Sony continues to hedge its bets with EverQuest, even with the new EverQuest 2 on the horizon. The new expansion Omens of War introduces a whole slew of new stuff, pushes the level cap up for the first time since Planes of Power. The new top level is 70 and while it is rather tough to get there, within the first week of the expansion there were plenty of level 70 players on my server. The expansion also introduces more Alternate Abilities, most of which require levels above 65 to purchase. More spells, more zones, and more options for the higher level player. Some new zones also accommodate lower levels (meaning in the 40’s and 50’s) and new equipment reflects that diversity.
The new zones are quite detailed so watch out for your graphics card performance as it tries to chug to a halt. Thankfully there are more display options at your disposal, including some kind of refresh rate that you can decrease to help with the lag. Of course this is cryptic as usual so play with the settings until performance improves. The scenery in general is quite striking, and they have made some updates to current zone appearance as well.
So how do you get to the new zones this time? Instead of stone portals from the Plane of Knowledge, you have the greatly underused Priests of Discord, which are in your hometown, and also somewhat conveniently placed in PoK in front of the entrance to the Great Library. It’s that whole “discord” theme of the new expansion that probably prompted this brilliant idea. So you say to the PoD that you “wish to go” and you are whisked away (giving you enough time to invis up in case of unforseen trains) to Dranik’s Scar.
I can’t help but think maybe Sony stole some ideas from other MMORPGs, but well, I believe they all steal ideas from each other in the long run. One of the new concepts introduced is the “attuneable” item, which can be traded or switched around to other characters UNTIL it is equipped. Then it becomes flagged as “no-drop.” This is a nice safeguard against the accidental “ninja-loot” and gives an additional ability to equip other characters that may not be in the current group, allowing a piece to not go to waste.
Another highly anticipated part of this expansion is the new epic items for all classes. Currently the quests are still being figured out, but new NPCs have appeared across many of the old epic zones that will help you in the right direction. And if you don’t have your first epic you are able to go on a different version of the new epic quest. There are also reportedly two versions of the new epic, dubbed as “1.5” and “2.0” to distinguish them. Of course version 1.5 is still leaps and bounds better than version 1.0. Also, epic fights that require a raidforce contain other good drops for those helping the person getting their epic, to increase the appeal to help with those raids.
New spells from levels 66-70 seem to be mostly upgrades to previous versions of spells. However, many spells that used to give raw stat buffs now give an added percentage to an ability. For example, the upgrade to the Agility stat buff now gives a percent modification to Dodge. A buff that may look like a Strength stat buff (shown as a muscle arm icon) now gives a percent modification to damage dealt. The biggest problem with spells is the ability to get them, which is almost but not quite as bad as the Planes of Power spell gathering. In PoP you had to find ethereal and spectral parchments which were no-drop, and then turn them in for spells which were droppable. However the turn-ins were random so you didn’t know what spells you might get.
In OoW, the items you need are muramite runes, which have one type of rune per level. Minor muramite runes are for 66 spells, lesser muramite runes for 67, muramite runes for 68, greater muramite runes for 69, and glowing muramite runes for level 70, and ancient muramite runes for the level 70 ancient spells. 66-68 runes are droppable, but 69-70 are not (and only drop from raid-level targets). For melee classes these also will give you your level 66-70 disciplines. Once you have your rune, there is an NPC in the Dranik’s Scar zone which gives you back a spell of the corresponding level. Sony has made it so that you receive your spells in a certain order per level, and so you never receive the same spell twice (since the spells themselves are not droppable). This of course means all the good spells are at the end of the line so you have to do quite a bit of rune farming in order to obtain them.
One of the nicest parts of OoW is that there is only one zone in which you need to do trials and get a key to enter, and there are enough zones in OoW where you can get great experience and loot. There are also many instanced zones where you can take a group and explore, get experience and loot, get runes, etc. without those nasty mob “trains to zone” and kill-stealing from other groups.
Overall this is a good expansion to get for the high-end game, however to be honest it is quite easy to get to level 70 but then becomes frustrating when trying to farm for runes. Unlike PoP where parchments dropped fairly often and on trash mobs many times, in OoW the runes only drop from named mobs, but not always. With Everquest 2 and Worlds of Warcraft coming out soon, there will likely be a large decrease of interest in Everquest 1 even with all the new items, etc, and I highly doubt that with the amount of time to dedicate to developing a character in any MMORPG that people will be able to play both EQ1 and EQ2. Stay tuned!