Several people have reported on the EQ2Forums that the progress bushes aren’t spawning in the Jarsath Wastes and Sinking Sands druid rings.  Windslasher chimed in with this update:

Drat!

I goofed with the spawns in Jarsath and Sinking Sands, so the progress signs aren’t appearing in those two zones. Unfortunately it’s not a server-specific thing or a setting that I can just change on the fly, so even though I have the fix in the pipeline I can’t tell you how soon it will be on the live servers, yet. It’ll be fixed as soon as possible.

Update: According to the update notes, this should be fixed with the hotfix going in tomorrow morning.

At 11pm PDT on June 9th, 2010 (7am GMT on June 10th, 2010), several EQ2 servers were brought down for maintenance:

Befallen, Permafrost, Crushbone, Mistmoore, Oasis, Runnyeye, Splitpaw, Innovation, Valor, Storms, Battlegrounds UK, Battlegrounds DE, and Battlegrounds FR

The original announcement indicated that maintenance would take 7 hours. All servers were up after ~13 hours, with a total downtime of ~15 hours for Runnyeye, Innovation, and some of the Battlegrounds servers.

So what was this maintenance all about? And did it include the US-UK Battlegrounds bridging we’ve been hearing about?

We arrive at a topic which has garnered nary a comment from the EQ2 development team since February. I’m talking of course about class balance. While we realize it’s foolish to think that one day all the classes will be truly “balanced”, there’s no better terminology for the valid concept of making sure that all 24 classes have the tools necessary to do their jobs, and that classes that do the same basic job are able to put out similar numbers.

Shaders 3 Hotfix on the Horizon

Imago-Quem has been collecting feedback, bug reports, crash reports, and screen shots people have been posting regarding Shaders 3.0. We’re now expecting a hotfix in a couple of weeks. EQ2 Senior Producer SmokeJumper had this update:

Some good news for you folks:

1) The darkness issues are fixed in-house already. We’ll be pushing those fixes out to you soon.

2) We’re looking into the crash that occurs in guild houses with tons of items in them. We hope to have a solution soon.

3) Frame rate has been improved.

followed by Imago-Quem:

Just to add to that, we discovered the issue with the frost-rimmed chairs on Friday thanks to a player who helped us narrow it down to this item and we’ve already got a fixed checked in for it.

As SmokeJumper mentioned, we’re hoping to push out an update to address several Shader 3.0 issues in the next week or two.

It appears the Game Update 56 notes left out an interesting and (for players with many alts) fortuitous quest tweak.

The quest To Speak as a Dragon needs almost no introduction. It’s a crucial language quest which is key to completing many other quests in EQ2, including Epic Repercussions. This quest requires crawling the depths of 26 different dungeons to find the necessary runes to learn the language of Draconic. Despite dramatic improvements in travel since EQ2’s launch, it’s still a tedious quest, especially if you have done it with 2 or more characters.

So this quest received some changes with Game Update 56. From Domino (clearly branching out from tradeskills):

As of the launch of Game Update 56: Halas Reborn, any character that completes “To Speak As A Dragon” will receive an heirloom Tablet of Draconic Runes in addition to learning the dragon language.

While this is an important quest and was a very exciting and community-building event in its time, it is not longer necessary for every alt to do the quest individually. At least one character on your account does need to do the quest the “full” way, but all subsequent alts can simply acquire the quest in the normal manner, then study the tablet when they are on the step to learn the runes. In essence: your first character made excellent notes on the runes s/he studied, it allows him/her to teach your alts the runes directly.

Of course, if your alts prefer to finish the quest the long way by collecting all the runes, they can still do so.

Any character who had already completed “To Speak As A Dragon” before this change can obtain a copy of the Tablet of Draconic Runes from Shady Swashbuckler in Nektulos Forest if they wish.

Apologies that this somehow didn’t get into the full update notes, but hopefully this calls it out so everyone will be aware of it now.

Sentinel’s Fate brought us The Sundered Frontier and Stonebrunt Highlands but also brought some new quests to the Kingtom of Sky zones. Many of the islands have received new quests near the cloud stations. There was also a questline added called The Lost Drednever Team. With GU56, this questline is now listed in the Storylines tab of the quest journal. EQ2 Wiki has writeups for the whole questline and we’ve got links to get you started.

In Tenebrous Tangle on the Temple Grounds there is a gnome named Bilgeron Cogsworth IV. Bilgeron is a L.O.S.T Explorer. He will explain to you what L.O.S.T. stands for.

Bilgeron will give you the quest Cogs on the Droags. This is the first in a series of 20 solo level 57-70 quests that take you through all three Kingdom of Sky zones. Through the course of the questline you are rewarded with seven class specific armor pieces. The look of these items is similar to the T7 relic armor from Kingdom of Sky, and is unique to each of the 24 classes in the game.

When you have completed the entire questline, your final reward is your very own Self Contained Cloud mount.

Today’s Hotfix (Patch) fixes a bug in the Druid Ring Live Event, and includes tweaks to itemization, the new PvP Warfields, and numerous bugs in the Icy Keep raid zone. We also include the hotfix notes from May 27, 2010 which somehow got left out.

May 27th’s hotfix notes make mention of a change to Procs which were not working on spells. However, this change resulted in certain procs, specifically Pestilential Rain and Torrent, no longer working properly for melee. You can read more about this issue on the EQ2 Forums. Xelgad has responded:

Thanks for all of the information. We’ll take a look and see if we can’t get this working.

Players noticed that the cap on Arcane, Noxious, and Elemental Resists was seemingly lowered from 80% to 75%.  Xelgad has clarified this change:

The cap was always 75%. The 80% you all were seeing when your resists were high enough in the persona window was a display error. The display error has been fixed, so it is now showing 75%.

Do note that that 75% is against a target that is your level. A higher level target will require higher resists to reach the 75%. Also, some spells are harder to resist than normal (you should see this effect in the spell’s description) and will need even more resists to get to 75%.

Olihin has checked in with some fixes and improvements for PvP and especially Warfields which will become available next week. From the EQ2 Forums:

It was hinted after Fan Faire that new Spell Effects and Animations were on the way, and at one point we were listing it for Sentinel’s Fate/Game Update 55. Timetravelling has chipped in with some more info, and actually one of these new animations is available in-game.

Believe it or not, the hard work of bolting Shaders 3 onto the antiquated EQ2 engine is done.

What remains is polish and cleanup. With all the combinations of armor, weapons, and with as many zones as there are in EQ2, this final bug sweep must take place with the help of the player.

Players have been diligently posting screen shots and even videos demonstrating the numerous areas of the game including guild halls, armor sets, etc. where Shaders 3 stumbles — it’s too dark, it’s washed out, there are halos on objects, or the colors are just plain wrong.

Imago-Quem needs your help now to finish the last mile of the race so he can move onto upgrading other things in EQ2. Don’t give up or just accept that items and armor you worked hard to get won’t look right with Shaders 3 enabled, bug it, or post screenshots on the EQ2 Forums.

So you’ve got a tradeable Lore item that you’d like to pass from one of your characters to another on the same account. How do you do it?

You could hand it to a friend, change characters, and have them hand it back to you. If you’re in a guild, you could put it in the guild bank, change characters, and hope its still there for you to pull it back out. Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could just put the item in your own shared bank? Well now you can!

In response to a player query about this, TimeTraveling responded:

Tis intended, and apologies for it getting missed on the release notes!

So it’s official! You can now put LORE items in your shared bank!

It seems that U.S. EQ2 servers are back up after today’s Game Update 56 patch.

Once the thread is unlocked, you can post your feedback about GU56: Halas Reborn on the EQ2 Forums.

The EQ2 Servers are now receiving the Game Update 56 patch. Servers are expected to come back up at 9am PDT.

While the servers are down, you can chat with us online! We will be in the EQ2 ZAM chatroom.

	For instructions on how to connect to the chat using mIRC, Trillian, or other chat client, check out the fantastic instructions at EQ2 ZAM.
	If you are not able to run chat software at work, or you just want to jump into the chat through your web browser, you can chat here.

See you in the chatroom!

It was only a matter of time.

Ballads has reported in from EQ2Flames that the Reinforced Slippers of Balance ( \aITEM -1095264150 2115375301:Reinforced Slippers of Balance\/a ) have been nerfed with Game Update 56. Despite being level 70 items, these were the best foot items in the game for tanking certain encounters due to the possible number of stoneskins this item could generate. We had already heard from developers that this item would not be replaced and that the effect would not be copied to other items. Indeed, a nerf was anticipated by players in fall 2009.

Instead of proccing (triggering) potentially dozens of times per minute providing dozens of stoneskins, this change means this item will only be able to absorb 3 attacks per minute.

Over two years after the introduction of Mythical weapons, Furies and Mystics logging after today’s Game Update 56 will notice a change in their mythical weapons which has neither been documented in any Update Notes, nor commented on publicly by any EQ2 developer.

Previously, the Mystic and Fury mythical weapons have added 10% of the character’s Wisdom to the character’s Potency. With today’s stealth change, furies and mystics will instead receive Ability Mod from their mythical weapon.

The result of this change, as per several players who have experienced the changes on Test and have thoroughly documented the results through statistics tracking software (ACT), will be a 15-30% decrease in healing effectiveness for most players, especially on Heal-over-Time spells.

Based on a Fury with 1,400 wisdom, this change will result in:

• -17.2% potency from the single target Heal-over-Time
• -17% potency from the group Heal-over-Time
• -27.4% potency from Death Swarm
• -26.7% potency from Tempest
• -2.9% potency from Thunderbolt
• -3.3% potency from Starnova

According to a player on the EQ2 Forums (Frametree) who contacted developers by PM and received a response this change is a “global bug-fix affecting more than just the healer classes weighing in here.”

You can read more about this change here:

• Fury, Mystic Mythical Nerf

• Just How Big a Nerf is Coming to your Healer?

• Mythical Nerf, again

The Sentinel’s Fate expansion (and its associated Game Update 55) opened the door to each character becoming a master of Tinkering, Transmuting, and Adorning. At least on Butcherblock, this change promptly doubled the price of all transmutable materials on the open market. Treasured weapons and armor, as well as Adept spells are now trading at record prices.

As a result, tradeskill societies of all major cities have received a visitor named Londiar Inygad who is interested in offering Adorning work to players. These are daily quests, appropriate to your Adorning level which allow you to make 10 adornments per day using materials provided to you by Londiar. These daily adorning quests can be picked up in West Freeport, Gorowyn, Kelethin (at Tunare’s Pages), Neriak, New Halas, and North Qeynos.

Completing these quests will reward you tradeskill experience, a city token, coin, and increase your faction with your city’s primary tradeskill faction.

Optional

These quests are completely optional and only add to the existing means of skilling up your Adorning, which is to transmute items, to make enough powders and fragments, to complete the standard Adorning recipes.

Max Skill Level

NOTE: Your maximum transmuting, tinkering, and adorning skills are based on your highest Adventure or Tradeskill level.

• A level 80 adventurer or tradeskiller has a maximum transmuting/tinkering/adorning skill of 400.

• A level 90 adventurer or tradeskiller has a maximum transmuting/tinkering/adorning skill of 450.

After the jump, we’ve got the complete Game Update 56 Notes for May 25, 2010:

From Kiara:

As you know, our game update Halas Reborn, goes live May 25, 2010.

This will happen at the usual time of 7am PDT for the US servers and 9pm PDT (4am on 26 May GMT) on European servers.

The update notes are available here and the feedback thread will be unlocked for feedback once the update has been completed on the US servers.

EverQuest 2 does not natively support Anti-aliasing, however determined players have managed to enable it by adding “r_aa_blit” to their EQ2 INI file. Unfortunately, players will have to wait a bit longer if they want to experience Shaders 3.0 and Anti-aliasing at the same time. Players attempting to use both will see zones which are entirely blacked out. From Imago-Quem:

I just submitted a fix for this. Hopefully it passes QA and can get out to you in a hotfix here soon and you can run AA with Shader 3.

And as for the prospect of using CPU Shadows with Shaders 3.0, Imago-Quem gives us the backstory after the jump, and it’s not promising:

Upgrading a 9 year old game engine to support a feature it was never designed for is a daunting task. No-one knows that better than Ryan “Imago-Quem” who has been busting his butt since before Fan Faire 2009 to revamp the graphical pipeline of EverQuest 2 to support Shaders 3.0.

One of the preamble events leading up to the Destiny of Velious expansion will be the reconstruction of several dilapidated and corrupted Druid Rings. Read the article on EQ2Players.

As we reported in April, we are expecting the druid rings in Nektulos Forest, Loping Plains, Zek, and Feerrott to be rebuilt.

Windslasher has posted extensively about how this event will work and what participants can expect…

Previous EQ2 Senior Producers Alan “Brenlo” Crosby and Bruce Ferguson rarely responded directly to player inquiries. Thus we featured their posts here on EQ2Wire in separate posts.

However Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has been tearing up the EQ2 Forums in two threads:

• Suggestions and requests for the new Senior Producer
• First Ever Mount on the Marketplace

In preparation for Game Update 56, some of the art assets (and likely music) for Game Update 56 are being pushed in an update today. This update is approximately 200MB. From EQ2 Senior Producer “SmokeJumper“:

[Today’s] update includes a lot of the files needed for the upcoming Halas feature set. We’re splitting the download into two parts so that the pain is a bit less each time.

A prelude quest leading up to Game Update 56 and the introduction of the city of New Halas has been available for some time now, if you could find a Guide or in-game GM or CM. But now in the last week leading up to this update, NPCs have been added throughout Norrath for those players who want to do this quest.

This quest is A Vision of Valor. Follow the link for a list of NPCs and locations.

EQ2Players has a preview up for one of the two new raid zones coming with GU #56: Icy Keep: Retribution.  This one was designed by Carlos “Gninja” Mora with help from Cyndi “Xadrian” Johnson.

From the Gninja:

Which raid zones are of a comparable difficulty?
The difficulty should be aimed at the same difficulty as Lair of the Dragon Queen or slightly tougher in the later areas.

How many named mobs are there?

There are ten normal encounters and one challenge mode encounter. However some encounters might have to be unlocked in order to gain access to them through the questlines or various puzzles in the zone.

What do you think is the most impressive part of the zone?

The Chessboard by far is the most impressive. The art team did a fantastic job really capturing what I was going for in there.

Read the entire article at EQ2Players.