f13.net

Oh whatever it's named.  Overall seems decent little tutorial area but I'm glad their revamping it so people can get a much better feel for their classes actually will be.  I made it to a lvl 5 Scout/4 tradeskill person without doing much of anything to speak of.  The combat didn't show anything new beyond autoattack plus specials we are all familar with plus scouts get stealth, and two crafting items i made were just watching a progress bar and deciding if there was any reason to hit "stop" prior to the quality hitting max. I'm going to try a mage type character to see how that flows, but im guessing not too different.

With all the positives I seeing here, I'm thinking about picking it up anyway (just in time for server migrations, yeah!) but is there like an advanced tutorial after you get off that island?  If I were truly a new player, I'm feeling like there's a ton of information i wouldn't have a clue about (from food/water, to crafting mini games and making actualy useful stuff, spell advancement, not to mention the actually advanced class abilities and such).

Anyone want to give their two minute second run down of things I should be aware of?

Xilren

Crafting is a bit opaque. If you go into your skills window (default: k iirc), you can mouse-over each skill button to see what they do, and drag them to your hotbar. I recommend using the button in the corner of that window to organize them, too. Then, in addition to using the tradeskill buttons to react to events, you can also affect the durability and progress of the item. There are a few different effects, and you gain more as you level as a tradeskill profession, as I said, mouse-over to see what they do. I mash +progress stuff until durability falls too low and then mash +durability. You can finish things a lot faster and save a lot of bad progress or durability rolls that way.

Crafting on the Isle isn't much of a challenge as its basically impossible to fail.  Later on you actually have to work to get a pristine (although crafting skill helps a lot too).  I actually enjoy crafting in EQ2 - it's a bit beyond watching the green bar.  Although I haven't done enough of it to be considered an expert.

Xil, might I suggest patching the Test client? The whole newbie game is changing in two days anyway :)

The stuff Dreak gives you, sure. Crafting Apprentice spells and skills or bags, works just like in the regular game.

As far as I can tell you can get pristine 100% of the time by just spamming +durability, though it takes longer that way.

I'm given to understand that this is how people run craft bots.

Nearly everyone I see in the crafting rooms seems to be botting.

I see the same thing.  They macro craft green items for skill and take too little damage to kill them.  It's kind of a shame, the crafting game isn't all that bad and will improve without the need for sub combines.

They aren't necesarily green things. Someone could bot an even con recipe just as easily as a green recipe. And it's not for skill gain. It's for exp and cash.

There's a reason why you see Ashen roots and other t5 materials at a high price on the broker. T5 was the last level for tradeskill tasks that pay decent cash. The botters buy tons of raws, process them into subcomponents, then run tradeskill tasks. At a guess I would say they probably average about 1p per hour or $4-$5/hour through botting. Run 10 or so PCs at the same time (on different servers of course) and you got yourself a nice little business going.

I'm sure you're correct.  Every once in a while I find myself forgetting that mmogs are small online businesses rather than games.

So PopTart nagged me enough  :-D that I finally installed and made a character on her account this weekend. Maercus, the human Freeport Assassin.

The newly designed Newbie Isle is much better than it was during beta. The quests are actually focused on something, and starting out as your final class is certainly better than the archtype for 20 levels shit. It's a great deal improved from beta. There's still too much auto-attack in it, IMO. The heroic opportunity thing is even more macroable, if I were so inclined.

After I got to Freeport on Saturday, I started having graphic issues that caused me to be unable to play. I can't tell if I care to continue or not.

Who are you, and where did you put Haemish?  This post you made was more ambivilent then jaded.  I call shennagins!

It's ambivalent because I didn't really get enough of the game to figure out if I like it or not. The Newbie Isle isn't really enough, and wasn't in beta, and that was when I HATED the newbie isle. If the problems in Freeport continue, then you may see some piss and vinegar.

Are you using a Radeon Card?

Omega drivers work well, although I'm not sure about the latest Catalyst drivers.

Also, turning off shadows and setting Complex Shader Dsitance to -1 should help a lot.  Although then the game looks like shite.

When it started, I was using an Nvidia 6200. After it started giving me shit, I switched it to my old Radeon 9600. I went with the Radeon partly because The Movies runs like monkey shit on the Nvidia card. I was still having problems with the Radeon on Saturday, but last night I played for about 30 minutes without problems. I set the graphic settings to balanced, then fiddled a bit. Before I'd done a lot of fiddling.

The latest catalyst drivers claim to fix the long running EQII stability issues they were having.  I haven't tested them myself, YMMV.

Yeah, I was using 6.1 Catalyst drivers(the latest) when it started giving me issues.

I tried running my 9800 pro with the latest drivers and found that the omega 5.2 were much more stable.  A friend that I play with was using the new drivers on his 9500 and was having all sorts of fits.  The older drivers seem much more reliable to me.

I'll say the Omegas are working better for me as well.