EQ2Follow

That would be an awesome name for an EQ2 Asylum guild...just sayin'



Yes. I know. I don't know how to get past the swear filter.

It's much better than it used to be.Not bad at all.

We played together? Where the hell was I?

Well, we bought EQ2 a few days after it hit the shelves. On release, it was horrendous. I would go as far as to call it nearly unplayable. I hung it up quickly, but kept the account active since it didn't cost all that much more for Station Access.

A few months and three or four major modifications later, I gave it another shot. It was decent, far improved from it's initial release. Far from perfect, but much more playable and far less rigid.

On the down side, it was also underpopulated and what population was there contained quite a high percentage of prudes. It was the Blackburrow server, and I found it's population at the time to be filled with joyless players who would often throw fits in /ooc about people chatting. It didn't need to be offensive, risque, rude or juvenile chat to set them off. An /ooc about the weather might just be enough to cause a **** storm to break out. It was quite odd.

I swore if took up another MMO after EQ that I would try my hand at a healer. I made a Mystic, got pretty comfortable with it, pushed the toon up to 37 in mostly half size groups and was in general pretty impressed with the fairly wide range of abilities the character had. I was actually really getting to like EQ2.

Not being one known for having a case of altitis, I leveled a good 5 levels past Yan and tried my hand at other classes to give her a chance to catch up. I leveled at least 5 toons on the good side to the low 20's and then would just quit playing them. Why? I never wanted to have to play through the Thundering Steppes again. I absolutely hated that zone, and you have to spend weeks if not months in there getting through the early and mid 20s. That zone is almost as much torture as the tradeskill system, which I think has to qualify as a human rights violation somehow.

I took a few days rest from the game and came in to a large patch and noticed in the notes that an all "New and Improved" combat system was implemented. I hadn't really kept up on this but figured what could they really do to a caster/healer type that wouldn't be too hard to adjust to. To put it simply, none of the tactics I used on a regualr basis worked anymore, spell lines that never conflicted in the past now did and entire spell lines had been modified to do entirely different things.

This bugged me, but I went out and cautiously soloed a bit and found that I still had a functional toon that was much simpler to play due to all the spell conflicts making the array of spells in use dramatically smaller and fights seemed to be repetition of two or three spells timed out by their refresh timer and "wheel" positions. It was less fun, but tolerable. I could adjust to this so far.

Then I got in a group and found out that the Mystic was now the ultimate aggro machine. Just standing there afk was enough to perma lock aggro on a mob. This was brought up quickly to SOE on the forums and in petitions. SOE's stance: "Working as Intended".

Neat

I farted around long enough in the game to get another level and a half through and learned how to defeat the same level of mobs that I did before the combat system was implemented, but now it was just a series of repetitious, timed, button punches.

The class was now useless in a group due to instant aggro issues and on top of that it's healing power had been dramatically reduced. It reminded me of what happened to the monk class in EQ on the release of Luclin, and in some ways worse.

About 5 weeks and no major movements made to fix the class, I cancelled the game. A few weeks later, I read about another major revision being done to the combat system and I laughed. Even though people claimed it was an improvement this time, the developers had already proven that they just can't stop messing with things, especially if they don't really need to be fixed.

The developers should have worked all this stuff out in beta before releasing a half finished game.

As for WoW, I liked the game but hated the interface.

You couldn't pay me enough to play EQ2 again.

I'm still in EQ, Yan is playing WoW.

I hate you all

Patching now. . . . .

2hrs +

Make that 3 :{

Edited, Wed May 31 15:26:23 2006 by Nobby

I played mostly during Beta and on 1st release - Memory leaks, bugs, crappy play. Yep.

But bored enought to risk it - so many people who had the same experience as I seem to love it now.

I'll try anything twice.

Kinda like you were "done" posting here?

Shush you

KoS.

Dont need to worry bout DoF until lvl 45.

You mis-heard. What I actually said was "I have no thyme". Silly.

ok I guess 45 is the right time. I thought it was earlier than that but reconfirmed 45 with SK.