Veksar– What?

Yesterday was my first trip into Veksar in EQ2. I had exceptionally fond memories of the zone from EQ1, especially since Nostalgia the Guild had just been there not too long ago. I spent days and weeks and months in the zone back in 2003. I even did the dragon raid as one of my very first raids and it was so much fun. Not with a proper raid of course, back then Veksar was already old news. I had high expectations though.

I was dissapointed with this new Veksar. I understand it’s just a teaser and therefor not very large. How come we couldn’t have gotten a completed Kurn’s Tower that we were promised with the release of RoK?

The zone reminded me of every other sewer zone in EQ2, especially the Freeport hideout where you have to kill an epic. Granted, there was one portion of this zone that was underwater (the entrance to zone in – and just past once you’re in the zone) but I had expected.. I don’t know, more.

There are only four named in the zone, and my group may have had a single death or two when someone took too much of an AOE, but we went in with 1 shadowknight tank, 1 templar, 1 assassin, 1 conj, 1 illusionist, and myself playing dirge and had no issues at all. We got three legendary chests and a master chest though I didn’t win a single thing. Not even a piece of trash loot – go figure. One item was an upgrade to the conj, everything else was just roll for greed. The master wasn’t anything anyone could use.

I know there are at least three fabled pretties within the zone, but no one saw any of them this time around. The entire zone didn’t even take 45 minutes. and that was with some pretty careful pulling by the tank. The final named had some adds spawn with the encounter that the enchanter made short work of, and has a nasty elemental AOE. The named before that one splits into pieces – but if you tank it in the front left hand corner (if you’re at the doorway facing inwards) you don’t actually get any of those adds and you can single pull them later. There are some worms that spawn a la Deathtoll style, and you have to turn some statues and place a rod – but other then that the zone left me with very little desire to go back.

There are four quests that involve the zone. One has you killing the mobs around the Omen’s Call docks first. Get that done and it opens up another quest for within the zone. Once you have the three quests you’ll find a fourth from a corpse in one of the rooms. The quests require some killing, some clicking, and you get nothing but some coin and a book.

I was far more impressed with the revamp of Everfrost then by the release of this instance. Did you know (of course you did) that there is a quested charm slot item from Everfrost that rivals and surpasses almost every single other charm slot item out there aside from high end raid charms? It’s better then the contested Mayong charm item. Better then the wishbone crafted item – there are five choices of charm, for every class, and the quest is simple.

Of course it’s not so simple right now because there are 40+ people in everfrost who are level 80’s trying to complete this amazing quest.

It’s like the Butcherblock charm item quest that people were doing, since it was pretty good (before the faction recipes were added that include the wishbone etc). A level 25 solo quested item can surpass T8 easily. Now we see it again with Everfrost. It’s great that all of these things are getting revamped, and I’m enjoying the extra content. I have to wonder to myself though what exactly is it doing for the balance of the game.