Complete Heal

Many famous battles in the history of the world are associated with some legendary call to rally the troops. It took one of these legendary rallying calls last night to push our guild over the finish line as we were stumbling trying to take down Lord Mithaniel Marr in the Halls of Honor. What was the call? Although rather unorthodox, it was simply “get out of the corner and stand by the big ass robo pig!”

Our journey to reach the Lord of the Halls of Honor started in front of the entrance to the zone shown above. I love those pillars with the lighting surging in between them. It really sets the mood and reminds you that you aren’t in West Karana anymore. I always thought this zone was pretty cool back in the day and I have to admit I was feeling a bit nostalgic retracing steps I hadn’t taken in 7-8 years.

Mithaniel resides in HOHb so we had to fight our way to that sub zone through a lot of huge dogs and other unpleasant mini bosses like the guy shown above. These guys all fell quickly to our blades and honestly the ease of blowing through this trash may have led some of us to get a bit over confident as a very difficult fight awaited us at the end of this dungeon crawl.

Before we could spawn the main boss, we had to do a tango with this gigantic frog shown above. He was an interesting fight if for no other reason than it was cool to do battle with a giant Kermit the Frog. I don’t remember another frog boss in any other MMO I’ve every played. I’ve fought lots of dragons, vampires, spiders and other miscellaneous things but frogs? Nope.

Fighting frogs is one thing but fighting Lord Mithaniel Marr of the Halls of Honor is a different story. This guy hits like a truck and doesn’t care too much for visitors. Our first pull didn’t go too well and we met an untimely demise. Fortunately, we were able to get a cleric camped and so we rezzed up and decided to give it one more shot. At this point, it was getting late and some people started getting grouchy about various things such as people not being shrunk or knights not off tanking etc… I was thinking we were headed toward a big disappointment but I was mistaken.

Once the raid “stood by the big ass robo pig” we got focused and achieved victory! We had our first real complete heal chain rotation going and our healers did great work healing thorough all the smack down Lord Minthaniel Marr was putting on our raid. While its true most of us out gear this content, you have to remember that it was designed for a full raid force and we killed him with 25-30 raiders who were locked at level 65 or lower. Not too bad if you ask me. We are starting to jell a bit and I am looking forward to the fights that lie ahead.

It was fun to down Lord Mithaniel Marr again and I even won my first piece of raid loot since my return to Everquest – a Cloak of the Wrulons. Are you looking for some casual old school raiding with a great guild? It’s not too late to join us! Visceral awaits.

Many of our members are hitting 65 – so our progression raid force is coming along nicely. Since we are starting to get some decent numbers, we are making some laid back runs through Planes of Power raid mobs before we start our organized progression in a few weeks. Currently, we are doing these casual raids on Thursday night and Sunday afternoon. Our raid started this afternoon with Grummus in Plane of Disease.

This raid was pretty straight forward as we just cleared a bunch of trash and a few mini bosses before we arrived at our target. He was pretty much a tank and spank encounter. As we worked our way to this guy – our guild leader mentioned how many tells he gets every time our raid force hits a POP raid zone. Many people on the server are asking questions about why a raid force of level 65s keeps hitting these zones. We are generating a lot of interest in the guild and having fun at the same time so it’s all good.

Grummus went down without too much fuss. I can’t help but wonder what is up with all the nipple rings. The BOT giants have them and now Grummus? Bizarre. Speaking of BOT, our next target was to go after Agnarr the Storm Lord in the Bastion of Thunder. In order to reach him, you have to go through a series of portals where you find yourself facing a boss such as Evynd Firestorm shown below.

These fights are all pretty similar. You basically zone into a big circular platform with the boss in the middle of the room. A series of portals lines the perimeter of the platform and mobs keep spawning out of each platform. You either offtank / mez the adds while a ranger kites the boss around the room until all the portals are destroyed and all the adds are down. Once that happens, you engage the boss and before too long he’s taking a dirt nap.

Once Evynd fell, we zoned into the next area and fought Emmerik Skyfury. This guy caused us a little more trouble – mainly because half the raid got stuck at the teleport NPC because we couldn’t figure out what the correct phrase was to zone to the next area. Eventually, we succeed in downing this guy and moved into the last chamber to face off against Agnarr the Storm Lord.

Agnarr the Storm Lord means business. At least to a partial raid of level 65s who don’t quite have the flow down yet. We wiped on this guy and didn’t really put up much of a fight. Unfortunately, by the time we got back up to him the portal guy had despawned and we missed our opportunity for the day. This boss remains on our short list and the next time we meet he will not be so lucky. As we were fighting this guy, I had flashbacks of fighting him over 8 years ago. That’s nuts. If any of you are interested in joining us when we start progression raiding in a few weeks – check us out at this site.

I gave it my best shot. I kept telling myself that I didn’t need to go to Fan Faire this year and that there were plenty of reasons why it made more sense to stay home. For weeks, I was able to resist the urge to hit the submit registration button. I’ve been to the last four events and my level of commitment to SOE games and really online gaming in general seems to have waned a bit over the years. After all, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time in virtual worlds since the release of Ultima Online many years ago and as many gamers have experienced the passage of time brings raising a family and getting pulled in all sorts of directions – most of the time away from gaming due to work or other RL responsibilities.

In the end, I pulled the trigger. Why? Just because I can. After all, who doesn’t need a break from the day to day routine of being a “responsible” grown up? What else am I going to do with that cash – fix the sink or paint the house? Seriously, you only live once and I’m going to pack it up and go to Vegas. There is something unique about these events and I’m excited about going once again. The Blueberry Muffin Man shown above would be proud.

Speaking of the Muffin Man, what happens when a GM with a lollipop shows up on the Luclin / Stromm server? He draws a crowd of course! In the last month or so that I’ve been back in EQ, I’ve seen a fairly large number of GM run events from horse races in the arena to passing out experience potions and offering up special character titles. In my case, this Blueberry guy was announcing his retirement from the GM program and passed out 10 – 30 minute double exp potions before he called it a night. He also gave my Enchanter a sweet last name. I enjoyed talking to this guy and hope to see him in game again one day.

When I met the GM, I was in Iksar form and there were very few other players around. He called me a “Chicksar” magnet and then dropped “The Lounge Lizard” surname on me. I think it’s pretty fitting in either Iksar form or in my default gnome skin. Anyways, my EQ time last week was spent grinding AA points in COD, BOT, Plane of Fire and Tower of Sol Ro. I’m up to 161 AA points currently and am enjoying the nightly grouping. Since I have a few veteran rewards, I can use the daily “lesson of the devoted” which grants double experience for 30 minutes every 20 hours or so. You can basically play EQ for an hour or two at a time and get a lot done – whether it’s regular exp or AA exp. It’s been fun checking out these zones in Planes of Power that I haven’t seen in years. I’m still looking forward to beginning our official raid progression in a few weeks and getting the chance to beat the Plane of Time – something I never finished during my original stint with Everquest. In the meantime, I better get going as Kibartik apparently has an axe to grind.

Howdy strangers. So here I am roughly six months since my last post and it feels like it’s been even longer. Where have I been? Well, I’ve been gaming on and off over the last few months but mainly I’ve been focused on RL activities (work, family, picking up some new hobbies etc…) Life is great though so I can’t complain – things are calming down enough that I should be able to get back to updating the site more frequently.

What’s new in my online adventures? First of all, I spent a few weeks playing World of Warcraft with my priest but it just didn’t stick. I even bought tickets for Blizzcon but now I’m not sure that I’ll even fly out to Anaheim later this year. It’s probably too late to sell my tickets so I’m may be out $300. At the same time, I’d save a few thousand dollars by staying home so that might make more sense in the end. Who knows maybe I’ll end up going after all as attending a Blizzcon would be something to check off my gamer bucket list. I have to be honest with you guys though, World of Warcraft just isn’t my thing – no matter how much I try to force myself to get immersed in it. In the end, I think it’s all the instanced dungeons. EQ2 has the same problem. I just miss open world dungeon crawling and being somewhere with a group only to see another group of people run by on their own adventure. Don’t get me wrong WOW and EQ2 are great games they just lack the immersion factor for me these days and without that factor I’m just not that into it anymore.

I tried some Age of Conan with the Godslayer expansion. I even leveled up to max level with the “free level” feature that they put into the game recently where you are awarded a level or two a week just for keeping an active subscription. I didn’t enjoy leveling up in that game very much so my theory was that I could get to max level and have a fresh start but it just didn’t feel all that fresh. There is a whole new expansion worth of content to check out but I’m not motivated to play AOC at the moment. Age of Conan feels like a cramped fish bowl sitting on top of a mountain. You see so many interesting things but just can’t get to them. EQ2 held my attention for a few weeks as I got my Fury on Nagafen up to max level and then betrayed and made him a Warden. I did some entry level raids in the new expansion but it seemed like group content and overland pvp dried up due to the implementation of battlegrounds. Needless to say, battlegrounds got old quickly for me and playing a Druid just seemed way too common so I put EQ2 back on the shelf for a while.

As the list of titles that interested me dwindled, I found myself deciding between Vanguard and EQ. I really wanted to spend more time in Vanguard but it’s hard to justify a large time commitment to a game that is effectively down to a single server. Granted, the world of Telon is huge and having all the players in one realm probably makes a lot of sense but I don’t know how long a game on a single server (other than Eve) can survive. Last week SOE laid off 34 employees and early rumors had several of the remaining VG developers getting their walking papers. Fortunately, these rumors seem to be off base as it appears the developers in question remain at SOE. What would make me want to spend more time in Telon? Honestly, some direct communication to the players from the developers regarding their master plan for the game and reassurances that the game isn’t going anywhere. Those reassurances plus details on new content in the coming months would go a long way to calming my Vanguard jitters. Until then, my 40th level Bloodmage will remain on the fence – waiting to see what happens.

With all that out of the way, guess what was left? Everquest of course! As the title of this post indicates, absence makes the heart grow fonder. In the last month or so, I’ve leveled up an Enchanter on the recently combined Luclin / Stromm server. He’s now locked at level 65 with about 80 AA points and has joined a new casual paced progression raiding guild called Visceral. The guild is planning on going through all EQ content starting with the Planes of Power expansion with a two day a week raiding schedule. It’s exactly what I was looking for. Sometimes coming back to EQ can be difficult because players are two boxing or using mercenaries and groups at low levels can be hard to find. At the same time, high level veteran players have so many AA points that the gap seems monumental. However, in this guild I’ve had groups almost instantly upon logging in each day and everyone has a great attitude. At the moment anyway, people are playing because they love the game and everyone is helping each other out. It’s a guild full of EQ veterans, returning players and people looking to relive experiences they had years ago. I know it’s not a novel concept and many guilds of this nature don’t make it very long but I’m hoping this will be different. I could really see myself leveling up with a group of people over the coming months and experiencing a good bit of EQ content that I missed over the years as I went looking for the “next best thing.” Perhaps, sometimes we are staring it right in the face but we just don’t notice it.

The guild is currently recruiting all classes and all levels (below 65). We have about 115 members now and had our first little mini raids this afternoon – taking down the Dragon Xanamech Nezmirthafen in Plane of Innovaiton which gave us keys for the Factory. Inside the Factory, we killed the Manaetic Behemoth which was a fun fight. Our raid split into two groups and each group was charged with keeping a constant stream of adds at bay (go go Enchanter) long enough for other groups to down the boss. That’s it for now, back to Norrath.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a few months since my last post. It’s been a busy time for me as work has kept me on my toes and I’ve had very limited gaming time. Since my play times were more limited than normal, I chose to spend what little time i had in game vs. posting about games. You might be surprised how much time even a low key blog like mine takes. As we move into the new year, my goal is to get this blog rolling once again. My apologies for the interruption.

Where to start? Let’s start with Vanguard. By now, most of you have probably heard about this post over on the official Vanguard forums. Vanguard has had it’s share of ups and downs but this might take the cake. In a nutshell, Silius announced to anyone who would listen that just about all the future content that was either in progress or had been promised would be suspended indefinitely. Instead of finishing off things such as alternative advancement, new raid content and class revamps – the developers are going to focus on squashing more bugs and adding single group content. I appreciate his honesty although it’s a bit untimely. It would be better to promise low and deliver high vs. the other way around. Seems like I learned that somewhere. Anyways, my Blood Mage is still stuck at 40 and with the announcement linked above and server merges coming (which may take the game down to a total of 2 servers) I’m on the fence about investing more time in that game. To be honest, I haven’t really played much since FanFaire. It’s still a great game but it’s clear SOE isn’t very interested in putting more money into what appears to be a sinking ship. Of course, people have been saying the ship would be swamped by now but it’s still plodding along with a number of leaks in the hull.

Since my last update, Everquest launched it’s new expansion called Underfoot. I’ve been debating making a return to that game on either the Luclin server (where I have a 75th level Cleric) or on Mayong (where I could dual box characters up from 51/50). After rolling up my cleric, I got a bit disillusioned when npc mercenaries were doing so well in group content and it was hard to convince people to take a low level healer with light AA points and ghetto spells over the well equipped mercenary with what seemed like infinite mana. Fortunately, in the new expansion group content, the mercenary healers aren’t doing as well and clerics are rejoicing. I got into a group yesterday for Ashengate since it’s the 75+ hot zone and had a good time. Perhaps I’ll invest my efforts in EQ once again – not sure currently.

The last time I talked about EQ2, I had rolled up a Templar on Antonia Bayle and joined a progression raiding guild. They took the holidays off from raiding and I took the holidays off from EQ2. Well, that is until I got the urge to return to my pvp roots and rolled up an Illusionist on Nagafen. I’ve managed to level up this new character to 57 so far and have ambitions of hitting 80 with him before the new expansion Sentinel’s Fate hits in mid February. I’d also like to continue to do some progression raiding with the Templar. Speaking of the next EQ2 expansion, I saw some new screenshots yesterday that left me scratching my head a bit. Floating islands and panda bears? Hmmm, where have I seen those before? I hope there is more originality on the way and not rehashed Kingdom of Sky zones with World of Warcraft pandas. I have faith in Brenlo as the EQ2 producer so let’s see what happens.

I also had a decent run in World of Warcraft where I managed to get my Priest all geared out in Epics and did some raiding. It’s fun but doesn’t seem to have that intangible factor that just makes me want to log on every night. I’m not sure where I’ll be spending most of my online time in the first quarter of 2010 but wherever it is you can bet I’ll be sharing my journeys with you guys. I’m going to enjoy the holidays with my family for now but just wanted to stop in and give you all an update. Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone!

What’s that you say? A World of Warcraft update? Yes, it’s true. I decided to make a few moves tonight with my World of Warcraft account in hopes of greener pastures with that game. For those that don’t know, I played World of Warcraft pretty hard core after it was released in 2004. I played a dwarf priest and raided 40 man zones such as Molten Core, Onyxia’s Lair, Blackwing Lair, ZG, and more. I really enjoyed the game back in those days as there was significant challenge to it and you felt like your efforts were rewarded with unique items and accomplishments. As the Burning Crusade expansion approached and the raiding game changed, I created a new Blood Elf Priest on a pvp server and leveled him up to 70 only to get disenchanted running Karazhan over and over in 10 man mode. After a while, I put my character on ice and went off to play other games.

When the Lich King expansion hit, I soldiered on to level 80 but really got into Vanguard and EQ2 so I left WOW once again. I tried coming back a few times over the last year or so but my old guild was so far ahead progression wise and I just needed a change of scenery. To be honest, I never really did get as attached to the Horde as I did to the Alliance. A few days ago, I was listening to a podcast and the guy was going on and on about how much fun he was having with a guild called Gamers with Jobs on the Blackhand server. I started kicking the idea around of doing a server transfer and faction change with my priest to join these guys. I have a lot in common with them and tonight the pieces fell into place. My priest moved over to the Blackhand server and then switched to the Alliance faction – becoming a Dwarf. No more sissy Blood Elfs for me!

After joining the guild, I decided to go kill the Headless Horseman in the Scarlet Monestary. The Horseman is a seasonal boss mob that drops a nice epic healer ring (among other things) and since I’m just starting to gear out this character I figured it would be a quick and easy place to start. Luckily, he dropped the ring and my “new” dwarf priest was on his way. It was a long night of talking to the new guild, deciding to make the move, getting all the moves processed, figuring out how to play my priest again and then going out and downing the Halloween boss mob. I was pretty impressed with how quick and easy it was to move servers and factions. All in all, I had a lot of fun and look forward to playing more WOW in the near future with these guys.

The most recent update to EQ2 came with a station cash item which lets you change your race. My 80 Fury on the Nagafen server started out as a Dark Elf. This new station cash item gave me the chance to transform him to a smaller race and to add wings! I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. SOE successfully got me to engage in microtransactions and purchase the racial change potion. Here is a screen shot of my character just prior to the change. Notice the pop up window where you can select any of the available races in the game. Neat stuff.

You basically buy the item in the cash shop and then click on the potion. A confirmation box pops up as soon as you select your new race and then…. voila you are a different race. I have to admit the whole thing made me feel a bit dirty as I was rather attached to the old race after playing that character for countless hours. If you could change your race, would you do it? The price for the racial change potion is pretty steep at $25. I asked myself – how much is my time worth? I can tell you that $25 is a drop in the bucket these days so why not do it? Sure beats trying to level up a new character to be a different race.

What race did I go with? Well, the Fae of course! The EQ2 racial traits were recently redone and the Fae offers decent stats for healers – see info for all the races here. Since I was doing new things, I decided to move my apartment to Qeynos (I used to be in Exile and before that Freeport.) That process was also easy as all of my old housing items from Freeport just showed up in a moving crate once I bought my new pad. I spent some time unboxing stuff and enjoying my Woushi achievement plushie. Going through my bags, I also had been given a Kunark achievement robe (shown above.) This character killed Trakanon and cleared VP before it was nerfed, but he’s been on ice since before the TSO expansion. I’m getting the urge to dust him off. Stay tuned.

We had an extremely short raid on Wednesday night. I logged in to find that we only had an x2 online with 2 people making up part of a third group. We were scheduled to go kill Gorenaire to continue our T7 progression since one of our short term goals is to hit Deathtoll very soon. We zoned into the the x4 version of Ascent of the Awakened even though we were down 10 players. I knew the raid would be challenging, but it was about to get even more interesting. Once inside the zone, I got a message from our normal main tank Templar asking me if I wanted to try main tank healing for the night. It was a hell of a night to try, but I gave it a shot nonetheless.

Our first pull didn’t go so well and our dps was really light because we didn’t have enough players. The low dps put stress on my mana and it was a challenge in the beginning keeping my group alive through all the cures, aoe attacks and stuns. Eventually, I got in the groove and we took down the dragon with 14 players and a brand new main tank Templar. Since we didn’t have the raid force to go much deeper, we called it a night. I think the entire raid took about 45 minutes.

During the past week, I’ve also been playing Aion. I managed to level my Cleric up to 18 and get in my first group. The screen shot above shows our group’s main tank standing next to me and she obviously heard about my EQ2 accomplishments. I figured out that killing EQ2 dragons gets you chicks! Grouping in Aion is much more fun than soloing and allows you to get lost in the moment – forgetting that the game is so grindy. I got some great upgrades like the helm I’m wearing above. While I had a good time, I don’t know if I’ll be able to dedicate the time required to reach the end game in Aion. There are just too many other games that offer more enjoyment per hour spent playing and they tend to pull me in their direction since I have limited play time these days. I’m having a blast raiding casually in EQ2 on AB, there is a pvp server merge coming out today which should spice things up on the Nagafen server and I may even start spending more time on the 360 with games such as Dragon Age: Origins and Modern Warfare 2 coming out soon. This is a great time to be a gamer. I just wish I had the free time now that I had back in college.

We just finished up raids for the night clearing Labs as well as the contested mob: Mutagenic Outcast. We were able to get all of that done with an x3 of level 70s which I think was pretty strong. Our guild of casual T7 raiders is actually very talented and we drop raid bosses while having fun at the same time. There’s nobody yelling “minus 50 dkp” and there are no Chuck Norris jokes. It’s serious, yet relaxed and I’m digging it.

Labs was a pretty fun raid zone. There are lots of named mobs wandering around and the zone looks pretty solid – it actually has some color and feels like a raid zone in it’s scope. Sometimes, EQ2 has a tendency to be all drab looking with zones full of greys and lacking color. I wouldn’t call labs as colorful as say anything in World of Warcraft but for an EQ2 dungeon it was pretty solid.

The screen shot above shows a curious Lord Vyemm. He is the final boss in Labs and has a bit of a technical pull. It took us a few attempts to down him and it was really just related to getting the right positioning. This dragon was huge and hit pretty hard. You have to watch out for his tail as it will ruin your day if you aren’t careful.

After clearing labs, we headed outdoors for contested Mutagenic Outcast. I guess he’s not very contested these days since he is a T7 mob and there aren’t exactly tons of people trying to kill him anymore. Nonetheless, he gave us all we could handle on our last attempt but tonight we had a bit more well rounded raid, albeit a x3 still, and we decided to pay him a visit. I think it took us about 5-10 pulls before we finally got a good strategy going and we downed the bug. It was an intense fight and our romp through Kingdom of Sky continues. Until next time…

I play a lot of MMOs. Because of this, I bought an extra Raptor hard drive about a year and a half ago from a buddy at work and kept it loaded with roughly 10 games. This second hard drive had EQ, EQ2, Vanguard, Warhammer, Aion, Age of Conan, Darkfall, LOTRO and a few other titles ready to be played on demand. My theory was to keep the games on a different drive from the one that has my operating system on it to perhaps get a little bit better game performance. I also kept my screen shot library on this drive, which I used to update my blog every couple of days.

Early last week, my main gaming rig wouldn’t boot up properly. I was able to trace the problem down to the hard drive in question and once I disconnected it; everything worked fine. My buddy tested the drive and sure enough it was dead. Unfortunately, that means a good bit of the screen shots I wanted to use for this update are gone as well. Fortunately, I still have most of my CDs / DVDs and I also have an external drive with most of those games installed. In the end, it was just a bump in the road but an aggravating one. At least it wasn’t a dead CPU, RAM or Motherboard. For a while, I was starting to price out building a new computer.

It’s been just over 10 days now since my last update and I’ve been busy playing EQ2, Warhammer and Aion. Most of my time has been spent in EQ2 as our guild on Antonia Bayle has managed to defeat a whole bunch of T7 content on a three day a week raid schedule with basically three groups each time. We don’t seem to have enough players to fill out a full raid force but we haven’t had any trouble clearing Labs, Lyceum, Ascent x2 and a number of contested Kingdom of Sky mobs such as Hurricanus. My favorite kills so far were HarlaDar and Venekor (shown above.) The loot hasn’t been that great but my guild has a great group of people to raid with and the old content is pretty enjoyable just for the experience.

The only mob we haven’t been able to take down yet is the Mutagenic Outcast, shown above. This guy is a contested T7 mob. He’s got a few waves of adds and we just didn’t have the dps to take him down with our partial raid. I think we got him down to around 20% one time but when people start dying he heals up like crazy so it becomes a losing proposition in a hurry. I’m sure we will pay him another visit soon and emerge victorious – hopefully with a full raid.

Shifting gears a bit, I spent Friday after raids playing my level 80 Fury on the Nagafen server. This is the character I raided with when I was healing for Onyx in the Exile faction. These days he is enjoying retirement in Qeynos with his mythical weapon, a good number of masters and lots of fabled gear from Veeshan’s Peak. He’s almost like a time capsule as he hasn’t even stepped foot in the TSO expansion which was released a long time ago.

A buddy of mine told me that SOE made obtaining T8 pvp armor much easier with a recent patch. On the pvp servers, you can now get a full set of gear that rivals T3/T4 shard gear and mid level TSO raid gear in about a week by simply going out and fighting other players. You basically get a repeatable quest to kill 6 enemy players from a guy in Kylong Plains. You can repeat the quest every 10 minutes and you get 5 tokens as a reward. There are tons of people from each faction zerging each other for these updates. If you compare the risk vs. reward and the time commitment required to get this amazing gear under this method vs. raiding or grinding instances, it’s easy to see why so many people are upset about it. The time people spent over the last year running zones for shards and raiding was largely wasted. I’m not sure how much sense it makes to load up the pvp servers with easily obtainable gear. They are going to have an advantage in pve content vs. the players on pve servers as well. I had a fun night killing Freeport players but it just felt cheap.

Another issue I have with EQ2 pvp is game performance. The game just doesn’t run well when you have a ton of players on the screen at once. Furthermore, the pvp system in EQ2 just feels “tacked on.” It feels a bit forced like the developers just dumped it on top of a pve game and there doesn’t seem to be any real point in it. There are no objectives to hold, no keeps to siege, no real reason to go out and fight the other faction unless you want to fight over contested raid mobs or gear up your character in a cheap zerg-fest. Those feelings got me thinking about how much I enjoy pvp but just don’t see the point of it in EQ2 anymore. I decided to spend some time in Warhammer and Aion. Both of these games, have pvp built in to their original design and it shows. I’ve played about 10 hours or so of T1 and T2 content over the last week in Warhammer with my level 14 Rune Priest. I’m on a very populated server – relatively speaking but it still feels empty. Scenarios are a fun way to kill some time but the lack of player concentration in the open world just kills any momentum the game starts to build

Aion, on the other hand, has that player concentration which is so critical for an enjoyable experience in an MMO centered around pvp. It will be interesting to see if the game can retain their players as the experience curve is rather steep and it’s a bit of a grind fest. My cleric in Aion hit 16 last night but it feels like I should be 40 by now due to the amount of time it takes to level. The leveling feels as slow as original EQ1 and I hear it only gets worse. Travel times also feel like Vanguard to me at times – before the rifts. I was doing a quest last night and it was very difficult. I fought this mob 4 times and each fight lasted 5-8 minutes in a one on one slug fest. I would either end up running away or he would kill me and I would have to run back to the quest guy each time to get another potion to use on the mob and then run back again which I swear took about 30 minutes of travel each round. It was nuts. I finally got the mob down and the quest complete but the experience just left me shaking my head a bit. Why couldn’t I use my wings in this zone? Was I having fun? The jury is still out. It’s hard to adjust to a game with an old school difficulty factor when we have all been spoiled by the instant gratification of WOW and EQ2.