Have You Done That Little Job I Gave You Yet?

A couple of days ago, I mentioned in passing that Panda Panda Panda was back. The event, which used to be known as Days of Summer, when it started a litle earlier in the year, is a series of weekly quests in EverQuest II that, at least on the face of it, offers a huge boost in power for casual players at the cost of very little effort indeed.

At least, that's how it appears until you take a closer look at the way it works. I had the opportunity to do just that yesterday, when I went to pick up the first of this year's quests and found I hadn't finished last year's yet. Or started them, either.

Technically, I had started the 2024 set of nine quests, but only in that I'd visited Bao Bao, the current Panda-in-Residence, and taken the first one. It was in my Journal but I hadn't actually done anything about it in twelve months. Bao Bao was not interested in giving me this year's quests until I finished the job I was already on.

I had thought you could skip the ones you hadn't done. You'd probably want to if you were a new or returning player because the event has been running since 2017, meaning there are now seventy-two quests in the full sequence, not counting the new ones this year. There are a lot of rewards from previous years that still have some currency, not least the huge number of house items, but the main thrust of the event has always been to gear up and who wants a load of outdated armor with inferior stats?

The wiki is somewhat confusing on whether you can skip the years you don't want to do: "Each of the quests must be completed in the order they were released, starting with the quests from 2017. You cannot skip ahead to later points in the quest series. *2023 can be completed without previous progress in this questline." (Emphasis theirs.) Why 2023 is different from the rest I couldn't tell you but it doesn't seem to have been the start of a new, more relaxed ruleset because this year's starter quest looked to be firmly gated behind completion of last year's.

I imagine the reason I thought you could skip was because in 2023 you really could. Maybe I did. I haven't checked. I vaguely remember deciding last year that, since I wasn't going to use any of the gear, I wouldn't bother doing the quests. Or maybe that's post hoc rationalization. It's entirely possible I just forgot.

There were nine quests in the 2024 set. There are nine every year. It takes us through the autumn to the arrival of the annual expansion, one quest dropping every week after the regular update, usually, on a Tuesday. It's a pleasant weekly ritual to get the new one, fly around for a few minutes ticking the necessary boxes, then come back to see what new stuff you can grab off the store-panda.

If you let yourself fall behind, however, it all feels a bit less amusing. Last night and this morning I did all nine quests. I did it the fastest way possible, using my All Access Membership for instant travel to and from the various zones, moving between the various locations within those zones on my very fast, max-level flying mount and using the detailed walkthrough, complete with copy-and-paste waypoints, from the Wiki.

Since I was on my Level 130 Berserker, all mobs in every required zone were grey to me and non-aggressive. All I had to do was port, fly, gather and return. It still took me two hours to finish all nine quests.

The quests themselves were exactly as they always are: gather some samples from various parts of Norrath so some lazy/greedy/cowardly panda can satisfy their curiosity/stuff themselves stupid. Bao Bao is quite an endearing panda as these things go and the quest dialog was amusing enough but the most interesting part to me is how long the dev team can keep the whole thing going. 

There's a whole gang of pandas standing around in Sundered Frontier now. I think there are three questgivers and two vendors at least. When the thing started in 2017 there was only Yun Zi handing out the quests and he did his own storekeeping.

Thanks to the wiki, I had very little trouble finding everything. Almost all of the items were there in profusion. Most of them sparkled and some were oversized. A couple were none of those things but the wiki warned me about that and told me where to look, with accompanying screenshots. 

The only part that gave me any real trouble was the quest that asked for some foliage from Lesser Feydark. Lesser Fey is and always has been a total pain to navigate. It has no portals at all accessible via map travel. The best you can do is map to either Butcherblock and take a griffin from the cliffs above the dock or port to Greater Feydark or Steamfont and fly to the zone-in.

I went via Butcherblock first, only to find that the BB entrance brings you in on the opposite side of the map to where you want to go. I figured it would be faster to map-travel to GFey and come back in from that side than to fly across the whole of LFey so I did that and it wasn't. 

I'd forgotten that you land in Kelethin and Kelethin has its own map and I got myself lost coming out of the dumb elf tree city and ended up wandering about for ages before I finally worked out where I was supposed to be going. 

Once in LFey it wasn't much better because the whole place is constructed from a bunch of separate valleys with invisible walls preventing you from flying between them. You have to follow rivers and go through tunnels and you can't fly through most of the connections so you have to go on foot. The whole place is a confusing, annoying mess and flying really doesn't make it any easier.

So that was fun. I got it done eventually, anyway.

With all of that out of the way, I was finally able to get the first of this year's quests, for which we will be collecting rocks, just for a change. It turns out Bao Bao, who demonstrated his lack of self-control when it comes to stuffing things in his mouth all through the 2024 questline, ate his way through his grandmother's entire vegetable garden and now he needs to give her some pretty rocks for her collection to get back on her good side.

Guess who'll be doing the hard work lugging those rocks about. Muggins, that's who.

And that brings me to the question, once again, of whether it will be worth it. I looked at the first set of rewards, which include a bunch of purple Augments, some weapons and the inevitable bags of decorating items and... that's it. 

Usually there are full sets of armor for all weights and dozens of Augments, along with a few other odds and ends, utilities and so on. I'm not sure if that means none of those things are going to be on the vendor this time or whether they'll only appear week-by-week. And if they aren't going to be there, does that mean there's going to be a substantial change to the way gear works in the new expansion?

Or does it just mean someone has finally admitted that handing out three full sets of gear in three months, each of which upgrades the one before, is taking generosity beyond the bounds of reason? If so, you can bet there will be howls of complaint.

Not that the dagger I took does upgrade the best one already available to me, anyway. I took it because it's an upgrade for the weapon I was using but I wasn't using the best weapon I own. I haven't claimed the weapon from the Anniversary crate yet. The panda dagger won't upgrade that and if there is panda armor this year and it has the same Resolve as the weapons, that won't upgrade the anniversary gear, either.

In fact, it will be much worse. The Anniversary stuff is 525 Resolve. The new panda weapons are 505. 

Even if we discount the Anniversary gear, which you only get for one character on the account, Resolve 505 isn't going to cut it for long. As a casual soloist I already have lots of 495 pieces so it's a minimal upgrade and it will be instantly rendered redundant the day the expansion arrives. I don't know what the Tishan's gear will come in at but you can bet it will be at minimum 505 and come with Augments that work in the new zones, which none of the old ones will.

Some of that is speculation. This is, or should be, a level cap increase year. Those are usually when things change the most so anything could happen when the expansion arrives. As must be plain from everything I ever write about EQII, the game is ferociously over-complicated, especially when it comes to gear and stats. The team have been trying to strip away some of the accrued cruft for a while now but every time they remove anything there's an outcry, not least from the crew that claims to play EQII specifically because it's complicated and difficult to understand.

I'll be doing the panda quests anyway. They're a fun little diversion and don't take too long (Lesser Feydark always excepted.) and they unlock the vendors for the whole account so it's a useful option for some of my sub-max-level characters. Most of all, though, I don't want to fall behind again. 

Who knows, next year the pandas might come up with something different. If they do, it'd be nice to be able to grab it right away instead of playing catch-up first.

Traditional And Modern - Scattered Thoughts On A Friday

Following on from what I said yesterday I was going to be posting about today, this isn't going to be the promised (Threatened?) music post nor my considered thoughts on Carole and Tuesday. It might have something to do with AI in but it's beginning to look very much as though everything will, soon enough, so probably no need to draw attention to it.

I guess we may as well just call it another Friday Grab-Bag. On Friday. Again! Two weeks in a row that makes it! Who had that on their bingo card? No-one, I bet!

Panda³

It's back! Panda Panda Panda, that is. (You can sing it to this tune - boy did I have to work to find a version I was willing to link!) 

I'd forgotten all about it. I had a clear window of a couple of hours this morning so I thought I'd try and nail down another instance in the signature quest from EverQuest II's soon-to-be-last-year's expansion, Renewal of Ro. As soon as I opened the launcher I saw two news items - one for Panda Panda Panda, the other for something called Gear Up, Swag It Up, which appears to be the new Gear Up, Level Up , another event that always runs around this time of year.

The main purpose of both GULU and PPP used to be to get everyone ready for the upcoming expansion but I guess it finally occured to someone that we only get a level increase every other year these days. Also, levelling up takes a fraction of the time it once did. I doubt anyone needs much help with that.

Gear is another matter. The panda quests, if you do the whole nine weeks of them, will get you something for every single slot plus all the necessary augments, not to mention a bunch of other useful stuff. When the quests were first introduced it made a huge difference to power levels but these days the difference is more incremental. 

I went straight over to check this year's rewards and they're good but not as good as the drops from the Shattered Overture instances. On the other hand, the panda quests are super-easy and extremely quick, plus you're guaranteed to get everything, whereas the SO instances take a while, aren't a cakewalk and give drops that have an element of RNG involved.

Of course, for anyone who plays more than one character at max level, the real attraction of the Panda quests is that they're account unlocks. You can get the rewards on as many characters as you like just for doing the quests once. Can't turn that down.

Usually I follow the walkthrough at EQ2 Traders but there doesn't seem to be one this year, possibly because Naimi Denmother is now the dev who writes them all, so I guess it would seem a little odd for her to hand out instructions. Never mind. The wiki has everything you need. Or it will have, when each quest appears.

As for Gear Up, Level Up I got a reward for it when I finished my main quest instance this morning so clearly you don't have to do anything in advance to qualify. I haven't been to look at the vendor yet but the Swag Shield buff ought to help me finish the Sig Line in good time for the expansion so I'll probably get that.

Speaking of which, isn't it about time we got the name of the expansion and the pre-order details?

How Are The Mighty Fallen

Demoted to a couple of paragraphs in a grab-bag. How humiliating! I read Amazon's blog on October's Prime Gaming giveaways last night and realised that even though I could have gotten a whole post out of the details, I really couldn't be bothered. 

I'd have to read up on a whole load of games that don't interest me and think of something snarky to say about them all and I really don't care enough to do it. I'm sure they're all perfectly fine for people who like that sort of thing and I'm far too mature to get a kick out of mickey-taking just for the sake of it. (Shut up at the back!)

Also, I get the feeling this has been one of the least-useful series I've done over the years in that no-one other than me really seems to mention Prime Gaming any more. I might be the only one left who cares, always assuming anyone else ever did. Or that I do.

I am still mildly interested to see what I can get for free each month. There's usually at least one game I think I might enjoy. This month that's definitely the bizarrely-named GRUNND.

The game's Steam page has a lot of detail, which is more than can be said for Prime Gaming. It's a kind of point & click adventure, which is good, but based on platforming design, which might not be. It's "inspired by the works of Franz Kafka and David Lynch", which is right up my street, as is the mention "Southern Gothic" but I'm not so keen on the influence of "Black Metal".

It sounds worth a look, anyway. I'll be claiming that one when it becomes available on 5 October. 

I'll probably also grab The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters the week after. It's"an atmospheric, story-driven game" set in a haunted school. All this month's choices are vaguely horror-related to fit in with Halloween. Horror's not really my thing but as I observed a while ago it seems to be creeping into everything nowadays, which has had something of a numbing effect on my sensiibilites. I can stomach a bit of horror better than I once could, anyway.

And that's probably it for this month. I suppose I might claim Ghostwire: Tokyo, which I had at least heard of, but honestly it's not speaking to me. Other than that, I claimed something for New World and Guild Wars 2 and that was it. The GW2 freebie includes a top hat, which is worth mentioning, I guess...

Still Looks Like A Brick To Me

I've never had a Facebook account and I have almost no interest in VR so I haven't been paying all that much atention to Mark Zuckerberg and his Meta project, other than to chuckle when Wilhelm points out the latest idiocy. As with Musk and Twitter, I really don't have a dog in the fight so it's easy to just sit back and treat it all like some wacky sitcom.

It was a bit of a surprise, then, to see this pop up in my feeds yesterday, followed by some quite cogent analysis this morning. Inbetween the two, I did a little research of my own, from which I learned not just that "Smart Glasses" are a thing but that they've been one for several years.

If you put "Smart Glasses" into Amazon you get over two thousand results, everything from simple specs offering Bluetooth hands-free calling at less than a tenner up to AR/VR sets costing thousands of pounds. Plenty of them have built-in video cameras, allowing you to film whatever you happen to be looking at, which I thought was the feature that had pitchfork-waving mobs threatening to burn Larry Page in effigy outside Google HQ when Google Glass was making headlines a few years back.

I always thought Google Glass was a great idea. It seemed so obvious that a light, comfortable, inconspicuous wearable, offering a heads-up display and access to social media was the inevitable next step after the smart phone. Only mass hysteria over spurious privacy issues and Google surprisingly running scared of public opinion stopped the device becoming ubiquitous.

Despite publicly withdrawing from the fight, Google quietly kept on with the project, developing and selling "Enterprise" versions to industry for a decade before finally throwing in the towel this spring. What lies behind that decision only Google knows, although this article lays the blame squarely on the cost, which at $1500 does seem steep. 

Pricing for RayBan's Meta Glasses, which I believe you will need a Meta account to use, start at a fifth of the cost of Google Glass - just $299. Not only do they have the video capability that supposedly caused all the ructions last time, they allow for hands-free livestreaming through Facebook and Instagram. 

If it wasn't for the tie-in with Facebook, I'd be wishlisting a pair of those right now. They look like the future to me, at least in principle.

I would not, however, be considering the actual Meta Quest 3, the device whose launch triggered my investigation to begin with. It's a clever idea with its "Passthrough AR", meaning you can see a representation of the real world as relayed by cameras in the unit, rather than being cut off altogether from reality as in previous VR headsets. 

It's still waaaaaay too big and waaaaaaay too weird to imagine wearing anywhere other than in the privacy of your own home, though - and even then you'd only want to wear it when no-one else was home to see you doing it. I mean, doesn't it remind you of that face mask Hannibal Lecter used to wear?

Still, we are clearly edging closer to the future we all thought was coming a decade ago. The last couple of would-be hype trains - NFTs and Crypto - ran into the buffers of their own worthlessness and ineptitude, while the one before them - Virtual Reality  - shunted itself into a siding, where it remains, of interest only to a relative handful of hobbyists. The next couple coming down the track - AI and AR - look far more likely to instigate the kind of paradigm shift we're all hoping for.

We are all hoping for that, aren't we? If only it wasn't Mark Zuckerberg driving the engine. (And I haven't even mentioned Snoop Dogg as a Dungeon Master...)

And Finally

I had more but it's getting late and my mouse is being really weird so I'm going to stop. I was going to finish with a tune but it seems I don't have many new ones to choose from. Good thing I didn't try and do a music post after all, eh?

Oh, I know! Let's have some Carole and Tuesday!

Don't worry. I'll be obsessed with something else soon enough. You'll look back at this little fad some day soon and wish it could have lasted longer!

I'm Coming! I'm Coming! Just Give Me An Hour To Get Dressed...

 As Wilhelm noted, today marks the launch of EverQuest II's latest expansion, Renewal of Ro. It's just as well he mentioned it. I'd forgotten and, somewhat surprisingly, Daybreak don't seem to have sent me a reminder.

There was scheduled downtime lasting five hours before the servers opened on the new lands. I'm guessing it went to plan because by the time I finished walking Beryl, cooking her chicken and feeding it to her, it was half an hour past the appointed hour and there were three instances of the opening zone, Raj'Dur Plateaus already up and running.

For once, there was no frenzied scurrying, trying to find out how to get there. The Message of the Day gave clear instructions. All we had to do was find a magic carpet in one of the home cities and we'd be whisked away on our great adventure.

I had been planning on finishing the Panda quests first but it occured to me that, based on previous expansions, as soon as I got there I'd be junking pretty much everything in favor of the free catch-up gear lying on the ground next to the first questgiver.

That indeed proved to be the case. The stuff in the box is 390 Resolve, a huge upgrade from the 315 of the Hua Collector's gear, even though that's only a matter of weeks old. At this point, I really can't see the point of the Panda quests, or at least not of the equippable gear they reward. It's hard to see who would use it, except maybe people who don't buy the expansion but still play endgame from the last one. Does anyone really do that?

Of course, the Tishan's gear itself is only a stopgap. The rewards from the two quests I took at the docks are upgrades to it. Then again, if you don't equip the starting gear, good luck doing those first quests unless you're in full raid gear fron the last expansion!

Gearing up from the box is not a simple process, as I learned to my cost several expansions ago. There are numerous Adornments to check, fit and replace, some of which are Lore and clash with things you're probably already using. I imagine it's going to take me an hour to get myself sorted out and that's just doing the bare minimum.

I'm also beginning to get a little desperate for a new mercenary. My current one is from the expansion before last and while he's still keeping me upright, I think it might be asking a bit much of him to go one more round. I was excited to see this cheery-looking fellow hanging out his shingle in the dockland area but sadly he wouldn't do more than pass the time of day with me. I hope he'll be more communicative when I've done... something. Not sure what, yet.

Since an hour was about all I had, if I was going to get this post done before bed, I had to content myself with a quick explore around the harbor and a very tentative peek at the desert beyond. Again from experience, I know that without the new gear I'll be one-shotted by the first aggressive wildlife that spots me trying to sneak past.

The canyon at the back of the docks led to what looked remarkably like the open sea and was, disturbingly, strewn with dead sheep. When I cautiously poked my nose around the cliffs I found out what had been kiling them. Vultures.

And that's as far - and as close - as I got. I already have a quest to kill those vultures, along with some non-aggressive mites I passed on the sands, but both of them would very definitely be picking my bones within seconds if I was rash enough to take them on.

That's going to have to wait until tomorrow, after I've sorted out my gear and done the dozen other necessary things one always has to do at the start of a new expansion, the first of which is going to be deciding who to take through the Signature line first. I'm leaning towards my Necromancer. It's been far too long since I played a pet class in EQII.

Then again, my Berserker's already there...

Expansions, Pandas, Events... It's All Happening In EQII

So, we know the name of the next EverQuest II expansion at last. It's Renewal of Ro. Jenn Chan slipped it in at the end of her latest Producer's Letter.  

Darkpaw seems to be developing some kind of slow release, drip feed for expansion news, a technique I find rather effective. There's just enough new information each time to keep the appetite piqued and it takes several bites out of the news cycle. Like most things Daybreak is doing these days, it feels like a solid, competent effort from a significantly more focused marketing department than we've been used to seeing in the past.

There's still very little detail on the exact setting or storyline for EQII's nineteenth expansion, other than the hint hidden in the very last sentence - if you can call something hidden that's been both bolded and italicized. "Get ready to Tack on your best gear and establish yourself as one of the greatest of spelunkers in hiztory". Jenn does love her puns.

You could engrave everything I know about Takish Hiz on the head of a pin - if you were a gnome with one of those sets of magnifying goggles they all seem to wear. I have a passable grounding in Norrathian lore, myth and history but the first I ever remember hearing of the legendary home of the elves was in 2003's Lost Dungeons of Norrath, the sixth (And in my opinion one of the best.) expansions to the original EverQuest.

Takish Hiz was one of the LDoN dungeons, where I spent a great deal of time in the six months before the next bi-annual expansion suddenly made getting groups to go there all but impossible. I remember it clearly as a complex of marble halls and corridors entombed beneath the desert sands. Of the sylvan forests so dear to the elves who once ruled Norrath during the eponymous Takish Age, there was no sign at all.

How long Takish Hiz has lain beneath the sands I'm not sure but by the time Renewal of Ro drops it has to have been a millennium at least. EQII is set five hundred years after EverQuest. EverQuest Online Adventures, the iteration of Norrath created for Playstation 2, was set five hundred years before. Much to my regret, I never played EQOA but from the wiki I can see that Takish Hiz was a zone in that game and the pictures and descriptions clearly show it long abandoned, the desert already in the process of reclaiming a land left empty by the vanished forests of the elves.

I have to say I am very interested by the choice of location for this year's expansion. While I do like to see and explore brand new places, I feel one of EQII's strongest cards is its connection with EQ . Every time we're offered the chance to re-visit old haunts there's a powerful emotional charge freighted in that frisson of familiarity, combined with curiosity. 

It's subtly different from pure nostalgia, more like the odd, disconcerting sensation that comes from seeing how things have changed when you go back to a place you once knew well, after a long time away. I find that feeling compelling in the real world and it's no less energizing in virtuality.

Added to that, the EQII expansion which the new one references, Prophecy of Ro, was very good indeed. It had a truly huge amount of content, much of which I've completed more than once, and it had a strong, consistent theme that held everything together. I had many good times there and still do, whenever I go back.

The last expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, was lots of fun. It ticked all the expected boxes for an EQII expansion and I got several months of quality entertainment from it but perhaps the only thing I felt a little unsatisfied by was the supposed connection with the troubled EQ expansions Gates of Discord and Omens of War. I was looking forward to revisiting some of those locations - Wall of Slaughter maybe, Natimbi certainly, but in the end there was barely a namecheck for any of the places I knew.

Takish Hiz is much more of an unknown quantity. It was already lost in the mists of history the first time around. The Desert of Ro, on the other hand, has already had its day in the sun in PoR. I'm very curious to know just what the balance between new, old and new-old will be this time around.

Before the expansion arrives I probably need to do some work on whichever characters I intend to take through it first. I haven't been neglecting the game entirely but these last few months my activity there has tailed off a lot. I'm substantially further behind than I have been for a couple of years.

One way I've been able to benchmark is by the new gear available from 2022's Panda, Panda, Panda! event, which was patched into the game earlier this week. The event itself was always on the schedule, but it hadn't been entirely clear whether there would be a new set of quests this time.

There will. Nine weeks of quests, just like usual. This year they take the format of Creature Catalogs, a very smart way of reducing the workload for the team, while still giving players a similar experience to previous years.

This morning I did the first, a series of identifications around Kylong Plains in Kunark. With instant travel, flight and a surprisingly accurate memory for the exact locations of all the creatures needed, the whole thing took me about five minutes. If you did it old school and weren't familiar with the area I'd guess it might take fifteen or twenty.

Either way, it's a very good return on time invested. The first tier of rewards includes weapons which, at 315 resolve, will be upgrades for all but one of my characters. Browsing through the very large selection of gear, augments and sundry items available from the full sequence of nine quests, I can see that I'll need to pick up most of what's on offer, even for my best-equipped character.

Last year, for the first time, most of the Panda gear wasn't really an upgrade for the character I was planning on taking into Visions of Vetorvia so it shows how much I've let things slip. Of course, these days, the panda gear itself tends to be made obsolete by the hand-outs from the box on the floor next to the first questgiver in a new expansion, so it's a moot point whether I really need to take this short-term, interim upgrade. Since I'm going to be doing the quests for the fun of it anyway, it would be crazy not to pick up the rewards.

There's also a huge number of housing items to be had, all of which you'll be able to see at EQ2Traders as the event progresses. Niami Denmother also always has the best walkthroughs for the panda quests, should you need any handholding.

As well as the pandas there's also the other "get you ready for the expansion" event that always runs alongside it: Gear Up, Level Up. It comes in three phases and this time its available on all servers (Emphasized as "yes, all servers".

The schedule, should you need it, is as follows:

• September 27 – October 10 = Double Loot
• October 11 – October 17 = Mount Training Drops
• October 18 – October 24 = Spell Research Drops

I don't usually bother with Gear Up, Level Up but I might this year. Spell research boosts are always the most souhgt-after but to take full advantage I really need to get on and make all those Expert spells I've been avoiding.

Mount training boosts I already have in abundance, thanks to Overseer, but unusually, there's still content I haven't finished in the last expansion. Those double drops from instance bosses might have some things I want, even if I don't techically need them at this stage.

Either way, it's great to have options. Now all I have to do is find some time to excercise them.

The Ant And The Panda And Me

This week sees the conclusion of EverQuest II's "Panda Panda Panda" event. Every week I've meant to get back to it but somehow I never have. Today, I finally managed to drag myself away from New World for long enough to catch up. I still had two-thirds of the quests to do (six out of nine) but that didn't take too long. I knew where most of the locations were without having to look them up.

It's always a fun, no-pressure event.There's no particular urgency to do each week's quest as it drops because once they're in, all the Summer/Panda quests stick around forever. You can go back at any time and do them at your leisure. You also only need to do them once per account. All your characters get immediate access to the rewards as soon as you finish each stage.

Looked at from another perspective, though, the clock is ticking. Part of the reason these questlines were added to the game and why there's a new one every year is to allow slackers to catch up before the annual expansion, which should be with us in a matter of a very few weeks. If you're a casual and/or solo player and you plan on getting Visions of Vetrovia on release you probably want to makes sure whoever you plan on taking into the opening zone has the advantage of all the free panda gear.

I've always suspected as much.

Or do you? I'm not at all sure. Another modern EQII tradition is the "Tishan's Box" that sits on the ground somewhere close to the first questgiver in each new expansion. It's full of armor, weapons and adornments for every archetype and it usually upgrades whatever you just got a few weeks earlier from the pandas.

If I had the determination I'd run some kind of comparison on the two this year to see just how much better the Tishan's gear is and whether it upgrades everything or whether you need to mix and match for best effect. I've thought of doing it before but what always happens is that I'm too excited to get on with exploring the new content and by the time I've calmed down I'm already wearing a mish-mash of panda, Tishan and early quest rewards.

Another reason is that upgrading gear in EQII is ferociusly complicated. One of the reasons I've been putting off finishing the panda quests this year is that I've been dreading the moment when I have to go through every item and compare it with what I have on. 

That's a lot of slots.

It would be bad enough if it just meant checking my armor and my weapons but there are the adornments to look at, too. An EQII character doll has more than 20 equipable slots and each takes up to six adornments. 

Adornments are where most of your power and survivablity comes from so you can't just slam in anything and hope. They come in sets, too, with set bonuses that can be extremely powerful and they have numerous status effects and buffs, not all of which can be applied at the same time on the same character.

When I read, as happens most years, of returning EQII players being slaughtered by the low-level wildlife in the introductory zone of the new expansion, I know it's always due to lack of preparation, if not lack of understanding. 

For years, the game has been very soft indeed for solo players and casuals, even in brand-new content, provided those players understand the expectations that lie behind the design. They give you all the gear you need, for free. They do expect you to at least put it on.

As an illustration, when I did my due dilligence this afternoon and compared every piece of new Hua armor and jewellery with what my Berserker was wearing, I only ended up equipping a couple of rings, a necklace and a pair of boots. Even as a very casual solo player the great majority of the gear he had on was better than anything the panda had to offer.

That's quite significant. I haven't really done what a solo player is intended to do to make sure their gear is up to scratch. That would be to run solo instances until my eyes bleed in the hope of getting the rarer drops, to do all the Public Quests I can find for as long as the wider community is running them and to do all my dailies and weeklies until there's nothing left that would be an upgrade. Not to mention the summer ethereals, the collection questline and the mid-year Fabled dungeon update, all of which have solo content that gives upgrades.

If you do all of that you'll end up very nicely dressed. I didn't. I did a few bits and pieces now and then when the mood took me but other than that I just did Overseer quests for the first four or five months of the last expansion cycle and that got me to 235-240 resolve in some slots and 225 in the rest. I was lucky to get a 270 resolve two-hander and a 260 cloak as well. 

The Hua gear from this year's panda quests is 225 resolve, which means you can take that as the minimum baseline for solo and casual players. The devs are telling you that you should be at least this tall to ride by now. If you've been playing much at all, you probably already will be but if not then Panda Panda Panda!

It would have been easy to slap on those few obvious upgrades and call it a day but that would have been a serious error. Gear is important but adornments are crucial and even though my Berserker is a maxed adorner with a very good set of recipes, there are a whole bunch of non-craftable adorns that only appear each year with the questline.

I spent a good long while meticulously going through every one of the dozens of adornments the Berserker had studded into his armor, comparing them with what was available on the panda vendor and swapping out all the ones that looked like improvements. It wasn't just the quest-specific ones I needed, either. 

Even though I could have made a load of white adornments this year I hadn't. I was too stingy to use the mats I had and too mean to buy the ones I needed. I spotted a whole bunch of free upgrades on the vendor and bought them by the stack.

And then I had to fit them. Including everything, the whole process took me about two hours of which only thirty minutes was flying around the world doing the six quests I hadn't done. Most of it was spent taking adornments out of things and putting others in. 

The reason it took so long is that adornments are slot-specific in various ways that can't just be seen at a glance from their color but needs to be studied in detail. Some things will go in many slots, some in few, some in only one. If you don't concentrate you can end up putting something that could go in half a dozen places into a slot that you should have saved for another gem that only goes in one or two.

It's not a major issue if you mess up. There's a handy gadget you can get from your class trainer that allows you to take adorns out of items without losing them or damaging the armor but it takes time to do and it's annoying when you find yourself removing the adornment you only added five minutes ago because you didn't plan ahead.

All of this sounds very off-putting and it is - to returning ex-players or potential new starters. To the core EQII players, the people who pay the subscriptions and buy the expansions, I strongly suspect it's the exact opposite. EQII players love complexity. They love fiddly systems and mechanics that take up hours of their time. They like to think their game is more intellectually demanding than other mmorpgs, whether it's true or not.

Over the long years I'm sure I've seen far more complaints when the developers have tried to reduce the number of choices to make things simpler and easier than I've seen about any new system that takes a lot of figuring out. The more abstruse and arcane things become, the more people seem to appreciate it. It's that kind of game.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't like it this way, too. It's absorbing while I'm doing it and satisfying when I'm finished. There's nothing like going from 520k hit points to 650k just by standing in your house fiddling around in your bags. 

I learned a few things, too, like I really need a new mount. The one I'm using is a decent one and it's maxed but it's from the expansion before last. I hadn't realized I never got a new mount in the whole of Reign of Shadows. I also haven't been keeping up with the gear upgrades for my mercenaries. I have quite a lot of stuff they could be using but it's not doing much good in my bags and bank vaults. And don't talk to me about Familiars... 

There's a lot of work still to do and I confess I'm not sure if there's much point at this stage. Unless Visions of Vetrovia veers wildly off the path set by most previous expansions, anything that looks like an upgrade now is going to look like cast-offs in a month or two. So long as I'm sufficiently well-equipped to handle the signature questline I'm probably better off just turning up as I am and swapping stuff out as I go.

For anyone who isn't interested in setting themselves up for the expansion, I'd still recommend finishing up the panda quests anyway. There are quite a few nice non-combat treats in the slightly misleadingly named "Decoration Packs". 

I particularly like Antony, the ant mount. Like most EQII mounts he's nicely animated, presumably by the invaluable Ttobey, who Darkpaw are very lucky to have. He's very characterful and not nearly as creepy as he could be. Antony, that is, not Ttobey. 

It's a shame Antony can't fly but then flying ants don't have much of a record of airworthiness, so it's probably just as well.

It's All Panda Panda Now : EverQuest II

As you can see from the screenshot above, Yun Zi the panda is a popular chap. It's not so much his friendly, affable personality or his open, childlike enthusiasm. It's more that he gives you stuff.

It's pretty good stuff, too. For any casual player who hasn't been putting in the hours since last year, the gear Yun Zi hands out is likely to offer some serious upgrades. And even if you have made the effort, the fact that he's happy to equip as many of your characters as you care to bring makes doing his simple runaround quests an annual ritual no-one wants to skip.

He's always surrounded by players, digging through his stockpile, but he's starting to develop a bit of an entourage of his own as well. When he first appeared, back in 2017, he was on his own but when we saw him again the following year he'd acquired an assistant, Pas Yu, to handle the merchandise. 

This year Yun Zi isn't giving out quests at all. He seems to have sated his thirst for third-party adventure. He's basking in the reflected glory of being the only panda who knows anything at all about the world outside the secluded village where he and his friends and family live.

He's become such a local celebrity, off the back of the tales we've told him, that a panda by the name of Mei Lan has been tasked with arranging a celebratory feast in his honor. Naturally, since Yun Zi is such a well-travelled explorer, albeit vicariously, she wants the menu to reflect all the myriad places he's visited. Or had us visit, I should say.

It's a delightful conceit. I was wondering how long Yun Zi could hold up the narrative of the naive rich kid blowing the family fortune on a personal obsession. The story was starting to get a little threadbare but this refreshes it perfectly.

This year, instead of zipping around the world each week in search of stories to tell, we're tasked with finding ingredients for Mei Lan to turn into amazing "local" dishes. The first excursion takes us to Antonica, where we need to find the makings for Coldwind Clam Chowder.

I know Antonica pretty well. A quick glance at the list told me just about everything I needed to know. 

I figured the giant Coldwind clams would be on the wide, desolate beach just down from Archer's Wood, where Mrs. Bhagpuss, myself and a friend spent hours hunting crabs for spell drops in beta and after launch. And yes, that's where they were.

I went for the old oak potatoes next, thinking they might be in the woods above the beach. Silly of me. Yes, those are oak trees, but who ever heard of potatoes growing in a forest? They are, of course, in the tilled fields just outside gates of Qeynos, where the bugs are so huge you can make a good living killing them for the farmers nearby.

The last ingredient on Mei Lan's list was wild Coven onions. There's only one coven I know in Antonica and that's along the riverside between the bridge and the aquaduct. 

The onions were there, sure enough, but so was something I wasn't expecting at all. As I said, I reckon to know Antonica pretty well. I must have spent hundreds of hours there over a decade and a half. I know I don't have the greatest memory but I think I'd have remembered if there'd been molehills the size of hobbit houses all over the fields next to the stream.

I stopped and looked at those for quite a while before I noticed something else I swear wasn't there before. A farmhouse, in the typical Antonican log cabin style, up a path in the low hills looking down on the river.

I don't know. There are a lot of farmhouses like that in Antonica. Maybe it was always there? I'd believe that before I believed those molehills were, that's for sure. 

The farmer was standing by his porch, gazing out at his fields. I thought maybe he'd have something to say about the infestation so I went to talk to him. He was happy enough to tell me how he felt about his lot in life but on the topic of the giant molehills peppering his land he remained strangely silent.

I filed it away as another of Norrath's mysteries. Must have been some event I missed. Forgotten, abandoned debris from those litters the lands from Qeynos to Freeport and far beyond. Everyone likes to organize events but no-one wants to clean up afterwards.

Back in Sundered Frontier I gave Mei Lan her makings and moved on to see what Pas Yu had new for us this year. I've been a lot more diligent than usual since the return to Luclin so I wasn't expecting much in the way of upgrades on my berserker, who's had first pick of all the goodies from instances and Overseer missions.

The items become available week by week as the questline continues but you can see everything from the start. There are some very nice adornments to be had, which is good because one area where I have been lax is in making top-notch white adorns. My berserker is a maxed-level Adorner and he has almost every recipe but the mats are a bit expensive. Also I kind of forgot.

I noted those for the future and carried on sorting through the new "Shadowed Excursion" gear. I followed my usual policy of checking the Resolve to see if anything was worth equipping. Resolve isn't specifically intended as a gear score but it acts as a very reliable benchmark. 

As I expected, there was nothing with resolve much higher than 170. My berserker isn't wearing anything lower than that and much of his gear is 175 or 180. Most of my roster have similar although I'm sure there must be a few 165s and even 160s lurking here and there.

I'd all but dismissed the idea of taking anything for the berserker when I happened to notice some of the rest of the stats. In EQII, as you mouse over gear, an automatic comparison with what you're wearing in that slot pops up. It seemed that although these new items had a lower Resolve rating, some - if not most - of the other stats were higher.

I spent a while doing a close compare on several slots and the conclusion was inescapable: the panda's gear was better than most of my berserker's, whatever the difference in resolve. What's more, the base stats on the Shadowed Excursion were often better than the enhanced stats on the gear I'd poured platinum and infusers into improving.

Even the rather nice 350 resolve, planar level six, two-hander the berserker had wasn't as good as the 340 resolve, planar level one Heavy Staff of the Shadowed Excursion that becomes available right after you complete the first of this year's quests. With the Two Handed Shadowed Excursion Rune: Power of the Planes that also opens up after the first quest installed, it was a serious upgrade. 

It looks as though I'll be swapping out almost everything for panda gear once more, after all. Maybe not the 180 resolve stuff. Definitely not the 200 resolve ethereal cloak. But most of it.

And then, quite possibly, that will get replaced with free stuff from the box beside the first questgiver in the new expansion. And that will get swapped out for the first set of quest rewards. Which will soon give way to drops from Overseer missions and instances.

You could be forgiven for wondering what the point of it all might be. It does seem a little self-defeating, all this built-in obsolescence. Only, having played a game for eight years where I haven't needed new gear for almost as long, I know which I prefer.

EQII's a funny old game, but I like it.

I just wish I know where those giant moles went.

Let's Go To The Moon (Like We Did Last Winter)

Right after I finished yesterday's post I found out EverQuest II had dropped a double-sized update, including some pre-expansion events and this year's somewhat inaccurately-named Days of Summer questline. That makes me very happy, for two reasons. First, new content. Yay! Second, something to post about. Yay!!

Last year the run-up to the expansion was spectacular but that was largely because it co-incided with the fifteenth anniversary celebrations. The two things were very cleverly intertwined.  

The expansion-related quests themselves were relatively low-key. Some collection and crafting for tradeskillers, some solo slaughter for adventurers. The real attraction was a sustained draconic assault on the wizard spires, which created huge crowds and a party atmosphere. There was a big tradeskill event, too, with the corpses of the defeated dragons providing the materials to build the giant statues that now stand proudly in Antonica and the Commonlands.

It was enormous fun and the desirability of the rewards kept people coming back all the way until the expansion launched. I spent many hours across a couple of months, leveling tradeskills and fighting dragons, to my great profit and satisfaction.

It would be a bit of an ask to expect Daybreak to repeat the whole extravaganza all over again, although I admit I was hoping they might. Based on what I saw last night, that's not going to happen but there is some solid, enjoyable content in the form of the by now traditional repeatable quests.

Like last year, the action begins in Teren's Grasp, the icebound mountain city high above Kylong Plains. I woke up my berserker and sent him there, via the spires, to grab whatever was going. 

There are five tradeskill quests, all of which I have and none of which I've done yet. Probably should have thought about that before I started the post, really. I don't imagine they take very long. Why don't I do one now and see how it goes? Talk among yourselves for a moment...

And just as well I did! That wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Oh, the gathering of the one specific quest material went as I'd imagined it would. Just run around Teren's Grasp and harvest from the many spinning crystal formations. 

No, the unusual part happens when you come to craft whatever item the quest requires, in my case a Box of Nails. The dwarf who gave me the quest said he wasn't picky about what materials I used, something confirmed in the quest description in my journal, so I was planning on using whatever ore I had the most of. 

I wasn't expecting the combine to decide at random which materials I was allowed to use and I certainly didn't imagine they'd all be rares! The recipe requires seven mats and you need to repeat the combine three times to complete the quest, making twenty-rares in total. And for that you get a measly two G.L.E.E.S.H. Marks, the new currency. (You don't need to know what the acronym stands for, trust me on that).

I know rares aren't what they once were and I can certainly farm a lot of them fast these days, but even so that seemed out of order, so I checked. God bless EQ2Crafters is all I can say.

Niami Denmother is recovering from some very major surgery (get well soon, Mum!) but Wilhelmina from the French crafting site EQ2Artisans has stepped in to keep us all informed. It seems that you can indeed use regular mats but the quest doesn't select them randomly at all. It picks the smallest stacks in your inventory. 

If, as I did, you go to your home and let the stupid AI loose on your materials depot, it brilliantly  manages to spot that all your smallest stacks are, inevitably, rares. Because of course they are. That's why we call them "rares"!

The solution is to pick out the materials you want to use and have those in your inventory and to do the combine somewhere other than the zone where you have your harvesting depots. Shame I didn't read that first, isn't it?

I'm not sure I'll bother going to all that trouble. Not when there's a nice, simple adventure quest that, once completed, lets you farm an infinite number of invading mobs, each of which has a fifty-fifty chance of dropping a mark.

That quest, by the way, is called "The Not So Nice Yet Accurate Prophecies of Beckah Stormsong", which has to be a hat-tip to Pratchett and Gaiman's "The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch". As well as giving props to the masters, the quest also throws a little shade on the work we're all doing to facilitate the next phase of the recovery of Luclin. Let's hope Beckah isn't really as accurate in her prognostications as Agnes turned out to be.

Last but for my playstyle definitely not least comes a repeatable Overseer mission. It follows the familiar pattern we've come to expect from previous holiday and event chains. You speak to an NPC in Teren's Grasp to get the initial quest and then each subsequent mission gives you the next in the sequence. 

I'm on part five, I think. It's called Iksar Intent: Into The Essence. There's at least one more part after that. Not sure what you get but I'm betting on a title.

And that's about it. All of the above will be with us from now until the expansion launches which is... well, we have no idea yet. I don't believe we even know what it's called, do we? Unless it's "Haven Bound". But I think that's just the name of the pre-expansion event.

It's always like this. I rather like the vagueness. We'll find out soon enough, I'm sure.

I ran on so much there, I think I'll save what I have to say about the new Panda quests for tomorrow. I've done the first one and I do have a few observations on how that went.

Meanwhile, I think I'll go farm some marks. I do want those petamorph wands and who says no to free mounts?

Late Summer: EQII

What with all the excitement over WoW Classic these last few weeks it seems like an age since I logged into EverQuest II. I had a heap of things I wanted to do over there before the expansion arrives in... well, whenever it comes. It doesn't even have a name yet, let alone a release date.

The main thing I've let slip is the Days of Summer annual questline, also known as the panda quest after the NPC, Yun Zi, who sends you out exploring on his behalf. I did the first three as they appeared this year and then fell off the train. Logging in today I found I had four new ones to do, meaning it's been a full month since I last played. How time flies.

There are nine Days of Summer and we're currently on number seven. There's no real rush to do them because they don't expire when Summer ends. Still, I like to keep on top of things.

The fourth quest took me to Kunark, the fifth to Moors of Ykesha, the sixth to Velious and the current one, the seventh, to The Ethernere. I'd be exaggerating if I said it was a nostalgia trip. I've visited all these places many times this year alone.

I levelled a character through much of Kunark earlier in the year and I'm in and out of Moors every time I play. It's an extremely convenient one-stop shop for banking, brokerage, crafting and transport and until Daybreak added free instant map transport to the All Access membership perks it was my go-to spot for all of those things.

As for Velious, I was playing around with some old raids there just a few months back. It's been a while since I was last in The Ethernere though.

I found these four quests made for a fascinating little trip through the evolution of EQII graphics. Kunark looks very elderly now, all blocky textures and undefined details. Moors of Ykesha was never a visually appealing zone although it has endless hidden charms if you take the time to look for them.

Velious is the watershed. I place the turning point at the introduction of Cobalt Scar, the final zone that was added to Velious after launch. The earlier zones are some of the least visually attractive in the whole of EQII, all glaring, featureless white snow and glacial ice.

The lush pinewoods of Cobalt Scar.

Cobalt Scar is different altogether. The edge of a pine forest abuts a series of rocky beaches. There are scrubby grass-covered dunes, sheltered ravines lit by scattered winter sunlight and the colors range from deep woodland green to distant, misted blue.

It's a bit of a tone poem and it surprised the heck out of me when I first saw it. I had no idea the EQII engine was capable of such subtlety. From then onwards EQII's graphics took a great leap leap forward. Every new zone, each expansion since, has been sumptuous and rich to see.

Yun Zi's current obsession, The Ethernere, takes lushness to extremes. The Ethernere is one of the realms of the afterlife (a tricky proposition in Norrath at the best of times so I won't attempt to be more specific than that) and the artists pulled out all the stops to make it live up to the "ethereal" part of its name.

I don't visit it as often as I might and always forget just how gorgeous it is. When I came back to EQII after a significant break a few years ago and played through the two expansions set in the lands of the dead, Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan, back to back, I found the relentless use of deep color washes and the dense foliage somewhat overwhelming. Now I love it.

Finding the souvenirs the panda wanted was easy enough. I used the invaluable guide at EQ2Traders to speed things up but really all the things you're looking for are right next to the locations given in the quest journal.

I did have one small issue in Cobalt Scar, when the statue I was looking for didn't want to show up. I suspect I glitched something by mistakenly going to the third location first. Each step has to be done in the order they appear in the journal. A quick relog soon fixed whatever it was and I was back on schedule.

All four weeks of quests took me about an hour to complete. It would have been quicker if I hadn't kept stopping to take screenshots. That was the easy part.

This is an easy one. It's clear that all the major stats on the "Bold Crusade" piece are direct upgrades. Not many of the comparisons were as simple to read as that.

I was more than another hour going through all the rewards available from Yun Zi's diminutive assistant. (All the new gear is named "Bold Crusade", making it easy to search for). EQII has an exemplary item comparison system, one of the best I've seen, and DBG have made a huge effort recently to simplify and consolidate stats but even so working out what's better than what requires some serious intellectual effort.

As a solo Berserker I run something of a split-level build. I use the offensive stance to maximize my damage output but I combine it with a focus on hit points and armor class for better survivability.

If I was to go full defensive, which would give me no fewer than three "stand straight back up after you died and carry on like nothing happened" get out of jail cards, the Berserker would be next to unkillable in solo content. I played that way for years but eventually I decided it was getting just too slow to kill stuff so I swapped and I haven't regretted it.

The problem - well, one of them - with assessing potential upgrades is working out what's going to happen to my health pool. The obvious contributors are Stamina and straight-up Health pluses but there are several other stats that affect your total number of hit points and none of them is obvious.

Even this extensive guide at EQ2 Library doesn't really explain how the stats interact. Fortunately panda gear is free and available in unlimited quantities for the asking so all I needed to do was take every available item and try it on.

With the aid of the absolutely essential unlimited adornment removal ability granted for completing Shattered Seas timeline from the Age of Malice expansion I was able to pop all my adornments off the old stuff and add them to the new. Then I reversed the process if it turned out the old was better after all.

In the event, even though quite a few of the new items seemed to me to be "worse" than what I was wearing, when they were equipped they all proved to be upgrades. Finally, I ran every new piece through a few hundred platinum's worth of Infusions. My Health went from around 65 million HPs to just under 72m and my Potency rose from 46k to 50k. There were similar increases for most of my other important stats, too, particularly Crit Bonus.

I was really surprised how much difference this year's panda gear made. I consider my Berserker to be decently geared for a solo character but this new baseline seems to be around 10% above where he was. Assuming that's the lowest possible gearing point for the upcoming expansion I'd recommend everyone not already in gear from last expansion's Heroic Dungeons or Raids to upgrade via the panda.

I'll be putting this gear onto all my max level characters. The Days of Summer quests are an absolute boon for anyone with lots of alts. It avoids having to repeat the previous expansion's content multiple times just to be ready to do the next one.

Still two weeks to go. That should replace the two biggest pieces, Chest and Legs, and also the Primary weapon, although there I do have something that's almost certainly better than anything Yun Zi has in his attic.

All of this has definitely put me in the mood to get back to EQII for some new adventures and another ten levels. Let's hope the pre-orders are coming soon.