It is election day for me as my state is part of Super Tuesday, and as a result this post is going to be fairly short and to the point. Last night I did a thing, and that thing was deciding to roll a healer on a new account so that I could at some day sort out how to do the MQ2 thing and have a tiny healing roomba following me. I took a real trip down memory lane and decided to skew the naming convention of “BELG” something and instead recreated my original main from Everquest. Exeteroth the Dwarven Cleric. During the early days of the internet my OG handle was Exeter, and I don’t have a glorious reason for it other than the fact that it would fit into a name slot on the NES version of Ultima.
In D&D I always liked playing Clerics because they seemed self sufficient. You could turn one into a decent melee character, they could wear decent armor, and they had access to spells that could heal themselves in a pinch. My jam was always rolling a Cleric of Tyr because that gave me access to Bastard Swords. So when I ventured forth into Everquest and saw that Clerics could wear plate armor and use two handed maces… I thought hey… I will be able to relive this battle-priest fantasy. Only to find out that the life of a cleric is living in a party and casting the same spell over and over from the moment you get it at 39. The alternative was to find an area where you could control your surroundings and root/nuke until something fell over and repeat this with breaks in between to regenerate your mana.
The EZ Server experience thankfully is way more reasonable than that as they seem to have scaled up combat on all of the epic weapons even the “support” ones. I am effectively just running around and meleeing things down and the noobie item is keeping me alive during the process. Last night I made it to level 10 and started in on Paladul Caverns, which is the alternate zone to Oasis of Marr in their leveling curve. This is a significantly better choice as all of the fungoids can drop the Kunark armor sets as opposed to the Orcs and Crocs of which there are WAY fewer spawns. Additionally by the time Luclin came around, Sony got way better at building hunting camps as opposed to a bunch of randomly roaming monsters.
One thing I an consistently impressed by is just how damned good we had it with it came to third party map support for Everquest. Even though I have map files in game, I still find myself referring back to EQ Atlas and the old grid paper and color pencil maps. I chose to include Butcherblock Mountains given that it is my old stomping ground as a Dwarf Cleric and it also is a fairly square map which would show up here when embedded in a reasonable manner. The map for Paladul Caverns where I was actually hunting last night is a long mess of a thing, which would just translate to a blog post weirdly. I remember having bunch of these printed out and in a binder so I could check them while I was furiously running across a dangerous zone.
The thing is… while I have nostalgia about being weak and small in a large and dangerous world… I don’t find that I actually want to return to it. I like knowing that I am more or less safe to walk away from the keyboard at any point and if I die there will be absolutely nothing lost other than a run back to wherever I happened to be hunting. I like being able to go off and do whatever the hell suits my fancy without needing to somehow convince five to six other people to want to do the same thing. I also don’t miss sitting around and doing nothing because we either didn’t have enough people on or nobody would take the initiative and decide what was going to happen that evening. While I loved Everquest for what it is… what I want now is a modern game set in this rich universe. I also love Everquest II, but it has a myriad of its own problems. Norrath however is too rich of a setting to let it wither away and not take advantage of the IP with fresh new games.
