I'm in a much different situation playing EQ2 today than I was back in the height of my EQLive days. I used to raid every night (except Friday, the off night) from the time I got home from work until about 2am, religiously. This had a couple of ill effects, one being the lines between what happened in EQ and what happened in the real world sometimes blurred a bit, but it was all in good fun. The upside was that I was really quite uber, and nothing beats seeing a group of 60 or so players work together perfectly for hours on end to defeat raid events. This used to be what I played MMOs for.

Now I have a son, and I'm having a little bit of trouble adjusting my gameplay. Not that I'm playing too much (I'm not), it's that I don't play enough to join a high end guild and raid every night. So the question is, what the hell do I do now?

One thing I've found that I enjoy is seeking one of the more uncommon titles for my character: Treasure Hunter. A player receives this when they've recovered five heritage items. Heritage items are pieces of notable gear from EQLive. Things such as the Ghoulbane, Guise of the Deceiver, and Serrated Bone Dirk. Most of the items can be soloed or done with a single group, which is easily doable for me. Generally the quests also require a good bit of time and effort, so not every monkey with a keyboard can complete them (at least for the time being).

Right now I'm working on the Legendary Journeyman's Boots. This quest requires you to race against a set time in seven zones across Norrath, some of which are fairly hostile. It's a nice change of pace from your usual quest, and a nod to the guilds that used to have lowbie races across Antonica in EQLive.

Things like that have kept me interested so far, but who can say over the next few months. I'm still not quite 40, so 50 is probably at least a couple of months out.

I would now to take a minute to complain about how they did character power advancement in EQ2. It's on such a smooth ramp it's like I hardly advance at all. I get new spells and find they don't give a big power boost, they are the starting point for a smooth curve of advancement for the next 16 levels or so. For example, if I get a nuke at level 20 and it does 50 points of damage, when I get to 30 the same spell will do 70. I then get a new version of my main nuke at 31 or so, and it will do 75. At 40 it will do 95, scaling by a constant, BORING few hitpoints each time I level. So the power curve on my main nuke would make a nice even graph from level 1 to 50, all smoothed out with no jagged edges or spikes like some watered down lowest-common-denominator network TV show. Man I hate that...I want my new nuke to blow things up, not advance smoothly throughout my characters life! It sucks!