Favorite Zone ever?

[Cathan]

Original EQ I really loved Rathe Mountains. In my 20s with Jboots I was able to easily kill giant skeletons and later cyclops and hill giants and even later the Sphinxes. I always thought there should have been some lore with the sphinxes or something should have been done with them. Hill Giants were what got me interested in EQ though, hearing my friends talk about them...

[Surlok TP]

Originally Posted by Cathan

Hill Giants were what got me interested in EQ though, hearing my friends talk about them...

This is probably the only instance I can think of where people purposefully killed a particular type of mob simply ofr the money it dropped. HG's were not the best XP but that zone always had a half dozen at least groups of people in it XPing on HG's just for plat and fine steel drops.

Do people still remember doing this? Once you could solo them you could get better money elsewhere but the gap between being able to gorup them,and solo them was pretty large and so they remained a popular XP spot for a long time thanks to the cash drops,and it was always a good place to hang out for /ooc drama over people KSing.

[kasey]

I remember walking past those people wondering why on earth they arent in cazicthule :P

[Blumpster]

I was always jealous of those people. I would solo on my Cleric as much as I could, root and nuke, but eventually it just wasn't acceptable how slow it was. Two kills for a whole mana bar, WOOO. Couldn't LFG for dungeons and solo at the same time, so it was one or the other.

Druids and Wizards. They had it easy, for the most part. I actually felt bad for Druids sometimes. They were just buff/port bots, and PL machines. Wizards were fairly gimpy too until 40+. Rend was bread and butter.

Cazic was banging. It was a cool zone because there was actually things that you could solo while LFG in there, like pulling gators up the well and stuff.

[Solariss]

Originally Posted by Fayvren

Most of the EQ zones when they had less than 20 maybe 25 players in them were fantastic. More than anything I think what made dungeons and zones interesting in EQ was that you really never knew where the "boss" was. More than likely you were going to get lost before you got there. The outdoor zones people list in EQ "benefit" in a similar way in that there were no built in maps then. You kinda just had to wander around until you figured it out and the process of doing so is probably why many people are nostalgic about them.

This probably why people love BRD instances in WoW as well. Until you really spent time there or had someone guide you, you just had NO idea where the heck you were going. It's one of the few instances where you kind of just explore and then finally it clicks.

Yeah, I remember the first time I was in line to get into the FBSS room group. That room was perma camped and you had to get on a list to get in there. I was finally called to join the group after hours of waiting and had no idea how to get down to the room. I remember looking at the map on eqatlas and being completely befuddled. I remember how risky it was to make the run down there with invis on too knowing that any second it could wear off and I'd be fucked... and probably end up without a group because I'd be in for one hell of a corpse run if I wasn't lucky enough to find a group in the area or somebody traveling down that way.

[dean_pritchard]

This is a hard question.

EQ
As far as pure zone quality goes, I would have to give it to the cazic thule temple. that place was great.I did most of my late 20s there. I loved everything about it. The feel, that big ziggurat deep in the zone that you could fight your way up, the lizards, everything. I still to this day remember that brown looking avatar of fear.

As far as most fun times, I would go with guk. I played on Tallon Zek, the race war server, as a DE nec. Guk was a killing field. The pathing there made it very easy to fear people into a massive train if you wanted to cause someone an exp death. (not that it was really that hard in any dungeon zone, but I digress). Even without that, it could sometimes be a target rich area, especially in off-hours when the lighties (anyone not a DE, ogre, or troll) felt more brave to come in. One of our favorite tactics was to go invis on the live side, let them clear (EDIT: usually the dead side) for a while, then attack. When I played, Tallon Zek had item loot--meaning you could loot any one non-weapon non-nodrop item not in a backpack off of any enemy you killed. The lighties would typically come in naked or in very crap gear until they felt it was safe. So we would wait till we felt they had been in long enough, then attacked. We often looted many an item this way.

I also liked Karana too for the pvp. When I was lower level (leveling in cazic) and either tired of pve or just waiting on a group opening, I'd swing over and up to Karana to attack lighties. Lighties in Karana also tended to be less judicious about protecting their gear.

DAOC
The Albion frontier and the battlegrounds. Although most of the day-to-day pvp took place in emain, I personally liked pvping in alb much better. It felt like actually attacking a real nation in a real filled out landscape, rather than attacking hib which felt like playing in a green sandbox.

DAOC was the only game that I actually replayed later on after I left, and that was because of the battlegrounds. They kicked ass. Though the fact that you couldn't go back in after a while because of too many realm points got to me. I didn't feel like re-leveling characters over again to be able to continue to play.

WoW
Thousand needles, unquestionably. That zone was breathtakingly beautiful. The high-up outpost and the long swinging bridges, the long climbing paths up to those caves on the side or the dark tauren city, the racetrack in the flats--everything about that zone was cool.

[Kuriin]

Does anyone remember soloing the ice giants in Everfrost in front of perma? Man, I could solo them, but there would always be the off chance of screwing up somehow and ending up dying or running away as fast as possible, lol.

[Kharza-kzad]

Did anyone mention the Veil Rift in hibernia daoc? Don't know how it plays but it is one of the craziest looking zones I've seen.

[Fayvren]

Yeah, I remember the first time I was in line to get into the FBSS room group. That room was perma camped and you had to get on a list to get in there. I was finally called to join the group after hours of waiting and had no idea how to get down to the room. I remember looking at the map on eqatlas and being completely befuddled. I remember how risky it was to make the run down there with invis on too knowing that any second it could wear off and I'd be fucked... and probably end up without a group because I'd be in for one hell of a corpse run if I wasn't lucky enough to find a group in the area or somebody traveling down that way.

My best memory ever in any MMO was the first time I tried lower guk. As one of the first players on my server we went in with a group when it was completely empty. Even wandering around corners we were taking every precaution because we knew if we died we'd be screwed for hours. I think thats the closest I've ever been to being "Scared" in a video game.

WoW has dungeons that u can just grind through and alot of the easier content while you're learning the game. Theres DEFINITELY a place for that in every game and it should be integral to your experience as you are learning the game. Unforgiving blackburrow tree hole at level 5 is just frustrating and completely unreasonable for new players.

On the other hand though, there is an elemental of "adventure" thats kinda missing when you can just infinitely respawn and brute force through every instance to clear it. It's not so much a risk vs reward thing but more an issue of having to play carefully in a dungeon. Thats definitely whats missing from WoW outside of raiding, the sense that you need to be on your toes because you really dont want to screw up.

[XadionDarkborn]

Originally Posted by Javvo

Rivervale, hands down. Best town music, great environment and a great race to populate it.

Log on friends account- run them nekked into the middle of rivervale where they dont know where they are- shrink them get them under something, unshrink and bind- then email them with eqclient.ini that has sound and music maxedand a UI file that messes with the options menu makeing it 1x1pixle telling them "its a patch fix"....wait and enjoy their decent into madness


CT before they "upgraded" it was 100% win, rubicite mmm first real "boss" like mob- the AoFear scared the poop out of me, deff pulling him...fun

[Kreugen]

Nothing like clearing to AoF, only to find the spawn point in the bubble empty and realizing he's behind the goddamn zoneline again.

[XadionDarkborn]

Originally Posted by Kreugen

Nothing like clearing to AoF, only to find the spawn point in the bubble empty and realizing he's behind the goddamn zoneline again.

Thats why you always take a peek up top before you treck down :-) Thinking of that reminded me of the 'traps' in CT...so many places you could fall into the sewers and isnt there one of the temples where the water drops you above the bubble.