MMOAxis

Other than to get the level 20 quested mounts, I hadn’t yet investigated EQ2′s new mount system. Under the newfangled thing you can get a horse at level 20, a leaper at level 30, a glider at level 60 and a flying mount at (I think) level 85. Thing is, either Adventure or Tradeskill level will qualify you. This morning, without that purpose clearly in mind, I took my level 6 Troubador (but level 31 Provisioner) down to Butcherblock to do a couple of crafting quests there. Before I knew it, I had gotten the level ground mount quests done and the leaper line.

I confess to not being a believer in the “leapers and gliders” thing when the news broke. It seemed a halfhearted effort in a game with a world very much broken up into zones, eroding the appeal of that kind of fast travel But having fooled a bit with it, the leaper is actually kind of neat. It works exactly how you’d expect – you hit the spacebar to jump and steer from there, and it also insulates you – completely – from falling damage, as far as I can tell. I was able to get into some parts of Butcherblock where even my two level 27s hadn’t been yet. Admittedly, I died instantly to the mobs there… but still, it was kind of cool.

One thing I’ll complain about, though, is that in order to make flying/gliding/leaping mounts work, the developers has to lower the “ceiling” in a number of places in the world. Butcherblock is evidently one of these, so there are some of its many plateaus you can’t really get to. And you apparently can’t leap at all in Qeynos, which is on the lame side as well. One hopes that this will be addressed when the two big cities are revamped this year and next.

I also might mention (those following me on Google+ may have read this already,) that I won one of Massively’s EQ2 mount giveaways. I got a glider, which of course I don’t have a character of high enough level to use just yet. But it’s a nice motivation to push leveling, which I want to do anyway. After Iskaaron (my Warlock, who is the character I am concentrating on leveling right now apart from this digression,) finishes up Butcherblock I doubt I’ll want to go back there for a while.

In and around the weekend I made some excellent progress in EQ2. Nothing like Stargrace, admittedly, but I don’t have her resources, and I’m happy with what got done.

I leveled a new character, a Paladin, to 20 in Greater Faydark. Of the four current starting zones, it is my least favorite, and also contains my least favorite major city. But it’s done now and I pretty much don’t need to send anybody back there any time soon. This leaves me with four characters – Defiler, Conjuror, Troubador and Illusionist – under level 20.

I also leveled that character to tradeskill level 20 as well, as a woodworker. Not the most obvious choice for a Paladin’s tradeskill, but I already have an Armorer and Weaponsmith. As part of my larger tradeskilling plan, I intend to have all nine tradeskill professions covered, and this ticks another off that list. I have a character who’s going to be an alchemist but hasn’t started that yet, and a Scholar at crafter level 11 aimed at Jeweler, and that will be all of them. Once both of those are at 20 I will be out of the first two crafting tiers forever.

To answer the obvious question: yes, I bought a couple of character slots. I have nine in total, all of them filled. The classes not represented are the Cleric, Druid and Predator. For reference, and for anyone looking to add me to in-game friend lists (I’m on Antonia Bayle,) those characters are:

• Ardwulf, level 20 Barbarian Paladin and level 20 Woodworker
• Dirrha, level 34 Wood Elf Illusionist and 34 Tailor
• Ellyreos, level 12 High Elf Conjuror and level 30 Carpenter
• Friyja, level 50 Barbarian Berserker and level 28 Armorer
• Hrasst, level 27 Iksar Brigand and level 24 Weaponsmith
• Iskaaron, level 20 Human Warlock and level 20 Sage
• Lillard, level 14 Ratonga Defiler and level 11 Scholar (aimed at Jeweller)
• Rakjaw, level 20 Troll Bruiser and level 3 Artisan (aimed at Alchemist)
• Rantry, level 6 Halfling Troubador and level 30 Provisioner

I keep saying I want to pick one of those characters and push him (or her – two are female) upward toward the cap, and I think I have settled on the Warlock, who’s tremendous fun chewing up hordes of mobs with AoE spells. I did some light prepping at the very end today and have him ready to go in Butcherblock; he’s likely to get about 10-12 hours between Thursday and Friday due to a shifted work schedule at the end of this week. We’ll see how far I get with him in that time. Prior to that, I want to push the Woodworker a bit higher to get a nice mastercrafted staff – he’s already in a full set of mastercrafted cloth from my level 34 tailor.

Some of these characters predate the starting zone revamp and introduction of mount quests at level 20; the Warlock was one such, so to get him his mount I started and finished the appropriate chain in Frostfang Sea, after setting him to 100% AA Experience. As a result he’s in fine shape as AAs go, with 26 total at level 20, and poised to continue with the slider at 50%. Friyja at 50 is unfortunately in kind of a pit for similar reasons; I’d done that leveling pre-silder and didn’t level-lock her very much, so she’s only at 27 AAs, which makes her on the weak side for her level. When I eventually pick her back up I will have to address this via the slider and chronomancy.

My natural inclination in EQ2 is to level characters more or less evenly, keeping up tradeskill levels in the appropriate tiers so as to support everyone as they level. This has more or less worked out for the first two tiers but I’d like to push a character farther now, into tiers 4 and 5, harvesting as I go, and the tradeskillers can move forward by using the fruits of that work. Next week I’ll post another update and we’ll see how far I’ve gotten; I’ll be out of town for most of the weekend so I won’t get to play very much.

I’d mentioned in the last post that I wasn’t such a fan of the Butcherblock Mountains. Playing some more in that zone today, I think I finally “got it.”

The problem isn’t the zone itself. It’s the “Golden Path” and the expectation that it sets up. The “Golden Path” is sort of an optimal leveling path that was talked about by the designers a while back, that takes you from your 1-20 starting zone, to Butcherblock, then to Steamfont, then Lavastorm and so on, all the way up to the level cap.

The disconnect is with the “optimal leveling path” idea that’s implicit in the very mention of a Golden Path. It sets up an expectation that there will be a linear progression of quests from hub to hub to hub, an expectation largely borne out in the 1-20 starter zones, particularly in Frostfang Sea. But beyond that (and not fully even sub-20) EQ2 leveling isn’t like that.

Yes, there are breadcrumb quests and multiple hubs in the leveling zones, but there’s also a mix of content levels available at each hub, instead of six level 22-23 quests in one place, and when you finish those there’s a quest taking to you the next hub containing six 23-24 quests. This is, essentially, the Cataclysm style of zone design, which EQ2 uses here and there to some extent.

What Butcherblock, along with Thundering Steppes and Nektulos Forest, the other leveling zones in that range, do instead is mix things up. There’s enough quests and mobs in each to carry you all the way through the range, even if you ignore Heroic quests and instances and stuff. But you also need to explore and find stuff to do, and all those places are packed with goodies off the most direct path: neat stuff to see (like the giant chessboard in BB,) for the explorer and out-of-the-way quests and named mobs for the progression-focused. They’re themepark zones but you’re expected to inhabit them much like you would a sandbox world.

So in retrospect, my negative impression of Butcherblock, formed dozens of months ago, was a misconception; where I am now as an MMO gamer, it’s almost an ideally-designed zone, one that you can almost get away with never leaving until you finish it, and a whole sub-world in its own right. It means more running around, which can be annoying, but it also encourages exploration and nonlinear play, which I personally think add a lot to the MMO experience. I look forward to exploring Steamfont in this new light, as well as seeing how prevalent this type of zone design is in post-50 Norrath.

As was my plan going in, I took some advantage of EQ2′s double XP weekend. I’d had tradeskillers stuck in Tier 3 for years, and I resolved to get them out and into Tier 4, where there were mats stockpiled and waiting for them.

I can’t say that this was a complete success. For one, of the four tradeskilling characters involved, I only got three of them to level 30. One of those I pushed to level 34 – high enough to make T4 bags, and then a whole level’s worth of making them. But my Armorer (my highest Adventuring character, by the way,) got left behind at 28 and I added another tradeskill, Weaponsmith, on the Brigand that I’d been leveling landing that at level 22. So I now have three tradeskillers in T4, two in T3, two in T2, and two more dithering in T1 or without any work done yet aside from that first tradeskill quest. On the upside, I have plenty of T2 harvests stockpiles, a character in T3 adventuring content to harvest there, and another ready to start that tier.

I also leveled the above-mentioned Brigand to 25 in Butcherblock, and started a Ranger, played 7 or so levels with him, deleted him, and started fresh again as a Paladin in Greater Faydark. That character may not stick either, but I hope he does because I made him a full T1 mastercrafted kit.

Normally this is something I wouldn’t bother with, as characters are in and out of T1 so fast that making gear for them isn’t worth the trouble, other than bags, quivers and strongboxes that they won’t outgrow as quickly. In this case, though, I had a lot of T1 rares cluttering up my shared bank and wanted that space for the T3 gear I’d made on my tailor for my three clothies (all of which are still in adventuring Tier 2.) So I made what I could and stuck the rest on the broker.

Speaking of which, over the weekend I netted about two plat selling T1 harvests (I’d had a serious surplus of the regular ones, too,) and assorted crafting by-products. I also spent a lot of that buying up ingredients on the broker, but when all was said and done my bank was still twice as rich as it had been, and if any of the mastercrafted stuff I put up for sale actually sells that will increase a lot more.

I can’t say that I’m terribly fond of Butcherblock Mountains as the go-to leveling zone for level 20-30. On the one hand, there’s some cool stuff there and all the amenities are available, but on the other the questing seems disjointed and the zone is a hassle to get around in. I had never leveled through that range solely in Butcherblock, but I’m going to try on my Brigand and see how far I get; it’s not like I can’t hop over to Nektulos Forest if I should need more quests, and I’m almost halfway out of it already. Unfortunately, the next zone in the “Golden Path” is Steamfont, another zone I didn’t like much the first time through. We’ll see if I like it better this time. At some point soon I may also hit up the Armor questline (even though I don’t really need the armor,) and the deity line once I actually pick a deity.

By the way, when I logged in on Sunday afternoon to create that Paladin a couple of hours before prime time, six servers were at heavy population, which was good to see.