Adventures in Everquest 2

From outward appearances Atlantica Online is just another Korean MMO. The models and texture work is outstanding but the game play is different. It’s not the typical run around hack and slash type MMO. When combat is initiated it goes into a Final Fantasy style combat sequence. Where you only see one player on the over world when you get in combat you have a whole team. How big this team is depends on your level as well as personal preference. When you start out you are only able to get 2 mercenaries. There classes are also limited to swordsman, riflemen, archer, and spearmen. As you level more classes of mercenary become available.

When you enter combat there is a player attack phase and an enemy attack phase. During your attack phase each of your characters is able to do one action. The enemies follow the same rules in their attack phase. What really makes it interesting is that you can group up with others (up to 2 others) and fight as a team. So you effectively have 3 teams of fighters on your side. When you are grouped the xp is split between all of your characters. It makes grouping an effective way to level a new mercenary or just one that has fallen behind in the leveling. Otherwise the only way to get XP is to successfully attack or kill an enemy.

It however does fall in to some of the traps of Korean MMO’s. Like in others it is a grind. You spend hours killing the same monsters to try to get just a tiny bit of XP. Another common problem that I see in Korean MMO’s that also plagues this one is everyone looks the same. Now the models that are there are really nice but everyone looks just about the same. Team makeup also tends to be about the same. The mercenaries don’t change appearance based on what you have equipped on them (I forgot to mention that each one has its own inventory and needs to be equipped with weapons, armor, and potions).

From what I understand this is going to be a free to play MMO. Where they will be making their money is off of what they call licenses. These licenses are effectively long term buffs. They do all sorts of things from making it so you can auto run to quest objectives, to being able to see monsters health. They last for different amounts of time I imagine depending on what you are willing to spend on them. In the beta they were freely given and I really can’t imagine playing without them. The auto battle one is especially nice (I know you are thinking walk away and let it level if there is auto battle. They make it so after 20 battles you have to fight manually to build up the number of auto battles again).

All in all the game is good enough that I would want to give it a shot when it goes live. Once the open beta starts I am going to fire up 2 accounts and see how well having a constant group works out. I imagine it will make the leveling progression much easier for the whole team rather than having a few at level 20 and the others at 15.

Right now the game is still in closed beta but if you have even a free fileplanet account you can get a beta key from them and check it out.

After 2 nights of working on a strat to get this old lady to come out of her room we finally got her. We started by clearing out all the giants on the way to her room. Then we pulled the giants out of her room with a bit of trial and error. Finally we were just left with frozen terrors which turned out to be slower than Vox so they would break or get lost on the way.

Vox on her own turned out to be no problem though I had some trouble keeping agro we killed her in no time. Grats to everyone that was there tonight. Naggy! YOU ARE NEXT!!!

This week the Friday group hit up the Everfrost LDON’s. We started off the night with enough for one group so we formed up and headed in. This is the first time that I actually tanked for the group but it went nice and smooth. We did an easy and destroyed it in no time. When we popped back out of that one we split in to 2 groups of 4. Being the adventurers that we are my group took a hard and headed in. The hard turned out to be much much harder and with only 4 our DPS was a bit lacking. Coldheat did a great job of keeping me healed though and once we got in the rhythm of luling and pulling we really started to fly through the place. There were a few times I died but our beastly (ogre) rogue Dainty and good Sir Gozad the monk were able to stay up long enough to kill the mobs.  We ended up failing the hard one at 53/60 monsters but even that was impressive. After we picked up another easy just to end the night on a good note and it was no problem for us at all.

I wish that we had a few more people in the guild that could be there every friday to fill out the ranks. We really have just about everything we need to do it but any class that would fill the open slots would help greatly. We have decided to lock our level at 51 ( well 52 for me since I get my defensive disc at that level) and just get AA and explore the old content. That sounds like a good idea to me. Look out Nagafen, I’m a coming for ya!

Nothing new has been going on in EQ2 so I am going to post about the Nostalgia group again. Last week it was Butcherblock LDON’s which are in Lesser Faydark and are underground dungeons of Mistmoore.  So they are full of vampires, zombies, dervishes and the like. We were able to run 3 that night with out much trouble. The only real trouble was half the group got stuck in the zone of the first one we did. Eventually it booted us out when the timer was up though so it all worked out. One thing I see as a recurring theme in these groups is that after about an hour one of the groups looses a bunch of people (often really needed classes as in tank or healer) and we end up combining groups. Well this happened again this time and Minxe was nice enough to sit out so we could have just one full group. Everything went smooth though and it was fun to do those dungeons again.

In the middle of the week I decided that what I really needed was a big damage 2h. In the olden days the highest damage 2h I could think of is the A Weighted Axe. These drop off mountain giant Tumps or any giant higher level in Frontier Mountains. So I spent the next 3 days killing these giants. It was slow going but my on and off camping paid off and I got my shiny new axe. The thing is a beast and hits for 100+ every time just about.

This weeks Nostalgia group was in Mistmoore Castle. This zone was known for big and constant trains of monsters to the zone in. The group started off small and included our new (ogre) rogue Dainty.  We waited around for a bit for more to show up and eventually they did. Though everyone was AFK forever I took the time to smash everything I could manage to pull to zone in.  Eventually we managed to form 2 groups of 4. My group had no tank so I took up that job as best I could. It was super hard to keep agro off the healer though when there was more than one monster since I don’t have any taunt besides damage. Our cleric had to take an extended AFK so we pushed on with no healer and wiped 2 more times. In the mean time I guess the other group lost its tank as well. So once again we formed up in to one group and tried to make our way into the castle.  We had a famous ranger pull and we all ran to the zone in as a final train to remember the zone by. Feeling that we had not really done much I asked everyone if they wanted to run another Butcherblock LDON and everyone agreed it would be a nice way to end off the night. We had a few mishaps but in the end we finished it up before the timer ran out and it was good fun.

After the group was done I was thinking about how these friday night groups have been working out. We always seem to start out with 2 weak groups then form in to one slightly stronger group after about an hour. One thing we were consistently missing was a tank. After much soul searching I decided I would put good old Rogbog on the sidelines and play a warrior. I was originally thinking of transferring my old 61 warrior off of Mith Marr and maybe selling some of her levels to a necro. However that would have been $50 to transfer and I would have lost my name. So I started a new warrior on Luclin. I figured that since the group was only around 35 I could catch up before next Friday and so far so good. I am siting at 25 after about a day of playing. This time leveling up I thought I would hit one of the old spots I missed on the way up. Nothing says nostalgia like killing crocs in Oasis. So everyone give a big warm welcome to Ceiphied, Nostalgia the Guild’s new Drakken tank!

Delusions of Grandeur was my first real raid guild in EQ2. I joined them around the end of EoF so I saw them in their prime for that expansion. Everything was on farm status more or less and even avatars were not out of the question. When KoS hit the guild ran in to some problems. The first was people that did not get on to level. They got the boot! Then as we started to get in to the raid content we found our selves quickly over run by the other large guilds on the server. The slower we went the more people  we lost. Eventually it was at the point were we did not have enough people to raid. The core players hung in there though and we got some new quality players to replace both the good and bad that drifted away. I am proud to say that we are now a Veeshan’s Peak flagged guild!

The night started out well. Someone needed Pawbuster for their epic so we went and took him down in short order. Then we moved on to the beast him self The Leviathan. He put up a struggle at first and managed to wipe us once. We rebounded and on the 2nd attempt he fell not only flagging everyone there for VP but also giving me the 2nd step in my mythical epic. Congrats all the Delusions of Grandeur members that were there for that fight!

We were excited so we went directly to Veeshan’s Peak from there and cleared all the way to the first boss. By this time it was nearing 1am and everyone was getting tired. We tried a few pulls on him and called it a night.

The next day we came back fresh and ready to tear the place up. We rolled over the first boss and after a bit of trouble with the trash hit the 2nd. Tool effect kicked in on this one and for some reason it took us about 6 pulls to kill this super easy boss. Again it was getting late but we decided to clear some trash anyway and moved on to Druushk. So close to my mythical epic I can almost taste it.

Next time we head there hopefully after the night is over several of our members will be mythical epic holders!