For many years in EQ2, I was a casual raider.  What I mean by that is, I would primarily run group zones with guild mates but from time to time I would join a pickup raid or tag along when another guild needed to fill some raid slots.  Several times, when filling those empty raid slots for other guilds, myself and some of my guild mates were asked if we would be interested in coming along on a regular basis.  In one of those cases, I even worked my way up to being one of the raid leaders even though I was in a different guild.

The reason myself and some of my guild mates were able to do this is because we like being good at our characters.  We try to get whichever upgrades we can from instances, quests, faction merchants, etc.  We make sure all our spells/CAs are Expert or above.  We make sure our items are adorned.  We try to come up with the best AA spec we can and consult with each other to try and be as good a player as possible.

Tank and Spank vs. Complex Scripting vs. Fun

In recent years, I’ve seen numerous posts from people complaining about how the different group/raid encounters work.  A lot of the complaints say that they don’t want simple “Tank and Spank” encounters. But they also don’t want encounters with complex scripting, fail conditions, cure fests, etc. They want encounters that are fun and challenging without any of those things.

So it got me wondering, how do you do that? How do you make an encounter without complex scripting, fail conditions, cure fests, etc. without turning it into a tank and spank in the process?

Last week, SOE released their new server status page.  I took a look at this to see if there was anything there that I might be able to use myself.  There was.  I’ve put together three different versions of an EQ2 server status page, two of which can be embedded into your own website.

Having used my adornment calculator for a while now, there have been a few times where having the short descriptions in the drop down lists instead of the name of the adornment has been frustrating.  Usually, this is when I’m trying to put in what I currently have adorned, rather than starting from scratch.  The descriptions work well when you’ve never adorned a particular slot, but there are times when you don’t need them and would rather see the adornment names.  For example, if I wanted to send a link to someone that shows my current adornments, I would first need to enter all the ones I’m currently wearing.  Sometimes that’s easier by using the short descriptions but a lot of times it’s easier to go by the name of the adornment.  Now, you have a choice.

You can now choose which way you want the adornment calculator to show the drop down lists.  And you can change it back and forth at any point without losing what you’ve already chosen.   Just click the radio button for “Adornment Descriptions” or “Adornment Names” just above the list of adornments.

Enjoy!

Class-specific red adornments have been added to the EQ2Wire Adornment Calculator by Dethdlr.

That’s 221 adornments added to the existing 175 for a total of 396 T9 adornments.  And I still haven’t added the ones that drop from the public quests.

Choose your class in the class dropdown to have that class’ adornments added to the proper dropdowns.

Rather than converting the class specific red adornments from their names to what they do, I’ve just included the names in the dropdowns. For one thing, this should help with those that don’t stack. For another, it means you don’t have to wait for me to find time to convert 221 adornment descriptions into text that will fit in the dropdowns. Once you click calculate, you can hover your cursor over the item names to see the tooltip popup of each adornment or click them to see them on Zam.

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to try and convert them or just leave them as is. I’m leaning towards leaving them as is.

Also, the in-game item links will be added as time allows for the new adornments. There are 221 of them and I can only cut and paste for so long before falling asleep.   If you click through to Zam though, they should have the in game links already.

Let me know if you find any errors/bugs. I still need to indicate the items that only work on shields, but that will most likely be another day.

Let me know if you find any errors (other than the shield/secondary slot issues, I already know about that).

Update: 96 additional adornments have been added that can be purchased in Thurgadin after completing The Fallen Swords questline.  This brings the total up to 492 T9 adornments.  Thanks to Maikeruu for emailing me the info.

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.

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.

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!

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!

A Bow to Pull With

Any good plate tank needs a good pulling bow.  You know, one that can hit mobs from way across the room.  You may not use it all the time, but you at least have it on your hot bar.  They come in handy for all sorts of things.  Once you’ve used one with an extra long range, it’s hard to go back to using anything else.  They even make questing easier since you can hit the mobs from so far away (less running around).

I remember several years ago preparing to raid Deathtoll.

The first thing I did was ride a cloud up on Bonemire and jump off at just the right spot so I could land on the floating island containing Arbiter Selek. But before I could talk to him, I had to speak Draconic. That’s right, first I had to do the quest Speak as a Dragon that started with a raid and then sent me all over Norrath looking for items.

Fan Faire is now over and one thing seems to be clear: SOE does not have a plan to balance the new players coming into the game between EQ2X and EQII Live, at least not one they are willing to share with us… 

E3 took place this year from June 15-17.  SmokeJumper was interviewed and said that the current subscription model would not change.  When asked after the announcement of EQ2 Extended about that interview, he had this to say:

Yes, at that time, we were discussing the concept. No, we were not ready to commit to it, nor did we have any details of what we might be doing.

On July 27th, EQ2 Extended was announced.  I counted up how many work days passed between the interview and the announcment.  Guess how many work days went by?

Overview

Welcome to the first installment of Dethdlr’s Dungeon. This is my little place on EQ2Wire to post my commentary on EQ2. Unlike the news items, this is more for opinion based articles from my own perspective. For my first article here I’m going to tackle: How to figure out an encounter.  I’m sure some of our readers know all of this information already but there’s probably a tidbit or two in there that may help someone out.  Here goes…