Level 58 in Kunark

I was going to lay low on EverQuest II for a while.

I did actually resist for a bit.  I stayed away for the first few days after Rise of Kunark came out.  I did not want to go through the same routine as last year, when Echoes of Faydwer came out, of waiting for patches and updates on that first night.

I certainly would never take time off work for the first day of a release. (*cough* Kendricke *cough*)  I learned that lesson back when Gemstone went live on GEnie back in 1988.

I also have a new computer on order and figured I would be doing a whole bunch of re-installs anyway, so why download stuff twice, right?

But then I started playing around with the new SOE Station Launcher on Thursday after work.  I downloaded the beta, got it up and running, and started chatting with Gaff while he was in-game.

He told me where to catch the boat to Kunark (at docks in Antonica or the Commonlands) and said he was running around in game exploring.

I let the beta Station Launcher patch me while I was having dinner and came back to it to find EQ2 all patched and Rise of Kunark installed.  (There were still no copies of either Rise of Kunark or Secrets of Faydwer on the shelf at Fry’s on Friday morning, but I did the digital pre-order for RoK this time around, so I was set.)

The beta Station Launcher wouldn’t launch EQ2 however, so I had to start the old launcher, patch it, and launch via that. (The new Station Launcher has not had that problem since.  I don’t know if it was a “doesn’t work the first time” bug, or if patching the old launcher changed anything, but it seems fine now.)

I logged on with Blintz, saw that he was closer to level 58 than I thought, and started him on a trip from Kelethin to Antonica to catch the boat to Kunark.

I thought they might have used the dock to nowhere at the Northwest corner of Antonica, but they did not.  The ship for Kunark pull up at the dock with the bell used for travel in Qeynos. (And the same is true in the Commonlands, the dock with the bell for travel in Freeport is the spot.)

There were a lot of people hanging around the dock when the boat arrived, and there were six instances of the initial Kunark zone, Kylong Plains, when I got there.  A busy place!

No new ship model though.  We are stuck with the same ship they always use.  However, if I were going to list out priorities for the game, a new ship model would be pretty low down the list.

They did spruce it up with new sails.

Here is Blintz on the Freeport boat in Kunark.

The boat to the Commonlands

And Blintz on the Freeport bound ship looking at the Qeynos ship pulling out of the docks at Kunark.

The boat to Antonica

I took Blintz around and hit some discovery experience near the docks, getting to my goal pretty quickly.

But then I took the boat back to Antonica, headed to Qeynos Harbor, and then road the carpet out to the Desert of Flames to work on a quest or two out there.

Unfortunately, there is nothing in Kunark for Blintz yet.  The smallest mob I saw was 10 levels above him.  So if I want to do much with this new expansion, I either have to create another alt or level one of my characters up to level 70.