EverQuest: Legends update -
Dumstah, the Kerran hit level 11 last night. I had originally planned on playing Druid/Magician/Bard and tried that out for a bit. Once you hit level 10 you get to chose your third class, and as such I did pick Bard.
Honestly I found it to not really be beneficial. Perhaps I'm just not that good at Bard. I did find that the Mage pet was pretty powerful. Especially the water pet, which is a rogue, and have the ability to Backstab. So I found I could tank and let the pet do lots of damage. However a lot of the mobs in this game are really tough.
It's funny in a way. Your character is WAAAY stronger than in traditional EQ, but because of that you end up just fighting stronger mobs. So sure, anything even leveled is a cake walk, but you're likely going to be doing battle with stuff ~5 levels higher than you. There's also a difficulty modifier. Every zone is essentially an instance, and there are 5* of each. D0-D4. D0 is just the standard version of the zone. As you scale up though, the mobs get stronger and stronger. They are also more likely to be multiclassed themselves. So for instance you go into the D0 version of BlackBurrow, and most of the common Gnolls you fight will be warriors, monks, rogues, and the like. Even the rare, named mobs will be single classes, or potentially dual-classed. You bounce up to D1 and these rare mobs start dual classing more, and you may see some of the common mobs picking up a second class. I haven't tried it myself, but apparently at D4 most mobs have two classes.
*There is also additional instancing. If the open version of one zone gets overpopulated they will open more instances to ease congestion.
In addition to the diffIculty instances, you can also create a limited number of private instances. This is a really cool feature. You can spin up a private instance of any zone for yourself, or your group and not have to share. You can also set whether or not you want the mobs to respawn, which is really neat. I've been a really casual EQ player my whole life, so I've never really gotten to experience a lot of these dungeons, and the ones I have experienced I haven't seen much of. So I like to set the zones to not respawn mobs, so I can work my way through them at my own pace and not have to worry about stuff respawning behind me.
Back to my class however. The Mage pet is really powerful, but I found a disconnect in my build. The mage is well equipped for single target damage, whereas the Bard is more of a group buffer, and a AOE debuffer/damager. I found I was mostly single pulling mobs anyway, and my Druid buffs are good enough that I was leaning on those more than the Bard ones.
While the Mage is my favorite class, I also found that dumping large amounts of damage into each mob was really mana intensive. So I tweaked some stuff and re-set my classes to Druid/Necromancer/Warrior. This has proven to be a pretty good mix for my playstyle. I find a camp with a couple of baddies in it, and I'll root the biggest one, and drop some of the Necro DoTs on it. Then when the other one or two smaller mobs run at me I'll drop some smaller DoTs on each of them, and beat them down with my big 2-handed hammer and the assistance of my Necro pet, which is a bit weaker than the Mage one, but still effective.
Something interesting about this game, is that you only get one character slot. So you can't really make alts, but you can change your classes seemingly at will, as long as you're in a city. You can also unlock other races, and change that as well. I'm currently working on unlocking the good Elven races (Wood Elf, High Elf, Half Elf.) as they're some of the easier ones to do.
All in all, I'm really enjoying the game. It's giving me exactly the experience I want from EQ, and that's the ability to play through and see all the content at my own pace. I'm currently doing Befallen, which was a zone I never really got to play much. In EverQuest 2 however, my favorite dungeon was Stormhold, which is essentially Befallen. (From what I've heard, during the early development period, it was supposed to actually be, just Befallen. But some things changed and they wanted it by Qeynos instead of Freeport so they made it connected through the lore, and renamed it, making it just the successor dungeon instead.) So it's really neat to see the design and what's similar/different. Funny enough, the dungeon floor is tiled in a black/white checkerboard pattern and the tiles are rather large. Roughly the size of one mob. Perhaps not 5ft, but close enough. I'm tempted to break out some graph paper and map it out as I play it, and treat it like an old school experience. OG EQ didn't have in-game maps, and it makes me wonder how many early adventurers were manually mapping dungeons on paper back in 1999.
