I played EQ for a year and logged 200 hours played (during high school). I’m just wrapping up my first year in college and I’ll have 4 months to kill (assuming I can’t find a co-op job) so I’m considering the evilness that is MMORPGs. One question about EQ in particular though: is travelling long distances still a bitch? When I quit my account, my monk had journeyman’s boots, which was the only thing that made it bearable. How difficult is it to get speed-enhancing items now?
Yes, even now, the addiction has stayed in me (I just finished the mainquests in Morrowind and the Tribunal expansion and am getting bored).
Traveling long distances is much easier now,if you have the Planes of Power expansion. It enables you to travel to the Plane of Knowledge (there are “PoK books” in most newbie zones,in safe spots outside cities,and away from guards). Once in PoK (Plane of Knowledge) you can go to “portal stones” and travel at the very least to the zone you want,and often outside the city you want too. Go to the site links I put up in a previous post and check it out. It’s much easier to travel now. (They aslo have a new cartography system with the Legacy of Ykesha expansion,which allows you to mark the location of the PoK books and such on the maps,if they are not already marked once the mapping process is done.)
No, JBoots are still a ridiculously long camp. So far I’ve not bothered to do it with any of my characters.
HOWEVER… once you hit level 50, you can put experience points into an alternate advancement skill that makes you run faster. This is a permanent buff - no clicking, no casting of spells, AND it works inside as well as outside (SoW only works in outdoor zones).
You can also buy a horse that runs almost as fast as bard speed, but that’ll cost you 100K plat. I think doing the JBoots quest would probably be easier.
The importance of SoW is downplayed as well by the gazillions of ports now available, free and easy. You no longer have to spend 30 minutes running from Zone A to Zone B to meet up with your buddies. You just pop up to PoK, run to the appropriate portal, and click on it and you’re there.
The Nexus has also become a zone where people vend their spells. Need a SoW? Pop to the Nexus and shout for one. Most of the time someone there will do it for donations, other buffs, or for free. Same with HP & Mana regen buffs. You can also typically find people there porting for donations, in the rare case that you’re going someplace where there isn’t a portal.
There is also an option to buy “traveler’s boots,” (I believe that’s the name). They are sold near the guy that sells tink bags. They have the same effect as jboots but aren’t insta cast.
I started out with UO very shortly after the beta, way before even the instant kill guards. I usually only played an hour or two a night, just a little chillin with my guildies, then setup my mule to macro mine in my guild’s tower. Those were very fun times until the GMs removed our guild and banned most of the people in it. SO WHAT if we took over Minoc for a couple of days? Thats no reason to BAN us. Anyway I played it for a few months after that but quit after they deleted my house for macro mining.
As for EQ, I got it then me and my roommate spent about 72 hours straight playing it. After that the months flew by until I realizerd ALL I did was play that game and everyonce in a while get a few hours of sleep in. Talk about thinking about the real world in EQ terms. I was a ranger, so on the few times I was out I would be sitting in the bar trying to figure out how to use my tracking skill to find a hot girl to cast “Calm Animal” on. Very weird.
I finally broke my addiction by spending about a month in the woods backpacking with some friends. Beats EverCrack ANY day.
