-I'm on Kithicor, not Guk. Guk.dirges is the cross-server Dirges channel, where you can hear everyone whine. -I'm going to be your sugar-momma when you've already said you won't pass along any cute paladins without messing them first? (here) Honestly. -My pleasure. -Whysp
Yeah. Kithicor. /em scratches her head... I just missed... a lot of letters. I knew that, really. /cough Hot thread cross-reference there, Lady-Ma'am.
ummm so i have just neglected my work for about a day while reading all 10 pages of this thread which i never even noticed till now BECAUSE IT IS NOT STICKIED on someone's forehead in plain sight where it should be. tis very inspiring, very witty and valuable reading for all young dirgelings (yes i'm lvl 80 but i still FEEL young :snif thank you whysp =)
Entry the Twenty-Sixth: Challenge and Uberness and Why We Do This, Anyway I started this a year ago or more, and wanted to go ahead and get it out there, even though it ends rather abruptly. So, a few months ago I had a good night, though it started out ominously. I got a group to go to CoV camping for those stupid forearms, only the group leader invited a troubadour, so I figured even if the item dropped she’d win the roll. The creature wore the female formal outfit instead of sensible chainmail, and the brigand kept drooling over her, to add insult to injury. Also I got beaten by a fae in a duel while we were waiting to go in, which undoubtedly took the edge off my air of glamorous competence. It turned out just peachy, though. The troubadour made some bad placement decisions, got eaten twice and had to be rezzed by the dirge, so she finally shucked the skimpy gown in favor of armor which clashed with her hair, and she already had the Vhalen’s forearms so when they dropped I shouted ‘mine’ and I got ‘em. Served her right, the hussy. After that the group dissolved and, after a bit of mooning around in indecision, I went to Lesser Faydark to continue the endless search for Cloak of Flames pages. And wonder of wonders, I got the last LF page. I had one left to get from Mistmoore Catacomb’s and the two from New Tunaria, and there’s not much to solo in MMC and the troubadour had been a high elf, so it seemed like a sensible thing to go to New Tunaria and bash a few Tunarians. I haven’t spent much time in NT. I didn’t realize, for example, that there’s a great big honkin’ 65^^^ golem that sees invisible and wanders the pathway down to the city. I know about it now, of course. I also discovered that it was just a touch beyond my capabilities. Two revivals later, I figured out that I could just charge past and thumb my nose at it as I vanished into the distance on my putrid old J-boots. Then it was a matter of hunting stuff and waiting for boxes to drop. New Tunaria, for those of you who haven’t been there, is a place where the Koada-dal (a.k.a.High Elves) express their true, ultra-snooty natures and pound the cookies out of any outsider who shows her half-blooded-red-haired face. There’s a lot of denizens in the 55-59 range who don’t mess with ol’ Whysp, and smart of them, but there’s a fair number of green level 60-65 High elves and their deluded servants, plus the odd vampire, drawn to their moral kindred. Problem is, most of these critters are heroic ^^^s. With all but one or two masters and mostly legendary for the rest of it, the dynamic sorted itself out pretty rapidly. I could mostly handle the heroics if I got the drop on ‘em, and they could mostly handle me if they got the drop on me. Any add, even non-heroic, was death. Fortunately, the Tunarians are too snooty to be very social, so I could mostly pick ‘em out one at a time. And wonder of wonders, I got one of my pages. ‘Get to the point, Whysp,’ I hear you cry. All right, I’m getting. I think I died a total of six times getting that one page before I succumbed to the lure of actually going to work sane the next day, Called home, bought an outrageously overpriced adornment for the Vhalen’s forearms, and called it a night. So, what was the most fun I had? Sailing through CoV again, trying to ring a new change on abusing Valdoon for his blowhard proclamations of evilness, getting the long-coveted forearms? Or skulking around New Tunaria, getting munched on by adds and making sure the mender’s kids all go to Harvard? Well, we each have our own answer to that, but it’s absolutely fundamental to how we approach The Great Balance Question – which might be the reason there are so many opinions on the subject. What, precisely, is ‘balance’ in a game like Everquest II? Consider that there are somewhere between 3 and six play modes; solo, group, and raid, plus PvP, and some would split solo, group, and raid within the PvP world. Now consider that there are twenty-four classes. There’s no way that you can make twenty-four classes all play the same within six different play modes. Even if it were possible, I don’t think it would be desirable; to make it happen you’d have to strip away much of the uniqueness that make the classes distinct; and which, incidentally, add tactical and thematic interest to the game-world. My feeling is that ‘balance’ should be defined as ‘making sure everybody has cool stuff to do.’ It’s a pretty loose definition, I’m afraid, and it wouldn’t meet everyone’s standards, especially folks who’ve painfully leveled up a character and want to make sure there’s a raid-slot for them. -Whysp
