Homesickness.

For Neriak, FFS.

I am acutely aware that the true glory of EverQuest is gone forevermore. It was gone shortly after Shadows of Luclin was released, even. Oh, the crappy graphics of a long dead age. The music with tinges of MIDI, that was so horrible yet so right. The clunky interface. The ridiculous difficulty. The fact that you could experience a graphical virtual world on the Internets, with thousands of other players, in a day and age when dialup was king.

Such a thing will never come again. That age of innocence, awesomeness and novelty cannot happen ever again – the marches of technology and time have seen to that.

I will never again experience the sense of scope and beauty that, after running through the commonlands, skulking my way through Kithicor – at night, sneaking through Highhold… I viewed as I slowly made my way down that massive ramp-like trail through the Karanas, at dawn. And with games focused on instant travel (not that instant travel is a bad thing), I doubt I shall ever again end up with a cloud of wood elves and halflings eying me suspiciously, wondering what, exactly, the hell a Dark Elf is doing in Queynos.

I reactivated my EQ II account. The Internet tells me that nostalgia is a contagious epidemic. Before reactivating, I did some research – am I rejoining yet another dying game? I have a habit of doing that. DAOC, EQ, PSU, et cetera. Apparently, though, the EQ II population has been continuing to increase. Say it with me now – WTF?

Well.

I’m not that surprised. World of Snorecraft was never a rightful or even equal challenger to EverQuest. That honor went to Dark Age of Camelot which, still, didn’t directly challenge Norrath. Only by virtue of diametrically opposed gameplay did Mythic throw down the gauntlet. To put it simply, nothing has managed to compare to EverQuest. Not even EverQuest II. But whatever. Home is home. Home is Neriak.

Population on my apparent chosen server of Blackburrow is… curious. The areas aren’t swamped with people, but I’ve yet to run through anywhere – and I’m going through low-level areas here – where I haven’t seen other players. A far cry from the deathbeds of Dark Age of Camelot, where you could walk through Albion without seeing another living soul. Crafters are happily crafting in Neriak, despite there being other starting cities and such – I’m sure with all the expansions, the hub of activity has moved elsewhere.

…So apparently, Sony had the bright idea of Asianing up EverQuest II. There are some fairly hideous ‘alternate models’ now. Some of them are improvements, I admit, but take the human female – the human female has gone from human female to human female smacked repeatedly in the face with a frying pan. And the Tier’Dal female…

Yeah, I’ve gone through the alternate appearance setup, then blew a veteran reward mirror on doing it again because it borked up my hair color. And now…

My poor, innocent Inquisitor of Hate is angry. Very angry. And looks like every other Tier’Dal in Neriak. Seriously. I walk around, and everyone has my face. My scowling, angry face. This disturbs me, because my Inquisitor is supposed to be pleasantly amused at piles of corpses and puddles of gore.

Honestly, I know what Sony was thinking – if I understand correctly, they killed the Asian servers and shoved folks from the greater Asia area onto standard servers. Which meant those fine, paying customers would want to keep their special models. The problem is, now how your character is seen is entirely in the hands of other players. This doesn’t sound like a big deal – but really? It is. One of the standard features of an MMOG is that you get to control how others see your character. To put it simply – there’s a reason people want l33t, hard-to-get gear, and it isn’t for the stats – it’s so people can see how awesome you are. You’re in a virtual world, almost certainly using an alias – how your character looks is vital to personal identity.

Note that this problem also occurred with the original EverQuest! Shadows of Luclin took an aging, ancient graphics system and kicked it into next Tuesday – bringing a slew of new character models along the way. There’s a key difference, though – Luclin was a massive upgrade in quality. You knew that the vast majority of the playerbase would be using the new models as soon as they possibly could – they were just that much better. These EQ2 alternate models, on the other hand, clearly aren’t upgrades. Honestly, some of them do look better than the original models, but others definitely look worse – and instead of a clear, obvious case of ‘these graphics are much better!’ you have a situation where it all comes down to player aesthetics.

In short, you have no idea which models a player is going to be using, and thus, your character can be viewed in more than one way. Which means you have to get both models reflecting the way you want your character to look. Which, with these alternate models, is clearly impossible for some races. I seriously mean it when I say all Tier’dal females look exactly the same, save for skin color and head size. The potential for facial structure differences, especially with regard to the mouth and nose – are fairly imperceptible.

Maybe I’m making too much out of this – but my character goes from awesome to ugly with nothing more than two mouse clicks. That infuriates me.

Meh. Maybe I’ll get over it. I miss my dark elf. Then again, I’m kind of enjoying my new Arasai…

• Vampiric Gaze
• Insidious Parasite
• Spiteful Spirit
• Mark of Pain
• Suffering
• Weaken Armor
• Chilblains
• Resurrection Signet

Equipment was Kaolin Accursed Staff (<3), elite armor with +3 curses and the rest health/armor runes/insignias.

16 Curses, 10 Soul Reaping, 8 Blood Magic.

Heroes:

Hero #1: Jora

• Savage Slash
• Sever Artery
• Gash
• Final Thrust
• Healing Signet
• “Watch Yourself”
• Charge
• Resurrection Signet

Armed with a Deldrimor Sword and assorted health/armor runes/insignia, +3 Swordsmanship.

16 Swordsmanship, 10 Tactics, 8 Strength

Hero #2: Livia

• Tenai’s Wind
• Jagged Bones
• Animate Bone Horror
• Death Nova
• Putrid Bile
• Blood of the Master
• Resurrection Signet

Armed with stock weapons, and health/armor runes/insignia, +3 Death Magic.

16 Death Magic, 10 Soul Reaping, 8 Air Magic

Hero #3: Ogden

Stock hero.

Henchmen:

• Devona
• Cynn
• Professor Gai
• Jamei

Luxon Attack:

Downed a birthday cupcake and two +5% morale candy canes.

Henchmen to the right, heroes to the left. Everyone on their respective stairs. Took Jora on excursions to ice siege turtles. Concentration was on the turtles, rangers were often left for cleanup since we were at risk for adds which the two of us couldn’t handle efficiently.

After all six turtles were dead, I took Livia and Ogden with me to quickly polish off the remaining rangers.

Afflicted:

Downed a birthday cupcake.

Left side was henchmen, right side was heroes. Two juggernauts at the left side, one at the right. Parties were between hills with the juggernauts a bit more forward. Important to have strength on the left for the initial attack, it’s a doozy – but Devona and Cynn supported by my curses seemed to do an ample job. Had a couple of close calls with warriors/etc. getting through and going for the tree singers; keep a sharp eye out and prepare to call targets.

After the initial wave, things went quite smoothly with myself alternating between which gate was being hit the hardest, throwing devastating curses out to the clustered groups of soon to be removed Afflicted. Last group had the two warriors sneak in on the left and wail on a treesinger; I was expecting it and they went down quickly. I then moved Livia to the left gate just because I’m paranoid (what if that wasn’t the right final two warriors? ) and moved the henchmen to the right to help wipe up the bosses.

Game, set, match. I actually think this was a bit easier with a Necromancer instead of my Assassin; I was able to stand far behind the lines and simply toss out curses, whereas I was (perhaps due to my kick-ass Grenth costume) more inclined to play the action hero with my Assassin, shadowstepping to the rear to gank monks and such.

It’s 2010.

Do you know how long it’s been since a two-CPU Pentium 2/400 box was insanely expensive and top of the line?

Do you realize that you can get several gigabytes of RAM for the price of an iPod?

Why the hell are so many text-based games – especially the new ones – still failing to be persistent? Why isn’t everything in memory, dumped regularly? Your bog standard MUD – assuming a popular codebase – was designed when memory was at a premium. Back in the days when a few thousand player files could actually eat a significant chunk of RAM. But you know what? MUSHes and MOOs were already keeping everything in memory.

What’s the excuse?

I’m going to guess tradition and/or laziness. Whatever. It’s 2010. Administrators, stop acting like it’s 1995. Make your worlds persistent. Let me hide an object in some random room, only to retrieve it months later.

Anyway, while downloading Nexenta Core, I decided to run through Sunjiang again – about the eleventh time. Finally got my hands on a Kaolin Accursed Staff. Not only does it look good, but its stats are teh awesome.

This is a farm I didn’t mind – I can always use more tanned hide squares, after all, and they drop decently enough in this area.

But anyway, the coolness factor of my shiny new staff brings me to an interesting point:

Necromancer armor is damned ugly.

I’d like to be l33t and have a suit of prestige armor for every occasion, but frankly… I really, truly prefer the appearance of the non-elite necromancer armors. Really sad. I’m still going to go elite armor collecting, if only for the sake of getting it – but to be honest, I think I’m going to need to order a few more Xunlai storage panes to toss all the junk into.

(Yes, yes, perfect salvage kits – they’re expensive, and I like to just switch armor, not go, ‘BRB NEED TO MOVE RUNES LOL’ :p)

P.S.: If you’ve tried necro in the past and found it rapidly diminishing in awesomeness, switch from death magic to curses. Curses own.

Shocking? Hardly. The population has dwindled to nothing, and SoJ’s treatment of non-JP players as fourth-class citizens (we don’t even rate as second class) has been the primary drive toward the destruction of the game. Hilariously, Sega’s pushing MAG+ now – really? People are going to farm a mission knowing with absolute certainty that it will be meaningless a mere two months later?

Oh, the rants I could spew here. Pointless, though – everything that has needed to be said has been said by the player base. I’m sure Sega will pay no attention to that, however.

Well – PSU was a damned huge improvement over the remedial Diablo that was PSO. Here’s hoping the next PS* game manages to get things right. Third time’s the charm, yeah? Sadly, it’s been ten years – I have little faith that Sega will ever understand the need for regular content releases on multiplayer games.

But Sega – if you’re listening?

Get Sonic Team away from Phantasy Star. They should’ve never gotten control of the franchise in the DC/post-DC era in the first place.

Overworks (pardon, WoW Overworks) is the only team that can do justice to the memory of Algo.

Assassin:

• 11 + 1 + 1 Dagger Mastery
• 6 Shadow Arts
• 12 + 1 Critical Strikes

• Unsuspecting Strike
• Fox Fangs
• Death Blossom
• Death’s Charge
• Shadow Refuge
• Optional (Breath of the Great Dwarf)
• Optional (Word of Healing)
• Critical Agility

The only time I’ve found it necessary to have a secondary on an Assassin is for perma, and frankly, I’d rather just grab my heroes and lay waste to an entire area – it seems far faster to generate platinum by doing that, than by farming specific drops.

The optional slots are entirely optional – you totally don’t need them. I left Word of Healing on my bar by accident after capturing it for Ogden, as it were. As for Breath, I like it due to killing burning and providing a quick party heal. It’s pretty useless in this mission.

CA, SR and some form of shadowstep are critical for this mission. CA should never leave your skill bar at any time, to be honest, it’s just that awesome. But you’re going to be doing a lot of solo-vs-small group combat; what you do is CA, SR, shadowstep, start Death Blossoming.

You also want energy-sucking blades – I’m currently using Pywatt’s Talons (which just look awesome), but Droknar’s Daggers will do in a pinch too. I picked up Pywatt’s due to the enchantment bonus, when I started playing around with Perma – but I like to keep it around for CA, too. And since you should always be using CA, you should always get your damage bonus, to boot.

In terms of armor, I’m running full Survivor. The HP really helps out. I’ve got a Rune of Superior Vigor thrown in, which is of supreme importance – but feel free to spend ~4k instead of 22k and get the next level down – missing 9 hp isn’t as important as getting at least +41 hp.

Hero #1 (Tank):

I used Jora for this, simply because she’s the only hero I’ve invested in so far. She’s set up with mostly +hp/+armor stuff, but any tank (M.O.X. even) will do in a pinch. But for interest:

• 9 + 1 Strength
• 12 + 1 + 2 Swordsmanship
• 9 + 1 Tactics

• Sever Artery
• Gash
• Final Thrust
• Savage Slash
• Shield Bash
• Watch Yourself!
• Healing Signet
• Resurrection Signet

…This is a completely random build; I’ve never played a Warrior, haven’t looked into decent builds, and I haven’t been buying/capturing skills for Jora. Should note she’s wielding a Murakai’s Blade – the energy regeneration is near useless with this build, but I plan on giving her a much cooler weapon whenever I can upgrade her to Deldrimor armor. Yes, I’m vain, and want my heroes to look imposing, damn it.

Hero #2 – Livia – Minion Master – N/E:

You simply need an MM for this mission – two would be better, but one does well in a pinch. Livia’s my Necro of choice – I really need to get around to upgrading her a bit.

• 9 Blood Magic
• 12 Death Magic
• 9 Soul Reaping
• 3 Earth Magic

• Jagged Bones
• Animate Bone Minions
• Blood of the Master
• Death Nova
• Well of Blood
• Glyph of Lesser Energy
• Churning Earth
• Eruption

I’m tempted to kill Well of Blood from this build, since Livia often uses it far too often, when I’d prefer she raise a larger army. Still, she seems to add a hell of a lot more kick to my party these days.

Hero #3 – Ogden – Healer:

Definitely need a hero healer, simply because you want to split into two groups, and your hero group will need healage.

• 12 Healing Prayers
• 3 Protection Prayers
• 12 Divine Favor

• Word of Healing
• Orison of Healing
• Ethereal Light
• Healing Touch
• Signet of Devotion
• Healing Seed
• Draw Conditions
• Resurrection Signet

I didn’t give Ogden a non-signet rez after reading an interesting article about the merits of heroes with rez. It made some damned good points about the time/energy cost of rez spells, and how they will end up causing a wipe instead of just having a single group member lying on the ground until your current predicament is solved.

Still, this is a long battle – you might want a rez, but disable it and use it manually if you do take it.

Henchmen:

• Devona (<3)
• Aidan
• Eve
• Jamei

The important thing here is Devona (she’s an arsekicking machine and can hold a line for a decent amount of time) and Jamei. Everything else is negotiable, though I like Aidan because being a Ranger, I’m figuring he does some interrupting or something. Interrupting the bosses/monks is a good thing.

The Mission

Phase One

In the first phase of the mission, you’ll be fighting off Luskan, err, Luxon, invaders. (Yes, I went Kurzick solely because Luxon reminds me of Luskan, and I hate those damnable Luskans.) This is the easy part. This is the really easy part.

Place your party at the top of the stairs to the right. Place your heroes on the left stairs – Jora near the bottom, Livia and Ogden near the top.

Sit back and relax until you get warnings about siege turtles. Who’s going to kill siege turtles? You’re going to kill siege turtles.

On approach to a turtle, activate CA and SR, shadowstep to a ranger, and begin laying waste to the rangers – keeping an eye on your health and activating SR as necessary. You want to whack two or three of the rangers before hitting the turtle, simply because their damage really adds up when you’re solo. If you have good armor/skillz, you can survive it, but this is a long mission – you’re better safe than sorry. Once you’ve killed some of the DPS, slaughter the turtle. Make sure you keep an eye out for reinforcements if you’re on the north or south slopes – generally they run by, but aggroing a pair of elementalists can really ruin your day.

After killing a turtle, check the situation – feel free to mop up the rangers if you’ve the time. If there’s another turtle up, go kill it, if not, return to the central area and help out your teams or smoke a cigarette.

Phase Two

This is where things get hairy. Immediately upon cutscene completion, you need to get to work on placement – you can activate the three juggernauts, and you want them, but they move slooooooow and you’ve got Afflicted en route.

Place your party on the right – behind the gate – between the two hills. Grab a single juggernaut and put it in front of them.

Place your heroes on the left – again, behind the gate. Jora should be in the center. Ogden can go on the hill to your right – often times, if he’s not busy, he’ll run over to help your other group with healing. Place Livia on the hill to the left. You want the other two juggernauts with Jora.

Sit back, make sure your insurance forms are filled out, and wait for the balloon to go up – you won’t wait long.

The first waves consist of mixed groups on both gates – your party shouldn’t have any problems with the right gate, but do keep an eye on them. The left gate is your glorious chance for failure. You end up with a lot of Afflicted stacking up really quickly, including ranged afflicted and a devastating boss. If possible, you want to be in the thick of things on the left gate – try and take out the initial rush as soon as possible, to provide ample fodder for Livia. Step back, wait for the boss to charge, take him out. Then quickly play cleanup – shadowstepping, if necessary, to the back lines of the Afflicted to take out their ranged/monk support. WATCH YOUR HEALTH AT ALL TIMES! It’s very easy to die here – be very careful when attacking the Afflicted rear. It may make sense to not attack the rear before you eliminate some of the Afflicted on the front lines – you don’t want them swinging about and nailing you when you’re down the stairs – concentrated ranged fire from the numerous rangers, mesmers and elementalists will roast you.

The next few waves are general mixed groups, and should be light. Keep an eye on your hero and henchman parties, assisting where necessary – your assistance will again usually be in the form of shadowstepping to the rear and laying waste to support. Also, as you lose juggernauts, now’s a good time to re-activate them (they’ll be at the north tree – the one to the right) and re-place them.

The final wave consists of two bosses hitting the right gate. At the same time, you’ll have some very minor action on the left – I believe a pair of Afflicted Warriors. Livia can deal with those on her own; so at this point you can either move Jora, Ogden, or both of them to the right.

In terms of the boss fight, your job is simple – sit back, let Devona/etc. take aggro, then shadowstep to the rear and execute the Afflicted Monk. Once that’s done, cleaning up the two bosses is simple – I suggest taking out the ritualist first. The assassin boss didn’t seem like much of a threat, he simply took some time to take down.

Enjoy the Master’s reward – what a nightmare.

Final Thoughts

This is the roughest mission I’ve done solo. There have been some missions in EotN I simply couldn’t solo – kicking Cyndr’s butt, for example. There have been missions that were impossible until I figured out the correct tactics – A Time For Heroes, for example – I paid 1k for my first run; my second run was done on the first try thanks to clever placement, and myself doing nothing during the fight but spamming Breath of the Great Dwarf and Pain Inverter.

Still, this monstrosity, I ran probably a dozen times before succeeding.

The most important things to keep in mind while running this mission are to watch your health – don’t sacrifice yourself for the sake of quick damage. You’re doing a lot of soloing, and you can’t afford to bring Ogden to you if you bite the dust on a siege turtle or behind a line of Afflicted. Second, preparation and knowledge is key – knowing which team needs your assistance, why they need it, and when they need it, is the key to victory.

And keep an eye on your health at all times!

Nine down, four more to go… Ugh!

It’s the only four words with regard to setting up custom firmware on a PSP under Vista. My PSP Slim is now running 5.00 M33-4. Wewt(tm)

Edit: I was going to post a how-to on how to create a Pandora battery, however, I appear to have pierced the battery while opening it, albeit in a ridiculously minor manner. Worked well enough in the PSP at least, but I don’t feel like handling a strangely… gooey, battery for the sake of taking pictures.