f13.net

Free level 85s if you sign up, with a free flying mount: https://www.everquest2.com/register?cid=1064680

New accounts only, I assume.

This was posted in the EQ2 subforum a week or two ago.

Didn't know there was one. At any rate, it's presumably of interest to non-EQ2 players such as myself that the game is taking this step (unprecedented for a major MMO, AFAIK, to hand out endgame characters in F2P?).

It's more of a free trial.  You create a lvl 85 and try it out but you can only level it to 86 before you have to pay for it.

If you pay, do you have to go back to level 1? Or can you continue onward and ignore levels 1-84 if you pay money? If the latter, point stands.

It's "free to play" up to level 92, but once you get up into those end game levels, you need better equipment and spells and you need to pay to equip that.

You can do lower levels in "junk" equipment and really play for free. This is kind of kickstarting you up to the level where you need to cough up not to be a second class citizen.

"Free" is kind of misleading.  You can make a lvl 85 for free but progressing it past 86 will cost you money.  If by free you mean free to skip everything betwee 1-84, then yeah.

It seems fair to point out that EQ2 is a huge, huge game now, and even starting at 85 you have maybe three and a half expansion-worth of content to do (the top half of The Shadow Odyssey as well as Sentinel's Fate, Destiny of Velious and Chains of Eternity), plus the new expansion Tears of Veeshan that comes out next month (ie November), plus a load of zones they added in between the expansion packs.

It seems to me that perhaps a bit of a problem for any game that's been around as long as EQ2 (if it's a traditional diku MUD thing) is that veteran players want new content on a regular basis but if you give it to them then eventually the gap between newbiedom and reaching the later game grows massive. Letting gamers skip 60 per cent of the content - and I think it probably is only 60 per cent maybe even less - gives newbies a bit of hope that they have a chance one day of catching up with their veteran buddy. And it gives veterans a chance to level up alts that will be capable of joining their veteran friends' characters in a party.

I'm not saying it's an elegant solution or even that I'd recommend it to anyone thinking of trying EQ2 for the first time but I think I can see the logic.

TERA gave out level 58 characters (max is 60) just over a month ago.

I get the point of putting newbies where everyone is, but the idea of starting an MMG with a near-capped character seems like teaching someone to swim by throwing them into a flooded quarry.

They added a tutorial designed to teach you how to play your 85; I didn't try it though as I'm familiar with the game.

That was a test. It's likely they'll be selling those in the future.

I hope it's a test for "you know, people actually hate leveling".

The TERA end game isn't any more fun :awesome_for_real:

The cap is 95 and a gear grind. Plenty of time to learn.

It is not an elegant solution but given how high the level cap is now and how many AAXP you can get it was getting harder and harder for new players to ever push past the waste land levels of limited numbers of people to get to the levels needed to play with friends. Given the pace of content sony pushes for eq1 and eq2 its not like there won't be enough stuff for them to do.

I do see one issue with doing this in this specific game.

You start a new character, pick something like a defiler, and immeadiately have 60+ abilities.

I mean, more buttons is always better, but that's a steep curve even for me....

That can apply to any game though. Granted this one is specific (they hope) to brand new players. But even for every MMO from DAoC to GW2 that's offered this kind of autoleveled thing, even I never go for the option. It's just too confusing to be dumped into a class 1/3 of the way through the progression. That progression is about your learning the class and whether you'll enjoy it or not.

It's not easy to learn how all skills / gear interact with abilities when you're dumped into the middle of them all at once.

I took up this offer a few weeks ago (they had a running promotion that gave all old players a 'heroic' character for free) and bumped my fury to 85 because it seemed like the most solo-friendly caster/healer type, plus I like playing healers. Now, I haven't played eq2 since 2006 - and even then my main was an illusionist that I got to level 30-ish, my fury was a level 6 mule - but it wasn't THAT hard to get into things.

Some impressions as someone who doesn't really have much experience with EQ2 in general:

• Like others have said, omfg buttons. Now, I actually like buttons, but my level 85 loadout barely fit into my standard 4-hotbar MMO hotkey setup. After dumping all the self/group buffs and out-of-combat utility stuff to a click-only hotbar, it became a lot more manageable. It's also not too bad when fighting, I can use 7-8 abilities and do fine in mostly any solo situation so far.
• Dat AA system.  :ye_gods: There are like 7 different kinds of AAs, and I'm sure there have been theorycrafting holy wars about which choices are best for end-game raiding. I usually like researching my class in MMOs, but I didn't feel like doing hours of that just for trying out a game. Thankfully I could just choose 'solo' from the dropdown and go (well, still had to select my racial / class focus choices, but that's just 3 pages of stuff).
• Speaking of buttons, there's definitely some ability bloat. I have three different combat rez spells, two out-of-combat rezzes, and four debuff cleansers. Of course they are all slightly different (in cooldowns, cast time, etc), but isn't this exactly the sort of thing you are supposed to streamline? As a tangential note, I have an entire hotbar full of 10+min cooldowns doing various things related to saving the raid (and myself, I guess, when soloing). Would be interesting to see how it works in an actual group.
• I still don't get the reasoning for the entire looting mechanism with the chests and stuff, but then I never played EQ.
• Mob and quest levels are strange. The zone heroic characters start in (Iceclad Ocean in velious) is billed as level 85, but the quests start at 87, and I was fighting level 92 enemies before long. I don't think I ever did a quest with white/blue (or undercon) mobs until I went back to a previous zone to fill in for some xp gaps.
• Questing flow and pacing is... a bit janky. At its best it's as smooth as WOTLK-era WOW (which is actually pretty good), but quest xp by itself isn't enough, even with full vitality (200% xp) stacked with one of the vet reward xp potions (+110% xp). I ended up having to do a few daily rep quests to get past a 87->88 hurdle and unlock quests in the next zone. I also actually went back and did Stonebrunt Highlands (the second zone of whichever expansion was before the 'designated' one) to just get me from 88 to 89.3 or so, hopefully the quests in that jungle zone are unlocked by now.
• As a positive note, there were some quests that required doing stuff other than 'go to marker and murderize everything that moves / collect blinkies', and sometimes I actually had to read the quest text. I like this quite a bit, no sarcasm.
• Killing shit is generally easy, even when I pull an entire enemy camp on me to do a kill quest in one AOE sequence. Even then the problem is not incoming damage (easily healed through), but rather constant spell interrupts from all those little hits. I have some sort of talent somewhere that gives me interrupt immunity for a few seconds when I cleanse a debuff (?), which is usually enough to unload a few AOEs and murder everything. The starter gear is powerful enough (or the enemies are weak enough) that I never broke a sweat except when fighting some dude with two ^^s by his name, but even that was doable with some cooldown abuse. I first thought that they gave the heroic characters some really uber gear, but the quests in velious seem to be giving straight upgrades, sooo... I don't know. Also, when I went into Stonebrunt, it became even more ridiculous, I was literally 1-shotting quest mobs; a typical quest consisted of me flying around on my mount to aggro 8+ enemies, LOS them, and start channeling my AOE that would kill them all when they reached me. Considering that the Stonebrunt quest rewards were really really weak, this is probably standard DIKU Expansion Syndrome.
• I wasn't able to get any groups for the level 87-ish mini-dungeons that are required by the heritage / storyline quests, and LFD doesn't seem to include them. I think they're coming out with a 'better LFD' with the next expansion, but yea... not a good first impression.
• PVP... yea, not touching that. Just doing a cursory search about it raises about five red flags.
• The "upgrade to gold" popup and the "gold membership" cash shop page auto-opening on quit are fairly obnoxious, but not quite SWTOR-level yet. I also can't sell anything on the auction house without buying AH tokens in the cash shop, so I ended up vendoring approximately seven billion 'adept' books of various spells of other classes that the enemies sometimes drop in the aforementioned chests.
• I had a few EQ2-playing friends who hooked me up with a full set of 46-slot bags as well as directing me to download a custom UI. Definitely made a difference!

What was the custom UI?

Different game

DrumsUI (http://www.eq2interface.com/downloads/info4961-DrumsUIFullInterface.html). There was also an alternative called ProfitUI, but it isn't updated anymore, or something.

New Veteran rewards are coming  :why_so_serious:

(https://assets-cdn.soe.com/uploads/dcsclient/000/000/035/341.png?v=0.0)

Needs more shoulderpad.

Being an iksar just makes that look like they got two helmets and stuck them on his shoulders.

A couple years ago Sony promoted, transferred, or laid off EVERY EQ2 developer, from both expansion and live teams, who had ANY MMO experience, much less comprehension or even knowlege of EQ2's design history. The combiniation of a rdiculouslly small and inexperienced team with complete institutional amnesia has resulted in a spectacular mult-year trainwreck of backsteps, misteps, and basically a reenactment of every single mmo/mud development mistake ever made, hypermudflation being one of the more obvious but less noxious.

Sadly, the EQ2 team seems to have a good heart and has come up with some good if incremental QoL innovations as well, but they've been mostly lost in a swamp of ill-conceived, inconsistent, and poorly implemented meh born of ignorance and neglect.[/list]

Stonebrunt is for levels 87 or so to 90 and Velious is for levels 90 to 92 but the problem Is that a Velious level 90 is much stronger than a Stonebrunt level 90, partly because they increased the AA limit and added new AA lines when Velious came out and partly because even the starting quests in Velious give gear that craps all over the Stonebrunt stuff.

Stonebrunt and the various dungeons there used to be the endgame if you didn't raid, and they were hard. There's an instance there called Royal Palace of Erudin that well-geared, Max level groups with optimal class makeup just wouldn't try because it was so hard. Then the next expansion comes out and it all seems trivial.

By the sound of it though, you have plenty of challenging content to do - the two Velious zones and all their instances, the Withered Lands stuff (actually an add-on to Velious but almost an expansion in its own right) and all the Chains of Eternity stuff, which not only has two outdoor zones and associated instances but a load of level 95ish instances and a big public dungeon scattered across the globe.

The standard outside, non-raid shit in the basic Velious zone that cons at 89-90 gets eaten for lunch by my newly 85 ranger.

Yep, same (except I play a fury).

The only mob that has been any challenge so far while questing (other than me trying to foolishly solo the 3-man dungeon) was some red-con miniboss with ^^ next to his name, and it was more difficult just because of the sheer damage output; he was pretty much hitting me for 1/3 my hp every few seconds, so I had to alternate between heals and nukes.

FWIW one of the perks of the new WoW expansion will be the same thing. Boost one character to 90 with the new level cap being 100.