halls of the forsaken

When is it the End?

This weekend was great both in game and out. On Saturday before I headed off to a (very filling) wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, I spent some time using Chronomagic to mentor down and complete a few Desert of Flames raids – including the twin dragons that give you the shimmering scale to get into Djin Masters Prism (a zone I have only ever done once).

It gave me a lot of achievements, and slowly over the course of them I started inching my way towards level 80. Yesterday (which was a wonderful holiday Monday) I spent the evening doing a few instances, Necrotic Asylum and Halls of the Forsaken. I was almost there, 10% away from my (13th?) level 80 character. My group decided to take a quick trip through the shard of love which rewards a LOT of experience. It was fantastic.

Finally, I could put on all of the gear that I had stashed aside for numerous levls now, including the nice fabled shield from Outer Stronghold that has ranger written all over it. Now I’ll have to try to start my epic, and next weekend when Paradise Lost does their VP run I should be able to get my mythical (fingers crossed) which would be fantastic. We’ll see how it goes.

Now that I’ve hit level 80 (again) I’m wondering how to people categorize the “end” of a game for them – specifically an MMO that technically shouldn’t even have an end. When do you move on? When the game in general stops being fun? When you gain the final level? When you’ve completed every goal you set out for yourself? When you’re sporting nothing but the best of the best in terms of gear and spells? When you reach 200aa? When do you finally tell yourself that a character is “complete” or at least finished enough for you to start working on something else (for me it will be my 75 paladin).

The ranger is completely different from what I typically play – and I’m enjoying every second of it. I have always played support and healer classes, so being able to ping things off with a bow is a LOT of fun. Night of the dead is coming up soon, not to mention a few other in game events, and I’m looking forward to it all.

Hope everyone else had an amazing weekend, I’ll see you in Norrath!

Halls of the Forsaken

The cloak pictured above is a quest reward for one of the Commonlands TSO dungeons – the image on it is new, at least to me, I’m fairly certain that the graphic used to be of something else.  I love seeing things revamped like this. Thanks to Wpus for modeling it for the screen shot. He’s been having a lot of fun adjusting his colourful outfits lately. It’s nice to see so many new options in EQ2 as far as gear goes, even without dye. It has taken a little bit to get there but it’s coming along. 

Since last night was LotRO night, I didn’t have a lot of time to play in game. I did managed to get the Commonlands instances done for shard updates though with my mystic and coercer – and the coercer managed to ding level 79 at the same time which I was really happy about. While we were defeating the final boss in Halls of the Forsaken, we stumbled upon an interesting body drop. It was the head of Gynok in a crate (fabled item). Apparently not all of the trophies come from raid instances which was a great surprise to me. EDIT: Or, and this is probably the more likely culprit – the raid version of Gynok and the instanced version for some reason are sharing the same loot table for this particular trophy, and that’s why it is dropping. Ack! Well, glad I got one in that case!

Of course, my guild on Kithicor doesn’t have a guildhall at the moment, and we don’t have one of the player crafted bases to attach the head to yet but it’s nice to have this trophy waiting for when we do get those things. I’m sure we will even if it takes a bit of time. 

Today is the day that the new station market items get implemented. I think the costs are fairly reasonable, and they’ve been a long time coming. You can rename your character for $15. You can change their gender and appearance (though the barber shop already changes appearance for a gold) for $15. You can also change your character’s name, gender, and appearance for $25. 

I’ve already written about these new SC items over here, and I really don’t think that it’s going to be as big a problem for keeping track of ‘bad eggs’ that some forum users made it out to be. There are always preventative methods and just good common sense when it comes to recruitment. On that same note – I DO wish that the automated server transfer service had been restored instead of implementing these new automated gender and name changes. The service has been down almost a year now and it’s very frustrating to deal with the petition system and days of waiting for the transfer to take place. I understand there’s only so much manpower and there’s always lots of things on the ‘to do’ list and my list certainly doesn’t match those of the SOE employees, but it’s a little personal wish of mine none the less.

Once I had completed the three instances with Wpus, it was time to spend the evening in LotRO which is experiencing it’s own number if bugs and issues lately. It was still a nice evening, hanging out with good friends always makes things much better.