I want to make sure to get my thoughts from the last two weeks of EQ down before we go and have another session. Yes, technically I’m ‘behind’, but in reality the last two weeks were just one looong session with a break in the middle. The reason? Waiing Caves.

Two weeks ago, the three of us embarked alone from the West Freeport gate, out into the Commonlands. The quests right around the gates are the perfect acclimation fodder: go find this mob (about 100 feet up the road), kill it a bunch, and come back. While it’s the same damn thing I’ve done a million times before, it’s always nice to have ‘getting to know you’ time with a zone. Instead of relying on me knowing where everything is right away, these quests just work me in one part of the zone. Good stuff.

From there, we made our way to the Crossroads, and began loading up on our first batch of Commonlands quests. (Why do WoW and EQ2 both have a Crossroads not too far away from a Wailing Caves/Caverns? They were in the original releases for both games, so there’s no real chance there was plagiarism here; I just think it is funny.) There are a couple we won’t be able to get to until later, which is another quest-laying strategy I like; give us something to look forward to. While we were en-questing, another friend logged on and joined us with his Necromancer. NecroWarty has been around the MMOG block once or twice too, so we were somewhat balanced again.

Thus began a long, rambling, somewhat disjointed session as I proved how awesome I am at reading a map. I didn’t realize that ‘The Graveyard’ was a zone, and so when we arbitrarily picked a quest to start working on it took us a while to work our way to the zone-out marker north of the West Freeport gate. Specifically, we went down tot he Enlightenment Cemetery, then across to the Enlightenment Cemetery, before moving up around around to The Graveyard. We took a quick tour of the mini-dungeon at the Enlightenment Cemetery, and learned that four level 14 characters were not sufficient to overcome the skeletons at the end. More’s the pity.

Once we’d finally made it to The Graveyard, we found that we were slightly too high of level for it. In fact, really, by banding together and working so well as a team, we leveled right past pretty much all the content inside of Freeport itself (in the mini-zones, that is). That was sort of an interesting discovery for me; I’m not sure I really like the mini adventure zones, but they appeal to me as well. Keeping the new players close to a ’safe’ place can only be a good thing, but I also find it somewhat pedestrian to be adventuring *in* a city. I like the idea of a big dungeon beneath a major city – Ragefire Chasm is a great feature on the Horde side of WoW. By the same token as my dislike for adventuring in mini-city zones, I’ve never like The Stockades. I guess, if I’m adventuring I want to *feel* like I’m not in a safe place.

By this point, we’d run through some Commonlands quests, and had given up on The Graveyard. We wanted to get some quests very specifically accomplished, though, and all of us had things to do and people to kill in the Wailing Caves. We struck out for the nomad camp, and (with a few more quests in tow) headed in.

Invader Zim … I mean “Cog Burn” … greeted us just inside the door, a voice-acting choice that got great big smiles and cheers from the four of us. I knew there were several voice-actors in the game that I enjoy, but hadn’t run across any yet despite having spent some time in the game. I know Wil Wheaton’s voice is running around in here somewhere, and hope we have the chance to run across it sometime. (Cross referencing IMDB and Allakhazam, it looks like two of his NPCs are in Beggar’s Court. Guess I know what I’ll be doing on Wednesday.)

From our entrance into WC until we /camped out for the night, we had a hard lesson in team tactics. As TheeNickster said in a comment on my last EQ2 post, Wailing Caves is a great preview of higher level team play. We’d already gotten aggro down pat; Brian’s Shadowknight does more than enough to keep up with Katie’s Wizard. Given my feeble direct damage abilities, I’ve basically just been sticking with my debuffs and healing. I totally don’t mind; this is a very new way to play a MMOG for me, and I’m loving it.

Our problem actually came in crowd control. There are some fairly tight spawns in there (especially near the beginning), and it took us a few tries to get shackling/debuffing/pet attacking down pat. We may or may not have dropped our gnomish Shadowknight once or twice in learning this; the world will never know.

When we came back to the game last week, we were a lot more focused. We churned through our quest-required mobs like buttah. The Ree Orcs were especially enjoyable, as initially killing one fulfilled a requirement for three separate quests. That’s the kind of multitasking I likes.

We spent most of the play session working through the caves, but we never did make it into the depths to take on the jail cells and the boss. (I’m hoping I can lobby for that for this week.) The reason was twofold, and one of them is kind of irritating.

The first reason was totally my bad. At one point Brian piped up with “Um, I think my gear is a little low-level.” I had a little bit of a headache that night, and apparently it had stopped me from asking about everyone’s equipment before we headed out. We were wandering around fighting level 15ish things with gear we’d gotten back on the newbie isle! (*headdesk*) We were doing ‘okay’, but I know we would have done much better (and I would have had to heal less) if we’d had better equipment.

I’m going to foist some of the blame off on the game, though. Even though it did helpfully point out that our gear was too low of a level for us, there was never any sort of quest to tell us about armor and weapon merchants. A simple, obviously obtainable quest (perhaps as we were leaving our racial ghetto) would have been a really nice kick in the pants. “Hey, go buy armor, stupid!”

On that note, why do quest and NPCs have a one-to-one relationship? If a quest is important enough for you to do (like, say, learning how to find and buy armor), it should be offered by multiple people. That way, even if a dumbass player (like me) missed the ‘buy armor’ quest on the way out of the ghetto, they’d still get flagged down for it in one of the bigger zones.

These ‘utility quests’ are one of my absolute favorite parts about WoW (”Here’s some supplies for the INNKEEPER.”), and I find myself missing them in EQ2. Everquest 2 certainly goes for the quality over quantity angle in quest-giving, and given the EQ tradition I certainly understand that. Just the same, perhaps a little more of a hand on the rudder wouldn’t be totally out of line.

Speaking of tradition, the second reason we didn’t do as much as we would have liked last time can be summed up in a single word: respawn. With most of our other quests done, we spent something like 45 minutes looking for barrels/waiting for Soulspike to spawn. It was for the quest ‘Vibia’s Wailing Cave Ingredients’. We were finally so annoyed we hit Allakhazam in the middle of a play session (something I’m not a big fan of), and began hunting for those barrels to spawn the critter. I’m not sure we ever did, but he did eventually pop and we killed him but good.

When Brian complained about the wait, I told him we were “Living the Legacy”, referring to the long … long … looong wait times in the olden days of Everquest. I both love and hate EQ2’s connection to Everquest Live. I love little moments of deja vu (I’m really looking forward to seeing Faydwer and such), but c’mon … long spawns? Triggered spawns? Bah.

When we got back to Freeport at the end of the evening we blew pretty much all the cash we had getting new armor for everybody, and a new weapon for Brian. My headache was pretty bad at this point, and I completely flubbed out on the Brokers. They would have undoubtedly saved us money, so I’m going to make sure we use them next time we need equipment upgraded. Bah.

The merchant thing I mentioned above, as well as my forgetfulness with the brokers, and the quest sharing gripe I had last time, all lend themselves to one complaint: Everquest’s cities are too real. You know if you’ve ever been to a World of Warcraft city; with the possible exception of Orgrimmar, none of them feel in any way organic. Ironforge, Stormwind, and Undercity are all preplanned package cities, with ample signage, quest NPCs, and merchants places *just so*. Thunder Bluff and Darnassus are slightly better, but suffer from a lot of planning as well. Only Org really has a level of ‘where am I?’ that you occasionally get in a real city. Freeport and Qeynos both have that in spades, especially since they’re divided into seperate zones. “Okay, did I need to talk to someone in North or West? And where is that?”

Even with icons for salesweasels right on the maps, it would be ideal if some of those oh-so-scenic buildings had a few more useful NPCs in them. Ideally, I’d like to see an armor merchant, a spell merchant, a weapon merchant, and a broker in every single major city zone. Then give me big, obvious signs (that I can read without a mouseover or that have icons on them). Point me to where I want to go: treat me like a moron. Because, let’s face it, I am. :)

This Wednesday I hope we’ll take some time to clear out the end of Wailing Caves … I like to feel as though I’ve ‘beaten’ a dungeon, you know? We’ll also probably clear out more of our Commonlands quests, and begin moving to the west side of the zone.

I mentioned, last time, that given some of the cool additions the expansions give us (and that some of the additional content is actually going to be upon us soon), it might be cool to standardize on the EoF box. Having all of us with all of the expansions sounded like a good plan … and to my shock I got murmurs of agreement.

I guess … I guess we’re having fun(tm). Good times.

Update: Brian the Shadowknight has commented below on additional things.

One thing I forgot about, that he mentions: What the hell is with trading coins? Shift-Click-Drag to get the coins into your trade window? Which tablet from R’lyeh did the designers read to decide that was a good idea? You *CLICK* and then *DRAG*. No shift, no control, no nothing. Sheesh. It should not take two college-educated folks, who have designed software and run networks, five minutes to figure out how to move coins.