Interest in EQ2, More Rift Stuff, and More SWTOR thoughts as well

EQ2 stuff 1st:  I decided to buy the new expansion coming out early next month and re-subbed to EQ2 in order to re-familiarize myself with the game.  I played a couple of evenings, found a guild of “old-timers” (ages 30+ IRL) to join, had the “Thorg Armor” crafted for my level 90 toons, was very disappointed that it was WAY better than the other armor pieces that I either endlessly ran instances ot get enough tokens to buy or else was rare drops from those instances, and also finally ran the Cella instance on my SK in order to complete my Mythical Conversion quest.  All in all fairly productive time.

And after that I simply wasn’t interested in logging in again.  I don’t feel like leveling up alts, I don’t feel like running instances.  Frankly, I don’t feel like logging in at all.  EQ2 wasn’t boring to me, but it was uninteresting.  So I canceled the subscription, canceled the pre-order of the expansion, and I think I just might be completely done with EQ2 after all.

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Rift dropped patch 1.6 recently.  The only thing in it that’s really affected me is that there’s a new level 50+ zone added for my capped toons to play in and some of the souls in mage and rogue were re-done so I had to re-allocate some points.  I’ve done some minor exploration of the new area (see the screenshot 😛 ), but right now I’m more interested in leveling up my 2 non-capped toons on Faeblight, so my mage is now level 32 and my rogue is level 38 and both are steadily climbing.

Something I actually like about Rift is the way the skill trees seem to have enough “good stuff” in them that there’s almost always something just a point or 2 out of reach that you want to level up so you can get it.  Even if that “just out of reach” thing is on a different soul tree.  Right now on my rogue, for example, 1 build I’m working toward is a “melee ranger” (also called the Hoku spec).  It has 23 points in Bladedancer soul, 24 points in Ranger, and 19 in Assassin.  I’ve got the 23 and 24 in BD and Ranger, but only 3 in Assassin as of yet.  And there’s a nice skill called “Puncture” that I get with 6 points in the soul, so it’s only 2 levels away (since I get 2 points at level 39) so…. there’s incentive.  More “good stuff at 12, 15, 18, and 19 points as well, so no goal feels like it’s very far off.  And thus my interest is still piqued and Rift keeps me logging in, even if not on my capped out toons that I don’t want to endlessly grind instances on.

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Finally, SWTOR Beta.  I was in it 2 weeks ago, but not last week, and then again this week.  No character wipes yet, so I even had rested XP on the ones I’d logged out in cantinas.  TBH, since I know i plan to play as a Trooper at launch and didn’t want to spoil any of that story, I wasn’t all that excited about logging in this weekend.  But since I had the bonus xp sitting there and I did kinda want to see the animations for the dual-bladed lightsaber, I fired up the Jedi Consular and played with it.

Due to having the rested xp and my penchant for “grinding” any red mob between me and a quest objective (no avoiding mobs for me) and also that I got in a group for the “Chamber of Speech” heroic quest, well….. at the point the story seemed to think I was level 7, maybe approaching level 8, I was already level 10.  Once I hit 10 I decided to see if I could go up to the fleet and get my advanced class, and. . . yup, sure could.  So suddenly I had these nice passive skills as a Jedi Shadow and a nice Blue-level dual-bladed lightsaber.  It started green — the consular color — but we all got the pre-order crystal in the mail so I slotted that in and it turned it black with a yellow outline.  I tried to get a few screenies, but the beta client doesn’t do them and apparently it somehow disabled my Windows thing too, as when I tried to paste into MS Paint it didn’t work either.  And no, I don’t have any other things like SnagIt or whatever, so. . oh well.

My next fight vs multiple mobs back on Tython was kinda fun as the toon would flip the saber back behind her to block attacks.  I don’t know that it was actually blocking or just animating that it was, but it did make it look pretty cool.  Sadly, this did break some immersion, as the next series in my story line sent me to go craft my 1st lightsaber.  Except I already had one I’d been given up in the fleet.  But I still got up to “The Forge” and said “Finally!  A lightsaber!” just before crafting it.  And after crafting that (single-bladed) saber (which wasn’t as good as my dual-bladed one so I didn’t use it at all) I went back to my master and the Jedi Council who I’d already talked to with the saber-staff hanging from my belt and they made a big deal that since I *now* had a lightsaber that meant I was no longer a Padawan.  Oops!

After I’d done that, I didn’t really feel like “testing” anymore.  Anything I do will be wiped anyway, and I’m really only interested in the Trooper class to start and didn’t want to go past the level 10 I already did 2 weeks ago on it and just be repeating content once the go-live happens.  All in all, still enjoyable, but I want the launch to happen before I do anything more.

My only complaint about this beta was that the “Next Target” and “Closest Target” keys never worked for me.  I asked in chat and was told they were buggy, so I ended up just click-targeting everything or letting the “auto-target-back” feature move me on to the next mob that was attacking me.  Not really enjoyable as a melee class with a forced close-in camera so it was hard to see or click on things behind me, but not the end of the world either.