watching my girlfriend play zelda on the wii

i can't help but immediately draw comparisons to EQ, and how much better of a game EQ is than Zelda. Take for instance the starting zones in Zelda, where you run from person to person, and graphics indicate if you can speak to these people, and you're lead through dialogue rather than actively engaging in it yourself. Whereas in EQ, you more or less have to type your way through each and every conversation. Granted, most EQ conversations require little more than a "hail" and then following the [brackets] but there is still room for some creativety and fun, in that you could put those bracketed words in any arrangement and still get the desired response. freedom is something you'll find much of in EQ, however i would say lately that freedom has been infringed upon, by way of poor zone design, the zone walls all to apparent, whereas in the Kunark era zones we had much more elaborately designed zones for us to roam in. The most current expansions have really disappointed me in the way they seem little more than boxes with hill and tree graphics within. many zones are just flat, featureless, and boring, populated with cloned versions of similar looking mobs. Just plain boring really, nothing to feast your eyes on, and little to interact with. Unfortunately, present day EQ seems to be going the way of Zelda on the wii. But there was a time EQ understood what real gaming was about. and thankfully that content is still playable. Only once you've made your way through it all, and are high level, you are forced through the bottleneck of having to go through the new and poorly designed content.

EQ sadly doesn't seem to realize that for a span of years it knew what real gaming was about, in that basiclaly, there were no other competitors doing quite what they did. it's the depth of the gameplay that caught so many of us, the fact that there was so much to do, so many things to get, and so many real advantages to getting those things. EQ has alot of special items you can go and get to make your character even better. Augmentations, items, all sorts of things. click effects, and the like. But for me nowadays the real lure in EQ that remains is that of the caster, those who are given the lions share of those neat and interesting spells. I've plained the melee round ad nauseum, i can't even stomache a warrior and even hybrids at this point that swing a weapon just draw ire. Instead i take refuge in the more thoughtful casting game, which to me is just a hell of alot more fun and refreshing. Constantly having your screen pivot back and forth as you swing is just so annoying for me at this point. Similarly constantly having to hit spells that have little real game impact (stuns) is ewll beyond annoyance for me. Now yes i understand quite well that the stun does mitigate lots of damage, but still... you see nothing... health remains, fight continues to stretch on... and as an effective killing tool... stuns just simply don't rate.

but stuns... they were essentially the paladins main tool. paladins were classified tanks. but the stuns they were given were just... well... lets just say they have their perks. mobs do damage, but stuns can cut lots of that damage out. you could explain it by calling it the rate of damage. basically a stun makes the creature stand still for x amount of time. they are frozen in place whilst time passes by. i mean, yes, this is a semi neat ability. but to me, it just never seemed appropriate for a so called knight class to merely have the ability to freeze things in place. sure, there are other abilities, access to root for instance, heals, which were also nice, but this led us to more or less be a battlepriest more than we were say a holy KNIGHT. there was nothing KNIGHT-ish about paladins in fact. they were about avoiding doing damage, as their ability to deal a deadly blow with a weapon was quite mediocre, and their primary and secondary skills had nothing to do with dealing damage to the creature at hand. that left paladins with little to do but prolonge the fight and hopefully survive the greatly reduced mobs damage whilst slowly whittling away at the mobs hp bar with subpar swinging skill. it just was a very drawn out process.

here's a great reason i dont visit the paladin boards much: