God the trains in Unrest were epic. That whole house would be empty and at the zone line.
You could get some huge trains in Kurn's Tower as well. Of course, the largest trains I have ever witnessed took place in Karnor's Castle. I always hated it when people didn't follow the "train right" rule on my server (I assume that was common on other servers as well, like using the EC tunnel for trading). Luckily I could just feign death (when it didn't decide to fail) and live. One time I saw a monk DC at the entrance when a train was being pulled there and then proceeded to solo the whole fucking thing. I have no idea how that happened.
Sometimes I miss camps. I mean running quests and dungeons is great and all but there was something really fun about clearing your way to a camp in sebelis and just parking it for a few hours of killing.
I lived at B2 in Old Sebilis whenever the camp was free (I heard it was nerfed due to bots sometime after I quit playing). 'Twas a great source of money, especially when you didn't have to share with a group.
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
Gotta ask, we got any Monk's in this place? Anybody else remember Q's board? Or all the other guys, like Bodi and all the rest at Monkly Business? Soygen of Prexus, Zadkiel, Yang? God, I remember everybody who was anybody in the Monk community was on those boards.
Speaking of Monks, I just loved that class. Before all the expansions turned them into the ezmode that they became later. If you saw a fellow Monk out in the world, you new he suffered the same trials as you. Camping for Raster and all those other bastards; long ass chain quests that never payed off in rewards anywhere close to classes; lack of class specific armor. Remember weight limits? If you went over 14 stones, your armor class dropped by increasing amounts. But that included everything you carried and wore, even the bags and money! So you were always poorer than other classes, cause you couldn't loot just to fill your bags, and you hardly ever took all the money off a corpse cause while 100 copper might equal 1 silver, it sure as hell didn't weight the same.
I could go on and on, and I have to my friends every time they bitch about something in WoW being particularly difficult or some mob on a long spawn.
So I'm in one of the high end raiding guilds on my server with bunch of buddies, only one of whom played EQ with me. We were raiders in that era too, actually raiding from velious to a little before the end of PoP, and we're frequently asked to tell stories of back in the day. Fucking camping stupid shards for the VT key for weeks, only to have to kill one of the toughest (and most hotly contested) raid bosses for the privilege of keying some of the raid? Shit like that makes me laugh whenever anyone bitches about the grind of WoW, or how blizzard is shitty and doesn't pay attention to class balance.
Also, ig, I'm with you on the camping for epics thing. I played a warrior (a whole other kettle of shit...tanking with no threat abilities other than weapon procs made me the beast of a tank that I am now), and I don't know how long I spent in the Emerald Jungle looking for Sev so I could get my green dragon scale. Still nothing worse than the old ragefire camp though, before he got moved to sol b.
Gotta ask, we got any Monk's in this place? Anybody else remember Q's board? Or all the other guys, like Bodi and all the rest at Monkly Business? Soygen of Prexus, Zadkiel, Yang? God, I remember everybody who was anybody in the Monk community was on those boards.
Those guys were all posers. Vabtoo, now HE was the champion monk!
I think the most memorable part of EQ was the guild drama. You'd get three or four "top" guilds at each other's throats to claim a boss, with all kinds of forum bickering and accusations of "strat stealing" or "cheating" to try and get an edge. With PoP, there was the ever-popular "cock block" to try and deny other guilds from progression by monopolizing bosses.
To wit:
(a surviving relic from an old flame war regarding PoP)
It was hilarious seeing factions grow on the server, guilds would form alliances to cause headache to whoever the enemy of the moment was, those alliances would fracture, and new ones would form.
Such memories of EQ. I remember the first time i played (started out as a wood elf ranger (yay 25% hybrid xp penalties), running around Kelethin talking to enchanters pets because i thought they were invisible characters (and then probably falling to my death). And there is nothing as punishing as losing a whole days work to a bad pull, then having to track down some nearby friendly cleric to res you (i can only imagine what kind of sadistic cleric would run around without /rpg on).
Lots of amazing memories, the world just felt so large and alive (and deadly). The lack of hand-holding that game had was one of the things that i remember the most. Even the simple act of traversing a zone was an adventure due to the lack of a map function (/loc ftw) and you really felt the acomplishment when you found your way to where you wanted to be.
I really loved the community and social aspect of the game, and how a non-instanced world forced/encouraged the guilds on a server to co-operate (or at least tolerate each other enough to stick to a schedule and rules regarding planes/dragons/etc). Camping message boards so that you could secure a plane for a guild raid just was another level of hardcore that todays MMOs dont really have.
My first character was replaced soon after Kunark came out, when i fell in love with my Iksar monk. Such a great class (and i too am one of those who prefers the older models over the new) tons of memories of Kunark. Also i cant forget the Raster camp, and the thrill when he finally spawned for me, and the near disaster as i engaged him out of excitement before i was at full health and then ended up shouting for help to the zone, and the last minute heal from an amazing cleric that literally saved the day. I never played in real high end stuff, but i remember pulling for Hate raids (there has to be something wront when the pull team gets the most xp on a raid, but it was great). I think i ended up at around level 55 when i quit (shortly after Luclin came out), and all the MMOs i have played after(WoW, WaR) have never really left me with the same feelings as EQ.
And as a super nerd ending, i met my girlfriend and soon to be wife in the Lake of Ill Omen. We both have fond memories of the time spent playing the game togeather.
Octobot on
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FalloutGIRL'S DAYWAS PRETTY GOOD WHILE THEY LASTEDRegistered Userregular
Oh man, pulling. I kinda miss the days when I as the tank would stand at the head of the raid waiting for the pull team to bring back a swarm of baddies. There's not really a feeling in any game since then that I've found to compare to having your team of offtanks and CCers ready to work with you as you pick targets and work through 10 pulls. That level of synergy just isn't around in WoW, that's for sure. And when you think that a lot of us did that without vent...
Actually 15% was the hybrid penalty which was removed in.. Kunark or Luclin. Ogres had a 5% exp penalty (because they couldn't be stunned from the front by melee, spells worked though) Trolls and Iksar had a 10% exp penalty because of their regen bonus. Making troll/iksar hybrids have a 25% exp penalty and ogre hybrids a 20% exp penalty and all other hybrids just a 15% exp penalty. First they removed the hybrid penalty, then later the race penalty.
I still wish some game would recreate the bard class. I know FFXI had it, but I have no idea how it played, as I never got a character above level 9 in that game, and therefore could never unlock it.
As for clerics being sadistic and going /anon or /rp , bullshit, that's not sadistic that's protecting your sanity. I don't know if you ever played a cleric or enchanter, or to a lesser extent druid/wizard.. well I had all of these up to level cap in PoP expansion (was that lvl 65 or 70 I can't remember) You'd get tells from assholes all over the world demanding you come to them and cleric) rez them, enchanter) KEI them, Druid/wizard) port them.
EQ had some great communities, but it also had a ton of assholes who thought that because you played class x, that meant you were everyones bitch and HAD to go do things for them.
One of my fonder memories was the first time I solo'd some of the WW dragons on my shaman. I think on that first day I killed 4 seperate dragons, some of which were ones that "couldn't be solod" cause they hit for too hard with spell damage, and debuffed all your buffs. I even once pulled one of those "hard" ones that debuff all your buffs (which sucks as a shaman using torpor as your main heal, think a HoT that takes quite awhile to fully end, so having it removed all the time sucked) then got one of those wandering dragons as an add, and took them both down. It was fucking amazing and a very long fight, that involved a lot, and I do mean A LOT of using my shaman epic dot, and just trying to keep myself up, while my little jobober wolf pet nipped at their feet.
EWom on
Whether they find a life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited March 2009
I could never forget Kelethin. So many times I died because of lag while riding the elevator. That whole town was awesome and yet a deathtrap.
I also liked how night was fucking dark as hell! Torches or better yet moonstones, iirc, were a must have. Unless you were one of those unclean races that could see in the dark. :P
I have a story of a very foolish Enchanter.
I had a Dark Elf Enchanter who was lvl 14 at the time. I was part of a guild and I was invited to join them for a raid of some Manor. I forget the name, but I think it was the zone near Butcherblock. Well I told them that I was only 14 and the zonel was a bit to high for me, they said no worries come anyway and gain some easy levels. I agree.
Now I should point out that I had recently upgraded my RAM so my load times went from epically long to instant.
I arrive at the zone and quickly get invited to join one of the many Guild groups. They welcome me with open arms and tell me to hang back and soak up the xp. We find a nice room that had a couple mobs and a named mob and set up shop. For awhile things were great. I died a few times though and the corpse run from BB was starting to annoy me. So I thought, y'know the group is doing so well that I can just bind right here and save myself the walk.
This did not end well.
No sooner had I bound myself then a dude came running through our room with a train at his back. The party wiped. I loaded instantly at my bind spot right in the room, I was killed. I loaded instantly at my bind spot right in the room, I was killed. So on and so on. A few minutes pass before my group was able to clear and lock down the room so I could respawn in peace without being insta-killed. I think I lost a few levels that day.
A hard lesson learned indeed!
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
i got a halfling druid to a respectable level around kunark/velious, and had a beautiful system of oct-kiting mobs
i figured out a way to root 8 mobs at a time out on some big ice glacier, get em all together, and aoe them down
man, that was fun as hell
also, being able to self-sow, wolf form, and porting wherever?
i loved exploring
For a game that liked to kick you in the balls I have a lot of fond memories of it.
The very first character I ever created was a Ranger over in the Qeynos area. I remember trying to navigate the tunnel to get into Surefall Glade so I could train some skills. It was night and whatever race I'd picked couldn't see in the dark so I ended up going in circles in this windy, twisted tunnel until I finally gave up and made another character instead.
Another of my earlier characters was a troll warrior. Early on I didn't realize the zones were basically rectangles with a couple points leading to another zone. Without any kind of map function it was easy to get lost. I was creeping along the zone wall killing stuff(for a quest I think) when I happened upon the entrance to Guk. I started killing the frogloks there but I aggroed one too many so I had to run. In my panic I ran the wrong way...going away from town...and ran past more of the frogloks aggroing them. As I ran I would jump causing me to leap forward and gain some distance but each time you jumped it used up some endurance. For awhile I began to pull away from the frogloks chasing me(by now there were a good 6-8 of them) but eventually my endurance ran low and they started to catch up. They'd poke me from behind doing a bit of damage...at which point I'd jump ahead out of reach again because my endurance had regened a little bit. The troll's natural health regen was just barely enough to keep me alive. I don't know how long this went on with those damn frogs chasing me all over the swamp. Somehow I got turned around again and ended up back by Guk. Eventually I found my way back to town where the guards intercepted some of the mobs chasing me but I kept running straight into town. Talk about a narrow escape!
I never did a whole lot with that character but there was a night where I ended up camping a spot in Karnor's Castle(level 50ish stuff I think). For several hours I tanked for this group and we had no healer. We chewed through the mobs just killing everything in sight and pulling extra stuff just because we could. Very fun evening!
When I created my iksar shadowknight I transferred some really nice armor and weapons to him to speed the leveling process. We're talking expensive, hard to obtain stuff. So I'm running around outside in one of the iksar starting areas killing stuff and I manage to find a hole to fall into. Who puts a concealed hole into a deep pit in a newbie zone? The fall killed me of course....it was a loooong way down. So here I am now, respawned and naked because all my stuff is down on my corpse. I spent the next two hours trying to get back down there without dying and having nightmare visions of not being able to recover any of the stuff. I finally manage by some luck to make the fall and not die. I then spent another couple hours creeping around these tunnels trying avoid other pitfalls and hoping I don't run into anything nasty. I eventually found the exit and breathed a huge sigh of relief.
I remember the epic trains in lower guk and blackburrow when the entire zone would get roused and clean everything out from top to bottom of the zone. And accidentally attacking vendors when you meant to sell to them instead. Dunno how many times I did that. Kinda funny to harm touch one with my shadow knight but then the guards come running.
I got into all sorts of trouble with my mage. I ended up having to do a lot of faction work to repair all the ones I inadvertently ruined in my travels. At the end there I think the only people that hated me were the Freeport guards. I occasionally went on killing sprees wiping them all out. When I first started out with him I remember having such a hard time killing the wimpy little orc pawns in greater faydark. About half the time I'd end up running away because I couldn't manage to kill them and I was overjoyed when one of them dropped a piece of cloth armor(equivalent to a statless grey item in WoW). I remember soloing a quest at level 30 in one of the mountain zones(the one with all the hill giants and giant skeletons down south near the troll/ogre starting area). I died quite a few times doing this quest(which wasn't meant to be soloed)....for a bracer that had +2 intellect and cast the Eye of Zomm when clicked on(similar to WoW eye of kilrogg).
My mage ended up being my highest character. The pinnacle of my achievement in EQ was obtaining his epic weapon(a staff with some nice stats which summoned a really badass air elemental). By the time I got it the pet it summoned wasn't quite so badass anymore. The stuff I went through to get that.....but with a lot of luck(and some help from friends) I managed to finish it. I didn't have the heart or the will to try and upgrade it or do the epic 2.0 quest.
Anyone who's ever crossed the Ocean of Tears will be familiar with this. See, in EQ boats crossed between continents but they didn't cut the trip out of the middle. You had to ride the whole way(about a 15-20 minute trip). The boat would leave the town of Freeport and zone into the Ocean of Tears. It would stop at one island and then continue on passing an island with some cyclops along it's route. Sometimes one of the cyclops would get dragged out in the water and aggro the people on the boat and kill them. Your corpse generally ended up on the bottom of the sea. You'd end up naked, back in town(or wherever you were bound at) and now needing to do a corpse run(and secure some means of underwater breathing to do it). Good luck avoiding the sharks! When you were done collecting your stuff you still had to catch the boat to finish your ride.
EQ was also infamous for putting mobs twice the level of the zone they were in. Griffins in east karana, Varsoon the necromancer in Qeynos hills, Sand giants and Spectres in the desert oasis of Marr. Devilsaurs and Felreavers are but a pale imitation of these horrors.
I could probably go on for hours with stories....such a frustrating game but rewarding too because of the effort and challenge.
I was kinda sad when they added in-game maps, I loved having to learn my way around and remember landmarks. Much more immersive and fun.
I don't think I'd be able to deal with it today, but I agree with this a 100%. this made the game so much more immersive for me (that and being forced into a first person view because every other view was horrible)
As for clerics being sadistic and going /anon or /rp , bullshit, that's not sadistic that's protecting your sanity. I don't know if you ever played a cleric or enchanter, or to a lesser extent druid/wizard.. well I had all of these up to level cap in PoP expansion (was that lvl 65 or 70 I can't remember) You'd get tells from assholes all over the world demanding you come to them and cleric) rez them, enchanter) KEI them, Druid/wizard) port them..
i meant sadistic if they didnt have /rpg or /anon on, the ones who did i could totally understand
Oh man, pulling. I kinda miss the days when I as the tank would stand at the head of the raid waiting for the pull team to bring back a swarm of baddies. There's not really a feeling in any game since then that I've found to compare to having your team of offtanks and CCers ready to work with you as you pick targets and work through 10 pulls. That level of synergy just isn't around in WoW, that's for sure. And when you think that a lot of us did that without vent...
i attribute my ability to type with speed to EQ. Pulling was definitly my favorite thing to do, and was often my job in groups (nothing like breaking up and maintaining a spawn and keeping the mobs coming at a good rate (mana be damned!)
I still wish some game would recreate the bard class. I know FFXI had it, but I have no idea how it played, as I never got a character above level 9 in that game, and therefore could never unlock it.
Bards in Vanguard are EQ bards version 2. They were one of its bright spots even during its rocky beginning.
I was kinda sad when they added in-game maps, I loved having to learn my way around and remember landmarks. Much more immersive and fun.
I don't think I'd be able to deal with it today, but I agree with this a 100%. this made the game so much more immersive for me (that and being forced into a first person view because every other view was horrible)
lol I remember I did my first linux install to run Show EQ, mostly to have a damn mini map.
Started in Beta on a PVP server, the whole MMO thing was new to me as I didnt play UO. I got hooked after subscribed at startup. Rolled on Rallos Zek, Dwarf Cleric , made it to level 20ish before I moved to Test (character copy) we kept playing until a nice loot table bug caused all the creatures in Sol A(or was it B I forget) to drop Nagafin loot. THat was a nice bit of loot, which ended up getting the server wiped. After much bitching by the Test community, characters where reinstated but were naked, we at that point moved servers to Prexus ( I think )
I ditched the Cleric and rolled a Rogue,
hooked up with a smaller guild that was doing planes runs etc called Stasis (Velious expansion was out by now) and I took my Rogue out with the big guys and just skilled up my abilities and shot the shit, one time I hide snuck to the big Gelantious Cubes in Skyshrine (was level 25 at the time, these where level 60+ mobs) had fun taking swipes here and there and leveling up. A nice dagger dropped and I was the only rogue there so I got it, much to the dismay of a wizard who bitched about it severly ("Its got +2 int on it I can put it in my ranged slot, why are you giving it to the 25 rogue, he isnt hitting for shit. blah blah almost ragequit the guild")
Ended up getting the rogue to 48 did some planes runs got some POG boots and then handed the character over to someone else and quit the game.
Gave it ago again years ago when the PLatnium edition came up, played for 2 months then quit again. Havent looked back.
I just cannot understand why people thought the updated models looked worse.
The animations looked like a first year art student did them. They were wooden and boring. The originals were more like cartoons than anything else, so it was easier to look past the problems. Everything that moved had character to them, which was lost with the new models.
They didn't get any better with EQ2 either, models are terrible there as well.
Not surprised you feel this way after seeing you say the graphics were outdated on release.. wait what? UO was the only other mmo and it was still 2D at EQ1 release. Come on.
Anyone actually still playing? Some of the new stuff looks like it has made the game more solo viable in SoD.
So what are the server populations like for EQ and EQ2 now a days?
Not sure about EQ2 but EQ still has reasonable server pops when I last played a few months ago. Everyone is pretty high-end now though so all the pre level 80 zones are pretty much dead. Should be a new progression server launching in a few months which will be fun for a couple of months until the crap expansions start opening.
I played a bard, and nothing describes the game better for me than pulling PoG for 8 hours straight, kiting around crap endlessly. The fact that pee bottles at the computer was a running joke back then makes me laugh right now.
Also, I don't think many games have uberguilds with 100+ members coordination on raids these days. I think EVE does, but WoW's 25-man raids are NOTHING. Coordinating 70+ people while on dial up (including some dipshits on AOL dial up) running 486s without mods was absolutely crazy.
cuellar on
"Fuck newbies. They deserve it for not being high enough level to fight back." - TDL
Paladins became gods of tanking, but before they axed the xp penalties it was rough for them and the other hybrids.
Bard for lyfe here. Nothing like breaking a camp and bringing in a mob just as the last one dies, mez parking it for debuffs, buffing the group and limp-wristedly flailing away at it.
I loved the LDoN expansion. Man I was the master of pulling those things. Last time I logged on (about 6 months ago), I was still on the leaderboard in several categories.
I only played EverQuest for about six months, and ultimately quit because the grind began to bore me, but for a time I had a really great time exploring the world. That was the biggest and best part of the game for me ... EXPLORING.
So naturally, my fond test memory is the old Freeport to Qeynos run (did I remember those towns correctly?). Was still fairly low level and getting deep into the plains was a dangerous thing for me. Hooked up with some folks who said they'd escort me across. Cool! A chance to span the continent!
Cut to the chance, many dangers later we made it and it was AWESOME.
My biggest regret is that I didn't get to see all the lands, and can't without paying to play the damn thing. I had gotten the Scars of Vellius disc just before I quit but never made it to those lands, and also had the first expansion -- what was it called, Karnask? Anyway, saw, like, one place there.
I'd love to be able to just load them up and wandering around, even if they were empty.
If Everquest let you have an insta-lvl 50 or something I'd sign up again for a month, just to wander the lands I hadn't wandered.
Ah, EverQuest. So many stories about that game, all of them along the same lines of "Back in my day, we walked to school with no shoes on in the snow, uphill both ways!" But the fact that its so cliche doesn't mean its not true!
One of my favorite examples is the Rogue class for the first months after release, possibly even up until the first expansion but I don't remember exactly. One would assume that some sort of stealth mechanic was the bread and butter of a Rogue class, right? Well, for a very, very long time, Rogues had two abilities. One was called Hide, one was called Sneak. Hide only worked while standing still, and Sneak only worked if you were behind the monster. So you basically couldn't sneak anywhere. Of course, a Wizard could just cast "invisibility" and start running around, but not the rogue! The day that they patched in the "use hide and sneak at the same time, to move around while hidden!" was the greatest day.
Luckily, during that long dark time of no sneaking around, we were compensated by being able to DISARM TRAPS. Except, there was only one trap in the game. And it was a giant rock that moved up and down and smashed people. For no damage, or any effect whatsoever. But you my friend, the rogue, could make it stop moving up and down for a second.
I played EQ from release until a little after the first expansion came out. The complete lack of solo play is what did me in.
However, some of the most memorable times I've had playing an MMO was on that game.
I remember (as an ogre) that since I was evil, the only way to do....anything...was to get your faction high enough to get into Freeport. The only way I knew to do that was to:
1. Have someone cast invisible on you.
2. Go into the dwarf hometown and buy milions of Tumpy Tonics, and then..
3. Go to the Freeport docks and wait for a spawn on a 15 or 30 minute timer to pop inside the bar and while still invisible, feed them Tumpy Tonics as fast as you possibly could before they would despawn.
If that invisiblity wore off, you were dead in either the dwarf town or Freeport.
For a short period of time, doing this quest was an unbelievably fast way to get 10 levels or more in a single day, which is absolutely unheard of in old-school EQ. It got nerfed relatively quickly.
Also, waiting a half hour for the boat, hopping off in the middle of the ocean and swimming to a few rocks in the middle of nowhere, and killing mermaids for really fast xp.
i was thinking more about this thread and EQ last night and remembered hell levels. Nothing like having a level take twice as long for no real reason. Fond memories gaining a single bubble of xp sitting in Sol B pulling kobolds all day, good times.
And remember when they added /gems? a game inside a game to help reduce the boring downtimes.
I started playing EQ1 about a month after release, and played up til a couple months before Luclin came out. I never got a character over level 45, but even so I still look back on that time as the best I’ve ever had in any MMO since (and I’ve played just about all of the major western MMOs except SWG).
It’s hard to express what it is that makes so many of us oldtimer EQers so nostalgic about it. It certainly wasn’t the game mechanics, they were brutal and would be seen as offensive to paying customers today. Corpse runs are nothing; when the game first launched and for the summer of 99, if you lost your corpse deep somewhere you couldn’t get again, you could /consent to have someone retrieve your goodies. Problem was, some people used this method to rip people off (even made fun of people on a web site called “EQ Idiotsâ€). These guys were on my server, was fun to argue with them… Fortunately they eventually changed it so /consent just allowed others to “corpse-drag†your stuff. But things like corpse-dragging are so unique and hilarious and bizarre that they wrap around the spectrum from insane to awesome. And EQ1 was full of stuff like that. Bizarre quest chains and NPCs and secret areas whose meaning are not spoon-fed to you - these things became legend as people came up with various theories (and who could tell what was real? There was no Thottbot or WoWHead back then). To this day there are various mysteries that still intrigue me and I hope to find out more about (like Pyzon and Varsoon in EQHills, and the placeholder mystery… the story behind the barb and ogre pirates and their collection of artifacts… so many more).
There were also so many fluff spells and utility spells that most games don’t have today, or if they do, they somehow aren’t as fun. My favorite character was an enchanter. Mezzing in its own right was so frustrating and yet so rewarding when your group worked with you - no other game has come close to that kind of mechanic, most consider it a broken mechanic I guess, yet I found it very fun. As an enchanter I had so many utility and fluff spells, it’s not even funny: all of the various illusions, including inanimate objects and every race; invis and invis to undead; levitate; bind sight (sparklies!); gravity flux; clarity; whirl til you hurl; the list goes on.
The game was hard, and every game since has gone out of its way to make sure everyone can solo (and I admit, nowadays I appreciate this in my MMOs); but damn if it didn’t make people work together. I met the best people I’ve ever met in any MMO way back in EQ1. No one knew anything; there were precious few spoiler sites (and most of those were just getting going and populated with incomplete or incorrect information); and you lived and died as a group (except of course the vile necros and droods and later the quad-kiting wizards). The world was big and dangerous. My lvl 16 warrior used to get PAID by people to escort them from Freeport to Qeynos (one coast of the main continent to another) - that’s insane! No one would do that in a modern MMO. You’d just take a gryphon ride… yawn!
Tradeskills did suck, though. I got carpal tunnel syndrome from doing jewelcrafting. And what kind of idiot thought a random 50-50 chance of losing a 500 plat recipe component, even with high enough skill, was a good thing?
But you just can’t beat the dungeons. So insane. Blackburrow, Crushbone, Unrest, Mistmoore, these places were legendary for their trains and insanity. You had to experience them to understand. Guk - oh man. It was an entire subculture to itself. And who was the masochist who thought it would be fun to make the night-blind barbarians have a single exit from their starter zone to the rest of the world through a pitch-dark, winding, gnoll infested tunnel that then emptied you into a dungeon (Blackburrow)? That guy was either a genius or a madman. And even though I gnashed my teeth and sweat bullets at the time, I have never forgotten the first time my barbarian warrior ventured out. I look back and smile, and wonder if any game will ever capture that magic again.
–
Following are some of my thoughts on what made EQ good and not so good. Keep in mind I never had a max-level character, and never did end-game raiding, and I quit before Luclin. I’m more of an explorer/socializer, although I do love loot. I’m sure there are a lot of things in my lists that “hard core†or end-game players would find fault with.
* WHAT EQ1 GOT RIGHT *
- secret areas. The Qeynos catacombs were awesome. Having “hidden†entrances to it from at least 6 different spots all over Qeynos was also awesome. Though after you knew what to look for (all false walls had the same “cut out hole†motif in their texture) it’s not really fair to call them secret or hidden. I also liked the back door to Permafrost and the tunnels under Freeport.
- fluff and utility spells.
- dungeon layout and difficulty.
- shared/contested dungeons. Though having some ability to instance either specific dungeons or specific portions of shared dungeons would have been welcome.
- overall difficulty. Wisps that could only be hit with magic weapons (which were rare at the levels you would encounter wisps); hill giants and griffons that could 1- or 2-hit kill low levels roaming the countryside.
- overall art direction and game lore/atmosphere. The Chessboard in Butcherblock Mountains. The Avaiak Treehouse in South Karana. The Diving Board in Lake Rathe. The minotaur hero rampaging in Steamfont Mountains. The locked door and well of doom in Befallen. The mystery of Pyzin/Varsoon and others in Qeynos Hills. The mystery of the clickable orbs in Ak’anon. The tree city of Kelethin (and the piles of dead newbies underneath). Kithicor Forest at night. The wooden bridge between North and West Karana. The hags in the Estate of Unrest. Lower Guk. The creepy named evil eyes in Beholder’s Gorge. The narrow, orc and gnoll besieged pass of High Pass Hold. The spaceship temple of Rodcet Nife and his sacred Koliandl fish in Qeynos. Fippy-frakking-Darkpaw and Queen Kliknik in the Qeynos newbie yard. Ambassador D’vinn and Emporer Crush in Crushbone. Hunting Hill Giants for plat in Rathe Mountains. Lockjaw, Sand Giants, and spectres in the Oasis of Marr. These things were legendary to everyone who played the original game in its early years, and instantly evoke all kinds of smiles and nostalgia.
- Monks. An avoidance-based meleer was brilliant. Giving them the weight restriction was inspired. It lead to a certain purity of gameplay and commitment to the spirit of the class that really made the folks who loved the monk class stand out, I found. They were different from everyone else. I also loved watching monks beat the crap out of the ogre bouncers in Ogguk, the battle-sound spam was impressive. *smack* *punch* *oof* *crack* *Boom!* *thwack!* *pow* *ugh!*
- non-PC factions. I liked that even though different races/religions would be KOS to different NPC factions, anyone could group with each other. I thought that was a lot better than the whole Alliance is for wimps, Go Horde! / Horde is for spastic 13 year old boys, Alliance is for mature grown-ups, and never the twain shall meet of WoW. WoW’s entire background is that the two factions have an uneasy alliance or at least peace, and there are no open wars or conflicts ongoing, yet for some reason my human warrior can’t group with a supposedly neutral, non-evil tauren. Not even a night elf druid and a tauren druid! I guess it makes sense in a PvP-centric game like WAR, though.
* THINGS OTHER PEOPLE PROBABLY WILL SAY WERE WRONG BUT I THINK WERE GOOD *
- naked corpse runs.
- limited spell slots.
- Droods/kiting/quad-kiting.
- Difficult world travel. Though the boats needed to run a little more regularly (and securely). This made ports, bind/gating, speed enhancement (SoW, Selo’s, JBoots), and knowing your way around valuable things, which I think is overall a good thing. One of the things I prided myself on when I played was pretty much knowing my way around every zone in the game without having to reference a map. The world had an evocative look and feel, and landmarks were important. If alchemy had been more viable (ie, if it didn’t cost the alchemist 10p to make a single SoW potion, so that they had to turn around and sell it for 15p+ to make up for the cost of learning the tradeskill), then SoWs for non-speed enhanced players would have been easy, affordable, and would have helped foster the alchemy player economy. As it was, it wasn’t ever that much of a problem to get a SoW from a passing druid or shaman (since that was 1 spell that pretty much never left their spellbar).
- zones.
- trains.
- quest mechanics.
- encouraged grouping.
- pulling. This isn’t something that the designers thought about for their game, but rather a logical player solution to the difficulty of the zones as presented. When I first left EQ1 I was somewhat disdainful of the whole “pull to safe location†mechanic as it didn’t seem very “realisticâ€. I thought other games’ promise of “roving hunting†sounded much better and more realistic - hey we’re really hunting! But, in retrospect, I actually enjoyed the camping/pulling mechanic more (in conjunction with the enforced downtime, though that could have been less harsh). It gave the folks sitting around the camp time to talk, and it gave the puller opportunities to shine and be skillful. The times I spent “hunting mammoths†on the frozen river and elsewhere in Everfrost remain some of my most cherished MMO memories. Running around, avoiding orc shaman and “mounties†(mountaineers), and “ibs†(ice boned skeletons, which could only be damaged by magic weapons), looking for mammoth calves, avoiding their enraged mothers, and bringing them back to the group on the ice river by the cliff wall… ah, good times, good times!
- no in-game auction house/broker. I love using the AH in WoW, but I gotta be honest, I loved the old trader spam in zone-wide chat that you used to see in the East Commmonlands tunnel and/or Greater Faydark. The people that were good at selling and marketing were more successful than those who weren’t, and it showed, like some sort of carnie/used-car salesman. It forced people to interact face to face with each other, which was special in a way that the AH is not.
* WHAT EQ1 DID WRONG *
- Tradeskills - they were just evil. They were way too expensive in terms of material components and time required to get good. You could “fail†on combines for no good reason, losing components that cost hundreds of plat (the largest currency in the game). To make useful things in some, you had to make hundreds of annoying lesser components. Some were just too expensive to be able to sustain an actual economy, such as alchemy. There was no harvesting mechanic at all, all the components had to be store bought.
- non-caster reliance on casters for binding. I didn’t mind the whole binding/gating mechanic in EQ1, or even that casters could bind themselves wherever they wanted and non-casters could only bind in cities. But it did suck if you were not able to bind yourself to have to beg and plead for someone to take time out, come find you, group with you, cast the spell (which they would probably have to find in their spell book and memorize, and then re-memorize whatever spell it replaced afterwards). Having either an NPC in cities to do it (for free, like was added around the time of Planes of Power), or an innate ability (like in EQ2) is a good alternative, and better than WoW’s inn/hearthstone mechanic in my opinion (as I think giving the casters the ability to bind anywhere and gate to it makes them feel more like, well, casters than the meleers).
- experience loss on death. Just crappy. I understand they wanted death to hurt and thus make people play smarter to avoid death, but in the size of the worlds and player-bases that EQ1 had, death was inevitable. And in dungeons, multiple deaths were inevitable. Since the point of the game was to encourage people to group up to take on harder things, thereafter punishing them with cruel experience loss on death (and the even crueler ability to actually lose a level in the process) was just uncalled for. Capped experience debt is a much saner, humane death penalty.
- hell levels. The experience leveling curve in EQ1 was some twisted, illogical attempt at creating a non-linear scaling curve which took orders of magnitude longer to level on a per level basis the higher level you got. That in itself might be arguably an ok idea, but the implementation in EQ1 had some sort of error in the math calculation which caused every 5th level to take inordinately more experience to complete than it should, starting around level 40 or so. It was just cruel, weird, and people hated it.
- Racial/hybrid-class experience penalties. Penalizing people with slower progression just for picking certain classes or races is just stupid. Even worse when you combine 2 (troll shadowknights were particularly sad - 140% experience to level relative to the average. +20% extra for the troll and +20% extra for the shadowknight).
- Halflings with superman stats. Seriously, why would a halfling, of all things, have one of the best strength scores of all the races that could be a rogue? Their stats were so godly, that they were way overplayed in the game. Halfling druids and rogues were everywhere.
- Staring at the spellbook to “meditateâ€. Seriously, that was just plain bad. In the early months/years of the game, when you were “medding†or meditating to regain mana if you were a caster, the game forced you to sit and then covered your entire viewport with the spellbook interface you used to memorize spells. You couldn’t see anything going on around you at all.
- Ridiculously low health and mana regeneration rates (downtime).
- Sense heading. Ugh. I mean, come on, really. We’re supposed to be playing daring and heroic adventurers. I’m just a normal nerdy guy, and I can tell the cardinal directions well enough in the real world just from looking at the sun’s location. Having to press a button over and over and over again just to be able to pretend our characters know which direction they are going is moronic. Just give us a compass already and get over yourselves.
- nightblindness. It was a little too much in EQ1, and just about right in EQ2. That twisting, gnoll-infested, pitch-black tunnel which was the only way for the nightblind barbarians to leave their starting zone was particularly cruel. Though not as cruel as making it empty out into Blackburrow, right next to an aggressive, diseased bear.
- spawn-camps. I’m talking about needing items for quests which only had a 30% chance of dropping off rare spawns which might spawn once every 48 hours or something stupid.
- broken quests.
- quest rewards. They sucked for the level of effort needed to accomplish them.
- the nerf bat.
- poor community relations.
- no in-game mailbox. I made an art of getting around this limitation to get items and money to my alts by finding the most out of the way places to drop things on the ground to pick up with the alt. But still, being able to mail things to alts and to other people is a basic necessity nowadays, I think.
- The entire continent of Odus. Seriously, what the heck? You have 3 continents at release, and one of them is entirely worthless, undesirable, and so hated that characters who start there count the seconds before they can leave for good and never look back, and no one else in the game even has a reason to ever go there. Nice job! A real shame, too, because the city of Erudin was one of the nicest laid out and unique in the game with its magical teleporters to move around.
- trivial loot code. I hated it. If I want to take my level 100 superman to the level 10 zone to get a drop off some named mob, so what? I’m paying money, too. I can understand wanting to prevent people from farming, but the trivial loot code seemed like a poor implementation to me.
- Forced grouping (inability to solo). This is the flip side of the encouraged grouping, which I think is ok. It’s not ok to make it 100% impossible to solo, though, for everyone except 3 or 4 special classes.
- Weak-feeling melee. My first character was a barbarian warrior. I chose that because I wanted to play a character that oozed strength, ferocity, and the ability to survive anything thrown his way (kind of like Conan, maybe). What I got instead was a character that couldn’t handle a 1 on 1 fight with an even or slightly lower level enemy by himself, or if he did somehow manage to survive, was out of commission for at least 20 minutes to regenerate health. That is absolutely moronic. People want to feel strong, not weak. Find some way.
- Inability for friends with too large of a level gap to group. If you play 4 hours a day, and your friend plays 2 hours every other week, you’re not going to be grouping with your main characters. True, you could start an alt and only play that when your friend is on, but that only works for close friends you can coordinate well with. What about the guy you never knew before but grouped with 2 months ago and really liked? You meet him again now but can’t group because your level disparity is too high. The mentoring mechanic that many subsequent games have come up with is a nice fix for this sort of thing.
EQ's tradeskills were evil beyond reckoning. You could learn them all on one character(there was even a quest that pretty much required this) but just raising one of them was a level of hell that WoW's tradeskills don't come close to. I remember trying to level up blacksmithing. You had to have molds for the item...and ore(and whatever else it required but those were the two main items). The molds were sold in Freeport. The ore was sold half a continent away in another town.
The components were expensive. There were no ore nodes to mine. There were no mounts. There were no flightpaths. You had very limited bag space and every item you carried encumbered you(and the ore was extremely heavy). The molds and ore did not stack. It might take half an hour or more just run from one city to the other. So you'd load up on molds in Freeport and run/waddle over to Highpass to buy ore to forge 4 or 5 items and pray for a skillup. Ugh.
Oh and Khoram....rare spawn/rare drops....the mage epic weapon quest needed that damn cloak off the damn pegasus in g'damn southern karana. Said mob spawned like once or twice a month or something ridiculous like that. The cloak was like a 1% drop or something. I got lucky in that I'd killed him a year before the epic quest was put in and already had it. Otherwise I might not have even started the mage epic quest in the first place.
Pyzjin....was just a very rare mob with some placeholders. Once you figured out which those were getting her to spawn was cake. The chance that she had the Glowing Black Stone when she did was almost nil though. Varsoon was just a rare spawn of a rare spawn I think. I don't remember the conditions of him being spawned anymore but I do remember him tear-assing around the zone and causing a ruckus when he did.
Speaking of the quest that required all the tradeskills....there were a couple of very long, involved quest chains in the Velious expansion. They were kind of unique because you started off with this crappy magic item but with each step of the quest chain that you finished you got an upgraded version of the item back(kind of like the Karazahn rings except you had to do a bunch of quests instead of rep grinding). One of the chains involved a shoulder armor piece.
The other was a ring. The culmination of the ring quest involved a war to stop a giant invasion of the frost dwarf city of Thurgadin. Fail to stop the invasion and the giants would in fact get into the city and kill every living thing inside...player and npc alike. Fail the quest chain and you'd lose your item and have to start over.
- Racial/hybrid-class experience penalties. Penalizing people with slower progression just for picking certain classes or races is just stupid. Even worse when you combine 2 (troll shadowknights were particularly sad - 140% experience to level relative to the average. +20% extra for the troll and +20% extra for the shadowknight).
Yeah, let's talk about Shadow knights. This was only part of the bullshit of being one. Apparently their logic was sort of a D&D thing. Because you're a hybrid you basically have the ability of two classes, so it should take you longer than other classes to level.
Except you pretty much sucked at both roles. You'd get necro spells like 10-20 levels later than the Necro would. By the time you got them, they were essentially useless save a few like Feign Death.
There was pretty much no reason to have Shadow Knights on raids except for off tanking or pulling, and other classes could do those tasks better. You couldn't tank raid mobs without being severely overgeared (and often not even then). You couldn't deal good damage, and your class defining ability, Harm Touch, sucked until Planes of Power. Even then it wasn't anything to write home about.
On the plus side, I looked cool and was good in PVP. Too bad PVP was unbalanced as shit. I also got handed any SK only loot since I was basically the only one in the guild for a while.
SK's eventually got balanced, but it took an extremely long time to happen. Same for paladins.
I always thought it was funny that their best threat building spell was the level 1 disease cloud, because of a "bug" with the way threat was calculated. It was a spell that did ridiculously low amounts of damage over a period of like 10 minutes. The bug was that dot threat was calculated at cast time, and took into account all the damage that the spell was capable of doing. So if you chain cast disease cloud, you could be credited for thousands of points of damage worth of threat when you actually did nothing.
My favorite trade skill story (my bard was a smith) involved loading up on ore till I was hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds overweight. Because I had Selo's, I could still move quite fast even so overweight, when normally you'd be rooted to the spot. I turn around to start running somewhere with all my ore, go down one step and instantly die from falling damage, from falling like 1 foot.
This led me to eventually convert my entire inventory to Tinkerer's bags (100% weight reducing bags).
Khoram, your list of things EQ did wrong is interesting, because they eventually addressed almost every one of those issues in some way. Downtime, for instance, was greatly reduced, following WoW's example, I believe.
I do remember getting lost in that tunnel, and the one from QRG to Qeynos Hills. There was a problem with the geometry in those tunnels and the walls wouldn't catch light from a light source. I'm not sure that ever got fixed.
Pyzjin....was just a very rare mob with some placeholders. Once you figured out which those were getting her to spawn was cake. The chance that she had the Glowing Black Stone when she did was almost nil though. Varsoon was just a rare spawn of a rare spawn I think. I don't remember the conditions of him being spawned anymore but I do remember him tear-assing around the zone and causing a ruckus when he did.
Well, see, that's just it. I spent a *ahem* lot of time reading at work when I played EQ. I found several interesting threads near the end of my playtime where people were discussing the mysteries they had found. I remember someone mentioning that there was a relation between Pyzin spawning, Varsoon spawning, and that necro dude that walked all around the zone. This person implied that if you paid attention and somehow tied in knowledge gained from a bunch of other quests and clues, that there was some grand connection. Said person claimed they could make Pyzin or either version of Varsoon (or the undead attack on Qeynos) spawn by completing certain things in the zone. Maybe it was all BS, I dunno.
I'd still like to know if Brad was just hopped up on drugs or if the original Fiery Avenger really was doable.
I had an SK, a DE SK. Yeah, the 10 levels too low necro spells blew, but I loved the SK anyway. They rocked. Original model DE SK in plate armor looked freaking awesome, man!
One of the most fun things was when sony opened up the discord server. It was only around for a couple months, but man it was the most hardcore thing in any mmo.
Basically it reset the game to vanilla state, turned on full pvp and full loot, then made it if you died, (for any reason at all) your character would be deleted, and you would respawn as a fresh level 1. I made it to like level 20 one time, I don't think anyone ever made it to cap.
My favorite unsolved mystery in EQ was the necromancer series for the Iksar. You start this quest at level 1 that gives you a helm with stats, and as you level up you continue to quest and make the item more powerful.
The quest eventually petered out around level 50 (if I remember right) and there were lots of hints that a followup quest actually did exist.. just that no players had found it. Necromancers across all the servers spent months and months trying to piece together clues to the problem.
Don't know if it was ever solved, it wasn't before I quit the game at any rate.
Yes I remember reading and following a thread about that iksar necro quest. The last I remember reading about it was around 2004 or so, some dev finally looked into it and found that there was a typo in the item db or something, basically making it broken. He fixed it up and the quest series ended with some mundane crap, making the whole thing rather anti-climatic.
Anyone remember something about that female barb and male ogre pirate in FP/FV? Someone mentioned there was some mystery quest with those two.
I played a warrior, it's saddled me with a terrible persecution complex. Once Kunark hit, the class remained pretty much completely static for a long, long, *long* time, due to one ability: the Defensive discipline.
3 minutes of taking ~60% less damage or so, 5 minute cooldown. This made warriors the only main tank worth discussing for the next 4 expansions or so, but at a nasty price -- you only needed 1, maybe 2, and warriors were third string or worse at everything else. Group tanking? lost to paladins and shadowknights, because their aggro was a couple orders of magnitude better. Damage? "Master of melee" translated to: "Dead Last". I still get jumpy whenever blizzard starts fiddling with their riff on the class.
Awesome (and horrible) stories:
I was a barbarian warrior, almost exclusively. My specialty was pulling, and training. I was really, really good at training (god hates me). In the early days (started at release) I recall hunting mammoth calves. Nice, safe, level 10ish calves, with level 30-40 mommies. One ill-fated time, the group was sitting on the rocky outcropping near the last guardpost out of the maze. I headed out into the wasteland, spot a calf, tag it, and hotfoot back to where I needed to be. Most of the time I actually got back there without getting lost.
One time, however, I tagged one a little too close to his mom, who was a bit too close to another couple, and so on. I charge back to our camp, turn around, and the entire ridgeline turns brown. We're talking Raiders of the Lost Ark intro here. Naturally, the group scatters to the four winds, and I start booking back into the maze for the city zoneline. Newbies were shouting about mammoths wandering the maze for the next hour and a half, it was glorious.
Much, much later, after many horrible experiences in unrest, befallen, and just about everywhere else one could get steamrolled, I found Lower Guk and Solusek B. One of these I loved, the other I loathed. In LGuk, there were enough camps to usually scrounge up a group slot within an hour, and once I had a grip there, the zone was mine. With 70+ people in zone, I could still reliably pull pretty much every trash mob on the dead side, and about half of the live side, and thus keep the experience points flowing in rivers.
Solusek B however, I usually tried soloing near the front, whatever (green) kobold I beat up would start running, I'd give chase, and suddenly, I'm in the bug caves, with spiders all over me. Twas horrible.
Sometimes I miss the social aspect of bullshitting in global with the 7-8 other camps in the zone, but I'll take the ability to solo, and no shortage of mobs over that any day.
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You could get some huge trains in Kurn's Tower as well. Of course, the largest trains I have ever witnessed took place in Karnor's Castle. I always hated it when people didn't follow the "train right" rule on my server (I assume that was common on other servers as well, like using the EC tunnel for trading). Luckily I could just feign death (when it didn't decide to fail) and live. One time I saw a monk DC at the entrance when a train was being pulled there and then proceeded to solo the whole fucking thing. I have no idea how that happened.
I lived at B2 in Old Sebilis whenever the camp was free (I heard it was nerfed due to bots sometime after I quit playing). 'Twas a great source of money, especially when you didn't have to share with a group.
Speaking of Monks, I just loved that class. Before all the expansions turned them into the ezmode that they became later. If you saw a fellow Monk out in the world, you new he suffered the same trials as you. Camping for Raster and all those other bastards; long ass chain quests that never payed off in rewards anywhere close to classes; lack of class specific armor. Remember weight limits? If you went over 14 stones, your armor class dropped by increasing amounts. But that included everything you carried and wore, even the bags and money! So you were always poorer than other classes, cause you couldn't loot just to fill your bags, and you hardly ever took all the money off a corpse cause while 100 copper might equal 1 silver, it sure as hell didn't weight the same.
I could go on and on, and I have to my friends every time they bitch about something in WoW being particularly difficult or some mob on a long spawn.
Also, ig, I'm with you on the camping for epics thing. I played a warrior (a whole other kettle of shit...tanking with no threat abilities other than weapon procs made me the beast of a tank that I am now), and I don't know how long I spent in the Emerald Jungle looking for Sev so I could get my green dragon scale. Still nothing worse than the old ragefire camp though, before he got moved to sol b.
Those guys were all posers. Vabtoo, now HE was the champion monk!
http://xzzy.org/files/games/eq/vabtoochamp.jpg
Even had a magazine article to prove it!
I think the most memorable part of EQ was the guild drama. You'd get three or four "top" guilds at each other's throats to claim a boss, with all kinds of forum bickering and accusations of "strat stealing" or "cheating" to try and get an edge. With PoP, there was the ever-popular "cock block" to try and deny other guilds from progression by monopolizing bosses.
To wit:
(a surviving relic from an old flame war regarding PoP)
It was hilarious seeing factions grow on the server, guilds would form alliances to cause headache to whoever the enemy of the moment was, those alliances would fracture, and new ones would form.
Lots of amazing memories, the world just felt so large and alive (and deadly). The lack of hand-holding that game had was one of the things that i remember the most. Even the simple act of traversing a zone was an adventure due to the lack of a map function (/loc ftw) and you really felt the acomplishment when you found your way to where you wanted to be.
I really loved the community and social aspect of the game, and how a non-instanced world forced/encouraged the guilds on a server to co-operate (or at least tolerate each other enough to stick to a schedule and rules regarding planes/dragons/etc). Camping message boards so that you could secure a plane for a guild raid just was another level of hardcore that todays MMOs dont really have.
My first character was replaced soon after Kunark came out, when i fell in love with my Iksar monk. Such a great class (and i too am one of those who prefers the older models over the new) tons of memories of Kunark. Also i cant forget the Raster camp, and the thrill when he finally spawned for me, and the near disaster as i engaged him out of excitement before i was at full health and then ended up shouting for help to the zone, and the last minute heal from an amazing cleric that literally saved the day. I never played in real high end stuff, but i remember pulling for Hate raids (there has to be something wront when the pull team gets the most xp on a raid, but it was great). I think i ended up at around level 55 when i quit (shortly after Luclin came out), and all the MMOs i have played after(WoW, WaR) have never really left me with the same feelings as EQ.
And as a super nerd ending, i met my girlfriend and soon to be wife in the Lake of Ill Omen. We both have fond memories of the time spent playing the game togeather.
I still wish some game would recreate the bard class. I know FFXI had it, but I have no idea how it played, as I never got a character above level 9 in that game, and therefore could never unlock it.
As for clerics being sadistic and going /anon or /rp , bullshit, that's not sadistic that's protecting your sanity. I don't know if you ever played a cleric or enchanter, or to a lesser extent druid/wizard.. well I had all of these up to level cap in PoP expansion (was that lvl 65 or 70 I can't remember) You'd get tells from assholes all over the world demanding you come to them and cleric) rez them, enchanter) KEI them, Druid/wizard) port them.
EQ had some great communities, but it also had a ton of assholes who thought that because you played class x, that meant you were everyones bitch and HAD to go do things for them.
One of my fonder memories was the first time I solo'd some of the WW dragons on my shaman. I think on that first day I killed 4 seperate dragons, some of which were ones that "couldn't be solod" cause they hit for too hard with spell damage, and debuffed all your buffs. I even once pulled one of those "hard" ones that debuff all your buffs (which sucks as a shaman using torpor as your main heal, think a HoT that takes quite awhile to fully end, so having it removed all the time sucked) then got one of those wandering dragons as an add, and took them both down. It was fucking amazing and a very long fight, that involved a lot, and I do mean A LOT of using my shaman epic dot, and just trying to keep myself up, while my little jobober wolf pet nipped at their feet.
I also liked how night was fucking dark as hell! Torches or better yet moonstones, iirc, were a must have. Unless you were one of those unclean races that could see in the dark. :P
I have a story of a very foolish Enchanter.
I had a Dark Elf Enchanter who was lvl 14 at the time. I was part of a guild and I was invited to join them for a raid of some Manor. I forget the name, but I think it was the zone near Butcherblock. Well I told them that I was only 14 and the zonel was a bit to high for me, they said no worries come anyway and gain some easy levels. I agree.
Now I should point out that I had recently upgraded my RAM so my load times went from epically long to instant.
I arrive at the zone and quickly get invited to join one of the many Guild groups. They welcome me with open arms and tell me to hang back and soak up the xp. We find a nice room that had a couple mobs and a named mob and set up shop. For awhile things were great. I died a few times though and the corpse run from BB was starting to annoy me. So I thought, y'know the group is doing so well that I can just bind right here and save myself the walk.
This did not end well.
No sooner had I bound myself then a dude came running through our room with a train at his back. The party wiped. I loaded instantly at my bind spot right in the room, I was killed. I loaded instantly at my bind spot right in the room, I was killed. So on and so on. A few minutes pass before my group was able to clear and lock down the room so I could respawn in peace without being insta-killed. I think I lost a few levels that day.
A hard lesson learned indeed!
i figured out a way to root 8 mobs at a time out on some big ice glacier, get em all together, and aoe them down
man, that was fun as hell
also, being able to self-sow, wolf form, and porting wherever?
i loved exploring
SE++ Map Steam
The very first character I ever created was a Ranger over in the Qeynos area. I remember trying to navigate the tunnel to get into Surefall Glade so I could train some skills. It was night and whatever race I'd picked couldn't see in the dark so I ended up going in circles in this windy, twisted tunnel until I finally gave up and made another character instead.
Another of my earlier characters was a troll warrior. Early on I didn't realize the zones were basically rectangles with a couple points leading to another zone. Without any kind of map function it was easy to get lost. I was creeping along the zone wall killing stuff(for a quest I think) when I happened upon the entrance to Guk. I started killing the frogloks there but I aggroed one too many so I had to run. In my panic I ran the wrong way...going away from town...and ran past more of the frogloks aggroing them. As I ran I would jump causing me to leap forward and gain some distance but each time you jumped it used up some endurance. For awhile I began to pull away from the frogloks chasing me(by now there were a good 6-8 of them) but eventually my endurance ran low and they started to catch up. They'd poke me from behind doing a bit of damage...at which point I'd jump ahead out of reach again because my endurance had regened a little bit. The troll's natural health regen was just barely enough to keep me alive. I don't know how long this went on with those damn frogs chasing me all over the swamp. Somehow I got turned around again and ended up back by Guk. Eventually I found my way back to town where the guards intercepted some of the mobs chasing me but I kept running straight into town. Talk about a narrow escape!
I never did a whole lot with that character but there was a night where I ended up camping a spot in Karnor's Castle(level 50ish stuff I think). For several hours I tanked for this group and we had no healer. We chewed through the mobs just killing everything in sight and pulling extra stuff just because we could. Very fun evening!
When I created my iksar shadowknight I transferred some really nice armor and weapons to him to speed the leveling process. We're talking expensive, hard to obtain stuff. So I'm running around outside in one of the iksar starting areas killing stuff and I manage to find a hole to fall into. Who puts a concealed hole into a deep pit in a newbie zone? The fall killed me of course....it was a loooong way down. So here I am now, respawned and naked because all my stuff is down on my corpse. I spent the next two hours trying to get back down there without dying and having nightmare visions of not being able to recover any of the stuff. I finally manage by some luck to make the fall and not die. I then spent another couple hours creeping around these tunnels trying avoid other pitfalls and hoping I don't run into anything nasty. I eventually found the exit and breathed a huge sigh of relief.
I remember the epic trains in lower guk and blackburrow when the entire zone would get roused and clean everything out from top to bottom of the zone. And accidentally attacking vendors when you meant to sell to them instead. Dunno how many times I did that. Kinda funny to harm touch one with my shadow knight but then the guards come running.
I got into all sorts of trouble with my mage. I ended up having to do a lot of faction work to repair all the ones I inadvertently ruined in my travels. At the end there I think the only people that hated me were the Freeport guards. I occasionally went on killing sprees wiping them all out. When I first started out with him I remember having such a hard time killing the wimpy little orc pawns in greater faydark. About half the time I'd end up running away because I couldn't manage to kill them and I was overjoyed when one of them dropped a piece of cloth armor(equivalent to a statless grey item in WoW). I remember soloing a quest at level 30 in one of the mountain zones(the one with all the hill giants and giant skeletons down south near the troll/ogre starting area). I died quite a few times doing this quest(which wasn't meant to be soloed)....for a bracer that had +2 intellect and cast the Eye of Zomm when clicked on(similar to WoW eye of kilrogg).
My mage ended up being my highest character. The pinnacle of my achievement in EQ was obtaining his epic weapon(a staff with some nice stats which summoned a really badass air elemental). By the time I got it the pet it summoned wasn't quite so badass anymore. The stuff I went through to get that.....but with a lot of luck(and some help from friends) I managed to finish it. I didn't have the heart or the will to try and upgrade it or do the epic 2.0 quest.
Anyone who's ever crossed the Ocean of Tears will be familiar with this. See, in EQ boats crossed between continents but they didn't cut the trip out of the middle. You had to ride the whole way(about a 15-20 minute trip). The boat would leave the town of Freeport and zone into the Ocean of Tears. It would stop at one island and then continue on passing an island with some cyclops along it's route. Sometimes one of the cyclops would get dragged out in the water and aggro the people on the boat and kill them. Your corpse generally ended up on the bottom of the sea. You'd end up naked, back in town(or wherever you were bound at) and now needing to do a corpse run(and secure some means of underwater breathing to do it). Good luck avoiding the sharks! When you were done collecting your stuff you still had to catch the boat to finish your ride.
EQ was also infamous for putting mobs twice the level of the zone they were in. Griffins in east karana, Varsoon the necromancer in Qeynos hills, Sand giants and Spectres in the desert oasis of Marr. Devilsaurs and Felreavers are but a pale imitation of these horrors.
I could probably go on for hours with stories....such a frustrating game but rewarding too because of the effort and challenge.
I don't think I'd be able to deal with it today, but I agree with this a 100%. this made the game so much more immersive for me (that and being forced into a first person view because every other view was horrible)
Fansy the Famous Bard
i meant sadistic if they didnt have /rpg or /anon on, the ones who did i could totally understand
i attribute my ability to type with speed to EQ. Pulling was definitly my favorite thing to do, and was often my job in groups (nothing like breaking up and maintaining a spawn and keeping the mobs coming at a good rate (mana be damned!)
One of the funniest people ever in game.
Sullon Zek was the absolute greatest server to ever grace an MMO, and seeing as it was a server for the best game ever...
well, it was obviously the greatest thing that has existed.
Bards in Vanguard are EQ bards version 2. They were one of its bright spots even during its rocky beginning.
lol I remember I did my first linux install to run Show EQ, mostly to have a damn mini map.
Started in Beta on a PVP server, the whole MMO thing was new to me as I didnt play UO. I got hooked after subscribed at startup. Rolled on Rallos Zek, Dwarf Cleric , made it to level 20ish before I moved to Test (character copy) we kept playing until a nice loot table bug caused all the creatures in Sol A(or was it B I forget) to drop Nagafin loot. THat was a nice bit of loot, which ended up getting the server wiped. After much bitching by the Test community, characters where reinstated but were naked, we at that point moved servers to Prexus ( I think )
I ditched the Cleric and rolled a Rogue,
hooked up with a smaller guild that was doing planes runs etc called Stasis (Velious expansion was out by now) and I took my Rogue out with the big guys and just skilled up my abilities and shot the shit, one time I hide snuck to the big Gelantious Cubes in Skyshrine (was level 25 at the time, these where level 60+ mobs) had fun taking swipes here and there and leveling up. A nice dagger dropped and I was the only rogue there so I got it, much to the dismay of a wizard who bitched about it severly ("Its got +2 int on it I can put it in my ranged slot, why are you giving it to the 25 rogue, he isnt hitting for shit. blah blah almost ragequit the guild")
Ended up getting the rogue to 48 did some planes runs got some POG boots and then handed the character over to someone else and quit the game.
Gave it ago again years ago when the PLatnium edition came up, played for 2 months then quit again. Havent looked back.
Not surprised you feel this way after seeing you say the graphics were outdated on release.. wait what? UO was the only other mmo and it was still 2D at EQ1 release. Come on.
Anyone actually still playing? Some of the new stuff looks like it has made the game more solo viable in SoD.
allchuffedup#1671
lol that was great, he reminds me of the Galad from UO
allchuffedup#1671
Not sure about EQ2 but EQ still has reasonable server pops when I last played a few months ago. Everyone is pretty high-end now though so all the pre level 80 zones are pretty much dead. Should be a new progression server launching in a few months which will be fun for a couple of months until the crap expansions start opening.
I played a bard, and nothing describes the game better for me than pulling PoG for 8 hours straight, kiting around crap endlessly. The fact that pee bottles at the computer was a running joke back then makes me laugh right now.
Also, I don't think many games have uberguilds with 100+ members coordination on raids these days. I think EVE does, but WoW's 25-man raids are NOTHING. Coordinating 70+ people while on dial up (including some dipshits on AOL dial up) running 486s without mods was absolutely crazy.
"65 Pally LFG PST"
Bard for lyfe here. Nothing like breaking a camp and bringing in a mob just as the last one dies, mez parking it for debuffs, buffing the group and limp-wristedly flailing away at it.
I loved the LDoN expansion. Man I was the master of pulling those things. Last time I logged on (about 6 months ago), I was still on the leaderboard in several categories.
So naturally, my fond test memory is the old Freeport to Qeynos run (did I remember those towns correctly?). Was still fairly low level and getting deep into the plains was a dangerous thing for me. Hooked up with some folks who said they'd escort me across. Cool! A chance to span the continent!
Cut to the chance, many dangers later we made it and it was AWESOME.
My biggest regret is that I didn't get to see all the lands, and can't without paying to play the damn thing. I had gotten the Scars of Vellius disc just before I quit but never made it to those lands, and also had the first expansion -- what was it called, Karnask? Anyway, saw, like, one place there.
I'd love to be able to just load them up and wandering around, even if they were empty.
If Everquest let you have an insta-lvl 50 or something I'd sign up again for a month, just to wander the lands I hadn't wandered.
One of my favorite examples is the Rogue class for the first months after release, possibly even up until the first expansion but I don't remember exactly. One would assume that some sort of stealth mechanic was the bread and butter of a Rogue class, right? Well, for a very, very long time, Rogues had two abilities. One was called Hide, one was called Sneak. Hide only worked while standing still, and Sneak only worked if you were behind the monster. So you basically couldn't sneak anywhere. Of course, a Wizard could just cast "invisibility" and start running around, but not the rogue! The day that they patched in the "use hide and sneak at the same time, to move around while hidden!" was the greatest day.
Luckily, during that long dark time of no sneaking around, we were compensated by being able to DISARM TRAPS. Except, there was only one trap in the game. And it was a giant rock that moved up and down and smashed people. For no damage, or any effect whatsoever. But you my friend, the rogue, could make it stop moving up and down for a second.
However, some of the most memorable times I've had playing an MMO was on that game.
I remember (as an ogre) that since I was evil, the only way to do....anything...was to get your faction high enough to get into Freeport. The only way I knew to do that was to:
1. Have someone cast invisible on you.
2. Go into the dwarf hometown and buy milions of Tumpy Tonics, and then..
3. Go to the Freeport docks and wait for a spawn on a 15 or 30 minute timer to pop inside the bar and while still invisible, feed them Tumpy Tonics as fast as you possibly could before they would despawn.
If that invisiblity wore off, you were dead in either the dwarf town or Freeport.
For a short period of time, doing this quest was an unbelievably fast way to get 10 levels or more in a single day, which is absolutely unheard of in old-school EQ. It got nerfed relatively quickly.
Also, waiting a half hour for the boat, hopping off in the middle of the ocean and swimming to a few rocks in the middle of nowhere, and killing mermaids for really fast xp.
And remember when they added /gems? a game inside a game to help reduce the boring downtimes.
It’s hard to express what it is that makes so many of us oldtimer EQers so nostalgic about it. It certainly wasn’t the game mechanics, they were brutal and would be seen as offensive to paying customers today. Corpse runs are nothing; when the game first launched and for the summer of 99, if you lost your corpse deep somewhere you couldn’t get again, you could /consent to have someone retrieve your goodies. Problem was, some people used this method to rip people off (even made fun of people on a web site called “EQ Idiotsâ€). These guys were on my server, was fun to argue with them… Fortunately they eventually changed it so /consent just allowed others to “corpse-drag†your stuff. But things like corpse-dragging are so unique and hilarious and bizarre that they wrap around the spectrum from insane to awesome. And EQ1 was full of stuff like that. Bizarre quest chains and NPCs and secret areas whose meaning are not spoon-fed to you - these things became legend as people came up with various theories (and who could tell what was real? There was no Thottbot or WoWHead back then). To this day there are various mysteries that still intrigue me and I hope to find out more about (like Pyzon and Varsoon in EQHills, and the placeholder mystery… the story behind the barb and ogre pirates and their collection of artifacts… so many more).
There were also so many fluff spells and utility spells that most games don’t have today, or if they do, they somehow aren’t as fun. My favorite character was an enchanter. Mezzing in its own right was so frustrating and yet so rewarding when your group worked with you - no other game has come close to that kind of mechanic, most consider it a broken mechanic I guess, yet I found it very fun. As an enchanter I had so many utility and fluff spells, it’s not even funny: all of the various illusions, including inanimate objects and every race; invis and invis to undead; levitate; bind sight (sparklies!); gravity flux; clarity; whirl til you hurl; the list goes on.
The game was hard, and every game since has gone out of its way to make sure everyone can solo (and I admit, nowadays I appreciate this in my MMOs); but damn if it didn’t make people work together. I met the best people I’ve ever met in any MMO way back in EQ1. No one knew anything; there were precious few spoiler sites (and most of those were just getting going and populated with incomplete or incorrect information); and you lived and died as a group (except of course the vile necros and droods and later the quad-kiting wizards). The world was big and dangerous. My lvl 16 warrior used to get PAID by people to escort them from Freeport to Qeynos (one coast of the main continent to another) - that’s insane! No one would do that in a modern MMO. You’d just take a gryphon ride… yawn!
Tradeskills did suck, though. I got carpal tunnel syndrome from doing jewelcrafting. And what kind of idiot thought a random 50-50 chance of losing a 500 plat recipe component, even with high enough skill, was a good thing?
But you just can’t beat the dungeons. So insane. Blackburrow, Crushbone, Unrest, Mistmoore, these places were legendary for their trains and insanity. You had to experience them to understand. Guk - oh man. It was an entire subculture to itself. And who was the masochist who thought it would be fun to make the night-blind barbarians have a single exit from their starter zone to the rest of the world through a pitch-dark, winding, gnoll infested tunnel that then emptied you into a dungeon (Blackburrow)? That guy was either a genius or a madman. And even though I gnashed my teeth and sweat bullets at the time, I have never forgotten the first time my barbarian warrior ventured out. I look back and smile, and wonder if any game will ever capture that magic again.
–
Following are some of my thoughts on what made EQ good and not so good. Keep in mind I never had a max-level character, and never did end-game raiding, and I quit before Luclin. I’m more of an explorer/socializer, although I do love loot. I’m sure there are a lot of things in my lists that “hard core†or end-game players would find fault with.
* WHAT EQ1 GOT RIGHT *
- secret areas. The Qeynos catacombs were awesome. Having “hidden†entrances to it from at least 6 different spots all over Qeynos was also awesome. Though after you knew what to look for (all false walls had the same “cut out hole†motif in their texture) it’s not really fair to call them secret or hidden. I also liked the back door to Permafrost and the tunnels under Freeport.
- fluff and utility spells.
- dungeon layout and difficulty.
- shared/contested dungeons. Though having some ability to instance either specific dungeons or specific portions of shared dungeons would have been welcome.
- overall difficulty. Wisps that could only be hit with magic weapons (which were rare at the levels you would encounter wisps); hill giants and griffons that could 1- or 2-hit kill low levels roaming the countryside.
- overall art direction and game lore/atmosphere. The Chessboard in Butcherblock Mountains. The Avaiak Treehouse in South Karana. The Diving Board in Lake Rathe. The minotaur hero rampaging in Steamfont Mountains. The locked door and well of doom in Befallen. The mystery of Pyzin/Varsoon and others in Qeynos Hills. The mystery of the clickable orbs in Ak’anon. The tree city of Kelethin (and the piles of dead newbies underneath). Kithicor Forest at night. The wooden bridge between North and West Karana. The hags in the Estate of Unrest. Lower Guk. The creepy named evil eyes in Beholder’s Gorge. The narrow, orc and gnoll besieged pass of High Pass Hold. The spaceship temple of Rodcet Nife and his sacred Koliandl fish in Qeynos. Fippy-frakking-Darkpaw and Queen Kliknik in the Qeynos newbie yard. Ambassador D’vinn and Emporer Crush in Crushbone. Hunting Hill Giants for plat in Rathe Mountains. Lockjaw, Sand Giants, and spectres in the Oasis of Marr. These things were legendary to everyone who played the original game in its early years, and instantly evoke all kinds of smiles and nostalgia.
- Monks. An avoidance-based meleer was brilliant. Giving them the weight restriction was inspired. It lead to a certain purity of gameplay and commitment to the spirit of the class that really made the folks who loved the monk class stand out, I found. They were different from everyone else. I also loved watching monks beat the crap out of the ogre bouncers in Ogguk, the battle-sound spam was impressive. *smack* *punch* *oof* *crack* *Boom!* *thwack!* *pow* *ugh!*
- non-PC factions. I liked that even though different races/religions would be KOS to different NPC factions, anyone could group with each other. I thought that was a lot better than the whole Alliance is for wimps, Go Horde! / Horde is for spastic 13 year old boys, Alliance is for mature grown-ups, and never the twain shall meet of WoW. WoW’s entire background is that the two factions have an uneasy alliance or at least peace, and there are no open wars or conflicts ongoing, yet for some reason my human warrior can’t group with a supposedly neutral, non-evil tauren. Not even a night elf druid and a tauren druid! I guess it makes sense in a PvP-centric game like WAR, though.
* THINGS OTHER PEOPLE PROBABLY WILL SAY WERE WRONG BUT I THINK WERE GOOD *
- naked corpse runs.
- limited spell slots.
- Droods/kiting/quad-kiting.
- Difficult world travel. Though the boats needed to run a little more regularly (and securely). This made ports, bind/gating, speed enhancement (SoW, Selo’s, JBoots), and knowing your way around valuable things, which I think is overall a good thing. One of the things I prided myself on when I played was pretty much knowing my way around every zone in the game without having to reference a map. The world had an evocative look and feel, and landmarks were important. If alchemy had been more viable (ie, if it didn’t cost the alchemist 10p to make a single SoW potion, so that they had to turn around and sell it for 15p+ to make up for the cost of learning the tradeskill), then SoWs for non-speed enhanced players would have been easy, affordable, and would have helped foster the alchemy player economy. As it was, it wasn’t ever that much of a problem to get a SoW from a passing druid or shaman (since that was 1 spell that pretty much never left their spellbar).
- zones.
- trains.
- quest mechanics.
- encouraged grouping.
- pulling. This isn’t something that the designers thought about for their game, but rather a logical player solution to the difficulty of the zones as presented. When I first left EQ1 I was somewhat disdainful of the whole “pull to safe location†mechanic as it didn’t seem very “realisticâ€. I thought other games’ promise of “roving hunting†sounded much better and more realistic - hey we’re really hunting! But, in retrospect, I actually enjoyed the camping/pulling mechanic more (in conjunction with the enforced downtime, though that could have been less harsh). It gave the folks sitting around the camp time to talk, and it gave the puller opportunities to shine and be skillful. The times I spent “hunting mammoths†on the frozen river and elsewhere in Everfrost remain some of my most cherished MMO memories. Running around, avoiding orc shaman and “mounties†(mountaineers), and “ibs†(ice boned skeletons, which could only be damaged by magic weapons), looking for mammoth calves, avoiding their enraged mothers, and bringing them back to the group on the ice river by the cliff wall… ah, good times, good times!
- no in-game auction house/broker. I love using the AH in WoW, but I gotta be honest, I loved the old trader spam in zone-wide chat that you used to see in the East Commmonlands tunnel and/or Greater Faydark. The people that were good at selling and marketing were more successful than those who weren’t, and it showed, like some sort of carnie/used-car salesman. It forced people to interact face to face with each other, which was special in a way that the AH is not.
* WHAT EQ1 DID WRONG *
- Tradeskills - they were just evil. They were way too expensive in terms of material components and time required to get good. You could “fail†on combines for no good reason, losing components that cost hundreds of plat (the largest currency in the game). To make useful things in some, you had to make hundreds of annoying lesser components. Some were just too expensive to be able to sustain an actual economy, such as alchemy. There was no harvesting mechanic at all, all the components had to be store bought.
- non-caster reliance on casters for binding. I didn’t mind the whole binding/gating mechanic in EQ1, or even that casters could bind themselves wherever they wanted and non-casters could only bind in cities. But it did suck if you were not able to bind yourself to have to beg and plead for someone to take time out, come find you, group with you, cast the spell (which they would probably have to find in their spell book and memorize, and then re-memorize whatever spell it replaced afterwards). Having either an NPC in cities to do it (for free, like was added around the time of Planes of Power), or an innate ability (like in EQ2) is a good alternative, and better than WoW’s inn/hearthstone mechanic in my opinion (as I think giving the casters the ability to bind anywhere and gate to it makes them feel more like, well, casters than the meleers).
- experience loss on death. Just crappy. I understand they wanted death to hurt and thus make people play smarter to avoid death, but in the size of the worlds and player-bases that EQ1 had, death was inevitable. And in dungeons, multiple deaths were inevitable. Since the point of the game was to encourage people to group up to take on harder things, thereafter punishing them with cruel experience loss on death (and the even crueler ability to actually lose a level in the process) was just uncalled for. Capped experience debt is a much saner, humane death penalty.
- hell levels. The experience leveling curve in EQ1 was some twisted, illogical attempt at creating a non-linear scaling curve which took orders of magnitude longer to level on a per level basis the higher level you got. That in itself might be arguably an ok idea, but the implementation in EQ1 had some sort of error in the math calculation which caused every 5th level to take inordinately more experience to complete than it should, starting around level 40 or so. It was just cruel, weird, and people hated it.
- Racial/hybrid-class experience penalties. Penalizing people with slower progression just for picking certain classes or races is just stupid. Even worse when you combine 2 (troll shadowknights were particularly sad - 140% experience to level relative to the average. +20% extra for the troll and +20% extra for the shadowknight).
- Halflings with superman stats. Seriously, why would a halfling, of all things, have one of the best strength scores of all the races that could be a rogue? Their stats were so godly, that they were way overplayed in the game. Halfling druids and rogues were everywhere.
- Staring at the spellbook to “meditateâ€. Seriously, that was just plain bad. In the early months/years of the game, when you were “medding†or meditating to regain mana if you were a caster, the game forced you to sit and then covered your entire viewport with the spellbook interface you used to memorize spells. You couldn’t see anything going on around you at all.
- Ridiculously low health and mana regeneration rates (downtime).
- Sense heading. Ugh. I mean, come on, really. We’re supposed to be playing daring and heroic adventurers. I’m just a normal nerdy guy, and I can tell the cardinal directions well enough in the real world just from looking at the sun’s location. Having to press a button over and over and over again just to be able to pretend our characters know which direction they are going is moronic. Just give us a compass already and get over yourselves.
- nightblindness. It was a little too much in EQ1, and just about right in EQ2. That twisting, gnoll-infested, pitch-black tunnel which was the only way for the nightblind barbarians to leave their starting zone was particularly cruel. Though not as cruel as making it empty out into Blackburrow, right next to an aggressive, diseased bear.
- spawn-camps. I’m talking about needing items for quests which only had a 30% chance of dropping off rare spawns which might spawn once every 48 hours or something stupid.
- broken quests.
- quest rewards. They sucked for the level of effort needed to accomplish them.
- the nerf bat.
- poor community relations.
- no in-game mailbox. I made an art of getting around this limitation to get items and money to my alts by finding the most out of the way places to drop things on the ground to pick up with the alt. But still, being able to mail things to alts and to other people is a basic necessity nowadays, I think.
- The entire continent of Odus. Seriously, what the heck? You have 3 continents at release, and one of them is entirely worthless, undesirable, and so hated that characters who start there count the seconds before they can leave for good and never look back, and no one else in the game even has a reason to ever go there. Nice job! A real shame, too, because the city of Erudin was one of the nicest laid out and unique in the game with its magical teleporters to move around.
- trivial loot code. I hated it. If I want to take my level 100 superman to the level 10 zone to get a drop off some named mob, so what? I’m paying money, too. I can understand wanting to prevent people from farming, but the trivial loot code seemed like a poor implementation to me.
- Forced grouping (inability to solo). This is the flip side of the encouraged grouping, which I think is ok. It’s not ok to make it 100% impossible to solo, though, for everyone except 3 or 4 special classes.
- Weak-feeling melee. My first character was a barbarian warrior. I chose that because I wanted to play a character that oozed strength, ferocity, and the ability to survive anything thrown his way (kind of like Conan, maybe). What I got instead was a character that couldn’t handle a 1 on 1 fight with an even or slightly lower level enemy by himself, or if he did somehow manage to survive, was out of commission for at least 20 minutes to regenerate health. That is absolutely moronic. People want to feel strong, not weak. Find some way.
- Inability for friends with too large of a level gap to group. If you play 4 hours a day, and your friend plays 2 hours every other week, you’re not going to be grouping with your main characters. True, you could start an alt and only play that when your friend is on, but that only works for close friends you can coordinate well with. What about the guy you never knew before but grouped with 2 months ago and really liked? You meet him again now but can’t group because your level disparity is too high. The mentoring mechanic that many subsequent games have come up with is a nice fix for this sort of thing.
The components were expensive. There were no ore nodes to mine. There were no mounts. There were no flightpaths. You had very limited bag space and every item you carried encumbered you(and the ore was extremely heavy). The molds and ore did not stack. It might take half an hour or more just run from one city to the other. So you'd load up on molds in Freeport and run/waddle over to Highpass to buy ore to forge 4 or 5 items and pray for a skillup. Ugh.
Oh and Khoram....rare spawn/rare drops....the mage epic weapon quest needed that damn cloak off the damn pegasus in g'damn southern karana. Said mob spawned like once or twice a month or something ridiculous like that. The cloak was like a 1% drop or something. I got lucky in that I'd killed him a year before the epic quest was put in and already had it. Otherwise I might not have even started the mage epic quest in the first place.
Pyzjin....was just a very rare mob with some placeholders. Once you figured out which those were getting her to spawn was cake. The chance that she had the Glowing Black Stone when she did was almost nil though. Varsoon was just a rare spawn of a rare spawn I think. I don't remember the conditions of him being spawned anymore but I do remember him tear-assing around the zone and causing a ruckus when he did.
Speaking of the quest that required all the tradeskills....there were a couple of very long, involved quest chains in the Velious expansion. They were kind of unique because you started off with this crappy magic item but with each step of the quest chain that you finished you got an upgraded version of the item back(kind of like the Karazahn rings except you had to do a bunch of quests instead of rep grinding). One of the chains involved a shoulder armor piece.
The other was a ring. The culmination of the ring quest involved a war to stop a giant invasion of the frost dwarf city of Thurgadin. Fail to stop the invasion and the giants would in fact get into the city and kill every living thing inside...player and npc alike. Fail the quest chain and you'd lose your item and have to start over.
Yeah, let's talk about Shadow knights. This was only part of the bullshit of being one. Apparently their logic was sort of a D&D thing. Because you're a hybrid you basically have the ability of two classes, so it should take you longer than other classes to level.
Except you pretty much sucked at both roles. You'd get necro spells like 10-20 levels later than the Necro would. By the time you got them, they were essentially useless save a few like Feign Death.
There was pretty much no reason to have Shadow Knights on raids except for off tanking or pulling, and other classes could do those tasks better. You couldn't tank raid mobs without being severely overgeared (and often not even then). You couldn't deal good damage, and your class defining ability, Harm Touch, sucked until Planes of Power. Even then it wasn't anything to write home about.
On the plus side, I looked cool and was good in PVP. Too bad PVP was unbalanced as shit. I also got handed any SK only loot since I was basically the only one in the guild for a while.
I always thought it was funny that their best threat building spell was the level 1 disease cloud, because of a "bug" with the way threat was calculated. It was a spell that did ridiculously low amounts of damage over a period of like 10 minutes. The bug was that dot threat was calculated at cast time, and took into account all the damage that the spell was capable of doing. So if you chain cast disease cloud, you could be credited for thousands of points of damage worth of threat when you actually did nothing.
This led me to eventually convert my entire inventory to Tinkerer's bags (100% weight reducing bags).
Khoram, your list of things EQ did wrong is interesting, because they eventually addressed almost every one of those issues in some way. Downtime, for instance, was greatly reduced, following WoW's example, I believe.
I do remember getting lost in that tunnel, and the one from QRG to Qeynos Hills. There was a problem with the geometry in those tunnels and the walls wouldn't catch light from a light source. I'm not sure that ever got fixed.
Well, see, that's just it. I spent a *ahem* lot of time reading at work when I played EQ. I found several interesting threads near the end of my playtime where people were discussing the mysteries they had found. I remember someone mentioning that there was a relation between Pyzin spawning, Varsoon spawning, and that necro dude that walked all around the zone. This person implied that if you paid attention and somehow tied in knowledge gained from a bunch of other quests and clues, that there was some grand connection. Said person claimed they could make Pyzin or either version of Varsoon (or the undead attack on Qeynos) spawn by completing certain things in the zone. Maybe it was all BS, I dunno.
I'd still like to know if Brad was just hopped up on drugs or if the original Fiery Avenger really was doable.
I had an SK, a DE SK. Yeah, the 10 levels too low necro spells blew, but I loved the SK anyway. They rocked. Original model DE SK in plate armor looked freaking awesome, man!
Basically it reset the game to vanilla state, turned on full pvp and full loot, then made it if you died, (for any reason at all) your character would be deleted, and you would respawn as a fresh level 1. I made it to like level 20 one time, I don't think anyone ever made it to cap.
The quest eventually petered out around level 50 (if I remember right) and there were lots of hints that a followup quest actually did exist.. just that no players had found it. Necromancers across all the servers spent months and months trying to piece together clues to the problem.
Don't know if it was ever solved, it wasn't before I quit the game at any rate.
Anyone remember something about that female barb and male ogre pirate in FP/FV? Someone mentioned there was some mystery quest with those two.
3 minutes of taking ~60% less damage or so, 5 minute cooldown. This made warriors the only main tank worth discussing for the next 4 expansions or so, but at a nasty price -- you only needed 1, maybe 2, and warriors were third string or worse at everything else. Group tanking? lost to paladins and shadowknights, because their aggro was a couple orders of magnitude better. Damage? "Master of melee" translated to: "Dead Last". I still get jumpy whenever blizzard starts fiddling with their riff on the class.
Awesome (and horrible) stories:
I was a barbarian warrior, almost exclusively. My specialty was pulling, and training. I was really, really good at training (god hates me). In the early days (started at release) I recall hunting mammoth calves. Nice, safe, level 10ish calves, with level 30-40 mommies. One ill-fated time, the group was sitting on the rocky outcropping near the last guardpost out of the maze. I headed out into the wasteland, spot a calf, tag it, and hotfoot back to where I needed to be. Most of the time I actually got back there without getting lost.
One time, however, I tagged one a little too close to his mom, who was a bit too close to another couple, and so on. I charge back to our camp, turn around, and the entire ridgeline turns brown. We're talking Raiders of the Lost Ark intro here. Naturally, the group scatters to the four winds, and I start booking back into the maze for the city zoneline. Newbies were shouting about mammoths wandering the maze for the next hour and a half, it was glorious.
Much, much later, after many horrible experiences in unrest, befallen, and just about everywhere else one could get steamrolled, I found Lower Guk and Solusek B. One of these I loved, the other I loathed. In LGuk, there were enough camps to usually scrounge up a group slot within an hour, and once I had a grip there, the zone was mine. With 70+ people in zone, I could still reliably pull pretty much every trash mob on the dead side, and about half of the live side, and thus keep the experience points flowing in rivers.
Solusek B however, I usually tried soloing near the front, whatever (green) kobold I beat up would start running, I'd give chase, and suddenly, I'm in the bug caves, with spiders all over me. Twas horrible.
Sometimes I miss the social aspect of bullshitting in global with the 7-8 other camps in the zone, but I'll take the ability to solo, and no shortage of mobs over that any day.