Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

A few months ago I used my Station Pass (which was originally subscribed to for Vanguard and EverQuest 2) to jump onto the pre-boarding for Pirates of the Burning Sea. I have to admit that at the time I had an absolute blast with my British Naval Officer, Rayda Skaldensen (obviously taking a break from being a Dwarf for a while) who quickly rose to level twelve in time for release, just in time to procure himself a very admirable battle ship and one of the first you can acquire with front and rear mounted cannons for a full three-sixty-degree arc of death!

Despite my exposure to EQ1 not being enough that I really found out how to go about Armour quests I knew of them. In fact Miglok was given his first AQ fairly early on, I had never encountered these things before so the idea of farming animals, adding their elements to a box, then hitting ‘combine’ was a novel one but I never got around to exploring it. Frankly, the drops were scarce and this was in the days before I really bothered to research anything in-game.

Times change so Hinjani is looking for a nice set of plate armour now that he’s reached his twenties, so a quick look on EQ2Wikia (Nowhere near as user-friendly as wowwiki is but it’ll do) sent me straight to what I needed. As an Inquisitor, thus someone with questionable morals (though Hinjani has great morals, he’s just acting the rogue to keep in with the Freeport lot) my quest will take me to Dyric Pire who will give me Custom Fitted Armor - Part 1.

This is my reward, when I work through all six stages of the quest I will be left with Armor of Dark Arbitration, a tier 3 armour set.
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So what could be enough to drag me away from my usual “What do I feel like tonight?” tour of World of Warcraft, EverQuest 2 and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2? (My current new obsession I should add, though to be honest it’s nowhere near as enjoyable as Call of Duty 4 and Gears of War.)

Call of Duty 4 Variety Map Pack. Four new multiplayer maps!

There’s ‘Creek’, a departure from other CoD4 maps with wide open fields and numerous farmhouses in disrepair scattered around. This is the map I’ve had a chance to test and it’s certainly a very different affair to that which I’m used to, it’s open environment has made it fairly easy to get picked off unexpectedly.

Then we have ‘Broadcast’, a multiplayer modified version of the slaughter fest that was the single player map ‘Charlie Don’t Surf’, set as you may have guessed in an Arab TV station.

‘Kill House’ sounds like an exciting change, a small and tight recreation of a training kill house as the name implies, with lots of chipboard walls and mocked up buildings.

Finally the one that really excites me is the import of Call of Duty’s Carentan level. However for CoD4 it’s been modernised with a conversion to a Chinatown theme and apparently it’s set at night…which is also a fun setting.

It 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.
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