EQ2Wire got an invitation to go on a tour of the Sentinel’s Fate Beta with the lovely Christine “Kiara” Renzetti, EQII Community Manager, last month and we’re now able to post some screens and details of that tour. We were able to check out the hub city of Paineel, the sprawling open dungeon the Hole, the Vasty Deep Conservatory, and the Erudin Library.

I believe the most stunning aspect and lasting appeal of Sentinel’s Fate will be the artwork.

The Shadow Odyssey artwork was not my favorite. I found the “void” look of purples, greys, and sharp edges just didn’t appeal to me. Also it seemed that many of the NPCs and monsters in these zones were not entirely new. If you ask many players, I think they will tell you their favorite artwork in the game’s zones have been Kingdom of Sky and Pillars of Flame. I think fans of that design will be thrilled to see Sentinel’s Fate make a return to the bright color palette and rich zone design of the past, while at the same time not simply recycling what we’ve seen before. The Conservatory is an eye-popping visual feast. As we saw at Fan Faire, the developers have been working hard to add completely new monster and NPC appearances.

One of my favorite parts of the Sentinel’s Fate zones I’ve seen so far is the influence of housing on zone design. Most dungeons in Sentinel’s Fate were laid out in a very “down to business” fashion. Long corridors full of monsters that need killing RIGHT NOW.

Sentinel’s Fate, as far as I have explored, seems to have a more “lived in” feel which I find very appealing.

Armor Appearances

This was not part of the Beta Tour, but we thought I’d throw in some screens of some of the armor I’ve seen in game. These are mostly the Raid armor sets from Sentinel’s Fate.

Beta Tours Around the Interwebs

EQ2Wire is all about newsworthy rumors, scoops, announcements, and breaking news. But if you’d like to read a much more extensive Beta Tour, it’s worth checking out the Beta Tour at EQ2 ZAM by Calthine and Kain. Each of us have exclusive screen shots of Sentinel’s Fate.

Niami has also started to post her Beta Tour and Sentinel’s Fate Info. I know she has been working diligently to document all of the tradeskilling there is to see on the Sentinel’s Fate Beta and will continue to make EQTraders your one-stop shop for Tradeskill info.  Check out the screen snapshoty goodness Niami has posted so far at EQTraders.

While we don’t have all the details on what perks will be available to Guilds reaching the new level 90 cap, we know that Game Update #55 will add 2 new Guild Hall Amenities.

The first is pretty straightforward. It’s a Wizard Portal NPC with all the destinations available from the Ulteran Spires. It does not include the Kingdom of Sky zones of Tenebrous Tangle, Barren Sky, or Bonemire: Realm of Dawn. You’ll still need that amenity if your guildies are making regular use of these zones.

The second new Guild Hall Amenity is the Guild Standard Bearer. If you’ve ever been on a group or raid and just didn’t have the right setup. If only you had a little more oomph, more defensive stats, more DPS, etc. you could clear the zone and claim your reward.

The Guild Standard Bearer is a bit like a vending machine, selling (at a steep platinum cost) zonewide buffs to your allies within a group or raid instance. No doubt there will be more items added to this amenity over time.

Guild Standard (Click to Enlarge)

Updated Notes from Beta (added Friday, Feb 5th)

• These are only usable in Instances.
• They are not usable in Battlegrounds.
• We can expect more Standards to be added.
• Only one can be active inside a group dungeon or raid zone.
• Hopefully before Sentinel’s Fate launches, the descriptions for these items will contain specific numbers such as amounts of bonuses, etc.

EQ2Wire is providing continuing coverage of Game Update #55 (now on Test) and the Sentinel’s Fate expansion.

News is coming hot and fast now, so we’ve improved how news items are labeled and have added a News Ticker at the top of the site.

Don’t forget the UStream Sentinel’s Fate Beta Tour which will be led by Alan “Brenlo” Crosby. This is tomorrow Friday at 4PM PDT.

We are currently working on articles about the new Adornments, Guild Amenities, Leveling Tweaks, and a Zone List for the expansion.

And just to bring out tour of the UI improvements in Game Update #55 full circle, the lowly Zone Timers (Lockouts) window has been the bane of many a raid leader, as they remind players over and over to reset their group/raid persistent zone timers.

While I didn’t see a /resetallzones command (there might be one, I’m just not aware of it), the new Filter function at the bottom of the Zone Timers window should help considerably at raid time.

Many of us have been faced with the prospect of trying to find a spell or combat art out of our Knowledge book, only to be frustrated by a wall of all our spells from levels 1-80. This will only get more difficult when another tier of spells is added with the expansion. Fortunately, the Knowledge book has gotten a great new Filter feature that lets you choose to only show the highest level version of each spell you have. This doesn’t just mean all the spells from 71-80. Some classes have abilities which do not get updated beyond level 35 or levels 51-55. These show up with this Filter option set.

Screen shot after the jump…

You’ve probably already seen screenshots of the Updated Quest Window. We saw it way back in November when Brenlo posted it as a twitter picture. It’s great to finally see it coming to the live game.

If you’ve ever been frustrated with having to constantly open the Quest Journal and flip through your quests to see what steps you need on all the quests you are working on in a certain area, you will be relieved to see the multi-quest tracking feature of the new Journal.

Now, you determine what quests appear in your Quest Helper floating window by clicking the checkbox next to each quest you want to track. You can track, I believe, up to 10 quests at a time. You’ll notice there’s even a diamond icon next to each quest with the color of the quest’s level. Also, when you get a quest update, the quest name flashes briefly to draw attention to which quest was updated.

Screen Shot after the jump…

Consolidating Stats

Sentinel’s Fate consolidates many separate stats in an effort to simplify itemization. Developers have been hounded on the EQ2 forums for “ignoring” healers, hybrid classes which need both spell and melee abilities, etc. in designing gear. Stat Consolidation is a huge step in making a smaller set of gear usable by a larger player population. Here is the list of changes:

• Crit = Damage Spell Crit, Melee Crit, Range Crit, Heal Crit
• Crit Bonus = Spell Crit Bonus, Melee Crit Bonus, Range Crit Bonus
• Double Attack = Double Attack, Ranged Double Attack
• Potency = Base Spell Damage, Base Combat Art Damage, Base Taunt, Base Heal Amount
• Ability Mod = +CA Damage, +Spell Damage Mod, +Heal Amount
• Physical Mitigation = vs. Crushing, vs. Slashing, vs. Piercing
• Elemental Resist = Cold, Heat resists
• Noxious Resist = Disease, Poison resists
• Arcane Resist = Divine, Magic, Mental resists

Consolidated Stats naturally lead to a simplified Persona Window. Most classes will no longer have to hunt in Spell Stats and Melee Stats to find their Crit, Crit Bonus, Double Attack, etc. numbers. They’re all right there on the main Persona page. There isn’t even a Ranged Stats page anymore.

Inflated Stats?

If you think about how this consolidation works, you’ve probably realized that it’s going to be very easy for Druids, for example, to end up with 100% spell/heal/melee crit, or for rangers to end up with 100% self-buffed Double Attack/Ranged Double Attack. We already know that this expansion is going to be all about Crit Bonus. I think the developers have just accepted that even casual raiders are going to be at (or very close to) the 100% caps for Spell/Heal/Range/Melee Crit on day 1.

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what changes we’ll be seeing to Transmuting come February 16th. So I thought it was worth a rehash as Transmuting is changing quite a bit.

The Way It Was

Transmuting started out as a secondary tradeskill. It granted the ability to not only break down unwanted Treasured, Legendary, Mastercrafted, and Fabled gear, but also make certain adornments. But the drawbacks have been many.

Transmuting could only be skilled up to 100 by breaking down items. Reaching 400 skill could only be achieved by crafting (at great expense) hundreds of worthless low level adornments. And because the adornment recipes were spread over all 9 primary tradeskill classes, as well as transmuters and tinkerers, there has never been a great demand for Transmuters.  Really, only 1-2 Transmuters have been needed in any one guild just to break down unwanted No Trade group/raid loot.

Transmuting in Sentinel’s Fate

Domino, lead tradeskill developer, took a lot of player feedback at Fan Faire and on the EQ2 Forums in order to revamp Transmuting and the art of making Adornments. In the process, the entire array of adornments has received attention as well. A lot of gaps have been filled and more options opened.

The biggest change is that Transmuting has been split from Adorning. They are now two separate skills. Transmuting becomes just another harvesting ability which all players get like Mining, Foresting, Trapping, and Gathering. By breaking down items, you can skill up your Transmuting ability from 1-450.

Where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, is in the new Adorning skill. Adorners make EVERY player-made adornment in the game. Instead of adornment recipes being spread out through all of the tradeskill classes, Adorners will be the only game in town for getting your favorite adornments. Adorners can only skill up their ability by creating adornments.

Best of Both Worlds

As we have reported, with Sentinel’s Fate, you will now be able to be a skilled Tinkerer and experienced Adorner on the same character. Both skills can be raised to 450 on the same toon!

The Transition

Those who have already mastered the art of Transmuting will find their skill carries forward in Sentinel’s Fate. If you have a Transmuting ability of 362, then when you login on February 16th, you will find that your character has skills of Transmuting 362/450 and Adorning 362/450. You’ll probably need to pick up any new recipes for new adornments that have come out, but you don’t have to start over!

Since a lot more people are going to be Transmuting, I’m going to link to the Transmuting FAQ. Figuring out which items can be transmuted is tricky at first.

Everything you know about the main Character Stats is about to change.

For the past 5 years, in addition to the primary stats that each class uses:

• Predators have focused on STR to do melee and ranged damage and INT to increase poison damage.
• Druids have focused on STR to do more melee damage.
• Crusaders have focused on INT for spell damage and WIS for healing.

These are just the most obvious examples, but all 24 classes had some unique benefits from the different Stats. Starting with Sentinel’s Fate, each class now benefits significantly from just ONE statistic, even if they are considered a “hybrid” class.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Crushbone, Befallen, and Permafrost will be brought down Friday morning for some upgrades to address the lag issues.

The estimated downtime is four hours.

We’ll be bringing down the servers at 6am PST and will update this thread with details as needed.

Rothgar has been communicating what steps the server team have been taking with regards to this issue. You may be interested in some of those details he’s posted, after the jump.

The EQ2 Test Server has just been updated with most of Game Update 55. GU55 will be the free content available to all EQ2 players on February 16th, to coincide with the release of the expansion.

The biggest part of GU55 (with the loss of New Halas, Shaders 3, and the TS Revamp) are Battlegrounds.

Players are being asked to run dungeons, etc. to see what effect combat changes may have had.

Rothgar @ EQ2 Forums

Last week, we reported our suspicions about New Halas being delayed, but we now have official confirmation. New Halas will be released as a free content update in Game Update 56. This would likely be in May based on the current GU release cycle. Here is Brenlo‘s official announcement:

Halas is indeed delayed until GU 56.  We (read I) were a bit ambitious in our grand plans for the year and despite my constant whipping, we could not squeeze in everything we had on the agenda.  Thus we are taking our time to get it right and get it out there in a truly awesome state.  Hopefully this will help tide some of you over.

Brenlo has posted a New Halas screen shot on Twitter, presumably of the housing we will see in New Halas:

Last month, the first ever City Festival camped outside the Kelethin gates and provided a selection of both local and traveling rewards, house items, and temporary costumes (I want that Gi as a permanent item!!).

When it pulled up stakes, we had no idea where it would end up next. Early this morning we caught wind of the news that the traveling City Festival had arrived in Gorowyn. The theme for Gorowyn seems to be all things in a deep crimson. Here’s a sneak of what you can purchase with City Tokens for the next week, before the event rolls on to the next city.

While the City Festival is running, City Tokens can be earned for doing tradeskill and other tasks for the event hosts. City Tokens can also be earned any time just by doing City Writs.

If you are going to plan out your Guild Hall or house, there is no better place to lookup Furniture, House Items, etc. than EverSeek.com. Expect them to have the updated Gorowyn city fest items soon!

While we’re speculating, Sigrdrifa has put together a writeup of what we know about New Halas so far. It’s a nice preview while we wait for more official news about this level 1-20 starting zone which we are now expecting in Game Update 56 along with Shaders 3.0. It should be an interesting May.

New Halas Demystification on EQ2Forums

For those of you lucky (or unlucky 😉 ) enough to be raiding MMB, the zone is currently difficult or impossible to complete due to the January 28th hotfix. More information about this issue can be found in this EQ2 Forums thread.

We’re now less than 3 weeks from the release of Sentinel’s Fate. There has been no sign of Halas on Test. We’ve already been told that Halas is important to SOE, that they want it to be a starting zone to win new players. And I just don’t see them adding a starting zone with 20 levels of content with less than 2 weeks of testing. So at this point, EQ2Wire is now ready to call Halas for for Game Update 56 a few months after the Sentinel’s Fate expansion. This is purely speculation on our part until there’s an announcement, but we feel confident enough to post it.

I understand there are folks who are nostalgic for Halas after playing it in EQ1 and have really been looking forward to starting new characters there. I know I was looking forward to seeing what the Art department could turn out after seeing preliminary artwork at Fan Faire.

But Halas not being in-game for the expansion won’t ruin my life. Timorous Deep and Darklight Wood are still excellent options for leveling toons from 1-20. Really that level range is pretty saturated. The Golden Path we’ve been hearing about will be a polishing of existing zones (the changes to Sinking Sands were the first part of that) to make a smooth progression from 1-80.

More news on Battlegrounds and Sentinel’s Fate as we have it… This has been a busy news week and next week will probably be even busier!

Tomorrow’s Hotfix will include some changes targeted at server performance/lag. These changes will affect the number of spells and combat arts which can be linked together in 1 macro. We are trying to determine the maximum number of spells or combat arts which it will be possible to put on a single macro.

Thursday, January 28th Hotfix

As we now know, EQ2 will be getting Battlegrounds in Game Update 55 in February to coincide with the release of the Sentinel’s Fate expansion.

If you are wanting a closer look at the Maps of the 3 Battlegrounds zones, look no further than this EQ2Players writeup.

Battlegrounds are NOT intended as “end-game” or high-level only content. Although at launch they will be limited to level 80-90, there will be continuing effort to make Battlegrounds available to lower levels, complete with unique armor awards for these level ranges. Kiara posted about it here.

When Commission crafting was altered in March 2009 to prevent crafters from using their own Void Shards and other NO TRADE/HEIRLOOM materials for other players, it closed the book for several crafters on this highly profitable market.

However it was quickly discovered that a crafter could still use their own shards if the customer had at least the requisite number of shards in their own inventory to make the item. This was accomplished by swapping out ingredients in the Commission Materials window.

Today’s Hotfix marks the closure of this exploit:

Patch Notes January / 26 / 2010

GENERAL
You can no longer swap no trade and heirloom items given to you in a consignment trade.

Mentored Shards

Further, EQ2Wire is now hearing rumors that it will be impossible to run mentored “grey” void shard runs in Shadow Odyssey dungeons once the Sentinel’s Fate expansion launches. This likely will take the form of either being booted from the zone or a forced mentoring if a “trivialized” condition exists (mobs are grey).

It seems a concerted effort is now being put forth to restore the logical progression of gear in EverQuest II:

• Treasured/Mastercrafted — solo gear
• Legendary — group gear
• Fabled — raid gear

The Problem

1) Some players have no interest in getting into any sort of group, and play EQ2 entirely as a solo game, yet they are currently getting exceptional gear.

2) Some players are husband-and-wife or trio setups. Either they don’t want to do a full group and deal with the personalities, or they are undergeared and not able to get into a group.

3) And some players already have several main characters and are leveling an alt, possibly an alt that is not always desired (summoner, druid, brawler, etc.).

One of the biggest problems players of The Shadow Odyssey faced is that all 20 dungeons were targeted for level 80, and if more than one mid-70’s character joined the group, then zone rewards were scaled down (no chest, no shinies, level 67 gear).

The Solution

1) Treasured and Mastercrafted gear in Sentinel’s Fate will be much better gear comparatively than level 72 gear was for level 80 characters. Considering how powerful the T1 and T2 void shard armor are, for many solo players, it will likely last them well into the 80’s until they replace that gear with Mastercrafted and quested rewards.

2) The Hole offers a large sprawling open dungeon ranging from level 82-90. Most of it is tailored to 3-4 players. Instead of waiting for hours, trying to build the “perfect” group, I expect players will simply show up at the entrance and jump into whatever ragtag groups are running through. Also, a variety of quests and large number of named encounters exist within the zone.

3) We haven’t heard much word on Class Balance, but hopefully with the changes, and the fact that Sentinel’s Fate dungeons range from level 82-90 means that people will actually get to group up with mains AND alts throughout the level range. With the AA slider, it should be possible to earn AA just as easily this way as solo questing.

With the dungeons in Sentinel’s Fate not being locked to level 90 (The Hole is 82-90, and the first instance is accessible at level 83), players won’t be pressured quite so bad to “solo quest grind to 90” before being able to play the group game.

Alan “Brenlo” Crosby has announced some tweaks to the Experience Curve in EQ2 that went live today (January 20th, 2010):

Hey folks,

I wanted to pass along some news that you will see on the live servers tomorrow.  We have adjusted the experience curve in EQII.  We have done so for a number of reasons;

1.  It really wasn’t a curve before, more peaks and valleys.

2. Some levels had some very crazy and erratic peaks while others were far too fast.

3. We needed to adjust the curve overall for the addition of 80 to 90.

What will this mean for you?  You may see your bar move a bit when you log in after the update.  For most of you it will move forward, for some it might shift back a little.  The rate of progression from 1 to 65 will be the same in terms of gross XP needed but the level progression will be smoother.  We have increased the speed from 65 to 75 and this is due to two changes;

The required experience was lowered as it was actually harder to get from 65 to 75 than from 75 to 80.  Now it is in line with our expectations of speed of progression.

The quests in that that range will now give more experience as they were slightly behind the times in terms of XP rewards.

We hope you notice the smoother rate of progression and this removes a few bumps in your leveling.

Thanks all.

and further from the January 20, 2010 Patch Notes:

We have taken a look at the experience required to gain levels and made some adjustments. Leveling from 1-65 will still require the same overall amount of experience, but the experience required at certain levels has changed.  There were certain levels that required much more experience than others, but now the progression should be much steadier. Leveling to 65-75 should be a bit faster now for two reasons.  The first is that required experience was lowered some.  The second is that quests should give slightly more experience in this range now.

Today’s hotfix notes bring news that your player appearances (including illusions) can now be set in-game using a Magic Mirror type tool. Update Notes from EQ2 Forums:

ITEMS

• Appearance customization items have been changed! This affects these items:
  • – Shave and a Cut, Makeover (combined into the same item)
  • – Nalana’s All-Natural Cosmetic Balsam

• When used, these items now open a window that allows you to customize your appearance in-game instead of returning to the character select screen.
• In addition, Shave and a Cut and Nalana’s All-Natural Cosmetic Balsam now affect your current illusion if it is that of a player race (such as Erudite or Dark Elf). If an illusion is active, then the item will affect the appearance customization settings for that race. Once done, these will be saved and activated whenever you activate that illusion! In this way, you can create customizations for each of your player-race illusions!
• You can now preview appearance backpacks in the dressing room.
• Unequiping an item with a set bonus now cancels casting.

PVP

• Signet of Devouring is now purchasable with tokens.

TRADESKILLS

• Tinkered portable workstations can now be used from level 10 up.

Hotfix Notes for December 15:

ACHIEVEMENTS
The Butcherblock Bloodhound achievement will now acknowledge players that had previously completed the Butcherblock quests: “Silent Beckon”, “A Dim Light”, “For the Dogs”, “A Mind Of My Own”, “Sarnak Sympathizer: Part 2”, “Dark Tides”, “Picking up the Pieces”, “Ain’t No Monkey Business”, “Simple Grunt Work”, “When You Mess With An Angry Dwarf” and “Solid Foundation”.

QUESTS

• The intended pages of “Hrath’s Journal” are now readable while on the quest “Hadden’s Earring”.
• Learning the Path quest should now update correctly when completing a PVP writ.
• Sinking Sands quests should now scale to the difficulty of the zone.
• The Freeport Emissary in Highkeep for the Qeynos Claymore quest line should now spawn in Tenebrous Tangle near the Norrath portal.

SPELLS
Call Servant spell is now instant cast.

The servers are coming back up after scheduled maintenance, patching in Frostfell, and more importantly, fixing some bugs introduced by Game Update 54:

Just FYI, the main 2 reasons people want to travel to the Queen’s Colony, Outpost of the Overlord, etc.  are they want to complete the quests there, or more importantly, they want a decent choice of deity for their class.

The servers are coming down in a few minutes for what will be a 9 hour downtime for some server maintenance, a hotfix to hopefully fix the multitude of bugs introduced with Game Update 54, and of course to patch in Frostfell!!

EQ2Players Downtime Announcement

Servers will be back up at 10am PST or 1pm EST.

It’s going to be a busy week for Norrathians.

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In other news, the Highland Stalker — the Sentinel’s Fate Collector’s Edition mount — will get a speed boost over the previous announcement. Out-of-the-box it will have a runspeed of 65%.

Looking Ahead

On December 20th, we’ll see the return of the monthly Moonlight Enchantments event which takes places in the forests of Norrath. These zones will have several new house item rewards including tiles with the textures of water, clouds, sand, etc.

Also around the first of January, we can expect the new City Festivals to start up. Every month, there will be a city festival just outside the gates of one city for the first week of that month. These offer many house item and other rewards.