I have a lot of quests open for this area, so let’s rip apart those bird-people! The event is next Wednesday, May 29.
Anyone level 20 – 30 or willing to mentor down is welcome to join.
We start at around 21.30 CET, meet in Skawlra Rock, at the camp.
Regular playtime
Skawlra Rock is way too tough to go it alone! And even the Skrilien Point quests involving Cyclopses and whatnot, this stuff is hard. I’d be lying if I said that I’m still as motivated as in the beginning, and I think the reason is that I’m much older now and have a lot less time than when I played EverQuest back in the 90s. So I can only tolerate so many restarts, and only so much organizational overhead to get gaming.
So the idea now is to keep regularly scheduling three options for the next few months:
- Tomb of Lord Tsang, or
- Skrilien Point, or
- Skawlra Rock
This will be happening on the last Wednesday of every month, starting 20:00 CET. I’ll be waiting near Skrilien Point. If no one shows up, I’ll just switch to some other game. Of course I’ll try to organize level 20ish groups with the guild as well, to increase the chances.
Let’s see how that goes!
Never been so happy to be dead
Woohoo, I got my feign death (thanks to Breizou, who basically breezed me through the quest and is very sad in this picture):
Awesome. I think it’s also nice that one of these main skills for a necro comes from a quest. Yes, you might say it’s old-school, and that a character should be able to buy or train all their skills on their own. But remember Guild Wars? There, you had some elite skills out in the field that required human help to get. And you had to trudge to areas of the map that you would never ordinarily visit. The reward was an elite skill, something that you’d be able to use again and again and that would help you make your character more unique.
Doing this feign death quest felt somewhat the same. Of course I don’t have any illusions of individuality: Surely every necro in the game has this skill. But it cheers me up nevertheless.
Afterwards, I tried doing some level 20ish quests involving Skawlra Rock:
That place is way out there. You have to fly, swim or float over water for quite some time to reach this place, which is nice and gives it a slightly mystical aura. Too bad that once you get there, it’s full of lizard people that smash the brains out of your skull. I’ll have to return here with a group!
Not doing much around Qa Riverbank again
When I did the last few Hunter’s League quests, I had to go back to Neamsog Bunker near Qa Riverbank, and then follow the Qaliathari quest lines for people around level 20. I didn’t really want to do that, I planned to stay around Kojan, but oh well.
So today, I didn’t do much, just finished a quest around the quest hub there:
Ho hum. Not really much going on at the moment!
An artsy-fartsy screenshot from a beach somewhere
There. See the framing of the moon? Awesome, eh?
Raiding the Tomb of Lord Tsang
Remember that adventure in Jin’Ka Forest? That was a quest line that led up to the ability to raid Tomb of Lord Tsang, a level 18 – 22 (I’d say) dungeon.
We assembled a a very tidy group and went inside:
Flop, and that’s what it looks like on the inside:
We wiped somewhere around here, the first time around. Something or someone had mezzed our tank.
On the second try, we moved past that and into the rooms beyond. There are several quest lines leading to named mobs and quest givers like this:
Mysterious hallways like this:
Rooms with shafts and pools of light:
And here’s an upgrade for my staff, from a random named:
And this last guy was in a purple room, I think dropping a purple gem or medallion:
Yeah, it doesn’t look like much in my screenshots, but the reason they didn’t turn out any better is that I was too busy to take them! Wow. From the first minute I set foot in that dungeon with my group, it felt like EverQuest again. So much so that when we were about to be wiped, I had the caster reflex of just standing still and waiting to get killed, not running back so as not to pull any respawns by mistake. It turns out that in Vanguard, that wouldn’t be necessary. I could try to flee (the repops aren’t so fast in that dungeon), hide somewhere and then go back and rez my friends with a rez orb.
Had I only known. But now I do.
The whole experience was really exciting and the game totally captures the vibe of 1999. Congratulations!
A long way home
As I’m finishing up quests from my quest log, I noticed some level 12 quests involving the Ksavari near Qa Riverbank/Neamsog Bunker. You might remember that from my earlier exploits.
I’ve been spending a good amount of time on one of Kojan’s largest islands, and meanwhile I think I’m used to the way things look there and how the quest areas are laid out. It still doesn’t feel like home, though, even though my character is Kojani. I blame the Isle of Dawn for this, the newbie area you can choose to go through.
With my halfling alt, I skipped the Isle of Dawn and noticed how much flavor and identity the racial starting zones add. If there’s one recommendation I can give, it’s to skip Isle of Dawn if you have any experience with MMOs of this kind (EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, any of the PvE-focused holy-trinity games). You will miss some crafting tutorials that you could have had on Isle of Dawn, but if atmosphere, backstory and setting mean anything to you, the racial starting zones are much more satisfying.
Otherwise you’ll end up like me, having a Kojani to whom this Qalian (or is that Qaliathari?) desert/river/bunker setup feels like home:
Ah, I’m finally back.
