EQ2: a game of cat and mouse

I created a new character in Everquest 2 to play with a friend while showing him the game. After some discussion I ended up creating a Defiler cleric and he chose a Monk tank. This pair need to be able to handle themselves if we’re to do dungeons in later levels (with the odd mercenary to assist), so a tank+healer duo seemed prudent.

A cat and a rat went to Neriak

Everquest 2 has so many choices of classes, races and starter zones – with restrictions on what combinations you can choose. I’m no expert, but I had an idea of what starter zones to recommend trying (Neriak or Gorowyn). For races, the friend chose Ratonga, and I had chosen Ferra. So when our characters entered the world, it was as though we’d recreated a heroic version of the cat and mouse.

In the first session we played through the first couple of quest hubs of this Dark Elf starter zone. The levels come quickly enough, by the end of the session our character had hit level 8 and had a hotbar’s worth of abilities already. Heroic opportunities are now available so I can finally get some experience of trying to complete them in a group – I’ve mostly solo’ed in this game over the years.

The profusion of classes and races is one of the reasons why I recommended we try EQ2 over other, older, MMORPGs. The game also has some systems that help make duo gameplay that much more viable – mercenaries, mentoring (if one of us gets out of sync level-wise) and chronomancy level-sync so we can repeat lower level dungeons for variety.

The cat, err … tiger.

This close to the Legion launch we’ll not have that many opportunities to play I suppose, but it’s something we’ve talked about trying for quite some time and will be an activity to come back to when my husband is raiding in WoW later in the year.