You’re reading the title right. Last night Smed semi announced EqNext. Kinda, sorta. We were treated to a concept art slide, then an in-game screenshot. The screenshot reminded me of WoW, and was of a swamp area.
Evidently there will be EqNext feedback panels, where we’ll get to see a little more behind the curtain. Stay tuned.
So this year I finally decided to go to Fan Faire. I’ve never been, but from all accounts it’s a pretty good time, which is easy to imagine since it is in Las Vegas. I should be arriving tonight, and then kickin it the rest of the weekend with a handful of my RnH guildmates. I’ll also try and make some posts from Fan Faire as I can, but we’ll see how that goes. And for those of you that care, you’ll be able to follow my exploits via my twitter account, http://twitter.com/echounderground.
And for those of you heading to Fan Faire as well, hit me up, we’ll knock down a few glasses of scotch and kill it hangover style.
I haven’t written in a while; just over two months to be more accurate. To be honest, I haven’t really had the time to blog of late. I’ve been swamped with work, and the majority of free time I’ve had, has been divided between EQ2 and riding my bike. One of the major changes for me the last few months in EQ2 has been the betrayal of Maesyn from Wood Elf Ranger to an Assassin of Neriak. It wasn’t an easy decision, and even once I had decided to make the jump, I wondered had I made the right choice.
In the end, I’m glad I betrayed. I’ve firmly planted myself in the T1 dps for our guild, consistently 2nd on the parse for most raid encounters, and at times on top (if Philly happens to be slacking). As a Ranger, I felt I had reached a point where I just couldn’t get any more out of the class, and hated the lack of utility I brought to raids. As a sin, I’ve worked my way into the MT group with my ability to hate xfer combined with my high damage output. And one of my absolute highlights happened the other night when we reached Sara Greenheart in Labs.
We usually run with a Zerker, SK, and Monk most nights, but unfortunately for the night we were down to only SKs. Not normally an issue, but one of Sara’s main mechanics is forcing two tanks to constantly switch. Instead of stopping for the night, or moving on to another instance, we took the advice of one of our tanks (Fidgets). He runs as an Assassin with Ancient Legacy on our server for late night raids, and had successfully tanked Sara. Evidently her spell which forces tanks to switch only affects fighters, not scouts. So we decided to give it a try.
I slapped on all the crit mit jewelry I had, and with the addition of a Warden in the group, brought myself up to nearly 80% (still don’t have raid chest, shoulders or legs yet). I popped into defensive stance and pulled Sara into the corner and went to town for the next 10 minutes. Surprisingly I managed to be 2nd on the parse, and had a fun as hell time tanking. This was just another in a series of moments where I’ve realized my decision to betray was a great one. Other times were when I broke 30k dps for the first time, something I never came close to as a Ranger.
As far as my guild goes, RnH has been making great progress in SF content. We’ve cleared all normal mode encounters except for Rohen Theer and Perah Celsis. Currently we’re working on Pcel, which has been a frustrating encounter to say the least. I’m really not a fan of encounters that can either go horribly wrong, or be a wipe simply because of the RNG. We seem to do fine, unless the MT gets charmed. At that point, our Zerker just wrecks everyone. Even if our second tank is able to grab Pcel for a bit, it’s extremely difficult to recover. We’ve also made great progress in VFDx2, even though we’ve scaled back to about 2 hours a week, sometimes not at all. We’ve managed to down all the nameds in VFDx2 except for the final two.
I’m also going to be at Fan Faire this year in Vegas. Three weeks can’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned.
echounderground 