Journeys with Jaye

All Mythical’d Up

My 3 year old son got his mythical yesterday.

Oh, sure, it was just a tinker toy wand.  But in the right hands, (his) and with the right flick of the wrist, it became a projectile-launcher of epic proportions.  In one fell swoop, from across the room, my son was able to use his wand to send the big round wooden wheel on the end of it right through the glass of a nicely framed picture in the living room.

Regardium Leviosa punks!

Above: My son’s Wizard 101 avatar, the inspiration behind the tinker toy wand.

As I sat there picking tiny shards of glass off the couch cushions, I got thinking about the progress that our guild has made in getting mythical weapons.  The big push began around the start of the summer, and we now have over 50 characters with mythicals.  Last week, we raided with a fully myth’d raid force, a guild first.  For a casual guild like ours, it certainly was not easy, and there were a few times where I really wondered if we really would be able to do it, but the guild stuck with it and pulled it off.

Mythicals aren’t just shiny “look at me” status toys.  It goes well beyond the “momentary pause in Norrath” serverwide broadcast.  For dps classes, mythicals practically double your dps output.  For healers and utility classes, they provide game changing buffs and effects.  Raiding with myths vs without is like night vs day.  So when players make resentful statements about how mythicals are just shiny carrots on sticks, and how efforts to get them are just another example of nerdy hardcores trying to show off their uberness, they totally miss the mark.

It’s interesting to look back at the evolution of “epic” weapons from the early days of Everquest, to today’s Everquest 2.  In the early years of EQ, epics were important because they defined your class.  They were supposed to be something that not everyone could get, and in fact, only a very few, rather sleep-deprived players actually did get them for a long while.   But there’s an important difference between the EQ epics of old and the mythicals of EQ2 today – in EQ, there was no raid cap.  So if there were 4 clerics with their sprinklers, or 2 mages with their skittle epics, and you were without, it was no problem to have you along.

Times have changed, though, and MMOs now have set limits on the number of people you can take to a raid.  In EQ2, it’s either 12 or 24, depending on the zone.  So if you’re that 7th healer, and the other 6 have mythicals, you’re probably out of luck that night if the raid is overfull.  The problem gets even more pronounced going forward, because content will always have to be designed around mythicals.  It’s practically a requirement now that you have your mythical in order to to raid current endgame content.  So epic weapons have evolved over the past decade, from something that only a few actually can get, to something that everyone is expected to have.

I’ve talked a lot about barriers to grouping, and complained about all of the hurdles that people have to get over in order to do something meaningful together.  Levels, class balance, quest synchronization, access flags, and group/raid caps are just a few of the many things that prevent people from playing together.  In EQ2, you can now add mythical weapons to the list.  Mythicals are so important in the game, that upgrades with the next expansion are supposed to actually incorporate the mythical’s features somehow, so players will still want to get them even though it’s a reward from two expansions ago.  How much fun will that be for a newer player, desperately trying to catch up, and needing to find a raid that will want to go back in to 2 year old content for one mythical update.  Sign me up!

Above:  I know this entry is about EQ2 and I only have Wizard 101 screenshots.  But if I put in a picture of my son’s toon, it goes without saying I need to add in my daughter’s.  Note the purple dragon!

Getting mythicals in EQ2 is much easier now, after they significantly toned down Venril Sathir and Nexona, and then dropped the barrier to the second wing in Veeshan’s Peak, which allowed guilds to skip the tough first wing mobs of Nexona and Druushk.  Funny how they nerfed all that stuff right after we got past it, by the way.  /grumble.  But mythicals are still something that requires a lot of help from a lot of people, meaning that they are now yet another form of backflagging in an MMO.

I’m not sure what the easy solution is though.  Nerfing content helps, as will the increase in the level cap in February, but you can’t nerf the content too much – it is supposed to be mythical after all.   Designing content around the easier to acquire fabled epic doesn’t work either, since too many will blow right through too quickly.  Completely abandoning mythicals and itemizing replacements for them in the next expansion basically removes the notion that these weapons are epic and mythical.  Lifting raid caps is a solution I’d love to see, for more reasons than just the epic weapon conundrum.  But with instancing and the way content is tuned, that’s a difficult task.

All of a sudden, those tinker toys are looking better and better!

Posted by jayernh under Uncategorized | Comments (7)