Gorge alchemist for treant fists.

Not really a rare spawn, but I camped Overseer Dal'Gur in chardok for well over 60 hours before I finally got my assling illusion mask.

I just recently logged in on my old account and went to Lake of Ill Omen to get the Jade Chokidai Prod to get the key to Charasis and I actually killed a Sarnak Adherant I believe that dropped the Sarnak Earring of Station and i'm almost pretty sure that was a super rare drop that I only heard about once during the crazy non-stop camping there was for Dizok for the key to Charasis when you actually needed a key to get in...now you dont need any at all during current live version.

Don't need keys any more? Bleh, what's the point of that? It's not like the key to Charasis was hard to get - Jade Chokidai Prod and Xalgozian Fang, wasn't it, handed to Dugroz outside the Froglok village in SoNH? That's hardly a major undertaking, just a bit of running around. I got that key and I think the only time(s) I ever went to Charasis was to summon the corpse of a guildy .
So I suppose you don't need a Seb key either then?

Well, its really unnecessary for Kunark dungeons to be keyed. Anyone who can do the key quest solo, either is already too high for the dungeon, or couldn't survive without a group. There just isn't anyone IN Kunark to make the key necessary. It just keeps out people who want to go explore.

I wonder why they included keys for those zones in the first place, then? I got the keys to both Seb and Charasis but, as mentioned, only entered the latter once or twice to summon corpses, and as for the former I think I grouped there once or possibly twice but that was it. Anyway, if you're gonna remove keys for some formerly-keyed zones, why not just remove the lot? Surely it'd be much the same effect.
I spent more time arsing about in places like CB and the Warrens (when I was, say, 55+ ) than I did doing any "serious" stuff in high-level zones. Oh, I also spent quite a few hours making circuits of Kaesora as well. Just 'cause it was fun .

Yeah it is a very very rare drop. I have one on my old warrior, it dropped i believe in OT, near the ruins.

I spent many an hour in Dagnor's hunting Bilge on my druid. I killed him a total of 3 times and only once was when I was actually camping him, the others were when I was passing through to Unrest (got the PKT twice and the belt once). I actually got him once right after he had spawned and before he had a chance to begin his patrol. It kinda figured that after I was lucky enough to learn where at least one of his spawn points was I never saw him up again

Lmao!

This is awesome, on that bilgehunter website I found this paragraph:

Newsbite of the Week: How long will EQ survive?
I am looking forward to the upcoming expansion as much as the next person, and I hope that Verant plans on keeping EQ going for along time. On the other hand I tend to wonder if they can continue to keep the game interesting and fun for years to come. UO was a groundbreaking game, but I'll be the first to admit I bailed from the sinking ship as soon as Beta EQ came out. I think UO lacked a lot of the good features we find in EQ, but I wonder if the next big game will kill the EQ market like what happened to UO. Please feel free to post your thoughts on this in the Forum.

I played both UO and EQ in 1999. I played a ton of UO player-run shards because I didn't have a lot of money. I played EQ p2p for several years up until 2010. I really only played one month of UO p2p on the OSI servers. I have to say that EQ did some things better than UO, but UO did some things better than EQ. Overall, I'd say that the first-person perspective is what made me prefer EQ. But, gameplay-wise, UO did a lot of things better. The skills were more diverse. The crafts were more comprehensive and customized. You could own a boat and travel the world. There were treasure chests and treasure maps. (There was a cartography skill. You could make your own maps of a region to train cartography. You'd need a larger map to compare the smaller treasure maps to to find out where the treasure was.) You could have hirelings. You could build a house in the seamless world. There were no instances. You could make a guild house by buying a guild deed. Traveling was done via runes and marking/recalling ANYWHERE. You determined how you traveled. The list is long. UO did these things a decade ago.

It was ahead of its time as a sandbox-type world.

Here's a shard that's (somewhat or mostly?) like it was in 1999:
http://www.uosecondage.com/

EQ had a better PvE world and a better PvE experience, IMHO. In EQ, the world had factions and lore and quests and numerous named monsters and large conversation scripts for non-players. Items had names and felt unique in EQ. In UO, items felt more generic even though they were often crafted by other players and had the crafter's name etched into the item description. When you get an item in EQ, it feels like that item belonged to the thing you killed and wasn't just generated on the spot by a script. The world in EQ made UO's look bland and shoddy. UO didn't have the character that EQ had. And the first-person experience in a dungeon crawl could not be duplicated in UO. There's something very pleasing about being able to jump and run around a corner to escape some baddies or to attack an add. The impression EQ gave me is this feeling of being immediate and close. UO didn't have that.

My question is can we have a world that has the depth and character of EQ, the comprehensive sandbox nature of UO, and the accessibility (to a wide audience) and pvp of WoW? Or will these different approaches to games always yield different game and therefore different audiences? I personally feel there will always be niche audiences. For example, if you want to keep the non-linear and high-penalty nature of EQ then you will necessarily cut yourself off from the accessibility of WoW. Without that accessibility, you become a niche. If you cut yourself off from the depth and character of EQ then you can hardly call yourself an RPG and this will make you the butt of jokes from one corner of the world to the other. If you cut out the sandbox features of UO then you will forever be known as the iconic hero that speaks of adventure but knows it not because he only knows it through carefully choreographed exercises. In my mind, these things don't carry equal weight, though. I think a game can throw out sandbox features and still be a success. You can throw out depth and character and still be a successful game (an action-adventure game?). But you can't throw out all of them and expect to have a market.

My guess is that the weights look like (representative of population):
Sandbox: 15%
Depth/Character: 25%
Accessibility: 55%
PvP: 5%

I also don't think WoW is something you should compare EQ to. That's because WoW's audience is so large that it's an anomaly. What... I think it's over six million US subscribers or something? In climate forecasting they tend to avoid adding too much weight to extreme events. Another words, whatever WoW did, it probably had less to do with what preceded it than expected. It did something NEW somehow. And it probably expanded the mmorpg market worldwide. I've always felt that it was marketing and development genius as much as it was accessibility.

WoW's success was 100% due to an established fan base. Blizzard already had tons of people worldwide using battle.net for Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft. So when WoW came out they naturally moved over along with lots of EQ players who came over to check it out.

This got them the money to start running ads on TV and it took off from there. The major casualization of the game came later after a couple of raid expansions were released due to the influx of players who had no business playing an MMO in the first place.

Had no business playing an MMO in the first place? Because someone isn't willing to dedicate X hours a day/week/month to a video game they shouldn't be allowed to play at all?

Noah, MMRPG's give you what you up to them. The more time you spend on them the bigger your reward it's going to be, whether is levels, items, more money, higher skills etc.

Heh, some people just aren't gamers, and never will be. Everyone has different talents in this world, and a certain talent is required to be good at playing PC games. There will be people who are always going to suck at playing at video games no matter how easy you make it on them. I'm not saying they shouldn't be allowed to play, quite the contrary. However, I think when you dumb a game down for the lowest common denominator (hi WoW, EQ live!), you ruin it for everyone else.

Anecdotal example: my friend and his roommate got the first Gears of War game right when it came out, and it took them about a month of playing on and off to beat it on whatever the easiest difficulty mode is (don't remember what the options were). I thought it must have been good to have taken them so long, so I had them lend me their x-box and the game over a weekend. My roommate and I beat the game in a single 7 hour sitting. We got stuck once for about 20 minutes on the level where you have to break out of the house and get in the tank.

Right after we won I was sitting there thinking, "What? That's it? Glad I didn't pay 60 bucks for that!" I guess that's what the public demands these days though - flashy graphics and short easy games that play like movies.

I would argue that there are certainly diminishing returns to MMOs. I can feel sufficiently rewarded from a nice several hour session on a weekend, but if that session turned into 12 hours where I skipped out on hanging out with friends, going to bars, watching football, doing homework, work work, or reading a book, I wouldn't feel nearly as satisfied with myself. Certainly not enough to warrant spending all the time in the MMO.

I find it incredibly exclusionary and pretty snobby to look down your nose at people who don't feel it necessary to turn their MMO experience into a second full time job. Being a gamer is about having fun while playing video games, not how obsessed you can get.

And also, EQ was ridiculously easy on a difficulty level. I was 13 when EQ came out, and there were by far way more complex games on the market. EQ required a base level of understanding to actually operate and do well. Time spent =! difficulty.

EQ essentially was boiled down to: can you read, can you type, can you click auto attack. There wasn't any complex button combinations that were needed to memorize, there weren't very many platform-y elements of the game (even Velks is just a test of patience), you didn't need to have a keen grasp of rhythm, it was wander around and kill shit with a couple of buttons. You could certainly be engaged, but that's not "difficulty."

...unless you played a Bard .
Actually, surely playing any class well required skill, especially if you were gonna be doing groups and raids and stuff, when it actually mattered what you did as your actins would affect other people.

What took more than paying attention and clicking 3 buttons?

Swarm kiting 20+ mobs with PBAE DoT which took much "depth-perception" and "twitch" turning abilities? One bad turn and you can be stunned and dead. Patience would be chant kiting or even bellows kiting (lol.) Swarm kiting involves skill in movement as well as aptience.

Or charm kiting a slew of mobs and remembering spawn points of mobs you're killing, and their pathing, along with spawn points and pathing of casters to be avoided. Timing your charms with switching songs or turning them off to click a potion or item (to continue sow, or a buff.) What do you do if you get a caster on you? You can run and lose your group and have to get them again + they regain hp, or you can be smart and charm the caster then keep selos running while pulsing charm. Charm only lands if the mob is NOT charmed so you're doing it to prep before the charm breaks. Not if you only pulse charm but no selos and if its resisted you're toast, but the charm could break on selos in which case you need to RUN!

Let's describe a simple situation in a dungeon. Your group gets an add caster. Do you mez or do you with a resist song this "pulse" of songs. It depends on..

1. What type of caster is the mob? This along with spell particles can tell you what spell is being cast.
2. What spell the mob is casting (if it is casting.) Is it a resist type you're playing? cold/fire/mr or pr/dr/mr, or maybe you're using fr + DS song, or cr + DS song because you know the resists of this area from experience and want the DS added in due to the amount of melee mobs.
3. Will my last pulse of the resist song (if it was being played) wear off before the spell lands or after?
4. Is the spell a dmg spell (DD or DoT) or a utility spell (fear/mez/stun/root) or a heal?
5. How long it will take the spell to land? Will it land before or after my song? If it's mez or fear or stun on me that matters even more.
6. What are their resists are like versus mez? Does it often land or no? Does it cause a lot of aggro if it doesn't land? What further situation could there be if it doesn't land?
7. What is my group's resists like? Does the resist song make much of a difference?

These 7 factors (off the top of my head) must all be recalled and calculated by experience and perception in one moment. I won't even describe the multitude of situations that could happen and the guestimated % of which decision is best to go with.

I don't think you have played a bard, or at least not in situations where it counts, or... at least not well And that's okay. I haven't played a majority of the classes past 30. Most people haven't. I just want to make the point with a bard EQ is much more difficult than say... a warrior.

Back to the extremely rare spawns discussion!!!!

Agreed on getting back to rare spawns discussion... I thought this thread was the "Things EQ did that no modern MMORPG can deliver" thread (which is/was right next to this one) when I left my last reply.

However ... I can't let this accusation go unanswered.



It's not at all my intention to be a MMO snob and claim that the game should only be for people who can play in 8+ hour chunks. My point wasn't at all directed at the amount of time one can dedicate. I think the way that I quoted you suggested otherwise, and that is definitely my fault. However, your entire argument that EQ takes no skill (or that it can be boiled down to reading/typing/auto attack) is absolutely ridiculous, and patently false.

Yes, EQ can be played at a basic level by someone with very little video game skill. However, those players will NEVER be great. There is an immense amount of detail in the mechanics of EQ, and a great deal of strategy that can be applied. Sephin already made an excellent example specific to bards, but those principles extend to ALL classes. Even the lowly warrior can be played very well and very poorly. I would think this should be perfectly clear to anyone that played EQ for any period of time - there were tons of bad players out there, and many players with reputations of being awesome or "l33t". The fact that this distinction exists proves my point. There are several good topics in the Class Discussion forums that elaborate on this.

I guess my original point was that watering down MMOs so that "anyone" can be great does NOT make them good games. EQ in particular is a niche game and some people simply aren't going to like it or be good at it no matter how hard they try. Most importantly: I like it that way. If you want to play an easy mode MMO, there are MANY to choose from. EQ is hard, some people enjoy that, and that is precisely why we're all patiently waiting around for this project. Time spent performing a task doesn't equal difficulty, true, but it is proportional to the feeling of accomplishment gained from completing said task.

Again, apologies for the side-track. I just couldn't let that one go...

I hope they randomize all the spawn triggers and loots per mob in all the zones! Oh man that would be gravy. Go go adventure!

Randomizing triggers is good since Quillmane will be on lockdown by me and 3 pals if in fact it's the same. I am not sure if I can find that old info tho haha.

But mixing up the loots per mob is a bad idea and would not be worth the time or head ache. Mobs had certain items because they were the correct difficulty. Mixing them up will make it harder or easier than what EQ was meant to be. Either is bad.

Still the single, BIGGEST, middle finger I have EVER received from ANY game I've played to date.

My friend Mike and I beat GoW in about 4 hours and we got so far on the hardest setting. In fact I think we beat it, although it took many reloads to accomplish.
However! The multiplayer is where we were most fascinated with, that's where the 60 bucks really sunk in for us. Oh the fun times we had with GoW online. GoW was meant to be played online, having a not so strong yet satisfying story line.
Youre right about the fact games are flashy now. Button mashers too, drives me nuts I dont even play the crap that's released these days. GoW just sorta reminded me of a new age Contra. It was well done.

But games like bayonetta and the new resident evil games and all those ridiculous games where you get some kinda stupid currency and buy upgrades and stuff UGH! Its ugly and stupid. I could rant forever here but ill spare my readers for now



Fact is a lot of high end EQ players quit and went to WoW when it hit retail. Hell, I met a bunch of EQ players in beta. My friend and most of his guild relocated into wow.
A lot of the WoW development team were hardcore EQ players who went to work for Blizzard. Cant say I blame them...

I agree. Players left EQ for WoW in incredible numbers when it came out, and I was one of them. Everyone playing EQ1 was just waiting for someone to come out with a better game to kill it off, because EQ1 was doing so many things wrong by that time. There were a couple other games that attracted people for a little while but they went back to EQ1 eventually. When people left EQ1 for WoW, they didn't go back.

This had absolutely nothing to do with Blizzard's previous games and everything to do with EQ1 being bad but yet still better than anything else. So I greatly disagree with the "WoW's success was 100% due to an established fan base. Blizzard already had tons of people worldwide using battle.net for Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft." comment. It had to do a little with that, a lot with WoW just being many times better than EQ1 in many ways by that point.

This is not a knock on EQC btw, just pointing out that 5 or whatever expansion after Velious, EQ1 was a shadow of its previous self. The original WoW gamers were EQers, but now you can name yourself Naggy in WoW and probably no one would message you understanding the reference, because the market has expanded 100x since then, the few EQers are very diluted among the rest of the WoW playerbase.

Yeah a lot of the children playing WoW are like "Zomg wtf is EQ?!"
Basically i tell them EQ was the game that we played online while they were still shitting diapers.

Ive met a few people but very little remember or know what EQ was/is.