Welcome to a new chapter of MMOries of a Gamer. This time I’ll tell you of my little adventures in Everquest II, when I was quite a newbie, back in late 2004. By then, I was pleased with SOEs games and, after playing Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies, couldn’t help but ordering EQ2, even before the Europe release. That cost my a lot of money but, you know, I’m a gamer.
Once I got the game, immediately installed it and started to play avidly, hoping for new adventures, while recalling my glorious EQ past. The game was gorgeous and I liked the newbie island a lot, that was a good idea. Quests were easy to follow up and complete. Everyone said EQ2 was really an ever-quest MMO, as we all were quest-leveling instead of killing mobs on a spot for hours, farming to get experience points. The only flaw was performance. EQ2 was impossible to run properly on my computer, having lots of problems to play without those annoying graphic jumps. I remember lots of players complaining about performance and, in my opinion, that was the reason EQ2 didn’t have several million players.
After a few weeks playing, some friends decided to play with me. We ended up forming a balanced group, including the main roles of healer, tank, damage dealer and support class. The only thing we were lacking was crowd control. The group quickly started to advance in EQ2, doing lots of quests and exploring. We were playing without searching the Internet for advice, guides and the like, so it was fun but difficult. Anyway, playing like that, provided us some great moments in-game.
One day, we were at The Crypt of Betrayal trying to complete a quest for armor. Some of you would know that, starting in low levels, you could follow a quest series rewarding nice armor. I don’t even remember what stage of the quest it was or which piece of armor we were after but, I remember we were trying to hunt down The Specter of Ire. The place was quite hard for us and, without crowd control, was quite chaotic to fight a bunch of mobs, many of them linked. We didn’t care much though, when we were together we used to have so much fun, laughing and making jokes all the time, mostly when we had certain crazy wizard with a dangerous tendency to do AOE pulling.
Even before we could even start to figure out how to find The Specter of Ire, right after clearing some corridors close to the entrance of the crypt, someone (don’t remember who) said:
-”Bah! We are too low leveled for this place, we can barely clear the entrance so I don’t think we can go further and find that skeleton bastard… and if we find him, he will own us.”
I promise right in the moment he finished talking, The Specter of Ire spawned right beside him, laughing like mad with the famous EQ skeleton creepy laugh.
-”Ha HA ha Ha!!”
The Specter of Ire and his minions killed us quickly, while we were laughing so hard that some of has fell of the chair in front of our computers. We learned one of the skeleton boss spawning points that way and, after recovering from laughter, we managed to go back to the dungeon, we defeated The Specter of Ire and finished the quest.
Did you play Everquest 2? Do you have any interesting story to tell us about this game? Go ahead and post your remembrances of EQ2 in the comments section or, if you don’t want to tell us a story, simply leave your comments here, on MMORies of a Gamer.
See you all on next chapter, MMOries of a Gamer: World of Warcraft.
Truth is Down Below, Vermins Snye and Crypt of Betrayal did provide lots of good moments, not only funny ones but also epic.
I remember once, in Vermins Snye, we found a boss and after clearing the area a bit, we charged without much more thinking, for there was other players and they could “steal” it from us. First the adds were killed, then the boss slowly started killing us, no matter how much I tried to heal the tank and the rest of the group with my reactive healing spells or the direct ones, because after some long minutes of fighting my mana was depleted and I found myself being the only one standing against the boss, who was not so far from dying.
At first I panicked, but Templars in EQ2 are heavy armor wearers, so I decided to stand there and fight, one eye on the mana recovery while smacking our foe with my mace. I remember some other players gathered around and were close by, just watching the fight, not moving a finger to help me, so my pride kicked in and I did my best not to die. I used the reactive healing, which healed me each time I got damage, slowly recovering my health barely enough to keep me alive and prevent a critical hit to finish me off, while painstakingly slowly I was downing the health of the boss, waiting with my finger ready to press the key to cast the healing spell as soon as I had enough mana again.
This process took like 10-15 eternal minutes, my comrades dead, but encouraging me to go on and finish the boss, the watchers waiting to see if I finally died so they could get the boss themselves… though in the end, they applauded me when the mob finally fell to the ground and I resurrected my group triumphantly. I couldn’t believe I had done it! Ah, the memories…
October 31st, 2010 at 11:19 amQuote
I think EQ2 still has the best crafting and housing systems of any MMO I’ve played. I’m almost grateful that WoW never bothered to steal those systems, otherwise I’d never have broken the addiction.
October 31st, 2010 at 12:20 pmQuote
EQ2 housing is awesome.
October 31st, 2010 at 12:29 pmQuote