First off sorry for missing a post on Friday. If you don’t follow me on twitter you likely missed my announcement that one was not going to happen. Essentially I have been fighting some nasty flu-like crud and wound up staying home from work both Thursday and Friday. Were I not under the gun for several deliverable I might also stay home today because while I am feeling significantly better I am in no way 100% and it is the stupid stuff like the long walk into the building that I am dreading. This unnamed crud came with a general sense of weakness and an ability to make pretty much all food sound nasty and unappealing. I am hoping that I am back on the mend and can start to get on with life, but at least for a bit I will be moving a little slower and wearing out a little faster.
To go with this need for something slower paced I found it extremely hard to stay alive while playing Wolcen due to my sluggish reflexes and I wound up venturing back into the Everquest Emulator and landing on another server that one of my coworkers had talked about. “EZ Server” seemed like a neon sign calling out to me in a foggy night, and I proceeded to make an Iksar Shadowknight and had a glorious time wandering around the area surrounding Cabalis and leveling normally. It was only when I created a second character, a Halfling Ranger that I realized I was completely missing part of the experience. Instead of Riverdale I arrived in Surefall Glade that was set up completely as a newbie town with a greatly condensed set of vendors and npcs and the ability to port from there to anywhere else in the game.
So I proceeded to set forth about fixing this and ran from Cabalis to Warslicks Woods to The Overthere which apparently is a full pvp zone on the server and flagged me as soon as I entered. From there I took the Plane of Knowledge book and transitioned to North Qeynos and then Qeynos Hills eventually running all of the way to Surefall Glade. This was a run I was fairly unfamiliar with because I was a Freeport kid and had never started anything on the Qeynos side of the pond. Thankfully Allakhazam has a page of directions on how to get between a bunch of locations which came in handy. It was shortly after arriving at town that I decided to start goggling the server to find more information, and trying to determine why it had kept telling me that I really should be using the Underfoot or Rain of Fear 2 client and not Titanium.
During the googling I also found these charming and quirky server tutorials. Essentially EZ Server is exactly the opposite of Project 1999. While 99 wants a pure original game experience and takes actions to stop anyone from being able to run more than one character at a time… EZ Server goes to the other extreme and has added a bunch of new content that effectively requires you to be botting to be able to get through. I am not sure yet if I will be playing long enough to go down that rabbit hole but they support some software called MacroQuest 2 which effectively allows you to remotely control your “roombas” as the server guides refer to your bot accounts. For now I am just enjoying poking around in zones that I remember while being powerful enough to pretty much solo them. It was a trip roaming around Castle Mistmore and soloing my way through it.
They have also done some nonsense of editing zone drops and offer up a specific set of level range bounded quests to lead you to these specific zones. For example the Field of Bone Giant Skeletons for some reason drop a full set of newbie armor, that is way higher statted than anything else you could possibly hope to get at that range and a quest sends you there to kill ten of them. From there they loaded up the Orcs and Crocs in Oasis of Marr with the Kurns Castle era armor set…. and the orcs tend to drop 4 pieces at a time but you are still battling RNG to try and sort out a full set. The chain goes form there to Castle Mistmore where everything is dropping the Kael Drakkal faction armor sets and I managed to hang out there and collect most of a full set of Malevolent gear. Now I am in Dulak’s Harbor and the gear dropping appears to be from the Plane of Tranquility quests from the Planes of Power expansion and I am currently missing only a few slots for a full set of that.
Prior to me figuring out what I was missing from the experience, I spent an awful lot of time roaming around Kunark and a good deal of that killing Forest Giants in Warslicks Woods. There is just something enjoyable about killing Giants in Everquest… and I have been contemplating taking a trip over to Kael Drakkal and seeing if I can hunt there yet. Some of my fondest memories involve hanging out in that zone for hours hunting giants and collecting gear for the Thurgadin armor quests. As a cleric at the time… that meant a lot of me casting the same spell over and over but hanging out and chatting was enjoyable enough. I am trying to decide if I want to create my first “roomba” as a cleric to roam around with and heal me, or if I would rather have something like a druid. In Everquest II my power combo is my Iksar Shadowknight and my Wood Elf Warden, which has allowed me to solo a bunch of just slightly below my level content.
No trip down Kunark’s memory lane would be complete without a trip into Dalnir, to visit the angriest of sperm. I did fairly well in here until I got swarmed by frickin gnomes and died. The joy of playing on EZ Server is that death is effectively meaningless. You port back to your bind point, which is now in Surefall Glade in the Newbie town and don’t have to care about doing a corpse run. The newbie vendor in town sells things like Gate Potions for no cost allowing you to pretty much “hearth” at any time you like. This weekend I found the experience of roaming around and chasing armor sets to be extremely enjoyable, but I have a feeling that once I am no longer quite this sick the pace will feel way too slow for me and I will move on once again. It is making me want to patch up Everquest II and poke my head back in there again however.