A New Guild
Posted by: Mike in EverQuest 2, Gaming, Hinjani Lifegiver, Human Cleric, Rayda Skaldensen, Dwarf Paladin, World of WarcraftIt occurs to me that I never did follow up my post in December about reinstalling EverQuest 2. Well after the reinstallation which included a full patch up of all the expansions released so far, I decided to start with a fresh view on the world so I chose to make a Human Inquisitor (basically a Cleric/Healer class) named Hinjani, who I began in Timorous Deep. Timorous is one of the old world zones which made a highly anticipated return when the new design team took over and realised that what all EverQuest 2 players really yearn for are EverQuest 1 zones remade. New content would be wonderful but nobody could really accept that Norrath’s citizens would start from scratch and not remember the lands that existed before the cataclysm that occurred between EQ1 and EQ2.
So Timorous Deep it was, which turned out to be a good choice also because the dev team designed it clearly to be a way to progress players quite rapidly through the less glamorous first twenty levels. Before I knew it Hinjani had a nice selection of plate armour, a number of AAs (something I never really got to experience in EverQuest 1) and was able to choose his surname. As a tribute to Richard Lawson’s EverQuest 1 cleric who inspired me to make Hinjani, I chose the surname ‘Lifegiver’. It’s pleasant being a battle cleric, I have ‘reactive heals’ which basically heal me every time I’m hit allowing me to solo quite effectively when I want to as well as making me a promising future Raid healer. I also have my all time favourite spell, Enduring Breath to allow me to breathe underwater, as well as a very nice rez spell.
I progressed on from Timorous Deep and followed the aviak plotline all the way to my all time favourite land from EQ1, Butcherblock Mountains. The mountains were the former home of Norrath’s Rayda who hailed from the city of Kaladim which still stand in EQ2 today yet is now infested by kobolds. I feel some vengeance coming. However as I was working my way through the twenties I realised that I was missing a fun element, I needed people to game with. I’ll admit to some selfish motives such as a desire to give Raiding a try as well as wanting help with my quests however what I really just wanted was a community, people to talk to and get to know.
So there I was considering the Guild Search functionality that EQ2 has cleverly included for Guilds to recruit with when I got a tell from Narlia. Part of a husband and wife leadership team, they were recruiting for Burning Dawn. Normally I’m a little wary of Pick Up Guilds however this is EverQuest 2, not World of Warcraft and the community in EQ2 is very friendly. I decided I had nothing to lose so I accepted the invite and was pleasantly surprised by their recruiting speel. The perfect Guild, they’re casual, purely there to help each other out and they also Raid. In fact I noticed they had enough members to be able to Raid and are apparently already doing so, so this pleased me too.
It’s early days and I’ll let you all know how it goes, I’ll go on later and have a chat with them while I try out any new Game Update #44 items that affect me.
As for EverQuest 2, it’s a total blast now. The opening flaws have apparently been dealt with quite nicely, the introduction of more starter towns rather than a good and evil city is very welcome, it’s wonderful to see the old world again and the community is superb. Performance wise, well it’s been years since I played through the launch of EQ2 and thanks to a more modern machine and a nifty little program which automagically strips Windows XP down to it’s essential components (even the shell is shut down) I’m running with some wonderful eye candy at a more than comfortable frame rate. I even have bloom effect and high quality lighting which is a must I have to say, it removes much of the plastic/cartoony elements of the game that are present on low graphics settings.
Tags: burning dawn, cleric, eq1, EQ2, Hinjani, inquisitor, norath, rayda, World of Warcraft
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April 9th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
I wish to know of this automagical program and if it can help me
April 10th, 2008 at 12:53 am
The program is AlacrityPC (http://alacritypc.kensalter.com/), it has instructions in there but basically when you install, the program has two ‘profiles’ already existing, XP and Vista. You can either run your program and then alt-tab out, open Alacrity and run the XP profile…it won’t shut down your game, virus scanner or firewall, just the background processes. Don’t panic, it shuts down the shell by default too as Explorer can take a huge chunk of memory.
The way I do it is to use it’s autoplay functionality though. Hit ‘file’ then ‘new’ and on the first tab that comes up will be a profile option set to ‘Top Level’. Change that to XP and it will inherit all of the settings from the XP profile, then all you need to do is go to the autostart tab, hit ‘add’ and then browse to the game you want it to run. It will launch the game once it’s shut off all the processes.
Oh, it defrags memory very quickly before it runs the game too so you really do have barely anything running. I was able to bump EQ2 up almost 2 graphics settings, lots of real eye candy going on and I’m getting a comfortable frame-rate. All my games saw about a 10fps boost which was enough to run them comfortably.