f13.net

Rise of Kunark Description:

Adventure through the mystifying continent of Kunark as the new player race – The Mysterious Sarnak- and discover a world full of intrigue and danger. Engage in all-new epic quests as you embark on a crusade to reveal the truth and uncover artifacts of the obscure Sarnak history. Experience the lush, nostalgic continent of Kunark and begin your courageous path from the new starting city in Timorous Deep.

Rise of Kunark is the fourth expansion pack for the critically acclaimed EverQuest II franchise. The introduction of the new playable race – The Sarnak – and new starting point- Timorous Deep- Rise of Kunark provides a full range of content for new player’s levels 1-20 as well as advanced, high level players whom can now achieve up to level 80 in high level zones, both increasing their Adventure and Tradeskill classes. Rise of Kunark includes 13 new highly detailed zones, over 350 new exotic quests, 36 new deviant NPCs, 24 brand new Epic Weapon quests and fabled armor sets.

Feature Set:

All-New Player Race – Battle as the puzzling Sarnak – the new dragon-like humanoid creature that inhabits Timorous Deep.

New Starting Area – Begin your mystic adventure from the new starting area in the lush jungle islands of Timorous Deep. Conclude your day of epic quests and retire to new player housing within the Village of Gorowyn.

Over 350 New Quests – Continue your exotic quests throughout Norrath with challenging adventures and encounters for all player levels.

More Weapons & Armor – 24 brand new Epic Weapon quests for all 24 classes. Battle through your hostile opposition and acquire additional fabled and legendary armor sets.

New Mount – Explore the world on the shoulders of a new rampaging beast - The Kunarkian Rhinoceros.

More Unique Zones – Advance your way through 13 new, highly detailed zones filled with nostalgia and danger such as the Kylong Plains, Fens of Nathsar, Kunzar Jungle and Jarsath Wastes.

New Deities – Three new belief systems added to the world of Norrath.

36 New NPCs – Encounter and engage a wide variety of new deviant enemies that inhabit the menacing lands of Kunark.

Level Cap Raised – Expand your achievements as a solo player or as a guild and progress Adventure and Tradeskill classes to level 80.

Advanced Mapping System - New full-screen detailed maps and a smaller, always-up mini-map.

Thanks for the post.  I continue to watch EQ2 but I am not encouraged so far.

Yup - what this game needed was a new zone(s) and a new race  :|

Ok, what does it need? The gameplay works. Sure, not everyone loves it but it works. Once the devs get to that point, content is the name of the game. It's an MMO. The devs either revamp old zones or add new ones. There aren't a lot of options.

Because the only games I play are by Blizzard!

Comments on areas for improvement have been covered in other threads here.

In brief:  EQ avatar shapes preferred to many of the EQ2 versions of the same races; avatar kinetics is often painful to watch (e.g. jumping); the pvp "system"; lackl luster armor / weapon variety and appearances; fewere spells / abilities, but with more impact and meaning in combat.

As an aside - languages had more meaning in EQ than EQ2 if I recall correctly.  I always enjoyed learning new languages in EQ - it was trivialized eventually as learning new languages was made much faster.  I am not aware of any similar mechanic in EQ2.  In EQ we had some guild events where we just got together and taught each other languages we had picked up.  It was a nice diversion from raiding.

Some efforts at zone immersion would help.  I never liked the click on the bell and you appear somewhere else system.  I would have been cool to board a gondola just for a short ride before zoning somewhere.  It's all the little things that in retrospect - can be done to tweak the appeal of zones.  But these guys never seem to go back.  I understand rogues can now climb walls in EQ2 - but only in the "new" zones for that expansion - not retroactivaly to all the older zones. 

EQ2 could offer free hand-jobs and JPark would pipe up and claim, "SOE's handjobs are lacklustre, they are too fast and don't use enough lube....if Blizzard had handjobs they take their time and would have much more polish"

You guys brought up blizzard I did not.

May 21, 2007

Q&A: What's The Future For EverQuest II?
 In person, Scott Hartsman is an enthusiastic gentleman, talking a mile a minute about his passion: Sony Online Entertainment's PC MMO EverQuest II. Mr. Hartsman joined the team as producer three years, ago, in the wake of the title's somewhat slow launch.

Why the sluggish start? Up against the firestorm that is World of Warcraft, and by Hartsman's own admission laboring under a flawed vision of who would be playing the game, EverQuest II struggled in its first year of live service following its November 2004 launch. Since then, under the direction of Hartsman and people like now-departed lead designer Jason Roberts, the game has fundamentally changed in an effort to recapture the enthusiasm of past and current EverQuest players.

His enthusiasm was mixed with blunt honesty when Gamasutra spoke to him at the recent Sony Online Entertainment Gamers Day event. In a series of conversations over the course of the evening, he shared the reasons behind EQ2's rocky start, the philosophy that turned the team around, and the results of having a longer development cycle for game expansions.

Restoring The Fun Factor?

At some point after EverQuest II launched, the team looked up and said, "We are not having fun." The people on the team weren't playing the game and, according to Mr. Hartsman, "That's the kiss of death.".

For various reasons, the design standpoint when the game was first created was "we can't steal from EverQuest". The game's goal was to move as far away from EQ as they could, to attract new players while leaving the EQ player base more-or-less intact. That resulted in, essentially, a generic fantasy MMOG with some very strange design decisions.

For example, there was a lot of interest in controlling the player's experience, making sure that everyone at X level was exactly the same in a number of ways. This resulted in a feeling of sameness, and not a lot of enthusiasm for grouping. That was a particularly bad cycle, as the game was also absolutely brutal about solo play. "I think when the game first came out I leveled a character up to about 13 or 14 before I threw my hands up and said 'done!'"

That's just one example of a design structure that promoted frustration. There were several elements that fed off of each other: the locked encounter system, the initial class system that had players choosing their final class quite a ways into the game. "When your designers aren't playing your game, that means something is deeply, deeply wrong", Hartsman said - but took pains to point out that no one person or group of persons was responsible for the game at launch.

Morphing Into Something To Be Proud Of?

He explained: "The understanding behind the product was perfectly valid... it just missed the mark. So the initiative became, 'let's make this into a game we want to play.' The result is a title that everyone on the team plays quite a bit, apparently. Mr. Hartsman noted that several of his colleagues run guilds, and two in particular are regularly leading raids and unlocking new content in-game. "That's the sign that you're doing things right."

Scott Hartsman is bullish on the title as it currently stands: "If I didn't think that EverQuest II was worth working on, I wouldn't be working on the game, bluntly. I'm one of those people who needs to be truly into what it is that he's doing. I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't. This game, when it launched, did not have a lot of things that would be required to pull in a sufficient EverQuest-friendly audience. It has in the last three years become that game."

He continued: "Between our studio and the Taiwan studio we've probably had a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy five people work on this game. Every 'generation' of developers has gotten the game better and better and better. If it was just us saying it, it would be one thing. It's reflected in our better review scores. It's rare for review scores to go up over time, especially an MMO. Usually your game launches, you have a review score, and then all of your review scores kind of dance around, maybe go down. Ours actually trend upward for each new expansion... This franchise is improving in value. To us, that means that this game could go on for another ten years."

Free, Pay Content To Up The EQ2 Ante

When he wasn't discussing the game's past, last week Mr. Hartsman was explaining the new Neriak and Darklight Woods areas of EverQuest II. These zones are free content created by the SOE-Taiwan, the Soga studio, and will be patched into the game at no cost to the player later this month. Along with the two new zones, the darkly 'emo' Arasai faerie race will be added to the roster of evil races.

Mr. Hartsman grinned widely as he described the collaboration process between SOE-San Diego and their foreign coworkers, navigating a floating Arasai though the Dark Elf city of Neriak. The visual style and audio environment were specifically designed to evoke the city from the original EverQuest, and onlookers were treated to a number of examples of how the 'old is new again' in the upcoming publish.

While content from the upcoming expansion Rise of Kunark wasn't available to see that evening, Mr. Hartsman was no less excited about that project. The culmination of a shift in thinking at Sony Online Entertainment, Rise of Kunark will be the first EQ2 expansion given a full 12 months to gestate before being released.

EQ2's previous expansion, Echoes of Faydwer, was the testbed for the company's policy change. Success both critically and with the player base sent a clear message to the company: take the time to do things right, and bring back the EverQuest-ness to EQ2. When the idea for the expansion was being bandied around, Mr. Hartsman was still reluctant to go directly for a 'spiritual sequel'. He consulted the game's staff on the matter, as several of them had worked on the original expansion for EverQuest. The response was overwhelming: let's do this the way we wanted to do it back then.

Hartsman explained: "We have a fixed amount of time to do a thing, where a thing is the expansion. They set the amount of time, they set my staff levels. My team sets what it is that we can accomplish thats going to be fun and polished in that span of time. As long as we can control one variable, we can win the game. And so, what we really do is we plan to have as much fun and quality stuff as we can in there."

He continued: "In this case, we have enough time to do ten more levels of content, probably four or five hundred quests, we have enough time to do a full compliment of collection quests. That's a huge thing for EQ2 players, people love collections. And we have time to do a brand new race. So we're doing the Sarnak as a playable race. In there, we also have a little bit of time left over to do some R&D. And the nice thing about expansion cycles that last a whole year is that you get experimentation time. Whereas, if you have a six month cycle you have to go with what you know works. There is no tripping. If you trip, you miss your date."

But what's changing? "In our case, our big experimentation this time is the concept of having 'superzones'. I don't want to make them sound cheesy, but they're gigantic regions. You could place two, three, or four older EQ2 zones, outdoor zones, and make them as distinct areas inside this one all-encompassing zone. We're going to have a few of these regions out there, and then each of those regions will have a few zones inside them. What that lets us do is make an expansion where there is less zoning. We're going to have zone names that sound a little foreign to people. "The Jarsath Wastes", "The Kylon Plains" - that kind of thing. Inside of those areas, you'll see Skyfire Mountains, you'll see the Dread Lands, the Lake of Ill Omen. And so those will be full zone-sized areas inside these much larger areas. You can go back and forth and not have to be worrying about zoning the whole time."

Conclusion - More Care, More Of The Time

Indeed, in Gamasutra's recent interview with John Smedley, the SOE president explained the major change in attitude affecting EverQuest II: "The teams have their heads down, they're working hard, and we're learning from past mistakes. In the case of EverQuest II, it's still a very very healthy business for us. In terms of getting it in the public eye, that's the purpose of the free updates; we're trying to target several large-scale free things to add to the world."

Smedley concluded: "We want people to know that we're not just slamming out expansion packs. I think that was a mistaken strategy that we had for a while. It decreased our quality level. The teams, and myself included, just get to the point where you want to be super proud of what you're releasing, and we wanted more time to polish things, and so we said 'the heck with it' and went with it that way." How will this considered approach pay off in terms of buzz and increased subscriptions? Only time will tell.

Sarchasm alert!

Chardok and Sebelis?  Much love.  Maybe I'll get to use my walk-underwater spell finally!

If they reincarnate Howling Stones and Veksar, I will be in heaven.

My interest in this expansion is muted by my dread of having more zones in the middle nowhere and hours of running to said zones.

Travel is a huge pain.  Everything was cool when it was off the docks in TS/Nek.  In the 50s, everything is spread all over the fraking place.  So in addition to the painfully long time to find enough people, there is an 20min hump to get them together.  Its not usual to spend an hour looking/waiting for people in a group that only lasts 2 hours.

It must be a matter of personal perception then, because I felt that way, in particular, in Thundering Steppes and Nek Forest.

Uh, they are both massively open free roaming zones.  You can wander anywhere at all in them across wide open swathes of land at any time at all.

15 minute travel

Huh? Freeport and Qeynos are on opposite sides of the continent from each other. How would merge them physically? Fold the continent in half?

Legends of Norrath card game:
* The new game that is being released (Legends of Norrath) is a built in card game that is linked to both EQ and EQ2 (think Magic the Gathering but Norrath lore). You can challenge other players (even across games .. eg EQ guy can challenge an EQ2 friend). Starter packs are free. You can buy more packs OR get them as loot drops (depending how patient you are). As you win, you can accumalate real game items that you can use while in game(Cloak of Water that gives safe fall and water breathing), XP potions, mounts, etc.. So think of it as the modern version of Gems that you can play when bored that can give you real items.

* The new card game will be hitting test any time now with expected formal rollout at the end of August. One point that was made is any items you get in beta test you can keep after beta ends! He must have meant that you can keep it on the Beta Server though he didn't specifically say.

* Cards and entire packs will drop as loot from mobs. Cards will be sellable on the broker. The claim items will not be though.

* Check out http://legendsofnorrath.station.sony.com/ ... I want to win the beer stein that teleports you back to the bar of your home city !!

Gameplay/Mechanics/Engine/Graphics/MUSIC:
* You will reach Kunark by boat. When asked about druid and wizard ports the dev literally said OOPS ... he had forgotten all about that

* The new skeletel model system looks nice (we have nostrils now!!) but still far away from release. Does look neat and a lot more realistic.

* Zones are huge ... the Kylong zone is 3 kilometers by 4 kilometers in size ... that is over twice the size of The Commonlands. That one zone will have Field of Bone, Kurns Tower, Lake of Ill Omen, Swamp of No Hope, Karnors Castle.

* They have a new graphics ability that allows the look of the area you are in to change as you go from one part of a zone to another. So field of bone can be hot bright sun overhead and the swamp can be very dark and dreary.

* After Kunark, there will be a new Map system to replace what is in game now. Will come in two modes ... full screen high color mode and a permanant mini map. They are working with EQ2 Maps to coordinate compatibility.

* There will be an all new adaptive music system for combat. It will be dynamically created as you fight and will change as you are winning or losing as well as how long the fight is and how hard it is. So no more mundane looping music. They gave two examples ... one where you win a fight and one where you lose. Sounded very nice!

Lore:
* Sarnak were discovered by the Spiroc in a deep lab and accidentally woke them up 50 years ago

ZONES/MOBS:
* Two new zones are planned as Live Update Releases ... the Shard of Fear (group based zone) and the Shard of Hate (raid zone)!!

* Metrics of SOE show that folks hate grouping to gain XP in overland zones so nearly all mobs in overland zones will be solo mobs


Quests:
* There will be no new Heritage Quests since all the work needed to make the 24 class Epics. Class Epics quests will be like the Sword of Destiny style. You can get the first version of the Epic via grouping (the Legendary version) and to make it Fabled, you need to do Raid.

Spells/RACIAL TRAITS/AA:
* There will be changes to spells that will reduce the number of individual spells classes may have by combining similar functions into one icon; eg, if you have two debuffs they could be removed from game and replaced with a single spell that does both. Intent is to reduce the icon clutter (eg, 5 hotbars etc). Still lots of questions on how concentration slots would be affected and hate gain if multiple debuffs get sent in at once.

* The progression for new spells in Kunark will change such that all spell trees for a class will be upgraded in the 10 levels to 80 (no more waiting for 14 levels). Also upgrades for some of the ancient abilities from DoF will be introduced where appropreiate.

* The topic of player cast power drains came up and how they are worthless now. The dev responded that unfortunately the power drain concept is just one of those things that didn't quite work out the way they had hoped. As people may recall, at the release of EQ2, you could neutralize most named mobs by draining all their power ... thereby trivializing a lot of content. Well in response, mobs now have nearly limitless power pools. So the dev mentioned that as time goes on, any player spells or CAs that have power drains in them would be replaced with something else. No ETA given though.

* Two of the racial abilities of Sarnak are Dragon Breath (they breath fire) and Super Jump ... I guess they can jump far

* There will not be an increase in AAs .. so if you are already level 100 ... no change. But he did say that you can store two templates of how your AAs are allocated and swap back and forth via an item in your house. So you can have a Raid setup for AAs and a Solo setup for AAs.

Items/Armor/Weaps:
* There will be 3 sets of armor for all classes as part of the Kunark expansion. One legendary and two types of fabled. The top tier fabled will have abilities embedded in it that is only useful during T8 raids; such as the ability to avoid the crit damage mentioned earlier ... since only raid mobs will crit, will only have a value to raiders. Basically they are trying to make fabled armor more unique and powerful without overpowering base content.

* Mounts will be available that will go faster than any that are currently available.

Guild HALLS/GUILD:
* New mounts and titles for increase in guild level ... examples were a Rhino and the glowing dog things in Neriak .

* Guild Halls are now being actively worked on with completion sometime after Kunark ... say first Quarter of 2008

* Guild Halls would be islands placed just offshore from Antonica and the Commonlands. They would be instances so I imagine they will work similar to how apartments work, you click on something and enter your guilds own hall.

* Exile based guilds in PvP server would not have guild hall ... concern is that Exile guilds on PvP already get the best of everything ... no desire to give them even more of everything.

* Guild Halls will be HUGE ... bigger than deathfist citadell huge. Courtyard ... over 40 rooms can be unlocked and purchased. There will be two initial themes of look and feel. One very stately and following the style of Qeynos architechure. The other would be more foreboding gothic look.

* As your guild levels you can get more rooms (I imagine like how you get more bank slots in guild bank) and your guild can choose what that room will function as ... ideas include ... Guild Vault ... Mender ... Brokers ... Crafting Supply Merhcants ... Binding Rooms to call to ... rally points to launch to raids to ... the devs want folks to post ideas for rooms on the forums since they have a ton of rooms to fill

* There is customization to a degree for the halls ... banners ... statues ... your guild crest (from the cloak) on things ... etc.

* Will probably be able to get your first guild hall at guild level 10.

Gods:
* 3 new gods will be brought back ... Bertoxx ... Karana ... The Tribunal. There will be one more god release via a Live Update between now and the expansion release.

* The current gods will raise in level and so will the loot they drop.

* The other god that will be appearing between now and the Kunark expansion will be Bristlebane ... devs mentioned something about one of the miracles involved droping anvils on targets head

Raiding/Grouping:
* Raid progression is linear ... there will be 3 entry level raids and it will grow from there. All raids will be persistant. As a matter of fact all instances (even group instances) will be persistant.

* There will not be any 3 group raids ... there may be a couple of 2 gorup raids but the devs clearly don't think they bring much to the game.

* Veeshans Peak is one of the raid zones ... currently has 11 named with Trakannon leading them.

* There will be some Raid progression that requires you to have completed Raid Zone A before you can progress to Raid Zone B. Not everyone in raid will need to have completed the first to progress to the second.

* Two new zones are planned as Live Update Releases ... the Shard of Fear (group based zone) and the Shard of Hate (raid zone)!!

* There may or may not be contested mobs. The devs don't feel they bring much to the game for the amount of development needed to create them (eg, less than 1% of 1% of players will fight them).

Misc.:
* Timmorous Deep will be level 1-20 and then all other zones will be level 65 and up.
* The Sarnak starting city is now Evil (not neutral as originally released).
* Chardok zone will have the bottomless pit.
* They will be adding a new functionality to how clothing works. They are going to add a new layer of clothing that will fit over top of your armor so that you can control how you look regardless of how unmatched your armor is. This can be turned on and off.
* One dev commented ... "wouldn't it be cool if the cities were all one zone"!
* Tik Tok language is not in game and was never intended to be. Found that strange but that is what they said.
* Ventrilo or Teamspeak will not likely ever be built into the game ... why waste resourses when folks already have something they really like.
* None of the raid / heroic zones will be scaleable based on raid numbers or level. Takes just as much effort to do that as make all new zones.
* They would like to have a new character slot with expansion but can't promise since character slots are also tied into the Launcher and such which controlled by another division of SOE.
* Characters will not be sitting in chairs. The base code to scale body sizes and chair sizes just isn't there. Not like SWG where it was in there from day one.
* All avatars will be on the same timer like they are now (even if more are added).
* Rare item shinies for collections are not working out the way they wanted. Rares are too rare so probably won't repeat what they did on that with EoF for Kunark.
* If for some reason the Sarnaks are changed back to Neutral city, their class choices will be based off the Evil choices.
* One dev liked the idea of tintable furniture for rooms but tintable armor will never ever make it in game if he has any say

PVP:
* The topic of PvP came up and how to keep new folks joining the server from immediately getting slaughtered as they hit level 10 by the overpowered twinked level 14s with a billion AAs. Basically the dev said he was aware of the problem and is trying to think of ways to help such as making it easier to get purchased armor faster at lowest of levels and the AA cap was put in based on a players level. One thing he said they would NOT do was force players to level. Just not going to happen. Basically he said the PvP community needs to step up and protect the new folks.

Launcher:
* There will be a new launcher system that will replace the launchpad allowing you to easily launch any of the SOE games you own. There will also be background patching while you are not playing. So if you havent played for a while, when you log in, everything will be up to date (think of how MS Windows does the auto update thing). There will also be linking of ALL you friends lists (past and present) for all games allowing you to see who is online (even if on another game). You can go invisibile if you don't want to be seen online by your friends.

All of Freeport being one zone and all of Qeynos being one zone.  Not Freeport and Qeynos being the same zone.  They are currently 8-10 zones each (more acutally with the crafting zones and etc...) which makes moving around them pretty painful.

PVP:
* The topic of PvP came up and how to keep new folks joining the server from immediately getting slaughtered as they hit level 10 by the overpowered twinked level 14s with a billion AAs. Basically the dev said he was aware of the problem and is trying to think of ways to help such as making it easier to get purchased armor faster at lowest of levels and the AA cap was put in based on a players level. One thing he said they would NOT do was force players to level. Just not going to happen. Basically he said the PvP community needs to step up and protect the new folks.

Launcher:
* There will be a new launcher system that will replace the launchpad allowing you to easily launch any of the SOE games you own. There will also be background patching while you are not playing. So if you havent played for a while, when you log in, everything will be up to date (think of how MS Windows does the auto update thing). There will also be linking of ALL you friends lists (past and present) for all games allowing you to see who is online (even if on another game). You can go invisibile if you don't want to be seen online by your friends.

This is a strange one though, this is the exact same thing they announced last fan faire if I am not mistaken, must be one hell of a launcher.

Basically he said the PvP community needs to step up and protect the new folks.

Questing is far and away the fastest way to level and quests are not class/race restricted 99% of the time other than the obvious alignment-based/faction-based conflicts.

And if so what is currently the fastest solo leveling class?

I can see it depending on the area.  If you can get a bunch of quests that you can do in one spot (and this does happen a lot) then you can do them all while grinding but if you keep having to run back to town to get an update or wander across two or three zones then yeah, the time spent traveling will put a severe crimp in your speed.

The digital download link is up for Kunark. $40, includes the same junk you get in the store, and Kunark is a full all in one pack with all expansions AND all adventure packs.

They shouldn't add AA points until they add more AA! As it is right now, AA really can differentiate characters, adding more points without anyhing more to spend them on just dilutes the whole process.

Also...level 80 cap. Oddly enough, I've seen people bitching about it. The complaint goes like this "Oh 80 sucks, everyone will powergame to 80 and then only have four dungeons to farm for the next two years" (going on the assumption the next expansion is like EoF and no level increase...and conveniently forgetting the new AA window, I guess). Yes, SOE, stop adding new content because the lunatic fringe will consume it in a month and then be bored again. Fuckin' mmogtards. Also, your game is apparently too easy for these idiots, too, when they create a fabled/mastered twink to stave off boredom.

Travel is going to be a huge time sink in RoK, though. Empty your bags of all the junk you are carrying before you head out to the new lands. It is a long way between banks/brokers/vendors.

Hartsman has been saying in post-NDA interviews that they've had to tune the XP down a bit, there were too may 80s way to soon.  But I'll take the XP pots, and the -25% housing cost.  Maybe I'll finally move out of my one room.

The first quest line in RoK, for 65+, is to start unlocking the flight paths around Kylong Plains.  Once that's done it should be too painful - depending on where the evac points are.

We did the opposite -- Tuned the 20-70 experience requirement down to progress smoothly between the pre-20 Darklight/Faydark/Timorous experience, and the post-70 Kunark experience.

Their new "station launcher" had two options, one for just Kunark and the other for the all-in-one.

Ok. Maybe you need a publicist :P What does this mean? We level faster 20-70 now? Is this all experience, combat only, or what? With combat exp turned off I was already levelling a bit too fast for my taste!

Maybe just a "Make me level 70/80/cap" button for the people who don't actually want to play through your game?

 :uhrr:

I read it to mean exactly what it says...

Before the patch you would level to 50 and things would pretty much fly by. You'd hit 51 and things would almost hit a wall as you adjusted to the new exp rate. It seemed like it took basically the same amount of killing to do 51 to 60 as 1 to 50. Same thing happens again at 61 were it got REALLY slow to level. As in less than .1% exp per kill.

Yep.  That's exactly the jumps that got smoothed - The ones that felt wrong.

Not precisely hell levels, per se, since the original EQ hell levels were "A place where goofy math(tm) related to the exponential term of the per-level exp requirement caused you to have one level that was incredibly long, followed by a second level that was ridiculously easy."  Basically, each tiering where the entire formula changed.  Changing exponents in an XP requirement is just a bad idea.

EQ2's were just linear jumps that were a little too vertical to feel right.

EQ2's were just linear jumps that were a little too vertical to feel right.

If that's the impression I gave, I really need to choose my words more carefully.  :)

Yep.  That's exactly the jumps that got smoothed - The ones that felt wrong.

Not precisely hell levels, per se, since the original EQ hell levels were "A place where goofy math(tm) related to the exponential term of the per-level exp requirement caused you to have one level that was incredibly long, followed by a second level that was ridiculously easy."  Basically, each tiering where the entire formula changed.  Changing exponents in an XP requirement is just a bad idea.

EQ2's were just linear jumps that were a little too vertical to feel right.

get my sokokar flying pet

Wait, they've got the flying dragon-frogs that were only mentioned in passing in original Kunark?

So, I have been considering picking this up again and giving it a try. I love games with very fast advancement and from the talk it seems like it is pretty damn fast now. Is that true? How much /played would you say it would take to cap now?

So, I have been considering picking this up again and giving it a try. I love games with very fast advancement and from the talk it seems like it is pretty damn fast now. Is that true? How much /played would you say it would take to cap now?

Sky would love Kunark if he was high enough to go there  :rofl:

It looks like they put a lot more thought into zone layout in Kunark. It took about 6 hours (although I did repeat many quests for guildies) to do quests needed to get the 20k Teren's Grasp Faction needed to use the city.  It is a nice city. I went to Fens, it looks like I am going have to grind the Risilian faction so the damn rhino guards don't slaughter me.  I can see quests I can't get because of the guards.

Are the Soko routes for Fens not in the game yet or am I missing something?

Lewtz. Holy crap. Definitely the new place to be rolling evils.

One good thing is the easy access from Darklight Woods to Timerous Deep. You now have both zones full of 10-20 quests and gear to pick from and a pretty easy 15-20 AA's just from following quest progression in both zones.

To get back and forth:

TD -> Carpet to SS -> Carpet to Darklight - drops you off right in the main quest camp in darklight.

I really need to look through my parses and see what she starts casting to put up an alert to stop dps.

(?<attacker>Drusella Sathir) (?:begins to shield herself in a necromantic aura\.|is shielded in a necromantic aura!)

I just joined a guild on AB and have been running COA/VOES after a raid just about every night.