Race change potions have been added to the Station Marketplace in EQ2, and I was more than willingly to indulge myself in one. For quite sometime, I’ve been wanting to be an Erudite instead of a High Elf. I love the mysterious and alien look of the Erudite. It is as if in they’ve neglected their corporal form in the search of magic and the amount of power in them have twisted them into what looks like a twisted shriveled body, but one that contains pure power. In a way, it is like a cross between the Emperor from Star Wars and Voldemort from the Harry Potter series.

The potion can be bought for 2500 station cash, the same as what it takes for a character transfer. Some people however, are visibly upset with the race change potions. As Stargrace kindly pointed out to me, this would let someone be a Dark Elf Paladin easily instead of having to make a Shadowknight and betray it over, making some combinations of race and class easily obtainable without any effort.

Carrying on from where I left off yesterday, I assembled a group this morning in a vain attempt to kill Varsoon and finish up yesterday’s instance. After which, I spent the next couple hours spamming the channels looking a Palace of Ferzhul group while grinding out some writs. I even had time to spare, drawing a flowchart of how terrible my weekends are should anyone ask on the following work day.

In the mist of spamming LFGs, I learnt how to use Visio too. No more PowerPoint flowcharts for me.

The day didn’t just end there. I was saved by Latharek late the in afternoon who put together a PoF group for me. That’s the guy who also helped me get my T4 armor too. I owe him lots. Since our group’s Troubadour also had a saved Varsoon only instance of PoF, there was some confusion in determining whose instance, whether mine or his, to use so that one of us wouldn’t get the ‘you may not enter an instance created prior to when your previous instances minimum lockout timer expired’ message. I’ve never had an issue understanding the message, but it can be confusing for some. For heroic zones with a typical 18 hours lockout, what it simply means is that, if you zone into and instance and have a lockout starting at 0100h, you won’t be able to enter another person’s instance unless it his lockout started after 1900h on that day. How did I get the latter number? Time my instance was created + lockout time (18h). It’s only fair because otherwise could constantly do another instance someone else created and never having a lockout yourself. Perhaps I worded it badly, and still do, thus I ended up drawing a small diagram to explain.

Hope I made sense.

Back to the group, we ended up killing Varsoon twice. First time using the saved instance which was cleared up to Varsoon and incurring no lockout penalty, and then resetting it and clearing the whole zone again. Finally, I have my Dagger of the Ethernaut Magus, and wrapped up the TSO signature line. I plan to finish up the signatures and weapon quests from other expansions too eventually, but that’s for another day.

I wasn’t satisfied with just walking away from Varsoon after dying ten over times to him in Palace of Ferzhul. No, I had to get even somehow. As the popular saying goes, pick on someone your one size. Thus, I paid the Chronomagic NPC a visit, lowered myself to level 35, and served another copy of him his just desserts.

My fun with Chronomagic didn’t just end there. Along with the auto-mentoring system, SOE also added daily missions for them, just like the current shard daily doubles. Basically, the quests are a way to encourage and reintroduce old instances to people and get them grouping in those places again. The quest would send you back to an instance that is at least one tier behind your currently level, requiring you to mentor down, either by having a lower level friend, or by using the Chronomagic NPC. The zone for today was the Crypt of Valdoon in Looping Plains. I had a full group of people ranging from 77-80s mentored down to 70 for it, and it was cake.

The reward was pretty spiffy. It gave +1000 faction with the Chronomancers, which could be used to buy fluff armor when you have accumulated enough. However, that’s not all. It also gives you a choice to buy a miniature replica of whichever boss in the zone you had to kill for the daily mission for a bit over a plat. In this case, it was Count Valdoon Kel’Novar.

I’ve hardly explored much of the GU53 content, but I’m pleased with what I’ve seen so far.

Some people can be extremely religious about their group setups. They will not want to group unless the group consists of certain exact classes, and/or that the certain classes having certain specific gear. I had people in two different groups bail on me today because the setup wasn’t what they liked, even though the group in question would have been able to do the instance regardless because it was an easy one. One of them happens to Deep Forge – probably the easiest shard zone in game.

The classes in EQ2 can roughly be broken down into four different types. Tank, damage dealer, healer and utility. The bare minimum for a group would typically consist of one tank, a healer, one damage dealer and any others. This combination will work for most zones in game, although it might not be the most efficient. Compared to certain games such as Lineage 2, EQ2′s group system is rather ad-hoc without stringent requirements on group setup. Having certain classes might make a zone go faster, but without it, it’s still doable.

The question comes when deciding if you should just grab whatever classes are available and go, or wait for the right classes before starting. Unless the zone has specific needs, such as encounters requiring mezzes, and both choosing either option would let me finish the zone, I’m in favor of the former. Isn’t it better to start hunting when you can and make progress, rather than sitting around waiting forever to get the right classes? In today’s Deep Forge example, people bailed because we had two healers and they felt that was inefficient in terms of kill speed, even though it would only result in no more than a ten minutes different in completing in zone.

At the end of the day, the people who left formed their own group, and by the time we completed Deep Forge, they were still looking for the right classes.