The obviously misnamed Eversun City at sunset, outside the Planetarium.
I just can’t get it out of my head that Dream of Mirror Online is the real successor to EverQuest. Not the game as it is today — a high level game where raiding is king — but the old, old, pre-expansion, social game.
They have open dungeons here! That just blows me away. The usual trend these days is toward instancing. I haven’t found an instanced dungeon yet. I’ve also become used to having quests lead me from place to place. Again, unlike EverQuest, and unlike DOMO. There’s lots of interesting little spots here and there, and while they all have some quests associated with them, you won’t find many of them by running around looking for question marks on people’s heads. Oh yeah. There’s no way of telling by looking at an NPC if it has a quest for you. You have to click on them and see if they’ll talk, and if they do, they might have a quest… but come back another time.
Crafting! It takes forever to get enough stuff to craft with, and skill-ups seem random. I mean, who does that anymore?
It’s a sandboxy, social MMO that doesn’t lead you by the hand, that rewards exploration with cool dungeons and out of the way leveling spots — but lets you multiclass, and every job can have pets. In fact, there’s even a class that has special talents dealing with pets — the musician, or bard.
I just had to try it out.
That’s my char in “musician” clothes, with my chinese banjo by my side, doing one of the Drill Sergeant quests. He’s a guy in Swan Lake Basin who hands out low level group instanced missions. I was in the area already practicing up my herding.
Let me back up. I’d unlocked the Musician job awhile ago, but had only played it just long enough to get the pet heal, then switched back to Thief, but now with pet heals and buffs. When I swapped back to Musician Saturday, my pet had leveled to 17 from adventuring with my Thief job, and so I went kinda crazy and totally owned the level 10-15 grounds, grabbing the repeatable kill quests along the way for xp, gold and loot. As a Musician, I had many of my Thief skills available, so eventually I hit level 15, and it was time to upgrade my banjo.
Every weapon gets two upgrades, once it has leveled enough. Oh yeah, you level weapons up by using them, but upgrading too soon can make them too high a level for you. I did that with my beginner Thief dagger, and that caused problems. Upgrading my banjo took two Down and one Vine Rope, I think.
Fellow blogger Crookshankz and I relaxing outside the bank
I had plenty of Vine Rope, it’s a common drop. Down doesn’t drop at all — it’s a refined product. It takes 20 chicken feathers to produce one Down. You get chicken feathers from herding. To herd, you find a herding area, buy a sack of feed from the merchant, click up your herding skill (it’s a Commoner skill, everyone has a basic knowledge of herding and all other gathering skills), select the sack of feed from your tools, and then go find something else to do for about an hour. It takes a long time, but at least you don’t have to run from place to place looking for nodes. You don’t even have to be there.
The best refines are done by the master refiners in the cities, but if you’re in a hurry, you can get the apprentice refiner at each harvesting area to do the work for you, but the work is of lesser quality. This Drill Sergeant group was looking for more, and I wanted to go, so I handed my chicken feathers to the apprentice refiner.
Bad idea. Four of the downs were flawed, and I failed two tries at upgrading my banjo. The third try worked, so I hopped on it and flew it down to the group. Because, in DOMO, you use your weapons to fly (think I mentioned that before). The long necked Chinese banjo, by the way, looks really impressive, flying through the sky.
Losing those four downs was a good half hour work wasted, and I could have been using those downs to level up my Alchemy (crafting). I need to get my Alchemy to 10 to make my next Thief weapon.
I was exploring really, really deep in the Inn basement (level 15-25 dungeon) and came across this Weird Caskmaster, making really inconsiderate and hurtful remarks about me. I killed him. And guess what — that earned me the flat-chested title. Sigh.
When some critter starts saying things like that to you, what you really want to do is kill them. Lots of them. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. So that’s what I did — I joined a Cask AE group.
If you’ve ever beein in one of these in EverQuest, you’d be right at home here. The healers, bards (not me, I’d switched back to thief), wizards, dancers and whatnot gather in one spot, and the melees continually pull mobs to the group, where they are AE’d to death. I’d been puller in some groups, but I’ve been training my AE abilities, so this time I just stayed in and helped AE. I went from level 19 to 22 Thief there; that Mirror King in the back had popped in when I hit 20 to tell me to start working on the level 20 Life quest (all jobs get a Life quest every ten levels; the Thief 20 Life quest gives a recipe for a new dagger, as well as some other loot).
So, I’m sitting at -1% into level 23. You can’t lose levels, but you DO ***LOSE*** xp when you die, and I’ve been dying a lot from exploring so much. I’m an explorer. You can click the revival stone to buy back some of your lost experience, and I bought back 20% of it to get me pretty close to even.
If someone took EQ circa 1999 and shipped it to Taiwan, DOMO is what they’d ship back.
I actually started playing DOMO the other day, inspired by your posts. I was looking for something different than EQ or WoW and decided to check it out. Not sure if I’ll stick (or have time to play), but I really like it so far.
You’re very right about it feeling a lot like EQ in some ways.
Interesting. I might just have to check it out. So many interesting games, so little time.
You are so right. DOMO feels so much like old EQ its unreal. I haven’t got a chance to play too much of it lately, but I’m loving it, to the extent I haven’t touched MegaTen lol.