I haven’t mentioned my ongoing EverQuest 2 group for a while now because there hasn’t been much to report. Real life gets in the way, people travel, you know how it is. With the Living Legacy promo on, we wanted to really jump back in and get into the swing of things with this past weekend’s extra XP weekend. Yesterday saw us in-game, braving the harsh winds and scouring grit of the Sinking Sands. Specifically, we took on the open-air dungeon known as the Clefts of Rujark.

You may recall that we’ve been into the Clefts before. Our experience at that point (in our mid-40s) was sub-par. Everything was at the edge of our group’s killing range, and one wrong pull would result in horrible death. And did. Several times.

This time went much better.

I actually got the suggestion to try the clefts again from Karen, aka Jaye. Though she’s well known for her acumen in the world of Vanguard, she’s also a mega-star in the Norrath of EverQuest 2. Her considered opinion was that the clefts would be a fantastic setting for a group in their mid-early 50s.

And of course, being Jaye, she was completely right. The first floor of the dungeon is all solo content. All of those Orcs were great, easy-to-slay fodder for an organized group. Most of the time I didn’t even have to do that much healing – we just plowed through the critters like they weren’t even there. Our Shadowknight tank has really been coming into his own lately; he’s doing a great job of holding aggro in the toughest situations, and the solo mobs in Clefts were hardly a challenge.

The second and third floors, of course, are much harder. As you might imagine, the difficulty level of the mobs increases as you ascend. Double triangles on two become triples and larger groups on three. We headed up to level three precisely twice. The first time we were knocked from that part of the zone by a particularly horrible set of adds. At that point it was just a moving sea of orc flesh, undulating and stabbing. The second time was even worse. Somewhere on the top floor is an epic x2 boss, a dude with power emanating from every component of his being. I saw that he was epic about 0.5 seconds before Brian went to pull, and began to speak the word “Stop!” I was right at about “-op” when we died. Barely a flicker from the boss – amazing.

So instead of heading all the way up, we happily inhabited the middle tier. Really, that’s where we are generally as a group. The middle tier. Being two players short means there is some content we just can’t handle. Some is just too difficult for us, plain and simple, while other content would be achievable if we took the game more seriously. Instead, we’re pretty happy just to be out and about doing our thing - yakking it up, pulling mobs and taking them down.

This kind of play is, I feel, where MMOs really shine. A nice, casual group getting together to have a good time can’t be beat. There’s lots of things we could be doing better, lots of things we could be taking more seriously. EQ2 is a really great game, and well worth exploring to the best of your ability. That’s just not for us, though. That’s not what we want out of the game. So we play on, slowly gaining in levels over the course of lengthy stretches of time. I can’t believe how long we’ve been playing this game - something like two years now. These later levels are taking a long, long time to go through, and our pace has really stalled in the last six months. That said, we got the better part of a level during our Sunday outing. The extra xp and near-constant battle made for a (relatively) swiftly rising bar.

Appreciated, enjoyed, and extremely thrilling. Best time I’ve spent in-game debating the finer points of the farm subsidy yet.