Neighbourly love and Everquest

Insert childhood to continue

Strange things are happening around here. We have a new neighour living in the flat above ours. She likes leaving little notes at our door. To let us know we're too loud and she cannot sleep. Don't get me wrong, she seems nice enough about it, telling us to "turn down our tv at a reasonable hour" and all that. It's just - we don't watch tv. We're not overly noisy. Not that you'd be able to hear us, anyway, because we happen to live right next to the busiest, noisiest road in town. And literally two buildings away from the local pub, wich releases hordes of binge-drinking zombies into the night. But no, she is only bothered by our alleged noisy tv, because her bedroom happens to be right on top of our living room. Which is apparently our fault now.

Speaking of the geographical alignment of our homes: Her bathroom happens to be located exactly on top of our bedroom. Dear neighbour: we can hear you shit. We could also hear you vomit your guts out at 4am last saturday after your heavy night of drinking. Very classy and lady-like. I didn't say anything. You know why? Because it's none of my fucking business. Now if only that kind of courtesy worked both ways.

On a happier note, I'm getting more hooked on Everquest 2 than ever. Maybe it's the battle rabbit mounts or the sabretooth squirrels. I'm not even kidding:

I usually prefer my rabbits to be cooked, but I'm strangely tempted by this mount.

Or this one.

Um... nope, sorry.

The game has changed a bit over the years. Not anywhere near enough and it's probably too late for any major changes, but some of the quests are just a bit awful for newcomers and returners alike. When you finish a low-level zone, move up to the next zone, only to bump into a random quest-NPC who sends you right back to the noob zone, for instance. He gave me the names of some characters I was supposed to help, but he didn't reveal their location, he didn't say where to look for them and then you're stuck running all over the place or looking it up on Google.

And it gets worse. On the next step, he sent me to some place called the "Crypt of Betrayal", saying it's a place somewhere in the capital city. That's all the information you get. Turns out there is no direct entrance to the crypt from within the city. Instead, you have to make your way from your current zone into the city, into the "Down Below", which is their sewer system, head down to one of the many secondary levels of the Down Below, THEN head into the Crypt of Betrayal from there. The game doesn't tell you any of this. In fact, none of the places I just named even come with a map, so you'll be fighting your way through hordes of monsters, endless winding corridors and floating, pixellated shit (it is a sewage system in a ten year old MMO) hoping to click on some coffin, which is supposed to contain a bunch of spare parts for some gnomish invention. Because that's where you keep spare parts. In a coffin. And that's where you keep coffins. In a sewer. It's so intuitive.

Heck, even the fucking "crypt" was full of stupid quests. There was this corridor full of minotaurs. You have to kill about a dozen of the fuckers to get to the other end of the hallways. That's where a quest NPC awaits and asks you to kill ten minotaurs. Only you already killed them all just to get to the NPC, so now you're waiting for them to respawn. Sigh.

Much of the game's content is borderline unplayable without "EQ2Map2", the community-made atlas system, which adds maps, markers and locations to every area in the game. And since every area contains about eleventy trillion quests, getting a map plugin with all the pointers already drawn out for you isn't exactly ideal, either:

Now find that one dot, which marks your quest.

There is no nice way to say this. EQ2 requires an insanely high tolerance level for bullshit or else you won't be playing this for long.
Case in point: My most recent quest. It was the coffin spareparts guy again. Asking me to grab a couple things from the "ruins of varsoon". Again, he doesn't tell you how to get there or what that place actually is, so imagine how much fun it would be if said ruins turned out to be a six man group dungeon full of heroic mode bosses and shit.

But don't worry. The place only turned out to be a six man group dungeon full of heroic mode bosses and shit. Better still, I got the quest at level 29, but the baddies inside that dungeon went all the way up to level 35. But let me fast-forward to when something really cool and unexpected happened:

Pictured: Winning

You're gonna have to take my word for it, because my pet is an oversized, blocky dickhead, but on that picture up there I'm beating the final triple heroic level 35 boss guy while I'm level 30. Something that wasn't remotely possible when I last played Everquest 2 which must have been about 63 years ago.

But now that the alternate advancement system allows characters to beef up all their favourite abilities and skills way before the level cap, in addition to classes with battle pets and the disturbingly competent AI mercenaries, everything seems possible. Sweet!
Don't get the wrong idea here. I didn't just casually walk in there and started beating the crap out of everything with my brain switched to snooze mode. I have to control my character's abilities through keyboard shortcuts, click my pet's abilities with the other hand at the same time, tab through targets and make sure I pull in a way that won't cause my mercenary to run off and pull the entire fucking instance. This shit is hard work. But damn, did it feel good!

Dungeons in EQ2 were always a big pain in the ass to play. When I first got into this game many years ago, I played a berserker, go figure. What sounds like an awesome DPS-heavy class really turned out to be a tank, though. Berserkers are hired to be main tank and that's it. No other role for then. So I had to lead the way through a MASSIVE labyrinth of shit with no map, pull targets, tank and turn the mobs around so their backs would face the rogue - yes, that was the tank's job back then. And you don't just AoE your way through that shit, either. In fact, if you use area attacks at the wrong time, you'll pull an entire room full of monsters, wipe out the entire group and start the whole dungeon from the beginning. With respawning monsters and no checkpoints. Whee!

Eventually I just gave up on dungeons, because the only thing that's worse than having to be the tank when you're a complete noob is having to be the tank when everyone just expects you to know the way to every quest objective and every boss, as well as every tactic for every boss battle. A complete noob on EQ2 who has never been to those dungeons before? Unthinkable! Yeah, that really didn't work for me.
Now I can do that shit on my own. I can see all the content, play all by myself if I want to, kill all the bosses and keep all the loot. It doesn't get much more awesome than this, really.

Just me, my wolf, my mercenary and my mushroom.

This is probably not going to work all the way up to the level cap, but it works for now, it's a fun new way to experience Everquest and I'm happy with it. Heck, if you prefer it the old-fashioned way with groups and everything, you can still do it like that, but I'm glad I can always just take a tanky or a healy mercenary with me, who won't bitch at me if he dies and who won't need-roll on any of my loot. And they're pretty capable, as far as AI companions go. Sweet!

-Cat