After spending some time in the Enchanted Lands over the past while, Ordeth and Saryan were looking for a change of scenery and soon found themselves invited to a group that was heading into Nektropos Castle. I personally love this zone, from the quests, to the mobs, and most of all, the atmosphere. Actually, I’ve always liked Nektulos Forest in general, and have mostly fond memories of my adventures there with Davyydeous. Picture the ferocious Barbarian Berserker sprinting madly through the forest, a flock of flaming bats and owl bears hot on his heels, only to get killed by a crab at the foot of the docks. Good times. Not to mention the snakes. I remember constantly getting attacked by snakes just up the main path from the Commonlands and it drove me nuts. I always had a hard time seeing them through the grass and would walk right into them.

Travelling through the zone is much easier now of course, with the addition of the griffon towers, and with most of the angry mobs no longer hanging out by the roads. Even the road up to Nektropos Castle was void of the mobs that used to roam there; my how things have changed. With the group assembled outside the doors of the castle, we headed in. In addition to Saryan (Warden) and Ordeth (Coercer), we had a Shadowknight, Guardian, Swashbuckler, and Conjurer. This was the first time in the zone for all of our characters, and in fact, I was the only one who had previous experience with the zone at all.

It had been a while, but I remembered what to do well enough. We spoke to Alexa to start the whole process, then headed to the game room, followed by the hidden staircase to reach the second level and start the lockets quest. We didn’t have much trouble at all, wiping the mobs out like clockwork, until the room that had both Melanie and Crysta in it. We weren’t really paying attention and more or less stumbled into them. The two plate wearers went down fairly quickly, followed by Saryan, the Conjurer, then the Swashy, until Ordeth was the only one left standing. I quickly threw out my group mezz followed by some roots. I squeezed in some damage spells in between roots and actually managed to hold my own for a little while. Just when I started thinking that I was some sort of hero and was actually going to be able to kill the sisters, one of my roots broke and Ordeth soon found himself crumpled in a heap on the floor. Oh well.

We revived and headed back to exact our revenge which came swiftly this time. The rest of the way was a piece of cake. Down to the basement we went, the heartbeat getting ever louder, and made our way towards Lord Everling. The confrontation with Everling could have gone smoother, but ended well for us due in no small part to Saryan’s excellent healing. Ordeth managed to charm one of the servants and got him to do some of the dirty work as well. After all was said and done, we did quite well, I just wish Ordeth had progressed the Hadden’s Earring quest up to the Everling part. No biggy though, as I said, I like Nek castle and will happily return.

When I bought my PC about four years ago, I went as high-end as I could afford, anticipating it would last a solid five or six years, and it’s done quite well up to this point. It was only when I started playing Oblivion that I started to pine for a new video card despite being able to run the game smoothly at mid-range settings. I’ve never had a problem running Everquest 2 on the “balanced” setting, and it’s always looked nice enough for me, but I still wanted more. Having an older motherboard with an AGP bus had severely limited my video card upgrade options until the announcement of the Radeon X1950 PRO, and I wanted one instantly.

After several consecutive years of abysmal failure in the annual hockey draft I enter, I came through this year and took top prize. With my winnings, I decided to purchase the Sapphire Radeon X1950 PRO to replace my Radeon 9800XT. EQ2 was the first game I launched after installing the card, and out of curiousity I cranked the settings up to the max. Surprisingly, I found the game to be quite playable (and gorgeous) depending on which zone I was in. I was grouped with my wife in Ruins of Varsoon and got a consistent 40 frames per second. East Freeport was another story however, and the game became a slideshow in that zone. I now run the game at high quality most of the time, knocking it back down to balanced for larger raids. I did notice that balanced on the new card looks much better than balanced did on the old card. The colours seem more vibrant, the view distance seems greater, and there are lots of little details that show up now that didn’t before. I’m definitely quite happy with the upgrade.

Of course, I had to try out all my other games that I no longer play just to see how they looked. Half Life 2 looked and played amazingly at maxed out settings; so much so that I’m going to try and play through it again at some point. I reinstalled Doom 3 and got a constant 60 fps while running at max settings. The only problem with Doom 3 was that I thought the game sucked, so once I saw how it looked and played, I uninstalled it. Oblivion looks absolutely amazing and runs quite well also. I’ll definitely be spending some time in that world over the next little while. I’m very curious to see how much of a difference it’ll make in Vanguard. I bought the game the day it came out, but I haven’t installed it yet (a story for an upcoming post).

All in all, I’m hoping this new card adds another couple years onto my computers life, and so far it’s looking pretty good. I’m also pleasantly surprised at how quiet the card is. I read a few reviews that said the fan on it can get quite loud while running, but it’s actually quieter than my old card, so colour me happy. Now, I have no idea what pixel or vertex shaders are, but I do know that my games all look and play beautifully.

Just for the curious, my system is as follows:
Intel Pentium 4, 3.4 GHz
2 GB 400-MHz DDR SDRAM
Sound Blaster Audigy 2

Most of my play time lately has been spent with Ordeth, and I’m really liking the Coercer class. I especially like pairing up with my wife’s Warden, Saryan; It’s so nice having a healer wherever you go. Because we never know how long we’ll be able to play for, we’ve stayed away from grouping with others, and so far we’ve done fairly well as a duo. Ordeth has been doing the “tanking”, if you could call it that, mostly through using charmed pets to pull, then using roots and mezzes to control the fight. Saryan is an awesome healer, which is so nice because I never worry about looking at my health bar at all; I just make sure she doesn’t have any mobs on her.

A few days ago Ordeth and Saryan ventured into the Ruins of Varsoon to see what sort of trouble they could find. Not far from the entrance they came upon a pit filled with nasty looking spiders skittering all around their queen, The Crawler Queen. After clearing a path to the queen, Ordeth rooted her, so that they could focus on her henchmen who didn’t prove to be any challenge at all. With the henchmen gone, the queen didn’t stand a chance. I almost forgot to screenshot the queen, so the picture isn’t the greatest, and in fact it looks like Saryan (in wolf form) is sniffing somewhere very inappropriate and has caught Ordeth off guard.

We went as far into the Ruins as we could go, but soon ran into some mobs we wouldn’t be able to handle. Instead, we’ve been running around the Enchanted Lands carrying out various deeds for the locals. With most of the mobs and quests in the zone being yellow or orange to Ordeth, the experience came fast, and he soon made level 30.

The next night we headed back to the Enchanted Lands to continue with some quests, when a fellow adventurer asked if anyone was able to help kill a named wasp, Burnspear. Ordeth and Saryan were right there so we answered the call. The two of us, along with a Ranger and an Assassin made short work of the wasp, but I was too busy rooting and mezzing some adds to take a screenshot of it. After the fight the group leader asked if we all wanted to head to Runnyeye. We said we’d go so long as they knew that one of either myself or Saryan could potentially have to leave at a moment’s notice because of the baby. “Of course! No problem,” was the reply, which is pretty much what I’ve come to expect of the EQ2 community; very understanding. We added a Guardian to the group and headed out.

Just outside the door we noticed the Sludge Creep was swimming around in the water, and without hesitation the group jumped down to engage him. This was a tough fight; the Sludge Creep is a level 39^^^ named, while our groups average level was around 33. Saryan had to continuously mash her heal spells to keep the Guardian on his feet, but sure enough we brought the Creep down. With that, we headed into Runnyeye.

I’ve always liked Runnyeye; I love the mobs in the zone, and have always found the xp to be plentiful. That was certainly the case on this night, as we tore through the beginning of the zone. We took out a Clay Insurgent, Mudslinger, and a Gorehorn Hammerhead, among others. I think I was having too much fun to bother taking notes on all our kills. Ordeth quickly dinged 31, then 32 just before the group called it quits for the night. Unfortunately Saryan couldn’t stay the entire time, but she did manage to get some good xp herself, dinging level 33.

All in all, it’s been a very successful few days for the dynamic duo. I’ll say it again, I am loving the Coercer class and hope I can manage to get Ordeth into some of the higher end instances. For now though, it was nice to have Ordeth take part in a larger group; in fact, I think this was my first grouping experience with Ordeth outside of Saryan. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of seeing our group get swarmed by mobs only to have Ordeth put them all to sleep so that we can deal with them one on one.

A couple of weeks ago Davyydeous completed the The Courts of Maj’Dul quest lines and earned the title Hero of Maj’Dul. I was thoroughly impressed with this quest line and regret not having completed it while it was still level-appropriate. When the Desert of Flames expansion came out I was under the impression that you could align your character with only one of the courts. I decided to go with the Court of the Blades simply because it seemed the most appropriate for a Berserker. The guild I was in at the time didn’t pay much attention to the court quests, I think they couldn’t be bothered with the faction grinding, so Davyydeous solo’d most of the way through the Blades quests, grouping only when needed.

I was quite proud when Davyydeous became Vanguard of the Blade; I enjoyed the quests, and loved the title, which I didn’t see too many other characters sporting. I figured at this time, that I was more or less “done” with Desert of Flames. I had progressed through all the major quest lines (still waiting for Godking Anuk though), and Davyydeous had moved on to the Kingdom of Sky.

One day however, Davyydeous found himself walking through Maj’Dul when all of a sudden he was jumped by a band of Rujarkian orcs. The orcs were all over Maj’Dul in fact. I asked in guild chat if there was some sort of world event going on or something because I had never seen these orcs in Maj’Dul before. That’s when I learned of the Fate and Destiny quest, which becomes available after completing the faction quests for each of the three courts.

So it was, that not too long ago I found myself without anything else to do and started earning the respect of the Court of Truth. I ran up and down the towers of Maj’Dul, killing the guards and taking their coins for turn in at the Tower of the Moon. Up and down, lather, rinse and repeat. While it didn’t take quite as long as expected, raising my faction was still a bit of a pain, but I eventually gained entrance to the Court of Truth and began their quests. At level 70, these quests are a breeze, and soon enough I earned the Paragon of Truth title and moved on to gaining faction with the Court of the Coin. Up and down the towers I went, lathering, rinsing and repeating, eventually earning my Vindicator of the Coin title. Finally, I was off to Pillars of Flame to talk to Akharem to begin the Fate and Destiny quest.

While doing these quests I made a conscious effort to read all the quest text and follow the story. Yes, shamefully, I’m usually a Quicky Quest Clicker, ignoring the text, but I wasn’ t in a hurry so decided to follow along. I’m glad I did. The court quests are very well done, and I especially enjoyed Of Fate and Destiny. I would say it’s one of the few quest lines that has a big, epic feel to it. I could only imagine how it would have felt doing it when Davyydeous was level 60 instead of 70; there’s some pretty tough content in there.

The best moment for me came on the step that triggers the orc invasion of Maj’Dul. It felt really cool to have an effect on the game world like that; to see the orcs come running into Maj’Dul and start killing its citizens, and to see all the towers taken over by the Tears assassins and Rujarkian raiders. The pinnacle was seeing someone in 60-69 chat ask, “anyone know what the hell is going on in Maj’Dul? There are orcs everywhere.” That was cool, knowing that I caused that. For the next while I kept going back to Maj’Dul to check on it, and I think it was about a week before all the towers were back to normal.

Yes, the faction grind can be a bit of a pain, but this quest line is worth it in my opinion. It’s not often you get a sense that what you do matters in the game, but that’s exactly what I got out of this quest line… and a pretty cool title to boot. Davyydeous, Hero of Maj’Dul.

I’ve been caught in a ridiculously silly dilemma. I eagerly awaited the release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and eventually purchased it the day it came out. While I enjoyed the game very much, I found it hard to play something other than Everquest II during my limited play time and eventually stopped playing it. Roughly two months ago I decided to head back into the land of Cyrodiil and continue my adventures. It didn’t take long to get sucked right back in, and subsequently any free moment I had was spent playing Oblivion. This inevitably led me to Oblivion dedicated web pages and forums to help immerse myself more into the game. Unfortunately for me, all I found out was that I was playing the game all wrong.

I had no idea I was playing wrong of course, nor would I have, had I not begun visiting the Oblivion related web pages. So what was I doing wrong? Without going into incredible detail here, it all involves the leveling system designed in the game. Basically, all the monsters in the game scale themselves to the level of the player, so that when the player gains level ten, all the monsters in the game also become level ten. Each time your character levels, you’ll get to add skill points to three different skills. The number of points you’ll have to spend depends on which sub-skills you improved between levels. There is a way to maximize the number of skill points you get, which is something I wasn’t doing, so instead of being able to spend five points towards my strength skill, I was only able to spend three. After several levels of non-maximized skill increases, I’m now left with a character that is not as powerful as it could be. Again, something I never would have known had I not visited the web sites.

Apparently I started off on the wrong foot by choosing to play as one of the built-in classes, rather than creating my own custom class, which facilitates the way in which you maximize your skill increases. When I buy a new game, I usually just want to install it and start playing right away; I don’t want to fiddle with creating my own custom class. Now however, my character just feels tainted; he’s not being all that he can be. I’m torn; do I start over with a new character and maximize his skills, or do I continue to slog through the game with an imperfect character? More importantly, why is this even bugging me? I was having a great time with the game before reading about the leveling system, so why not now? I have to admit, it’s all completely absurd, and even if I decide to continue playing my character as he is now, I know for a fact I’ll start altering the way I play in order to maximize my skill increases.

This sort of thing isn’t restricted to Oblivion of course. My experience with World of Warcraft comes to mind. Back when I was trying that game out, it seemed as though certain classes had to follow very specific talent builds, otherwise your character was useless. I was planning on rolling a Human priest, but was told immediately that I wouldn’t get any group invites, nor guild invites unless I was a Dwarf priest. That really bugged me. I can’t say if it’s still like that in WoW as I don’t follow that game any more, but at the time it felt very limiting. Who are all these people to tell me how I had to play the game, and why am I such a sucker to follow along? Well I’m breaking the cycle, and I’m going back to my imperfect Oblivion character and I’m going to have fun, dang it!