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 Welcome to EverQuest! Required Listening: Everyone heard this when entering their server for the very first time What is EverQuest? EverQuest is the first 3D Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game to hit the market. Developed by 989 Studios and later taken over by Verant Interactive, both subsidiaries of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, EverQuest took the PC world by storm when first released. Unlike its contemporary Ultima Online, which featured pixel art characters and gameplay in an isometric view, EverQuest was designed from the ground up to be a fully 3D, first-person experience, like an old school dungeon crawler but where you play only a single character. What made EverQuest so special? The social aspects. Later MMOs would try to ape this, but eventually move to a mostly single player experience (as did EverQuest, much later in life), but EverQuest was designed around grouping up with your fellow players to tackle tasks you couldn't handle on your own. Of course, this wasn't precisely true, as some classes were far more capable than others - Necromancers and Druids, in particular - but we'll get into that later. EverQuest, by its very mechanics, required most people to make friends and group up for extended periods of time in order to gain experience and level up, as well as acquire gear. Equipment, as you'll come to see, is something very hard to achieve when first starting out, though again, EverQuest did eventually make this easier - multiple times, actually. So why are you showing this off if everything's changed from what you remember? EverQuest is also known for being the first MMO reverse-engineering project. People were unhappy with the direction EverQuest went as early as 2003, when they introduced Cats on the Moon. The EverQuest Emulator Project was born out of this reverse engineering, creating private servers for people to play on that matched their developers' vision of what EverQuest should be. When it comes to nostalgia grabs, three servers in particular stand out. Project 1999, perhaps the best-known EQ Emulator Server, has a name that is a slight misnomer. Project 1999 emulates EverQuest through its original release and the first two expansions, Ruins of Kunark and Scars of Velious, so really it should be Project 2001. Project 1999 is a cesspool of toxic players at the high-end, with a number of rules in place that make it the toxic place that it is, including First To Engage rules and a require to cede raid targets if you can't get your raid force to your First To Engage fast enough. Second is Wayfarers Haven, formerly known as Project 2002, which was originally intended to only go to the fourth expansion, Planes of Power, but more recently, since their name change, has been adding more expansions. Wayfarers Haven is a direct off-shoot of The Al`Kabor Project (below). And lastly is The Al`Kabor Project. Al`Kabor was a server in the original EverQuest, launched in 2003 during the Planes of Power expansion. It was the server meant for players on Macintosh computers, and originally only had a Macintosh client; later, when it went free-to-play, as it was no longer receiving updates and never moved out of the Planes of Power era, they also cobbled together a PC Client. Now, The Al`Kabor Project is a special one. The people on Al`Kabor loved their server, and they had plenty of advance warning about it being sundowned. And so in the months leading up to the server going goodbye, the developers dedicated themselves to recording everything; HP values, AC values, resists. Sniffing packets for XP totals to get the ZEMs right (this will make sense later, I promise). They took the Macintosh and PC clients and the EQEmu code and created a server made for those clients and no others. (Though the devs do have some testground branches of other clients, there's currently no plans to allow anything but the era-specific clients.) What does this mean? The client is everything. EverQuest is an odd game in that 50% of what goes on happens client-side, while the other 50% is server-side. But mostly, the client is your gateway into the world, and EverQuest has had a lot of client versions. Because of their use of what is now essentially a proprietary client, The Al`Kabor Project is the most faithful recreation of old-school EverQuest that can be found today. Project 1999 uses the Titanium client, released in 2006 (and uses custom coding to disable out-of-era features), while Wayfarer's Haven, and most EQEmu servers, use the Rain of Fear 2 client, released in 2013 or thereabouts. You can think of clients as hallmarks of the expansions; practically every expansion changed the client in some way, most of it related to the UI. And since EQEmu reverse engineers these clients to build their servers, they have used a wide variety in the past; Titanium, Secrets of Faydwer, Underfoot, Rain of Fear 2. In fact, the most recent client is the ROF2 client that they're basing future emulation development on, at least until a more palatable client comes along. But because TAKP uses such an old client, many Quality of Life features from newer clients are missing; even Project 1999 has (or had) mousewheel zoom, allowing for easy play in third person, while TAKP does not. It was a very difficult decision as to which server to play on between The Al`Kabor Project and Wayfarers Haven. TAKP has a higher userbase, but WFH has more things to do, and an easier path to gearing brand-new characters thanks to access to Lost Dungeons of Norrath. TAKP also has the greatest community I've ever played in, very reminiscent of old EverQuest official servers, but WFH is nearly on par. They both use the same experience ruleset, which was old Al`Kabor's, with a permanent 20% bonus experience and a "broken" grouping code that makes taking a fourth and sixth party member both give more experience than it should. WFH also has easier access to raid content, as Luclin and above is all custom-coded instanced for guilds. Ultimately, I decided on Wayfarers Haven, simply because of access to Legacy of Ykesha and Lost Dungeons of Norrath, but I cannot recommend TAKP or WFH enough for your experience if you want to play some oldschool EverQuest. Is this legal? For the moment, yes. Verant Interactive and Sony Computer Entertainment of America declined to pursue legal action against the EQEmu project, as did the company who later took over EverQuest development, Daybreak Games (now under their Darkpaw Games division). Project 1999, in particular, has been called out as being a preservation of the original EverQuest by the companies involved. What if I wanted to try this out? You can head on to http://www.eqemulator.org and make yourself a forum account and some GameServer accounts which will allow you access to most of the EQEmu servers. For TAKP in particular, however, you'll have to head to https://www.takproject.net/forums/index.php and make yourself a forum account and gameserver accounts, and for Wayfarers Haven you'll want to head to https://www.wayfarershaven.com to make your forum account and game accounts. So what's the draw, here? I know some people would be interested to see where games like World of Warcraft came from. EverQuest is the dawn of the modern MMO, with punishing mechanics such as experience loss on death and corpse runs, where you have to run all the way back to your corpse to get your equipment back. It is, in truth, probably the most punishing MMO ever made, before Sony removed all the death penalties except for experience loss. What's the audience participation going to be like? Minimal, I'm afraid, though I'll gladly show off things that are requested that are within my capabilities. Things like Epic Quests are probably out of the scope of this LP, given their need for raids, though I'm not averse to hopping onto Live EverQuest and showing them off with a massively overpowered character just so people can see them. Why screenshots? EverQuest is not a very exciting game in motion. You turn on autoattack and push a few buttons. That's it. I feel I can convey all I need to through screenshots, but may put up a few videos as we go along. So you just said people can't solo in this game. What's the deal? True. Most classes are incapable of soloing. However, The Al`Kabor Project and Wayfarer's Haven allow you to play up to 3 characters simultaneously, otherwise known as three-boxing or trioing. I'm going to be making the strongest trio I can to show off as much as I can. So, with that out of the way, let's get started.
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Races of EverQuest EverQuest launched with 12 races available for players to choose from, each with a different class selection available to them. As EverQuest took its roots from older editions of D&D, namely AD&D 2E, this should come as no real surprise that classes are race-locked. (The sequel, EverQuest 2, allowed every race to be every class.) The Ruins of Kunark expansion added another race, as did Shadows of Luclin, Legacy of Ykesha, and The Serpent's Spine. Additionally, there are two different looks for each race prior to Shadows of Luclin, thanks to Shadows of Luclin introducing a set of new character models. Let's go through and see what we're dealing with, yeah? I'll throw in some lore, too; EverQuest has some of the wackiest, zaniest lore.    The Barbarians, also known as the Northmen, are one of three races of Humans available in EverQuest. They live in the frozen north on the western side of the continent of Antonica. They are also, as you can see, vaguely based on Gaelic cultures with their kilts, even including woads on their faces and bodies. The Barbarians are a quasi-tribal culture, and can be considered the original cluster of humans, from which Humans sprang after a sudden mystical transformation altered some of their people into smaller, more intelligent individuals. They formed the Combine Empire while their Barbarian kin continued their nomadic lifestyle across the ancient protocontinent known as Tunaria, which would later be called Antonica after the man who founded the city of Qeynos and led Humans out of the remains of the Combine Empire, which died quickly for reasons unknown. Barbarians are mostly unchanged from the tribesmen they came from. Barbarians can be Beastlords, Rogues, Shamans and Warriors, which is the absolute smallest class selection of any race. Their Beastlord Warder is a white wolf. Barbarians are a Large race, but can also wear Medium armor, and have access to an equipment-neutral version of the Bash skill called Slam. Barbarians have no night vision.    The Teir`Dal, or Dark Elves, are the children of Innoruuk, God of Hate, and they take their Father's teachings to heart. The Teir`Dal are born in hate and die in hate, living their whole lives on a basis of hatred. They split from the original race of Elves, when Innoruuk took the first to be their kind, the King and Queen of Takish-Hiz, to his Plane of Hate and twisted them into a blueberry mockery, and placed them back on Norrath, slowly warping a not-insignificant subsection of elves into His children. Most Dark Elves revere Innoruuk, or at least fear Him enough to raise worship to Him. Even those who manage to escape worship still take His lessons of Hate to heart. Dark Elves can be Clerics, Enchanters, Magicians, Necromancers, Rogues, Shadow Knights, Warriors and Wizards. Dark Elves are a Small race, but also capable of wearing Medium armor. Dark Elves have Ultravision. Unlike AD&D's version of Ultravision, this colors the screen blue rather than in waves of different spectrums.    I think my favorite thing about dwarves is you can have beards on the women. Dwarves are the children of Brell Serilis, the Duke of Underfoot, the first God to come to Norrath. He seeded the underbelly of Norrath with creations, and later returned to create the Dwarves, and later still, the Gnomes. Norrathian Dwarves are exactly what you may think they are; proud warrior culture, love their drink, dedicated miners, living in a mountain. Scottish accents are up for debate, though any number of dwarven NPCs have been written with them in mind. Unusually, compared to most literature, the dwarves of Norrath are no strangers to the phrase 'work hard, play hard', and are amazing storytellers within the confines of the world, more akin to Tolkien dwarves than more modern interpretations. Dwarves can be Clerics, Paladins, Rogues and Warriors, sharing the tiny selection of classes with Barbarians. Dwarves are a Small race. Dwarves have Infravision.    The final race of Humans to come into existence. After the Gods intervened and created Humans, a small, frail man named Erud took the most intelligent of the Humans and left the shores of Antonica to a small island that would become known as Odus, and upon it, built a city dedicated to learning known as Erudin. Unfortunately, not all magic is created equal, and those who insisted on studying the dark arts of Necromancy were soon banished, where they fled across the Island and constructed a city nearly as magnificent known as Paineel. This eventually led to a war between the Erudites and the Heretics, as they came to be known, but it was a war unlike Norrath had ever seen. It was a war of magic, and that much magic flung at each other caused a massive explosion that destroyed most of Paineel and dropped it deep into the earth, and even tore open a hole to the Underfoot deep inside, letting elementals and imps escape into the now-ruined city. Erudite Ghosts haunt the final Tower before that portal, while the rest of the city is overrun with earth elementals, imps, and the Erudite's own golem creations who no longer recognize the Erudite people as being allowed to traverse the city. Erudites can be Clerics, Enchanters, Magicians, Necromancers, Paladins, Shadow Knights and Wizards, and are the first race on this list to have two starting cities; Heretics, those who worship Cazic-Thule, God of Fear, begin in Paineel, while all other Erudites begin in Erudin or Erudin Palace. Erudite Clerics are notable for worshiping Prexus, God of Oceans, and Quellious, Goddess of Peace and Tranquility, an unusual selection of deities that have nothing to do at all with either their race or their race's general philosophy, and being some of the only Clerics to be able to attain Neutral status. Erudites are a Medium race. Erudites have no night vision.    Gnomes, the smaller, wirer cousins of dwarves, also crafted by Brell Serilis. Gnomes are obsessed with mining just as much as the dwarves, but their goals are wildly different; Gnomes mine for gemstones instead of ore, and take what ore they do gather and refine and process it down to fuel their tinkering obsession. The great gnomish city of Ak'Anon is a delight to behold, a city of clockwork with fully autonomous clockwork guards that can guide you to any location in the city if you but ask. Gnomes are also the only people to gain access to the Tinkering tradeskill. Gnomes are my favorite race. My primary trios on TAKP are all gnomes. They're tiny, they're cute, and they're by and large considered a Neutral race, allowing them access to any city they want, except the Ogres and Trolls who look upon them as a foodstuff, and the Iksar who hate everyone. Gnomes can be Clerics, Enchanters, Magicians, Necromancers, Paladins, Rogues, Shadow Knights, Warriors and Wizards. Gnomes are a Small race. Gnomes have Infravision.    The Half-Elves, or Ayr`Dal, are exactly what you would expect if you've picked up a fantasy novel in the last 30 years. Union of human an elf, face prejudice from both sides of their heritage, you know the drill. They have no real place of their own in the world, instead sharing cities with the humans of Qeynos and Freeport, and the treetop city of Kelethin with the Wood Elves and their Paladins of Tunare Felwithe with the High Elves. Unusually, Half-Elves in EverQuest can be no kind of primary caster. Half-Elves can be Bards, Druids (Qeynos only), Paladins, Rangers (Qeynos only), Rogues and Warriors. Half-Elves are a Medium race. Half-Elves have Infravision.    Once again, exactly what you would expect. The Halflings of Rivervale resemble nothing so much as scaled-down humans and are a friendly, gregarious race of people. They even live in hobbit holes, and have a higher consumption of food/drink than other races. Additionally, they have a 5% experience bonus that was originally meant for humans, but a coding error assigned it to Halflings and it was never changed. Halflings can be Clerics, Druids, Paladins, Rangers, Rogues and Warriors, and they revere Bristlebane above all others, the creator of their race and the inspiration for their mischevious outlook on life, and Karana to a lesser extent for the rain He brings to their crops and the fury He brings to their enemies. Halflings are a Small race. Halflings have Infravision.   The High Elves, or Koada`Dal, the High Elves are the closest remnant to the ancient elves of Takish-Hiz. They are haughty and prideful, bordering on arrogant, and live long lives of distaste for the other races. Truthfully, most of this is born from just how glorious elven civilization was before Solusek Ro, Lord of Flames, arched the spine of the Serpent Mountains, causing massive droughts that destroyed the once-great Elddar Forest that covered most of what is now southeastern Antonica, and how bitter they are at its loss, all these millennia later. High Elves can be Clerics, Enchanters, Magicians, Paladins and Wizards, and share the unique distinction of being only one of two races that cannot be Warriors, the other being the Erudites. High Elves are a Small race, but are capable of wearing Medium armor. High Elves have Infravision.    Humans. Humans have a surprisingly long and storied history for a fantasy world, from their origins as tribesmen, the founding and fall of the Combine Empire, to the founding of the two great cities of Qeynos and Freeport on opposite ends of Antonica. Humans have the widest selection of classes available to them, as well as gods to worship, average stats, you know the drill by now when it comes to humans in any kind of fantasy story, right? Humans are unique in that they are the only race prior to Ruins of Kunark to have access to the Monk class. Humans can be Bards, Clerics, Druids (Qeynos only), Enchanters, Magicians, Monks, Necromancers, Paladins, Rangers (Qeynos only), Rogues, Shadow Knights, Warriors and Wizards. Humans are a Medium race. Humans have no night vision.   Ogres are one of my favorite races solely because of their lore. Rallos Zek, God of War, forged the Ogres into genius tacticians and brilliant warriors. He led his Ogres in battle, conquering and destroying, and soon the army turned their gaze towards the Planes of the Gods themselves. Fearful for their lives, the Gods gathered together and laid down a deific curse upon the Ogres, cursing them into utter stupidity and brazen dumbness, stealing Zek's greatest warriors from him as they descended into barbarity and tribalism, their conquered Empire collapsing in the wake of the curse. Ogres are best known mechanically for being immune to being stunned, as long as they're hit from the front. Ogres can be Beastlords, Shadow Knights, Shamans and Warriors. Their Beastlord Warder is a brown bear. Ogres are a Large race, and have access to an equipment-neutral version of the Bash skill called Slam. Ogres have Infravision.   The Trolls are the creation of Cazic-Thule, God of Fear, and share their deity's propensity for ugliness and violence. They typically reek of some foul stench and look upon almost every other race as a meal to be eaten, especially the frogloks with whom they share their swamp home of Innothule with, and have warred against since time immemorial. Trolls are best-known for their Regeneration ability, which increases their natural hit point regeneration the higher in level they go. Trolls can be Beastlords, Shadow Knights, Shamans, or Warriors. Their Beastlord Warder is an alligator. Trolls are a Large race, and have access to an equipment-neutral version of the Bash skill called Slam. Trolls have Infravision.   The Wood Elves, or Feir`Dal, live in the treetop city of Kelethin, a ten minute walk from the fanciful city of Felwithe, where their cousins the High Elves live. The Wood Elves see themselves as wardens of the great Faydark Forest, and are far more accepting of other races than the High Elves are - save for the Dark Elves, whom they hate with an undying passion. They look upon half-elves with the most kindness out of the other elven races, even going so far as to openly welcome them into their city. Wood Elves can be Bards, Druids, Rangers, Rogues and Warriors. Wood Elves are a Small race, but can also wear Medium armor. Wood Elves have Infravision. Expansion Races   The Iksar are a race that sees themselves as utterly superior to all others. Another of Cazic-Thule's creations, they were once the slave race of the Shissar. To escape captivity, they brought forth a plague known as the Greenmist, which was thought to have killed all the Shissar - though in truth, they just fled to the moon, where the Greenmist pursued them, so they created their temple in the center of a vacuum on the moon so the Greenmist couldn't follow them further. After freeing themselves from slavery, the Iksar built a glorious Empire that stretched across their native continent of Kunark, becoming so dominant that they caught the attention of the great and powerful dragons of the Ring of Scale. The Dragons started a war with the Iksar that lasted long enough to collapse their Empire into rubble, losing their capital city of Sebilis, which now is the lair of a poisonous undead dragon known as Trakanon. In the aftermath of the war, which was technically won by the dragons, the Iksar rebuilt a capital in the city of Cabilis. Iksar have a scaling regeneration ability like Trolls, and a scaling AC bonus due to their scales. Not only do Iksar hate all other races, all other races, save the Vah Shir, hate the Iksar, making venturing into any city other than Cabilis or Shar Vahl without some faction work a dangerous prospect. Iksar can be Beastlords, Monks, Necromancers, Shadow Knights, Shamans and Warriors, and every last member of the race worships Cazic-Thule regardless of profession. Their Beastlord Warder is a scaled wolf. Iksar are a Medium race, and all start with 100 points in Swimming, and can hold their breath underwater longer than most other races. Iksar have Infravision.  The Vah Shir were once bipedal, digitigrade talking cat-people called Kerrans upon their own little island on Odus, until the war between Erudin and Paineel began. When the magical explosion that destroyed Old Paineel happened, many Kerrans were caught up in it, and wound up teleported to the moon instead of simply incinerated. They created a new society, and the moon allowed them to grow tall, strong and plantigrade, and far more intelligent than their tribesmen left on Odus. They are now a highly honor-bound society with distinct castes for their people, all dedicated and loyal to their King, Raja Kerrath. Vah Shir can be Bards, Beastlords, Rogues, Shamans and Warriors, and all of their race are militant Agnostics. Their Beastlord Warder is a striped tiger. Vah Shir are a Large race, but can also wear Medium armor. Vah Shir also all have 50 points of the Safe Fall skill, meaning they take less damage from falling than other races. Vah Shir have Infravision.  Frogloks, otherwise known as Guktans, were added with the Legacy of Ykesha expansion. Featuring no sexual dimorphism whatsoever (save that female frogs cover their chest for zero reason, since as amphibians they don't have tits), unless you count skin color (only female frogs can be pink), they are a slightly more advanced version of the NPC frogloks in the game. Created by the Marrs and known as Guktans, the Frogloks actually conquered the city of Trolls during the time of Legacy of Ykesha, taking over their home city of Grobb and ousting the Trolls into the Innothule Swamp. The trolls would later take their city back and the Frogloks would be exiled into the Rathe Mountains, which is where they would start if made on this server. The Guktans worship Mithaniel Marr almost exclusively, but in the process of losing Grobb, the Dark Elves forced the Curse of Innoruuk upon them, which broke their unity and made them turn on each other; as such, a growing number of Guktans turn to the darker arts of necromancy and the worship of Innoruuk. (However, the server on which I am playing, Wayfarers Haven, doesn't allow Evil Frogs for whatever reason.) RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Jul 6, 2022 |
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Classes Bards are first on this list, and they are one of the most complex classes in EverQuest. Technically considered a hybrid class, they wield melee weapons and wear plate armor, and do not cast spells; they sing songs. Songs all take 3 seconds to start, and have durations varying between 6 seconds (one tick) and 30 seconds (five ticks). If you simply turn on a song and let it run, the song will refresh itself every six seconds. However, talented bards instead rapidly swap between songs, starting one to run then beginning another in a process colloquially known as "Twisting". Despite their plate armor, Bards are not tanks. What they are, however, are jacks of all trades; their songs vary from party buffs to enemy debuffs, damage over time and direct damage. Bards are the number one cause of RSI in EverQuest due to the necessity of twisting, but Bards can fill in several gaps in a party at once, slowing enemies, providing mana and health regeneration, hasting their allies and doing damage all at the same time in the hands of a skilled Bard player. But their most powerful ability is their runspeed buff, which outstrips any and all other forms of movement in the game. A unique playstyle available to Bards is known as swarm kiting; because most of their damage-over-time songs are Point Blank Area of Effect, they have no cap on the number of targets they can affect at once, and thus very skilled bards would gather up dozens of enemies, run them in circles until they were tightly grouped, and then start twisting their damage-over-time songs and their runspeed buff, killing many more enemies at once than any other class is capable of. On TAKP, you are only allowed to pull 80 enemies at one time, and I can tell you that I've seen bards pulling twice that number in their swarms back on the original EverQuest. This would later be nerfed into the ground by Sony by causing Bard damage-over-time songs to simply not do damage to moving targets. To combat the RSI-inducing nature of the Bard, they would also introduce a command called /melody, in which you could assign numbers associated with song gems and it will play those songs in the order indicated. This led to Bards largely being played as box characters with numerous /melody hotkeys; though in fairness, Bard boxes for their mana regeneration song were common enough before then.  Clerics are devotees of their Gods, and wield the most powerful heals in the game, both direct heals and heal-over-time spells. They also possess the biggest HP and AC buffs, especially once they reach level 60 and get the spell Aegolism. The downside is that their biggest HP buffs (Aegolism line, Symbols) cost reagents, and not cheap ones, either, the most expensive of which cost 10 platinum per cast in the form of Peridots. Clerics are the de facto healer of EverQuest, however, due to their level 39 spell Complete Healing, which does exactly what it says on the tin - a 10 second cast to restore ALL of the target's HP. Many raid targets are downed simply by pointing a tank at a mob, letting him get aggro, then unleashing the Complete Heal chain - 5-8 clerics all casting Complete Healing in a cycle in order to keep the tank alive while the DPS eats the mob alive. This unintended tactic is what led to the Complete Heal "nerf" of being capped at 7500hp later in EverQuest's lifecycle (somewhere in Velious, if I recall correctly) as the developers wanted to start making encounters more interesting than simply "Complete Heal rotation on a Defensive disc Warrior". I'll get into how they managed that later. Outside of healing, Clerics also possess the most powerful Undead-only nukes, and can summon up Undead-bane hammers to hit things with for their own personal use; hammers that, later, have big damage procs on them that affect everything, not just undead. Cleric healers are extremely powerful, and a solid choice for any and all groups. But perhaps the most valuable (or second most valuable, depending on how you look at it) thing a Cleric brings to the table are the Resurrection spells that bring a person back to their corpse and restores an amount of experience that they lost. The most powerful, Revivification, restores 96% of the lost experience, and is so important that their Epic Weapon has a clickable, mana-free version of Revivification, making it the longest-lasting and most valuable Epic in the game.  Druids are, ostensibly, healers; but they are not as good at it as Clerics. Nature's defenders, Druids have a little bit of everything going for them; they have debuffs, including the ever-valuable ability to snare enemies, direct damage spells, damage-over-time spells, roots, HP buffs, regeneration buffs, and later on in life their HP buffs also add mana regeneration. Druids are a good class, but one I've never personally played past level 20 or so. Druids are also best-known for being one of two classes to gain access to Teleportation spells; it was not uncommon for Druids who had reached level 39+ to make several thousand platinum a day selling teleports (colloquially known as "ports") to people who didn't want to run across the world. And EverQuest has a very, very big world. Druids are one of the few classes that can efficiently solo in EverQuest, as well. Druids can also charm animals, turning them into their pets, with a very high efficacy, capping out at level 60 animals. As of Shadows of Luclin, and later Planes of Power, the Druids gained two versions of the cleric's Complete Heal spell, only it was capped to 75% of the target's HP total, and further limited to a maximum of about 3000hp for the level 58 version, and around 5000hp for the level 64 version.  Enchanters are, quite frankly, my favorite class. They are not the showboats of any group, but they enable groups to do more and do it faster. Enchanters are, primarily, a crowd control class, gaining access to a line of spells known as Mezzes (short for Mesmerization, the first spell in the line) that are essentially long-duration stuns broken by damage. They also have powerful mana regeneration buffs and the best haste spells in the game, as well as a series of buffs known as Runes that simply absorb damage. In addition to all of that, they also get Slow spells, spells that reduce how fast enemies attack. But perhaps the most iconic ability of the Enchanters is Charming. They can take a powerful enemy and turn it into their own personal slave, up to a certain level depending on the spell, and turn it against their friends for long periods of time. This is an extremely powerful ability, especially once you grow confident enough to give them weapons to make them dual-wield and then cast a haste spell on them. Charm pets are extreme amounts of DPS all through the game's lifespan, to the point that they began to nerf the spells into causing slow effects on charm pets later on, making them far less valuable.  Magicians are masters of the elements. Sort of. They have the second-best direct damage spells in the game, directly behind Wizards, and gain access to a series of elemental pets that are tremendous DPS. These pets fill specific roles; Earth pets root things and have the highest HP and AC, Water pets hit things slightly harder than Earth pets and do a direct damage proc (and, later, they backstab like rogues), Air pets hit almost as hard as Water and have a direct-damage stun proc, while Fire pets have an extremely powerful innate damage shield - and later, they become useless as they turn into Wizards with tiny mana pools and outdated direct damage spells. Magicians, on their part, gain only Fire and Magic direct damage spells, letting their elemental mastery be seen through their pets instead of themselves. Magicians are a great class to have along, however; their pets provide a consistent stream of DPS and, in a pinch, can step in and tank mobs, forming ablative armor for the rest of the group. After all, bringing a dead player back to life costs a lot of mana, and a cooldown via rez sickness; a new elemental pet costs only a 5 silver malachite and some mana.  Monks are masters of melee combat. Even without weapons Monks are dangerous to behold, beating things to death. They gain the largest variety of secondary combat abilities, the best of which is gained at level 30 with Flying Kick. Monks also have a powerful healing ability on a 6 minute cooldown called Mend; this restores 25% of the monk's total HP, even if it's buffed. They can also Feign Death, which allows them to split groups of enemies for single pulls. Monks are a wonderful DPS class that truly kick rear end. Monks also get the near-unique Block passive defensive skill (shared with Beastlords); compared to other melees' Parry ability, Block has a much higher rate of activation, and both Block and Parry fully stop any unique instance of damage when it activates. This, coupled with high Avoidance AC and high caps on their Dodge skill, makes Monks somewhat effective Dodge tanks - though on Al`Kabor, Monks are all working with the Planes of Power era nerf that destroyed their softcap AC returns below even the arcane casters, making them less effective than on other servers.  Necromancers are unlike any other caster class. Instead of powerful direct damage spells, they gain powerful damage-over-time spells, as well as the ability to both snare and fear enemies into running away. This has led to the advent of "fear kiting", where they'll snare an enemy, fear it, load it up with dots and sit down while it flees, and their skeletal pet hammers on its fleeing rear end. Later in life, when things become immune to Fear (55+), and even earlier if they want to, Necromancers also aggro kite, where they load up the snare and dots and watch an enemy futilely try to reach them before it dies, moving at a sedate pace to keep ahead of it. Necromancers are one of the few classes that can truly efficiently solo in EverQuest, as they have a mana regen line known as the Lich series which slowly drains their hitpoints and gives them more mana than even an Enchanter's mana regen can. This, coupled with their Lifetaps (direct damage HP-stealing spells) and their Leach line (damage-over-time HP-stealing spells) makes them extremely efficient, and deadly. Additionally, they gain a series of spells that let them Feign Death, allowing them to quickly and easily drop an encounter that's going badly for them. Like Enchanters, Necromancers can charm, but only the undead, with nearly the same efficacy of an Enchanter, though like Druids, cap at level 60 undead. Necromancers, however, bring only slightly more utility to a party than a Wizard. Later on in life, they get a group mana-tap spell, a few healing spells that sacrifice their HP to heal another player, but most importantly they get the Subversion line of spells which allows them to take their massive mana regen and feed their mana directly to another player. These are colloquially known as "twitch" spells because of the emote that happens when they cast it on someone ("Soandso twitches.") and Necromancers find places on raids just to twitch Clerics on Complete Heal chains for longer fights.  Paladins are Holy Warriors of their Gods, wearing plate armor and powerful weapons to batter enemies into submission. While they have no spells that directly cause damage, save against the undead, they have powerful Stuns, Cleric heals (though several levels behind), the same HP buff lines as Clerics (again, several levels behind), and later in life, unique splash healing that heals their groups. They also have a panic button in the form of Lay on Hands, a 72-minute cooldown ability that heals another target for the Paladin's maximum HP total. Despite this, Paladins are one of the least-played classes, as they have very little utility; their primary goal in life is to hold aggro and get beaten on while others kill things. Against anything but the undead, paladins have the lowest DPS of any class. But they also gain a Cleric's resurrection spell line, though they cap out at Resurrection (90% exp restored).  Rangers are a dual-wielding, chain-wearing melee class that gains druid spells. As of the advent of Shadows of Luclin, however, they are far more known as archers, with the Endless Quiver (unlimited arrows) and Archery Mastery (30/60/100% more archery damage) alternate advancement abilities, as well as a class-unique ability that doubles their archery damage on a target that's standing still and not rooted. Regardless, Rangers are a solid DPS class, with class-unique nukes on short cast times and fast cooldowns, Druid damage-over-time spells and even a few class-unique ones, and the ability to snare. Rangers can also tank in a pinch, though you'll never find them tanking the highest-end mobs, but with sufficient gearing a Ranger makes an adequate tank for almost all groupable content in the game, though they do require quite a bit more healing than plate tanks.  Rogues are the purest of DPS classes. They can combine Hide and Sneak into a powerful form of invisibility, but mostly, they sit behind mobs and Backstab them. They can also drop their aggro by turning off autoattack and Hiding, a process known as "evading", which lowers their aggro significantly when it works. While Rogues wear chain, they do not have the ability to tank even as well as a Ranger does, to say nothing of a Monk, much less any plate-wearing class. Rogues can also pickpocket enemies for change or vendor trash. However, despite their shortcomings and their one-note playstyle, the Rogue does it well; Rogues and Wizards both vie for top spots on the DPS charts regularly, and they dish out so much pain, especially after level 55 when they get a chance to double backstab an opponent.  Shadow Knights are the other hybrid tank, and they share their spell list with Necromancers. Unlike a Paladin, a Shadow Knight is all about aggression, throwing snares, damage-over-time spells, and even class-unique direct damage spells. They also get a line of spells that simply give them lots and lots of aggro on mobs, leading them to be the greatest generators of "snap aggro" in the game. They also get a 72-minute cooldown ability called Harm Touch, which unloads a ton of damage into an enemy. They gain Feign Death spells like Necromancers do as well, and with their ability to snare, they can split mobs like a Monk. They can also lifetap enemies like a necromancer, and gain a series of spells that give them various procs on their attacks, including lifetapping. A Shadow Knight can self-heal while also dealing damage because of this, and as such, are one of the most self-sufficient, highest DPS tanks in the game.  Shamans are the last of the Priest classes, and their heals are on par with a Druid's - save for their level 60 spell, Torpor, which is an immense heal-over-time. Shamans, however, are the premier buffers of EverQuest, able to buff nearly every statistic save Intelligence and Wisdom. They get the second-best haste spells in the game, and even a pet to add on damage. Later on (past this server's timeline), they gained unique buffs that put procs on group members that procced extremely often, adding tons of DPS to the melee in their group. They get comparable damage-over-time spells to a Necromancer, and some strong Cold-based direct damage spells. But most importantly, Shamans get Slows like Enchanters - but bigger, better slows, slows that target resists other than Magic, which can really help against high magic resistance mobs. The Shaman's most iconic ability aside from Slow is the Cannibalization line; like Necromancers, Shamans can eat their HP for mana, but in a much more annoying fashion, having to spam their Cannibalize spell in order to do so. Shamans wear chain, as well, and with their Slows, roots, self-healing, and their powerful DoTs, are the last class on this list to be truly efficient soloers. Shamans, like Druids, also got a version of the cleric's Complete Heal at level 58 in Shadows of Luclin, once again capped at a maximum of 75% of the target's health and further limited to about 2000hp. They did not receive an upgrade to this in Planes of Power like the Druid, however.  Warriors are the pure melee tank of the game. They get no spells, wear plate armor, mostly tank while dual wielding, and can Kick and Bash. And that's it. Aside from their Disciplines, of course. Warriors are the premier tank, and due to their Disciplines, you'll find them tanking pretty much every raid mob in existence. Their Defensive Discipline reduces all damage they take by 35%, which is huge on a target that quads for 1100; Furious allows them to riposte every attack; Evasive increases their ability to dodge/parry by 25%, and so on. Their offensive disciplines are all useful for burn phases too. Warrior is the highest raw DPS tank on the list, but because they have no utility, they are the hardest to play in a group setting, requiring the group to participate in letting the warrior hold aggro. But when it comes to taking and dishing it out, Warriors stand above the rest. Additionally, Warriors were originally the only class capable of landing critical hits in melee (Rangers could crit with Archery, and Rogues with throwing weapons), which straight up doubled the damage of that melee attack, starting at level 12, the occurrence of which was influenced by Dexterity. As of Shadows of Luclin, all melee characters and hybrids can gain Alternate Advancement abilities that allow them to land critical hits, but with equal AAs, the Warrior still stands above all other classes for their frequency. The Warrior has one more unique mechanic - berserker frenzy. When they drop below 35% health, and until they are healed above 45% health, they gain a level-dependent amount of raw Attack stat (which only influences their Accuracy - the ability to actually land their melee hits), and instead of landing critical hits, they will land crippling blows - an extra 19% damage over a critical hit's double damage, plus a stun effect on the target.  Wizards are like Warriors; they do one thing, and they do it well. They blow things up. Their direct-damage spells are of the highest caliber, and the most numerous among any class, gaining at least one new nuke every spell level. Their direct damage spells run the gamut from Fire to Cold to pure Magic. They get very little utility outside of teleport spells and area-effect snares; their class is tuned to converting their mana bar into damage as fast and efficiently as possible, even giving them some on-demand mana regen spells in the Harvest line that immediately restores a big chunk of mana in exchange for being stunned for ten seconds. A Wizard is a finely tuned machine of destruction, but once they're out of mana, they're helpless. As of the March 22, 2002 patch, some few months before Planes of Power (October 2002), Wizards gained the innate ability to land spell crits, starting at level 12, doubling the damage of their spells when it occurred, with a roughly 2-3% base chance on every spell. This was further enhanced by Spell Fury Alternate Advancement abilities that were available to all casters, priests and hybrids introduced in Shadows of Luclin. Expansion Classes  Beastlords were added with the Shadows of Luclin expansion, the first additional class to grace the game (the second being the Berserker, added much later). Beastlords are a very strange class; a hybrid of Shamans and Monks, they wound up being more powerful than either of their parent classes were individually. Beastlords favor piercing weapons, blunt weapons, and hand-to-hand weapons, and at level 9, gain the ability to call forth a powerful pet known as a Warder. The Beastlord's Warder is where 75% of their power lies, able to give it powerful proc buffs and haste rivaling a Magician's Burnout spells. A Beastlord's Warder is the second-strongest pet in the game, and a Beastlord is no slouch themselves when it comes to tanking due to having Block, higher AC returns than Monks, Slows, and class-unique Direct Damage spells as well as a Shaman's Poison and Disease damage-over-time lines, some of the Shaman's statistic buffs (including class-unique versions of the Shaman's Focus line of spells that are slightly weaker), a class-unique attack buff in Savagery and Ferocity, and a class-unique line of spells that provide HP and Mana regeneration. Beastlords are great, but perhaps slightly overtuned. The only thing holding them back as a DPS class is the lack of Double and Triple Attack, and only gaining Kick and none of the Monk's special melee attacks, problems that are solved much later in life through Alternate Advancement abilities, though their personal DPS never quite matches more dedicated DPS classes such as the Monk, Rogue and Wizard, their combined DPS with their pets makes them extremely competitive, and their utility is incredible. Much, much later on in EverQuest's life cycle, Beastlords gained access to some of the Monk's secondary attack skills; Round Kick, Dragon Punch, Eagle Claw, Tiger Strike, and later still gained some Alternate Advancement abilities that added various proc effects to those attacks, ranging from direct damage procs to attack debuffs and aggro dumps and finally giving them a little more damage from something other than spells. We'll be seeing none of that here, however.  Berserkers were added with the Gates of Discord expansion, and are the Big Beef Answer to Rogues. Like Rogues, Berserkers are a melee-focused class, but instead of focusing on dual-wielding and backstabbing, they prefer big, chonky two-handed weapons and Frenzy. (Funnily enough, both Berserkers and Rogues want high Strength, as the damage calculation for Backstab includes a front-loaded multiplier for Strength past certain values.) Frenzy makes three extra melee swings on an opponent, and they miss a lot until the skill is leveled up, and has a level-, skill-, and Alternate Advancement-based damage calculation, so its damage is completely independent of the weapon wielded. What Berserkers excel at, however, is getting force-multiplied; in the right group, with the right buffs, Berserkers are not equivalent to Rogues - they're equivalent to Wizards on full burn. They trade this single-minded focus for being tied with Rogues as the worst at taking damage in the game and have zero non-combat utility; at least a Rogue can sneak around undetected, but everything a Berserker does is tied to doing damage or crippling enemies with Stuns and Snares. The big lure of the Berserker is that they were 100% designed around the change to melee combat brought about by Gates of Discord, where melee characters were now required to buy tomes to learn their disciplines that were previously free, and the Stamina bar became the Endurance bar. (As a trade-off, Disciplines gained unique Timers, allowing a wider variety of disciplines to be used instead of saving the refresh for the one big one.) Berserkers have the largest number of Disciplines in the game, and a not-insignificant part of those Disciplines revolve around their Throwing Axe abilities. They are obligated to purchase Axe Components of different varities, which they then use their Disciplines to turn into Throwing Axes of differing qualities, which then fuel a lot of their other Disciplines, such as their Snares, Stuns and Aggro-lowering abilities. However, their implementation is awkward, to say the least, and was one of Sony's arguably failed attempts to modernize EverQuest along with the melee changes made to accommodate them. Berserkers share the Warrior innate ability to land critical hits. Berserkers are also extremely limited in what races could be them; Barbarians, Ogres, Trolls, Vah Shir and Dwarves are the only available races to the class, and very nearly identical to the list for Beastlords (replace Dwarves with Iksar). RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 12:26 on Jul 7, 2022 |
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Update 1: Getting Started So, first things first: three-boxing is not the easiest thing to do, but there's a number of things you can do to make it easier on yourself. The Al`Kabor Project's client download includes two things that facilitate this - a program called Hotkeynet and a script to load called Script.txt. Script.txt has code that allows you to swap between windows named Client 1, Client 2 and Client 3 with Numapd 1, 2 and 3, which is extremely useful for quickly swapping clients. As a side note, the client for The Al`Kabor Project automatically names Clients in the order they're opened. For Wayfarers Haven, however, things are slightly more complicated; you need the program WinEQ2, and to set it up for swapping. For ease, I'm going to be making it function identically to how things would work on TAKP. First, you open WinEQ2.  Right-clicking on its icon in the task tray opens this. We're going to Options and Preferences.  That brings up this screen. We're going to EverQuest.  As you can see, I have various profiles setup for multiple servers I play on, but I'll show you the salient points. WFH in particular has two different clients it uses; the v2 and v3 client. The v3 client has a lot of Quality of Life features (like clicking items from bags) but also loses (most) access to the Bazaar, the player-centric buying/selling area added with Shadows of Luclin; there's a web app that lets you use it, though! I will be playing with the V3 client.  Most of this is the default settings. All you really have to do is pick a Name for the profile, and point it to the Path you've installed the Client to; as you can see, mine is installed into the folder D:\Games\EQ Emus\WFHv3. Once that's set up, we're going down to Hotkeys.  "Global Activation" is the option we want, and changing it is as simple as clicking into the box and typing what you want to use; yes, typing, it doesn't have an option to simply set the hotkey then press the button you want to use. I go with Num 1, Num 2 and Num 3 for my three primary clients, and that's everything set up! After you've run the wfh patcher included in the client download, you'll open the game like so through WinEQ2:  Right-clicking on the WinEQ2 icon, open the EverQuest pop menu, and click on WFHv3. Do this three times for three clients. Et voila, the game opens. I intend to show off a few things, so I've already got my three-box decided; additionally, I am not going to twink these characters - meaning giving them gear from my other characters - to show what starting life in EverQuest is like. My three-box is going to be as such: Vah Shir Beastlord, beacause I love cats. Erudite Enchanter, because I love charming. Dark Elf Cleric of Innoruuk, because I love not dying and I want some form of snare; more on that, later. This gives me a very well-rounded trio; the Beastlord is a very good tank - not as good as a Knight or Warrior, but with Block and good AC softcap returns, they make very solid tanks. Plus the second-strongest pet in the game makes for very good DPS output along with the Beastlord's own DPS capabilities, plus the Spiritual Light line will make keeping my other two characters in the positive, mana-wise, much easier. Plus having a slower besides the Enchanter is good for the Enchanter's mana pool, and helps to hold aggro off the other two characters. The Enchanter is the backbone of the group, with the ability to crowd control mobs, slow, haste the beastlord, regenerate mana, and provide high DPS in the form of charm pets. Finally, the Cleric keeps the other two alive and buffs the everloving hell out of their HP totals, making it easier to keep them alive. This is a very solid group, capable of trioing most group content and some raid content even. The Beastlord's reliance on leather armor isn't as big a problem as it may first seem, simply because Block is such a strong defensive skill when compared to Parry, being 2-3 times more effective and activating more often than Parry does. I'm going to break into a bit of mechanics talk for how the math works out, though: First of all, every class has a separate AC soft cap, and different returns on AC over the soft cap. This only counts for the raw AC on the items themselves, not whatever your Defense skill boosts those numbers to. Warriors, for instance, have a softcap of 430 "worn" AC, and returns of 33.3% on every point of AC over that at level 65 (the current level cap) - meaning 1/3rd of the "worn" AC applies to their AC. For our purposes, we're going to compare the Ranger and the Beastlord, the two "not-tanks" that are commonly used in trios like mine. The Ranger gets a Softcap of 375, and wear chain armor, so that AC is easier to reach; they get 14.3% return over their softcap. Beastlords get a softcap of 350, and the same 14.3% return, so shouldn't the benefit go to the extra 25 points of worn AC? Enter Block. Block is the equalizer. Block activates ~9-10% of the time at 220 skill (the beastlord's skill cap), while Parry (which Rangers get) activates ~3-5% of the time at 200 skill (the ranger's skill cap). Both of the skills serve the same function; if they activate on a melee attack, that melee attack simply does not hit. Simply put, even with lower softcap and the same return, the Beastlord is going to take less damage over time. Rangers have one unique advantage at level 60, called the Weaponshield Discipline. This lets them parry all attacks for 24 seconds (4 ticks), but it has a cooldown of 60 minutes. It's a great "oh poo poo" button. Beastlords, on the other hand, have Protective Spirit Discipline at level 55; 12 seconds of 90% reduced damage on a 4 minute refresh timer (3 minutes, 50 seconds to be exact). And this is before you realize that, unless specifically overaggroed to beeline towards someone, a Beastlord can also back off and make mobs hit their pets instead of them, and have very, very powerful pet heals. The Beastlord is a stronger, more versatile trio tank than the Ranger, and has more utility than the Shadow Knight and the Paladin (whose numbers are 403 AC and 25% return) who don't even get a single mitigation discipline in this era. The only thing the Beastlord is missing is snare, and even that isn't true once you start getting Alternate Advancement abilities, because Beastlords have one called Hobble of Spirits, which makes their pet proc a snare. This does remove their damage proc, but if you need something snared, the Beastlord can cover it, and you really only need them snared if they run and threaten to pull more mobs. Then again, having self-pulling chunks of experience can be very useful if you can kill fast enough to keep up. Need I remind you that this trio has the capability of pouring on the DPS between the Beastlord pet and charm pets? Race choice would make this trio stronger. The Ogre, for example, with their frontal stun immunity and high base stats, is a very compelling choice, as is the Iksar with their AC bonus (which counts as worn AC and makes getting to the softcap easier) and regeneration. There's literally no reason to be a Troll ever since Iksar came around, unless you like the look of them, or if you want to do the Innoruuk Symbol quest which has unlimited clicks of a snare spell, which, granted, can be useful. (We'll be completing that quest for our Cleric.) The only thing Barbarian would bring over Vah Shir is a better stat spread, but I don't like the white wolf warder, especially because it doesn't grow in size as much as the tiger and bear do. And I don't like the way Ogres look in leather; they look like hobos unless they have Velious leather.  Seen here, an Ogre Female in Leather Top and "plate" pants.  The Velious armor textures on Ogres.  Seen here: A Vah Shir female in leather armor. The choice is obvious. As for Iksar, the scaled wolf warder also has some size issues I don't like, and... I don't want to deal with the racial experience penalty. It drives me bonkers having characters leveling at vastly different rates. I went on Wayfarer's Haven in preparation for doing this to level a Shadow Knight/Enchanter/Cleric trio; my Enchanter and Cleric had reached level 12 when my Iksar Shadow Knight had just hit level 10. Now one thing I've yet to touch on are the concepts of experience bonuses and penalties. Originally, EverQuest had a series of experience penalties based on your class and race: Trolls and Iksar had a -20% experience penalty. Ogres had a -15% experience penalty due to their frontal stun immunity. Barbarians had a -5% experience penalty I guess due to being large and having good physical stats and the highest starting Wisdom for Shamans. Halflings, on the other hand, had a +5% experience bonus, which was supposed to be assigned to humans but mistakenly put on the short ones and never removed. Classes, as well, had experience penalties: Paladins, Shadow Knights, Rangers and Bards had -40% penalty. Monks had -20%. Wizards, Magicians, Enchanters and Necromancers had -10%. Rogues had +9% bonus and Warriors had +10% bonus. These penalties were multiplicative, which means that an Iksar or Troll Shadow Knight would earn experience (1.2*1.4)=1.68x slower, or 68% slower than anyone else in the game, whereas a Barbarian Rogue would level (1.09/1.05)=1.04x or 3% faster than most. A Halfling Warrior, however, would level 15.5% faster than anyone else. Additionally, due to an error in experience coding early on, having a hybrid in the party like a Ranger or Knight would make everyone level slower. The hybrid would get a larger portion of the experience relative to everyone else, whose numbers would be reduced to compensate. Knights and Rangers were hated for a lot of reasons early on before this was corrected, but hybrids still leveled slow as molasses. By this metric, the only characters in the game that had "baseline" experience gains were the Priest classes, excepting the Shaman since the only Shaman races were races with experience penalties. As of Scars of Velious, however, the class penalties are gone, while the racial penalties remain, as do the class and race bonuses. Which means an Iksar would be leveling a good deal slower. Not the full 20%, however, since there's been some experience smoothing. I'll go into further detail as to how experience works later; just know that, as long an Iksar is grouped with people that don't have penalties, they get magic experience out of nowhere during the experience splitting process to make their leveling much smoother and more in-line with other characters. This both helps further correct the above coding error and make them level faster when grouped as opposed to solo. They would be slower, though, as you can tell by my real-play example up above. Vah Shir have no racial penalty, look good in leather, and their warders get large. The choice, for me, is simple. Plus, cat on the moon. I was already hooked on EverQuest for three years, and then they introduced cats that can summon cats and my fate was sealed. It's really that simple.   So we'll make ourselves a Vah Shir Beastlord and pop her bonus attribute points into Stamina. Stamina is one of the hardest attributes to raise, and more HP is always good. A baseline of 90 strength will be good enough, and Strength goes up quickly once you start getting Velious gear. Now the Erudite Enchantress, all points into Intelligence for a bigger mana pool, but only 25 of the 30 points can go in there; the other 5 go into Agility to give us that 75 Agility breakpoint (see below). And finally the Dark Elf Cleric of Innoruuk. Yes, that makes this an Evil characer, but the Regent Symbol of Innoruuk, a quested item, gives unlimited clicks of the level 4 Necromancer spell Clinging Darkness which is a 30% snare for 30 seconds, which rounds out our access to utility nicely. This will also allow us to do some fear kiting, as both Enchanter and Cleric get access to Fear spells. Since a Cleric mostly casts spells, 25 of her 30 points go into her Wisdom stat, with the remaining 5 going into Stamina. Our stats are exactly what they sound like on the tin, but there's a few points, so I'm going to go into it. Strength has an effect on your melee Attack stat, but its most direct effect on the game is the Backstab damage you do. It also sets your Carry Weight, with 1 Weight equal to 1 Strength. Stamina affects your Stamina and your Hitpoint totals, and its benefit depends on your class; Warriors get the most mileage out of equal levels of Stamina, more than Knights, who get more than the other melee classes, who get more than Priests, who get more than Casters. Agility has an effect on your melee avoidance, and if your Agility is below 75, you take large penalties to your Avoidance. Ogre Shadow Knights, Erudites in general and Dwarf Paladins should all put 5 points into Agility since their baseline is 70. Dexterity mostly affects how frequently you make weapons with procs on them activate, but the effect is mostly unnoticeable until you go above 150 Dexterity. The class that needs Dexterity the most is the Bard, as it affects how often they miss notes on their songs (which interrupts them), though just getting skill in their song abilities helps the most. Wisdom is the stat all Priests run on, as it determines how high their, and Rangers and Paladins', mana pool is. Intelligence is the stat all arcane casters run on, as like Wisdom for Priests, it determines how high their, and Shadow Knights', mana pool is. Charisma is mostly a dump stat. Once thought that it had an effect on charming, this was proven mostly untrue (it had a miniscule, barely noticeable effect). Primarily, Charisma affects the Lull series of spells; the lower your Charisma, the more chances it has a critical fail effect, which, instead of lowering aggro ranges, causes them to immediately jump you. Additionally, Charisma affects the prices you get from vendors for your trash; around 132 and Indifferent faction is needed for maximum price from non-"Greedy" vendors (more on that later). We pop into game in three different places. First, the city of Shar Vahl on the moon Luclin:  Second, the Erudin Palace, center of knowledge for the Erudites, in the city of Erudin, on the continent of Odus:  And thirdly, our Dark Elf Cleric begins near the Temple of Innoruuk in Neriak Commons.  Now, originally, this would be a very, very dumb decision to split my characters up like this. Here's a map of the world as it stands during this era:  Our Erudite starts on Odus, on the far west of the map. Our Dark Elf starts in Neriak, on the east side of Antonica. And lastly, our Vah Shir starts on the moon of Luclin, which isn't on the map. To get these three characters together prior to Shadows of Luclin, I would have had to run the Enchanter all the way across the Plains of Karana, a journey which would take me across three very LARGE zones, to Highpass Hold, which is full of mid-teen level aggro mobs, through Kithicor Forest, which is deadly at night, through the West Commonlands, which is again full of mid-teens aggro mobs, to East Commonlands, which is mostly safe along the walls, and finally to Freeport, then find someone to bind my character in Freeport so when I die I don't end up back in Erudin. Or the reverse, taking the Cleric across, but that's a dumb idea considering the best experience is to be had on east Antonica and in Faydwer, and Dark Elves are hated everywhere. As of Shadows of Luclin, I would have to run my Enchanter to North Karana (across East Karana to North Karana), run to the zone line to South Karana, and sit at the wizard spires there and wait to be teleported up to Luclin, and then a 15 minute wait to get teleported down to Greater Faydark, then run through Butcherblock Mountains to the boat and ride it to Freeport. My Vah Shir would have the hardest time of it, funnily enough; the only link between Shar Vahl and the Nexus involves going through Paludal Caverns, which is chock full of aggro mobs that would paste a level 1 cat. There's a way to get through without aggroing anything, but it's tricky. Getting my other characters to Shar Vahl would also be fraught with danger in the opposite direction. But, thanks to the Planes of Power, we have an alternative:    Behold, the Books to the Plane of Knowledge. These were placed at Planes of Power's launch, and are all very nearby to the starting cities. Shar Vahl's is in Shadeweaver's Thicket, just outside the walls of the city; Odus has two, one for Erudin and one for Paineel, both very close to the city; and Neriak's is the most difficult to reach, as you have to follow a path fairly far from Neriak to reach it. Prior to Planes of Power, I would have had to make three characters that start very close together, if not the same race, or find a very friendly druid that had group teleports to take me close to them and doesn't mind not getting paid - for as you see, characters in EverQuest begin with four to six things. A very lovely starter weapon, a note to their guildmaster (which gets them a chest armor when turned in), a stack of food, a stack of water, and if they're spellcasters or priests, their first two spells, which have to be scribed and memorized. No money, and nothing they start with can be sold for money (though they can sell their starter chest armor for a little cash - a few silver pieces). Speaking of currency, EverQuest has four levels of coinage: Copper piece, ten of which equal one Silver piece, ten of which equal one Gold piece, ten of which equal one Platinum piece After about the first week of a new server, nobody deals in copper, silver or gold, simply platinum. And coin has weight; 50 coins of any type is 1 weight. Again, we see the influences of AD&D on EverQuest, in which encumbrance was a Big Deal (still kinda is in more modern interpretations, but depends more on table, really). So, now we hit the Plane of Knowledge, and have to find ourselves. I run my characters to a location in Plane of Knowledge known, depending on server, as small bank (because almost all the NPCs near it are of small races) or DB, which, depending on who you ask, stands for Dogle Bank (the banker's name is Dogle) or Dark Bank (due to its proximity to the "Evil" faction stones).  Now I invite my other two into the group, et voila, my trio party is formed. Now we take some time to scribe our casters' spells. Arcane Spellcasters begin with two spells - their first-level damaging spell and the spell Minor Shielding. The first-level damaging spell always deals 4 damage, but the Enchanter's, Shallow Breath, also applies a 5-point debuff to Strength and Agility. Minor Shielding is the first in the arcane caster self-only Shielding line, which improves HP and AC. In this case, it's 5hp (increasing to 10 by level 5) and 10 AC (increasing to 15 at level 5). Priests also begin with two spells; for the Cleric, it's Minor Healing and Courage, the first in their direct healing line (10hp) and their HP/AC buff (10-20 (level 10) HP, 10-15 (level 10) AC, heals the same amount of HP it grants) which stacks with the Enchanter's Shielding line. Shamans begin with Minor Healing and Inner Fire (the first in their "Shielding" line, which doesn't stack with the arcane caster's Shielding line, and doesn't get an upgrade til the 50s, but is a more efficient heal than Minor Healing), while Druids get Minor Healing and Skin Like Wood (the first in their HP/AC line, which doesn't stack with the Cleric's, but is identical to Courage but doesn't heal the HP it increases). Hybrids like the Ranger, Shadow Knight, Paladin and Beastlord don't get their first spells until level 9. Sony would later change this and give them some crappy spells at levels 1-6, then start giving them the spells people cared about at 7-9. Not having to play identical to a Warrior for 9 levels was a good thing, though. Now, our Beastlord is going to not be a great party member until level 15, when they get their first pet proc buff, but they will provide some consistent melee damage, plus the ability to kick for extra damage, meaning the Beastlord is our primary damage-dealer. For now. At level 12, though, the gloves come off when the Enchanter gets access to Charm, though using it will be expensive until level 16 when our Enchanter gets Breeze, her first mana regeneration buff. I decide to pilot the Beastlord, and using the other two characters target the Beastlord and type /follow to make them autofollow; EQ's autofollow is tetchy, though, so I need to keep an eye on them. We're going to Shar Vahl in an attempt to get our Beastlord some weapons.  Gyyi! Kedrustorii! I missed you! Your presence was much missed as well, darling. ...I suppose the two of you are an improvement upon the general incompetence of others. High praise from you, indeed, dear. You can drop the Innoruukian pretense, Story, we know you missed us. ...Ugggh, fine. You two never could let me have anything. Not when you're trying to pretend you hate us, hon. We know better. Save it for the uneducated. Fine, fine. I'll admit that five years under the tutelage of The Dead was miserable without you two. Thank you for visiting when you could. Of course, sweetheart. Thankfully the Teir`Dal do not look as hatefully upon us two. And what of you two? How was your novitiates among the Craftkeepers and the Khati Sha? Well, I know how to punch things, but I was told my bond to the spirits could take a while, and that my warder would appear "when you are ready", which is really just, ugh. We did warn you that pursuing the "spiritual" sort of magic could be frustrating. Yes, the two of you are about as spiritually aware as a dwarf. You're hilarious. My novitiate was just fine. *dreamy sigh* Years spent within the palace of Erudin, with access to the sprawling libraries, spending my days immersed in study and sipping tea... oh, it brings a tear to my eye. Lucky. I spent five years having "hate everything" drilled into my head and having to commune with that diseased mind of the Prince of Hate. Not to mention having to *shudder* engage in maintenance of the Ghouls at the entrance to the Temple. I hate the undead so much. Well, I'm supposed to be off gaining my proper citizenship through service to Shar Vahl right now; I mean, I got my citizenship slate, that's good enough, right? Let's head somewhere fun and start our career as adventurers off right! I'm game. So long as you're not taking us to that awful Kurn's Tower. ...Well-- No! ...But--! No! We're not even remotely ready for that. I know you've been dreaming about the place since we were children but I'll not go in there until I've mastered spells to blast the undead into pieces. ...Fine. I'm fairly certain your citizenship to Shar Vahl has responsibilities, dear Kella. Why don't we go help you with them? I guess.We head to Shar Vahl to do the quest that gets Kella her first weapons that are better than her bare fists. I've destroyed the dagger in her inventory; her bare fists are better. And here's a look at Shar Vahl:  Shar Vahl is a huge city surrounded by a fissure, in which are the low-level mobs that most Vah Shir adventurers cut their teeth on. They also include a number of quest-centric drops. The entire Citizenship questline culminates in a very nice cloak, but unfortunately, it requires assistance from one of every other Vah Shir class to complete. I just want the claws for punching things harder than bare fists. And look, here's our first enemy:  This little larva is level 2. I buff up Kella with the Cleric and start autoattacking. Welcome to EQ combat: It's not super exciting. After some attacks and a few Shallow Breaths from Gyyi and a little healing from Kedrustorii, the larvae falls:  Rrrrrrragh! The heart beats, the blood pounds! Exhilarating.Our experience total goes up by 13% for killing a level 2 NPC. This will become much, much slower in the future. Hold please, I'm going to run around killing things. Kella hits level 2 off the second kill, but our other two characters are much further behind; this is because the quest confirming your Shar Vahl citizenship boosts you to about 70% of the way through level 1, while the other two came here with only the 7% exp you get from turning in your newbie note. Nothing exciting is going to happen until we hit level 4, though, so I'll be back in a little bit.  Around level 3 we run into our first named. Named creatures in EverQuest, if they're not a town NPC or guard, are usually Important. They tend to drop loot. Tailfang is a rough fight for our level 3 butts:  He latches onto Gyyi about halfway through the fight and I have to spam heals on her to keep her alive. But ultimately, he falls. He drops his tail. This tail can be taken over to Dar Khura Pyjek near the bridge. I'll skip the quest text and turn the tail in with Kella:  Welp, that just obviates our need for the Khati Sha claws now. The Khati Shaw claws are a pair of 7/28 weapons, wwhile this dagger is only a 4/25; but, you see that Poison Damage? With Shadows of Luclin, elemental damage was added to some weapons, and they're a direct modifier of the base damage - IF the enemy fails a resist check against the damage type. This dagger is actually a 6/25, for an 0.24 ratio; the claws are 0.25. Speaking of ratios, that's the way to tell if your weapon is better than another. You divide the damage by the delay, and see which ratio is higher. Granted, the 7/28s would be nice for when we hit level 17 and Kella can dual wield, but I'm going to be going to a platinum-generating camp around level 10 and I'm sure I can find better weapons in the Bazaar. Also I failed the combine to continue the Khati Sha quest, and I'm not hunting a ton of xakra larvae down for it again. I'm just going to focus on leveling. The claws aren't magic, either, which will be important when we start killing things that require magic weapons to hit.  As a side note, my kill speed jumps considerably once I start stabbing with the dagger.  Around the north side of the pit we encounter our first Grimling. The Vah Shir share the immediate area around Shar Vahl with three hostile species; the owlbears, the sonic wolves, and the grimlings. The grimlings, however, are the most dangerous and the most entrenched; they were the dominant force in the area that would become Shar Vahl before the proto-Vah Shir appeared in a blast of magic after the Erudites blew a hole in Odus. A few champions of the Kerrans struck out to explore this new world, among them Khati Sha, for whom the Beastlords of Shar Vahl are named after. As a note, the Kerrans took the name Vah Shir to honor their King, Vah Kerrath, to honor him for his work in securing their new home, as well. Khati Sha explored a great deal of Luclin and mapped it for his kin, but ran afoul of the Shissar who, likewise, had come to Luclin from Norrath. The Shissar captured him, tortured him and experimented upon him, but one of those experiments went wrong and killed both Khati Sha and his tormentors. The twisted mockery that Khati Sha became is now imprisoned within the grimling fortress in the Acrylia Caverns, where the grimlings work foul magics to bind the twisted Khati Sha to their will. Khati Sha the Twisted serves as the final raid boss of Acrylia Caverns. The grimlings also stage raids upon the Vah Shir at every opportunity, creating great enmity beyond that; for the fate of Khati Sha is sealed so the common Vah Shir never learns what befell one of their greatest heroes. Anyways, I focus on killing grimling runts for a bit, because at level 3 they con yellow, meaning they're level 4-5, so they give the best experience per-kill. I'll be mentioning cons throughout, so here's a brief primer. Con, short for consider, accessible through targeting someone or something and typing /consider or /con, or just pressing the C button, will return a colored message indicating how powerful an enemy is. Gray/Green messages: Much lower level than you. May or may not give experience upon kill, depending on just how far down; at higher levels, the level range for consider expands, so greens will almost always give experience (a very small amount), while grays won't. Light Blue: Lower level than you by a good amount. Gives a low amount of XP on death. Blue: Lower level than you by at least one level. Gives a decent amount of XP on death. Usually the focus of xp grinding groups, as blues die quickly and give good experience. White: Same level as you. Gives a good chunk of experience per-kill. Yellow: 1-2 levels above you. Gives really good experience per kill. If you can mow down yellows reasonably, they're the best source of experience in the game, mainly because: Red: 3+ levels above you. What would you like your tombstone to say? The consider message is a bit dramatic; at low levels, unaided, a red con will gently caress you up, sure, but once you get some gear, you can take a lot of things that con red. The problem is that a red con could be 3 levels above you, or 30. It's impossible to tell unless you have insider knowledge. Once you go past 3 levels above you, enemies start hitting much harder relative to even yellow cons, as there's essentially a level difference involved in the calculation (really, skill levels). You will rarely encounter a raid boss that doesn't con red when you're of-level to fight them. And once you start going to 5+ levels, you start missing more often, and they start resisting spells way more often. Anything 10+ levels above you may as well be immune to every spell you have - you're not landing it unless it's got a massive negative resist modifier like Lifetaps (-200 MR checks). Finally, two hours and 15 minutes later, we all reach level 4; Kella's experience advantage of 63% has dwindled to 14% thanks to the experience curve.   Puff... puff... this is... more strenuous than expected... You're doing great, sweetie. Let's take a brief break, I think I can grasp the basics of some of those spells I read about now. I may as well go grab scrolls of greater spells, myself. I feel that I'll understand them soon enough.Arcane spellcasters like the Wizard, Enchanter, Magician and Necromancer gain new spells at every 4th level, until level 24, at which point they earn them every 5 levels from 29 onwards. Priests, however, gain their first new spells at level 5, again at 9, and then every 5 levels after. Hybrids like our Beastlord won't see anything to use her mana bar on until level 9, and then at 15, 22, 29, 39, 49. After level 50, everyone gets at least 1 spell per level. Let's divvy up the loot! You two take all of it. Go get your scrolls, and we'll meet up in the Plane of Knowledge at the small bank. You don't want any of it? I haven't felt like it's the "right time" as of yet, so the scrolls of the Khati Sha will be useless to me for now. You two go. We won't be long, dear.Up the tower Gyyi goes, to the Library of the Plane of Knowledge. Since Planes of Power launched, the Plane of Knowledge library has become a repository for access to spells. It's not perfect, in this era, but with every new expansion added in Live EverQuest, they keep updating the merchants with new spells. In WFH's era, though, we're not going to simply be able to buy all our spells here, but we'll be able to purchase enough of them. I'll have to pick up a few for the Enchanter from other players, namely Allure, the level 49 Charm, though I could quite honestly skip it and wait until level 53 for Boltran's Agacerie, which is on a merchant in Kunark. We'll get there when we get there.   The Library is... large. There's three levels above and two levels down, and the spell merchants are spread out. I'll skip me trying to remember where everything is and just go straight to buying spells from the Illusionists.  That's much better. I feel more like a Phantasmist than ever. Now, let's go see one of the trainers...Over on the Dark Side of Plane of Knowledge, we find an Enchanter trainer, for one very important reason:  Later eras of EverQuest will allow you to pick up these trainable skills as you get to the level they're acquired, but for now, you need to spend skill points to unlock any skill you gain through leveling. Those Specialize skills are almost mutually exclusive; only one of them can go above 50 skill prior to Alternate Advancement Abilities. Specialization skills reduce the mana cost of spells of that school as you cast it by 1% for having the skill, plus 1% for every 20 points of skill, up to a total of 11% reduction at 200 skill. Those stuck at 50 would only be 3%. As such, it behooves you to max out the one that most of your spells, or the ones you cast the most, belong to. For an Enchanter, Conjuration or Alteration - though I always wind up with Alteration. Their Crowd Control spells, their Mesmerizations, are all Conjuration. Their Point Blank Area of Effect Stuns are Divination, and their buffs and debuffs are all Alteration. Arcane Casters gain Specializations at 20, and Priests at 30; hybrids never gain them. The spell schools of EverQuest are pretty much what you'd expect; damaging spells are almost all Evocation, spells that make things are Conjuration (the level 60+ Magician direct damage spells are all Conjuration, as well), HP/AC buffs are generally Abjuration (as are Feign Death spells), spells that mask (such as illusions), hide (invisibility), or point directions (true north) are all Divination, and spells that increase/decrease statistics, provide haste, heal, or transfer health are Alteration. For now, though, at level 4, we have a more important skill to acquire:  Ahh, Meditate. Meditate is a skill given to casters, priests and hybrids at differing levels. Casters get it at 4, Priests at 8, and Hybrids at 12. Meditate allows you to increase your mana regeneration so long as you're sitting or mounted and not doing anything, as well as reducing the time required to memorize spells. It provides 3 points of mana regeneration on its own, plus roughly 1 point for every 15 points of skill. Bards also gain the Meditate skill, but it's permanently capped at 1, and only serves to allow them to memorize their songs more swiftly. Meditate is important, and the reason casters sit 90% of the time. Also, originally, spellcasters had to sit down and have their spellbook open to meditate. And since the old Stone UI used to look like this:  It meant that meditating spell-users were completely blind. This is the reason spells like Sentinel existed in the first place, which sets up an area around you that alerts you in the chat box if an NPC wanders through it. Later, Verant relented and let spellcasters over level 35 meditate without their spellbook open, and then later still it was everyone, regardless of level. Let's check in with Kedrustorii:  This place is huge... There they are! Okay, spells, spells... huh. Wait. What do you MEAN you don't carry HEALING spells? You're holding CLERIC SCROLLS!Yes, for whatever reason, the Plane of Knowledge cleric spell vendors don't carry heals, or resurrection spells. This is probably because in all the Cleric guilds, the Heals and Resurrection spells are all stuck on different merchants. Usually you have all the spells clustered by level onto specific merchants, but Clerics have to go to a separate merchant to find their Heals and Resurrections. But that would require going back to Neriak; I'll do that at level 9 to get everything we need, but for now...  Can't believe I had to go to a freaking shaman for a new healing spell... at least I'm not giving money to a druid. Oh, you're back. Well, did you find everything you needed? Oh, yes. When we have some downtime, I'd love to stay in that library and just read myself into a coma. ...Yeah. It was fine. Here, take the money and go ... get bags or something. Oh hey, good idea. That'll let me carry more loot for more money. Now, early on in EverQuest, the best starter bags were backpacks; 8 slots, Large size capacity. But when they expanded Tinkering, they added a new toolbox to the game that was even better:  Deluxe Toolboxes are 10-slot containers with Giant capacity, meaning they can hold everything, and are only about 4-5 gold more expensive than backpacks, and only weigh 1.0 weight, while backpacks weigh 3.0. I grab five of them, all we can afford for now, and head back. And that will be it for Update 1. Next time: Things get a little faster, and we shoot for level 9 so that Kella can have some fun. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 11:08 on Jul 7, 2022 |
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Jul 6, 2022 21:20
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This looks like an interesting, and ambitious, project. I came along far too late for Everquest and have only heard stories about it, so I'm curious to see where this will go.
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Jul 6, 2022 21:46
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Yeah, I'm eager to see how far you can take this.
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Jul 7, 2022 00:25
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I knew this game was the forefather to WoW, but not that much. Reading through some of the classes I kept going "Yup, recognize that from WoW. And that as well." Also you linked to SS023 twice by the way.
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Jul 7, 2022 00:57
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what a blast from the past. I look forward to when you show off some of the more memorable locales in the game. I think, even if you don't pursue them, it could be worth bringing up some of the more iconic items in the game, like the j-boots (the boots that gave the move speed buff for wearing them). It's crazy the kind of things EQ just kind of threw in there because the notion of MMO balance was calvinball at the time. So some of the crazier items are an interesting slice of history.
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Jul 7, 2022 01:47
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Obligatum VII posted:what a blast from the past. I look forward to when you show off some of the more memorable locales in the game. That's a good idea. Let's take a moment and appreciate some of the absolutely hilarious items that have graced EverQuest. First up are the Journeyman's Boots. AC1 boots that everyone could wear, but nobody did because having only AC1 on boots was pointless unless they needed magic boots to kick things that needed magic weapons to kill (yes, you needed magic boots on your feet to kick things that were immune to normal weapons; even Monks with their Flying Kicks even though Monk fists are magical when naked after level 30). The real joy in Journeyman's Boots was the click effect. A lot of items in EverQuest have click effects; nearly every epic weapon (known then as particle weapon) has a click effect. Journeyman's Boots had a click effect of a run speed buff. That was instant cast. With no recast timer. And had a loud noise associated with its casting. And a bunch of red particles that covered the character model of the person using them for about three seconds. The only saving grace was that, just like every other run speed buff in the game, it couldn't be cast indoors. Originally, the Journeyman's Boots dropped in the dungeon Najena, off the Lavastorm Mountains, off the named mob Drelzna, deep in its bowels, who required collecting keys off mobs in a progressive order; you needed the Guard's Keyring to open the prison cells in the bottom; the Guard Captain's key to open the first of two cells leading to Rathyl; the key from BoneCracker to open the second; the key from Rathyl to get to Drelzna; and the key from Drelzna to get to the titular boss, Najena. The boots were also No Trade, so you couldn't farm them to sell to other players, so it wasn't all that uncommon for if you had the key, you could roll in and pick up a pair off people farming Drelzna for her other drops; namely, the Tentacle Whip (a 4/25 one-handed slashing weapon that procced a 4 point lifetap), the Ashenwood Short Spear (a 6/22 one-handed piercing weapon that could be clicked for a Haste spell with 10 charges), and the Stiletto of the Bloodclaw (a 6/23 Shadow Knight, Rogue and Necromancer - and later, Beastlord - only one-handed piercing weapon that procced a 20-point direct damage that had a 2-tick 15-point damage over time effect). Later, Verant decided they didn't want such a game-changing item to be obtained so easily; EverQuest's world is large, if I haven't impressed that upon you as of yet, and only some few classes could increase their run speed; the Druid (14), Shaman (9) and Ranger (30) with their Spirit of Wolf spell, and the Bard with their Selo`s Accelerando song. Now, true, the Journeyman's Boots run speed buff was only about 35%, while Spirit of Wolf starts at 30% at level 9 (when the Shaman gets it) and increases to 55% by level 30. But for classes who didn't have Spirit of Wolf, the world suddenly got a lot more accessible with some run speed. Pair with the fact that most mobs and players run at roughly the same speed without run speed buffs, and even running from trains becomes easier. So, around the time the Temple of Solusek Ro went in, 3 months after lauch, rather than remove the item from the game completely, they left the already-dropped ones alone, but removed them from Drelzna's loot table. Instead, they created a new mob called the Ancient Cyclops, and put it in the Southern Desert of Ro and the Ocean of Tears. They also created a gnome NPC named Hasten Bootstrutter in the Rathe Mountains, who shared a spawn table with a necromancer named Melrath, who was important for Rangers, who, when asked about Journeyman Boots, set you on a quest to retrieve an Ancient Ring, a Shadowed Rapier (drop from shadowed men, who have eternal enmity with the Temple of Solusek Ro), and 3500 gold pieces. And yes. It had to be gold. 350 platinum would not work. Remember what I said about coin having weight? And Hasten Bootstrutter moved at unencumbered Journeyman Boots speed. You could, if lucky, wait at the crossroads Hasten passed through and make him stop with a hail; otherwise you'd need someone to hail him for you and hold him in place, as most hailable mobs interrupt their AI package when hailed and stand there to give you time to talk to them and do quest hand-ins. The Ancient Cyclops immediately became the most camped mob in the game. Lines set up on the Ancient Cyclops island in the Ocean of Tears for people waiting their turn to blow up "an ancient cyclops", who had a spawn timer of about 20 minutes, and was a rarer spawn than the normal "a cyclops". The one in Southern Desert of Ro was no less camped, but it took time to figure out his spawn cycle; namely, that he only spawned at night, and had a timer that meant you had to kill his placeholder at a specific time so that the next thing that spawned from that spawn point would spawn during the night cycle. For reference, EverQuest has a 72 minute day/night cycle. (This is also the refresh timer for a Paladin's Lay on Hands and a Shadow Knight's Harm Touch abilities - once per day.) The ancient cyclops could also spawn on the so-called "seafury island", an island full of late-30s seafury cyclopes, but it was a random spawn, and fairly rare, but the seafury cyclopes were killed because they dropped a lot of valuable gems to vendor for platinum, so it wasn't uncommon to snag one every so often. Before this change, the Journeyman's Boots were an easy to obtain item for anyone in their late 20s. After this change, you needed to be level 35 minimum to kill the ancient cyclops and the shadowed men for the rapier, not to mention the big platinum investment. 350 platinum was a lot to people in those days, especially any spellcaster who had to spend upwards of 20 platinum per spell scroll in their 30s. Journeyman's Boots remained relevant for a very long time. Most people did not box, and so didn't have a pocket SoWer. The ability to sell access to the Ring of the Ancients through a technically exploit of the No-Trade system called MultiQuesting - that is, one person hands in one item, the other hands in the others, boom, quest complete for the person who turned in the last item - was also an easy way to get some money. It wasn't until Shadows of Luclin introduced Alternate Advancement abilities that Journeyman's Boots would start to lose relevance; anyone level 51+ could farm experience for 3 Alternate Advancement points and invest them into the Run Speed AA, which, at level 3, was the exact same speed as Journeyman's Boots, and also functioned indoors and passively. These days, in Live EverQuest, the Journeyman's Boots are nothing more than a curiosity of a time long since passed - except for the Progression servers. Progression Servers take Modern EverQuest and lock it behind progression or time gates - lately, it's all time-locked, so you'll start in Classic, and after 3 months unlock Kunark, and after 3 months unlock Velious, and so on and so forth. See, many, many raid bosses dispel the person they're hitting (and some do it in a cone, so you'll most of the time see raid bosses facing only the tank, and everyone else hitting its back; this also avoids painful ripostes and stops them parrying, so it's good practice regardless). Dispels remove buffs. Having a 'junk buff', as it's called, is useful for diverting the dispel away from the buffs you care about. So having an item like Journeyman's Boots, which these days can be clicked indoors, helps protect the main tank's buffs, making the fight a whole lot easier. I cannot tell you the number of Rings of the Ancients I have farmed on Progression servers alone in order to multiquest them to my guild's raid tanks during Classic, Kunark, Velious, and even Luclin for that purpose - it is far, far more than I ever farmed for myself, even as a serial altaholic who'd get them to twink my characters with because gently caress running around the world at base speed. The number has to be around 40 at this point. Kella will have Spirit of Wolf at level 30, and we have Knowledge books. I think I'll pass on farming 3 rings this go-around. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 11:13 on Jul 7, 2022 |
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Jul 7, 2022 09:59
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Another infamous item within EverQuest, and this time, we're skipping past the grandfathered Classic items and going to a couple of items from Ruins of Kunark. The Ranger class was in a very weird place throughout EverQuest's lifecycle until Shadows of Luclin. Not tanky enough to be a tank, not dedicated to DPS enough to be a pure DPS, Rangers, more than any other class, defined the phrase "jack of all trades, master of none". Yes, in a pinch, they could tank. In a pinch, they could throw some heals. They could DPS all day long, but once their mana was gone, it dropped by about 20%. Really, if they wound up invited to a group, their primary purpose was "add extra damage and snare the runners". For all of that, though, I do love the Ranger class; I have one I was leveling on TAKP before I took a hiatus. More than anything, to me, the Ranger is a perfect example of what a hybrid class should be - you can see all the influence of its parent classes while also stamping out its own identity. For similar reasons, I adore the Beastlord; and one of the items we're talking about now affects both classes. See, around the time Kunark came around, Verant started paying more attention to the hybrids. Knights, in particular. They were restricted to the same weapons as Warriors, and Warriors got a lot of unique weapons in lieu of spells, even in Classic, like the Dagas from Plane of Sky with its 11/21 ratio (0.52) - better than most. In Kunark, Verant began making Knight-specific weapons; this involved putting two-handed weapon ratios on one-handed weapons so that they could do damage while also carrying a shield. These included the Mace of the Shadowed Soul (19/29), Noctivagant Blade (18/26), and the Shard of Night (21/24) for Shadow Knights, and the Jeldorin (19/24 with a 180-pt self-heal proc), though the Paladin also had Zephyrwind (19/26) which was later replaced by Thelvorn, Blade of Light (20/26) in Plane of Sky. In Kunark, there were two weapons that the Ranger cared about, though. One which seemed custom-made for the Ranger, and one that specifically was. The first was the Wurmslayer, a 25/40 one-handed slashing weapon that, originally, could be wielded in the off-hand, creating a massively damaging weapon for the off-hand; later, it was changed to primary only. (As a side note, I had one of these during Kunark for my Gnome Warrior, who wielded it only in the off-hand). See, higher-level characters in EverQuest get something called "Damage Bonus" on their primary weapons, usually meaning you want the fastest weapon you can get in your main hand (more on this, later) to apply that extra damage as much as possible. The Wurmslayer, however, flew in the face of that, which is why it got put into the off-hand, and became mostly worthless in the mainhand. Except for the Ranger, and to a lesser extent, Shadow Knight and Paladin. See, this was before a wide prevalence of fast-casting class-specific direct damage spells to the hybrids; only the Ranger got one at level 50 during this era. If a Ranger wanted to hurt someone magically, they had to cast spells with longer casting times (2+ seconds), and that could interfere with your melee DPS. The Wurmslayer was slow enough and hard-hitting enough that Rangers in particular got a lot of use out of the weapon, even after the nerf, as it let them beat things to death while also burning them to cinders. Speaking of burning to cinders, that brings us to the second item, this one made specifically for the Ranger: it was only usable by Rangers. The Steel Hilted Flint Dagger, a 4/28 one-handed piercing weapon. Now, that doesn't sound impressive, does it? Newbie weapons have ratios of 4/29. The proc, however. Oh, the proc. The weapon had no stats and a crap ratio, but the proc made it all worth it. Conflagration. Conflagration is a level 44 Wizard nuke. It does 625 damage. And here it sits, on a Ranger-only weapon, with a ratio just slow enough to allow spellcasts in between melee rounds. The Steel Hilted Flint Dagger was many, many Rangers' weapon of choice during the Kunark era, even rangers with their epic weapons - which, by the way, was a pair of swords, Earthcaller and Swiftwind; the primary had a slow and damage-over-time proc, while the offhand had a 41% haste effect. Many soloing epic rangers would start fights with the Earthcaller until it procced and swap over to the Steel Hilted Flint Dagger to burn things into the goddamned ground. And since Rangers enjoy access to Double Attack - the ability to make two attacks on the same melee roll with either hand - they could proc it multiple times in the same combat round with sufficient Dexterity. In Shadows of Luclin, Beastlords were added to the list of classes that could use it, bringing its total up to 2. I want that dagger by the time we're 50, which is the level it begins to proc. This weapon, and some few others like it, is the primary reason that "Lore" tagged weapons (meaning you can only carry one of those items on your person or in your bank) and "No-Trade" tagged weapons are no longer valid weapons to give to pets, even charmed ones.
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Jul 7, 2022 11:43
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One last item for today, and this one's going to involve mechanics talk. As of my last post, you saw me mention Damage Bonus. Damage Bonus is an extra mechanic for melee characters to watch; it is a direct bonus to damage done by a weapon. See, damage calculations in EverQuest start with (Base Damage)*2, and goes up based on your skill with that weapon and your Strength score. Damage Bonus adds a flat modifier at the end of the damage calculation, so you'll never hit for "1" ever again once you start to get it. This damage bonus starts at around level 20, and goes up solely based on your level; which is to say, that your level is the determining factor as to what level of damage bonus you get. Now originally, the damage bonus was hugely in favor of one-handed weapons with low delay, as it was a flat number across all weapons, so it behooved you to slam as many attacks as you could out in as little a time as possible. Even relatively mundane weapons like Fine Steel Daggers (3/19) became absolute blenders with a haste item and a haste spell active on a level 50 melee character. It was changed, and we'll get to why in a moment, during Kunark to a more complicated formula based on level and the delay of the weapon involved. (It was later changed again just before Shadows of Luclin.) The formula looked like this: delay<29= ((level - 28)/3) + 1 28<delay<40 = (level - 25)/2 39<delay<43 = (level - 25)/2 + 1 42<delay<45 = (level - 25)/2 + 3 45<delay = (level - 25)/2 + (delay - 31)/3 Faster weapons get comparatively less damage bonus (at level 65, this is 13 points), while higher delay weapons get more, making two-handed weapons more viable. And since the Paladin and Shadow Knights' Epic Weapons are two-handers (which allow bashing without a shield), that made them more viable. In Kunark, a weapon dropped that helped prompt the Kunark change to the formula above, some five months after Kunark's launch. This item was called the Mosscovered Twig. A comparatively lesser-known item, it dropped in the Frontier Mountains off a named yeti named Boogoog. This weapon was a 3/10 one-handed blunt. In Kunark, there was no minimum delay. These days, 8 delay is the absolute lowest you can get melee attacks to, and it's because of weapons like this. With a good haste item, and a haste spell buff, this item could absolutely. Positively. DESTROY any enemy. 10 delay, plus damage bonus, even on a humble 3 damage weapon, became a completely and utterly destructive force in the hands of the two classes who only hit things - Warrior and Monk, both of whom could use it (along with Rangers, Shadow Knights, and Paladins). To say nothing of what happened when they were hasted below 10 delay; I believe with hitting the 100% haste cap, this became 5 delay, though it's been a while since I looked into the exact math haste does on delay. To speak briefly on delay, as well - put a decimal point in between the two numbers. A 19 delay causes an attack every 1.9 seconds, for example. A 150 delay, and yes, there is a weapon with 150 delay, attacks every 15 seconds. At 5 delay, that's an attack roll every half-second (0.5), and every attack roll independently rolls for things like Double Attack and crits. Unlike past nerfs, this was the first example of Verant straight up both replacing the item that caused problems, and nerfing the grandfathered version. The Mosscovered Twig was changed to Secondary only, and was replaced in Boogoog's drop table by the Mosscovered Branch, a 5/15 two-handed blunt weapon - which was positively useless for anything but leveling up your two-handed blunt skill. Secondary weapons do not get the damage bonus, and thus the problem was solved - and then only a few months later they changed the damage bonus calculation anyways which would have made the Twig an interesting, but only moderately useful weapon. Alas, Mosscovered Twig; your time was gone too soon. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Jul 7, 2022 |
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Jul 7, 2022 12:02
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This is a really interesting read, I love this kind of blast to the past LP's. I played a bit of EQ at the end of ruins of Kunark and the beginning of the next expansion (Velious?). I've forgotten a lot about it however I'm most curious to check if the game really had as much bullshit as I remember.
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Jul 7, 2022 13:47
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I've never played EQ, but hearing the wild tales of how an MMO changed over time never fails to satisfy. Looking forward to hearing more stuff like the above!
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Jul 7, 2022 15:46
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While I was recording another update, something happened; someone decided to hand me some gear for Gyyi and Kedrustorii. This gives me the opportunity to talk about something that only entered into EverQuest in 2001, with the launch of Shadows of Luclin: Item Recommended and Item Required Levels. See, Verant was very concerned about Twinking, especially as expansions kept coming and stats kept going higher and higher, and weapons kept getting better and better. To combat this, a few high-end items began to start gaining Recommended and/or Required Levels. A Recommended level meant you could equip the item at any level, but with reduced stats, as you can see with these two items handed to Gyyi:     The first screenshots show what the stats they give are at level 4; the last two shows what their stats are at the recommended level. Required level, on the other hand, means you cannot use the item until you are of that level. This did not work as intended, originally, for weapons. See, the code was supposed to also reduce the damage of a weapon with a recommended level; this didn't actually work for a while, so you could pop a Recommended Level 60 weapon on a level 1 character and get its full damage/delay ratio. This was, eventually, fixed, which was a good thing because Planes of Power would go on to introduce tradeable weapons with high damage/delay ratios beyond anything that had come before, and having that code in place would mean that twinks would get wildly out of control. As a side note, the code for ranged weapons was not fixed until 2018, which meant that you could very well twink Rangers with bows far beyond them and have them do shitloads of damage more than they should have been until relatively recently. This decision greatly influenced future MMOs; there is not a single MMO on the market these days that doesn't have Required Levels for items. And it's all thanks to Verant trying to combat twinking, or at least slow it down some. This wasn't even their first attempt. The first two pieces of real endgame content beyond the two dragons, Lord Nagafen and Lady Vox, were the Plane of Fear, home of Cazic-Thule, and the Plane of Hate, home of Innoruuk. See, Plane of Fear and Plane of Hate dropped the first true "set armors" in the game, one set for every class, split between the two zones. And originally, you could enter Plane of Fear and Plane of Hate at any level. Which people raiding these places would, and frequently did, log their alts in just to loot pieces of armor for twinking purposes. I still remember being amazed the first time I saw such a character; a level 10 Ranger in full Thorny Vine armor, which had the appearance of green platemail, wielding a Fluxbladed Axe. Within a month they had changed the minimum level to enter Plane of Fear and Plane of Hate to level 46 - a fact that would hold true for every Plane except Knowledge from then on. Level 46 then became known as "Planar Level" within EverQuest's parlance. Creating Recommended and Required Levels was just the logical next step to gating access to endgame dungeons. Later dungeons in Kunark and beyond would require acquiring keys to enter them; Howling Stones (Charasis), the Ruins of Old Sebilis, and Veeshan's Peak are perhaps the most famous and remembered keying quests, along with Sleeper's Tomb in Velious. This would, in turn, lead to the creation of the first keyring mechanic in MMOs, which is the predecessor of modern-day MMO flagging. Before the keyring was added, you had to keep the keys on you at all times to enter the dungeon, which involved actually placing the key on your cursor before attempting to click into the zone. Later, when the keyring feature was added, you needed to only use the key once in this manner; a flag was added to your character file that would allow you to enter the dungeons without the physical key. The keyring didn't take every key however. Prior to this, these keys were also given the unique Soulbound flag, which meant if you died with the key on your person, it would be in your now-empty inventory when you respawned, so you could reenter the dungeon to loot your corpse. Also, some of the quests to obtain these keys were... painful. You can completely and totally blame the quest to obtain the key to Veeshan's Peak for the World of Warcraft Horde quest to access Onyxia's Lair, and the process to obtain Thunderfury on EverQuest's epic quests, because a number of prominent World of Warcraft designers - like Alex Afrasiabi, otherwise known as "That Dick Furor" from the guild Fires of Heaven - came from EverQuest's top raiding guilds. Let me just say that EverQuest players from Classic were 100% not shocked at the allegations leveled at Afrasiabi, simply from forum posts he made between 1999 and 2004. Planes of Power would do away with keys entirely in favor of flagging; hail some people to get a flag, show up, kill a boss, hail an Astral Projection to get flagged for the next zone in the progression, and so on. This would become the standard for EverQuest moving forward. As an aside, this is how Gyyi and Kedrustorii look now, geared up. They gifted Kedrustorii a nearly full set of Wisdom-increasing plate armor and jewelry; she now has quite a bit more mana. 
RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jul 7, 2022 |
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Jul 7, 2022 22:11
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I like the people floating in the background.  But yes, I do remember some of the things you had to do to unlock raids in WoW. Burning Crusade was from my memory the worst period where you had to go through some serious hoops to unlock the the Black Temple. Thankfully they went away, but as I recall you still had to jump through some hoops to unlock some raids. Or my memory of doing WoTLK era raiding completely fails me. Funny thing is that, they returned with a vengeance in another MMO that starts with W. Namely Wildstar. The devs there were very much more leaning into old school raiding. And it showed when they revealed the steps you had to take to unlock the upper tier dungeons.  But sadly the time for that had definitely passed and I think they relaxed it very heavily before going F2P and then closing down shop permanently.
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Jul 7, 2022 22:44
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And because I'm bored - low level combat in EQ is extra-boring - I'm going to talk about one of the absolute most infamous items in EverQuest history: The Manastone. The Manastone is a very humble item. It comes from a mid-30s enemy in Lower Guk, and has no stats. It's equippable, but why? Its purpose is to sit in your inventory and be clicked for its effect. And what was its effect? Converting 60 hitpoints into 20 mana. This might not seem like a big deal, but the Manastone was instant cast, had no cooldown, and could be spammed forever - as long as you had the hitpoints to weather it. This item is definitely, absolutely, the kind of thing you'd find as an artifact in an older editions D&D game. Unfortunately, EverQuest is not constrained by Turns and Rounds, and an item that might be a neat trick in a more constrained game - converting HP into spell slots every turn - with access to limited healing, its purpose would be pretty well ensconced in "oh poo poo" moments. The real game-changer was giving this item to a Cleric. Remember Complete Healing, which I talked about in the classes post? Most groups would only have a Cleric for a healer, and would occasionally be constrained by the Cleric's mana regeneration. With a manastone, that was no longer an issue. Clerics could burn their HP to nothing and heal it back up for far less mana than they had just gained, and the group could continue their murder spree. This was, of course, of somewhat limited use in Classic EverQuest; mana pools weren't huge. 1500-2000 mana at most at level 50 in the best mana-boosting and Wisdom-giving gear for a Cleric (and around 1500hp fully buffed with cleric HP buffs). The math works out to roughly regenerating 170 mana per second if clicked quickly enough. Again, maximum meditate only gives you about 16 mana every six seconds while sitting. The Manastone ceased dropping 3 months into EverQuest's lifespan, and is one of the most valuable curio items on the market today, if you can even still find someone who has one. Additionally, when Kunark came around, they made it so that the Manastone only functioned in "old world" zones, meaning on Odus, Antonica and Faydwer; zones later added to those continents were able to use it, up to a certain point, such as the Hole (Old Paineel), the Warrens (dungeon off Paineel), and Stonebrunt Mountains (through the Warrens). They added the Mana Robe to the game in Kunark with the same click effect, which could still be used from inventory, that could be used everywhere, but gave it a 3 second cast time. Lesson learned.
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Jul 7, 2022 23:04
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I am unlikely to have an update out before Saturday or Monday, so let's talk a little bit about the other things that go into EverQuest beyond just the gameplay. Today, we're going to talk about music. EverQuest's music was all composed and performed on MIDI devices, and was created for MIDI-enabled sound cards of the specific era the game was released in. The music I have thus far linked - the opening theme - did not sound like it does. You see, most of EverQuest's music was created to take full advantage of the Sound Blaster AWE32 card. The AWE32 card was, basically, an oversized sound card for older machines, measuring a full 14 inches in length. For reference, modern graphics cards have only just started to approach that length. The reason for the AWE32's length was simple; it was more or less two different sound cards in one, joined together in programming and hardware. Not only was it an entire-rear end Sound Blaster 16 card, it was also an entire E-mu MIDI Synthesizer. Jay Barbeau, the original composer, took this technology and pushed it to its utter loving limits, that even today requires the actual hardware to make sound anywhere close to how it did. Someone over on the TAKP forums - by the name of Shortok (an awesome dwarf cleric) - has been sourcing together both the hardware and software required, as well as the equipment needed to record the music in its glory. For a look at what a difference the proper hardware makes, I present to you this comparison: What the music for the city of Ak'Anon sounds like today on a modern machine. And Shortok's direct-line recording from an AWE32 card. Now, this isn't perfect, and in Shortok's thread over on the TAKP forums - here, by the way (you'll need a forum account) - others have been stepping up and using soundfonts to get the sound as close as possible to how we remember it sounding. Because all of Jay Barbeau's original compositions were exactly what a fantasy game needed - all the music, whether cheery or sinister, evokes the very essence of adventure that evokes the sheer scale of the game. And if there's one thing EverQuest has plenty of, it's adventure. No other MMO created since has managed to quite match the sense of scale EverQuest had, all the way back in 1999, and the music only made it feel all the more grand. More recently, Jay Barbeau has uploaded his own recordings of his compositions to Spotify - you can find those here. Jay's uploads are definitely the closest to what I remember - but I wanted to point out the thread, started before he did so. The lengths people will go to, eh?
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Jul 8, 2022 05:05
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Oh hey, this looks like a cool thread! I never played Everquest, but I'm still pretty nostalgic for the early era of MMOs. There was a certain edge to MMOs back then; not always a good thing, mind you, but a lot of things felt way more unique compared to the tried and true, cookie cutter formulas you'll find nowadays. Basically what I'm saying is I love the wild stories about just how weird and exploitable the game was, like how bards could kite 80 monsters or how an innocuous pair of boots became an incredibly sought after item. It's absolutely fascinating.
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Jul 8, 2022 05:29
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The economy alone in this game could fill piles of threads. I played from release until a little before Velious and it was one hell of a ride. I had extreme altitis in my younger days so I just ended up with piles and piles of characters, none of which reached 50. I still remember the stories of a hidden sea monster in every single zone random quests people made up, some of which actually ended up existing. It was one hell of an experience. I can't stand multiboxing myself so I just putz around on p1999 every once and awhile snagging some Mistmoore or Guk groups. Anyone looking to get into the old old oldish experience know that there is a thread in private servers tailored to all your EQ choices. I might have spent several days of my life in Highkeep.
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Jul 8, 2022 05:39
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Are you playing three characters at once?
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Jul 8, 2022 07:00
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Nissin Cup Nudist posted:Are you playing three characters at once? I thought I made that clear. Yes, yes I am. I'm playing all three simultaneously; well, as close to simultaneous as you can get with window-swapping. TGG posted:I might have spent several days of my life in Highkeep. I don't know a single person who played who didn't. The camp splitting in High Keep back during the original Classic run was atrocious; one group in the raider room, one group at the mine ent, and one at the warriors. So very, very slow.
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Jul 8, 2022 07:01
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RelentlessImp posted:I thought I made that clear. Yes, yes I am. I'm playing all three simultaneously; well, as close to simultaneous as you can get with window-swapping. There are games where I can barely play 1 character at once. Swapping between 3 seems nuts, but I guess you figured something out
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Jul 8, 2022 07:10
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Okay! So, I started this up and forgot just how much work goes into getting through the lower levels. Couple this with a general malaise and the progress on Update 2 has been very, very slow. I apologize. I will have an update out eventually.
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Jul 15, 2022 00:20
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RelentlessImp posted:And because I'm bored - low level combat in EQ is extra-boring - I'm going to talk about one of the absolute most infamous items in EverQuest history: The Manastone. Ooh, I've actually heard of this one!
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Jul 15, 2022 10:23
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I think everquest is the best game ever made, but I never boxed characters since it seems like a massive pain in the rear end. I took an even more insane approach and convinced people to play with me and fill out support classes lol.
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Jul 18, 2022 20:16
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If it helps, its been pretty interesting so far! I could never get into Everquest or MMOs of its era, but they're fascinating to read about.
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Jul 19, 2022 01:44
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Still playing in fits and spurts. Honestly, my least favorite part of EverQuest is the 1-10 game, regardless of class. It's all autoattack for that damage and a couple of spells here and there; it grows a bit more involved a little later, between crowd control, healing, and frequent spellcasts. So, it's time for another bit of history post. Let's talk about the Guise of the Deceiver and the Mask of Deception. For six months in EverQuest, an item called the Guise of the Deceiver dropped from an enemy named 'a ghoul assassin' in the dungeon colloquially referred to as Lower Guk or LGuk. The camp for this item was popular among characters in their mid-30s, as the enemies around it gave great experience for that level range. The problem with it is the camp was a small room at the top of a ladder (and ladders are frustrating) - now, you could very easily have sat in a much wider area, but back in the day, "camps" were delineated by your proximity to a mob, and people could and frequently did claim that a mob was uncamped if you weren't in the traditionally accepted camp spot. So many, many hours were spent in a small room lined with 2D casks, pulling mobs up a ladder and beating them to death in a room that just barely held six people. I feel it's important to note at this point that models in EverQuest, both players and NPCs, have collision; it's centered on the ground, at the center of the character model, and can serve as a barrier to movement, as its presence is determined by the size of a model. In a small corridor and there's an ogre in front of you? You MIGHT be able to clip through him, depending on the size of your own character model and how collision overlaps, but if you're a Barbarian, Troll, Ogre or Vah Shir yourself, you're not getting past him. With that said, you can see how this camp might be frustrating. The ghoul assassin shared its spawn with 'a ghoul supplier', and both had good drops; the ghoul supplier dropped a weight reduction bag (8 slots, 65% weight reduction, Large capacity) and an 8 AC, +15 Strength belt with 0.5 weight - good belts were very rare in EverQuest, especially All/All ones, and even moreso those with low weight, making it a perfect belt for basically every melee class, including Monks. Hell, I even knew some casters and priests who liked having it for the strength boost, since again, strength sets your carry weight, and caster and priest strength scores tended to be on the low side. On the other side, the assassin carried two drops that people wanted, as well; the Serrated Bone Dirk, and 8/27 dagger that procced Engulfing Darkness, a level 12 Necromancer/22 Shadow Knight spell that was a damage-over-time and high-percentage Snare (40%). But his other drop was the Guise of the Deceiver; a 4AC, +13 Charisma, +7 save versus magic No-Trade mask wearable only by Bards and Rogues. It had a click effect of Illusion: Dark Elf. The click could be used from inventory. By anyone. But like the Journeyman's Boots before, it was a common enough drop that anyone who got into the camp would get one eventually, and many wound up rotting. The problem, as far as Verant Interactive saw it at the time, was that they wanted the game to be cooperative, and Dark Elves have very small character models; it was a de facto shrink spell for any Ogres, Barbarians and Trolls who wanted to get around in dungeons not built for their size, of which there were many. Additionally, Illusion: Dark Elf gave the Dark Elves' Ultravision as a side benefit, meaning Erudites, Humans and Barbarians got an essentially free upgrade to their night vision. As to how important that was, well...  This is what the Rathetear Mountains, a fairly bright zone due to its open air and bright moonlight, looks like at night to a Human without any form of nightvision.  This is what it looks like with an Illusion applied (the green at the bottom is the spell effect for an Illusion) that gives infravision. Rathe Mountains as a zone is very, very bright compared to zones like Kithicor Forest or Nektulos Forest. So you can see the difference night vision would have made in 1999 on a CRT monitor. There are spells that exist solely to give Infravision and Ultravision, as well. So the Guise of the Deceiver was determined to be overpowered, simply because it removed a need to interact with other characters to solve any problems you might be having based on race selection, such as size or night vision. And so the Guise of the Deceiver was removed from the drop table, and the Mask of Deception took its place - an identical item to the Guise, except its click could only be activated if you were a Bard or Rogue. This became EverQuest's first delineation of click effects based on class; prior to this, the only thing that could determine if you could click an item is if it needed to be equipped or not, which was effectively the same thing. Future illusion masks would similarly be limited strictly to Bards and Rogues, with some few also being usable by Enchanters, thus the decision also helped to clarify class identity for two classes going forward. Isn't emergent gameplay fun? RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Jul 20, 2022 |
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Jul 20, 2022 00:58
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That first image is why my monitor is set to brighter than most games say it should be, and I still can barely see anything in it. That is just goddamn rude. This stuff continues to be weirdly fascinating, so I do hope this thread continues smoothly.
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Jul 20, 2022 07:59
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 Well, what now? We've got a handle on our abilities, and you two don't wanna go to the scary undead tower, so... Well, darling, how about we go investigate another one we've heard of? Blackburrow Lair, perhaps? So long as we stay away from that tower, I don't care. Fine. We'll go see about punching some gnolls in the face. We head to the Qeynos stone to pop down to Antonica.  Huh. Interesting-looking city.Qeynos was named after Sony. Qeynos is SonyEQ backwards. Now you know where the name comes from.  Qeynos Hills is an intermediate zone that has enemies ranging up towards level 10; it leads to Surefall Glade, the other "half" of Qeynos in which Human Druids and Rangers reside. Qeynos Hills is also infamous for an NPC named Holly Windstalker, a dual-wielding Ranger NPC. She roams Qeynos Hills on a very long path, and if she sees you killing a bear, she will immediately paste you into the ground. Holly does not like people killing bears. Do not touch the bears unless you are 100% sure Holly Windstalker is nowhere nearby.  This is... a long run. Fff... and that sun is entirely too bright. Oh, darlings, it's lovely scenery, just enjoy it. Finally. Blackburrow Lair. This is the original model for Gnolls in EverQuest. Their aggro messages have long been a meme among players. a gnoll pup says 'YAP! YAP! YAP! In the way of my father, I claim your blood for the glory of Blackburrow!! WOOOOOOOOOF!!' a scrawny gnoll says 'You have trespassed long enough on Sabertooth land!' And the classic, that generally is shared by anything you are KoS (Kill on Sight) to: a gnoll says '(Race) like you have ruined your own lands, you'll not ruin mine!'   Gotta love the theming, right?  We're almost immediately accosted as we enter.    And Gyyi goes down.  Kella follows shortly. Blackburrow Lair is an introductory dungeon for players who begin on Antonica. Ranging in level from 4 to 20, it is best known as Train Central. Getting in trouble in Blackburrow happens a lot; as a multi-tiered dungeon, it's easy to get in over your head, or take one step into the wrong spot with enemies 3-4 levels above you. A number of people of lower levels would camp out near the entrance in the safe spot, and thus any trains from deeper in could lay claim to many victims. After a short run back:  That was... unpleasant. Indeed. Shall we get back to Story? I hope you two didn't expect me to take a trip back to my soulbond point with you, did you? Not at all. Glad to see you didn't suffer it with us; it was... an unpleasant experience. Indeed. Rather ... existentially horrifying, to be quite frank. Shall we try again?We fight our way into Blackburrow for a bit.  We find an intersection down below that leads over two bridges; Blackburrow is a surprisingly interconnected dungeon, you could make a long circle through it, killing gnolls the entire way.  It's also easy to get in over your head at this intersection.  Maybe... we're not ready for dungeons yet. Perhaps it was simply the wrong dungeon, dear. Mm. We should choose one with less... ...crowding. Any suggestions? I've heard of a dungeon in Odus that could serve our purposes well. Only... Only what, Gyyi? It's in Paineel. Didn't you once tell me that Paineel was full of worshipers of Cazic-Thule focused on the extermination of Erudin? I did. But... I'm fairly certain we can get to the dungeon without angering the guards. We may as well try. It can't go any worse than Blackburrow did. Point. Shall we?It's around here someone pops up and hands me a bunch of gear for Kedrustorii and a couple pieces for Gyyi. We've already seen it, let's move on.  We pop over to the Paineel stone and head down onto Odus.  Fun fact, my first character in EverQuest was an Erudite from Erudin. I played around in Toxxulia Forest for a long time, and I heard early on that hugging walls was a safe way to explore a zone and find zone lines. So when I came across this entrance, I was intrigued; there were non-KoS skeletons inside, along with a foreman that wandered by.  The skeletons have rusty mining picks, and are around level 8. Occasionally, a foreman would wander past and bitch out the skeletons for not mining quickly enough. It was a fun set piece, but one problem: Paineel did not exist at launch. Heading into this tunnel would simply find it terminating at a blank wall. Paineel wasn't added until February 17, 2000, 6 days before the Kunark prepatch. With it came the Hole and the Warrens; one a high-level dungeon and the other a low-level dungeon. Before this, Evil Erudites would start in a hut along the river in Toxxulia Forest, surrounded by their class trainers and spell merchants.  Welcome to Paineel. The area off to the right leads into the actual city itself; you need a key that every Evil Erudite spawns with, but you need very high faction to talk to the guards in the newbie yard to ask for a new one. Unlike most player cities, Paineel runs on a single faction - Heretics. And the place we're going today gives faction to them with every kill, which means we may eventually be able to get a key into the city itself. The giant hole there? You can, in fact, jump into it. It will zone you into the Hole. In Master Yael's room. A giant level 53 earth elemental that will kill you instantly, regardless of level, if the imps and golems in his room don't do it first. We'll talk about Death Touches later.  Careful, darling. These skeletons aren't put together very well; if we remain out of their range of activation, we should be able to get past...The skeletons in the Paineel Newbie Yard are level 10, but hit like they're level 20. They also have a very, very, very small aggro radius, meaning if you run in between the two of them, you won't aggro them.  This tunnel leads to the lower half, with the proper entrance to the Hole and the entrance to the Warrens.  Oh yeah, that's an inviting tunnel. It'll be fine, you big pu-- er. It's fine, Story. They really did drill you on doing microaggressions, huh? Yes. I'm sorry. I'll do better. I believe you, hun. Nothing to forgive. Thanks. Welcome to the Warrens, a kobold-filled place. The Warrens is interesting as it, and the Stonebrunt Mountains accessed through it, was the original testbed of something called the Trivial Loot Code. Essentially, if a mob in the Warrens or Stonebrunt Mountains was killed by a person who gained no experience from it, all instances of Magic, No-Trade, and Lore items that it might be carrying from its rolls on its loot table were deleted from its death inventory. This was one of the earlier anti-twinking measures Verant tried out, but the backlash against it - and the resultant very low traffic to the Warrens and Stonebrunt as a consequence - convinced them to remove the code. The Trivial Loot Code was also initially in effect on the entirety of the Firiona Vie (Roleplaying) server, but it was removed around the same time they abandoned the Trivial Loot Code implementation.  Down here, I'm showing off a mechanic available to Druids, Rangers, Enchanters, and Clerics - Lulling. "Lull" is a series of spells that reduce aggro radius on NPCs, including social aggro. Let's talk about aggro for a moment. Every NPC has a radius around them that, if they "see" a player they are KoS towards, they will attack. This is the aggro radius. There's another radius around them, slightly larger than the aggro radius, in which NPCs on the same faction will assist on the NPC going into its aggro routine, immediately targeting and attacking the same person who triggered the aggro call. This is called social aggro radius. The Lull line of spells reduces the aggro radius and social aggro radius to, effectively, the NPC's collision box. If you have two enemies right on top of each other, Lull will not help - but in all other instances, it allows for single pulls quite effectively. The only problem is it's slightly slow, as Lull has a slightly longer than global recast, and its duration is not the greatest. If you have to Lull more than 3-4 NPCs, you're going to have to be perfect in execution, otherwise Lull might wear off before you're done. On this server, you get a messsage for it wearing off - but that's not standard for servers emulating older experiences.  As you can see, we only got one kobold; had we pulled without Lull, we would have gotten 3. Also, you can see that Gyyi has a pet. Enchanters do get a "summon pet" line, called Animations, that are loving useless. Animations don't respond to pet commands and only attack enemies that have caused damage to their summoner. However, since I am pulling with Gyyi, this is no problem, and the animations are some much-needed extra damage.  Another thing the Warrens is good for; getting Asian-inspired weapons. EverQuest has a dearth of things like katanas, ninja-to, etc., but the Warrens have lots and lots of Asian-style weapons. Even in modern EverQuest, the number of Asian-style weapons is a tiny fraction compared to Fantasy and European style weapons. Now excuse me, I have a lot of grinding to do.  At level 6, I take Kella to do some training; she learns Kick. Kick is an on-demand ability that gives you an extra attack on a 10 second cooldown, with damage based on skill and strength. It's an extra button to press and some extra damage, there's no downside here - except for the 'extra button' bit, since I'm 3-boxing. Also, the kobolds drop a LOT of bronze weapons that sell for 1-6 platinum each. I build up a nice little bit of plat, and take Kella over to the Bazaar. Kella's dagger just isn't really cutting it anymore.   This is the Nexus. Introduced in Shadows of Luclin, those spires in the center are where everyone taking the Wizard Spires up to Luclin - which was initially the only way to access the Moon - first set foot on Luclin.  To get back down, one simply sat on one of these platforms; every 15 minutes, the Scions would teleport you back down to their corresponding spires. These go down to the Dreadlands on the continent of Kunark. It's a very very out of the way place.  Welcome to the Bazaar, through the south tunnel off of the Nexus. This is where some people believe EverQuest started to go downhill. With the Bazaar, you could purchase 10-slot "Traders Satchels" (that were prohibitively heavy) that you could then put items into, activate a UI window, and set up your character as a merchant and sell things while AFK. This allowed for you to sell without directly interacting with other players; until this point, most trading was done via the East Commonlands, in the tunnel that lead to North Ro, and involved actively hawking your wares in the /auction channel and actually talking to other players. On the one hand, I do miss the wild west of the East Commonlands tunnel; on the other, the convenience of the Bazaar is not to be overlooked. Either way, I get to look for some stuff.  Ahoy, a new weapon. A 12/31 weapon is a massive upgrade; while a bit slow, Kella is now going to hit like a truck.  I pick up a new tunic and leggings for Kella, as well. Don't ask me why chain-looking legs on Vah Shir have holes in them. All game designers were weirdly horny in the 90s and early '00s.  loving FINALLY. After far too long, and our kill speed being absolutely loving trash, Story reaches level 8 - the level to pick up Meditate for priests. Having only 2 mana/tick while sitting has been keeping our kill speed frustratingly slow, as Kella needs lots of heals at early levels.  Even training Meditate one point jumps our sitting mana regen rate from 2/tick to 5/tick - remember that Meditate adds +3 as a base.  I boost it to 30. I also take the time to run around buying spells for everyone at their next spell level; 8 for Gyyi, 9 for Kedrustorii and Kella. I actually pick up the next two spell levels worth; 12 for Gyyi, 14 for Kedrustorii and 15 for Kella.  I also make use of the Soulbinder, finally. Introduced in Lost Dungeons of Norrath, the soulbinders serve a convenience function. See, when you die, you repop back at your "bind point" - if you've never changed your bind point, this is usually close to your home city, leading to a hell of a run if you died far away. The spell "Bind Affinity" available to Casters and Priests allows changing of your bind point; Soulbinders do the same thing. Simply target them and /say bind my soul, and they instantly cast Bind Affinity on you. People who can actually cast Bind Affinity can bind themselves pretty much anywhere; getting it cast on you, however, requires you to be in a city or bind-flagged area in a zone. You can cast Bind Affinity on people anywhere in the entire Greater Faydark, for example - or in the Lost Dungeons of Norrath camps, all of which have their own Soulbinders.  Arcane Casters have a "general spells" merchant which some of their spells are located on; stuff like Invisibility spells, their shared Shielding line, well, you can see the list. I pick up Invisibility, a level 4 spell for Gyyi, for one purpose; we need to take a long, long trip.  This is Rivervale, home of the halflings. We're just passing through.  This is the Ranger/Druid guild we're passing by; the entrance of Kithicor Forest is just past it.  Here, I check the time; Kithicor Forest gets filled with hostile, murderous undead after 7pm, which despawn around 5am; they're also in their 30s-40s, which means they would turn Gyyi into a fine red mist. Someone remind me to tell you about the GM event about Firiona Vie and Lanys T`Vyl sometime that turned Kithicor into an undead nightmare. During the day, however, the forest is filled with wolves, bears, bixies (bees), and orcs. So we cast Invisibility and run across.  This is the entrance to Highpass Hold.  And this is why we need Invisibility. These orcs are in their mid-high teens, and there's a lot of them. They usually path through Highpass and get murdered by the guards, but I'm not waiting for them to path away. Also, one of the bandwidth-saving features of EverQuest Emulators is that, when nobody is in a zone for more than 30 minutes, the zone is depopped and closed. When you're the first person to zone into such a zone, everything is immediately spawned, on their spawn points, and it takes a few minutes for their AI packages to fully activate - namely, the pathing. This is solely a feature of the Emulator; regular EverQuest kept zones open 24/7.  And finally, High Keep. We'll be coming back here later, don't you worry.   Tarn Visilin is the man we're here to see. Justin Rhymes has a bunch of Bard songs. Tarn Visilin, on the other hand, has all the Enchanter animation spells except the level 1 one. This is the only place to get Enchanter Animation spells at level 8 and above. I won't need the level 12 version, since we'll have Charm, so I pick up the level 8 and Gate back to my bind point.   The previous two merchants were the Cleric special merchants. See, originally, Clerics couldn't cast any form of resurrection until level 29; that was when they got access to Revive. Revive originally restored 0% of the death's lost experience. At level 39, they got Resuscitate, which restored 50%, and at 49, Resurrection, which restored 90%. In Kunark, they got access to Reviviscence, which restored 96%. Come Shadows of Luclin, however, the resurrects were revamped; Resuscitate suddenly restored 35% experience, and all the other resurrects were added, starting at Reanimation at level 14, which became the new 0% resurrect. Resurrection and Reviviscence were not changed.  This spell became invalid as of Gates of Discord, when the new Combat Disciplines system was introduced as I've already talked about. Invigor used to be a level 9 Cleric spell that restored Stamina. That's it. That's the entire thing. Stamina became Endurance, an actual resource, and Invigor was invalidated. That's the entire story; speculation as to why they never made an Endurance-restoring spell is neverending, though it does regenerate fairly quickly on its own. After some more grinding, I decide to do some preparation for Kella hitting level 9. I head to the Bazaar.    These items are summoned by Magicians, and are colloquially referred to as 'pet toys'. Muzzle of Mardu was added in Ruins of Kunark as a way to add a bit of DPS onto summoned pets, while the Fist and the Girdle were added in Planes of Power, for the same reason - the Girdle added quite a bit of survivability to pets against AOE attacks from raid mobs. Magicians frequently set up shop in the Bazaar and sell toys for around 5-10 platinum each. Toys persist on the pet for as long as it's summoned. Pets remain summoned through zone lines and camping out. These toys are going to last Kella until level 15, assuming she, or the pet, don't die. The Fist of Ixiblat is a special case, as well. See that proc? See the required level on it? The other two Planes of Power weapons, the Blade of Walnan and Blade of the Kedge, have a level 40 requirement to proc. Kella's pet won't be level 10. Her level 15 pet, however...  I... I can feel it. It's time. It's time! Time for...? I can feel the connection to the spirits! It's TIME! Are you sure...? YES I'M SURE! WATCH THIS! She's... she's ADORABLE! I shall call you ... Sascha! Congratulations. Indeed, dear. Congratulations. Thanks, guys. Let's mow through a few more kobolds and take a break, yeah? Sounds good. Of course. It'll give you and Sascha time to get to know each other.I equip the pet toys, which is done by simply handing them to the pet.  Kella`s warder's HP goes down to 27%. An extra 500hp is huge at this level.    Hahahahaha! Get 'em Sascha! Rip 'em to shreds! Well, it's certainly going a lot faster now. It certainly is. How about that break, Kella? Guts! You are small! That means you have small guts! RIP AND TEAAAAAAAAAR--huh? Oh, yeah. Lemme just rip this thing's pancreas out; Sascha needs a chew toy. Don't you, girl? Don't you? Who's a good girl? Yes you are!Next time: Rampant. loving. Murder. Things get a lot faster. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Jul 20, 2022 |
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Jul 20, 2022 11:15
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And one last thing to cap this momentous update off. Let's talk about the presence of the backtick (`) in EverQuest. You'll see the backtick a LOT in EverQuest, usually in the place of the apostrophe. You see it quite clearly on Kella's pet, as all warders are given the name (Character Name)`s Warder. Originally, the text interpreter used to display names did not support the apostrophe due to the coding being used. This carried to labels, like those that pop up when you mouse-over a spell name, which is why you'll see spells named Sharik`s Replenishing or Fire Spiral of Al`Kabor. Why you'll see NPC names like Vhal`Sherra or Te`Anara. As you can see by the label on the warder as well, this was eventually coded around, allowing for labels like "Kella's Warder". Those sorts of labels, however, were introduced far later. The backtick, however, gained a certain amount of popularity on the server Firiona Vie, which was the official roleplaying server. Let's talk about server types for a moment. Originally, EverQuest launched with only two types of servers - "regular" servers, and PvP servers. While anyone on any server could talk to a Priest of Discord in a home city and flag themselves as PvP-enabled, it was only mandatory on PvP servers. Flagging yourself as PvP on other servers was also a permanent decision, and immediately made you incapable of having even beneficial spells cast on you from other players that were not PvP-flagged - not even heals. This was to avoid people from interfering in "legitimate" PvP by being able to safely buff and heal PvP players while not being flagged themselves. Then on October 8, 2001, two months before Shadows of Luclin went live, Verant added a new server due to player demand - Firiona Vie, the Roleplaying server. Firiona Vie was a different sort of server; while every server enforced the Play Nice Policy, Firiona Vie was the first server where naming conventions were also enforced. You couldn't name yourself something like Xtis Cee, or Brobdingnagian Bard, or Fat Arse without the GMs forcibly changing your name, if it was reported. A language barrier was also introduced. Characters created on this server began speaking only their Native tongue; no Common. Elvish was quickly adopted as the "standard" language for everyone to be able to communicate, since a lot of roleplayers back then played primarily elven characters, and it was shared between several races - High Elves, Wood Elves, Dark Elves and Half-Elves, though Dark Elves and Half Elves began with only 50 skill (though it was easy to raise to 100 for fluent communication). Leveling a language skill was simple; you made a text macro with the in-game tools that was five lines long and spoke a phrase in group five times in a row, and then you grouped up with someone and sat there. Spamming that key. It could take about 20 minutes to master a language, or upwards of 40 if you both had 1 skill and were leveling off of each other. But the most attractive reason to play on Firiona Vie? It was the first Free Trade server. This meant the "No-Trade" tag did not exist. Every item in the game was tradeable, and this included, for a short period of time, Epic Weapons. I remember my "Auntie" (I call her that to this day, it annoys her) getting handed the hardest raiding warrior on the server's (Gore) Epic Weapons for a laugh while we were hanging out socializing one time. They later made certain items - like Epic Weapons, components for the Epic Weapon quests - No-Trade again. So what does this have to do with the backtick? Well, like I said, a lot of people played elves. Especially Dark Elves. R.A. Salvatore's Drow language was adopted as the "official" language of the Teir`Dal (and see, I'm so used to spelling their names this way I don't even realize I'm inserting the backtick instead of an apostrophe), and if you've read R.A. Salvatore's Drow novels, mostly featuring Drizzt Do'Urden, then you know that there are a lot of apostrophes in their shortened House names. But the apostrophe didn't work, and people wanted to play the blueberries like they were Drow. You gain the ability to acquire a surname at level 20 - this is literally a second name appended onto your displayed name. Originally, you had to petition a GM to get a surname. Which led to the GMs capitulating to people and changing the surname rules on Firiona Vie only. Now, when you requested a surname, you could prefix it with "d`" - as a nod to the Do' in Do'Urden, which was accepted to mean "of the House of". And yes, it was lower-case. This led to seeing a whole hell of a lot of dark elves with surnames that started with "d`". This also came with it a lot of people frequently using Drow as a language in their roleplay, sprinkled in because it's not an actual full vocabulary. I absolutely hated it, and to this day, still do; the Teir`Dal are nothing like the Drow, but off they went creating a fictional matriarchal society on top of an already fictional race. But to each their own, I suppose. (This didn't stop me from making a character that physically winced every time someone used Drow as a running commentary on the inappropriateness. Yes, I was that bitch as a teen.) When they added the /surname command to cut down on the time GMs spent every day giving people surnames, this functionality was not carried over - it was only implemented in 2020. So you still had to petition for your Dark Elven surname. All of this, more or less, spawned from the inability to use the apostrophe in names for NPCs. Sometimes the smallest thing... RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Jul 20, 2022 |
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Jul 20, 2022 11:51
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I played Everquest right from the beginning. There’s nothing like it that has come around since. Simply walking my low level monk from Qeynos to Freeport for the very first time remains a core memory for me from that time of my life. It’s easily my answer to that question that comes up - what game would you want to play as if you’d never played it before. Of course I would need the free time of a teenager but what can you do.
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Jul 20, 2022 16:25
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i absolutely HATE the luclin models for this game
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Jul 20, 2022 16:28
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That Little Demon posted:i absolutely HATE the luclin models for this game I hated the magician pet models most of all. Considering I played a magician most of all that was particularly galling to me. I reverted the model back to the growling lump as soon as I was able. 
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Jul 20, 2022 16:34
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The Many sings to usss...
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Jul 20, 2022 16:36
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Bo-Pepper posted:I hated the magician pet models most of all. Considering I played a magician most of all that was particularly galling to me. I reverted the model back to the growling lump as soon as I was able. The worst part is, originally, they tied the Luclin elemental models to also SHOWING THE HORSE MODELS. You couldn't have one without the other. So if you were a Magician and bought yourself a horse for the obvious meditation benefits, you absolutely had to have the awful, awful, AWFUL Luclin elemental models showing - because if you couldn't show the horse model, then you couldn't apply the horse buff and get its benefits.  The Luclin Earth Elemental for comparison to above. RelentlessImp fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Jul 20, 2022 |
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Jul 20, 2022 21:14
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Ugh I hate it
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Jul 21, 2022 01:30
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RelentlessImp posted:Qeynos was named after Sony. Qeynos is SonyEQ backwards. Now you know where the name comes from. Oh my god, I can't believe I never noticed this.
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Jul 21, 2022 03:21
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theres a lot of stuff like that two guards in qeynos named Van and Halen lol E'ci the god of ice lmao they were just thought naming things backwards was the easy way to get good names, and hell, they were right
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Jul 21, 2022 04:38
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That Little Demon posted:theres a lot of stuff like that I think my favorite is Bait Masterson, a fisher in East Freeport and Qeynos Aqueducts.
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Jul 21, 2022 05:27
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