Things that make you go Oh!(GU #39)

Well this week brought upon the release of GU #39 in EverQuest2(release notes here). And with it comes the ominous "Shard of Fear", which is essentially a small portion of the larger Plane of Fear that we are all so familiar with from EQ1.



Just looking at this screenshot I get goosebumps. The blood red rain, and the wall of fire, it all brings back such fond memories of my first real raiding experiences. It really makes me wish Chestone was level 70 and actually in a guild, just to experience what looks to be a pretty amazing zone. Alas Chestone will have to wait his turn, as he is only level 35.

Still there were other things in the patch aside from new zones. One thing I noticed last night as I was tearing it up in Crushbone Keep, was that they had finally separated out buffs and debuffs out into their own windows. This is certainly a welcome change as it sort of annoyed me for awhile. There were many other changes in the patch, guild banks, and all sorts of things that I havn't really gotten to play with yet, see the patch notes for official details. Well back to work for me, I have to have this form working and a whole bunch of other things by five this afternoon, later everyone.

P.S. Over at MMOQuests there is a great write up of their first time in the zone. I also stole the screenshot from there, just wanted to give credit.

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Chestone

Pushing GUs Like Weights

Now I hate being an echo chamber of a blog but I felt since I now play EverQuest2 that I should make a post and have my say. So GU 37 was released, here are the official notes, with commentary here, here, and here. Now I'm not going to go on about this because I'm new to the game and frankly a lot of issues addressed in this update don't overly concern me as a newbie. Though one thing I have to say the new furniture is fabulous, I just love it(check out pictures here, since I don't much like deeplinking).

One thing I am concerned about is vendor buyback and its effect on overall game immersion. It really seems to me that the ability to buy back the last ten items you sold to ANY vendor is a little ridiculous. Say I sold to Johnny McFriendly and we are good buddies, I have a positive faction with his people then sure I can see him selling me back things I might not have wanted to sell because we are buddies. Now if I were say selling to the Shady Swashbuckler(nostalgia kick!) and he is a unscrupulous character with whom I had rather poor relations, now I wouldn't expect him to sell me anything back at anything but an increased cost. The idea that this guy would hold my items and sell them back to me at the price that I purchased them seems ridiculous to me. Of course this is another move toward convenience over immersion, and another "Warcraft's done it" feature. This is fine and all as I'm sure I'll use the system and enjoy it, but I felt the need to get out a little bitching about immersion.

Anyways, time to go enjoy some GU37 goodness.


Edit: I didn't realize this at the time of writing but EQ2 has added in a "smart loot" system that frankly blows my mind. The mob intelligently drops epic/fabled loots based upon the inventory of the raid members. I had no idea this was going into the game and am dumbfounded that none has as far as I know introduced this system. A great discussion is going on over at FoH, so check it out.
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Cheston