Erudite Beastlords or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bong.

This idea hit me one night while I was playing Legends of Norrath. I'll make a deck focusing on the new Beastlord class theme cards for the Scout Archetype in Oathbreaker. I'll focus on the Wolf Warder and its un-exerting abilities to push out a lot of damage in few turns using the extra power from gypsy wines and the damage potential from spirit of wind combined with the direct damage from fleeting fury and pick off. When it works it works beautifully and I've been rolling with it for a couple weeks now I think but its got a couple weaknesses that I need to work out. Mainly opposing items and players who don't quest. Since it isn't a heavy questing deck when I face players who don't quest for the mana, mainly small unit rush decks, I get pinned into a wall where I can't get much going and my warder doesn't last long enough to get it to face the opposing avatar. I'm thinking some Erudite Warlocks will help with that and adding some more mana generating items.

Anyway, back to my point. With this deck ready I had to find the right avatar so I look through them all and the Erudite has the ability to pay 2 power and exert it to exert all opposing units at a quest. This would be great to use in combination with Tundra Wolf Claws and my Warder to wipe out enemy units... I just have never had a chance to use it. Usually comes down to that mana issue I find fighting the Froglok Fighter/healer unit rush decks. Okay back to my point, now I've got a learned high man who is imbued with arcane power getting down and dirty commanding wolves. It looks silly after several years of EverQuest.

Yeah that post was masturbatory, maybe one of the three other LoN players in the world will read this.



Other than that the Living Legacy promo is coming to a close for the first phase, the big one where everyone got nearly two months of free game time. I'm still playing EQ2 just not as much, up to level 60 and in the Loping Plains I just need to sit and play it more. Yeah I know I robbed you of posts with juicy details and photos of my short lived adventure on Ro and then my affair with Kelethin and Faydwer. I moved there and the Echoes of Faydwer zones are INCREDIBLE. Kingdom of Sky has also been sort of a letdown for me, so hopefully I'll still be able to get through the 60's.

Here's a picture of when I had the tame beast ability from the Ranger AA's, me and my two tiger pets. I miss that.

Is Derv 2 Camped?

I spent most of last night in the Desert of Ro. Feeling rather nostalgic after an hour of so of slaying ghouls and orcs around the highway I just had to /ooc "Camp check! Is Derv 2 free?"

Unfortunately nobody got the joke, it's a real shame that so few survived the Shattering. Back in EQ around level 7-10 everyone anywhere near the Freeport area would go to North Ro and fight the Dervish Cutthroats, they were just regular player-race mobs that dropped leather armor and rusty weapons but gave great exp for the level and were split into three camps. I don't remember where 1 was but 2 was a double-sized one in the middle of the zone and 3 was off near the shore and had a named dark elf. 2 was the most coveted because of the high amount of spawns there and once the camp was broken, meaning the respawns were staggered, you could stay there until all the mobs were green. Stuff like that was most players first or second grouping experience, really it was dervs or orc hill in gfay, maybe the warrens or blackburrow if you were to the west.

Anyway, enough nostalgia, what I was trying to say but got all lost was that 500 years later the desert really felt lonely. There were a lot more npcs but few players and Maj'dul was empty. Sure it was just one night in the middle of the week but things weren't what I expected. Somehow I managed to ding twice gaining levels 50 and 51, don't ask me how. I must have gotten over half a level of exp exploring Maj'dul. I do really like the atmosphere though, I just need to play some more and do a lot more quests and work up my faction with the Court of Truth and check out the housing and whatnot... Otherwise I'll just roll through to 60 and head up to the Sky.

It is a beautiful game though and I'm having a blast. I've gotta start taking more screenshots and posting those.. Maybe start forming some opinions on AA's and class balance and rather than just detailing the crap I did explain to you why stuff goes one way or the other. Actually, forget that, you can read all that crap everywhere else and this isn't gonna be a whine-board. I'm having fun! I don't care if I don't double attack 8% of the time right now I can charm giant spiders! TERRORANTULA I CHOOSE YOU!

Norrath, Part IX

I've recently started playing EQ2 again. Thanks to their Living Legacy promotion I jumped back in and (thankfully) the game hasn't undergone any major changes in the past year and future-Aarkan was able to jump right back into the game. I claimed all the crap I had and one of the items was a Norrath Adventure Pass that I clicked on thinking it would be unlimited but it was used up and I was dropped right in the middle of Faydwer and once again I fell in love with the game that was made for me. Steamfront Mountains was the ancestral home of the Gnomes, it used to be full of clockwork, harpies, minotaurs, skeletons, insane gnomish tinkerers and magi and everything in between. Oh, how could I forget that you also had to go there and farm level 10 clockworks for the Trueshot Bow. Anyway, absolutely nothing has changed in 500 years. It's the same ball of gnomish chaos that we all loved except EVEN MORE CHAOTIC. Imagine in the years since The Shattering the clockworks became sentient and took over the gnomish city of Ak'anon and renamed it Klak'anon and are mass producing themselves and imbuing themselves with magic. Yeah, great, like the gnomes weren't bad enough themselves!

Anyway, Archer Aarkan Heartsting of Quellious went from level 44 to 49 there and I had a blast. After some cleanup of my inventory and some disappointing exploration of Everfrost I went down to Ro, the level 50-60 island of the first expansion. I'll let you know how that goes.

On another note, I bought 6 packs of Legends of Norrath cards today and got no loot but now I hope to make my own deck and maybe get good at this game. I've gotta figure out a good setup to have EQ2 on one screen and LoN on the other.