Ah, my old nemesis from EQ1 and I can’t even call it my nemesis because I actually never managed to see Quillmane in game in all the times I attempted to. Famous for their pegasus feathered cloak which is used in the magician epic SOE has continued with the humor by spawning angry mages at the end of the EQ2 event. Yesterday I spent some time in EQ2 doing the EQ (confusing eh?) 12th anniversary quests. Mostly because I wanted the awesome house items that go along with it. I really wish EQ had put some house items in game with their anniversary tasks, but alas I’ll just have to be satisfied with augments.

The only instance I really had troubles with was Lavastorm, but I toughed it out playing a shadowknight and coercer together so that I could get the title at the end of the event. Now that I’ve gotten it, it’s simply a matter of farming the pieces I want (Guk for the level 90 gear, and Enchanted lands for the pegasus cloak which just has an incredible graphic). Each instance drops a fabled adornment, a common piece of jewelery, and the chance at the rare drop from that EQ1 encounter. You also get two tokens which can be spent at a special vendor in Antonica. Doing all of the instances once gave me enough tokens for every item that was not a plushie – plus two plushies. I’ve added them to my museum on Antonia Bayle, and I’ve started collecting items for the coercer on Oasis since at this moment I’m still split between both servers.

I also participated in my first public quest yesterday – and it reminded me of public quests  in Rift and Warhammer except for one really important factor. EQ2 is not made for these sort of quests. What I mean is that there are very few spells that land on anyone outside of your group / raid and you won’t always be invited to one despite advertising. This was the case with my warden who landed (literally) on top of the PQ (public quest) in progress. I was not invited to the raid, and I couldn’t heal anyone or do anything but throw a few little nukes at the encounters. My buffs are useless for anyone not in my group and over all the experience was incredibly poor. Thus since my participation was deemed poor, my rewards were poor.

The second time around went much better. My first PQ was the Ring War (I believe that’s what it’s called on Oasis at least) and the second one was SG (not sure what that stands for). SG is the least popular of the two public quests, and I was invited to a raid without issue. Basically you battle hordes of mobs that swarm the raid and there’s an actual strategy to the encounters. We did wipe once, but revive places you right where you need to be, so it was nothing to get back into the fray. I healed for all I was worth, and managed to score a piece of legendary gear. Not that bad I suppose considering we only had one raid worth of people around.

The quests were fun but without the ability to cast heals outside of group I feel that healers really get the short end of the stick on these. I’d like to see a special flag applied while inside the blue marked map that turns your heals into AoE heals – the problem with this is that classes like shaman may see far higher returns in participation because of how their heals work. They are wards, and prevent damage from coming in. In other words a ward gets used up first before a regular heal will land. Based on the damage being done to players I doubt this would be much of an issue in a raid situation, but you never know. Hopefully we see some sort of “join public group” option in the future to make participation easier on players.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself! Woohoo for Friday!

Eventually if you play a number of different games, you’ll come across a point where you think to yourself ‘I wish such and such game had THIS feature!’ It doesn’t matter what the feature is exactly, but you’ll think it and you’ll feel a little dirtier thinking it depending on what “it” is. Now, there are a couple of directions you can go with this thought.

Number one, it’s common for games to “borrow” from one another and add popular features to their game that may have shown up elsewhere ‘first’. This only makes sense, why would you NOT add a popular feature to your game, even if someone else is using it. It’s not the developers who cry ‘we had that first!’ but the players who typically shout ‘oh yeah, well THIS GAME had that feature first! So it must be better.’ In the end it doesn’t really matter.

Second of all, if games only used unique and different features in their games we’d have even more indecision on what to play because no one game could possibly house everything you would like to see.

What feature have you seen in one game but would love to see in another? Would this feature changed whether or not you played either of those games? Feel free to name some that are realistic (ie: you could actually see them being implemented in your game) and some that you know there’s absolutely no way you’d ever see in your MMO of choice.

One of mine would have to be from world of warcraft. I would absolutely love to see EQ2 with a built in calendar much like WoW has (you click on it from the mini map) that tells players what world events are going on, and when they start. You can click on each specific day of the calendar and it will tell you everything you need to know about this event.

I think this would be fantastic for events such as the moonlight grotto that comes once a month, Frostfell, and every other holiday event out there. When a special promotion is going on (ie: doubt exp weekends, SC cards on sale) that could also be mentioned.

Of course it’s not good enough to simply swipe another games idea, you have to improve on it and make it better. So how about allowing guilds to customize their calendars and add events to it, raids. Then players know what is scheduled without having to always log over to their guild web site, and it gives officers and leaders a neat place to write things down and keep track. The general calendar could be something simple and edited by the community team so that developers don’t have to spend hours and hours working on it once it’s released to the game, and things like Antonia Bayle’s server wide roleplay events could eventually get added to these calendars for players to look at while they’re in game.

This feature may not be for everyone, but it’s still something I would one day absolutely love to see (and yes, I’ve left /feedback about this before). Lets hear some other features out there, it doesn’t matter what game you’d like to see it in, I want to hear them all!