Not flaming, just commenting;

How did you miss that its only geared to 35+? Every snippet you could possibly read about it stated that it was intended for mid-high level characters. I think it says it on the box even. I went there with my level 31, and did just fine.

Also.. when you /con something, you can tell if its going to attack you or not. In your screenshot even, it says the "shadow guardian conned indefferent - What do you want your tombstone to say" Notice the INDIFFERENT part..that means its not going to attack you :) Until it cons ready to attack or threatening, then you should be just fine.

I am sure you would change your opinion of Velious if you had 10 more levels, and a couple friends to go explore with. I have yet to leave there since adventuring there the first day. Its phenomonal.

"How did you miss that its only geared to 35+? Every snippet you could possibly read about it stated that it was intended for mid-high level characters. I think it says it on the box even. I went there with my level 31, and did just fine."

Oh, I knew it was for levels 30+, but since I wanted to write about it, I went there anyway. Believe me, the box doesn't make it clear and not everyone knows that. It would have been easy for Verant to simply put a warning on the box: "Warning: Velious is designed for levels 30 and higher, so if you don't have a character that high, you will have problems" or something like that. Maybe I missed it, but all I could see on the box was "Dozens of quests for levels 35+", which is pretty ambigious.

My second night there I took the boat with a level 20 character who had no idea it was too high for him.

This isn't a criticism of the gameplay in the expansion, but the marketing. The gameplay seems solid. I mean, it's Everquest. If you like the game, you'll like the expansion. If you don't like it, I doubt the expansion will change your mind.

You should take a look at http://boards.station.sony.com/everquest/Forum2/HTML/051721.html (semi-random pick, half a dozen other similar threads would do as well).

The gist of the matter is that the SoV mobs hit for insane amounts (compared to non-SoV mobs of similar level) and have extremely high magic resistance, rendering enchanters (and to a lesser extent clerics) useless. This is having a ripple effect on all the other classes, because without clerics and enchanters the mobs are too tough to deal with.

Result: SoV is shaping up to be a failure.

These guys obviously have HUGE amounts of time to devote to EverQuest. I was amazed at the encyclopaedic posts devoted to the subject.

You should see it when someone asks a question like "What is the haste percentage on a as campare to ?". They whip out statistics that obviously took a few people several days worth of testing to figure out.

I'm glad there are people out there like them to figure this stuff out, because frankly there is no way in hell I'm going to sit there with a calculator and a stopwatch to figure out which item is more efficient or whatever.

Well, log analyzers make it a little easier, but I hear ya.

CALCULATOR AND A STOPWATCH!! LOG ANALYZERS!!! w00t! Sounds like *someone* is having fun!

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Mark, are you ever going to finish your Scars preview? It still says "Tomorrow's installment: Corpse retrieval and then more sightseeing." on an article written December 20...

Not complaining, but if you're not coming back to it, it might be better to edit the ending to say so.

Ack! Yeah, I should do something about that. My halfling is still sitting on an ice floe somewhere, cowering for his life in that too-high-level expansion.