I recently bought Bloodline Chronicles for EQ2. This was SOE’s first adventure pack and I never really bothered because SOE made a point to say these weren’t necessary, and it launched toward the end of my first stint with EQ2 which by the time I got back Splitpaw was out and that was far preferred at the time. Well recently SOE has revamped a little of this adventure pack, adding Vampire Master and I felt that this was a worthy thing to have for EoF raids (which are Vampire intensive at times) so I went out and bought it.
Now I have played through the main quests with one character and almost done with them on a second, I have decided that I fairly like the pack. The zones themselves have a fairly simple layout, but the pinkish caves with blood red crystals throughout are different and interesting.
The addition of vampires are boring due to their look being very near identical to the elves or dark elves, but other creatures used in the zone are lesser used models such as the blue goblins, the hellhounds, the big giant snakey looking things. I’m not sure if these were invented for this pack, and later used in future expansions as the vampire were, but they are all very interesting in use given how little you really see them elsewhere.
The two big features touted in this pack were breakable walls and single shot items such as wands that do dmg and potions that heal or give power. Both I think were rather minor. I like walls here better than splitpaw largely because I don’t have to find a barrel to break them, but overall unimportant. Overall, I still think this is badly designed… something like this should be obvious to the player how to deal with it… I kept looking for a barrel due to splitpaw and took awhile to figure out that I could just hit it. There wasn’t any tutorial or anything to rely on, which I suppose is more realistic, but I’m just too stupid to really figure it out on my own, and considering how small a feature it was it seemed odd to me that it took so much effort.
The one shots too were bland. It was a good idea, and they may work well for a level 35, but they don’t scale and SOE dropped it. I mean at level 70 gaining 10-15 power isn’t much use in reality, and thus this aspect is completely lost. Which is too bad as it seemed like a focus to SOE for this.