Onto Chains of Eternity

As I mentioned in my last Everquest 2 related post, I found out that I needed to be level 92 before I’d be able to enter into the next expansion, Chains of Eternity.

I had taken up doing various tasks to try and grind out the XP needed to hit level 92. After finishing off The Withered Lands and the first mission in Skyshrine during my last post, I still had two more missions to do and had started working on the HQ: The Book of Thex.

That HQ saw me wandering back and forth between The Moors of Ykesha and various dungeons added during that expansion (the HQ was a bit old, sitting in my journal for a while). I ended up having to clear out a one of the Befallen zones completely, hitting a couple of targets in the other two Befallen zones, clearing Evernight Abbey in the Loping Plains, and then killing another named in the Obelisk of Ahkzul. Finally, after gaining entry to a tomb in the Commonlands, I killed another named and from there it was just FedEx steps til completion.

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Ironically after all that the NPC I had been working with (or more correctly, had been sending me to do all of his dirty work) ended up dead by the end of the quest line. He did leave the Book of Thex and the Mallet of Thex on his person though, so the HQ was complete and I had a couple of new house items for the trouble. From there, I still had two more missions to complete in Skyshrine, so I managed to squeeze those in as well.

The 2nd mission took place in an area different from the first mission, as Skyshrine consists of three districts. The first mission I completed in my last post was in the Covenant District, this second mission was taking place in the Lyceum of the Recondite. It still was the same sort of tank and spank instance, where I was required to kill a few named for the final to spawn, followed by killing him and collecting my reward.

The third mission in Skyshrine takes place in Dracur Prime, and is called an “advanced solo” which leads you to believe the difficulty would be increased. Overall, clearing the mobs and the named was pretty easy, though the final named Dragon did end up killing me once. It was the first time I had died since coming back to the game, so that’s something? Either way, it was the same sort of mission, and it was completed readily enough.

At this point I was only 50% into level 91, so I ended up coaxing my Dad into running me through the contested portion of Skyshrine. I had attempted to go in here with just my mercenary previously, and though I did alright, I knew I wouldn’t be able to kill any of the named by myself. He agreed, and we ended up clearing most of the named in the zone along with plenty of trash mobs. I chugged an XP potion and within a bit over an hour, I was level 92.

From there I assumed I was clear to enter the Eidolon Jungle finally, but it turns out that I had mail. When I was back at the guild hall I checked said mail, and it was the beginnings of a quest line to gain access to the next expansion. The letter directed me to Freeport, where I was to meet with someone. It turns out the whole of the quest was mostly FedEx quests, so it was easy enough to complete. During the chain, I ran into Firiona Vie which was the first time I’ve seen this iconic character in a game, despite having graced most of the covers of the Everquest boxes over the years. The quest culminated with a run into a small druid circle instance in Antonica, killing a spirit, and then heading to the Feerrott, where a “tear in reality” allowed me to teleport to the Eidolon Jungle.

So there you have it. I’m finally inside of the next expansion, finally into new territory for the first time in a long time. Granted, this expansion is almost three years old, so it’s not exactly new content, but it’s new to me and that’s what matters. It seems most people who are playing EQ2 are having fun with the new Time lock expansion servers, but I’m having a good time working through the end game stuff. That’s all I can ask for.

#everquest2 #eq2 #daybreakgames #chainsofeternity

Couch Podtatoes Episode 55: Company Reputation Part Two

Picking up where we left off last week, here is the second half of our discussion on Gaming Company’s Reputations. We discuss a few more reputations before diving into some questions about the topic at hand. Talarian is still our guest for this one. That’s all there is to it!

 

Couch Podtatoes Epsiode 55: Company Reputation Part Two (runtime: 47:25)

Discussion: Company Reputations (starts at 0:00)

Host Contact information:

Izlain
Blog: Me vs. Myself and I
Twitter: @mevsmyselfandi

Eri
Blog: Healing the Masses
Twitter: @ausj3w3l

Guest Contact Information:

Talarian
Blog: Gamer By Design
Twitter: @talarianjs

Music Credits:
“Level Up” by Cookie Monsta (from the Riot! EP)
“Enchanted Rose” by Bury Your Dead (from the album Beauty and the Breakdown)

Couch Podtatoes is a podcast about gaming, though we might stray into other forms of media. Sometimes we use strong language, but we try to keep that to a minimum. All opinions expressed by us or our guests are our own and are in no way to be interpreted as official commentary from any companies we discuss. You can visit our official podcast page at http://couchpodtatoes.libsyn.com/. Be sure to follow us on iTunes, and/or Stitcher Radio.

Questions, comments and feedback are welcomed and encouraged!

#couchpodtatoes #podcast #gamesdiscussion #gaming

Fantasy Thursdays Week 8

Another week down, and the streak continues! After what was looking to be a disappointing season, starting off 1-2, my team has gone on a hot streak, winning four games in a row. I am now fully in control of my own destiny, as a win will keep me in first place across the board. Other scenarios include losing, which puts me into a tie with Teamsoapymid once again, and then it will come down to point totals. I currently lead her, but Judentus still has more total points than I do, so that makes things more complicated were I to lose and he ends up winning.  That would put three of us in a tie for first, and he’d probably take it with more points at that time. So I just need to win this week and keep the dream alive! We shall see how it goes, but first, let’s look at what happened last week:

In week 8, I had solid performances from most of my players, though Fenix and Rekkles didn’t put up the numbers they have for me in the past. Everyone else did well for their rolls, and I ended up eking out a win. It wasn’t looking pretty for a little while there, but at least in the end I prevailed. Looking forward to this weekend, there were some tough decisions to be made.

It didn’t come down so much to the lane matchups of my team versus their team, but more who my team members were playing against more specifically. On the surface, you can see that my projected points are lower than theirs (though it did fluctuate a bit beyond when I got this screenshot), and you’ll see I had swapped out BunnyFuuFu for Lustboy because he was projecting higher. I don’t solely rely on projections though, because doing a little bit of research, I found that nine times out of ten players like Rush and Apollo will project ~30 points and then end up posting 60+. Let’s look at my roster going into the match:

So yes, I did swap Lustboy in, though I also made another change at the last minute, so I preemptively screwed up these screen shots, but let me explain. I put Xiaoweixiao in for Fenix as well, because not only was he projecting higher, but as of late, Gravity and Team Impulse have been giving me more points than Team Liquid (and seemingly performing better on the Rift IRL as well). I put all of my eggs into the Gravity and TiP baskets, minus Rekkles and Lustboy of course, because I wanted a little diversity and they have both done well for me in the past. There are some tough matchups though, with Gravity and TiP playing each other, but then playing a weaker team afterwards (Gravity faces TDK and Impulse is playing Liquid). The TiP vs TL game was the kicker, as I feel like TiP will outperform and outplay TL, so I didn’t want another awkward lane in this roster for the week by leaving Fenix in. Either way, win or lose, I feel like GV vs TiP we’ll see points spreading both ways. It’s a gamble, but I’ve been doing that the whole time, and it hasn’t always paid off. Still, going with my gut this time around.

Let’s take a look at the leaders of the pack for week 8 and the summer now, just for posterity:

It’s surprising to see two members of Team 8 as top scorers for the week, but they did have pretty convincing performances last weekend. It seems like after making some substitutions they’re finally starting to gel, albeit a little too late. I believe it was said they *could* make playoffs, but I think it was more like they were just going to avoid auto-relegation. Also odd that a Cloud 9 player was present, but they did have a good couple of games as well. Apollo made another appearance on the list, and is also one of the top summer players, along with Rekkles, who has been there for a while. Both of my ADCs I’ve owned since day one have been solid contributors.

That’s it for this week. We’ll see how the final week of the season went, next Thursday.

#fantasythursdays #fantasyLCS #leagueoflegends

Let Me Tell You A Story

It’s no secret that I’m a big League of Legends fan. Love the game, enjoy the strategy and the competition. I watch YouTube videos, streams, the LCS and even participate in a Fantasy league. It’s permeated my life in ways that an MMO might permeate yours. Today, I took part in a game that utterly astounded me, and here my thought was that I had seen it all. This level of trolling and stupidity has been reported by many players I’m sure, but it’s typically easier to shrug off than this particular match up. First off, let’s go over what I’ve been doing in the game as of late.

The 5th season of the game started early this year. I played ranked in the past, but only during season 3. Last year I didn’t touch ranked, as I was mostly playing other things and only toying around with ARAM and Team Builder. I decided when this ranked season rolled around that I would dive into it again, though I didn’t jump in right away.

When I finally did my ten provisional games, I was placed in Bronze I. This didn’t offend me, as I had only placed in Bronze III a couple of seasons ago, and worked my way up to Silver from there. It was assumed that I was on easy street, that getting back to Silver wouldn’t take long at all. Oh how wrong I was.

I dropped from Bronze I to Bronze III rather rapidly early this year. From there, it was back up to Bronze I, and then back to Bronze II for quite some time. I rose and fell through the ranks over and over again, finally settling in Bronze II where I would stay for a time again. It wasn’t until I started to duo with a friend from my guild Obsidian that I finally got back to Bronze I.

There was a catch of course. He was already in Silver by the time we started to duo. Apparently you can only queue with someone who is only one tier ahead of you, and if they go beyond that, you’re assed out. My friend managed to help me get to towards the top of Bronze I, before he promoted to Gold V, and couldn’t offer his help anymore.

I took breaks here and there, but eventually got back into it pretty religiously. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve gotten into the promotional series to head into Silver V four times now. The promotional series to go between say Bronze II and Bronze I are only best of threes, so you only need two wins to move forward. To move up a tier, from Bronze to Silver, it’s a best of five, so you need three wins to get ahead.

The first series saw two immediate losses. Then two wins in a row, and I ended up staying in Bronze I after going 2-3 in the series. I still had the attitude that other people were bringing me down, and in some cases that was true, especially when a player disconnects or goes AFK. This happens more often than I would like, but there are still plenty of time when a team and I are so cohesive that everything goes right.

The next two series ended up coming down to two mistakes that I made, in pivotal games. I ended both of those series 2-3 as well, though I can’t remember the exact order. I just know that during one of the games in the first series that ended up being a loss, it came down to us needing one hit on their nexus, me being the last guy alive, and missing the opportunity to just dash away and get that last hit.

The same goes for the next series, but that one had quite a bit of toxicity thrown my way. I had called for ADC in champ select, and though another player was below me in the pick order, he insta-locked an ADC so I was forced to support. I play quite a bit of the support role, so I was ok with it, just irritated that the guy did that, and then turned out the be kind of bad at the role. We didn’t feed, but it didn’t go so well, especially when we were dived quite hard by multiple enemies. Our jungler who was playing Shyvanna was doing really well, and got fed early. By mid-game, our top, mid and ADC seemed lost as to what to do, so I started shotcalling. It was working well — we took out all of the towers and inhibitors in top and mid, but by that time the enemy team was respawning, so I called for retreat. Shyvanna decided to stick around, died, the rest of the team tried to help and died too, and I made it out alive. Shyvanna laid into me at that point, saying that I was a “pussy” and gave me grief for the rest of the game. On the next push, we managed to get both their nexus turrets down, and it was a replay of the game I mentioned before, where we needed one hit on their nexus to win, but we all died. They pushed into our base for the win. These things happen, but Shyvanna put all of the blame on me, and raged over and over. I’ve not had that treatment since my newbie days when I truly didn’t understand the game, so I can see why some people would want to avoid these types of games altogether.

However, I feel like I have a greater understanding of zones, objective control, and other facets of the game that people in my ELO might not normally have. For instance, we didn’t get a single dragon that whole game. It’s not just the jungler’s responsibility to maintain dragon control, but that is one of their primary focuses. It’s also not just the support’s job to ward, but she managed to rag on me for not having enough out, despite being at my max. Either way, just because you are fed and the rest of your team isn’t, doesn’t mean ragging on them will accomplish anything. Either way, that promo series ended the same, 2-3. I lost a couple games after that, then go to the point where I only needed one more win to get back into a series, which brings us to this last game I played:

The score lines aren’t really all that important here. Starting in champ select, I said I’d prefer ADC, and Vayne was first pick and said they wanted it. I was last pick so I ended up filling, and picked Lux mid. Jax was top, Alistar in the jungle, and Janna support. Not the best team comp, but it was at least more meta that the weird ass team the opposing force picked. They ended up with Talon mid, Aatrox top, Kalista ADC with Katarina support, and Master Yi in the jungle. First of all, fuck Katarina. I hate that champion more than any other.

So of course, the Katarina and Kalista lane gets fed, and after dying three times in like five minutes, Janna says she’s going AFK. Typical. I was doing fine in my lane, Talon wasn’t a challenge. Jax was losing his lane to Aatrox, citing ignite as the problem. It’s more likely, that neither lane knew how to play it safe. I didn’t die until both top and bottom’s outer towers were down, and roamers started coming to my lane. This is typical Bronze solo queue shit, and part of why I’m still stuck in this ELO Hell.

In all chat, Katarina keeps talking about how much of an asshole their Master Yi was, and that she felt that he deserved to lose. Jax is egging this on, and between the two of them, it’s decided that Katarina and Kalista will AFK. At this point, Janna comes back and starts to play, albeit still playing like a dumbass. The entire rest of the game, Kat and Kali toyed around with farming and spammed all chat. We were already at the point that we had all of our inhibitors down and it took the whole team to defend against the super minions. Yi, Aatrox and Talon would push in, we’d kill them, and defend. Eventually we were all level 18, had full or mostly full builds, and we were able to take a couple of dragons, barons and towers. They almost got to our base a few times, but we still fended them off. We pushed into their base, and got a nexus turret down before Katarina and Kalista came out of the fountain to harass, and ended killing all of us but Alistar. He still managed to fend off minions and Yi, while I came back up and helped finish them off. We all pushed into their base, killed Kat and Kali, and won the game.

The only positive I can take away from that game is the fact that I’m now back into a promo series to get into Silver. But I almost wish we would have just lost the game, because their behavior was atrocious.  I reported both the Katarina and the Kalista, stating:

By far the weirdest match I’ve ever been a part of. Kat and Kali managed to snowball their lane, but said Yi was an “asshole” so they sat afk and gave us tips on where everyone on the other team was. I enjoyed getting a win, but it wasn’t earned and this behavior breaks the game. Consider a ban.

The sad part is that all of them were at least Silver V, Kalista being Silver III. I was hoping getting out of Bronze would mean less of this shit, but apparently I was wrong. I still love the game but this was simply ridiculous. That’s all I have to say.

#leagueoflegends #ranked #pvp

SkyShrine and Beyond

The Everquest 2 progression servers are officially a thing, with Stormhold and Deathtoll going live tomorrow. Despite my interest in going down memory lane and especially getting involved in the frantic action that will undoubtedly happen on at least the PvP server (my memories of the opening of Nagafen are some of my best memories of the game), I’m not going to commit to it. I came to that conclusion a while back when I really put some thought into it, and realized that I have 3 expansions worth of content ahead of my main two characters. Why go and subscribe to the game just to play through content I’ve already completed more times than I can count (I had severe alt-itus back in the day, despite having only brought two characters through to the end game)? If I’m going to subscribe, it would be to gain access to the newest expansion, but I still have to get there first. As such, I’ve been plugging away at some older content that’s new to me, but only sporadically. As I mentioned in my last post, I have a bunch of MMOs installed on my hard drive, among countless single player games, so finding the time to commit to one game or another just isn’t going to happen.

I know that I would probably enjoy myself, but there’s that whole issue with nostalgia tricking you into thinking things from the good ol’ days were better than they actually were. There’s also the issue of paying for a subscription, when that would only guilt me into playing that game, regardless of if I really wanted to. Finally, as I said already I would much rather see more of the game I have yet to experience, rather than seeing more of the same — for free I might add — without the pressure of feeling like I “wasted” subscription time. The freedom of F2P is great for this reason, despite the fact that there are some drawbacks to the system. My fear of commitment has manifested itself in all facets of my life at this point, but hey, I am who I am and you either accept it or block me on Twitter. The choice is yours.

Moving on, let’s talk about what I’ve been doing in Everquest 2. It was previously mentioned that I had cleared the remaining quests in The Withered Lands and that I was now able to move onto Skyshrine. This entire zone and dungeon were introduced as a free update to bridge the previous expansion Destiny of Velious and the next one, Chains of Eternity. DoV was the last expansion I had really played through prior to my 3+ year break. Even though I revisited Norrath a year ago, I mainly visited dungeons and other bits of group content that I had missed throughout the years as my playtime was very sporadic post-Kunark. During that time I was grinding to 280 AAs so that I would be able to level past 90, and then when I returned this year with the F2P option, found that the XP curve had changed and all my other characters got a boost to their AAs. This means my play time a year ago was basically a waste, though it was great to see many of the dungeons and other areas I had missed, so we’ll chalk that up to being a learning experience.

So the last chunk of content available to me before moving into CoE, was Skyshrine. This is a contested dungeon accessible via a griffin in The Withered Lands, that has various questlines inside, but is Heroic, meaning a group is needed to complete the content. Grouping in EQ2 is basically non existent at this point, especially for older content unless you have a guild or otherwise know more people with whom you can group. I am in a guild, but it consists of my father and a couple of other people who apparently are still playing the game but aren’t usually on when I’m playing, so maybe I’ll get around to doing the content of the zone eventually, but for now it’s a bit out of my reach. Perhaps in a few levels I will be able to solo it, as my mercenary actually did fairly well in keeping us alive through a couple of encounters, but I think we need to level up a bit to make it manageable. So that leaves the other option, which is a concept that is fairly new to me, but was added into the game circa 2011/12 — Solo Dungeons. Thinking about it now, there actually were solo instances in one of the early adventure packs, but that’s neither here nor there. So, I completed my first solo instance last night, and it was fairly enjoyable.

Apparently there are three different “missions” that I can go on, though I assume they all use the same instance, and are just populated by different mobs, but I won’t know until I do the next. There is a lockout timer on these missions, so I was only able to complete one last night, and plan to do another tonight. The mission I did run through required beating 4 named within the zone (with trash mobs in between) which would then spawn the main named to get the update for the quest. From there you return to the Skyshrine lobby, turn in and then wait til the lockout timer expires. Overall it was easy going with my merc, and I earned both the achievement for completing the instance but also the achievement for completing it rather quickly. Kudos to me. From there, I ran into a hiccup.

I had no problem with waiting on lockout timers, I figured I would just move on to the next expansion and come back to Skyshrine later. However, it turns out that you won’t be able to pick up quests from NPCs in the next expansion without first being level 92. At the time I was sitting at 20% into level 91. This also helped me to discover a limitation to the F2P system in EQ2 that I was previously unaware of. It turns out that your AA slider is locked at 50% and you can’t touch it when you’re F2P. This is fine when you aren’t at the level/AA cap, but when you do hit the maximum amount of AA, you are effectively losing 50% of your XP at all times. I don’t see this being an issue while I level through older content, but that definitely makes subscribing later on a more definite possibility. Due to the fact that I had been sitting at this 50-50 split between adventure XP and AA XP for my past few play sessions, it actually has slowed down leveling to the point where I need that extra 80% to hit level 92 before being able to traverse into new territory. Not a huge deal, as there are plenty of older quests in my journal along with HQs, Signature Series and more — I just had to decide what to work on first. I perused my journal and ended up deciding to work on the HQ “The Book of Thex” as I had already completed some steps for it. This required a bunch of back and forth to a secret hideout in The Moors of Ykesha, and I didn’t actually finish the quest before calling it a night.

Looking forward, I am going to try and work on this and other HQs along with the other solo missions in Skyshrine until I hit level 92. From their I can go back into the Eidolon Jungle and progress through the Chains of Eternity expansion. From there it’s on to Tears of Veeshan before I won’t be able to progress any further. At least I hope. We’ll see what happens as I get there. I know that I purchased ToV while subscribed last year, so I should still have access to that, but I’m not sure on other F2P limitations. I have not purchased Altar of Malice, so I know I will have to do so and subscribe when I get to that point. Either way, it’s been pretty enjoyable to this point.

#everquest2 #daybreakgames