In Everquest 2 that is. I spent most the day Wednesday goofing off, and then Thursday I logged in one of the alts I had not leveled, my troubador Crystalos. He is a high elf and one of the few characters in my "character whore stable" (bonus points if you get the movie reference) that I had not touched. Wednesday I got my monk to level 40 and my new warlock to level 6 (WOOT!) but today I felt like playing the assassin type. Tuesday I played my new froglok paladin Freok to level 15 and had to log out, and then toward the end of the week I have a lot of doctor visits and junk like that so I knew I wouldn't be able to play much.

Knowing that at 5pm I had to start drinking this crap I knew that my playtime would be short so off I went. I remembered most of the quests in Greater Faydark and by level 9 I was on my way to help the mushroom folk out in Dyer Mycoria once more. I always liked this section of Greater Faydark because these quests were off to the side in a long tunnel that was a little mini adventure before you left the starting place. It evokes a great sense of exploration and has a really cool theme to it. After all it is not everyday in this game you get to help mushroom people. The voice acting here is superb as each mushroom character speaks slowly like you would expect one to.

I had forgotten how extensive those tunnels were back in there and almost got lost a few times, but I got my wits about me and started off on the first few quests there that had me talking and mingling with the fungus folk.



I spoke to Agarighus and started the quest chain that would eventually lead to my character becoming an ally of the mushroom cave denizens. The first task was to get some shrumblers out of the mushroom breeding area and put them back in their proper place. To do this Agarighus provided me a net and I was soon off to round up the baby shrumblers and throw them back in their pen. On the opposite of Agarighus is another mushroom man leader that gave me a quest to take out a few Grobin...

Well it would appear a terrible thing has happened. I have gone back to EQ1 full time it is official.

I will simply sum it up as I have tried since 2004 with no luck to get away from the memories of this game, the zones, the music, the play style and I just cannot do it.

Even coming back to EQ2 I sat there and said "Man this is cool but its NOT EQ!" I say that in EVERY game I try don't I?

So this week, with my faithful guild co-officer in tow, I went back to Norrath 500 years ago and now I find myself logging into that more than EQ2. The reasons are simple. Everquest 1 has always and will always fit my play style.I can list the reasons and they are many, but a few are:

I don't like to be guided along on rails.

I don't like my epics or my content easy.

I don't like questing.

I want the freedom to move about where I want.

I want to be able to buff people or alts.

I want a fast interface and the ability to macro and make my own commands.

I want my graphics ok but not so over the top they ruin my play experience.

I want vast content.

I don't want instances.

I want people that KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING.

I want the ability to have NPC's in my group (something that makes Guild Wars so close yet so far).

In short, I want my old game back. EQ1 has changed a LOT. The death penalty is virtually a joke now. When you die you keep all your gear on you. They have mercenaries that in some cases play better than players. They have FREE guild lobbies. We made Titans of the Old Lore on Povar with TWO people. And we got a free guild lobby. Granted it doesn't have the "ooh's and ahh's" of an EQ2 Guild hall but so what. We just want a place to hang our heads at night, tradeskill and port around. We also get a bank and the ability to store tons of stuff. And that odd Guild Banner thing.

I don't care how dead old zones may be, I will just work up to the places where people are. I have over 500 zones to explore and I am way behind the new stuff, but I actually started...

A recent post by a Champions Online forum user drew Cryptic team member Balseraph out of hiding and he posted some official insight on defenses in the game.

http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=16333

"Small corrections to Regeneration - it's actually a pretty complicated beast.: it does start off with fairly good healing at the first hit, and ramps up as you get damaged, capping out at 3x its initial heal rate. One of the tricks to it is that the rate of regeneration isn't based on your hit point level, but rather on the amount of damage you've taken. In other words, even if part way into a long fight an ally heals you up to full, it keeps going at full power.

It automatically "forgets" damage as time passes, though... about 1 attack worth every 4 seconds or so. It takes 30 seconds of time out of combat to fully "reset".

The healing from regeneration is *not* a percentage of your life; it's a flat amount that scales up with your level. The active button burst O heal, however, does scale with your HP (technically, your CON), but has the downside of making your regeneration "forget" a lot of damage.

The intent is that the active button play for Force Field and Regeneration are opposite patterns. With Force Field, you want to press the active button every time the cooldown is up, as soon as it's up, which means making sure you have the energy to push is (and thus holding back a bit on dps).

Conversely, with Regeneration, the active heal button is really cheap, but you want to push it as RARELY as possible, since it slows down your passive regeneration substantially.

(and if you buy them both, even though you can only have one passive at a time, you can use both actives, leading to some interesting combinations...)

Yes, graphing that might look odd. =)

For what it's worth... no, these defenses don't work remotely like anything in CoH, CoV, WoW, or really any other *MMO* that I'm familiar with; they're all designed to be unique and...

When does the will to level actually harm your MMO experience? All throughout this recruit a friend bonanza I have had a very very slight tinge of regret in the back of my head about how incomplete these two orcs will be. Now much of this stems from the fact that I am very impatient and I want to pump up my horde account NOW rather than wait. Some of it is also attributed to the fact that I have done levels 1-60 a lot also.

A few of the nit picky RPG things that concern me are faction, titles, pets and achievements, and while I can go back and get these later it does make me feel a little guilty. I have this view about it: I can always get to 60 and go back and do these things, but for 90 days I have triple XP and the ability to grant free levels. Should I actually feel bad about not leveling up slowly or not doing trade skills when I wouldn't have a mount and it would very painful? I don't think so. A character in an MMO is more than just levels to me. I know that once I hit 60 the two orc brothers have a lot of work still left to be rounded out. I am not stupid, I know they will be lacking skills and weapon abilities.

However to have the ability to run any of them through Outlands and Northrend, the content designed after blizzard got their heads out of their asses, is priceless to me. It puts me on the cusp of catching up to the new end game and does not exclude me from grouping with new death knights and their ilk. The one major argument people have with the RAF program is of course idiots that don't learn their class and jump right into 5 mans and get you slaughtered. I think in a sense blizzard was smart to halt RAF at 60. This forces players to still run Outlands instances to get really good gear and it also gives the death knights people to group with.

Sometimes I feel like blizzard has has quite a few tricks up their sleeves and this is just one of them. Smart design either way.

All in all, even though it pains me not to be a completest during these 90 days, I know that I have all the...