I played EQII at release, playing a templar on the Lucan D'Lear server to level 60 and doing a bit of raiding. Lucan is a roleplaying server, and by and large it was a really great experience for me. Being a healer, you are of course in demand, so there was always something to do for me no matter when I logged in. The trouble with that was...it was seldom what I, ME, wanted to do. I would get group and raid invites non-stop, but the people doing the inviting already had a plan formulated, so I was just the "icing on the cake" or the "last piece we need".
While that was frustrating to some degree, what really killed me on Templar, and on EQII back then was the general abuse I suffered at the hands of primarily the tanks, but also the DPSers. Everything from pulling when I was low on mana, complaining when I "let" people die who don't know how to control agro, so on and so forth. These themes however are probably familiar to many (especially healers).Additionally, there were alot of bugs with the UI, that after petitioning about many times, never got repaired, hell, they never even got addressed, either in game or in the forums. Add to that the absurdly tedious crafting system (and I LOVE crafting) and I walked away.
Reading on Cupperella's blog that she was back into EQII and was inviting anyone to hop on the free trial and try it out. What an amazing turn around this game has had in the last year that I have been gone.
Crafting: Just amazing. Simple, intuitive, rewarding, AWESOME. I can recall vividly that a year ago, I would spend 4-5 hours harvesting (getting a maximum of 3 harvests-3 items total from a node), then 2-3 hours making components, followed by 1 hour of crafting, which was difficult, and more often then not resulted in failure. Now I can get up to ten harvests per try, not per node, and I don't have to do any component manufacturing. More like a game, less like work.
LFGuild tool: I was unguilded and accidentally clicked on the guild option and up pops something totally new, and wonderful !! A well thought out tool to help you find a guild, with a picture of the face of the recruiter online, their name, the guild name, a short blurb on what they are all about, some general comments about what type of guild, and even if they are online, with an option to send them a direct tell. Take that Wow !!!!!
Housing Vendors : It used to be how many vault slots you had = how many boxes of items you could sell, and it still is, but now those vault slots are used for what they should have been all along, a vault. Now you load your sales boxes into the "Sales" interface, and load your items into it. AWESOME. The interface is well thought out, lists sales to who, date time, what and how much, total money you have earned, and retrieved, even breaks it down by which box sold what.
But that's not all, If you played a year ago (or longer) you will recall the tiresome task of typing out (no copy and paste option) the entire items name, in full (including any special characters ala - (Adept 1) with punctuation) to search for an item to get a price range. NO MORE, a simple button to "search for item" automatically looks for and displays all of said item for you. THANK YOU !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Zones and Quests: A lot of zones have been revamped, including the newbie island, forest ruins, and even from what I can tell, Antonica. Different mobs, different questlines, quite a bit of stuff I have never seen, and you can believe I leveled alot of alts to 10 to try out classes. I was worried coming back that I would have to slog through all the old quests again, and to be sure I have covered some, but there are so many new ones, the old ones just mesh right in.
AA - Alternate Advancement - I really loathed this in EQ1, it was just another grind fest, just another treadmill to run on. However, in EQ2 the implementation is just about flawless. You earn AA points for doing certain quests, killing certain named, and visiting new areas. At level 20 I did something I have never done before, I turned off combat experience, and have had no desire to turn it back on. I LOVE doing quests, LOVE IT, and I always felt the leveling curve was far too shallow in EQ2, generally you out-leved a given area before you saw most of it, and ended up deleting half the quests you found there because they went grey. Using the mentor down trick, you can still turn those in for experience / items / AA which is just fantastic. Almost level 22 and still plenty to do.
Not so good stuff I have encountered but haven't soured me as of yet, it's still a clunky performer with shadows on, especially environmental. This is the same rig I played on last year, only difference being a bigger, 22" wide screen monitor versus a 19". I had really hoped to see more of a performance increase over such a long period of time, but I imagine the shadow "engine" is just the way it is. I also ran into one of my most hated UI bugs (still hasn't been fixed, you guys need to be beaten) where your chat windows set to be invisible unless chat goes to that window / channel (and then fade away) won't fade and stays stuck in the visible mode. Only happens if you have 5 or more chat windows (I run 6) and is fixed if you relog. Reported probably 10 times a year ago, apparently ,window fading is rocket science or something. *spits on the ground*
Finally, pricing (at least on Lucan) is just dumbfuck stupid. 15g for a level 7 adept 1 ? 35g for a tier II rare ? What newbie has that kind of money ? Answer : none. I had originally had dreams of being a monk, and making my own bags and armors but I quickly realized, I would never, EVER be able to afford any adepts for my character, EVER. So I changed course and decided to make my own spells, and always wanted to play a warlock, so voila, Sushi was born.
I am really loving
EQII now, I could gush on and on about the community, the new furniture, the old friendships renewed and so on, but I think that will do for now.
