Whirly: good to go

We had to take it slow in EQ. Mark and I were able to play on Thursday a little, but Mike hasn’t played in three years. Karnor’s Castle seemed a good place as Mark and I were able to work there with a mid 50s Monk and Druid. It would give Mike time to remember how to play his Rogue.

Getting from the Druid drop-off to the castle was a little chaotic - levitate seems to work a little different than before. We got separated vertically. Once inside, and settled, I started pulling. I had Mark harmony one of the fist two guards and pulled the other. Later, while reading a Monk strategy guide, I was reminded that Monks can mez. It took me another half hour to figure out what it was, and find I had it available.

We didn’t enter Karnor’s, working the entrance instead. I didn’t want to push things, so we just ran a cycle of ten re-spawning mobs - nice and easy. No surprises, other than my new Dell computer spontaneously rebooting once. Luckily the mob we were fighting had just turned.

This was the first time we ever played EQ with voice chat. It’s a much slower game than the current MMOs. Plenty of time to text I guess. I miss the mini-map, “where is everybody?” And, the ability to see casters mana bar. I hate having to deal with cash, especially as a Monk. Fighting for melee classes is simplistic - auto attach, hit special when it recycles. Hmm, maybe melee is like that in all MMOs, just with more specials.

I enjoyed the experience in a ‘isn’t this slow and boring’ kind of way. Of course we weren’t pushing the difficulty envelope at all. There is still too much to remember before we start fighting hard. Experience gain, on the Test server, appears to be much faster.

I’m trying hard not to give up on AoC. It’s beautiful, that’s for sure, lots of quests, but it’s buggy - you know it is.

Mike and I played AoC this weekend instead of our regular WoW Pally/Druid. We’ve been playing this AoC pair for a few weeks. We work shared missions, if we can find any. We’ve finally gotten out of Tortage. I’m looking forward to seeing what the real world brings. We each had to quit the game a few times because of graphic anomalies.

Unfortunately, Monday AoC patches mean we’ve not been able to play, as a full group, for weeks. We three live in far flung time zones. I’m the furthest west. As soon as I get home from work it’s time to play. A long patch means we can’t play AoC. The boys live in the real world and have higher-speed Internet connections than I can get here in Alaska. Friday is our other fight night, but as it’s Friday we get to play a little longer than on Mondays - perfect for a WoW instance.

We are still committed to reaching level 70 in WoW, switching to some other game full time just isn’t in the works yet. We are level 66 though and are starting to think about what the future will bring. Starting over in WoW for the forth time is being considered, but not with overwhelming excitement.

Sony is having ‘welcome back’ events on a few of their games, including EQ. Mark was first, then me, Mike is downloading the game now. I suspect we’ll play EQ a few times between now and July 25, the end of the event. Mark and I went on a little run today with two testbuffies, we play on Test. It wasn’t easy remembering how to play EQ. I’m playing a Druid, I demanded we have SoW, and I’m sitting, meditating for mana, most of the time. My part of the fight is to Dot the mob, when they comes in, and throw a snare if needed. Other than that, I just watch. At least I don’t have to look at the book. When EQ first came out, casters sat, looking at a picture of a book, until they reached level 35. That’s so crazy. Enchanters, who are crowd control for a group, couldn’t even see how many mobs were in the fight. This was before we had voice chat as well. Ancient history, fondly remembered.

We made a run at ‘Escape from Durnholde Keep’. It was a multi death / not much success effort. We were unable to handle groups of four level 66-67 mobs, there were lots of em. I made some dumb mistakes as well. When mind controlling mobs, it’s important to NOT use the mob’s fear spell. It’s a lesson I should have learned long ago, I occasionally need a refresher.

After four of five deaths we moved on to Blood Furnace. I figured we had a 2/3 chance of beating The Maker. If Mr. Maker charms my Priest or Mike’s Mage we can survive. He chose Mage - we won. Although there was an added twist. When he charmed the Mage, my priest was silenced, making it harder for me to stay alive with a Mage nuking me. We won anyway. It was time to camp so we left it at that.

Mark picked up some plate gloves. He wasn’t that excited. I don’t think they were an upgrade. They had slots for gems. When we returned to town, I purchased a couple and Mark installed them. It was our first gem enhanced item.

Our visit to Underbog went swell until we ran into Hungarfen, the first boss. Actually, it went better than swell - we did great. But, then there was Hungarfen, our only death of the night. Those Underbog boys are hard for a small group. They put out a lot of damage. Hungarfen has a  360 ever 2 second dot that can stack up to 5 times -  that’s 1800 damage per 2 sec. I couldn’t heal fast enough for that. We finished the evening in the Slave Pens, nothing new to report there.

We’d planned to play AoC. Monday is patch day and there was a large patch that was going to take me a long time to download. I pulled the plug and we switched to WoW. Mike made fun of my 1/2 meg bandwidth. He says he has 16 meg. I think it’s rude to flaunt it.

I’m this close to quitting AoC so we can continue our slow march to 70 in WoW. The thing is, AoC isn’t that easy to give up on. It’s a great game with a lot of good ideas. Playing AoC was just a lark, I never expected we’d stay, but it’s better than than most. I’m not quite ready to give it up.

We’ve been stuck doing the same instances for a while. It seemed like a good time to take a break, do some exploring, and track down the next instance ‘Mana Tombs’. Unfortunately, I made a small error and took us off on a goose chase. Surely you can see the similarity between the names ‘Terokkar Forest’ and ‘Blade’s Edge Mountains’. Even a non dyslexic can understand that mistake. Anyway, the instance ‘Mana Tombs’ is not in Blade’s Edge Mountains. I know that from experience, now. The closer we got to where I thought the instance was, the harder the surrounding mobs became. Eventually, I started thinking, “these guys are just too hard for the entrance of a level 63 instance.” A closer look at my research-maps showed my error. We turned around and headed the other direction.

We worked Mana Tombs, the one in Terokkar Forest, until we reached the first boss Pandemonius. Man that guy can put out some damage - I was chain healing Mark’s Warrior and couldn’t keep up.

Mike’s Mage ported us to Ogrimmar and we took a bat to Gadgetzan to explore the ‘Caverns of Time’ which I had never heard of. It was all new to us, and we had no idea what to expect when entering the ‘Escape from Durnholde Keep’ instance. It took us to Hillsbrad Foothills, seven years in the past, to help preserve, blah, blah, blah. I don’t know why. We were transformed into, not very attractive, humans, and given the task of helping some guy escape from the Keep. We poked around the entrance, but it was past our camping time, and we didn’t stay long.

An interesting evening. We collected around three bubbles of experience. Next time, back to work. I’m thinking Underbog.

I had a flashback playing Age of Conan with the boys last night. At level 14, we entered a non-exclusive outside elite instance. We wandered, died a few times, and finally found a good spot, on a long set of stairs, to pull to. The stairs had a resurrection plate at the top, so that was convenient. My Guardian would go out and pull a couple mobs to the boys, on the stairs, where we would beat them till somebody died. The flashback was of EQ. That’s how we often worked in EQ. I specifically remember a spot on the moon where Mike’s Shaman would pull bugs to Mark’s Priest and my Enchanter. The play style was very similar. But, in AoC, there is no death penalty to speak of. In AoC failure is an option.

We fought there, on the stairs, until I got too bored. We all dinged 15, and moved to a indoor elite dungeon. We were crawling through when another player showed up and started ‘helping’. I’m sure she wanted a group invite. We are kind of picky, so we left the instance, it was getting late anyway.

This morning I realized that even the dungeon encounter was much like EQ. When you were dungeon crawling in EQ, you often came across other groups or players you had to work around. Though we played on EQ Test where there was plenty of room for everybody. I know on EQ production-servers it often got ugly in dungeons with groups working the same area. Usually on Test, if there was somebody in the dungeon you wanted, you just moved on to a different dungeon.

I’ve not decided on AoC yet. The EQ model worked well for a long time. EQ eventually created instanced dungeons, which we used extensively. The instances kind of killed the EQ community. We’ve been playing WoW for years now, almost exclusively instances, without meeting anybody new.

Forget everything I said about Blood Furnace, and The Maker, last time. It turns out, I had no idea what I was talking about - a common experience. We beat Mr. Maker again Friday, our third time, with a little room to spare. He charmed my Priest first, no big deal, then Mikes Mage, we survived. The danger is when He charms the Warrior, but that didn’t happen. He dropped leather, or was it mail? Doesn’t matter, we don’t use either.

We even made it through the second boss, Broggok. Old Brog wasn’t much of a fight after we survived the four waves of guards outside. Brog dropped leather, thanks for nothing. Still, it was good to see him fall. We worked our way in a little further, to the bottom of the ramp leading into the big circle room. We were no match for the groups down there.

I finally got a toon, solo, to level 20 in Age of Conan, and out of Tortage. I’m sort of lost on what to do now.