I logged in last night and found that the big bad wolf was at the door of Tower 2. The big bad werewolf that is.
Werewolf!
I’m telling you, West Karana is a dangerous place. At least at level 7. That werewolf is level 25.
It is a good things that the guards at Tower 2 are pretty tough. They are level 30, so were able to dispatch the werewolf, though they seemed to be struggling with Froon the other night.
The instance group does indeed still play World of Warcraft. But it has been a while.
Real life kept us away for a bit, and Potshot and I used some of that time… well, a lot of that time… to go play EverQuest. But last Saturday we were all online and ready to go at last.
The group line up for the night was:
And the Dungeon Finder… well… there were not a lot of choices for us.
We had already been through all of those at least once. But we needed to get to level 29 to open up the next instance.
We decided to just spin the wheel and let the Dungeon Finder pick our first location.
We drew the Scarlet Monastery Graveyard.
This was actually a reasonable choice, since the last time we started that instance, we were all too low level to get the quest for the instance. This time around though, our friend Joseph was happy to give us the quest.
A quest to reward your patience
The goal was to kill Bloodmage Thalnos who is in the crypt at the far end of the instance.
Just dying to meet us
The Graveyard has to be one of the shortest instances in the game. We zipped on through, then went back to wipe out any undead that happened to be lurking in order to get the group closer to 29. Three of us made it before we ran out of undead, but two more still had a ways to go.
So we let the Dungeon Finder pick for us again. This time we got Gnomeregan.
More Troggs
Fortunately, we only had to kill for a little while before all of us were finally level 29 and we could leave Gnomer behind us.
We were now ready for the actual goal for the evening, the Library in the Scarlet Monastery.
Ethelred got to break out his new druid form. He is now, officially, a boomkin.
Doing the Funky Chicken
Meanwhile, much to my surprise and in contrast to what we saw in the graveyard, we were actually offered the quest for the instance when we arrived.
The main quest for the Library is go take out Arcanist Doan, who looks oddly like William Techumseh Sherman, at least in his quest mug shot.
Sherman/Doan
They even have the same scowl.
And this lead to some of the most challenging instance play that we have had in a long time. Getting into the instance at the earliest level possible ensures the maximum challenge. The individual fights were not so hard, but the fact that our levels gave us a huge aggro radius meant that we got adds on almost every fight. Clearing the first courtyard ended up being one non-stop battle as we kept pulling additional bad guys.
Resting up after the courtyard brawl
And the wild battles continued into the Library proper.
Into the Library
However, we did not appear to be in any huge danger all the same. Wild battles are not always dangerous battles, and even the adds piling on and the spell resists didn’t lead to any deaths on our part. I do not think anybody was ever close to dying. Whether that was a result of our long teamwork or Blizzard nerfs is up to the reader.
In the end, we reached Doan and did him in. The battle was a bit anti-climactic after the fights getting to him.
Doan Done
Along the way three of us got another achievement.
Level 30 is enough for us to take on the Armory wing of Scarlet Monastery next time.
Xula and Ethelred were short of the mark, still sitting at 29, but took it upon themselves to get to 30 before our next run so that we can hit a new instance.
Until then, Maloney has a new spell to play with.
Wolf on Ice
And while WoW is fun, I have to admit that the challenges of original EverQuest are still a little bit more compelling at the moment. Of course, I am playing a cloth wearing caster in both games, which as I said before, is kind of a new thing for me.
Nintendo was tweeting up a storm yesterday because Satoru Iwata was giving the keynote speech up at GDC.
You can see here, which you’ll no doubt want to do if you are a big Nintendo fan.
And even if you aren’t, his address is interesting for the gaming history he brings up as he talks about things like social networks and gaming. I recommend it.
There was, of course, some mention of Nintendo’s newest hardware, the Nintendo 3Ds.
But of all the bits of information I saw, this one probably surprised me the most:
My initial reaction was to dismiss this, but as I thought about it I had to admit that the concept is interesting.
I want to see what a streamed film would look like on the new 3DS screen, which is much larger than the screens Nintendo uses for their current DS/DS Lite/DSi line of hand helds, and which support 3D, which is where so many of the movie studios are going these days.
We’ll see how it looks this summer.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 