Curious, not excited?

Velious is almost upon us. I have been doing some digging since the NDA has been lifted and the screenshots and information seems to have flooded on to the web. There are some new stuff that I am liking. One is quite a small update really and to be honest I don’t know if it even forms part of the expansion or is simply a general update. But I’m most definitely loving the in game calendar for guild use. That thing is going to be invaluable to me. Mainly because I cannot tell you how much of a struggle it is to get folks in my guild to head to the website to sign up for events and as such attendance really does end up being a lotto of who is online at the time and willing to join in. With the calendar option I really do think it will boost attendance to our events massively. We are a large guild and most of the members are keen to get involved with such events, but as they generally don’t use the website and therefore don’t know when they are, a lot miss out the events offered.

New Events Calendar

Other screenshots I have been looking at look pretty good and one of the things that interests me the most is the fact that the flying mounts can be used in pre-Velious zones. Apparently some lend themselves well to flying around, like the KoS zones, but others like smaller restricted zones such as Everfrost will apparently be a bit more useless EQ2Wire tells us. Whatever they are like I must admit I am curious to give the flying mount a go. Some have told me it is tough to control though, although admittedly others seem to have got the hang of things rather quickly. I am most definitely looking forward to exploring the SF expansion on flying mount.

Back to EQ2Wire! They have really been coming up with the goods to prepare those of us who weren’t on beta for the expansion. Click here to get access to their DoV AA Calculator, so you can get a good look at the new lines you will have available. I must say from a Bruiser point of view, I’m looking forward to getting enough AAs to hook up the Combat Mastery skill. That thing looks awesome! All combat arts hit for max damage for the whole group. Lasts 18 seconds with a recast of 3 minutes. I bet that’s pretty darn useful and I reckon will guarantee me a spot in my raid force in the melee group. Predators and Rogues are gonna love me. Gonna have to hit the questing hard to get Volts AAs up though. He will need another 49 points to be able to get and use Combat Mastery. You need 275 spent overall and 40 spent within the new ‘Heroic’ tree. A few AA potions whilst questing and grinding will do that quite easily I’m sure. Tag Team and Stone Cold seem very nice too for Brawlers.

The lethargy I have been experiencing with the game usually goes away for a time after a new expansion is released, although normally when an expansion comes out there isn’t so much change within the equipment stats and the mechanics of the game. Having said that with SF we did get quite a few changes in itemisation and procs I guess. I just hope it doesn’t affect gameplay too much and not having experienced Beta, I only have info passed to me to go on. Here’s a list of the expansions so far and a few brief thoughts on each.

Desert of Flames: Great expansion, but not so much on release. A lot of good content added later. Fun exploring Deserts. My first great title ‘The Ebon Dragon’. Court faction intensive.

Kingdom of Sky: Not so much fun apart from in TT. I did like the raiding in this expansion though. Deathtoll was an amazing zone.

Echoes of Faydwer: Too flowery for me. I did like the raids although Emerald halls was a bit too large.

Rise of Kunark: One of my faves. The many many new overland zones and some great instances made this a really meaty expansion for me.

The Shadow Odyssey: Loads of good quests and some cracking instanced zones. Heralded the start of ‘shards’ and sub currencies making item progression a bit more linear and easier for thickies like me to understand. Moors way way too dreary.

Sentinel’s Fate: Good content, not enough of it in contested overland zones. The Hole was OK, but didn’t light my fire. Raiding was fun but became repetitive.

Destiny of Velious: High hopes for locations, but shame there are only two overland zones. A little concerned as to how the mechanics / itemisation changes will affect gameplay.

I guess we’ll see what happens come 22nd February!

Be well.