Here are your Update Notes for January 31, 2012:

GENERAL

• Fixed a bug where some characters wouldn’t show on character select.

ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION

Tower of Frozen Shadow (Raid)

• Tserrina’s spell “Wing Buffet” should no longer cause priests to become knocked back.

• Adds spawned from shadow doors should no longer spawn quite as quickly.

• The number of adds that spawn from shadow doors has been slightly reduced.

Tower of Frozen Shadow: Umbral Halls

• Demanti Sheda should no longer have issues resetting his encounter.

• Demanti Sheda’s spell “Paralyzing Fear” should now stun instead of fearing and has been reduced in duration.

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A video preview hosted by Emily “Domino” Taylor of the new “Storm Tower” Prestige Home was posted last week, and now this home is available for purchase for 1350SC.

The preview:

The announcement from EverQuest2.com:

For those looking to create something evil and forboding, the new Storm Tower Isle Prestige Home has plenty of space for sinister decorating. Dark and stormy, the island comes complete with crashing waves, gloomy clouds, and a watchtower based on the Tower of Bone in Darklight Woods.

Here are your update notes for today, January 17, 2012:

ANNOUNCEMENTS

• Extra Dungeon Mark Days are here from 17 January until 30 January! Dungeon Maker dungeon players and creators will receive 25% MORE tokens during this time period. To create and see listings of available dungeons, select Dungeon Maker from your EQ2 Menu button in game. Visit the Dungeon Maker category in the Marketplace to spend your tokens on items to equip your play character, as well as items to enjoy and build more dungeons.  Prepare to get your dungeoneering on!

GENERAL

• Fixed a UI bug on the mini-map window.

• Fixed a bug where if you had a single target maintained spell on a group member and logged out that the spell would still be there when you logged back in.

• Fixed an issue that prevented respec cards from working with beastlords.

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Here are your update notes for January 10, 2012 from the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Fixed a bug where you would have to recast buffs on group members every time you zone.

• Fixed random lighting bugs on characters and environments.

• Players will now receive achievement credit for earning hall of fame status if they are offline when awards are processed.

ACHIEVEMENTS

• Sense of Urgency: Debone Bonewing should correctly update when defeating the zone boss in under 30 minutes from zone in.

DUNGEON MAKER

• Dungeon Maker creatures will no longer temporarily reappear when defeated while under the effect of a tier-adjusting object.

• Dungeon Maker adventurers should now show up in the Marketplace preview tab.

• Fixed a UI bug with the Dungeon Maker create window.

BEASTLORDS

• Fixed an issue that allowed “a drakonine guardian” to be tameable.

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First I’d like to wish a Happy New Year to all of you. No doubt many took advantage of the Double XP weekend and squeezed in the last bit of Frostfell magic.

In the coming weeks, we should be hearing more from EQ2 developers and their work on the upcoming Game Update 63 coming in February. This update is expected to include new Destiny of Velious content, including dungeons, raids, and more.

Here are some issues we’re tracking this week, some of which got a nod from a developer or community:

• Character Lighting
• EQ2Players
• Invisible Mercenary Healers
• Timorous Deep (Kunark) client crashes
• Tradeskill Apprentice Recipes for Provisioners
• Characters Stuck in Frostfell
• Character Transfer Server Tokens
• What House Items do you want?

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Here are your Update Notes for January 5, 2012:

GENERAL

• Fixed an issue where the client could get stuck trying to load a character into Mok Rent.

PLAYER HOUSING

• The City of Freeport: The Magical Academy housing portal should no longer vanish after being placed in a house.

• Fixed a bug where loading a layout of an invalid file could cause the house zone to crash.

DUNGEON MAKER

• Mystic Guardian avatar for Dungeon Maker has had the zombie scare attack changed.

• Fixed an issue with Dungeons being put into the Housing hall of fame.

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Here are your Update Notes for December 20, 2011 from the EQ2 Forums:

DUNGEON / PLAYER HOUSING RATINGS

• The house and dungeon leaderboards have now been converted from the previous 5-star rating system to a new “Like” system.

• When visiting a house or completing a dungeon maker zone you now have the option to “Like” the zone in either of the two categories.

• The leaderboards are now based on the accumulation of likes.

• Awards continue to work as before and are given to the players at the top of the leaderboard.

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From the EQ2 Forums:

UPDATE: Although not included in the notes, some of the Scout war runes have now been flagged to support Beastlords as per this post.

GENERAL

• All Membership levels may now claim Veteran rewards.

• Fixed a bug where expertise AAs would not load properly from a mirror.

• When using an AA mirror to switch profiles you will no longer be spammed with onscreen messages or having icons autopopulate into your hotbars.

• Fixed a bug where the character tree would not show in the respec window when attempting to purchase AA respecs.

PLAYER HOUSING

• Prestige house portals should no longer disappear when placed.

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A few bits and bobs we wanted to bring attention to…

Throwing Weapons

Cyliena took the lead on some random changes with Game Update 62 affecting a variety of thrown weapons (sheaths, pouches, bandoliers, and satchels) which use throwing daggers, shuriken, and other such ammo. Some items were flagged Beastlord-only, some flagged anything-but-Beastlord, and yet others flagged Fighter, Priest, and no Scouts at all.

After some communications with Rothgar and Silius, this is going to be ironed out in the next update:

Just a heads up I that I have fixed the thrown items. Should be live with the next hotfix. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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From the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Fixed a bug with the 48 hour grace period for trade for some no-trade and heirloom items.

• Magic Carpet guild hall amenity now has Fens of Nathsar as a destination.

• Fixed a bug where loading a profile from your Mirror of Reflected Achievements would reset your AAs instead of loading the profile.

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Here are your Update Notes for Friday, December 9th, 2011 from the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Characters created before 12/6/2011 no longer have class or race pack restrictions.  Characters created after that date are still subject to your current membership restrictions, if applicable.

• Fixed a crash that could be caused by doing a raid with a large number of mercenaries.

• Fixed a bug that was preventing mentoring on PvP servers.

• Dungeon maker items in the marketplace that contain house items will now display previews in the paperdoll window.

• Fixed issues with Shader 3.0 causing client crashes.

The complete Update Notes after the jump…

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From the EQ2 Forums:

Age of Discovery is the eighth expansion of the groundbreaking EverQuest II franchise.

Age of Discovery offers never-seen-before features including user-generated content and the re-imagining of the Beastlord class from the original EverQuest release.  You can make your mark in-game by creating your very own Dungeon, hire some much needed help for your heroic battles, push tradeskilling research to new heights, customize your weapons at the forge, and of course, play as a Beastlord. There’s a lot to like about this expansion!

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Traditionally, when an item has been placed in a Guild Hall, that item has been considered as “donated” by the person placing it. As there is no cash value to items acquired in-game, donation seems an appropriate paradigm.

However with the introduction of furniture and other placeable items to the StationCash Marketplace, you are entering the realm of items with cash value. The ability to place items purchased with StationCash in Guild Halls has been inconsistent at best, mostly because of the Customer Service implications of thousands of players asking for their StationCash money back (or items) if they are booted from a guild they just finished placing $30, $40, or more dollars worth of items into.

This issue has been endlessly discussed on the EQ2 forums, with players arguing both sides, either that all items placed in a Guild Hall should be considered forfeit, or that Marketplace items are special because of the inherent cash value, and some even advocating that ALL items placed in a Guild Hall should be re-claimable by the placer.

Personally, I am in the camp that when you start factoring real money into the game, then you have to be very careful about transfer of ownership, and I’m not sure that placing an item in a Guild Hall should automatically be considered transfer of ownership. This isn’t chump change either. Some of the furniture sets in the Marketplace costs in excess of $30.

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From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION

Plane of War

• Players may now enter the plane of war, once someone on the server has defeated all 3 demigods of war (Sullon, Vallon and Tallon Zek) in challenge mode.

Drunder x4 raid zones

• Players can now enter the challenge mode Drunder x4 raid zones without having killed the previous demi-god in challenge mode.

Sullon’s Spire x4 raid [Challenge Mode]

• Aaranae Acrimae: Her adds have less health. The rage devourer no longer casts the aoe multistrike.

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From the EQ2 Patcher:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION

Silent City: The Delving Dead

• Levels below 90 should actually have collections.

TRADESKILLS

• Appearances on some tranquil threadbare crafted armor have been updated.
• The Scroll of Fire Seeds is now heirloom rather than no trade.

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From the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Fixed an issue with Guild Halls.
• Fixed an issue causing the streaming client to use old assets.
• Fixed an issue which could cause the streaming client to crash on startup.
• Fixed a disconnect bug where some characters would get dropped to character select upon login.

Players will now be prompted for a one-time, free item unattuning:

• If you answer yes, all items will be immediately unattuned.  Any equipped items will be popped into overflow.
• If you answer no, items will not be unattuned and you will not be asked again.

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PC Gamer has landed a time-lapse video of SOE production artist Nate Temple conceptualizing the Raptor mount recently added to EQ2. He takes the raptor from a blank page to full color concept art which was then passed off to the 3D modeling and texturing team.

Game Update 61: “The War of Zek”
UPDATE NOTES

A GENERAL SUMMARY OF WHAT’S IN GAME UPDATE 61:

• All dungeon and overland loot items have been re-itemized. What does this mean? It means loot everywhere should be legitimate for the level it drops for, no matter where you go now. Go explore some nooks and crannies you haven’t seen for a long time and get off the Golden Path! The loot’s good again.
• The Velious saga continues as you journey past the Citadel of Drunder to the Plane of War itself in a new dungeon and raid, and a continuation of the Signature quest line.
• New dynamically-scaling dungeons have been added. These scale to your group between levels 60-90 and are designed as new single group heroic content that’s more re-playable. We’ll be watching your reactions to these initial two dungeon experiments and improving on these in the future!
• The new House Rating System lets you publish your house so other players can rate it, as well as adding house leaderboards, easy access to housing, and more! (And we increased House Ownership limits to 20, instead of 10!)
• If you ever wanted to show EQII to your friends, it’s now very easy. Push a button, record, and post your footage to YouTube with our new Video Capture system.
• The Eastern Wastes area in Velious now has a lot more overland content added to it (the new quests start at the Ry’Gorr keep).
• A big revamp of the class AA tree so that it’s easier to select the AAs you want, and adding more utility to the AAs that were weak previously.
• Many stats have been un-capped so that they have meaning as your characters progress. This doesn’t result in massive power increases, but it does let all stats continue to have meaning as you earn new items and power. Additional mechanics changes were made to increase power for many classes. (See below for things like spell auto-attack, flurry improvements, etc.)
• Tradeskillers now have their own AA tree to chase!
• And yes, Fae and Arasai now have a level 85 quest that can unlock their ability to FLY!

After the jump, the full detailed Game Update 61 “War of Zek” Notes…

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From Domino on the EQ2 Forums:

Just wanted to post a quick update since I know folks are looking forward to hearing whose houses we picked, and how.

Due to the large number of submissions we couldn’t visit each house in-game, so we looked over all the linked screenshots that Amnerys compiled from the submissions in various places and made a short list of what we thought were the most outstanding houses, which we could then visit in game. There were some really fantastic submissions and it was a great to look through them all!

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Niami Denmother has turned in an in-depth preview of Game Update 61, including new House Signs, Tiles, Dividers, Paintings, the new House Rating system, and Furniture. Don’t miss it!

As we reach August’s midway point, we are potentially in the “home stretch” on Game Update 61. If internal schedules hold true, we could see the next update pushed to live servers in 2 weeks. This is usually the point where player anxiety levels are highest, as what’s on Test seems  incomplete and not ready for prime time. Although it’s a well-worn cycle, the question is always “Will it be ready?” Will 2 weeks of dev crunch time result in a solid Game Update 61?

Level 20-80 Reitemization

We’d caught hints, but Fan Faire brought confirmation that level 20-80 gear was being reitemized.

When I first heard this announcement, I hoped that this would be done with a light touch. Despite organic development over 6 years, through several different producers, the itemization in EverQuest II from level 1-80 has been one of its strengths. Only through several revamps has Mastercrafted armor managed to disturb this progression. A revamp of level 20-80 gear should provide an opportunity to the EQ2 team to put this right, all while re-aligning Mastercrafted armor where it belongs, behind Legendary and Fabled dungeon drops. With a few minor tweaks, mostly adding Agility to any item wearable by Scouts, Intelligence to Mage-equippable items, and so forth, itemization would, at least from level 1-80, work with the changed mechanics, without losing its uniqueness.

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For those who were excited about the Felwithe Manor prestige house teased at Fan Faire, and perhaps have taken a tour on Test, it looks like there’s a wait ahead before they can be purchased. From Amnerys and confirmed by SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

I’m pretty sure I heard that this will be available sometime within the month or so after GU61 goes live. So I’d say most likely by the end of September.

Meanwhile a new style of house has already appeared on Test — a replica of the Court of Blades in the Maj’dul. A thread has been created about it on the EQ2 Forums. No word on when it will be released.

Bunji posted this on August 11th at 5:54pm PDT on the EQ2 Forums:

[Everyone having monk AAs] will be fixed tomorrow morning.  We couldn’t get the fix in tonight for [because?] the next build includes the house rating system which requires us to update the server databases (needed more time to do the update than normal basically).

Peleş Castle, Sinaia courtesy Harvard.edu

From Amnerys on the EQ2 Forums:

Are you ready to show off your best house?

When the house ratings system launches with Game Update 61, we’d like to have a few outstanding house examples ready to show off in the Hall of Fame, so we’re asking you for some suggestions!

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Here’s our final video from SOE Fan Faire 2011 “EverQuest II: Content and Zone Design”.

If you’d like to view the transcript from this panel, check out our EQ2 Panel #6 – Content and Zone Design writeup.