Pandas and Gear Up and Level Up Events Hit EverQuest II

With the announcement of the Visions of Vetrovia expansion last week I opined that we might soon be seeing Gear Up, Level Up events as well as the possibility of the now usual Days of Summer event.

The 2021 Expansion

And this week saw both get announced, though not in that order.  The Gear Up, Level Up event news hit the EverQuest II site late on Tuesday announcing the usual array of pre-expansion bonuses.  For live servers we will get:

• Tuesday, September 21, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, September 27, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double loot drops, double experience for members, double status for members.
• Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, October 4, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double loot drops, and for a limited time: mount training drops.
• Tuesday, October 5, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, October 11, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double loot drops, and for a limited time: spell research.
• Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, October 18, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double loot drops, for a limited time: spell research, double experience for members, double status for members.

For those on the Kaladim server, there are some lesser bennies… but they’re paying to walk to school up hill in the snow both ways, right?  I guess they do get a bit of double XP.

• Tuesday, September 21, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, September 27, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double status for members.
• Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, October 4, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double Destiny of Velious Hunter coins.
• Tuesday, October 5, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, October 11, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double experience for members.
• Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, October 18, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double Destiny of Velious loot drops.

And then there is the Tarinax PvP progression server, which I am reminded is even still a thing, has its own set of bennies.

• Tuesday, September 21, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, September 27, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double status members.
• Tuesday, September 28, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, October 4, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double Cobalt coins.
• Tuesday, October 5, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, October 11, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double experience for members.
• Tuesday, October 12, 2021 at 12:01 a.m. PDT until Monday, October 18, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. PDT
  • Double Kingdom of Sky loot drops.

As with Mickey Donovan’s favorite jacket, these bennies are “Members Only,” which means you have to subscribe to the Daybreak All Access plan.  $15 a month is all they ask.

Those bennies are all fine and good, though not much there really appeals to me.

On the “Level Up” front  I managed to get six characters to the current level cap of 120 back when we first went to the moon with the Blood of Luclin expansion.  I still have characters that are not at level cap, but I do start to wonder how many level cap characters I really need.  (Also, there is a pile of them in the 40-70 range, which is a long way from level cap.)

As for “Gear Up,” I am already way behind there having not bought the Reign of Shadows expansion.  That means I’ll be depending on the crate of gear that is on the ground at the start of most of the recent expansions.

And then there is the Days of Summer event which, even at its earliest, ran deep into autumn, and has finally submitted to reality and been given a name change.  It is now Panda Panda Panda … because the related NPCs are pandas.

Panda Panda Panda starts in autumn

As with gear up/level up, there isn’t much available that we realistically ready me for the next expansion, though I am sure the gear will be upgrades over what I have.  But the event, which comes in a series of weekly tasks, sends you all over Norrath and is kind of fun.  And there are always some cosmetic items worth having, and this year there is a mount… and ant mount.

I wonder if that is foreshadowing for the next expansion?

Anyway, I’ll be doing that over the next few weeks.  And then when that ends we’ll be in the zone for the launch of the next expansion.

Bhagpuss also has a write up about the event and I am sure we’ll both share pictures of the mount.  It certainly won’t be the worst looking mount in the game.  I wonder if it scales to barbarian size?

Checking Up on Alts in WoW Classic

I have been mostly on about the instance group in WoW Classic for the last few months.  That is both because that is where I have spent most of my play time as well as the fact that the tales of the group tend to be nice, discreet stories that have a beginning and and end.  The paths of my alts, out in the world leveling up, tend to be messy, with starts and ends that are more a function of my play time available than having reached the end of a particular zone or quest line.

But I have carried on with alts, at least a couple of them.  As tends to happen, I rolled up a bunch of alts and some have fallen by the wayside.  I have a few still lingering in their 20s and another in his mid 30s.  I have kept up with two of them though.

One of them is Wilhelm, my paladin.  I thought he might have been a lost cause, as he hit something of a wall at about level 40 where at-level mobs were starting to get the better of him and grinding them out was starting to feel like a real grind, where he had to stop and recover after every fight.

However, at the end of Zul’Farruk a polearm, Khoo’s Point, dropped as a bind on equip item after a fight.  Nobody needed it so I asked if I could have it for Wilhelm and, as it turned out, it was just the thing he needed.  The boost in damage over what he had been swinging suddenly made him viable again and I got a few levels on him before I found another polearm at the auction house.

Wilhelm running down another quest

He has made it up to 45 and is about set to start poking about in Searing Gorge.

Then there is Tistann the hunter.  He is my main alt, so to speak, and also the guild leader.  I like to keep him up with or a bit ahead of the dungeon group.  He was my first character to get to 50 back in June.

Once he wrapped up Searing Gorge he had a quest to go out to Chillwind Camp in the Western Plaguelands, which actually has a couple of quests that were manageable at his level.  He grabbed those and the Argent Dawn commission, and killed some undead, but the quest chain there ramps up pretty quickly, so he got on the bird and headed elsewhere.

While the post-40 leveling process is known for sending you all over creation, you do get to settle down for a bit now and then.  In Un’goro Crater you can chase down some quests without too much running about… or at least running to other zones.  There is plenty of running about in the zone.

And some things running at you

After that it was off to Felwood, which is kind of a pain to get to in the first place.  And once you get there you get a work out again.

Felwood map

The quests start down in Emerald Sanctuary, but the objectives range further and further up the map.  The first quest is close by, but you end up hunting stuff all the way up around Felpaw Village, which can make for a long ride back and forth.  But at least you can grab the flight point, which is south of there.

While I think of Un’goro as an ideal place for my hunter, since he could skin, Felwood worked pretty well for me.  There are a lot of quests where some patience for grinding mobs will serve you well.  When I am in the mood, that can be quite relaxing.  You just carefully slay mobs and work your way to your target.

Made my way to Xavathras

There are some underground adventures as well, with the and escort quest in the mix, because of course there is.

Nobody can leave captivity without their stuff

And a couple of the quests send you off to other zones, which wouldn’t be so bad, but that flight point is a long way off still.  I actually ran to the Azshara flight point once, just to see if it was closer, but it is about the same distance.

Out to watch a ceremony before I ride, then fly, then ride for the turn-in

Eventually you get the quest that sends you on to Winterspring, which takes you through the Timbermaw tunnel, a location of some renown.  Fortunately, this was not my first Felwood rodeo, and being in no hurry, I went and ground out a bit of reputation with the Timbermaw Hold so that I did not have to fight my way through them.

Unfriendly means they don’t attack

I was able to run through the tunnel unmolested to start in on the Winterspring.

First stop, Denova Snowden

I was 54 at that point, and Winterspring is just a bit above that if you want to play it safe.  I persisted for a bit.  A hunter with a decent pet can get away with some things I won’t try with my pally later.

I made sure to get the flight point at Everlook and picked up a bunch of quests there.  I did the ones I could, but some of them either send you directly, and others eventually, back to the Plaguelands.

So it was back there, where I started off at level 50, to hunt more undead.

A Plaguelands panorama

And it was there that I hit 55, which is sort of the last milestone before level cap.  That was also where I started feeling like I was really going to make it there.  From 55 to 60 is not a trivial grind but, going back to the leveling guide, I still have most of Winterspring and Western Plaguelands to work through.  I’ve barely seen any of the the latter.

Where I’ve been from Chillwind

And I have not even started in on Blasted Lands, Azshara, Burning Steppes, or Eastern Plaguelands.

I have enough content between me and level 60 to just follow that along to 60.

And then I have to get my paladin through all of that as well, which is a very different experience.   But I’ll leave that for another time.

Deadmines Preparation and Some More Travel

While we knocked out our first instance, we still are not quite settled as a group.  After running Jeepy the mage in Ragefire Chasm, Bung wanted to try out a druid.  This led to something in a shift of who was playing what.

Basically, what I will call the “small council,” Skronk, Ula, and I, decided that going without a mage would be bad.  Not only is the mage arguably the best DPS in a group, but there is also a ton of utility that comes with a mage, from food to transport to crowd control.  We would feel naked without a mage.

So Scscla, our Ragefire Chasm tank, was sent to the bench as Ula the mage came in for the team.

That meant we needed tank and the feeling is that only a warrior will do.  Until Earl is settled… still in transition to Japan with most of his stuff still in a shipping container on a boat somewhere… I pulled out my fourth alt, Viniki the gnome warrior.  Poor Chad was going to be on the bench as well.  Too bad.  He was feeling like he had a personality to me.

The changes, in turn, meant making sure we were on the right path to the Deadmines in Westfall.  With five active alts having run into the zone I am now a bit hazy on who has been where.  Viniki, it turned out, was reasonably far along.  He was at the Defias messenger stage of the lead in, which meant standing around in Moonbrook until he popped.

Outside the blacksmith’s shop

The first time I did this I ran it from memory.  But my memory was from a less busy time, when there wasn’t something of a queue waiting to kill the messenger, so he would actually have time to wander up and down the road between Moonbrook and the quarry.

There is also a bunch of running back and forth, both to keep you busy as well as to introduce you to another zone, Redridge in this case, before you get back to Gryan Stoutmantle.  At that point you might find yourself in a bit of a pickle if you don’t read his quest text… or maybe even if you do.  He doesn’t give you another quest, he just tells you to go talk to somebody.  But, if you’re like me and it is the last quest you do in the evening before you log out, you might not get what you need to do next.

I had to go do that step with a second character to get the quest text, as once it is gone it is gone.

The Defias Traitor

That isn’t a lot to go on, especially since the Defias traitor is likely nowhere in sight.

Just hanging about Sentinel Hill, nothing special here

It is another quest, like the Defias messenger, where there is one NPC and if somebody else is using him you’ll have to wait your turn.  It just seems odd that Blizz didn’t put in a linking quest from Gryan to the traitor, just to remind you of what you need to do.  I mean, the traitor isn’t too far off.

There he is, back from another walk to the Deadmines

And he does have a quest available marker above his head.  But if you’re like me and you’ve done all the other quests you’ve been handed, your quest log might be empty when it comes to Westfall, and some of us older players need a reminder.

Ah well, Classic is as Classic does.

The plan was to get everybody to the Defias traitor, as that is the lead-in to the instance if I recall right, and you want to be on that quest chain because otherwise Gryan won’t shout out your name to the whole zone.

Having gotten that lined up, both Viniki and Ula needed to get a couple levels as the guild target was level 18 to go forward.  With Westfall pretty much done we headed to Loch Modan with Skronk’s hunter in tow, since Skronk was already set in levels.

It has long been my habit to run both the Stormwind and Ironforge quest zones, and Viniki has a a few on the list there while Ula had a mage class quest in the zone as well.  So we spent some time slaying troggs, finding all of the tools Bingles lost, getting supplies to Ironband’s expedition, which has that odd surprise aspect that triggers an event when you arrive at the quest target, and a few other items along the way.

Then, for kicks, we decided to visit the ogres.  There are a couple of quests flagged as “elite” that involve bagging some elite ogres for one and a named ogre for another.  As there were three of us, we figured we could give it a try.

Flushing ogre brutes out of a cave

It was one of those things that, for the three of us, a single elite ogre wasn’t so bad.  The brutes were a bit brutal, but the others were no big deal.   Pairs of them though… well, when the tank yells “run” you should run.

And then run back to where it all happened

If we had had Skronk the priest along for heals it would have been a walk over, but a tank and two DPS meant getting things done with only a lesser healing potion for backup if there were adds or other issues.  Only one death, but we were dissuaded from going after the named ogre without heals.

We decided to take the path across Stonewrought Dam to turn in the quest, which had us stumble across another quest.  This is the thing about WoW Classic, there are proto-quest hubs, but there are a lot of rogue quests just out and about as well.  This had us checking up on the Darkiron dwarves hanging about the dam, then sent us off to the Wetlands.  So, after turning things in, off we went, letting the game guide our adventure.

At levels 16-18 the Wetlands were not a problem, not for three of us anyway.  I wasn’t keen to go chasing herbs in the middle of the local orc camp that Skronk saw on tracking, but on the road we were fine.

True dat

We got the turn in for the dam quest, which sent us back to Loch Modan, but we had also picked up a quest along the way that sent us to Menethil Harbor.  Since two of us needed the flight point there anyway, it seemed like a good plan to just keep on running that way.  We could always fly back.

Across the Wetlands

At Menethil Harbor we picked up the flight point and turned in the quest, but also found another quest that sent us off to Theramore Island, the Alliance outpost on the eastern side of Kalimdor.  Well, the boat to Theramore was there, so why not keep on rolling?

Once there, we grabbed that flight point, turned in the quest, and then decided to see if the run to Ratchet from there was viable.  Going via Theramore was one of our possible routes to Orgrimmar for our Ragefire Chasm run.

Routes to Orgrimmar

We gave up on that route at level 13 as being too dangerous, but at 17 or so…  well, it was still pretty dangerous.  The mobs were still level “skull” to us, but so long as they picked on Viniki we seemed able to outrun their interest in us.  When they went after Ula though, things were less happy.

That did not go well

We were able to get through with just that one death, though we had to learn the lesson about just sticking to the road in the Dustwallow Marsh, as Ula tried to take a direct route as a ghost and ended up getting funneled the wrong way for a bit.  But we eventually arrived at the Shady Rest Inn, where the sign promised refreshments.

Viniki could go for a short beer

The inn itself however did not live up to the promise of the sign.

Not at all like the pictures on the Airbnb site

I especially like the skeleton against the tree, its skull pinned to the tree with a knife.

There is a quest that sends you to the Shady Rest Inn at some point, that shield on the chimney being part of it if I recall correctly.  But that is for later levels.  We were into The Barrens, just a simple run up to Ratchet.

That was when we were reminded just how big The Barrens really is.  This is a zone on the scale of a couple of the Karana zones in EverQuest.  There is a reason they split it into two distinct zones with Cataclysm.  Running from what was not nearly the southernmost point to Ratchet, which is well shy of the northern end, was a bit of a hoof.  We made it without incident, save for a level 24 hyena jumping us at the southern end of the run, and ran into Ratchet to pick up the flight point there and take the boat across again to Booty Bay.

The boat was pulling in just as we arrived… we missed it

Across the water in Booty Bay we picked up our last flight point for the day, rounding out another travel adventure.  However, on seeing the price of a flight from Booty Bay to Stormwind (6 silver? Am I made of coin?), we opted to use our hearthstone to return home.

Recalling from the roof

Viniki and Ula got far enough along to be in the zone for Deadmines and I was able to work on a bit of the warrior tanking skills.  The hope is to be able to run the instance this coming weekend.

And I still have to get back to Stonewrought Dam to finish off that quest line that sent us off across the world.

Time Capsule – Computer Gaming World October 2003

I ran across this while I was working on upcoming Month in Review posts.  If I have a block of time I will sometimes knock out a couple of those long in advance.  Well, I’ll knock out the part I can do ahead of time, the looking back sections covering a year, five years, and ten years ago on the blog.  That is the most important part of each month’s review post, at least to me.

The review section is primarily about what I was posting back in the day.  However, I have started adding in addition information for context of the time, usually in the form of launches or closures.  Those will sometimes fall further back in time, being 15, 20, or more years ago.

As I was tracking something down that came up in 2003 for a “15 years ago” entry I ended up on a website that has an archive of issues of Computer Gaming World in .pdf format.

I started digging through the site, scanning various years.  Computer Gaming World, which later became Games for Windows Magazine, stopped publishing back in 2008, having run for 27 year.  During its run it covered a lot of computer gaming history.

You can find the archive at http://www.cgwmuseum.org/ .  Or you could find it there.  At some point between Thursday night and Saturday the site went down.  When I went back to continue looking I was greeted with error messages about the site having gone missing.

The transitory nature of the internet is one of its major frustrations.  Things change or disappear and data goes missing.

Unless, of course, the Internet Archive is backing the site up.

Fortunately I was able to find everything that went missing backed up and waiting for me and I was able to return to this gem from October 2003.

Computer Gaming World October 2003 cover

Just for openers there is a preview of World of Warcraft from more than a year before its launch.

There is also the CGW review of Star Wars Galaxies, something which will annoy the purists I am sure.

And while those are worth the price of admission, there are just so many little things in the issue that are interesting to see.  There are, of course, the ads.  So many great ads.

For SOE fans there are ads for the EverQuest Evolution, a roll-up pack of EverQuest expansions, the EverQuest Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion featuring the all new “dungeon crawl” experience, and Lords of EverQuest, the Norrath based RTS.

There are many other things worth seeing.  Half-Life 2 was the top pre-order. (And EverQuest Evolved was on the top releases.)

And then there is the Pipeline section that has a list of upcoming releases with planned launch dates.  Included on that list:

• EverQuest II – Q4 2003
• Total Annihilation 2 – Q4 2003
• World of Warcraft – Feb 2004
• The Matrix Online – Q4 2004
• GuildWars – Q4 2004

Good times.

Anyway, if you have time to roll though video game nostalgia, you could find worse places to wallow.

The Age of the Full Zone Respawn

More memories from the depths of TorilMUD lore.

Being one of the proto-MMO MUDs, and the MUD in particular that influenced the creation of EverQuest, TorilMUD included early/crude/simplified versions of many of the MMO mechanics we have come to love/loathe.

One of these is, of course, the respawn.

Oh, the respawn, one of those quirks required of a shared world.  You can’t just kill a thing and expect it to remain dead in a game where a hundred or a thousand other people might need to kill the same thing… or ten of the same thing… as well.

And so we have grown used to respawns, spawn tables, rare spawns, and all of that in our MMORPGs.  The sight of slain mobs reappearing on the field is nothing strange.  I remember when the two hour respawn timer for mobs in WoW dungeons used to be an issue, back when WoW dungeons took longer than 20 minutes to run.

(Even the term “mob” dates from the MUD era, when it referred to a “mobile object,” which is all our orcs and dragons were back then.)

But back in the MUD era, things were less sophisticated, resources more restricted, and even drive space could be an issue.  Back then there wasn’t any process keeping track of every single trash mob in the world, respawning them one by one on individual timers.

Sure, there might be a bit of code keeping track of a very special boss mob or a rare world spawn, but for the most part respawns were handled at the zone level.

Kobold Village Zone – Surface Level

A zone back in TorilMUD… back in DikuMUD… was something of an autonomous process.  I tinkered with zone creation at one point and have forgotten most of what I once knew, but I recall that they were discreet areas that contained all the data… rooms, descriptions, objects, and mobs… that they contained.  There could be a lot of zones in a MUD.  You can see a list of zones from TorilMUD on a previous post I did.

When actually playing TorilMUD, it could sometimes be difficult to tell where one zone ended and another began.  The world was seamless in its way, probably more so that WoW, where you can see the change in geography and color palette as you move from one zone to another.  You had to look at the style of the text in the zone.

Sometimes it was obvious.  An old or connecting zone might have no ANSI color characters in it or the writing style in room descriptions might change dramatically.  And, sometimes, there would be a sign announcing the area, often including a warning about dangers ahead. (See the sign on the fence outside Kobold Village for example.)

Within a zone, all the mobs would respawn at the same time.  The standard timer in TorilMUD was 20 minutes if I recall right.  When off on a experience group, grinding levels some place like Kobold Village, the buffalo fields, the pirate ship, or even on the walls of Waterdeep, where elite guards gave great experience, it was important to establish a flow that worked with the respawn timer so as to limit down time.  We used to come up with regular cycles and move from mob to mob, winding up back where we started just in time for the respawn.

Some zones were different.  There were a couple of zones that were set to not respawn.  Once they were done, they were empty until the game crashed and restarted.

Other zones… the special zones like City of Brass that required a full group of 16, correctly balanced… would not spawn until empty.  That is, nothing would respawn until there were no players left in the zone.  That could lead to difficult times if there was a full party wipe.  With everybody dead and back in their own respawn points… their class guilds in most cases… the zone would respawn and all the mobs between the players and their corpses… corpses which had all of their equipment… leading to difficult times.  It was not uncommon to bring along an extra person just to sit in the first room and “hold the zone” for the group to keep it from respawning in the event of a wipe.

And there were, of course, some oddities with the full zone respawn, like spawn order.

Any unique mobs in a zone were likely just that, unique.  There was only one and they had a specific spawn location.  But more generic mobs, guards or patrols, or other trash if you will, might be a single mob that was set to spawn at a list of points.  At respawn time the zone would then refill any missing mobs from that batch starting at the top of the list of spawn points.

This meant that if you killed a generic mob from the second spot on the list, when respawn time came it would respawn in the first spot.  The process was simple.  It didn’t check what spots were empty or keep track of which mobs had spawned in which spot.  It just checked to see how many of that mob were left and, if the count came up short, it spawned more of them to fill out the desired number.

This could be painful if somebody killed the wrong mob.  Spawn order was serious business.

For example, I mentioned the elite guards on the walls of Waterdeep.  Those were tough mobs, but they would not call for help or trigger a city-wide alarm if you attacked them.  And they were excellent experience and dropped a decent amount of cash.  But they were generic mobs and you had to be careful to kill them in spawn order.  If you didn’t follow spawn order, or missed the respawn and kept killing in order past the first spawn after a respawn, you could end up with two elites in that first room.  And while elite guards wouldn’t call for help of set off the alarm, they would assist each other, so now you faced a double spawn.  And given that you probably setup your group to maximize experience, which meant keeping it as small as possible, a double spawn would be then end of things unless you got some help.

And so it went.  As I recall, the reavers on the Pirate ship

Anyway, that is my MUD memory of the day.