f13.net

This is about an hour or two of play. (All I had time for).

Disclaimer: I'll probably mention WoW a few times during this simply because it and EQ2 are the two contenders for my money right now.

I made a scout because I figured that is closest to the WoW hunter class. I will make a fighter later for similiar reasons. My thought process was by playing similiar classes in each game it'd give me a better feel for their
differences and similiarities.

I'm not far enough in to give any kind of accurate class rating. So far the scout plays like a rogue which is kind of fun. I'm assuming you can get ranged attacks later.

Graphics:

The graphics are ok. They look blurry and stuff to me when up close. This is probably due to me not having a god-like machine. So far they are technologically pretty cool but not as stylish as WoW. I Don't feel like I can honestly say alot about the graphics simply because I have to run them at medium to be playable so it doesn't look as good as the movies.

Sound:

Sound is pretty good in some areas, lacking in others. This may be a setting I haven't found but it doesn't seem like EQ2 has many ambient sounds. Birds chirping, things like that. It does have awesome music, and the voice overs are pretty good. (Though I have yet to hear all the speech from the Qeynos king when I activate that coin I started with on the island. I don't have the patience for it). Actually, I've already noticed myself clicking through speech alot. I enjoy the voices, but am impatient by nature. I do the same thing in alot of single player RPGs with voices.

Gameplay:

It's way to early to tell much. I have gotten lost a few times. The quests seem ok. I started a goblin Mastery quest which seems kind of cool other than being based on rare drops. (I hate drop quests in any game. Mostly because my luck with drops suck.) My only complaint so far is that it feels like grouping is being rammed down my throat. Let me explore for abit before having to have a group of random strangers with me dammit.

I am having trouble with HOs. Are they still disabled?

They are working for me (just tried it). The earliest HO combo a Scout gets is Quick Strike, Evade, (wait, wait, wait) Quick Strike. Yes it's counterintuitive to Evade since it doesn't do anything when soloing but that's the way HOs are. Look for your flashing combat arts/spells for the next step in the combo (though they don't flash when greyed out, oh well).

The "Simon says" nature of HOs while soloing is kind of dull. It removes any semblance of strategy from the way you fight, as opposed to the myriad of options the WoW rogue has.

Perhaps this dynamic improves as you level, I'm not sure. It definitely has more important implications when grouping as opposed to soloing.

Yeah it said they'd flash but I didn't see it. So far things feel...less interactive than WoW did at this point, does that make sense?

It makes sense to me even though I haven't played WoW myself. Rogues have their combo and finishing moves which is like a much more flexible HO system, Warriors have their combat stances, and Pallys have their, uh, run away moves.

Scout's in EQII do have one nice non-HO combo of their own which is Cheap Shot (which you get at 6 I believe), Sneak Attack (which I think you get at 5). Cheap Shot will stun a mob long enough for you to circle strafe around to its side and Sneak Attack it. Make sure you turn off autoattack before doing Cheap Shot or else you'll break the stun too soon.

Here's my review: I spent more time beta testing AC2 and Horizons than I did EQ2.  That should sum it up.  Of course, I've only had my account for a week, but I'm not even interested in logging in right now.  

Not that EQ2 is in any way worse than those games, it's just that since I've had very little lag, and no game-breaking bugs I've been able to deduce how boring it is in half the time.


Slightly more in-depth review...

Graphics: Would be passable if not for the fact that most male avatars look like over developed females, and the poor performance their engine gives.

Landscape: Not even done as well as AC2 (osteth continent) or DAoC.  Bland, bland, bland.

Cities: Multi-zone, 10-min city traverse runs are horsecock.  Trying to find something/someone without using a 3rd party map is unbearable.

Locked-combat: I hate this crap.  Can't heal other people, get no experience if you disengage, you pull every mob in a group always, etc.  If the zones weren't so claustrophobically small, there wouldn't be a big kill stealing problem.  But then they couldn't beat it into your heads right away to group up.

Class Divergence: Or really, the lack thereof.  Snooze.  Even EQ1 had at least a few unique classes.  4 is crap.  The new systems they're putting in aren't enough.  

Leveling: First few levels went by well enough.  Was doing alot of quests, and it didn't bother me too much.  But then I went to try to explore, became fully aware of how much like EQ1 this game was in that regard, and then felt the grind set back in.  The quests I was seeing were nothing new or different.  By level 11, I'm already sick of the grind.

Spells: It feels like I only have 3-4.  At least, that's all I really use.   Spell list looks like it follows EQ1 tradition in that you basically just get higher level versions of spells.  Simplistic combat options, and their weak hero opportunity system doesn't do jack to alleviate the feeling.

Evil Elvis and Riggs - it may be posted elsewhere - but to put your comments in context for me - can you say what MMORPG you like / are currently playing?

Thanks.

My fav mmorpg's were UO and AC.

UO for it's unique world feeling, open-endedness, and for never knowing what was going to happen that day.  AC for its fast fps feel, great lore, monthly content, and physics-like engine.   I also thought CoH was pretty good, except for the fact that it was very one-dimensional, and I grew tired of doing nothing but monster bashing simply for some story that didn't draw me in.

There really isn't an mmorpg out there that even sounds interesting to me.  Noone's trying to improve on the experience, they're just trying to copy EQ's mechanics and supposebly making them accessible to casual players with things like instancing and locked encounters.  Someone wake me up when we get some real advancements in AI, open skill tree systems, and deep involving quests that aren't just a front for foozle bashing.

Jpark,

The MMOs I have liked in the past

AC1: I enjoyed it though I got tired of gimping my characters and having to have magic of some kind to be at all playable at high levels

AO: Kind of fun though it didn't last long for me

DAoC: same as AO. It was somewhat fun but didn't hold my interest long.

CoH: The only MMO besides AC I've ever quit and considered going back to. I honestly quit CoH more for money reasons than anything else.

MMOs I didn't like:

UO: Player justice is BS.

SWG: Ham. Nuff said

EQ1: Tried it about 6 months ago. Found the interface clunky and the graphics almost unbearably ugly.


MMO I plan to play in the future:

It is looking solidly like WoW. It has addicted me more than any MMO in the past ever has.

Oh, and to update my impression. I played for oh...probably another 4-5 hours tonight with Aslan. I made I think 2 levels. (level 4-6). I seem to be leveling slow pretty early, though this may just be due to not taking the right kind of quests or something.

One growing frustration I have is with quests that say "go find NPC x". It rarely gives me any kind of clue as to where this NPC is so I waste 20 minutes wandering around a zone trying to find them. I noticed that when you die you can activate a waypoint to your soul shard, I just wish something similiar would work with "find NPC x" quests.

One thing I've noticed, the spell affects seem kind of bland. I'm surprised considering how high these graphics shoot. Maybe Ijust need to give it some time.

Also finding bugged quests left and right. For instance, in a place called...ummm...hell I don't remember. It's a zone in Qeynos feeled with halfings and gnomes. Beeblebraur or something like that. Everytime I enter I mysteriously get a bag of parts in my inventory. However, when I examine it and click on return it to the owner nothing happens. I've found said owner and can't seem to give him the bag.

Another example is the citizenship lore quest. You have to go around the city and talk to certain NPCs. At least one and maybe as many as three of them do not exist in the game. Or so other players tell me.

Scouts now get Tracking (not sure starting at what level) which helps *a lot*. Everybody else is still screwed.


There are some controls you can fiddle with to adjust the spell effects but I agree that generally they are nothing special. EQ overall had better spell effects frankly, though some of the EQII bard song effects are pretty good.


They all exist (unless they took some out last patch) since I've completed it with one of my characters. However, not only are most of them a pain to find but many of them are in areas that are dangerous to wander around at the low levels people get that quest at.

SPeaking of dangerous places, are there any maps of Antonica?  Someone mentioned mapping and having good maps...  but the only map I saw on a fansite was a screenshot of the city-view of Freeport... in short, less than useful.

I can manage with most of the zones, but Antonica is just so huge.

Alkiera

http://eq2vault.ign.com/images/map/Antonica.jpg

There are maps up at EQ2 Vault, the Freeport one is complete and there's a link to it further down in this forum.  The last time I lchecked, however, there was no key associated with the Qeynos map, although the locations are numbered.  Someone did fill it in somewhere on vnboards, but I can't be arsed to look for it.

So I am noticing that with ALL the changes announced for EQII over the past week - at least looking at the Priest forum there is very little discussion...

Sorta wondering whether the mods deleting the posts / rants and keeping it confined to the non-public beta forums...

That is what ended up happening with SWG.

Yeah, good idea, innit?  You can keep the pissed off paying customers from spreading their venom while pissing off potential paying customers by not allowing them to read it.

SOE has always been an equal opportunity anatagonist.

Yep, I had more fun playing Horizons than I did this POS, EQ2 is being uninstalled in lieu of other much better games coming out.

While a certain amount of hate is expected. That is truly going a little overboard.

There are good maps on Eq-artisan.com Also a skill list, though I don't know if it's been updated or not.

I'm also surprised there's been so little discussion about the changes. There was quite a bit from the priests in the private part of the site.

Again I am confused - if the NDA is lifted - why is there a "private" part to the site?

I probably won't play EQ2 for a few months.  I've decided it's not really good enough yet.  For me, anyway.  If there is a chance it'll improve, and I think there is, I'd rather not be so pissed off at it that I never give it another chance.  I'll probably play WoW open beta, and possibly release.  I did enjoy the short period of time I played, but games nearly always seem fun during the initial discovery period.  I never played beyond that, really.  I'll fiddle with GW during the open weekends and will play casually on release.  I may even try Halo 2 and Half Life 2, if Righ gets them for himself.

I'm not worried about having no game to play, not with all the games being released and beta tests coming up.  I'll enjoy this Feast period right now... this time next year might be Famine... who knows?

After playing this weekend I cannot dispute any of the critiques here. The game is fun so far (level 8 in qeynos doing class quests) but it is hard to separate out the new from the good. Isle of Refuge was great and I probably left too soon but it's a beta so I wanted to see more than the island.

Like most MMOGs, if you want to group you have to be proactive. Once I started asking, I found willing people. Sharing quests is so much more efficient, a player has to be ignorant or a moron to not group with someone else trying to do the same Kill 10 Fairies quest.

Group fights are a fucking fireworks show - way over the top on sparklies.

I have skipped a lot of basics - like upgrading my skills - just to try and see as much as I can. Wandered Antonica at level 8 and survived ok. Killing falcons with a sword is pretty stupid. Little things like that hurt my brain.

Ha if you think killing a bird with a sword is funny try being a scout and tracking fish then swiming to them and have the fish repeatedly kick you in combat.

Still thats pretty classic mud stuff and probably left in there just for kicks and giggles for the old timers.

Fixed it for you.

Glad to know I'm not the only one who was wholly unimpressed with the game. After looking at the map of Antonica, I see I've barely explored half of the damn zone. Yay for me. That zone is huge, and even with Griffon rides and teleport spells, it's going to run into the "West Karana" problem. Zones can be too big.

There are a lot of posts on the more reputable gaming boards (yes, yes, oxymoron and all that) from people who are going to play EQ2, although they wish the game was better.  A lot are saying they'll play WoW open beta and set EQ2 aside until some of the problems are fixed.  I don't think they can make a patch big enough for launch day to resolve all the issues that are apparant this late in the beta.  At this time they are still in that nasty bit where updates break as much as they add or fix.  This mustn't happen on launch day... it's better to release a half finished game that works reasonably well.  We've all seen it before.  It's got to be the number one thing that pisses people off, almost as much as nerfing high level characters that you've been playing for ages.  

Haemish is NEVER alone in his underwhelment of over-hyped MMOGs.

I didn't want to start up a new thread, so I'll tack my initial impressions on here.

I like the game, glad I didn't cancel my preorder. It's not the second coming of the son of the invisible man you may or may not worship, but it's good entertainment.

Firstly, it passed the home theater test by having overall higher production values (combined, one or two games ding it in individual categories...but only one or two) than any other game I've ever seen on my system (and I've seen a lot of those types of games on it). I can run it with all options cranked (except shadows, set to minimal or off), 1280x720 with 16xFSAA/AF. Looks incredibly good, textures could be a bit sharper up close, but I'm not dinging it much for that. With bloom and mirror reflective water, it's almost a painting come to life in some areas.

I didn't bring in any expectations, and I haven't played a 'traditional' mmog since I quit EQ years ago (2001?). It was kinda like playing a much better version of EQ, which I see as a pretty good thing, since I liked EQ (before it got to the endgame). I saw a few things to gripe about, but nothing too major.

I'll probably hate EQ2 by the time I get to the endgame and have dealt with the inevitable ubertards, but if I can get a few months of gaming like this past weekend, it's well worth the box cost. Beautiful graphics and sound, runs good on my system, enough content to spend a few months on. I wish I could say that about Fable, goddamned abortion that was. If I can waste $50 on a game I didn't like, blowing $50 on a game I might only like for a few months is a gimme.

I took the opposite method from Shiz's: I intend to not leave the Isle of Refuge in beta, don't want to ruin the sense of discovery on release. Instead of exploring the world, I'm exploring the game mechanics, getting a solid feel for them before venturing out. Played most of the weekend and still have a couple little things to do on the Isle yet, it's a nice self-contained mini-game with most of the major gameplay elements fully intact. Since I haven't played this kind of game in a few years, it's nice to have a solid refresher like that.

Ohh dear.  This is like staying in your bomb shelter, only looking outside at the one patch of grass that survived armageddon and thinking everything must be alright.

Seriously, take a step into the world.  The nightmare doesn't materialize until you're off your front lawn.

I suspect Rasix has a point. The reviews written on the isle of refuge and the reviews written in the teen's are dramatically different in tone, even if it's the same person writing. Of course if you want a game that hits every feature your graphics card has there's not much competition to EQ2.

I think this game is fun and all, but I won't be buying it for release either.  Riggs keeps telling me that the things I like about EQ are, for the most part, also in WoW and that they work better and feel truer in WoW.  Also, I hard-crash about every third or fourth zone that I try to go into, and that gets pretty freaking old.  I tried fiddling around with different settings to fix it, but nothing yet.  So I like the beta, and if WoW wasn't coming out a week or so later, I might be tempted to pick it up, just to fill the medieval MMO gap in my life.  But WoW is coming out soon, and this game is made by SOE, so that clinches it for me.  I won't be buying this, at least at release...but I will play the free beta as long as I can, heh.

Well, Sky's approach isn't invalid. I do think his enthusiasm for the shiney will change when he leaves the island. My system ran much better on the island than in the Qeynos, although his PC is probably better then mine (2.5GHz ti4600 1GB RAM). What really kills the cities is the zone load times. They seem brutally long (20 seconds is a long time when you are staring at a progress bar) and the zones are not that big so you do a lot of zoning.

As schild said, The Isle of Refuge is phenomenally well done (which is why I wanted to get off ASAP) but it differs from the Qeynos game in important ways:

1) There is no zoning needed (except to tradeskill and the final orc fight - both of which are small zones that don't take long at all.)

2) There are only a few possible quest givers and they are all in the same place. Same with the stores.

3) The whole island has an automap. Off the island, only the city sections do. Places like The Peat Bog and Oakmyst Forest do not.

Go to the city, Sky. I actually thought the game got better in Qeynos, but I was wholly underwhelmed by the entire Island experience. It felt like kindergarden.

The true suck doesn't show itself until you have to run across two zones, with horrible loading times just to deliver a note, then run back to get your reward of 11 copper pieces.

That isn't one quest, that's a LOT of the quests.

You are forgetting the exp, though, Haemish. At least those delivery quests are teaching you the layout of the city. EQ2 is a lot less about running around a forest killing things to level than EQ. At least so far. Also, you don't need money/gear before level 10. The Isle sets you up pretty well.

You don't need money or gear unless you like combat, that is. And I like combat. If you actually want to fight at any time during those levels, you'll eventually need gear. And if you go into the Down Below, expect to die a lot. WORST ZONE EVER.

Agreed.

Down below is the one modelled on EQ1's `befallen' zone I think. Since it was the worst zone ever in EQ1 I applaud their consistency.

To be specific it had multiple hidden trapdoors that would drop you down three levels, behind three locked doors, surrounded by mobs you had no hope of defeating. Many a noobie cancelled their subscription over that zone.

Made it to level 9 last night. I'll be doing my class quest for level 10 tonight I guess. I want to play with the graphics settings, so far the game looks terrible. I mean, butt ugly. I mean DAOC ugly. I need to raise my textures or something I guess.

My biggest complaint at the  moment is still that it is hard to find things. For instance, I got a quest to deliver some lager to a tavern in one of the city zones. Neither Aslan nor I can find this tavern. I had another quest to take a blue stone to a mineral guy to have it analyzed. Aslan literally stumbled across the guy. The quest doesn't even give you a hint as to where to find the guy.

Maybe I'm too used to WoW which tends to be pretty specific in most cases. "Deliver this note to so and so, who is in the weapon shop NW of here". Then you have EQ2. "There's a guy. Somewhere. Find him."

Aslan and I are having issues with group HOs. We can alternate our Solo HOs in fights if we time our attacks right, but we rarely get true group HOs.

You need to begin a starter chain that has icons around it that the other players can trigger.

For example, here's a starter chain I started as a Scout:
(http://www.pandadesigns.com/eq2/eq2_cw_small.jpg)
The only chain I can continue as a Scout is the green coin one. If I do that one that'll bring up a "solo" HO. All the other icons can only be triggered by other archetypes (at least at my level) and those will bring up a group HO which typically takes 2 combat arts/spells to trigger instead of the single combat art/spell a solo HO needs.

It may be that at your levels the two of you have no starter chains that can be continued by the other player's archetype combat arts/spells so you are stuck with solo HOs until later levels or you add other archetypes to your group.

I wrote this up for some friends on another board. Hope it is helpful.

--------

Last night really exemplified the best of EQ2 so I thought I would share more. I will try and be as general as possible to avoid spoiling.

I logged in and decided to continue my class quest. I was 80% through level 8. I had to talk to some people to learn about the Crusader option. I then decided it was time to upgrade my combat skills so I recalled to Graystone Yard, the starting area for Barbarians and Dwarves. I found the trainer and bought and scribed some of my combat art from Apprentice I to Apprentice II. I grabbed a quest to kill some shrillings (bats, basically) in the Down Below (catacombs). I still hadn't done my Kill 10 Ratonga quest so I figured I would try to do both.

The shrillings were all green/blue and marked solo. It did not take long. Then I started looking for the ratonga and found them nearby. However, there were 3 packs, all marked group, some ^, some ^^, some white and some yellow. I was going to need some help. I started chatting with people and found Ilryssa (8 priest) and Tasiren (7 fighter). Tas needed the same quest. Supposedly you really should have 4 for a group encounter, but it is beta so what the hell.

To pull, I waited for the 3 packs to separate then picked a white group and taunted one and pulled to my group. Targeting 1 highlights all of the linked mobs. The 3 rats surrounded me and I AE taunted, followed by my AE spin attack. I am getting hammered, but the priest is doing well healing me. One rat goes after her and Tasiren goes for the peel without being prompted. In the middle of the fight, one of the ratonga says "Is anyone a healer?" I almost pissed my pants. We win.

The next fight I screw up. Two ratonga in different groups are too close when I pull. We get 6. I die, my fellows run. I don't know if they broke the encounter (hit the "call for help" button and other people can heal you, kill the mobs for no exp), but they get away. I respawn IN THE CATACOMBS at the entrance area. How cool is that? I have a 400' run to get my spirit. There is no binding that I have seen. When I die, I appear in the zone at some safe spot. The exp debt is a red highlight on my exp bar. It is gone after 2-3 more fights.

After that we get in a groove. After a few more fights (the quest has long been completed) I ding level 9. We stick around since the fights are fun and the spawn rate is fast. The only downtime is 30-45 seconds here and there for the priest to regen power (it's not really medding anymore.) I get a new art, Call to Arms, that is a 30 second group attack buff with a 45 or 60 second recast timer. I open my "spellbook" and move it to my hot bar. I had to make room by moving my gate spell to hotbar #2, which I keep hidden. Very intuitive stuff.

I decide to go get my quest rewards. The shrilling guy give me some copper and a choice between 2 items: a ring and a belt, both yellow to me and both with resists. I take the belt. Next I go to the ratonga quest giver and get offered copper and the choice between 3 red weapons: 1 handed hammer, 2 handed hammer and a dual wield hammer. These weapons all max out at level 20. I cannot equip any of them. I pick the 1 handed and sell it for 4s. I use this money to buy the rest of my art upgrades to Apprentice II (which all cost 1s 22c). I am a happy Barbarian. I am halfway through level 9 now.

Later on, I met up with Gael. He is a level 7 scout. We try a group encounter in Antonica, but these blue snakes kick our ass. Group encounter = healer needed? Maybe. Probably. We kill some solo stuff that is yellow to me with no problem. I am getting 1% exp per kill. When I was killing blues solo, I was getting 1.5% per kill. It was fun seeing the scout Heroic Orgasms (as I like to call them) for the first time. We kept interrupting each others chains. Some chains required a mage which we didn't have. Heroic Orgasms scale with group size btw. Both of ours were doing almost double what they did when solo.

My last task for the night was an arena fight to become a Warrior. It was a solo affair against some weak grouped animals in a warehouse. I was 95% through level 9 when I started and dinged 10 upon completion with almost 20% of 10 completed. My new art was Taunting Blow which does what it sounds like it does. I logged. Play time ~ 2 1/2 hours.

The game is fun. No denying it. I am curious how other classes play. I have a feeling that every class plays very similarly in that you click your spells/arts at the best times. This should make it easy to play other classes, but it might hurt replayability quite a bit.

Right clicking on a guard ggive you the option to ask for direction to an NPC. Type the name. Sometimes the guard will not know, sometimes he will point in the general direction. You might have to ask several guards, but it works ok most of the time.

There's also a decent waypoint system I uncovered by accidentally clicking on something, it listed all the npcs in the zone that I knew and I could click on the names to create a waypoint/glowy trail.

Ah, but that's half the fun of the blue gem quest. The quest is to find a mineral expert. That quest is specifically geared at the Explorer types (of which I am one). I love just cruising around the city doing quests and finding neat little things. It makes it more immersive for me. As a matter of fact, the next generation of MMOGs could work on the immersion factor by raising the level of interaction with NPCs such that you could ask other NPCs if they know of a mineral expert and they could give you clues, or not, as to who might know more or who might be one. Hell, they could do that now, even if it was just on a static basis driven by their current menu conversation system. So anyhow, ummm, yeah, I enjoy the occasional quest with very little info. Hell, I have one to find a guy in Antonica. I have a name and a huge zone to search (note: I won't use maps to find him because it breaks immersion and ruins the fun of the hunt). Now, if every quest was like that, I might start to get irritated simply because it would be way too time consuming.

Well, if you're a scout that is the tracking ability. It seems ot have a limited range or something as sometimes the NPC would show up and sometimes they wouldn't.

As for asking the guard, that's all well and good and I tried it, but I never once got anything but a shrug from them so I gave up on it.

Oh, and about the Citizenship book quest, I was told in game that a couple of the NPCs aren't spawning and haven't for awhile. No big deal.

Also, Aslan and I stumbled onto an access quest. Not sure what it does, other than you know, give access. Access to what I don't know. It has to do with ratonga though.

I had modest success.  Call it 50/50.

If you are going after  single mobs listed as group cons they will be pretty tough for a duo. They are doable usually but you have to work well with your other team mate.

Usually when I am in a duo we tend to pick on solo con mobs but of a higher level like high yellow or oranges. If you have three people you should be doing group con mobs pretty well.


kaid

I haven't played a scout yet.

They fixed the Citizenship quest today.  The guy no one could find apparently isn't supposed to be there, 'cause they removed him from the quest completely.  At the end of it you get the book to keep in your house.

The access quest appears to be access to another zone, Lanei and I have worked thru a good bit of it, just have the big bad guy, the undead noble guy, to kill to finish it, I think.

As far as group and ^, ^^, ^^^ mobs, I'm pretty sure it means bring a healer.  Rogue/Enchanter groups can not deal with the level of damage they output.  I can take (group) pairs by mezzing one to start and killing the other one, but ^ mobs are tougher, more hp, more damage... and ^^, if it's not by itself and green, I don't touch.  Solo Blue^^ group mobs eat my lunch.

As for it being hard to find things...  That is actually a bonus for me.  Like Soukyan, looking around and exploring is a large part of the fun.  Part of what bothers me about CoH is that the game holds your hand the whole way, with waypoints, arrows, maps, and rarely leaving you without a contact for missions.  Today they also added an in-game map for Antonica, which is pretty helpful due to it's large size.

I also found a repeatable quest today, has you kill 10 fire beetles, snakes, and rats in Antonica.  There are some solo, and some grouped, versions of the mobs out there.  Quest reward was decent exp and 2 silver.  Lanei did it again got 3 silver.

They also changed the HO system today, gave everyone a power that does nothing but start the chain, which you continue with your powers.  The chain works the same way as before, just with a different power starting it.  I personally think it's annoying, other people seemed to like it.

I'm having a blast in the game.  I will not be playing at release, I'm gonne give it some time to mature before playing.  I may pre-order for the J-boots, tho, if I can convince the spouse.

--
Alkiera

The guy I couldn't find was a knight commander or something like that. I also had trouble finding some NPCs in Antonica simply because I had no idea where to look. Found the one in the lighthouse but that was it. I've found the others.

I too need to kill the Undead Fallen Noble as well for the access quest.

Aslan and I have primarily dueled. I'm a scout, he's a sorceror. It's worked pretty well. We had a healer team with us once to kill some elemental types in the forest ruins. (Forgotten Guardians I think). He and I both noticed the battles were much, much easier with a healer. Worlds of difference.

I can see where explorers like the whole "there's an NPC somewhere you want to talk to thing". I like exploring overland, but not for quests NPCs.

Knight commander Sydwen.  For a while he was by the claymore in North Qeynos.  Then they took him out.  Today they fixed the quest so you have to go to Knight Lieutenant Somethingorother.  Hes easy to find in NQ, and is also who gives you the repeatable quest Alkiera mentioned.

In-game maps of Antonica were added in todays patch, with fog-of-war.  The map is about as useful as the maps in the Qeynos city zones.  Which means 'not very' for those of you without access to the game.

Todays patch also added poisons for rogues, and pet cats you can buy for your house.  It also broke some spell effects, introduced several bugs, and completely fucked up access to the tradeskill instances.

Heh, the tradeskill instance on the Isle was more stable last night that it was all weekend.

I thought it was a good patch, fixed a hell of a lot of things I've bugged in the last few days. I like the new HO system, it allows players to use thier character's abilities without needing a scout around to constantly be rerolling the chain. I'm glad my fighter can kick again without having to do the whole chain or lose it every time, now kick is an independant attack.

Adding abilities to lone group mobs? Oh yeah. The Shadow Serpent is now not soloable by a melee (at least without AppIII, I haven't scribed mine yet). I used to smack it for an item when it'd spawn, killed me fairly easy with it's new poison attacks (I counted two). Then after I got my spirit back, I watched another fighter die twice to it, then a rogue do the same.

It's nice that the snake now poisons, but kinda sucks for soloers, since it was one of the few good item droppers on the Isle.

I finally tried this damn thing the past few days.  Overall.... I like it.  But by that I mean I like the grind to a bigger purpose, raids, death penalties, reputation, trade skills and new combat systems.

EQII is a bit different from WoW  and EQ in its combat paradigm.  You have zerging - you pull entire groups - unlike EQ.  Unlike CoH - there is not only healing aggro - but too much of it.

The ideal group is really 2 priests and 2 tanks.  Fill in whatever for the rest.  Because aggro is so fast for healing it requires different strategies than traditional MMORPGs... save Shadowbane (pvp).  The key attribute of a healer here is... Constitution (born out nicely by our tests in SB).  Priests get too much aggro give the nature of combat.  Most folks are thinking non-zerg - and see their main attribute as Wisdom for healing...

So new learnings here - and I like that challenge.

The scout class is damn powerful and fun to play - right of the bat you get a nice movement buff, stealth and tracking.  Good start to that class.

The models still suck - but a few are better than I expected.  I did not find lag to be an issue to date.  

Ya I like elitism, politics and tough situations.  I like all this and be "casual" at the same time - which makes this activity even harder.  There are 3 guys I play with so this will be our next challenge.

I thought the voice over to be a gimmick until I played - it does add immersion.  Fortunately they are not planning faction balancing like in WoW - since I have a feeling those choosing Freeport for a starting city will be low.  I was there 5 minutes and it gave me a headache.

Its hard to play any of these games after CoH though.  EQ2 is so stiff compared to CoH in how the models move and your ability to interact with the environment.  Watching avatar jump in EQ2 is just... ugly.  However, the incombat animations are excellent (eye candy).

I realize that a lot of what can appeal to me in a MMORPG is repugnant to many of you - so the fact I did enjoy this game may be consistent with that (plan to keep the CoH sub though).

Well, I enjoyed EQ2 for the time I beta tested it. In the end it's just not for me. It's too ugly with my current system specs, combat is too group-focused, it's anti-casual, anti-solo. The quests were neat, I loved stumbling on quests by clicking on piles of books in dungeons, things like that.

The HOs were neat but need an overhaul. Why does a scout cause a bunch of rocks to fly up when he does an HO? Shouldn't his HO be some kind of kidney shot or something?

I am thankful I got a chance to betatest. It was entertaining and frankly, it also saved me $50.

BTW, here's an interesting anecdote. I have a friend who is a hardcore EQ player. Been playing it for years. He came over to my house and wanted to see EQ2. So, I start it up. It starts a download. My computer slows to a crawl, IE, trying to do other things while it downloads is almost imposssible. It finally finishes, I load it up. I show him Qeynos. Zone. Crash. He shakes his head and tells me he's seen enough, then asks me if he can log onto my WoW beta account to play.

Is your machine that much worse than my 1.4 ghz Athlon?  I have 512MB of ram, and a Radeon 9600 Pro(128MB).  Other than South Qeynos, the game runs fairly well, better than EQLive in many cases...  And it looks better than EQLive does too, IMO.

I played up thru the end of beta today, and enjoyed it.  The crafting is interesting and deep enough to explore, the world is large and full of quests, at least up thru the low teens, that I was rarely for want of things to do.  I couldn't solo everything, but I didn't have problems getting a group to help me with a few group^^ mobs a few times that I needed to kill some for quests.  The last several days they were finishing the crafting society system, and adjusting harvesting, and all kinds of things.  Really, the game looks pretty good.  I don't agree that it's ready to ship, there are still plenty of issues with the game, but not much another week or two wouldn't have cleaned up, at the pace they were maintaining for the last week.  It was nuts the amount of things they'd fix(and break) in each hotfix.

I don't plan on playing next week, but maybe next year.  Give them a couple months to finish the game, clear up the major issues that show up when 100k people all try to play at once, and then maybe I'll give it a shot.

I played an Enchanter to 13, and a Predator to 12 or so, enjoyed both greatly.

Alkiera

The crafting looks disastrous to me. Such an inordinate number of rare dropped books, excessive sub-combines, rare spawn harvesting and tedious process that only the truly masochistic would bother with it. Give me crafting which is convenient enough you can justify using it on consumables (e.g. WoW's explosives, weapon and armor patches).

Oh well, I am very looking forward to release and the month after, but only as an observer, i'm still not convinced that SOE will manage to patch in the fun. In addition having boss mobs quadding for 3K on release make me wonder about their high end game balance.

I never got a 'rare dropped book'.  I certainly didn't _need_ one.  Everything I needed was in the books available on the vendor.  Was there stuff I couldn't make?  Sure.  Was it anything that I OMG HAD TO HAVE!?!!!  No.

I'm confused about the 'rare spawn harvesting'.  There were harvest nodes all over the place.  By the last day there were more different kinds, as well, so that there were fewer things per type of node.  They split the roots out into herb garden, roots, and another garden, and added bushes for berries and other things.  Except when they were messing around with the harvesting systems itself(changing to skill reqs and use-based skillgain over level-based), I never really had a problem finding the resources I needed to make stuff.

Finally, IMHO, the many subcombines are a good thing.  It makes the crafting process take some time...  and if you put the time-usage on that end, you have less of a tendancy to require a large amount of time getting the items to do the crafting, a la EQLive.  As in real life, the difficulty isn't so much in getting the raw materials, they're outside laying around.  It's in  knowing what to do with them once you have them, and how to do it efficiently and effectively.  Some might call that craftsmanship.  Making the crafting process take time also lets you give better exp rewards for doing it, so low level crafters won't have to flood the market with hundreds of useless items.  I was able to level up to 10 Scholar just making things I needed for my own use, with the occasional item made for curiousity, or to drop in my shared bank for my rogue alt.  Not thousands of rifle barrels or tent kits or burlap pants or other useless crap.



I'll just be an observer for the first couple months, myself.  Not gonna pay to watch them finish the game, I can do that for free.  I found the game to be fun already, tho patching in some character stability and fixing of bugs with some game systems will certainly enhance the fun, and reduce the occasional frustration.  As far as the end game... I'll worry about that in a couple years when I get there.  It took me more than 3 years to get to the EQ endgame, I don't expect this game to improve that time much.  The journey is fun, imho.

Alkiera

My machine is better than yours. Not much, but a little, mostly in ram. (I have 1 gig.). Aslan, who posts to these boards occasionally has a better PC than mine and he crashed about 1 in 5 times we zoned.

I think the problem is the game is just not close to optimized and it is affecting some computers worse than others.

Possible.  Perhaps the lack of optimization can be attributed to them probably issuing debug builds, and running them on the servers, especially during the stress tests, they would want the profiling data.

Of course, optimization can introduce its own bugs and misbehaviors, especially in a project this size.

In the couple weeks I was in beta, I crashed to desktop once, and had no issues at all with frame rate with the graphics settings turned up a bit, but not all the way up.  For hardware comparisons, my rig is a dual Athlon XP 1600 with 1.5 GB of RAM and a Radeon 9800XT.  I think its safe to say that More RAM = Better EQ Experience, no matter which version you have.

I like the EQ2 crafting.  The reaction system could have been based on ideas in discussions here among other places, make crafting a mini-game.  Make it more than time investment.  I think they had a fair success at it, and as far as I know its the first major budget MMOG title to include something like it.  Harvesting isn't too onerous, dropped crafting books and  rare item recepies are not the be-all-end-all of items.  The "forced" specialization is a little heavy-handed in my opinion.  Once you get past crafting level 10, you cannot make every sub-component of a recepie yourself.  In some ways this mitigates the number of sub-combines, since the sub-combines for a given recepie are spread out over several professions.  On the other tentacle, hardcore crafters are going to use their other character slots, or other accounts to make crafters of those other professions, so they can do as much as possible of the work themselves.  Still, I expect there will be people that fill the market niche for subcomponents by making almost nothing else, and selling them.  

Housing... meh.  Its nice to see a game deliver it on release when they said they would.

Market  - like the bazaar in EQLive, but without a big zone that makes your computer cry.  Excellent design, decent implementation.  I'd have made it so you could bring up the market window from any market-connected merchant, not just a broker, or a market board you own.  Maybe even let any player market merchant BE a broker, though that could be exploitable with cooperation.   Best feature: its in at release.  Worst feature: you have to stay online to market, just like the bazaar.

Scout ringing blow HO graphic..  if you use an anime paradigm, hitting someone so hard the ground under them explodes kinda works..  At least its better than a lightning bolt from the sky when you hit them really hard with a sword.  Honestly, I never paid much nevermind to the graphical effect, other than to note they broke it several times while I played.

overall, I'm probably in the same camp as Alkiera, I may pick it up in January or so, but likely no sooner.

I did encounter some pretty serious game play issues in the Down Below which wiped my party twice.

In on instance the skeletons attacking us ... were invisible.  You literally could not see them.  In the second instance you could see them, you just could not target them.

Ack.

Alkiera and I ran into the former, but not the latter once.  Fortunately we were able to target the offending skeleton, once we figured out what the heck was going on.

Wandering aggro in the catacombs is seriously unfun, and at the levels that zone is designed for, pretty much completely unmanageable.

Well I plan to go the tank route in EQ2 after playing a ranger for 63 levels in EQLive. If my job is to hit taunt every 5 seconds, I won't last long in that archetype. Pre-taunt patch, I could taunt to pull, then AE taunt, then AE attack and the priest would get aggro from one or more mobs pretty relaibly within the next 20 seconds. AE taunt never got the mobs back on me the first time. I would taunt the one with the most health/highest level first, then AE taunt then AE attack again to get aggro back under control.