DoV Hot Zones not so Hot? Changes coming in GU60!

For me, since DoV came out, the “hot zone” hasn’t seemed to be very “hot”. I’ve said this in a few threads and have seen others chime in with different theories on why they seem that way.  There may be fixes to this coming our way in GU60.  Details after the break.

Gninja was recently looking for feedback on Umbral Halls. After providing my feedback, I couldn’t resist explaining why we had just ran the zone. 

Dethdlr said on the EQ2Forums:

We did this zone because it was the hot zone. I still say that for DoV, the only way to tell it’s the hot zone is to look at the welcome screen. Otherwise, by running the zones, you’d never notice the difference. But that’s another topic.

This apparently prompted this response from Gninja:

I am going to get some stats run monday morning to make sure the hotzones are working correctly.

Monday, Gninja filled us in on what he found:

Can’t really comment on item value/quality as its not really my place but I did track down some interesting stuff about hot zones in general.

Yes the hot zones are working. But yes there is a reason they don’t feel quite as hot as previous expansion’s hot zones. I will be making some changes to them to give players a bit more chance for fabled drops when a zone is hot and we should see this go in with GU60.

and followed up with this:

There are actually 2 bosses per instance that can drop fabled. Typically the last boss and the boss before it. Both will be affected by hotzones.

Thanks to Gninja for looking into this and for all the rest of the work he’s recently done to try and improve ToFS!