Feldon 
Hiding in every Game Update, there are changes that go through that are either undocumented, or otherwise slip under the radar. Some of them appear as a single line item in the Update Notes, but have significant ramifications. Some don’t appear at all. Today, we shed some light on these changes.
NPC Cast Bar – See the cast progress of enemies to interrupt or avoid attacks.
This will be an interesting raiding tool. In the past, we’ve been dependent upon watching the various spell animations of raid bosses to figure out what spells they are casting. For instance a waving of the arms, brandishing of a weapon, a color change, or an emote. This NPC Cast Bar may strip away all the mystery of just what our enemies are plotting next. Time will tell.
Greater Faydark Revamp
This hasn’t really been covered in any articles on EverQuest2.com (the former EQ2Players.com), but the entire quest series of Greater Faydark has been revamped to address complaints that Kelethin offers a poor choice for level 7-20 characters once leaving the Nursery. Some of the mobs (enemies) and quests have been uptiered, quest hubs have been moved, all with the consequence that In Honor and Service, a popular heritage quest, now has a minimum level of 17. The folks over at EQ2 ZAM have been working hard to update their comprehensive Greater Faydark Quest Series to reflect Game Update 58’s changes.
Improve Display of Mitigation Score – View differences in armor mechanics to gauge their worth and effectiveness.
Already players are noticing some differences in their Mitigation scores with this change.
Cure Curse
The Cure Curse spell has been fixed so that if the target does not have an active curse, the spell will not cast. This would have been very helpful in the Shadow Odyssey when healers had to coordinate curing 3-4 curses at a time.
Tinkered feign death items now share their own unique reuse timer and should no longer interfere with the adorning tradeskill arts.
A day I have dreaded for 2 years has finally arrived. Domino (or another EQ2 dev) has realized that the Tinkered Feign Death items — Loosely Wired Heart Stopper (50%), Heart Stopper (75%), Gigglegibber’s Secret of Death (99%), and Defibrillating Heart Stopper (99% + heal) — each have separate cast and cooldown timers. It has been quite nice to have not one but 4 chances to feign death within a 10 minute window. These items never competed with the enviable floppiness of Monks and Bruisers, but I will truly miss having 4 chances to flop before having to wait.
Neutral Class Lore
And you thought they just made 18 out of the 24 classes neutral (good/evil) for absolutely no reason. Turns out there are some citizens in Qeynos and Freeport who have quite a lot to say on the recent appearance of Rangers in Freeport and Inquisitors in Qeynos, for example. If you’d like to read more about what went into these changes, look no further than the EQ2 Forums.
New Token / Seal Gear – A new Trader of Arad has appeared named Krin’Jilna and she sells powerful armor for those strong enough to defeat the denizens of the depths. Bad’Ushra’s inventory has been expanded to include more armor slots at the cost of Marks of Manaar.
New Battlegrounds weapons and accessories.
Yes, new sets of gear have been added for Battlegrounds, Heroic, and Raid content. Also a vendor has been added to sell T4 raid gear, but he requires components only available within specific raid zones. Don’t worry, they’re not giving away the store just yet.
Some of the key points in this article appear at EverQuest2.com:
Now Available – Arcanum Revealed 2 EverQuest2.com
The Future
I think most will argue that Game Update 58 is what Game Update 57 would have been if it weren’t for the launch of EQ2 Extended. At this point, what’s done is done. SmokeJumper summed up the EQ2 team’s priorities best here:
BTW…we’re focusing 95% of our team’s efforts on Velious for the remainder of the year now, but after Velious releases, we intend to dive back in and do a ton more stuff like this (some of which we *know* you’re going to love). There’s a lot more we’d like to improve, revamp, and fix.
I like the change and i know that some one at SoE has realized to by know, but the brawler change to add about 1200 mit to your self buff has gone in with this patch also.
NEW 12 slot trade window! WOOT!
Trade window wasn’t undocumented, i just failed at reading all the notes.
Didn’t know that the brawler change went in, thankfully they are bruisers so i don’t need to stop my monk-bashing. 😀
The NPC cast bar is actually a massive change to the game.
While I admit in a perfect world I would much prefer to have to rely on watcing the NPC’s casting animations, at the same time all too often I could not either see the animations due to mass effects (the spell revamp has improved that) or they have animations that didn’t register as anything special (deathblooms, I’m sure they do something that wipes the group now and then).
So overall I see this as a good thing for the gameplay, we’ll have to see if it takes anything away from the immersion, but for most players I doubt it though.
“in the Shadow Odyssey when healers had to coordinate curing 3-4 curses at a time”
Some fights in STF have that too. The mob in PoRT just after the guardian. he may be a easy mob but he curses like a sailor. lol
The NPC cast bar was described on Greg’s Place.
The NPC cast bar is a great addition and I wish they had it working for PC’s as well (perhaps only in PVE). A new player could learn a lot from watching others using the same character class. For example seeing how a good Templar heals. In Guild Wars even in PVP when you spectate you can see what everyone is doing. What is there to hide? Even if I was the best PVP player in the world and I give you my technique, gear setup etc. you may not be able to ever come close, because the difference is in the skills, speed of judgment, reflexes, and so on.
I hate it when smokejumper says “some of which we *know* you’re going to love”…its like the doctor saying “now this might hurt a bit”…
i didnt like that they put fanfair feed back before every change. Alot of these changes were awesome and most of the comunity will find something here that pleases them. But i have seen hundred pages threads go ignored. This was like saying, you wanna be heard? cough up 200$ and we might let you speak.
I agree with Zerigo’s above comment. It’s sad we could /feedback and /bug every day since launch day and simply because we did not attend fanfair and speak out, we get ignored in favor if changes we may possibly disagree with. To listen to that crowd rather then everyone as a whole, is complete and utter bull****.
It’s true. They listen to forum feedback, but I think it’s not unfair to say that fan faire feedback has a higher profile.
If I attend fan faire next year, I will collect some questions here. I may have to have an associate ask the questions though.
No comment, Dethdlr told me not to post here anymore.
@Blockhead: No, what I said was to tone down the LOTRO praising/EQ2X bashing since you were saying the same things over and over and over again. I just checked the comments and over half of the comments that mention LOTRO on this site have been from you. Almost 1/4 of all your comments on this site have either been about LOTRO or bashing EQ2X. So I asked you to tone it down. Your response was “Will do Dethdlr”.
I don’t have any problem with you or you posting here. I simply asked you to tone down the LOTRO/EQ2X stuff.
If you have to start analyzing and critiquing everything you say before you write it, is there really any difference?
What made this site so amazing was you didn’t have to worry about moderation and muzzling as long as you didn’t trash other posters, of course. What you did was make me apprehensive about posting here anymore, and now that i know you went and analyzed everything i have written to the point of fractions and percentages makes it even worse.
The freedom to speak your mind here was what made this site so unique, it was an unbelievable, fascinating place on the internet, a place where you could get away from all the hate and censorship and read what was really on peoples minds devoid of any scrutiny, it was place you could go and just be yourself.
You dont have to analyse and critique everything you write to post here. And other than attacking other players, we let things run very loose. We just, at this point, completely understand your viewpoint on eq2x and lotro. 🙂 I personally don’t think eq2x is good for the long-term health of the game as it doesn’t steer players to the live server. And I know that lotro is a better deal financially.
If an article comes up comparing the costs or relative value of f2p mmos, please feel free to compare eq2x to lotro in detail as you have in the past. But in an article that doesn’t mention f2p, I’d hope the comments are on a different tack.
Thanks for your understanding.
Morgan
Gee since you handled that so tactfully Feldon one can’t help but to understand.
I think wires got crossed. I didn’t play EQ2 pretty much since launch because it sucks and yes i am now very much into lotro, class A players, I’m now in a really good guild, starting to make some very good friends, doing lots of group stuff, solo as well. While waiting for SOE to get their act together they lost me, i spent to much time in lotro and have re-discovered what it’s like to be in a living breathing mmo again, and you get this no matter what server you are on, it’s fantastic. You have vets and newbs all working together, vets on the server I’m on anyway are coming out and donating their time to help new players learn the game, the advice channel has is loaded with vets always helping out answering questions, grouping takes mere seconds. You get points to spend in the store while you play and i can’t even begin to tell you how cool that incentive is to play, i literally could go on and on as you all already know ;).
SO. This is what is frustrating, this could have been EQ2. Turbine has now proven not once but twice that their approach to F2P works and works well. EQ2 could easily share in this glory as we all know it’s an excellent mmo and when they announced F2P i think for all of us it was a moment whether you like F2P concept or not, but thought, finally people can see how awesome this game is, breathe new life into starving servers, you know really light the fires, but nope, SOE approaches it like they do so many other things, you are left dumbfounded scratching your head. Instead of giving a little like earning points you get Exorbitant prices, and the only real unlock is subbing, and it’s only on one server they call an experiment. The biggest kick in the head is this does nothing for the live servers, well it starves live servers now that they removed the trial for them. It’s baffling and oh so frustrating. Like me. lol
So where is the vendor for the raid content items?