Just in case Monday’s chat with Scott left you feeling like I’m completely favorably disposed towards EverQuest 2, just know you’d be wrong. Last week my group had just about the most frustrating game session yet since we started playing EQ2. It made me fuzzy with annoyance, and had me muttering dark words of a vile nature under my breath. Think the dark tongue of Mordor, only every other word was ‘designer’ or ‘cactus’. As you may recall, we’re working our way through the content in Desert of Flames, and so far everything has been going swimmingly … err … sandily. We killed some crocs, braved some orcs, and the plan for last week was to check out what Maj’dul had to offer. In a word, the only thing it had to offer was PAIN.

The evening started off well enough. We had camped at the entrance to the Clefts of Rujark (with that damned confusing door), after facing down an entire room full of orcs. We won, because we fled. Newly emboldened by two weeks of forgetfulness, we headed back into the orc-infested caverns. This time went much better, with some sharp pulling by Brian and some fairly competent healing on my part.

We actually took on far more orcs than I thought we could at one point, and I chalk that up to our tank’s ever increasingly well-developed aggro management skills. Brian’s gotten fairly good at juggling mobs back and forth between Warty’s pets and his cooldowns. In general some 45 levels on I actually think we’re doing pretty well with these classes. It’s certainly a far cry from those first days in Wailing Caves when we were just working on stuff like ‘don’t let anyone but the tank pull’, and stuff like that. Good times.

Those ended quickly, though, with our arrival at the gates of Maj’dul. If you’re not familiar with the city, it’s a sprawling fantasy middle-eastern themed metropolis with three warring factions taking up different parts of the city. The Blades, the Coins, and the Truth group are skirmishing in the Desert of Flames for supremacy over the area’s resources. You know … all the sand. Anyway, it’s your standard faction choice in a MMOG, with the associated faction grinding. Which is fine, since it’s something new in our experience with the game and the change of scenery is kind of interesting.

The problem is that once you begin working for one group exclusively, the others change their opinion to KOS. The number of guards for all three factions wandering the city means that you are pretty much boned if you’re trying to walk around unmolested. The four of us have been allying with the Blades (because, as the guys in the group said, “blades are cooler than truth”). For Brian, Warty, and I it hasn’t been a problem yet. We aren’t quite at the KOS stage with Truth and Coins yet. But Katie … is. Somehow, the Coin folks Hate her to the tune of about 1500 less faction than the rest of us have. So we’d be walking down the street minding our own business and she’d get attacked out of nowhere. With the rest of us not initially involved in the fight it took us a while to figure out what was going on, and by then she’d be dead (squishy wizard doncha know). We are mightily confused as to why she makes them so much more angry that we do … we’ve essentially all done the exact same quests since we got into the DoF areas.

Those first confusing and annoying moments in the city turned out to be a precursor to a truly fricking awful evening. For about three hours we experienced computer troubles, faction anger, a confusing city layout, incomprehensible quest descriptions, and the constant aggravation of Coin guards attacking my wife. It was without a doubt the least fun I’ve had in-game since we started playing. In fact, as I understand it’s pretty much the questing hub for the expansion, I’m tempted to just throw in the towel and go hit up the Everfrost until we qualify to adventure in Lesser Faydark.

At least then we wouldn’t have to deal with these idiot factions in the narrow streets with nowhere to run and … gah.