Choose My Adventure: Necromancing in RuneScape is hella fun – so should I sub?

    
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Well, that was another unforced error on my part: I had put the City of Um as one of the questing locations to shoot for in RuneScape this week, but as it turns out, literally every quest in that area is locked behind a subscription. But we’ll come back to that later; for now, my husband and I elected to flip a coin to decide which of the second place villages we could do quests in to do, and Draynor ended up winning.

I was pretty much prepared for a few simple tasks and some basic MMORPG gameplay, but this one had a few other plans. Instead, I actually had to sort of use my brain a bit and the rewards ended up being much better than I had anticipated, both in mechanical and storytelling terms.

We started off by walking along the outskirts of Draynor, where a witch was brewing a special concoction and needed our help. Specifically, we had to go to three nearby witches in order to help her broom get enchanted so she could finish her brew. What followed was a series of… logic puzzles.

I haven’t faced actual puzzles in an MMO quest since The Secret World, so I was unnaturally excited to dig into this for a bit! My husband… immediately opened the wiki. Which is fair, honestly, considering we’re both wrestling colds and our brains aren’t fully functional.

To my credit, I did solve the first puzzle and sort of solved the next, but the third we definitely had to lean on a guide. I probably could have brute forced my way through it, but time was at a premium, and NyQuil fog waits for no man.

Once we turned things in, my expectations were subverted once more, as instead of a potion it was found that the witch was brewing goulash. That felt like a bummer… right until the point when we both found that we could slurp up 10 bowls of the stuff in order to get direct XP in whatever skill we wanted. Talk about a quest reward!

A little bit of wandering in Draynor then drew us to someone who was leaning on the side of a building seeking someone to help his friend get out of trouble with some manner of criminal element. This actually unfurled into what seemed like the start of a larger story, as the bit of dialogue between my character and an NPC (and another bit of very light logic puzzling) led to the kidnapping of a prince from Al Kharid and what appeared to be some history between a few of the players.

As interested as we were about all of that, what sort of sucked was the fact that, despite the two of us being in a party, my husband and I were forced into solo instances throughout these initial quest steps. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised, but I was really hoping that we would be able to fight together.

The forced separation continued when we elected to put the Al Kharid quest aside and do a couple more tasks in Draynor, specifically a vampire killing quest. It wasn’t immediately obvious whether we would survive or not, but considering the two of us were teamed up, we sort of assumed strength in numbers would win out. So imagine our surprise when we went to Draynor Manor, pushed open a coffin, and individually had to fight our own vampire at roughly the same time. We won, but not being able to do this as a real party kind of sucked, I’ll be very honest.

Even so, it was clear that my husband was enjoying himself immensely as years of memories started to come back to him. He’s already started up a new character and has been playing outside of the times we do this together for this column. I believe he’s a higher level than I am; he did hand me a new set of robes that he crafted, so I apparently have an avenue to get twinked out.

Also the questing was fun enough and the rewards took me by surprise as we were handed another XP-granting item in the form of a lamp. I was not prepared to simply rub this and leap my Necromancy level all the way to the allowed cap of 20, but that’s precisely what happened. Combine that with the other XP goodies I got by cracking open some of the in-game lootboxes with the free keys I was handed (I will never buy a lockbox key from anyone, let alone Jagex), and I was rolling in some character advancement.

But then that leap to 20 Necromancer leads me to my next problem. For a free player, this is the mountaintop. If I want to do more, I have to subscribe. And I kind of want to do more, especially considering the fact that I got to 20 way earlier than I assumed and because I will only ever get one more button to press once I get the right rank; other abilities are fully paywalled. What’s more, it is going to take me a pretty long time to get to that next rank with the rituals available to me, so I sort of feel like I’m at a busywork stage of profession advancement.

Now, I am not a fan of this by any means. I do not particularly like the idea that classes are locked to a subscription. But at the same time, I effectively do that for FFXIV now, and not only would I examine more of this interesting combat profession, I would also be able to explore Um like the polls requested last week. But then, do I really want to reward this itchy-feeling monetization model?

You know what? You all decide for me.

Should I subscribe to further explore Necromancy?

  • Yes. Dig in to the spooky. (54%, 51 Votes)
  • No. Do not reward this nonsense. (46%, 43 Votes)

Total Voters: 94

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For this week’s second poll option, I’m kind of following a similar path as the last week. As I mentioned previously, we stopped following the princely rescue quest because it was directing us away from Draynor and toward Al Kharid, but should we continue to follow that quest line? Or is it far too early for us to think about heading to the desert right now? Let’s decide!

Should we head to Al Kharid?

  • Yes. Rescue the prince and other stuff! (75%, 50 Votes)
  • No. You're not ready yet! (25%, 17 Votes)

Total Voters: 67

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Polling will once again wrap up at 1:00 p.m. EST this Friday, January 24th. I was going to continue to try to level up my clothcrafting profession, but now that my husband has decided to power up an alternate character, I guess I’m just going to sit on my hands. Or continue that slow ladder climb to getting 50 souls in my well and that second shiny Necromancer button. We’ll see.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.
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