I have long been a fan of how EverQuest, EverQuestII, and Vanguard all reward their veteran players each year. Some times the rewards are more useful then others. Out of all three games that I play I find the ones in EverQuest to be the most helpful. The topic of veteran rewards came up in discussion yesterday as my trio was playing, so I decided to look up what the current veteran rewards are. 

You can find a list of them here, on the EverQuest tip of the week news archives. 

1st year – Lesson of the Devoted:
The player is surrounded by a beautiful blue/white glow as they gain double experience for half an hour every 20 hours.

2nd year - Infusion of the Faithful:
The player enjoys maximum resistances and statistics and a faster run speed for 15 minutes while he glows brightly with power. Usable once every 20 hours.

3rd year – Chaotic Jester:
Summons a Bristlebane puppet that persists for 15 minutes and will randomly cast various spells that provide benefits or minor penalties. Usable once every 20 hours.

4th year- Expedient Recovery:
All the player’s corpses are summoned to their feet and given 100% experience resurrection if they are still eligible. Usable once per week.

5th year – Steadfast Servant:
Summons a creature that casts healing spells upon the player and others nearby. Lasts for half an hour or until you zone. Usable once every 20 hours.

6th year – Staunch Recovery:
The player is healed with health, mana, and endurance fully restored. Usable once every 3 days.

7th year - Intensity of the Resolute:
Surrounds the player in a glow of energy and increases the power of the player’s melee abilities, spells and heals substantially for 1 minute. Usable once every 4 hours.

8th year – Throne of Heroes:
The player is teleported to the Throne of Heroes in the Guild Lobby. Usable every 72 minutes.

9th Year – Armor of Experience:
The player is granted several layers of protection from harm for 90 seconds or 10 strikes. This protection lessens as you take more damage. Usable once every 20 hours.

10th Year – Resupply Agent:
Summons a mechanical merchant to the player’s side who sells supplies and buys loot. He will stay up for 10 minutes or until dismissed by the player. Usable once every 20 hours.

The rewards from EQ2 include things like experience potions (that have a time range before they expire so it’s not exactly an endless supply), little appearance things (fairy that sits on your shoulder) and items along those lines. The five year reward also gave you an object that you could use once a week that would replenish your vitality – adventure vitality only. Still handy to have. 

The rewards from Vanguard include a lot of house items (which look incredible) and experience potions, as well as unique titles. Each furniture bundle consists of items from a particular race, with a distinctive look (which I adore). 

It’s these little things in game that I absolutely adore. While people were upset when the living legacy seemed to mainly reward new players and returning players and leave those veterans out in the lurch, it’s nice to see some sort of ‘thank you’ for being loyal to a game. Especially this day in age when everyone is bouncing all over the place playing multiple games for short amounts of time and never really settling (I can be blamed for doing this as well). 

Anyhow, hopefully everyone had an amazing weekend gaming this weekend and playing whatever game (if any) currently hold your attention. See you in Norrath!

Last night my little trio was supposed to head to Lavastorm and continue on with the DoN progression quests – however I wasn’t really in the mood to work on those (it happens) and so I decided to create two alts (one on each account) and play around on those for a little bit. Ultann and Ninga also came to play on alts, and we had a lot of fun. 

I created a gnome paladin so I could do some tinkering (love crafting, so much) and a halfling ranger so I could do some foraging (and have track available and what not). Ninga created a drakkin bard and twinked him out, Ultann had a low level paladin already waiting, so we set off to the top floor of Crescent Reach and killed bats and rats until we were big enough to kill zombie and skeletons, and then moved off to the bear caves. Hot zones don’t start until level 20, and the first one is Stonebrunt which can be difficult to fight in, so we stayed in CR for the time being. By the time my eyes were threatening to close we had reached level 15, which was pretty nice. I’ll probably spend a little time today shopping for some gear and purchasing spells for the two characters, maybe work up some skills. 

Tonight being Friday (woohoo weekend!) We’ll get back to playing the big’uns and continue with our DoN progression. I’m looking forward to earning a few more aa and excited about unlocking the next round of ‘special’ DoN aa that gives 250 health and mana. 

March is just around the corner, and with it the 10th anniversary for EQ. I’m excited to be playing this year, I have to admit. I’ve never really been around for the fabled events, and I know a little bit more about what will be happening since I asked the EQ team in San Diego. What are they? You’ll just have to log into EQ to see!

I hope everyone has an incredible Friday, no matter your game of choice. See you in Norrath (and more then likely Telon for a while today)!

Yesterday was all about progression through Dragons of Norrath, which was an expansion that released February 2005, so it’s quite old now. Ultann finished (most) of his unpacking, and managed to squeeze a few hours in game which was nice. My happy little trio headed to Lavastorm, and then debated which camp we were going to follow. Ninga already had his faction with the goodies, while Ultann (who was actually on his shadowknight for the evening) had none and though I’ve done the DoN missions before, I apparently also had not worked any faction. I believe at the time I was advised against turning in my tokens so that I could obtain crystals from both camps and purchase whatever it was I wanted from the merchants.

Speaking of purchases, that was why we were doing the DoN bits to begin with. Not only does the progression reward special unlocked aa (and regular aa of course) and spells, but one of the merchants also sells a pet focus item that I wanted. This lets me cast more powerful pets – and the ‘nice’ ones are super expensive, so this free one that Ninga happened to find was absolutely perfect. 

You can find a fairly clear walkthrough for the progression here on Zam – but keep in mind that once you’ve completed the first tier, you have to earn more faction for the second tier. 

We did missions for the evening, and trapsed through Lavaspinner’s Lair, Stillmoon Temple, The Accursed Nest, Thundercrest Isles, and Tirranun’s Delve, as well as our home base camp in Lavastorm, and The Broodlands. It was a lot of fun, and my two girls earned a lot of achievements. Kameeko managed to finish off the craft aa that allows you to raise more then one craft over 200, so she can now begin to work on all of them. Next I’ll be turning all of those into reduced failures. I haven’t decided the method I want to take yet in leveling them, I was contemplating brewing and baking simply because I dislike purchasing so much food and drink on both of my characters. We’ll see how that goes though. Tailoring and smithing are high up on my virtual list, and pottery near the bottom but still something I want to complete. 

Not sure what this Wednesday evening will bring, but I’m sure it will be fun, and I’ll write all about it tomorrow morning as always. On an unrelated note – EQ2 has some amazing changes and revamps coming in their next update, and I’ll be sure to write about that too. I’ve always loved the original Lavastorm in EQ2 but felt it was sorely neglected from simply being outdated. If the Everfrost revamp was any indication, Lavastorm will be exceptionally popular and players will once again frequent it as they should. More on that later!

Yesterday was a little bit of everything all done throughout the course of the day. I don’t remember what order it was done in, but it was all fun. I spent the late morning and early afternoon taking my brother out for pho here in the city, which was fantastic. After logging into EQ, Ninga decided I needed to hit level 72 on my necromancer so that she could purchase her newest pet from the vendor in Direwind. While every other spell may have a ‘level’ to it (ie: Rk, RkII, RkIII) the pets do not, so purchasing them from the vendor is perfectly ok. We hung out in the pit of Valdeholm, which is the level 70 hotzone, and it didn’t take too long before I’d managed to collect quite a few aa on Kameeko (the enchanter) and ding 72 on Minxes. Kameeko should be saving her aa to get useful helpful things for leveling up with the group – but instead she’s my crafting character, so after maxing out jewel crafting, I maxed out salvage, and then started putting points into unlocking other crafts above the 200 trivial mark (two to date). Once that is completed I’ll start putting my points into not failing those other crafts, and hopefully I’ll be working on getting them to 300. I haven’t decided if I am going to do the evolving trophies for all of the crafts or not – ideally I’d like to. We’ll see how that goes though. The trophies tend to be a pain in the arse, and they may just take up inventory space, not sure. I wish there were a way to combine all of the trophies into one big mega trophy. For all I know there may be. 

After Valdeholm it was time to do something a little more interesting. Apparently there is a (I want to say ear?) piece that drops from a rare named in Gyrospire Zeka, and when Ultann had a few minutes to log in and play for a bit my little trio headed there.

Heading there ended up being an adventure in itself, you have to get shot out of a canon to start, exactly like you do in EQ2 except it doesn’t turn you into a barrel. You also get flung by a catapult shortly after that to get to specific destinations. It was a lot of fun and a brand new experience for me in EQ. After we hung out around the zone line watching a group continuously die in front of us, we learned a little more about the zone. Turns out, that zone is hard. They hit hard especially when your tank is a monk – it doesn’t matter if they have 1700+ aa or not. We still did amazingly well for what we had (three ouf us + one bot enchanter + one bot healer + one mercenary) but after failing to gain access to the third level of the tower we were climbing we decided to head off to do something else. 

That ‘something else’ would be to do missions for Ultann to try to get him the fancy robe that I am wearing, not for him to wear because I know he has better – but the +400 mana clicky makes it worth while. 

Speaking of which, a huge thank you to Ninga, who gave me a new clicky to add to my collection yesterday. It is not exactly fancy, just summons my pet to me, but it’s still pretty awesome none the less. Love my clickies.

It was a great weekend and I had a lot of fun. Hopefully everyone else had an amazing time as well, and this weekn is off to a wonderful start. See you in Norrath!

Someone commented yesterday on my xfire numbers for EQ over the past week – and I had to laugh. I gently reminded them that in order to set up a trader in EQ you still have to be constantly online, so I’ve been leaving my computer on while my trader sits in the bazaar and does her thing. Spells are expensive after all, and I’m still getting back into the swing of things. From that stemmed a conversation about how ‘easy’ things appear to be in EQ now, and whether or not EQ is still the same immersing game that it used to be. 

I had to disagree with the argument, because while things may have changed over the past 10 years it’s still one of the most complicated games I’ve played in terms of just plain game play, not to mention the questing and crafting systems. When I first came back there were so many changes to take in that it felt like a different game – for about an hour and then I started to see the familiar patterns again that I’d seen back in 2002 when I first started. A few of the changes caught me off guard. For example when you die you no longer lose anything at all except for the experience, you return fully geared. The only reason you would have to obtain your corpse is to get a rez and re-gain your experience. You also no longer lose your spell set up when you die, the gems are still in their last positions. This doesn’t take away the need for saved spell lists since those are always handy but if you’re a low level and die and have forgotten to put together a saved spell list you won’t spend hours setting one up. For some reason (I’m not sure why) if you are not of appropriate level to wear a piece of gear – you can now still wear it. You won’t get any stats from that piece of gear but it will fit into your gear slot just fine. I’m not exactly sure what this change was for, but it’s interesting. 

Mercenaries and the experience you gain while leveling has been changed a lot – but there’s a good reason for this. The game is 10 years old after all. If it took you as long as it did at release to level, then you’d probably be put off by trying to catch up to friends who are level 85. The community is much the same as it’s always been, maybe a little quieter now and there are less people around but the ones who are around love the game. They’re passionate about things, and they’re friendly and helpful. Out of all the games I’ve played EQ has one of the best communities I’ve ever seen. Vanguard is another with an outstanding community, but you really have to look for it first. 

The basics of the game are all the same and it’s comforting. There’s no one way to do an encounter. Monk pulls are still used (and are still amazing), kiting is still done (unless the mobs summon, ew!) and questing still involves figuring out the proper text to say to an NPC. There are still LOTS of options of what to do in game, especially once you start working on aa. If you get into crafting at all then your options are multiplied. Trains are still trains, and they still hurt (and they are fun!) and the very basic components of the game that make it fun are all still there and intact. The fact that things in the game are ‘bigger’ then you and there’s NO guarantee that you’re going to win, is a feeling that I love. Whether you’re taking down an even con mob or battling a great deity, things feel bigger then you. There’s a moment in the fight where you think to yourself (from time to time) “oh crud, I am not going to beat this!” and then it rips you apart. On the same note, there’s the satisfaction of taking down an encounter and then it becoming easier each and every time, and then a sense of triumph as you defeat it without breaking out in a sweat. It’s got that feeling of ‘conquiring’ that a lot of games miss. I don’t want to be able to defeat everything in the game easily, group or raid or solo. It should feel like a challenge (but also leave enough encounters around that I CAN defeat, so I don’t feel overwhelmed). This feeling is one I get every day as I play EQ. In EQ2, not so much. I felt like I could defeat pretty much anything depending on who I had with me. There was very little in the game that couldn’t be beaten, unless it was a high end raid zone (and I’m not a raider these days). 

If it sounds like I’m being a poster girl for SOE and their games, well guess what, I am. I enjoy the games, I wouldn’t be writing about them and I wouldn’t have played them for the last 7 years if I didn’t. I feel passionate about them, and I love the experiences I’ve had in them. There’s no shame in that (at least not for me). Does it mean I ignore the flaws or faults in the games? No, of course not. No game is perfect and it’s bound to happen. Bugs are there, down times occur, rollbacks hurt and all the rest. I’d rather spend my time talking about the good points of a game and share my passion for it then rip it apart and do nothing but complain – unless I really don’t enjoy a game (and trust me, it has happened) for whatever reason. What a fantastic time where we have so many choices of things to play, and so many great people in each of the games. I feel lucky to have found games that match my play style (or did I match my play style to their games?) and I hope everyone else out there finds ‘their’ game too. 

Shew, sorry for the rambling, but I guess you can expect that on my blog from time to time!

Safe travels, see you in Norrath!