Facing Off With The Faceless

Yesterday evening and again this morning, I did something unusual. I played EverQuest II.

I don't mean I logged in, collected my completed Overseer missions, set my new ones for the day and logged out, like I do every day. Although, I did do all of that... except the logging out part.

I'd been getting a slight itch to play an MMORPG "properly" again for a couple of days. It started, weirdly, when I was on Steam and noticed there were some patch notes for Rift.   

It's a constant surprise to see dribbles of content still dripping into the game during Gamigo's maintenance-mode custodianship but guess perhaps the oddest thing is that I still have Rift installed. It's not like I'm going to play it again. 

Or is it?

It was when I found myself seriously considering doing just that, wondering whether I ought to pick up one of my old characters and carry on with them or if it mightn't be better to roll up a new one and start over, that I had a little talk with myself and decided I'd be better off doing something productive in one of the games I was supposedly still playing istead, not taking a wholly ill-advised trip back in time to one I'd abandoned years ago.

The choice was pretty obvious. I clearly ought to patch up Wuthering Waves and try to get back up to date there yet again. There's another update coming and I haven't touched the last one yet. I'm already behind and soon I'll be too far behind to catch up.

So, I didn't do that.

Second choice would probably be Once Human. There's a lot going on there, too, and I haven't seen any of it. 

Didn't do that, either.

 

Also in the running, albeit as an outsider, there's New World. I realy like New World. It's my second most-played game on Steam, after Valheim. There's a major update - you could almost call it an expansion - coming to the game in less than two weeks and it looks very interesting, all vampires and werewolves and spooky castles. Just right for the season

It's a free update but you have to have New World Aeternum to get it and I don't. So I'd have to buy that, which would then give me even more new-to-me content. And contrary to what you might expect, that's actually a point against going back. I don't have the time or inclination to take on a big tranche of content in any game right now. I'm looking for something to fill the odd session, here and there, not some big commitment that could take weeks.

Something like, oh, I don't know, a new solo dungeon or an instance I haven't done. Even better, one that might have some drops I could use. I've always been a big advocate of the gameplay being its own reward but good drops are cake.

All of that led me back to EQII, where there have been two Game Updates this year that I haven't touched. 

Alright, that's not entirely true. I did set foot in the new, contested dungeon that came in GU128 back in April. It didn't go well.

That update is called Lure of Darkness and features a large dungeon by the name of Spiral of Vul. It's designed for multiple groups to explore at the same time, old-school style, but it does have a small, soloable area at the front, as has been the norm in EQII as far back as beta.

I can say from experience that the allocated area for solo players is soloable. I did a little bit of it back in April and I didn't die. I also didn't have much fun. The mobs were very tough and took ages to kill. If there are any soloable bosses, I never got far enough to try my luck with them. I did one quest, whch took about half an hour and gave up.

That was on my Berserker. Since then, I've upgraded all his gear using the Anniversary gift. He was mostly in 475-495 Resolve gear then and now he's wearing all 525. Resolve is a very sound indicator of performance, much like Gear Score in other games, and 30-50 points is enough to make a difference so I was hopeful I might get a little further this time.

I did not. I map-hopped over to the Sodden Archipelago and flew halfway across the zone to the entrance of the dungeon, went inside and immediately picked up a couple of shinies that completed a collection. That made the trip worthwhile, which was just as well because the trash mobs seemed no easier to kill than before. I tried a couple, decided it wasn't going to be any more fun than last time, so I  left.

The second of the annual updates arrived in August. It's called Fear of Eternity and consists of Fabled versions of the dungeons from the 2012 expansion, Chains of Eternity. Fabled dungeons are generally the same as the originals but with all the mobs revamped for the current level cap and all the loot similarly upgraded. They also come in all the regular flavors - Solo, Heroic I and Heroic II.

My experience with Fabled dungeons at the time they first appear has been patchy. There have been some I've been able to make progress in but mostly they're too tough for me. I usually give them a go, decide it's too much like hard work and leave them for later. Sometimes I do come back and finish them when I'm a bit tougher, sometimes I forget they exist.

I was fully expecting the first one I tried, Fabled Temple of the Faceless, to be at least as hard as Spiral of Vul. I mean, you'd think so, woudn't you? It's six months later, after all. What would be the point of adding something easier to the game at level cap?

It was easier. It was a lot easier. At least it was once I got myself sorted out.

The zone-in is much more conveniently placed, right on the dock where you zone in to Sodden Archipelago. No flying right across the map this time. That was nice. You can access all the available dungeons from the update from the same portal, too. Also nice.

I picked the first instance on the list, zoned in and pulled a mob to test the waters. They were warm. The mob, a three-up arrow spider, theoretically tough for trash, died in a reasonable time and didn't pose much of  threat. I worked my across the opening area towards the first boss, killing as I went and it felt comfortable. It wasn't a walkover but it wasn't a grind. I felt like I was moving through the zone at a reasonable pace.

I got in range of the boss and thought about looking him up for strats but I couldn't be bothered so I just pulled him to see what would happen. Nothing much. In fact, as far as he was concerned, nothing at all. His health stayed solidly at 100% no matter how hard and how often I hit him. Clearly there were unseen factors in play.

With my merc pumping out the healing and the Berserker having a pretty solid self-healing capacity of his own it was a stalemate, albeit one that was eventually only going to end one way, even if it was likely to take an hour to get there. I rummaged in my bags for a Totem of Escape to port myself to the zone entrance and couldn't find one so I just legged it to the zone-line with the boss beating on me all the way. He still didn't make much of a dent, even with my back turned.

Once I was safe outside, I looked at the wiki. It turns out there are two pillars, one in each of two side-temples, that have to be destroyed before the first boss can be damaged. I vaguely remembered that from whenever I did the dungeon when I was questing through the relevant expansion but that was years ago and I needed to be reminded.

I went back in, found the pillars, knocked them down, then had a second go at the boss. It went much better that time. 

I was curious to see what he'd drop. I was hoping it would be gear over 500 Resolve. In fact it was identical in quality to the Anniversary freebies - 525 Resolve. Since I was already fully kitted out in that, I was also hoping it wouldn't be Plate Armor. I could give that to my Inquisitor but she's not Level 130 yet so she'd have to do five more levels before she could wear it.

I was hoping for cloth so my Necro could have it and cloth was what I got. On the first boss, anyway.

It had been fun and profitable so far so I carried on. Temple of The Faceless is a fairly compact, to the point dungeon, without a lot of wandering about required. Exactly what I was looking for. I progressed through the next two bosses, checking strats just in case of any more surprises but having very little trouble with either.

That took me up to bedtime so I camped where I was and picked up again where I left off the next morning. There was only one more boss left but it was a dragon and they can be tricky. In the event, though, he went down as easily as the rest. 

I didn't get any more cloth armor but my Bruiser is going to be happy. The rest was all leather. The two sessions were fun, the difficulty just about right for me, requiring a certain amount of attention and concentration but not so much I couldn't take a few screenshots during the fights.

There are several more Fabled instances in the update so I'll most likely take a look at those next. The deciding factor on whether I do or not will be how much fun I'm having. The upgraded loot is nice but I'm all too aware it will be made obsolete by the free handouts at the start of the coming expansion, let alone the quest rewards from the storyline.

Not to mention there's the stuff the pandas are handing out. Which reminds me. As of this week's reset, I must have a new panda quest to do...

The Essence Of Nightingale

As you can see, Nightingale has fishing. What self-respecting survival/rpg mash-up doesn't? It's not a very sophisticated implementation of the skill/sport/hobby/pastime but it's fun and useful, either of which trump sophistication in my book, when it comes to pretending to catch imaginary fish in a video game.

I don't exactly remember when, where or how I acquired the recipe to make the fishing rod Flora's holding in the shot above. My best guess is it was one of the basics included with the Simple Workbench but it could just as easily have been a reward from one of the countless Insight, r Agility or Combat challenges. 

Sometimes, when you succeed at one of those, you get a new recipe. I might have gotten my fishing rod that way. I know I had it for a long time before I bothered to make it, which I ony did because there's a quest that requires fish oil you cvan only get from specific type of fish you have to catch for yourself. 

Other than recipes, what you get from doing those challenges are Essences. Essences are the fuel that keeps Nightingale's engine ticking over. I'm not sure it's ever explained what they're the essence of but the human survivors trying to make something of their new lives in the Fae Realms have adopted them as a kind of  universal currency, so you can never really have enough. A small amount of Essence also converts into enough Essence Dust to fund all your repairs for weeks.

OK, I suppose technically you could have enough Essences, eventually. There's a finite number of things to buy with them, for a start and you can certainly have enough of the lower-level ones quite easily as you outgrow the items they can get you. 

Recipe vendors are mostly found in specific Realms. Realms come in tiers and vendors in each tier use the local variety of Essence as coin. Naturally, as you progress through the Realms, becoming ever more powerful as you go, the weaker Essences of the lower tiers and the items they buy lose their significance. Still, I imagine completionists, who must make up a large proportion of players, if not the majority, will want to grab all the sets, no matter how useless they've become.

Essences are also neded to upgrade your gear, a process that, in Nightingale, has a massive effect on your viabilty as an adventurer. I'm used to more incremental progression systems, where it's hard to tell which of two items is better without one of those inbuilt comparison functions to make it clear but there's no need for anything like that in Nightingale, where upgrading an item can almost double its primary stats.

That, of course, means Nightingale is also one of those games where you don't need new gear because you can just keep improving the gear you already have. I don't generally like that approach to progression, mostly because I find it boring. It's extremely practical, sure, but practicality has never been high on my list of criteria for enjoying a video game.

My main objection is to the aesthetics, though, not so much the gameplay. It's not that I want to go back to the turn of the millennium, where getting an upgrade to your leg slot item meant finding out which monster dropped something better for that slot, then finding and killing it, if you even could, so you could steal that monster's pants, strip them from it's cooling corpse and put them on, still warm. Or, more likely, get the alternate drop and have to kill the damn mob several more times before it dropped its pants.

In addition to upgrades, Nightingale does also have a number of different gear sets that represent some kind of progression system in themselves, so you won't be stuck wearing the exact same thing forever. Instead you will be changing your gear approximately once per tier and then upgrading it, multiple times, which is better than nothing but nowhere near as good as a fully-functioning appearance system.

Nightingale doesn't have such a system yet, which is fair enough in Early Access, I guess, although personally, if I were head of a games studio, a fully-functioning appearance system would be a top priority all the way back in alpha. What's worse is that there isn't even a mention of any such system in the recently published Not-a-Roadmap covering the next two stages of development.

The upgrade system, like the Essences it uses, also comes in tiers. So far there are only three and the naming convention used suggests there aren't going to be many, if any, more. There are four qualities: Common, Uncommon, Rare and Epic which come in four corresponding colors: Grey, Green, Blue and Pink. Stop me if you 've hear this one before.

I suppose there's Legendary and maybe Mythical still to come in the standard RPG progression hierarchy, which would allow for enough vertical progression to support at least a couple of expansions. That should see them safely through the next few years.

For now, though, we have those basic four. In theory you could upgrade your Common items to Epic, I think. You can definitely take Common up to Rare. I can't be absolutely sure what happens after that  because I don't yet have the Epic Upgrade Bench or whatever it's called.

I have the one that uses T2 Essences to upgrade Uncommon to Rare. The Epic one, it won't surprise anyone to learn, I'm sure, uses T3 Essences, which come, as you'd expect, from T3 Realms.

The catch is that the vendors who sell the recipes for the Epic crafting stations and the items they produce only take T3 Essences, which means you have to do challenges in T3 Realms to get them. And those vendors want huge quantities of Essences for most of the recipes they sell. A few recipes go for the knockdown price of 100 Essences but the going rate for most is 1300 a pop.

That would be extremely awkward if it weren't for the current state of what passes for an endgame in Nightingale, which at present allows for some appropriately epic Essence farming opportunities. 

When you complete the first chapter of the main storyline and gain access to The Watch, you get a short questline to unlock The Vaults, a trio of repeatable dungeons backed by some very iffy lore. When you zone into any one of the three Vault instances (One for each biome.) you find you're no longer playing solo. Suddenly and without any real warning, the game has turned into an MMO.

I have no idea if there's any formal match-making algorithm operating behind the scenes. It certainly didn't feel like it the few times I went in. I just spawned in at the start with a dungeon run already in well progress. I don't even know how many other players were in there with me. More kept spawning and running past me so I fdidn't waste any time trying to figure it out - I just followed them. 

From the Gear Score next to each character name I could see I was teamed with some people much better equipped than me but also others about the same and one or two quite a bit worse. When I say "teamed", I mean it in the loosest possible sense. There's no organised group or party, just a bunch of people soloing together, much like public events in any post-Warhammer MMORPG. 

There's no shared loot system for drops, either, Anyone can hoover up anything that lands on the ground. That sounds problematic but then again, there's no credit system for completion either. As soon as any challenge completes, everyone in the dungeon can open the Essence chest and take a full share. 

There are regular loot chests, too, and I think they all have hypothecated items for everyone that opens them but there it's harder to be sure, especially since no-one ever speaks. My evidence for the supposition is If I was taking anyone else's stuff out of the chests, they never complained about it and there was always something in every chest I opened, even if other players got to it before I did.

In content, the Vaults are like a collection of the usual Realm challenges bundled together with a Boss at the end. There's some half-assed narrative justification for this in that the Fae supposedly used them for some nebulous sort of training and the Boss is actually always the same eternal etentity, inadvertently brought to the Realms by Qatermain himself, who keeps incarnating in varying forms. Killing him repeatedly is the only way to keep him from overrunning the Watch.  

I was not convinced by any of this but then neither are al lthe people who explain it so I think there's meant to be some ambiguity. Most games don't even bother putting any kind of narrative fig-leaf on this sort of thing so credit to Inflexion for at least trying.

The Vaults would be tough to solo, something you can do by crafting your own Vault card for use in a crafted portal. Soloing would be crazy right now, though. In the four or five runs I did I only saw the boss twice. Once he was dead within miliseconds aof my arrival in his arena and the other time I fought him, tanked him briefly, died, ran back and picked up my loot after someone else fiunished the job seconds later.

At the moment, as a critical mass of players reaches the endgame and tries to grind the tens of thousands of essences needed for the upgrade recipes, the public Vaults are constantly busy. You can zone in and find one in progress immediately. Since you get all the rewards just for being there, it makes no difference if you arrive just as everyone else leaves. You get the same rewards as if you'd been there from the start.

Well, so long as you can find all the glowing bubbles you need to click, anyway. A full run nets about 300 Essences but I could never find all of them - the whole damn place is a maze. 

My fastest run netted me a couple of hundred Essences for the time it took me to run through an empty instance from the entrance to the zone-out. My highest total was maybe fifty more for a whole lot of fighting along the way.  If you can face doing back-to-back runs for an hour or two, you could make several thousand Essences but even that would only buy you two or three recipes. You're going to be at it a for a while.

It's not going to be to everyone's taste, not least because it's a major change of direction from what you'll have been doing for the last 30-50 hours. If you don't like the sudden switch from solo or co-op to open grouping, there's always the option to just carry on as you were. As I mentioned, you can set up your own, private Vault but there's a whole set of open-world T3 solo Realms you can craft and farm. All you have to do is make the cards. There's even a quest to get you started.

I made one last night and had a run around to see how hard it would be. It was perfectably doable with my Rare gear but I'd be lucky to get a tenth as many Essences for ten times the effort. I'd recommend the solo/co-op Realms for exploration and for gathering mats but clearly grinding in the Vaults is the way to go if you want to farm Essences, at least until the current levelling bubble deflates and the torrent of nearly-free Essences dries up.

Other than for the fun of it and to satisfy the inevitable wish to have all the best stuff, there may not be much point in grinding for those recipes anyway. HAvign a full set of Epic gear would certainly make everything a lot easier but the main reason you'd want to be doing that content would be to get the gear in the first place. Once you have it, I'm not exactly sure what the point would be in carrying on.

For that, we'll probably need to wait until some higher-tier content is added to the game. That could take a while. It's not even in the medium-term development plan.

Reaching the Watch does feel like an ending to me. Not the end of the whole story, for sure, but the end of the first chapter, definitely. The driving urge I had to push forwards has all but dissipated now. I feel more inclined to go back to pottering around, exploring the variations on the three biomes, building up my base and generally leaning into the sandboxier elements of the game, which have very much taken a back seat for me until now.

Or maybe I'll just go fishing. 

I wonder if you can upgrade that rod...

In The Event

To no-one's surprise more than my own, I have now completed all the solo content in the recent Shattered Overture update in EverQuest II. 

Okay, no I haven't... not really. According to the press release there are fifteen new Collections and seven solo missions (Five daily, two weekly.) as well as an unspecifed number of achievements. But that's busy work. I'm not bothered with any of that.

What I have done is completed both of the solo instances. I recorded my experiences in the first, Shattered Unrest, in a post last week, along with my thoughts about the pre-expansion event, Fractured Skies. Today I finished the second instance, Imprinted Memory: Origins of the Felfeather.

It didn't take long. Around half an hour or so. That's because it's what's known as an "Event Solo" dungeon. Event Solos differ from regular solo instances in several  important respects. They're smaller,  have fewer bosses and those bosses are significantly tougher. They're PvE fight clubs, basically.

I'd love to go into a bit more detail about what makes Event Solo dungeons diferent from regular Solo or from Advanced Solo, the third kind of "solo" instance, sometimes also known as Duo Dungeons because they're tuned for two players or a player plus a mercenary. Unfortunately, specific information seems to be exceedingly hard to come by. 

Indeed, if I hadn't been there, when all of these things were added to the game, I'm not sure I'd even know they existed. It's only when you come to click on the portal and find yourself confronted with a long list of options that you realise just how many flavors of dungeon EQII has.

Yes, but what?

It's harder than you'd imagine to find out just what they all are, too. The wiki has a Dungeon Timeline that I used to use a lot. I haven't looked at it for a while so I was surprised to see how apallingly out of date it's fallen. The page supposedly listing Solo instances is even worse. MassivelyOP published a very thorough guide to all of EQII's dungeons back in 2015. Now long out of date, it appears to be the last time anyone even attempted anything of the kind.

In a moment of madness, I thought I might ask Bard to bring me up to speed. I asked it

 "What are all the types of instanced dungeons in the MMORPG EverQuest II and how do they differ in difficulty?" 

The reply was so staggeringly inaccurate, I shudder even to summarise it here for fear some of the misinformation it contains might feed back into the system and self-perpetuate, somehow.

I'll just pick out a few of Bard's choicest flights of fantasy:

"Adventure Dungeons are designed for groups of 6-12 players and provide a more challenging experience. They often require players to work together to solve puzzles and defeat difficult bosses."

No, they don't, for the simple reason they don't exist! There's nothing in EQII called an "Adventure Dungeon" and never has been. If an instance allows two groups to enter ("6-12 players".) it's called a Raid X 2 , not an "Adventure".

"Lairs are designed for groups of 3-6 players and are similar to Heroic Dungeons, but they typically have a single boss encounter as their focus."

Excuse me? Lairs? 3-6 players? A single boss? What the hell is this? It's not EQII, that's for sure.

"Group Challenges are short, one-room dungeons that are designed to be completed quickly. They are a good way to test your group's skills or to earn quick rewards."

To be fair, that is kind of what an Event Heroic is like... I think. I've never actually been inside one but it sounds like the general idea. The Event Solo I did today all takes place in one location and doesn't take long. "Group Challenge" is not a term I've ever heard used in EQII, though.

Positively the most egregious error in Bard's typically confident outline of the available options, however, is this utterly wrong-headed, extremely dangerous piece of advice:

Heroic Dungeons: Heroic Dungeons are the easiest type of instanced dungeon in EverQuest II. They are a good starting point for players who are new to instanced dungeons or who are looking for a more casual experience.

That is literally the opposite of the truth. Heroic dungeons are instant death for new players, quite literally. If you enter an at-level Heroic instance as a new player, chances are the very first trash mob you pull will one-shot you. Well, they will over Level 100, anyway, which is the last decade of content.

Even in a group of experienced players a newcomer will probably not survive. It's one of the main complaints made by the few who try. Before you start running heroics, you need to do a lot of prep work just to get your Resolve high enough to be allowed through the door and that's just the start of it. A casual experience is the very last thing anyone would call Heroics in EQII.

So, Bard doesn't know what it's talking about. No surprise there. I sent some appropriate feedback explaining what was wrong with the answer, the first time I've felt motivated to do so. I can't imagine it will make the smallest iota of difference.

Nope. Still none the wiser.

Getting back to the purpose of the post, which I seem to have very successfully derailed, today marks the first time I have ever successfully completed an at-level Event Solo instance. I can't remember the last time I even tried. I just know that they're always much too tough so I never bother with them. So how did I manage it this time and why did I even bother? 

Well, I gave it a go because the first Shattered Overture dungeon seemed surprisingly easy and I got five upgrades out of it, meaning I'd be even stronger going into the second. More cogently, though, I didn't know it was going to be an "Event Solo" until I got there.

First I had to find the damn thing. I was expecting Dr. Arcana to send me there but it turns out the two dungeons have absolutely nothing to do with each other. In fact, if anything, Imprinted Memory seems to relate to the expansion prequel, Fractured Skies, inasmuch as it involves the Hooluk again. 

There doesn't appear to be any obvious lead-in to the dungeon from the storyline. I didn't get a letter and none of the NPCs I'd spoken to gave me any kind of hint on where to go next, let alone an actual breadcrumb quest. In the end I googled it and found the information I needed in Kaitheel's post on the beta test forums. It's a bit of a back-assward way to go about things. Surely I must have missed something that provides a pointer in the game itself?

I was always good at history.

Once I knew where to go it was very easy to get started. I spoke to the Hooluk questgiver, Tento Felfeather, at his roost above the Nest of the Great Egg. He gave me a rundown on what to expect and told me to look at a book on a lectern next to him. I clicked on it and the option of Event Solo or Event Heroic appeared.

I thought "Oh, what the hell... I can only die" and went in. 

And die I did. Three times in total. But that was fine. Twice, my merc rezzed me and I went on to win the fight. Once he rezzed me and I died again immediately and had to take a do-over. Even with the deaths it was all quite manageable, mostly because the whole thing takes place on a small sky island with no mobs at all other than the NPCs and the elementals they summon for you to fight. No running back, no trash to clear. Die, get up, start over.

I won't bore anyone with the complicated set-up involving Hooluk deities, ritual magic and imprinted memories. I found it quite interesting if also mostly incomprehensible. The Hooluk god uses a four-winged model I hadn't seen before although I imagine it's pulled from some raid or other. Impressive, anyway.

After the first death, which happened when I had the boss down to less than ten percent, I decided to swap out of offensive stance so I could have the full beneifit of all my many Berserker Get Out Of Dying Free tricks. Most of them require you to be set up for tanking not DPS.

I'd also recently taken the trouble to read through a whole lot of my abilities that I never use and it seems I have about three times as many "Oh, Shit!" buttons as I though I had. I also discovered that by judicious use of their various non-stacking timers I can use them a lot more freely than I've been in the habit of doing.

Pass the pickaxe!

I made full use of that knowledge during all three big fights and it made a huge difference. My aging mercenary isn't really up to the job of keeping me alive through the kind of beating I was taking so he was very grateful to have some of the responsibility taken off of his hands.

Better still, even though I died several times, I managed to so some proper tanking, positioning the mob away from the healer, meaning my Merc stayed alive throughout. It's the first real test I've given him since the fairly recent change to mercenary AI supposedly improved their reaction time for things like rezzzing and curing. He certainly seemed on the ball today so I think whatever they tweaked must have done the trick.

Part of the event involves not letting two owl brothers die and I managed that as well. All in all, my three deaths seemed like a pretty solid performance, especially for a first run. The instance is repeatable and I could probably make some improvements but even though it went much better than expected, I'm not sure I'll be doing it again. 

It would be profitable to go back. Once again, I got several good upgrades and every time that happens, the next time theoretically becomes easier. I'm very aware, however, that any advances I make now will be overwritten in a matter of weeks so my motivation to go again and again, in search of the increasingly unlikely drops I'd need to replace everything I'm wearing, isn't great.

Why We Fight.

I'm very pleased with myself for having done the two dungeons at all, not least because the upgrades should definitely make finishing the Adventure Signature questline from the current expansion a lot easier. That's something I do plan on doing before the next Xpack drops.

I think my main focus now, in terms of preparation, probably ought to be replacing my mercenary with another Inquisitor. Gotta have one of those for Verdict, the insta-kill spell that finishes off many a fight just in time. There's a chance I might pick up a new Inquisitor in the forthcoming expansion but I didn't get one last time or the time before that so I'm not counting on it. 

Of course, when the new expansion goes on sale, I could always consider stumping up for something better than the basic version. The higher-cost packs usually include a new merc. Maybe I'll consider it this time.

That'd be another first...

Tarisland Closed Beta First Impressions: Dungeons

There's always a conflict when I find a new game that really intrigues me; I want to play it all the time but I also want to post about it. Yesterday, my blogging side won out. Today I'm going to play.

Ahh, crap. No, I'm not. I'm going to have to write this damn post first or I'll never be able to settle. 

What I will do, though, is keep to a single subject for once, instead of running off in all directions like I usually do. And today's topic is...

Dungeons

Surprised? I was. I have about a million things I'd rather talk about than boring old dungeons. But for once I've actually done a couple and I have a few things to say about the experience, one of which is that it... wasn't terrible. In fact. I quite enjoyed it.

The longer I play MMORPGs, the older I get, the less I enjoy dungeons or dungeon-like instances. I don't like the commitment, for a start. I like to be able to stop playing at a moment's notice, either leaving my character idling or logging out altogether.

Even solo dungeons generally don't let you do that safely or without losing progress. Obviously it's out of the question if you group. Okay, I know people do drop group without warning but there's no excuse for copying bad behavior.

I also don't much enjoy the mechanics. I used to like it when everything was about crowd control and aggro. That was fun. Now it's all about mechanics and scripts and every blasted fight feels like taking an exam. 

Put those two together and clearly dungeons are not ideal content for me. Unfortunately, many developers seem to think players can either be co-erced into enjoying them or have a moral obligation to run them at least once, as some kind of return on investment. They made these things and by god you are going to see them whether you like it or not!

That leads to to the - to my mind - unforgiveable design decision to incorporate dungeons into the main storyline and use them as gatekeepers. If you don't do the dungeon you don't get to find out what happens next. I could probably live with that but sometimes you also don't get to level up any further or gain key abilities or unlock new explorable areas or ever do anything new ever again ever!

I tend to think of it as the Final Fantasy XIV effect because although FFXIV didn't invent it, that's where I first ran hard into the roadblock of compulsory dungeon play and bounced off it even harder. When I got to Level Seven in Tarisland and found the MSQ similarly gated by unskippable combat instances, I can't say I was surprised but I can say I was not happy.

Still, what the hell, it's beta and it's Level Seven. Two things about that. 

1. Nothing you do at Level Seven in an MMORPG is going to be that tough.
2. In beta, no-one knows what the hell they're doing, anyway. No-one's gonna yell at you.

Well, hopefully.

So, I hit the Matchmaking button and got put into the instance in seconds. A few confirmation buttons popped and I said I was ready and off we went. I felt okay about it. As I mentioned yesterday, one reason I went with Ranger was so I could stand back and keep out of the way if something like this happened. 

And that's what I did and it all went fine. The tank ran ahead and pulled stuff. I started off trying to follow his target but when I used my AE nothing peeled off so after a while I just shot whatever and it was all good. Someone was healing and who else was doing what, I didn't really pay much attention. 

As for mechanics, if there was a marked area on the ground I got out of it and if the loud voice yelled at me to do something, I did it, which brings up the first thing I wanted to say about Tarisland dungeons:

Strats

I don't know if this goes on all through the game or if it's just for the lower levels but Tarisland's dungeons are the best-documented I've ever seen. I didn't spot it yesterday but in the Level Thirteen dungeon I did this morning I noticed an icon on the upper right that said "Guide". So I clicked and guess what? 

It's a guidebook on the dungeon you're doing. It has a page for each Boss and each page has tabs for a description of the Boss, what they do and how to deal with it. It's literally like they put the entire walkthrough right there in the UI. 

It ought to mean there's no excuse for anyone saying they don't know the strats but of course you do actually have to read the thing first and understand it and commit it to memory so no, that's not going to happen. But guess what? The devs thought of that, too!

Coaching

Even if you didn't have time to flip through the whole book because the Tank was all "Go! Go! Go!" you still don't get a pass for shooting the wrong thing or running the wrong way. Not only does a notice come up on screen whenever some new mechanic kicks in, telling you what it is and what to do about it, there's a fricken' commentator who yells out instructions!

Remember when I said yesterday that a disembodied voice yells "Dodge!" whenever you should have but didn't? The same thing happens in dungeons only it applies to everything you ought to be doing. 

I got yelled at to keep away from my companions, not to get in front of the Boss because he was going to charge, to kill the minions first and so on and so on. It felt kind of like my days back in EverQuest when we'd run with one of those really chill, together tanks, who somehow has time to type in a running commentary on what they're doing and what to expect. 

I loved playing with tanks like that. Dungeons were fun back then, weren't they? Well, 'till you wiped and it took three hours to get your corpse...

This is a lot more soulless and automated than that but it's still a hell of an improvement on silence. Once I got used to it I was waiting for instructions and carrying them out just like a good little soldier. Not that it got me off the bottom of the DPS list. 

Oh yes, there's a list. Didn't I say?

Damage Meters And Stats

Tarisland is in no doubt which side it comes down on in the debate over whether there should be damage meters and, if there are, whether they should be public. There's one on-screen in the upper, right corner all the time and when you finish you get a report card. 

You can toggle the display to show healing and damage taken and other stuff, I think. I was trying to play around with it but it's a bit awkward in a firefight. Everyone's name is color-coded but I haven't figured out what the colors mean. 

I do know that as a ranger I probably shouldn't be at the bottom of the DPS list. And I wasn't. Not quite. I was ahead of the tank and the healer! 

Players And NPCs

At least I didn't get yelled at for slacking, which was something. At first I put it down to what I said earlier - it's beta and no-one knows anything yet. But then something really weird happened...

This was in the Level Thirteen dungeon. I'd used Matchmaking to put me into a group and we'd run in and killed the first Boss easily enough. We moved on to the next room and...

Nothing.

Everyone just stood there. No-one said anything. Or moved. It was freaky.

I figured maybe the Tank was reading the strats. I had a look myself. I could hear the Mage periodically buffing herself but everyone else was eerily still and silent. 

I had time to use the in-game camera to take a photo. Then I had more time. And still more. 

There's an on-screen timer. It said we'd been standing in the doorway for almost five minutes. This was getting ridiculous. I considered just closing the client and quitting the dungeon so I could start over but I didn't want to risk bugging myself. 

(Interestingly, I realize now that at no point did I even consider speaking in group to ask what was happening or sending anyone a private message. It quite literally did not occur to me to do anything like that. It's only now, as I write this paragraph, that I've thought of it at all. That must mean something - although I'm not sure what.)

A couple of times I considered just whanging an arrow into the Boss, who was standing there staring at us from across the room. I didn't want to be That Ranger but seriously, someone was going to have step up. And in the end that's what I did.

I did it because by then I was entertaining a very strong suspicion I'd figured out what was going on. I was beginning to think the rest of my party weren't living, breathing players like me at all. I was starting to think they were all... NPCs!

And they bloody were! The moment I stepped into the room and fired my bow they all magically came to life. The tank ran in and took agro, the healer began healing him and the other two began pumping out the damage. 

I'd been Matchmade into a party of AI Mercenaries and I hadn't even noticed! What does that say about me? And the game? And the genre!?

Not that I'm complaining. I'd much prefer to be partied up with imaginary people who already know the strats, never complain, don't mind stopping if I need to take the dog out for ten minutes and can basically carry me through the whole thing if need be. I would, however, like to know it was happening!

My next mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find out if the storyline dungeons always and only use NPC companions or if the Matchmaker just shoves them in if no-one else happens to be LFG for that dungeon when you hit the button. I'll probably need to do some research on it because I doubt my anecdotal data from the handful of dungeons I'll be doing will prove conclusive either way and I'm certainly not doing extra to find out.

Repetition

That said, if I was going to play Tarisland seriously, I'd need to get used to doing a lot of dungeons. They're "the main source of equipment" as the game cheerfully explains. If you "want to get stronger" you're going to be doing them a lot.

And we all want to get stronger, don't we? Well, no, not especially. I want to get through the dungeons so I can hear the next part of the story, which I'm finding unexpectedly involving. 

But that's a post for another day. I said I was going to play, not post and I'm bloody well going to, even if it is hard to stop writing. Why does just doing somthing for the fun of it  feel like goofing off, sometimes? 

I mean, it's not like I'm getting paid to do this...

Bring The Jubilee

It's technically still Spring, although the weather outside is telling me it's Summer already. The EverQuest II team must think so too because they just announced their plans for this year's Summer Jubilee and they're awesome!

Okay, maybe not awesome because it's not 1992 and EQ2 doesn't have a 90210 Zip Code but summer in the Shattered Lands is looking pretty darn cool, let's just say that much. 

No, wait, no, not cool. That's just confusing. Um... fire, maybe? Okay, that's just as bad, but in the other direction.

Bitchin'? The cat's miaow? 

Erm...this isn't helping, is it?

Minus the confusing and chronologically-challenged slang, Summer Jubilee looks like it's going to be lots of fun. The event brings the three big seasonal holidays - Tinkerfest, Scorched Sky and Oceansfull - together under one, big holiday banner, stretching all the way from the beginning of  June to the end of August. 

The EQ2i wiki, once an absolute authority on just about everything that you could possibly need to know about the game, has been slipping of late. The Live Events Timeline there makes no mention of the Summer Jubilee at all. Worse, it still has Scorched Sky in June and Tinkerfest in August, whereas they actually swapped places last year.

For the most up-to-date information you're always better off looking at the in-game calendar but if you want to check out of game I'd recommend EQ2 Traders Corner, which these days has the considerable advantage of being run by the game's dedicated (In all senses.) tradeskill developer, Naomi Denmother. There, you'll find the dates neatly tabulated:

• Tinkerfest — June 5, 2023 to June 21, 2023
• Scorched Sky Celebration — June 29, 2023 to July 12, 2023
• Oceansfull Festival — August 10, 2023 to August 23, 2023

In fact, now I come to look at it closely, that's even clearer than the official Calendar, which has to cope with two events happening at the same time. So maybe go to EQ2Traders first. I don't know... I'm sure you can work it out!

The full details of what's new for the individual events are still under wraps but there's some exciting news about the new content that runs across the whole summer. First, we're getting a new equipment slot: Plume.

The Plume slot allows you to equip an item that gives you some very big bonuses to one of your choice of three key stats: Ability Doublecast, Crit Bonus or Max Health Percentage. You can obtain these by doing Summer Jubilee content but once you get one, you also get a recipe that lets you craft more. 

As the illustrations show, the stats are hefty enough to be useful even at Level 1 but of course you can level them up as the event goes on. If you're one of those strange people who actually play with others in MMORPGs, it gets even better:

 "When grouped the power of your Plume will be amplified by how many other group or raid members are also using a Plume."

Not only that but 

"The power your Plume gains is based on the tier of your Plume, so even groupmates that have not yet unlocked the best tier of Plume will contribute fully to the amplification effect of everyone in the group or raid."

It seems like a well-designed, well thought-out addition to the game to me but of course, this being EQII, the initial reaction on the forums is one of deep suspicion. One annoyingly persistent Debbie Downer (2004 says Hi!) wanted to know if this was just another way Daybreak planned to screw more money out of the players:

"Also, could you tell us if this new system will be monetized like the merc, mount familiar? Or will it be an extra item simply lootable via quests or achiev ? Basically, is this implementation only the beginning of a new cash system planned later? Like seeing op plume in crates, pushing players and raids to look into it, After a well-crafted hook? "

Naomi Denmother, employing the infinite patience for which she is so well-known, while no doubt wishing she could clout the Moaning Minnie (1942 says Hello!) with her rolling pin, explained that it was none of those things:

"No. This is an event slot, for participating in holiday events. It is 100% meant to be a fun, attainable item. Let's please not remove everyone's fun and enthusiasm with such speculations on the first day it is announced."

I very nearly signed in to alert the complainers to Wilhelm's excellent post about the current attempt by minority EG7 shareholder Alta Fox Capital Management to force the whole group, Daybreak included, into a series of moves designed to wring every last dime out of the games before they toss the empty carcasses onto the pile of corpses left by the rest of the late-capitalist leeches and move on, like the vultures they are, to the next victim. For all that EQII players think they're being screwed over now, they'll be looking back at this as some kind of Golden Age, when the bastards get their way.

Or if. Let's go with "if". If there's one thing the last decade or so has shown us, it's that Jason Epstein and whoever else is in charge over there really don't like to let too much light into the room. I'm guessing Daybreak has ended up tucked safely under the wing of the Swedish regulatory authorities through something more than pure happenstance. If the games have any protection, it's probably that.

At least we can hope so. Meanwhile, we can just play the damn games and enjoy ourselves. Well, some of us can.

Getting back to the joys and pleasures of an EQII summer, the other significant feature highlighted in the announcement is this:

 "Summer Jubilee Dungeon – Triad of Elements - Opening once Tinkerfest goes live is a new solo dungeon called, Triad of Elements. Whether you’re level 1 or 125, this dungeon is open to all and can be repeatedly completed throughout each Summer Jubilee in-game event... head in and farm to your heart’s delight... the loot that drops will be level-appropriate every time"

A new solo dungeon is always welcome, especially a scaling dungeon that you don't have to be a subscriber to access and that drops loot. Whether it's loot worth having, I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Also whether running it gives decent xp below level 100 (It certainly won't after that but that's a diferent question). If it does, I have a level 60 whose going to be very interested.

The dungeon looks like it'll be the primary source of Silver Jubilee Medals, this year's summer event currency, as well as the way you'll upgrade your Plume. The medals can be spent at the appropriate Jubilee merchants, who've added twenty-two new items to their stock, including a dog pet and a mount, species unspecified.

Well, unspecified in the official forum post, that is. If you'd care to look at that EQ2 Traders post I linked earlier, however, you'll find an absolute wealth of detail, including a full list of those twenty-two new items, with pictures. The mount is a "Parade Roan Stallion" and it's an appearance ground mount , which means I probably won't use it. These days you'd pretty much have to be a dedicated roleplayer to use a ground mount, I think.

The dog, though, looks fun and I could find plenty of uses for some of those house items. EQ2 Traders has a full list of how to get the medals needed to buy them (Do all the quests, basically, then keep running that dungeon if they're not enough or if you hate doing quests, in which case boy, are you playing the wrong game...)

There's also a clear explanation of how to upgrade the Plume (Do the dungeon ten times.) and how to get an even better Plume than that (Do it ten times more so you can buy an upgrade from the in-game vendor.) Also, the crafted Plumes aren't quite as good as the quested ones, presumably for reasons.

I'm very happy with all of that. It seems like a much more egalitarian system than the Summer Ethereals it replaces and the 2023 event looks like a good iteration on the inaugaural version from last year. About the only thing I really wish was different would be for the Plume to be a display slot. It'd be so great to be able add a Plume you could actually see to your hat! 

Or maybe that's just me.

Room For One More Inside?

For some reason, I don't seem to have paid as much attention to the new Game Update for EverQuest II as I usually would. EQII's GUs are a big deal, substantial content drops that some games might try to pass off as full expansions and the latest, Empire of Antiquity, looks like one of the biggest for a while. It's not like me to pass one up.

And the feature list is impressive. The highlights include

Overseer Season 05

Massive Contested Dungeon    

Buried Takish'Hiz: Emergence from Stone [Raid]
Sultan's Mahala: Daggers Drawn [Raid]

4 new red shiny collections

New Guildhall

40+ New Adventure quests  

25 new house items, illusions, and pets

That's by no means all of it. The official announcement has full details. It's a lot.

And yet, I haven't really been all that excited to dig in and see it all for myself. Well, not all, obviously. Not the raids. But most of the rest ought to be of interest to me. Jenn Chan's producer's letter did promise there'd be "content for all playstyles" and looking at that list there most definitely should be.

I think my lack of engagement stems from the fact that, for the first time in years, I hadn't finished the Signature Adventure questline from the most recent expansion before the spring update landed. I explained the dog-related reasons behind my tardiness in a post a couple of days ago but it's also true that these days I'm just a bit tired of boss fights with mechanics that need much attention paying to them. I never liked fancy fights all that much and now I just don't have the patience even to grind them out just to get past.

Anyone we know, Zel?

For that reason alone, I was less than thrilled at the prospect of Empire of Antiquity's center-piece, the "Massive Contested Dungeon"that is Buried Takish`Hiz. I now realize that was churlish of me. And shortsighted. 

"Contested" in this context, for those who aren't up on EQII jargon, means "non-instanced" or, in other words, what we used to call "a dungeon". I wonder how many other mmorpgs still have those, let alone would think about adding new ones in 2023. I just checked to see if World of Warcraft has any and found this list but those are what I'd describe as elite areas, mini-dungeons or even open-world dungeons, none of which is the same thing at all. 

Even before WoW arrived and turned the entire genre over to instancing, EverQuest had begun to move in that direction. 2003's Lost Dungeons of Norrath introduced the concept to the game and it was an immediate success. 

When EQII launched a year later it came with a mix of contested and instanced dungeons, a trend that carried on for much of the life of the game. For a long time, every expansion had to include at least one contested dungeon or players would revolt. 

Eventually, though, that tradition ended. According to the wiki, prior to this update the last contested dungeon to be added was Kralet Penumbra in 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra. I'm not at all convinced that's accurate and there have certainly been some contested raid dungeons since then, but as this reply by EQII dev Gninja, to a forum thread back in 2017 asking why no new contested dungeons, explains

 "...based on our numbers of how many players use them and how many versions of the zone spin up they are VERY underused compared to any of the instances... Even the less popular ones"

He goes on to confirm the devs like contested dungeons and would like to keep making them but with the resources at their disposal it just doesn't make economic sense. Which means, I guess, that we can take the appearance of an absolutely gigantic contested dungeon in 2023 as evidence of that increased EG7 investment in the game we've been reading about.

Whatever the reason, contested dungeons are back - big time. And to my very considerable surprise, this one does indeed contain the promised something for everyone.

I just happened to be in Takish Badlands this morning, working on the tradeskill signature questline with my Berserker, who's also a max-level weaponsmith, when I spotted a large, interactive structure I hadn't seen before. On further investigation it proved to be the portal to Buried Takish`Hiz and since I was there...

I was expecting to stand motionless inside the zone-in, con the nearest mob, see it was ridiculously out of my weight class, take a screenshot or two and leave. I ended up spending two hours there and I'd probably be in there still if it hadn't stopped raining outside, forcing me log out to take Beryl for a much-needed walk.

Far from being a sprawling, old-school contested dungeon along the lines of Sebilis or Karnor's Castle, Buried Takish`Hiz is a set of instances based around a hub but the instances themselves are indeed "Contested" and being underground certainly means they'd be referred to as "dungeons" by most players, so I think the description in the press release holds. 

The way things are set-up reminds me of Myrist Library and the four Elemental kingdoms accessible from there by portal. Those, I believe, were generally thought of as zones rather than dungeons, since they're open to the sky, but it's splitting hairs. If more than one group of players can enter an instance and get in each others' way then it's "contested", while "dungeon" is what every game calls any instance with a few bosses waiting inside.

Speaking of bosses, Buried Takish'Hiz has thirty-three. Sebilis, considered a pretty big dungeon in its day, has twenty-five. What's even better, some of them, like Wilhelm the Elm up there, are soloable. Not that I've proved it. Yet.

Yes, most amusing.
Now tell me where to find them.

In the lobby I grabbed a quest to kill eight each of three types of invasive species from an NPC who complained bitterly about all the adventurers stomping around his heritage site, looking for loot. I guess if there are bulls in your china shop you may as well bribe them to smash up the things you don't want.

The game also auto-granted me three other quests, to kill  regular mobs, Heroic mobs and Heroic I mobs. I didn't actually notice I'd been given the tasks until later, when notifications started pinging. 

I was, of course, only killing the regular mobs, which was in itself a miracle - there were regular mobs! For years, to save on duplicated development costs, the way Darkpaw has been able to offer solo players access to equivalent content to group players has been by slapping on a massive buff when you enter a solo version of a Heroic instance. That way, all playstyles get to use the same assets and much money, presumably, is saved.

I take the appearance of genuine non-heroic mobs in this contested space as another sign of purse-strings being loosened. I can't say as yet how many areas in the new dungeon complex have dedicated areas for solo players - access to each wing has to be earned somehow, presumably by doing the questlines - but the one at the start, The Elddar Exchange, certainly does.

That's also where Gnorbert, the D.I.R.T.Y. gnome asked me to go to pick up some artifacts for him. He remembered me from our work together back in the Tranquil Sea, many years ago. If you play an mmorpg for long enough, your name does get around - with NPCs, anyway, if not with other players.

And that's where I'm going to stop for now. I wrote a very long post yesterday and if I don't watch myself this is going to turn into another. Such length wouldn't be justified because as yet about all I've done is step inside the dungeon and knock out a couple of introductory quests. In doing so, however, I've demonstrated to myself that there is something in this update for me beyond the new Overseer season and a few collections. It feels good.

I'll hold off on any further reports about Buried Takish`Hiz until I've seen more of it. Also until someone's had a chance to write up a guide and post it to the wiki because I'm already stuck on a quest. I'm supposed to be gathering and repairing a dozen Elddar artifacts but so far I haven't been able to find a single one.

If only there was someone else in the dungeon I could ask. Oh, wait a moment...