I am thrilled to announce that EQ2U now supports Spirit Stones (green adornments) which were added with the Chains of Eternity expansion, and for which we recently received the necessary data. We hope you will find that the progression of stats on this new type of adornment is a lot easier to follow with our choice of presentation/layout.
Spirit Stone shown on a character's equipment with stats appropriate to the Spirit Level.
As awesome as it is that Raiders, Group, and yes Solo players get to experience the entire Drinal Signature Quest line which takes players through the entire Chains of Eternity storyline, the requirement to do this 8-12 hour quest on every Alt character just to gain access to the group zones, as well as loot [eq2u]Obol[/eq2u] and [eq2u]Greater Spirit[/eq2u]s was a bridge too far.
From EQ2 Lead Designer Akil "Lyndro" Hooper on the EQ2 Forums:
We're going to remove the entrance requirements from all of the dungeons and raids in the expansion except for Harrow's End. For Harrow's End you'll be able to get a Heirloom key from Drinal's Steward that you can give to other characters on your account to gain access to the zone.
UPDATE from Lyndro about [eq2u]Obol[/eq2u] currency and [eq2u]Greater Spirit[/eq2u]s:
We've been chatting about this some, and it makes sense to allow your alts to collect the Obol and Spirit drops if you have a character that has completed the signature line. The "Key" for Harrows End will allow for you to start gathering Obols and Spirits (Which are Heirloom). You'll still need to complete the signature line to see the merchant version of the Steward, but since the Obols and Spirits are Heirloom and the equipment that you buy from the Steward is all heirloom, you should be able to get the benefit on all your characters.
EQ2Wire answers 20 Frequently Asked Questions about EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity:
Like clockwork, Niami Denmother of EQ2Traders has turned out a fantastic guide to crafting in the Chains of Eternity expansion.
In this guide, she updates us on Handcrafted and Mastercrafted armor, jewelry, weapons, and so forth which have received a complete set of items (rather than being dragging out until level 100). She also delves into the new set of white Adornments, a new type of green Adornment called Spirit Stones, dramatic improvements to Tinkering, the powerful new Tradeskill Prestige abilities, and an update on the Tradeskill AAs tab which now has its own 40 points to spend. While there are no Tradeskill quests in the expansion, the number of new concepts being added to Tradeskills shows that the EQ2 team want crafting to remain relevant for the foreseeable future. Niami's guide is broken out into 2 additional sections as shown:
Holly "Windstalker" Longdale just tweeted:
Servers are unlocked! Welcome to Chains of Eternity everyone! #EQ2
— Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) November 13, 2012
EQ2Wire was invited to a Chains of Eternity Fansite Tour (yay! our first since Sentinel's Fate!) on Friday, November 9th and we're working on our writeup of that tour. In the mean time, check out some of the other previews which have been posted around the interwebs:
Karen Bryan and MJ Guthrie at Massively have been turning in some great writeups of SOE Live and the upcoming Chains of Eternity expansion:
TenTonHammer have also turned out their own preview:
Cyliena of EQ2 Zam has written a great writeup of her experience on the Chains of Eternity Press Tour she attended:
From the EQ2 Forums:
Chains of Eternity is EverQuest II's 9th expansion! In Chains of Eternity, adventurers will travel to the realm known as Ethernere in their quest to stop the siphoning of souls from Norrath. Here, the heroes will fight to save not only the mortals of their world, but prevent the imbalance in Ethernere, as well as meet the God of the afterlife, Drinal, the Silver Reaper. They may yet find the answer lies not in fortunes and portents, but deep in Norrath's past. Adventurers will also uncover all new areas in the mortal realm of Norrath.
The fate of the living and the dead are in your hands, heroes! Are you up to the challenge before you?
From the EQ2 Forums:
We're just hours away from Chains of Eternity™!
All EverQuest II servers will come offline at 7:00 AM PST* on Tuesday, November 13, 2012 to prepare for this content update. We anticipate game servers will be back online before 12:00 Noon PST*.
Important: This is an estimate of our anticipated downtime.
While the servers are offline tomorrow, make sure you keep an eye on Twitter, Facebook, the Forums, and the website for special countdown activities and updates, including diary entries from our off-duty server hamsters!
From the new EQ2 Forums:
Tomorrow EverQuest II will launch its ninth expansion, Chains of Eternity™! In addition to the two new overland zones (previewed last week here) and many other features, this expansion will include nine new instanced dungeons with unique, exciting encounters and loot! Check out the video for more about these new dungeons!
Remember, today is your last chance to pre-order Chains of Eternity™! The Collector's Edition is available at a special discounted pre-order price. Both the Standard and Collector's editions include an exclusive Cloak of Mourning for pre-orders as well:
Make sure you get your copy before 11:59 PM PST* today (Monday, November 12, 2012)!
Today's the day that gaming news sites who went on tours of the upcoming Chains of Eternity expansion are able to post their impressions and screenshots. And to go along with these stories is a new video interviewing the talented artists and animators of Chains of Eternity.
Commentary
I have to be honest. After seeing how energized the EQ2 team were at SOE Live, this video is a bit uninspiring. Everything is given in a flat inflection, and the visuals are mostly slow flythroughs. Where's the combat? Where's the epic battles?
I'm genuinely excited about Chains of Eternity, and there was an infectious enthusiasm when talking to different developers and designers in Vegas. After a year of revamps, retooling, and not enough endgame group/raid content, this expansion delivers massive, beautiful, well put-together zones in spades. But this video doesn't quite communicate the team's efforts.
Showcased above is the new EQ2 Character Select screen set in Eidolon Plains.
Screenshots of the two Chains of Eternity: Collector's Edition mercenaries (your choice of Templar or Paladin for each of your characters), as well as the SOE Live mercenary (a Vampire Shadowknight) which became available early this week can be seen in our previous article EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity CE Items, AoD, and SOE Live. We've also posted a screenshot of the Collector's Edition exclusive Wyvern Flying Mount in Ethernere colors.
From the EQ2 Forums:
EverQuest II is preparing to launch its ninth expansion, Chains of Eternity™! This expansion will take intrepid adventurers into Ethernere. Part of this expansion is the two new overlands in the spirit realm: Obol Plains and the Eidolon Jungle.
Nathan "Kaitheel" McCall, Game Designer; Maria Del Casino, Senior Environment Artist; Brandon McDonald, Environment Artist; and Chris Atkins, Character Artist talk about what went into creating the lush environments of Eidolon Jungle and Obol Plains. They may have started with Loping Plains and the Feerrott, but after all the changes, they are almost entirely new zones. The incredible art and animation coming from the EQ2 team continues to astound me.
From Holly "Windstalker" Longdale's twitter:
We are excited to announce we're adding an amazing Ethernere wyvern mount to the CoE Collector's Edition!
and for SOE Live attendees who have been justifiably balking at the $50 upsell to get the Chains of Eternity: Collector's Edition, it looks like there may be some movement on that price:
Also, our Community and Marketing team has exciting announcement coming this afternoon for SOE Live folks looking to upgrade CoE...
Glad to see these two changes based on player feedback.
From Dexella on the EQ2 Forums:
SOE Live attendees will be able to upgrade to a Collector's Edition for $20.00 (or foreign currency equivalent). Please complete the pre-order purchase flow as normal; you will see the reduced price once your credit card is charged. You must pre-order the Collector's Edition on the same account you registered for SOE Live with and you must pre-order before the deadline at 11:59 pm on November 12th.
When the Chains of Eternity expansion was announced, the Collector's Edition goodies were revealed to include Krivix Honorclaw, a Werewolf Mercenary, a healer. Then at SOE Live, players suggested that it would be great to have a choice of healer or tank for the CE, and so the decision was made on the spot to offer a choice of Paladin or Templar for each person who claims the merc.
Today, Holly "Windstalker" tweeted a screenshot of Krivok Honorclaw the Templar, who is a new Werewolf-like race, the Lujien:
So last night, we announced that we had made a snapshot of the AAs for some 150,000 characters which people could view at Beetny.com. We were pretty proud of ourselves until someone asked if that included the Beastlord warder AAs. It didn't. Beatny doesn't cover Beastlord warders.
So because we try harder, we've gone back and made an actual backup of every character's AAs right here on EQ2U and will hang onto it until well after the expansion. That's over 416,000 characters.
If you haven't got an EQ2U account, please feel free to sign up and do your own AA Backup! And let us know in the Comments if you have any questions!
With the EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity expansion comes new Prestige abilities, and that means an AA reset. In years past, news of an AA reset has seen players scrambling to capture screenshots of their AA tabs or scribbling down notes about where you've spent points (and how many) on each tree.
This year, we have a better suggestion: Sit back, relax, and let EQ2U do the work for you!
On October 28-29th, Dethdlr wrote and ran a script to Backup the AAs of every followed character on EQ2U, plus every single level 90, 91, and 92 EQ2 character ever looked up on EQ2U. Since 96% of level 92 characters have been looked up on our site, you're probably covered!
From EverQuest2.com:
EverQuest II's ninth expansion, Chains of Eternity™, will be taking adventurers to a realm never intended for living souls: Ethernere. What waits for them there? And what will happen to Norrathians as they cross the barrier between the living and the dead, a barrier that some seers argue never should have been breached?
At SOE Live, we got to see some amazing flythrough videos of the EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity. A Youtube video has been posted by CyberInk which includes just some of this.
NOTE: Some of these zone flythroughs were taken a few weeks ago, and we were told by artists at SOE Live that changes have been made since then, so if you want to see how these zones look now, head over to the Beta server!!
Ahead of schedule, the EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity Public Beta is NOW OPEN!
How Do I Get to Beta?
Unlike past betas, there is no Non-Disclosure Agreement to accept, and no separate Beta launcher to run. To access the Chains of Eternity, simply close and reopen your EverQuest II Launcher, click on the Version link in the top left corner (US English for US players), switch the region to "Beta", click Apply, and let the patching begin!
Beta Copy is 1000% better from how it has been handled in past expansion Betas. Instead of typing /beta and hoping that an hour or two from now, your character will miraculously appear on Beta, the /beta command now takes between 10 and 15 SECONDS to copy your character over.
After the jump, a detailed pictoral of how to do these steps, and some useful time-saving info...
From Holly "Windstalker" Longdale on the EQ2 Forums:
Sorry we haven't been more specific. We will do a stability pass in the morning and open when it is stable. We are aiming before noon PDT and we will keep you updated.
So wait a minute... Every other beta, there have been e-mail signups a month prior for us to all sign NDA and all that jazz. I guess we'll know in a couple of hours what path they choose to go. 
Normally I'd be banging the drum about Public Beta being cool, but hory shet I've got plenty of stuff on my plate with SOE Live videos (11 hours), and various articles before I can even get started screenshotting and previewing Chains of Eternity. 
Headed to Podcasting panel soon. Dellmon of the awesome EQ2Talk podcast on the panel. Will record a video. Already 7 hours (30GB) of vids, including our EQ2U panel, to crunch down and post.
Panel starting now. Dev intros.
Back by popular demand -- CONTENT
* New overland zones
* New Dungeons
* New Raids
* Signature line more accessible
* New type of adornments
* More Prestige abilities
* Level cap to 95
So for those folks behind on AAs, if you buy Chains of Eternity, you get an item you can claim 2 per account (not 1 per character) that if you are level 90 it dings you to 280AAs.
Just starting the EQ2 Art & Animation panel.
Dave "covic" Brown, Tom Tobey, Aaron "Gnobrin" Bisnett, Chris Myers
Lotsa slides.
This is a visual panel, so not going to be a lot of updates.
How we create a 3D environment
Showing a flythrough of a new outdoor 3D dungeon that's being worked on.
The expac will have 9 individual dungeons (not repurposed)
I just received an e-mail indicating that the new Chains of Eternity expansion is available for pre-order at EverQuest2.com.
Introducing Everquest II: Chains of Eternity™!
This is the 9th expansion of the revolutionary EverQuest II franchise. This expansion contains must-have features such as level increases, prestige abilities and new game items only available with this expansion, such as adornments that become more powerful with your character. Also, explore new content in two overlands in the spirit realm, and experience adventure with new dungeons and quests. Put right the imbalance in the Ethernere!
Nearly every EverQuest II expansion has included some kind of new feature, yet we tend to associate expansions with their content. Think of any EQ2 expansion and our recollections are of the continents, solo quests, group and raid zones, and level cap raises contained within each update. So what happened with Age of Discovery?
It's no secret that the original plan was to release two expansions -- Velious I and Velious II -- and charge for both of them. However it must have been felt that players would react negatively to a "Velious double-dip". So Age of Discovery was envisioned as an a la carte features bundle which would still offer the side benefit of funding continual Velious development.
Yet despite Herculean efforts by SmokeJumper to get players on board with the benefits of Features vs. Content Expansions, players remained skeptical.
So why even release Destiny of Velious and Age of Discovery in the same year?
![[IMG]](http://www.everquest2.com/images/en/features/2012/10/expansion/preorderitems/cloak.jpg)
