My EverQuest Experience - Beastlord Beatdown

I was playing my Beastlord today (huzzah for the BST class) after being gone from EverQuest for a long, long hiatus. I must say it was an absolute blast to play. After being gone for so long, the new changes are astounding! To any old EQ player, several of the games issues have been tweaked,changed, or fixed all together. When you die, regardless of level, you still have your gear on you. You can now hire NPCS (Called Mercenaries) so you can have a whole party to help you incase you can't find one. Need a pocket cleric? A tank? You can hire them instead of having to wait for a group.

Also great are Hotzones. These are zones where the monsters give a much larger boost to experience, better loot * Think ALOT better then the old Planes of Power expansion loot, even at the low levels!*, and gems to put in your armor to give them better stats. So this ends up with me being in the current hotzone for level 55 characters and above., Blackfeather Roost. It's a several tier zone where to get up to the next tier you need to perform a small quest. Thus begins my story of the beatdown.

So here I am, oblivious to all these new zones, abilities, and just great additions to the game. As I wandered around, I came across " A cunning mountain puma ". I'm 58, he con'ed dark blue to me, and I'm in some great gear. What could go wrong? In my ignorance, I was not aware that all the " Injured/Cunning/Poisonious " monsters were bosses. So when I ran up to this cute cuddly cougar...

I got my face ripped off and handed back to me. He hit for over 300-400 and double attacked me several times. I have several AA's with a good chunk of points into Combat Agility, however this did not save me from having to /train all the way to the zoneline. I made it, thankfully, though my poor little warder had to bite the dust to give me time to escape.

So, I'm back in EverQuest, and while the game has improved in so many ways it's still finds ways to kick the teeth in of even a experienced player.