From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION

Strategist’s Stronghold

• Severed Windpipe is now curable.

Tallon’s Stronghold [Non-Challenge mode]

• During the Tallon Zek fight Decorin Deahbringer will cast Deathbringer’s Touch and Impending doom less frequently.

Tallon’s Stronghold [Challenge mode]

• During the Lieutenant Klaatuus fight the aviak trooper adds have less health, no longer memwipe, and will always spawn at the bosses feet.

Vallon’s Tower [Challenge Mode]

• During the Gindan Commander Angler fight the Diaku Deceptors will wait a while before casting their stunning strike spell.

Kael Drakkel

• All dropped quest items that were previously flagged no-trade now consume the dropped quest item once the quest has been taken.

ITEMS

• Fixed an issue that cause some bows, thrown, and wand weapon damage to be reduced.

If you’ve been following the somewhat unfortunate adventures of the Gnoob the Gnome character, you’ll recall he had a big part to play in the introduction of Mercenaries to the original EverQuest when it was faced with its own problem of no new blood to help new or returning players leveling up alts.

There have been over a dozen Gnoob videos in the past but this one touches on the upcoming Age of Discovery and its Mercenaries feature. It’s worth a watch and comes with a laugh.

From EverQuest2.com:

The upcoming Age of Discovery expansion will include the Mercenaries feature. These player-controlled (or perhaps just guided, depending) NPCs will help players in groups or raids, for a small fee. You can read a lore-based/mock interview with one of these upcoming mercenaries at EverQuest2.com:

Recently, we have caught word that mercenaries will start to offer their services in Norrath come the end of the year. We were lucky enough to grab an interview with one of these soon to be job-seeking mercenaries! Her name Vittia Direshadow and she is a Teir’dal Shadowknight. She’s quite scary-looking but assures me she will not try to kill me.

Q. What made you want to become a mercenary?

A. My extensive study with the Dread Guard was extremely worthwhile but not inexpensive, and tithes to Innoruuk are not cheap either, so when I finished my training I found myself with debt still to repay. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of a loan broker in Neriak, I can assure you. So, I started work as a mercenary to pay my debts, and have come to find it a valuable source of income as well as an excellent way to see the world and learn new things.

Continue Reading the story at EverQuest2.com…

From Everquest2.com:

SOE Trick-or-Treat Event is Here!

It’s time to trick-or-treat in your favorite games*! Today through October 31, 2011, get treats and tricks when you visit your participating games each day. For EverQuest® II and EverQuest® II Extended, check the mailbox for your tricks and treats!

For more details visit www.soe.com/trickortreat.

Participating games include: EverQuest EverQuest® II,;EverQuest® II Extended, Free Realms®, Star Wars®: Clone Wars Adventures™, PoxNora® and Magic : The Gathering – Tactics™

Note: This actually started on Friday, Oct 28, 2011

From Everquest2.com:

Trick-or-Treat! Double Your Treats on 10/29/11!

What better way to fill your Halloween goody bag than with DOUBLE STATION CASH®! Get Double Station Cash on Saturday October 29, 2011 starting at 12:01 AM PDT when you redeem any SOE Pre-Paid Game Card or buy Station Cash*.

Plus, we have more tricks and treats in participating games throughout the SOE Trick-or-Treat Event! For more details visit www.soe.com/trickortreat.

*Offer runs October 29, 2011, 12:01 AM PDT through 11:59 PM PDT; excludes purchase by mobile/SMS.

Participating games include: EverQuest® EverQuest® II,;EverQuest® II Extended, DC Universe™ Online, Free Realms®, Star Wars®: Clone Wars Adventures™, PoxNora® and Magic : The Gathering – Tactics™

Smokejumper responded to a thread from nine days ago on the EQ2 Forums asking for a clear answer to what exactly is Age of Discovery.  He basically said what we already knew about the content included in Age of Discovery.  Reading through it and some of his follow up posts, it looks as though the “expansion” will be coming out near the end of November but price and distribution information won’t be released until next week by the marketing folks.
Read More»

From the EQ2 Forums:

There have been several reported issues of players who are unable to get the Nights of the Dead quests from Ponchy. If you have done them in previous years, there seems to be a bug where it won’t let you get them again. While we are working on fixing this, please petition Customer Service to have the old quests removed. We greatly apologize for the inconvenience and will message again when we have this working normally.

From the EQ2 Forums:

We are inviting the most fearful, dreadful and simply awful creatures to the frighteningly decorated Community Lounge to celebrate the Nights of the Dead holiday with us. Show off with your costume creations, partake in a variety of unique drinks, and meet new players!

Read More»

From the EQ2Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Temple of Rallos Zek [Challenge]

• Bosses should no longer get double buff packages.

Temple of Rallos Zek: Foundations of Stone [Challenge]

• During the Statue of Rallos Zek fight the automatons of escalation have reduced abilities and should be easier to handle. The statue itself will wait much longer after its final text before it activates retaliation.

Sullon’s Spire [Non-Challenge Mode]

• Hragdold the Frenzied: Ironclaw Priests now heal for less. Clawstorm mana drain is lessened, and it’s not cast quite so often.

Spire of Rage

• Spells that the Sullonites use now have longer casting times and they will start using them later in the fight as opposed to right away.
• Grolla Skullwielder will now say she is casting Sweeping Crash and it now has a longer casting time.

Strategist’s Stronghold

• Hypatia should now tell you when she will cast Fortification of Blades and it now has a 3 second cast time for her.
• War boars in Warmaster Korok Hai’s encounter should now stun a lot less.

Tower of Tactics

• Lady V’uul will only make her orbs vulnerable if she reaches 100% damage reduction. She should call out when this happens. All three orbs should be targetable and killable.

ITEMS

• Temple Guardian’s Shard of Illumination is now heirloom.
• Soul Touched Crystal Wand is now heirloom.

When 85% of the news articles on EverQuest2.com are about other games, it’s easy to miss bonafide EQ2 items. That said, a new article has been posted outlining some of the Lore related to the Beastlord class coming in the Age of Discovery expansion.

The beastlord class is coming in winter 2011 with the EverQuest II expansion: Age of Discovery!

In North America, Winter is defined as the time period from 21 or 22 December and 20 or 21 March. With the last Beta invites scheduled to go out on November 16th, we were assuming that the Age of Discovery would launch on either November 22nd or November 29th. Should we revise that estimate?

You can read “The Path of the Beastlord” at EverQuest2.com.

Enemies in EQ2 have always tended to exhibit some odd behavior such as running long distances or zig-zagging around a room in an attempt to reach the player. Destiny of Velious greatly exacerbated this problem, causing enemies to “orbit” the player, or worse, warp or teleport around. Because raid mobs are often able to ignore certain movement speed limitations, this has been a major problem in certain raid zones that require the tank to slowly keep the mob moving in a circle around a room. The mobs will teleport on top of the tank, or start to orbit clockwise around the tank. This has ranged from amusing to maddening for tanks.

Last month, some changes were pushed to the Test and Test Copy servers in an attempt to improve enemy “pathing”. Alas, these changes increased the occurrence of “orbiting” mobs and pets and other undesirable behavior.

It looks like we’re ready for another attempt as this note was posted by Bunji on the test forums:

The updated pathing has been turned back on for the Test servers.

These pathing updates should make ground mobs take more accurate routes to their targets.

With the old pathing, mobs would sometimes zig-zag toward their target (instead of moving in a more direct route) or sometimes run up walls (that PCs couldn’t) to get to their target, but this pathing should force mobs to take more direct routes to their targets while respecting the same geometry rules PCs do.

Ground mobs can still drop down from heights to get to their targets.

Also, the fix for mobs “circling” around the PC sometimes while in combat should be fixed on the current Test server build.

Please check it out and let us know what you think.

Read More»

Information about the upcoming Age of Discovery expansion has been few and far between, however SmokeJumper did take a moment to clear up how XP and loot will work:

Actually, you earn XP *and* tokens. The tokens are used to acquire items for any of your characters, not just the one you have currently logged-in. XP and tokens are awarded at the end of the dungeon run and based on a challenge rating system that should prevent exploiting. More on this soon.

As we heard at Fan Faire (which may, of course, have changed since then) is that there will be two vendors for DYOD, one selling armor/weapons/loot for your main characters, and one selling parts to add cool stuff to your own dungeons.

No additional information has been released about what choices there will be for DYOD Avatars (since you cannot play your own characters, you must pick one of the provided avatars), if you’ll be able to buy upgrades for them, etc.

From the EQ2 Forums:

BATTLEGROUNDS

• Fixed an issue with queuing for a battleground as a group.

From the EQ2 Forums:

DUNGEON FINDER

• Dungeons are now broken into categories.
• If a player declines a DF offer, they must wait 15 minutes before they can queue again.
• The dungeon finder will now give an indication of how many players of each archetype are queued for each dungeon.
• Any member of the group can now set group options, but everyone in the group must vote on the changes before they apply.

LIVE EVENTS

Nights of the Dead

• The headless Horseman should once again be patrolling Nektulos Forest.
• An Essence of Fear and an Eerie Essence are now being offered to everyone correctly upon completion of the quest “The Troubling Truth”.
• An Essence of Fear and an Eerie Essence now have appropriate descriptions.
• The “Petrified Bone Tile” can now be scaled even larger.

ITEMS

• Titaniir, Aether Strike has been returned to a 4 second delay.

QUESTS

• The quest “Researching Lavastorm: Relics of Battle” once more rewards the Flame Researcher’s Robe.

From EverQuest2.com:

Closed Beta registration for “Age of Discovery” is now open! Applications are available at this link. Beta testing is vital to ensure a great product launch. We appreciate your participation and welcome any and all feedback.

Click the link above, sign in with your Station Account, complete the application process, and your application will go into the queue for approval. Please be sure to read and accept the NDA. All applicants must have accepted the NDA in order to be considered for participation. All applicants will receive an email to confirm that their application was received.

Applications will be reviewed starting on October 27th. Closed Beta will close on November 14th.

Players who are approved for Closed Beta will receive an email informing them of their acceptance, so please confirm that we have your correct email address during the registration process.

Beta acceptance emails will go out between October 27th and November 16th.

Read More»

Nobody likes to be picked last for a team, yet the days where any player with level-appropriate gear could contribute in a meaningful way to the majority of dungeons introduced in an EverQuest II expansion are long gone. The straightforward turn-and-burn fights up to and including Kunark zones have given way to heavily scripted 6-person mini-raids. All but the easiest Velious dungeons have substantial checks on Gear, Alternate Advancements, and Skill.

I’ve talked to several players over the last week about Dungeon Finder and the recurring theme has been — Players who have normally been skittish about asking to join a group are queueing themselves up for Dungeon Finder, regardless of Gear, AAs, or Skill. They seem to figure ‘What have I got to lose?’

Read More»

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

Hey, folks,

We’ve listened to feedback and there were four areas we agreed needed to be improved to make the feature more useful. Below the list of those four major improvements:

1) The problem: People were joining the DF queue as “Random” and then declining group after group until they got the dungeon they wanted. The solution: If you queue and then receive a group invite…and then decline it…you will then suffer a 15-minute time penalty before you can re-queue again. This solution has no effect on people using the DF normally, but penalizes those that are trying to exploit the +25% bonus XP element.

Read More»

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

Thank you for all the feedback you guys have been giving. I'm sorry I haven’t come back and posted a response before now. I’ve been skimming the feedback and talking it over with other members of the team. The purpose of this post was to get a general feeling from you guys on what we need to look at and address in the future. We’re deep into our expansion cycle right now so it’s too early to give dates about when we can make additional changes, but I wanted to start the discussion as early as possible.

Continue to discuss these issues and know that we are reading your feedback. As soon as we have more info to post we will let you know.
Thanks again for the feedback and thank you for your patience.

The Nights of the Dead festival returns to Norrath today with a new quest and zone of mayhem as well as past events, craftable items, etc. Nights of the Dead is expected to run from Thursday, October 13 @ 12:01am PDT (08:01 BST) to November 7 @ 11:59 PST (07:59 BST).

EQ2 ZAM has a detailed writeup of all the recurring Nights of the Dead quests, collectibles, and craftable items as well as what’s new this year. There are so many quests involved in Nights of the Dead that EQ2 ZAM provides a printable NoTD Quest Tracker for the completists.

• Nights of the Dead 2011 @ EQ2 ZAM

In case you missed it, Niami Denmother’s Nights of the Dead Preview is up over at EQ2 Traders.

• Nights of the Dead 2011 Preview @ EQ2Traders

• New Nights of the Dead 2011 Crafted Items

From Yahoo News:

TOKYO (AP) — Sony said Wednesday intruders staged a massive attempt to access user accounts on its PlayStation Network and other online entertainment services in the second major attack on its flagship gaming site this year.

The Tokyo-based company temporarily locked about 93,000 accounts whose IDs and passwords were successfully ascertained by the blitz. Sony sent email notifications and password reset procedures to affected customers on the PlayStation Network, Sony Entertainment Network and Sony Online Entertainment services.

Credit card numbers linked to the compromised accounts are not at risk, Sony said. It has “taken steps to mitigate the activity” and is investigating any wrongful use of the accounts themselves.

“Less than one tenth of one percent” of the service’s customers may have been affected, Sony said in a statement.

Read More»

If there’s one thing you don’t want to recycle, it’s passwords, as some EverQuest II players found recently out.

I think we’re all guilty of using the same login and password on many different sites such as e-mail, bank websites, and yes our SOE acounts. Recently, attempts were made by outsiders to login to some 33,000 SOE accounts using login and password credentials taken from other websites. SOE and PSN detected these login attempts and have pre-emptively disabled any accounts that matched the login/password credentials stolen from websites not affiliated with Sony. Note: This appears to be unrelated to this May’s SOE/PSN security breach.

But first, a message from the EQ2Wire The Sky is Not Falling So Keep Your Pants On Club:

This is NOT a security breach!

SOE has not been “hacked again”!

DON’T PANIC!

Read More»

Here are your update notes for today, October 12, 2011:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION

All Drunder x4 raid zones

• Sullon’s Spire, Tallon’s Stronghold, and Vallon’s Tower: The named boss NPCs do less damage and have slightly lower health.

Tallon’s Stronghold x4 raid zone [non-challenge]

• The banners that spawn during the Tyrax Terrolus fight now have less health.

With today’s update, the entirely optional Beastlord Prelude #2 quest goes live.  It provides an explanation for where Beastlords have been and why they’re now returning to Norrath. Don’t worry — whether you complete these brief lore quests or not, anyone who purchases the EverQuest II: Age of Discovery expansion (when it goes on sale) will be able to create new Beastlords in November.

More controversial in today’s update is the removal of any “shard” cost from Thurgadin and Ry’Gorr armor.

You can expect crafters to be exceedingly busy today as they fulfill orders for full sets of Thurgadin armor as it is now essentially free minus the cost of common materials. Ry’Gorr armor also requires one of the tradeable gems listed below from Kael Drakkel zones. Don’t forget to tip your crafter!

If all crafters are currently assisting other customers, or you just prefer to go the Vendor route, Thurgadin and Ry’Gorr will be happy to sell their armor to allies with +40,000 faction, and a few plat. In the case of Ry’Gorr armor, you’ll also need one or more of the above gems from Kael Drakkel.

Check out EQ2Wire’s Guide to Velious Heroic Armor & Jewelry

Apparently any possible disruption this might cause to Progression or reduction in Tower of Frozen Shadow 1-3, Pools, Ascent, and Fortress groups hasn’t dampened the spirits of players excited to get free lootz for all their alts! Don’t worry, be happy!

Read More»

Here are the results of our Wednesday survey EQ2Wire Asks: Will You Use Dungeon Finder? Results are as of Oct 10, 2011 01:00 PDT.

Do you think the Dungeon Finder will be popular?

Total Votes: 1185

Read More»

From SOE’s Facebook page (as well as their EverQuest2 Facebook page):

EQ NEXT – help create the new chapter for the incredible EverQuest franchise, pushing design and technological boundaries to evolve the MMO genre. The Team is looking for a Senior AI Engineer, a Senior UI Engineer, a Senior Client Engineer and a Senior Tools Engineer. Join SOE as we forge a new world! http://corporate.station.sony.com/careers.vm

EQNext logo above is an artist’s conception and is NOT an official logo.