The Ancient Gaming Noob

The Crushbone Creep and Other Maladies July 11, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EverQuest II, Instance Group, Lord of the Rings Online.
Tags: Crushbone Keep
6 comments

Dungeons in EverQuest II, at least most of the dungeons below level 60, are considerably different from their World of Warcraft counterparts.

While WoW favors instances, in EQ2 most lower level dungeons are more like indoor zones.  There are some instanced locations, like Nektropos Castle or Deathfist Citidel, but they are the exception, not the rule, at our end of the level curve.

And like regular zones, there are quests that take you all over the place, multiple groups of people in the zone, and the mobs tend to span a rather large range of levels.  For example, in Crushbone Keep, our latest location in EQ2, the mobs inside the front door were level 20, but up on the second floor we were running into mobs that were level 30.

Also, like zones, mobs respawn rather quickly (your trash mob might be somebody elses quest mob) and there can be contention for named mobs, which some groups might need for a quest but which others are camping just to get master chest drops.

So a dungeon like Crushbone Keep… or Stormhold or Runnyeye or any number of other examples… tend to be places you need to delve into multiple times over a range of levels.

Which might be an issue in getting the instance group invested in EQ2.

We certainly have spent our time doing zones, running down quest lines, and the like.  But in WoW that tends to lead you towards a zone.  Westfall and the Deadmines are the classic example, at least pre-Cataclysm.  The main story in Westfall drove you towards the Deadmines, and completing that instance was the culmination of the zone.

Not that there are not, or were not, exceptions.  Uldaman was a good example, an instance with a wide level gap between start and finish that had a series of quests that required you to make multiple visits.

But the much-belabored point is that, as a group, we have grown used to the pattern of zone, then instanced dungeon crawl, then boss fight, and finally sense of accomplishment and moving on to the next thing.

Which is probably why EQ2 isn’t sticking for some of us.  We’ve been to Stormhold and Fallen Gate and I get the sense that there wasn’t much point.  We did some quests, we saw some boss mobs, but did we finish things?  Did we accomplish something?

How like real life, no?

Even I, long schooled in MUDs where “let’s go kill some stuff” was often the only goal for weeks at a time, miss the structured goals and regular achievements of WoW.  EQ2 is the game for some groups I am sure… but I am not sure it is the right game for our group with its “once a week” focus and varying level of commitment to any given game.

And so I have delayed doing this post about our venture into Crushbone keep because… well… we went there, we did some quests, and we left.

That is actually us leaving Crushbone Keep, but it is the best picture I ended up with of the entry to the keep, and it hardly does it justice.

That gives a little bit of the sense of scale, but not that much.  Still, you can see that it is much bigger than the version found in EverQuest.

That also shows our group.  Gaff got out his level 83 characters, Sixo the berserker and Chuggs the mystic and mentored down to Trucknut who, at level 19, was the lowest level member of the group.  I got out my troubadour and Potshot his Templar, and we headed towards the place.

Immediately inside we ran into one of the joys of open dungeons.  There was a pile of people just inside the door and they seemed to be intent on recreating the stimulating conversations that take place in Barrens chat right there on the foyer of the zone.

I had picked up some quests for the zone and there were some waiting for us just inside.

Initially we appeared to be following in the footsteps of another group, as the hallways appeared to have been cleared for us to move around.  Given all the running around that we needed to do, that probably wasn’t a bad thing.  The alternative was to fight our way through the trash mobs over and over as we moved to and fro.

We did eventually have to fight.

Eventually we worked our way upstairs and reached a point where even having a mentored down, raid geared, tank ceased to be the ticket to overpowering any resistance.  While Trucknut had gained a couple of levels by then, we were facing mobs that were level 30.  That was too much.

So we fought our way back through the repawns.

We ended up at the altar inside the main door for our traditional group shot.

Quests were completed.  Orcs were slain.  Levels were gained.  Items were looted.

But was there a sense of accomplishment?

That is the tough one.

It didn’t feel like we accomplished much, even to me.

And so it goes.

Our momentum in the game, which was shaky at best after the “punished for grouping” experience of the starting zone around New Halas, and which took a kick in the nuts with the SOE down time (that opened the door to LOTRO for a couple of us), and which has been handicapped by people having other priorities over the summer, was clearly slipping before this evening’s adventure.

But then Earl said he was probably out for the rest of the summer and that he was done with EQ2 as a game.  That would have been a blow had we been fully invested in the game.  But as a group we have grown lukewarm.  Even Gaff, who worked so hard getting to the guild to level 40, was feeling somewhat burnt out on the game after that sprint.

And so EQ2 seems to have faded for us again.  This is our second or third attempt at the game as a group and it just hasn’t stuck for us for a variety of reasons.

Now we have to decide where to head when we reconvene at the end of the summer.

I suspect that will mean World of Warcraft until one of the new titles, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars 2, or Diablo II shows up

In the mean time, it looks like a couple of us are going to pick up Lord of the Rings Online again and maybe, just maybe, see Moria.