With Everquest 2’s Rise of Kunark expansion on the horizon less than 2 months away, a new quest has appeared to get players involved and excited. The Iksar far from the lost continent are attacking Norrathian boats and it’s your job to protect the next vessel going out to sea.

What’s interesting here is that this quest is set up in classic storytelling structure. Allow me to demonstrate.

The Setup - This is one of the first things you hear from the crew when the instanced event begins:

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One of the reasons I love my World of Warcraft druid is the versatility of the class. WoW druids can customize their abilites many different ways: healing centric, melee dps/tank centric and spell damage centric. For awhile, I was spell damage centric aka Moonkin aka Balance specced. I started looking for gear to enhance my spell damage and found it hard to come by for my class.

At the same time, David Bowers, my fellow Shifting Perspectives druid class columnist at WoW Insider posted a feature highlighting gear available to non-raiding tank specced druids. Brilliant! I decided to focus my next feature on my current problem of gearing a non-raiding Balance specced druid. What I didn’t count on was my compulsion to be thorough.

Three feature length articles, five weeks and one sore pair of hands later, I completed my survey of gear for Moonkin druids leveling from 60 to 70 through The Burning Crusade expansion. You can check it out here:

• Part I - Chest, legs, head, shoulders, wrist and hand slots.
• Part II - Waist, feet and back slots.
• Part III - Neck, fingers, trinkets, two-handed weapons, one-handed weapons, off-hand and relics.

I couldn’t get to gems and enchants, so I linked the excellent coverage written on those two subjects by Fiordhraoi on his Balance of Power blog.

If you play a Shadow Priest, Warlock or Mage, you may also be interested in this third piece as many items are perfect for your damage specs as well.

Due to popular demand, I will continue the series, this time covering Restoration (healing) specced druids. I’ll link those up when they are done, probably some time in November.

ItemStats is a plug-in for WordPress bloggers that allows you to mouse over a World of Warcraft item link and get a small window with the stats. Behold the best tanking trinket in WoW for feral druids currently: [Badge of Tenacity].

It calls information from one of the many popular WoW database sites and displays it for your readers. You can also call up the item icon, like this one for the Badge linked above:

ItemStats1.5 works for Wordpress and many of the popular html portals (Joomla, PhpBB, PHPNuke, VBulletin, etc.). ItemStats doesn’t work for Blogger, but you can create the same effect with some html code. This excellent article describes the steps you need to take for your Blogspot site.

Now, go forth and item link like the wind.

In Patch 2.1, World of Warcraft introduce daily quests. Short, mostly solo quests that can be done, you guessed it, once a day. This is a great way to earn gold in the game. Since epic flying mount training costs 5000 gold, any way to earn cash is good. So I’ve thrown myself into exploring these quests.

The two bombing runs are quite fun. In one, you drop bombs on gigantic bird eggs all the while dodging the gigantic birds that laid those eggs. In the other quest, you must bomb ammo stacks which, of course, are sitting right next to the cannons that try to blow you out of the sky. I get a great WWII Red Baron vibe on that one.

It’s this other quest that is driving me a little crazy. You are asked to run into a mob infested crystal wasteland and wrangle a few Aether Rays (think Stingrays that float in the air.) This is me doing a little Ray rustlin’:

Good, clean fun, eh? The problem lies in the fact that the captured Rays follow you on a leash for a couple of minutes. So after you wrangle two or three, it’s impossible to see in third person view, or even first. The shot below is my entire screen with my UI turned off, not just a small window of my viewpoint.

See me? Neither can I. I’m at the end of my rope, uh, the rope. Did I mention the mob infested wastelands I was doing this in? Yeah, I made friends with a few real quick this way.

I’d love to see more daily quests, they are great fun, and this particular one had a unique and fun objective. But, in the future, how about no screen blocking autofollowing?

We all want the best items for our characters. But mixing and matching pieces of equipment can leave your character looking less like a bad ass and more like a clown at a kid’s party. For example, here is my mean, lean fighting machine in World of Warcraft, my feral druid:

All I need is a set of balloon animals and a red afro and I’m ready to conquer the 5 year old birthday celebration. And people wonder why I spend most of my playtime in cat form.

Everquest 2 has finally brought relief to it’s color blind players in its latest major patch, Game Update 38. Included in it is a second layer of visible equipment slots. Anything you put in there won’t add to your stats/armor/etc, but it will be the armor texture that is displayed. For example, here’s a screenshot comparison of my Bruiser, Katfight.

Admittedly, the armor on the left isn’t bad looking. But it is a complete set. Also, this guy is a monk-class, should he really be running around in that much heavy metal? When he first was created, he was granted a Gi that befits his class, but had only nominal stats. Fortunately, I never deleted it. Now I can have the appearance of his Gi, but the power and stats of his heavier looking armor.

Blizzard should definitely consider doing this in their game as well. They have already acknowledged the importance of appearance. In the next major expansion, Wrath of the Lich King; they are adding new hairstyles and dances. The least they can do is add functionality to make a raid look more like the Second Coming and less like Bring In The Clowns.