The announced removal of Critical Mitigation will coincide with the conversion of Yellow and Red Crit Mit adornments into Health adornments. So why will the replacement adornments have less Health (less than 250 points each) than White health adornments? According to Omougi, it’s because the EQ2 team thinks we should have other viable choices, like DPS. Adornments should be about choice!

From Omougi on the EQ2 Forums:

Our goal with these adornment and spell conversions is to give you guys something in the place of nothing essentially. Before, you were playing a zero-sum game if you had enough crit mit. If you didn’t have enough crit mit, you couldn’t do the encounters — period. All these adornments and spells did is bring you up to a threshold. If you were past that threshold, it does nothing for you.

Now, [while] these adornments and spells actually do increase your survivability at all times – equating the amount of crit mit lost to an equivalent form of HP doesn’t really work out, because any amount of HP is infinitely better than a threshold stat with no use. If you were slotting your adornments for survivability before, you are still slotting them for survivability with HP – the only change is the adornments have been made more powerful in their actual effectiveness with crit mit out of the picture.

This change equates to a free survivability gain across the board, and we need to be very careful with numbers at first to ensure things do not get drastically easier. Changing the difficulty of content is not the goal here – changing the accessibility of content is.

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From Silius on the EQ2 Forums:

Just to clarify some confusion.

• Crit mit as a mechanic is being removed.
• NPC crit bonus was countered by crit mit and we are reducing crit bonus to 0 across the board.
• Critical avoidance is staying around. Critical avoidance is an NPCs way of contesting your chance to critically hit them.
• Replacing the adornments with HP is not to compensate for anything. Since the critical mitgiation stat is no longer useful we are converting to a stat that benefits all players.
• The goal is for this change to not change the difficulty of the encounters. This is why we ask that you all take some time to log on to test once we push it there. We plan on having this on test by the weekend.

Note: NPC crit bonus may be used in the future on a case by case bases and will be considered in the balance of the encounter so that crit mit is not required.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to PM me.

In what may go down as the best decision in EQ2 history, or a total overreaction to a problem that could have been solved with a 15-20% reduction across the board, Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has announced that in the very near future, the Critical Mitigation stat will be COMPLETELY GOING AWAY.

First introduced in The Shadow Odyssey, greatly expanded in Sentinel’s Fate, and then becoming the most important stat within Destiny of Velious as an alternative form of progression to raising the level cap (which is technologically challenging), here’s the announcement of this revelation from the EQ2 Forums:

We’ve listened to all of your conversations since Critical Mitigation was originally introduced. The dev team has extensively debated about it internally. (Very extensively.) But ultimately, we decided that the right move for EQII is to remove Critical Mitigation entirely from the game.

Critical Mitigation initially seemed to do what it was designed for, but it has always suffered from a complete lack of intuitiveness for players, and it’s not a forward-extensible system. Ultimately, it doesn’t add any fun factor to the game.
So we’ve decided that a complete removal of it is by far the best solution for all concerned.

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A selection of Velious raid mobs have been doubling up on Area-of-Effect attacks since the expansion’s launch nearly one year ago. Atan (of Unrest) summed up the issues:

Condition 1: Modifieable timers line up such that a mob casts 2 different abilities simultaneously.

Condition 2: Ability that normally comes ever 40 seconds comes twice in a row with no delay.

Seems they are both bugs to me, but condition 1 is probably just a result of your design.

Maevianiu is getting serious about addressing the AoE double-casting by raid mobs in Velious raid zones and had these responses:

I cannot speak on Condition 1, I’ll leave that to the designers.

However, Condition 2 is definately a bug, and I’ve been chasing it for a while now and frankly. I cannot make it happen.

So I’m adding in some extra logging to try to pickup on when you guys make it happen and see if I can track it down from there. I’ll post in this thread later today with the zone(s) the logging has been activated in and you guys and post when it happens in those zones and hopefully we can find the cause and get it fixed.

And, if you guys can find a way to make it happen please post it here it will go a long way to getting this fixed.

and:

The logging is now active for any instances started after the time of this posting on the “Throne of Storms: Hall of Legends [Challenge]” zone.

Update:

Logging is also enabled in Foundations of Stone [Challenge]

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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We reported last week on the double-casting of AoEs by Destiny of Velious HM (hard mode) raid targets, making many fights either nearly impossible, or requiring exceptional luck.

According to Kander, this is now being looked at:

It is definitely a bug and we definitely intend to fix it. We have code looking at it right now.

Meanwhile, Gninja remains our point man on all things Mercenaries. At the prodding of players, he has nailed down some issues, first with Defiler mercs not taking advantage of wards:

Took a look at this. It seems they are still warding but they are giving heals nearly full priority. I will rebalance it a bit so they keep wards up as well.

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From EverQuest2.com:

Crushbone and Permafrost will be undergoing maintenance beginning at 4:00 AM Pacific* on January 31, 2012. We expect this downtime to last for approximately 8 hours.Chat will also be down for the Freeport and Oasis servers during this time.

We apologize for this interruption and will bring the servers back online as soon as the maintenance is completed.

Time Zone Conversions

• PST: 4:00am-noon
• EST: 7:00am-3:00pm
• GMT: 12:00-20:00
• CET: 13:00-21:00

Last week, MMORPG posted an interview with Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson.

The article is a bit light on revelations and threw a few softballs like “The Dungeon Maker is a brilliant addition to the game.  Can we expect more functionality now that it seems like the community loves the feature so much?” , it could still be an interesting read, especially players looking for any scrap of information about the upcoming fourth game in the EverQuest franchise (you didn’t think we forgot about EQOA, did you?).

Great ideas only really shine if you’re first to market with them. So we’re giving ourselves lead time against our competitors by being as close-mouthed about the game as we can until we feel like we’ve got a bit of a lead for launch. And then we’ll talk about it. You can’t imagine how much we want to talk about it. We’re bursting.But for now, all I can say are the things I’ve said before: a) It’s a reimagining of the Norrathian universe of characters and places; b) It’s utilizing the same Forgelight MMO engine that “Planetside 2” is using (and that engine is looking incredible right now), and c) this is not the MMO you’re used to playing. We aim to make something extremely different this time around. High-fantasy? You betcha.  Norrath? You bet, but expect some twists. Magic? Swords? Sorcery? Yup, yup, and yup. But beyond that…imagine all you want. Our aim is to make something cooler than what’s in your head.

Although EQNext is still pretty much top secret, Zoltaroth did post a picture of some members of the EQ2 and EQNext teams at a paintball range. Hey, we’ll take anything we can get including a pic of Rothgar’s armory.

It is now two weeks since the announcement that ProSiebenSat, a TV and radio broadcast firm based in Germany, will become SOE’s ‘Exclusive Partner’ in Europe. ProSiebenSat’s gaming division, Alaplaya, is mostly known for poorly supported region-locked free-to-play browser games.

The announcement immediately raised fears which, to date, have received no official (or unofficial) response from SOE beyond two posts from SmokeJumper asking for more patience:

I can’t give you the official answer yet. I’ve been specifically asked to wait until the full FAQ and everything is created for this.

However, this should be really big for EQII in Europe. Partnering with Proseiben.1 gets us access to television ads in Europe, which means we should be able to greatly enlarge our European server populations with new players. That would just be astoundingly cool for everyone involved over there.

I need to wait to talk about other details until all the p’s and q’s are arranged. (When we partner with folks, the discussions always take longer because it’s not just us making the decisions, and this is a big arrangement with many details to hash out.)

I am sorry this is taking so long, but the answers are coming soon.

After the jump, we address some of the issues that players are uncertain about:

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Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has posted a bit of a Twitter followup after his rather abrupt pronouncement that we should only expect three Game Updates this year, with the next one not arriving until sometime in April:

Funny how when you come back from relaxing, you always run real hard to catch up. Does this make sense? Really? Humanz iz odd.

DoV, Book 2, Chapter 1! (GU 63) : Withered Lands and Skyshrine. A big new overland, group instances, a contested dungeon, raids, and more!

Sometimes things go right. And then because of that, they keep going right because that becomes normal. This is a good time for SOE.

If you like posting on the EQ2 forums, you’ve probably been seeing a lot of the above screen.

Over 2 weeks ago, the SOE forums lost the ability to store login information using cookies. In other words, anyone who was not actively browsing an SOE forum or website was logged out after 15 minutes of activity. At the time, this was explained as a temporary glitch.

However last week, EQ2 Community Manager Amnerys (who returned to work at SOE in early January) had this unbelievable update on the issue:

The forum auto logout has been changed to 3-hours now. This should satisfy the security reasons for the change as well as allow a decent amount of time before needing to log back in.

EQ2Players is very much “coming soon.” I know you won’t believe it until you see it, but it truly shouldn’t be very long now. I haven’t seen it with my own eyes, but others on my team have.

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During Fan Faire 2011’s “Freeport and Beyond” panel led by EQ2 Exec Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, a slate of exciting plans was laid out.

The announcements outlined Game Update 61 (War of Zek), GU62 (Freeport Reborn), GU63 and GU64 which would each contain new Destiny of Velious content, and Game Update 65 slated for August 2012 which would bring about the revamp of the City of Qeynos.

Here’s a transcript of SmokeJumper’s Fan Faire 2011 presentation (watch video here) from 13:58 to 14:36:

What we’re concentrating on is making sure that we have not just new content to chew through really quick, although we’re constantly doing that, I think you guys all realize now that we’re on a quarterly basis for content.

We’re not selling areas, quests, and things like that in the expansion packs anymore. We’re giving that to you for the regular subscription price as you play the game. The GUs (Game Updates) will constantly be adding more stuff like that. We’re telling Velious saga stuff… After Velious, we had 60, 61, Freeport is 62, then it’s Velious again on 63 and 64, and then Qeynos next summer for [Game Update] 65.

So you can imagine our shock when reading SmokeJumper’s statement today in response to a thread asking Is there anyone making actual content for EQ2 anymore?

Lol. Sorry, folks. I went on a two-week vacation starting at the beginning of January. It’s nice to know I was missed.

GU 63 (the next installment of DoV) is in April, not February. You’ll start hearing about it soon. The Qeynos revamp (GU 64) is after that in mid-Summer.

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Optimization of the Broker is something that’s been on EQ2 Lead Programmer Rothgar’s long term To Do list for quite a while. So it was a surprise when a change we first heard about in September 2011 partly arrived in yesterday’s Update Notes.

All of those ‘vendor trash’ items with a description like “You might be able to find a merchant who would give you a few coins for this item.” are now NO BROKER. This change should help clear tens of thousands of items off the broker whose sole purpose has been to provide some flavor to players rather than just giving them gold pieces from certain mobs.

Now, this change did not go without a hitch: All Fertilizer ended up getting flagged NO BROKER.

These items which have played triple duty as food for Burynai house pets, the Guild Hall amenity of similar function, and Plant Food for house plants also got flagged as NO BROKER. As these items (ie. a flask of distilled water, a bag of compost, a large decaying bone) have traditionally traded north of 25 gold a piece, this has led to a certain amount of consternation.

According to Gninja, a fix for this issue is coming soon:

Keep an eye on the patch notes, fertilizer loot will be once again be able to be sold on the broker. Sorry about that folks!

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Here are today’s update notes from the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

Fixed a placement issue with certain moveable objects (for instance, the portals will now place properly during the Zynos fight in Anchor of Bazzul).

ACHIEVEMENTS

Characters who have completed “Your Eternal Reward” should now receive the “Agent of Freeport” achievement.

MERCENARIES

Shaman mercenaries should no longer continue to think they are in combat when it comes to casting wards on their group. They will still cast their out of combat preward spells.

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Raiders continue to wait for a fix to the double-casting of AoEs first reported shortly after the release of Game Update 61 in August 2011. This issue has been discussed here here and recently here. We got a We’ll look into it from Kander on October 27, 2011 but have received no further communication on the issue.

Meanwhile, there are a few tweaks coming to the difficulty of Drunder Raid Zones. These changes are currently on Test will likely go live next Tuesday.

ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION

Vallon’s Tower x4 (Tower of Tactics) [Challenge]

• Ambassador Grindstone will no longer reapply his Unbridled Fury of the Elements buff as soon as he has dispelled player debuffs, he waits a few seconds.

• Ambassador Grindstone no longer casts Crystalline Torrent Spell.

• Vallonite Sentinels no longer memwipe when they cast Sentinel’s Touch.

• Vallonite Sentinels no longer taunt lock players during the fight.

Tallon’s Stronghold [Challenge]

• During the Tallon Zek fight Deathbringer’s Touch is now cureable as a curse.

• Tallon Zek will warn players as he teleports and will not fire his arrow volley until 10 seconds after he changes his location.

• Fighters will not take as harsh a punishment if they turn their back on Tallon Zek as he is firing arrows.

Here are your update notes for today, January 19th:

GENERAL

• Fixed a bug with house item tooltips that would sometimes show incorrect housing restrictions.

• Group Friend spells should once again work on warders and pets.

MERCENARIES

• Blurt Grasplung should now cure detrimental spells on groupmates.

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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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Think of the cookies!

Ever since Monday’s ~30 minute SOE Forum Maintenance, players have been unable to stay logged into any SOE forum.

This is causing headaches for players and SOE staff alike. If you remember your login information, you may participate in the discussion here.

and an update from Amnerys who, if you have been following her twitter, know that she is back working after maternity leave:

We are borked. We are working on it. It’s frustrating for all of us and we’ll have it fixed asap. Sorry for the inconvenience!

image courtesy Jayne of Kithicor

Over the last month, a growing number of players have reported missing Quest Feathers and Quest Books. The feather and book icons are invisible, leaving only the yellow or white wisp appearing above each NPC’s name.

People have reported the occurrence of the problem after updating DirectX, while others have reported temporarily alleviating the problem by /camping their characters.

This issue is being discussed on the EQ2 Forums.

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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Although the much lauded Dungeon Finder was quickly abandoned by all but mid-level players thirsty for a dungeon crawl, SOE seems confident they can breathe life into this feature with the announcement of upcoming improvements. However none of the announced changes address the core problem, which we will address after the jump.

From the EQ2 Forums:

Come check out the all-new changes to Dungeon Finder!

As of last Wednesday, we announced two new features for the Dungeon Finder system. This should help game play by giving more options for available dungeons and more incentive to use it. So go out there and get adventuring!

Test Update Notes from the EQ2 Forums:

DUNGEON MAKER

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

• Fixed an issue with avatar power consumption rates. (also on Live as of Dec 22nd)

MERCENARIES

• Ten new mercenaries can be found within the major cities of Norrath. This includes Freeport, Qeynos, Neriak, Gorowyn, New Halas, and Kelethin!

• Gaeri Tallspire [Warlock] and Firus Scorchtouch [Wizard] have returned to their normal hangout and can once again be hired! They have been rebalanced a bit to do less spike damage but in some cases might do more DPS on sustained battles! Gaeri is now more encounter based where as Firus is more single target based damage.

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Here are your Update Notes for December 21, 2011 from the EQ2 Forums:

DUNGEON MAKER

• Fixed an issue with avatar power consumption rates.

QUESTS

Beastlord Epic

• Ralissk should now properly speak to beastlords on all steps of the quest “One Door Closes, Another Door Opens”.