and they sometimes leave me more exhausted than doing a Fractal.

EQ2's pitch is perfect. Mini-games like the gnomish sky racing circuits or the many variations on "whizz around running over stuff for a high score and prizes" are fast, frenetic and fun. Moreover, they contrive to be just hard enough that I can't sleepwalk through them and just easy enough that I convince myself one more try will do it.

Remind me what holiday it is again?

Do what? Get the prizes! That's the other part they get right. Stuff I want. Also, stuff I get that I wasn't expecting. Yes, I could look it up on the many estimable EQ2 info sources. EQ2Traders always covers holiday events in exhaustive and entertaining detail. Usually, though I just dive in and it all comes as a surprise.

Surprises from Bristlebane aren't always welcome but these turned out just fine. A full set of appearance clothes that make my ratonga beastlord look like he stepped straight out of a pack of playing cards, a Friesian bovoch housepet and perhaps best of all a great title. That's what motivated me to spend two hours bouncing after breakfast.

You said it.

Two hours, because I'm a bad bouncer. My best run netted me 69 points. The current high score on the billboard stood at 297. Which is where SOE win again. Holiday events in Norrath generally set a very low bar. It almost feels like someone wants you to have fun, even get what you want. The title comes with persistence. After a few dismal runs up it popped. Some of the clothes were on offer even after my most terrible attempts (32 being my worst). To get all the clothing options and the pet I think I had to break 65. Even I managed that. Eventually.

I envy anyone coming fresh to EQ2. Under the recently revised Freemium model it has to be the best value offer of its kind anywhere. And while I may be living elsewhere at the moment, I'll always be back for the holidays.