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.

The Adornments system in EQ2 has always been pretty confusing. And so far, there just have not been a lot of options for certain classes in certain slots for adornments.

Each of the 9 tradeskill classes and the 2 secondary tradeskill classes have each made a handful of adornments. necessitating adornment websites to keep it all straight. We are thrilled to see that the Kanga will be updating her fantastic EQ2 Adornments site for Game Update 55.

With Game Update 55, adornments have been rebuilt from the ground up. In fact some prized adornments (Parry) can no longer be crafted as the recipes have been removed.

Starting with Game Update 55, all adornments are crafted by those players who choose the secondary tradeskill of Adorning. If you were a 400 Transmuter, then you will be a 400 Transmuter and 400 Adorner on February 16th.

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.

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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.

It looks like SOE have renewed their partnership with nVidia for the launch of EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate. When firing up the EQ2 Test, I was presented with the NVidia: The Way It’s Meant to be Played logo.

Erollisi Day festivities started at midnight, February 4th (after a brief hotfix) and will run until the expansion (February 16th).

Erollisi Day is the celebration of the goddess of love and all things related to the emotion that sets hearts to galloping!

With the return of Erollisi Day, many of your favourite activities from previous years’ celebrations are making comebacks with new rewards!

Erollisi Day @ EQ2Players

Erollisi Day 2010 Event @ EQ2 ZAM

Erollisi Day Crafting @ EQTraders

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

From EQ2Players:

You’re invited to SOE’s first ever Ustream Beta Tour, on Friday, February 5, 2010, hosted by Alan “Brenlo” Crosby, Senior Producer of EverQuest II.

Beginning at 4:00 p.m. PST (7:00pm EST), tune in to SOE’s Ustream channel to get an exclusive guided tour of EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate, through the eyes of the game’s producer.

Sentinel’s Fate, the sixth expansion of the groundbreaking EverQuest II franchise, transports players into a universe of legend and lore where adventures are just the beginning. The fabled lands of Odus, filled with epic quests, magnificent dungeons and limitless content provide the ultimate MMO experience for new players and seasoned veterans alike. Sentinel’s Fate presents the next chapter of the EverQuest II legacy which will be written by the passion of players and fueled by the hunger for adventure.

We’re a bit late on this, but EQ2Players has the latest preview leading up to the Sentinel’s Fate expansion, this time covering the 3 parts of the airship Vigilant. All three of The Vigilant instances (the Incursion, the Infiltration, and the Rescue) are geared for adventurers level 90+. EQ2Players Preview of The Vigilant.

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

Rothgar has reported in that those changes to prevent large Macros have been pulled out, and a fix is going in which should hopefully resolve the issues in Munzok’s Material Bastion.

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.

Kiara is continuing to give us detailed previews of every zone we’ll be seeing in the Sentinel’s Fate expansion. Today’s preview is the third of the Erudin zones — Erudin Royal Palace.

The last of the Erudin group instances is the Erudin Royal Palace. It is the central stronghold of the corruptive influence on Erudin and Odus as a whole.

Stephanie Young is one of the artists who worked on the Erudin zones. She [has a history with these zones as]  also worked on Erudin in EverQuest and EverQuest Online Adventures.