The Day After (and Nostalgia the Guild 2.0)
stargrace 
Screen shot is of my 78 coercer Silhouette floating down to the Howling Stones area in Jarsath Wastes. When dark elves were first given hover I couldn’t figure out why, and thought it was slightly unfair that we’d suddenly learned how to glide down as though we had wings. Now it’s hard to play without it because I’m so used to thinking I’m the off spring of a fae or arasai. How cute, there’s even a little scorpion below – I’m obviously doing the repeatable faction quests, which I spent most of the night doing.
GU45 went off without a hitch – at least on Najena. I spent hours re-organizing my banks and putting everything “just so”. I dumped all my money into shared (bleh, I had more then 187p last I checked, I’ll have to earn more!) and made sure all my ‘mains’ had extra strong boxes to fill in the blanks.
The changes to coercers are nice. I dislike the change to the cure button for priests though. Why? Well, healing (for me) is sort of boring. The one way I could ‘prove’ that I was a competent healer though – was to be on top of cures. Now you have a single spell that removes ALL detrimental effects (one of each) with an instant recast and a .8 second cast time. It takes away the whole thrill (to me personally) of “oh no there’s a dot, we have to cure it and we have to cure it NOW” – and I’ve heard a few other healers mention the same thing. Am I glad we’re short three hotbar slots now? Well I don’t really care too much about those. I don’t think it was worth simplifying the spell. I understand a lot will disagree, but healing was something I didn’t need to be more simple.
I adore knowing where gray quests are, on the other hand. Fantastic change and it’s going to be fun. I had every intention of knocking out some gray quests last night to see how the aa works without mentoring – but got swept up with playing in Jarsath Wastes instead. I did level the coercer from 77->78 and managed to get 40% into the level while I chattered with Nostalgia. Last night was their Paludal Cavern run (how I love that zone).
Speaking of Nostalgia. We’ve basically decided to start up an EQ2 branch of the guild – with a slightly different twist then our EQ1 branch. In EQ1 we are very structured, there are very specific things we want to do, we meet at a specific time. It’s needed, in a game like that. There’s no mentor system, we have to stay within range in order to do anything together.
However, EQ2 is not bound by these, mainly due to the mentor system. I personally feel that it’s important in any mmo, to have a strong community. A lot of people end up leaving simply because the community was not for them. If you can start playing a game, with a group of friends already there — even if you don’t get to group with them all the time, but still get to talk, ask question, and generally know they’re around, it makes a huge difference.
Welcome Nostalgia the guild 2.0
We won’t be assigning (or at least I won’t be) a weekly day to play – but we will be hosting events such as dungeon crawls (instance runs) heritage quest nights, maybe city writ nights, old world raids in time (and with enough interest) and what not, on pre planned days so that everyone knows about it first. The guild has yet to technically be formed, I’m waiting for 6 people to be on at the same time and all together in Timerous Deep so it can be put together. Not an easy task when everyone has their own play times, which is one of the things that actually makes Nostalgia work. There’s typically always someone around (except the wee hours of the morning) we have people from all over.
Tipa and myself both agreed there’s no reason why this guild, or the idea of Nostalgia, can’t span across multiple games. We’ve met some wonderful people and none of us started together on one server. Why not present that opportunity to people (if they want it, no pressure of course) to take advantage of. Again, it’s not going to run as the EQ1 Nostalgia guild runs, but it will give people the opportunity to have a semi static group of folks around with planned events and things to do. People who have forums and vent, who are eager to talk and experience everything Norrath and Norrath 2.0 have to offer. In doing this, and the method we’ve been doing it, I think we’re also picking up a fairly good crowd of people. It’s not exactly random. People hear about us through our writing (we have quite a few bloggers) and word of mouth. We’re not just randomly recruiting people. There’s bound to be a bad apple here and there (they let me in, after all) but over all I feel fairly confident and pleased with the folks we’ve met up to this date. Which is surprising, as I’m typically a very anti social person. Not meaning to offend anyone, it’s simply the way I’ve learned to play my games.
Anyhow. Yesterday was a lot of fun. Between the new GU changes, and meeting new people through Nostalgia I couldn’t have asked for a better gaming day. I haven’t checked out the new quests added with the GU yet, but I hear there are house item rewards, and so you know it won’t be long before I meander my way over to the nearest quest npc to see what they’re handing out and what it’s all about.