So how fast do you level in EQ2 and how is soloing after the early levels? I’m tempted to try it when the PvP servers launch, but the time committment for playing a new MMO is a bit offputting.
Also, will any of the PvP servers be those servers where you can sell your stuff? I might be more inclined to play if I knew I could sell my character when I was done.
You mean like the bulletin boards in inns that EQ had that never, ever (ever!) got used?
Heh – yeah, I was thinking of those. First time I found one I posted something just to see how it worked, a “Kilgore was here” kind of message. Months later I checked again and hardly anyone besides me had ever posted there.
City of Heroes has a nice LFG tool. Other games should rip that.
That’s just basically the difference between the EQ(1 and 2) and WoW game model. WoW leads you through the game by the nose. It’s engaging, but shallow, IMO. There’s not much of a sense of exploration. You know where to go, what to do, how to get there, etc… at all times. You’re a hero treading known ground.
EQ2 (and 1) on the other hand seem slightly more like worlds where you have to explore and figure out things on your own. Even down to the differences in the same basic quests. From what I recall of EQ2, they’d say “Kill 10 Foozles. Bring us back the skins.” and WoW would say “Kill 10 Fozzles. The Fozzles live over there, behind the hollow log, down, to the left… no… that’s not it… yeah… right there… there ya go! Now, swing the sword at them. Alright! Bring us the skins now. Here you go, you da man, have some XP!”
The latter is obviously very, very useful for attracting the types of folks who like the more immediate and tangible gratification. Nothing wrong with that at all, it’s made lots of folks who didn’t like these types of games suddenly enjoy them. And it’s nice to never be lost. However, you really have to go out of your way in WoW to find something nifty or unique that not everyone and their pet dog knows about already. (Including the NPCs.) That’s not the feel I got in EQ2 as much.
(And I’m with ya… this thread is making me want to resubscribe too. But damn I don’t have time for WoW and EQ2 and I’m enjoying WoW right now.)
I’ve found the quest rewards in EQ2 to vary greatly, from really nice to meh, to what the …? But then again, I found that to be the case in most MMOs; WoW had decent quest rewards usually, though some were crappy, DAOC often had terrible rewards, though the later revamps have helped a lot there. At leat now in EQ2, finally, you can see the reward before undertaking the quest. And, unlike WoW, most quest rewards are sellable on the brokers in EQ2.
One reason the rewards for quests are a bit skewed in EQ2 I think is the generally very good crafting system (good as in how it plays out for buyers; actually making stuff is tedious beyond belief). Essentially, you can buy basic stuff from merchants, find better stuff on normal mobs, get better stuff than that from low level crafting, find better stuff than that on heroic mobs, get better stuff than that fron high level crafting, etc. At the top of the heap you do have the uber-quest reward stuff from raid quests and Heritage Quests, etc., but a lot of top level players carry crafted gear, because a level 60 crafter can make some awesome stuff–it’s more like DAOC in that regard.
Because you can sell damn near everything you find as a quest reward, too, there’s a huge secondary market out there. Lots of folks do quests for gear they don’t need in order to sell the reward. Because crafting is lucrative, and gathering annoying, you can actually sell low-end crafting materials because the folks who need them don’t always want to go get them. Stuff like that makes the economy kinda interesting.
As for instances for duos and trios, I heartily recommend the Splitpaw and Bloodlines add-ons, they’re like $5 each I think. The loot in Splitpaw–easily trioable at 35+, though you won’t come near to finishing all the quests at that level as a trio–is often amazingly lucrative, especially in crafting recipes and decent armor/jewelry. The stuff in the D’Morte Bloodlines quest is also pretty darn good, to wear or sell, and the mobs come in manageable bunches.
Vermin’s Snye and the Crypt of Betrayal have good stuff for twenty-somethings, too. They’re under Qeynos. I’m sure there is something similar on the Freeport side, probably Wailing Caves. Don’t be afraid to explore, either. I’ve found that you can usually get out of bad situations and if you don’t, eh, the death penalty is mild (too mild, IMO, but that’s another story).
BTW, EQ2 has a vitality system sorta like the rest system in WoW, except sometime ago they just decided to make it permanent–your vitality never goes below 0.1 % so you always get double xp, or rather, the base xp rate is now double what the normal rate was a year ago at launch. If you keep your account long enough, at intervals (every six months, for sure, maybe earlier) you get potions that temporarily boost your exp gain by a substantial margin too. Overall I’ve found exp gain to be good. The othe night we hit the Sinking Sands (part of the Desert of Flames expansion, well worth getting) at 40, did six quests ranging from 45-48, visited Maj’Dul, which is really a 45+ city but which is entirely too cool not to visit, and gained a full level + to 41 in about 2.45 hours. The exp bonuses for exploring Maj’Dul alone gave us like a quarter level or more.
It’s an acquired taste, like all these games, but for me so far EQ2 is far and away a more engrossing experience than WoW was–and I loved WoW for like 18 months. I’m on the PvP beta server scoping that out too and I’m really looking forward to the next year in EQ2.
I like EQ2 over WoW in almost every way except with regards to the answer to your question. Soloing is not a problem other than you forfeit some of the cooler loot. However, mid to high level xp gain is very slow. We are talking 1-2 levels a week for a soloer spending casual to moderate amount of time. I felt it was slow even with xp bonuses that you can gain if you don’t play as much. It’s unfortunate because I think it could easily be fixed with some increase to quest xp rewards. But most of the playerbase who are from the old EQ1 crowd are very opposed to making leveling faster.
This stuff is just absurd. WoW gives people a clue as to where to go, a sentence as to direction usually. Guess what this is a good thing. Why? It lets me actually go and do the frigging quest. I’m not wandering around a zone forever trying to find the damn camp of whatever, or having to yell in chat asking where the fuck the things are or look at a related websites that tell how the quests are done because the game sucks. I know there is group of masochists out there that loved the abusrd, and mind numbing treadmill that games like EQ are, but I think WoW shows that some people really liked being able to log on and accomplish something in an hour or two and not have to devote their entire lives to a game to have any fun.
EQ2 would have a lot more subs if their target market didn’t have such a good time getting lost on the way to the GameStop.
“Oh my, those “Dead End” signs are so delightfully painted! Perhaps I shall get out and walk. Now, where was I going?”
I played WoW and recently returned to EQ2 after a hiatus, and I’m again re-addicted to the later (I will never return to WoW).
I primarily play as a duo with my SO; I’m a 'Zerker, she’s a Fury. As a duo, we have done a lot of content and quests (even managed a few heritage quests on our own.) This past Sunday I actually gained two levels in one day (41 and 42) by wrapping up a large backlog of quests in Enchanted Lands. We can do quite well against most encounters, as both classes can AoE affectively. It feels as if we can do far more as a duo in EQ than we ever could in WoW (I very much dislike WoW instances.)
You can get very good experience from some quests; the collection quests are excellent. Splitpaw is very good experience for soloing (the upper tunnels).
But, in short, my experience is very similiar to Wombats.
I spent part of the weekend doing the first set of Qeynos Armor Quests (AQs 3, 4, 5, 6) with a group that didn’t feature a traditional healer. We had:
Paladin
Swashbuckler
Illusionist
Conjuror
We were able to take down ^^^ yellow heroics and complete the quests. We had to use different tactics and strategies and play to the strengths of our various classes, but that’s what made it fun. My little conjuror when from level 21 to 25 during the series of quests.
I think AQ3 is the meatgrinder for Qeynos AQs because it takes place in very scary, very dangerous place called Stormhold. If you can make it through AQ3, it’s smooth sailing because you won’t see anything worse.
For Freeport AQs I think Edgewater Drains (AQ4) is the place.
I’m tempted to try it on one of the new PvP servers, but it feels so much like signing up for a hitch in the army. I just won’t get much out of it unless I’m willing to play it quite a bit and stick with it, and I don’t know if I want that at this point. With WoW I can just play once or twice a week get stuff done since I can’t level anymore anyway.
I’m assuming you missed the part where I said that for most folks the way WoW does things is a good thing, and then just jumped in because someone said something mildly critical of the radiant WoW or something? Because, I think WoW is great and it’s certainly loads more accessible, but I do indeed get disappointed when I’m running around in an out of the way zone and find some silver-bordered elite that I never knew existed because the chain of quests drug me through and out of the area that the thing lived in. (I also miss the anticipation of such things dropping interesting and somewhat unique items, but that’s neither here nor there.)
WoW is more linear, more accessible, more direct, in your face, go-here-do-this about stuff. Is that really in question? That doesn’t make it bad, but it does curtail the innate exploration that went on in EQ and can go on in EQ2 because much of that information is more nebulous. I think that’s a drawback, but obviously not enough of one that I’m playing EQ2 instead of WoW. But it is a differentiation and I do rather miss the feel that there’s something worthwhile off the trail of breadcrumbs in WoW.
I don’t know about you, but I’m slightly more intrigued by the idea of just poking around in an imaginary world than I am in doing the same at my local strip mall.
Piemax,
Have you started/tried any of the Heritage Quests?
Wombat, we haven’t completed any of the heriatge queses yet. I’m at work, bit looking at a list of the quests I think we have Strange Black Stone and Hadden’s Earring, and Restorimg Ghoulbane. Which, if any, of these would you reccomend? Also, I can’t find an defintion of “heritage quest” anywhere- what does it mean? Does it mean only “multi-part quest that gives good loot” - like the AQ series- or is there more to it?
On the AQ’s- we did them through the leggings and by then we were high enough level for the “armor quests” in EL and Zek, which are quicker and in most cases seem to give better stuff. albeit with higher min level, we got a number of those pieces before we could wear them. So I’m wondering if we’ll find the same thing with some of the heritage quests- ie will there be quicker/easier ways for a trio to get comparable loot?
Or someone who’s never played ANY MMO before.
I use a WoW addon named Call to Arms. It’s basically the LFG window from
DAoC/EQ1. It serves two purposes: Announce your needs with a comment to
other CTA users, and gather LFG/LFM requests from the local channel.
These are posted on the CTA channel, and other CTA users can sit in an
instance and still see if anyone in Stormwind is looking for groups/members.
I find it baffling that there isn’t even a /lfg flag that works like the /afk and
/dnd flags in WoW, since they’ve tried their darnedest to mimic EQ1 in just
about every other respect.
Actually we haven’t done much with the Heritage Quests, which are multipart quests leading to good loot but also, often, to raid-level Epic mobs. We’ve taken down one Epic as a trio, but we were some levels higher than he was (the Scarecrow King, who is kewl). Hadden’s Earring is very doable though.
Mark, I think you can definitely do stuff in short intervals in EQ2. I often only play for a couple hours at a time, and usually between crafting, finishing up a quest or two, shopping, or advancing something or other it’s fairly productive. Rarely to I log off without some sort of perceptible monetary or exp gain. It’s harder as a soloer, true, but that’s true in most games I guess.
Don’t get me wrong–WoW is an amazing game. But as mouse says, there’s something refreshing about a world where I feel like I’m actually discovering stuff. Don’t ask me why I lost that feeling in WoW about a month into beta, but I did–even places like ZG or MC or Onyxia’s Lair didn’t have the ‘wow’ (sorry) effect that some of the EQ2 zones have had for me. Then again, EQ2 graphics are a very acquired taste I realize.
And for anyone worried about getting lost, even without one of the excellent map mods available for EQ2, the in-game quest and mapping system as now implemented is very good.
Did they ever put the SOGA models in the US release?
Yes, they moved them in as an option a month or so ago.