Ok, maybe not “another weekend” but it seemed to fit in with the theme from our last article.
From SOE’s Facebook page as of 9:13 pm EDT:
We wanted to let you know that our games will not be up this weekend. We are working around the clock to get our services back up and running soon. Thank you for your continued patience and support.
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.
Dethdlr’s Adornment Calculator now has the non-class specific, non-raid dropped red adornments up as beta. Let me know if I got any of the numbers wrong and I’ll see about getting them fixed. I believe I’m going to wait until after GU60 to do the rest since there may be changes headed our way from SOE.
Hope you like it. 🙂
I recently spent several hours researching what adornments I wanted to put on my new gear. This required going to multiple pages on multiple sites and manually calculating all the information I needed to know about adornments. This led me to think, there has to be a better way.
What resulted from that thought was Dethdlr’s Adornment Calculator. Details after the break.
You may have noticed this little tidbit in today’s patch notes:
Kael Drakkel
- Base Population in the contested dungeon now has legendary and fabled drops.
With this information you may be thinking of heading in there and trying your hand at killing some of the level 92 mobs to see what kind of trash drops you can get. Not so fast! Raviel on Guk apparently had the same idea and didn’t have the best of luck
Raviel@Guk wrote:
so ive been in here for about 2 hours now. wheres the trash gear we were promised?
Kander responded with this:
The hotfix said it was added, however it was not. We will try to have that corrected as soon as possible.
I am extremely disapointed myself.
Sorry about that all.
Guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer before seeing those trash drops.
Intro
With the release of Destiny of Velious, the starting instances seem to be a bit tougher and the encounters require a bit of strategy to take them down. This can make it a bit rough on the casual players/guilds. I previously wrote an article on how to figure out an encounter that includes lots of tips on figuring out a strategy for a given MOB. However, the best strategy in the world isn’t going to work if your group setup is awful. There are 24 classes in EQ2 but only 6 slots in a group. How do you go about putting together a group from the 24 available classes in order to take down an encounter?
This article will attempt to answer that question…
Tomorrow marks a week that Destiny of Velious has been live. I’ve had time to run through the Icy Fingers quest series on three characters, get my flying mount, check out Thurgadin, and even run through the first quest area in the Eastern Wastes. I’ve also poked my head into the Tower of Frozen Shadows: Shadowed Corridors. I’ve learned a few things during this time that I’d like to pass on. This is mainly meant for the non-raiding portion of our audience since the raiders most likely know all of this information already or have the level of gear so that this doesn’t really apply.
Tom “ttobey” Tobey is asking for feedback on what emotes players would like to see added to the game. Head over to the official forums and let him know your ideas.
Pretend I got sitting working…
What 5 emotes would you want to see?
Roleplaying type emotes I mean….
After seeing a few suggestions, he added the following:
i thinking more on the lines of /sit /sleep etc… /read is a good one.
This just in from Everquest2.com:
In honor of President’s Day, SOE is presenting special offers and events in many of our games, and you won’t want to miss out!
Here’s a sneak peek at the offers you’ll find in your favorite games this weekend:
EverQuest® II and EverQuest® II Extended: It’s a Bonus XP Weekend, from 10:00 am PST February 18th until the servers come down on February 22nd! Enjoy the bonus on adventure, tradeskill and AA experience!
Ashlanne has posted this over on Station.com:
Beginning at 12am PST on Tuesday, January 11th, ALL SOE games, subscription and commerce services will be unavailable for maintenance. We expect this maintenance to take approximately ten hours.
This might cause some forum accounts to temporarily lose permissions, due to the inability to verify account status while the maintenance is taking place. This is only temporary and normal permissions will return automatically once the maintenance is complete.
We apologize for this interruption and will resume the affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.
I suspect this has something to do with DC Universe Online which launches worldwide on 1-11-11 but that’s just a guess on my part.
Update: News of this downtime has now been posted on Everquest2.com with conflicting estimates of how long things will be down:
This just in from Everquest2.com:
Still need to finish some of your Frostfell quests, and get those last few once-a-year items? Well you’re in luck! Enjoy a little more time with the festivities and stuff your pockets full of as much Frostfell goodness as you can, until the hotfix on Tuesday morning, January 11th!
So there’s still time to get a few more lumps of coal before Frostfell goes away for another year. 🙂
I’ve been helping Feldon out here at EQ2Wire for about eight months now. My first post was on April 4th 2010 so I haven’t quite been here a full year. In that time I’ve sifted through over seven thousand items to bring you almost 100 articles here on EQ2Wire. Hopefully you’ve found at least a few of them useful.
I look forward to continuing my work in 2011 and bringing you all the latest highlights of what’s going on in the world of EQ2.
Happy New Year Everybody!
Smokejumper posted this announcement today on Everquest2.com:
The time for Closed Beta testing of “Destiny of Velious” is upon us!
Applications are now open and available at the following link:
https://account.station.sony.com/au…9&theme=station
Go there, complete the application process, and your application will go into the queue for approval. (Hint: You’re not finished applying until you accept the NDA.)
We’ll be reviewing applications starting on January 3rd, and Closed Beta will begin on January 5th. If you are approved for beta, you’ll get an email letting you know, so check your email (out-of-game only) between the 3rd and the 5th!
PLEASE NOTE: Despite the fact that the beta registration site says that the beta runs from 12/21 to 1/4, the beta will actually run from 1/5 to 1/31. You’re seeing incorrect dates on the current reg site and that will be fixed shortly. Notifications of beta acceptance will not *begin* to be sent until 1/3/11.
Update: Smokejumper posted this additional tidbit for all the Fan Faire Attendees:
Fan Faire folks will be authorized to enter the beta on Jan 5th with everyone else but are automatically authorized (after they fill out the application!)
Yes, even though you automatically get into the beta, you still have to sign the NDA that is included in the application.
Here are your hotfix notes for December 22, 2010:
GENERAL
Fixed some issues which could cause raid zones to crash.
Here are your update notes for December 21, 2010:
GENERAL
- This year you can support the Child’s Play charity by purchasing the new Cloak of the Snowfall from the Station Marketplace!
ITEMS
- Auto-consumed items such as the server merge titles will now be consumed on login if they were added while the player was offline.
AMENITESResearch Assistant amenities can no longer be purchased in a guild hall.
The latest from Rothgar on the merge:
Oasis should be unlocking now.
8 hours ahead of schedule isn’t bad!
Here’s the latest update from Rothgar:
Update:
Both merges are still going great, no issues so far. We hope to have the chat portion of the merge done in 2 or 3 hours.
FYI, this will be the last merge of the year.
Update from Rothgar as of 1:49pm PST:
Update:
We’re ahead of schedule on the merges today. Chat should be back up any minute now and the servers are being QA’d as we speak. Hopefully if there are no QA issues we will have the servers unlocked in an hour or two.
Also, if you happen to have characters on both of the servers that are being merged into one, Rothgar explains what happens with the shared bank:
If you have characters on both servers that are being merged, and both characters have items in the shared bank, one of the banks will have it’s contents put in your overflow. This is because we can’t merge the two shared banks into one bank due to slot conflicts. So if you log in and find stuff in your overflow, thats most likely the cause. Everything else should merge fine.
From SOEFanFaire.com:
SAVE THE DATE FOR FAN FAIRE 2011
July 7-9, 2011 @ Bally’s Las Vegas
Make the Trek, Meet New Friends and Get Your Game On!
Latest update from Zoltaroth:
Update:
Butcherblock should be open within the next 15 minutes.
Permafrost is going into QA.
Also, I can personally confirm that Butcherblock is in fact back online right this second. I’m logged in and checking out the new digs. 🙂
And this in as well from Zoltaroth:
We are opening up Permafrost now.
And we have confirmation from Quesera in the comments that Permafrost is up.
Looking for something to do while the servers are being merged? Check out Rothgar’s Christmas Lights! Today he added “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey.
Watch the new one and the original four videos in the original article posted here.
There’s a double station cash weekend happening from 17-19 December 2010. Looks like finally, for the first time, those outside the US will also be able to take advantage of this:
We’re having a Double Station Cash weekend!
For the first time ever and for a limited time only, Double Station Cash will be available across all top up amounts and for most payment methods*. Stock up now for double the fun!
Offer valid 12/17/10 through 12/19/10. Eligible purchases include those made with credit/debit card, PayPal or pre-paid game cards. Exact start time of promotion on 12/17/10 to be announced. Look for more details later this week.
*excludes SMS purchases
Here are your hotfix notes for December 15 2010:
LIVE EVENTS
Frostfell
- Tuwasp bixies in Greater Faydark are now the target for the level 5, Kelethin version of Gh’lad Tydingz’s quest, “A Gigglegibber’s work is never done.”
- Grikbar scamps in Steamfont Mountains should once again advance the level 35, Kelethin version of Gh’lad Tydingz’s quest, “A Gigglegibber’s work is never done.”
Rothgar has posted the following update on the Najena -> Unrest Server Merge so far to include info on worldwide chat:
Update:
The merge process is moving along and still on schedule. Nothing interesting to report, so I guess that’s good.
The chat system has been brought down as you’ve probably noticed. This is because we are moving all universal chat data for Najena characters to the new server, Unrest. As soon as this process is complete, we’ll bring chat back up for everyone.
So it looks like chat may not be down for the entire time of each merge. This is definately good news.
Another progress report from Rothgar:
Update:
The merge is still progressing very well. We are hoping to bring chat back online around 1pm PST. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for bringing Unrest up earlier than anticipated.
Server merge titles will be granted after the next hotfix. We found an issue with the auto-consume code that was causing players to not receive the title. If you’re reading this and were part of the Butcherblock Blackburrow merge, and already have the title item in your inventory, this item will convert into the title after the next hotfix.
Note: He meant Blackburrow, not Butcherblock. I mix them up sometimes as well. It happens. 🙂
And yet another progress report from Rothgar:
Update:
The merge process is still going very well. The chat merge is complete but we are running one more maintenance script while it is down. This script should recover mail that was orphaned after the Everfrost/Blackburrow merge. As soon as this is done, we will bring chat back up.
Today’s hotfix refunds the purchase cost of Research Assistants, adds 200 house item slots to The Mistmoore Crags Estate and a few other things. Read the full hotfix notes after the jump.
Ever wonder what programmers do in their off time? Sometimes, we program. I write programs for my own use, apps for my guild’s website, even wrote an editor for the raid abilities for Fetish Nightfall a while back.
If you’re Greg “Rothgar” Spence, the Lead Programmer for EQ2, you wire up over 30,000 Christmas lights and program them to go on and off synchronized to Christmas music!