Here is our list of dungeons and raid zones from Destiny of Velious and some difficulty indicators provided by developers updated with player feedback. Updated for Game Update 62.

Destiny of Velious Solo Zones:

Great Divide (86-90)
Eastern Wastes (89-90)
Crystalline Breaks (solo)

Here are some notes from Friday night’s live Webcast of Rich Waters, Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson and Salim “Silius” talking about the upcoming Destiny of Velious expansion, including player-submitted questions. Getting into the mechanics and itemization changes, we get very close to a full transcription as there is a lot of detail and information here. We recommend listening to the webcast to get a complete picture of what was said.

Some bullet points:

• The EQ2 team have the next year of Game Updates planned out with more group zones, raid zones, heritage quests, etc. The first Game Update will add more dungeons.

• Items will become a lot more modular and straightforward, with procs largely moved to adornments.

• Group players in Sentinel’s Fate should be able to jump right into grouping in Velious such as Tower of Frozen Shadow.

• Casual raiders in Sentinel’s Fate may want to test the waters with the contested Kael Drakkel dungeon which falls right before the easier raid content.

• High-level raiders who are already doing Underfoot Depths should be able to move into the easier raid zones in Velious without grouping, although Kael Drakkel is a good stepping stone.

• Silius went into detail on the new Adornment scheme including a new type of adornment War Runes.

• We won’t see new Battlegrounds gear or other PvP content until the Game Update after Velious.

• A new mechanic on mobs (NPCs) called Critical Avoidance which means you’ll need well over 100% Crit Chance to succeed harder dungeons and raids. This effect reduces your crit (including healing!).

• Flying mounts start at level 86.

• On March 1st, everyone will be able to fly as a live event. The gnomes are putting in experimental test pilot tracks in Lavastorm, Tenebrous Tangle, and Butcherblock. You’ll be able to grab a tinkered craft and run through the race against time.

From EverQuest2.com:

A ton of in-game events are coming up, including some run by media sites, some run by players, and some by the Community Relations Team! Have you made plans to attend yet?

Massively Livecast – EverQuest II: Saturday, Feb 12, 9:00 p.m. EST

This week, Karen from Massively will take a closer look at the mentoring system in EverQuest II. She’ll cover the basics of how to mentor down in level, highlight the chronomage system, and then take a trip into Deathfist Citadel, a lower-level instance from the original EverQuest II that remains one of her favorite zones. Let’s hunt some orc! Click here for the Livestream link!

Check out EverQuest2.com for more details of the upcoming Player Events on Antonia Bayle and Lucan D’Lere, as well as the Community events on Feb 15th and 17th.

After the launch of Sentinel’s Fate, players quickly noticed that a huge percentage of the level 81-90 gear had armor appearances from either the newbie islands, or level 40-49 armor sets, just recolored.

It turned out that new armor appearances had been built, but very few had been wired up, so most of the armor had placeholder appearances. It took at least a couple of months for another art build, and much work behind the scenes to get the situation resolved. Even still, there are considerable swaths of armor appearance choices which have remained limited.

Covic does not want a repeat of this and wants players to be genuinely impressed with the wide array of Velious armor options, with not simply re-textures and re-colors, but reworkings and new geometry (bolted-on pieces) to create truly unique appearances.

After the jump, his complete quote.

If you’ve been hoping for any hint of class tweaks we’ll see in Velious, Xelgad has posted an early preview. Naturally this does not include any mention of new AA lines or other abilities we may gain.

We’re still three months from the Destiny of Velious launch, and more sweeping changes than the ones listed below were made in less time, so take this as an early teaser, subject to change. In short, there is great news for Illusonists and Summoners, and some news for other classes as well.

Here are your update notes for Tuesday, 19 October 2010 after the break:

Here are your update notes for 14 October 2010 after the break:

Hiding in every Game Update, there are changes that go through that are either undocumented, or otherwise slip under the radar. Some of them appear as a single line item in the Update Notes, but have significant ramifications. Some don’t appear at all. Today, we shed some light on these changes.

Amnerys has posted the complete Game Update Notes for Game Update 58: Arcanum Revealed on the EQ2 Forums.

Here they are after the break:

If you’re an officer or leader of a small guild, odds are there have been times late at night, or really any time when you have been the only one logged in, yet wanted to invite your own alts to the guild. Previously, you’ve had to wait until another officer or leader of the guild signed on, or signed in another account, to invite your alts.

File this under M for Maybe, but that Guru of GUIs, Rothgar, has had a brainstorm on a possible solution. There is no announced date, and there may be unforeseen issues, but it’s worth a look.

Game Update 58 is looking to be a massive update, not so much in content, but in changes large and small to the game, and its User Interface.

Game Update 58 includes:

• A level 90 dungeon – Zraxth’s Unseen Arcanum
• New bosses in the Vasty Deep dungeons with new loot
• Spell Animation and Sound Effect tweaks
• Click-to-Cure
• Mounts and Currency tabs
• Numerous UI tweaks
• Outdoor Balconies have been added to 6+ room houses, making them feel a part of the city they belong to.
• House item limits have been increased, and Moving Crates now count independently of house item limits.
• Additional house items have been added to Moonlight Enchantments, City Festivals, and of course Nights of the Dead
• The adventure Vitality XP bonus remains effective at level 90.
• Betrayal now suspends your access to spells and spell upgrades you are no longer permitted to use, but does not totally reset them. Should you betray back to your original class, your spells will be restored including any spell upgrades you have purchased or researched. Changing your alignment or citizenship without changing class no longer resets your spells.
• Numerous Tradeskill tweaks

We have been unable to confirm if we can expect:

• New loot for Marks of Manaar

Update: We’ve been able to confirm this feature of Game Update 58:

• A fix for the Call of the Veteran to reduce some of the problems, and better messages when it doesn’t work.

Our more detailed preview of Game Update 58 after the jump…

EverQuest2.com has been updated with the first of several previews of Tuesday’s Game Update 58, named “Arcanum Revealed”. A news item has been posted which says that each time a new instance is created, there is a chance of an additional named spawning in each of the Vasty Deep zones. Check out the original news item for pictures of each new named.

The folks over at Massively.com have posted an interview with SmokeJumper.  In it, he talks about F2P, comparisons to other MMOs, the possibility of a dungeon finder, and the class balance manifesto.  Interesting read.

For a while now, there have been items that give a bonus to mitigation.  These bonuses are shown as the blue stat on gear that says +x% Mitigation Increase.  Apparently, for a long time now, there has been a bug with how this bonus is calculated which has been granting more of an increase than intended.

A fix for this has crept its way onto the test server which is lowering the mitigation of most tanks.  So, on the test server, if you have any of this gear and yesterday you were barely able to survive during a given fight, chances are, today you’ll go splat.  Xelgad posted an explanation on the EQ2players.com forums.

Xelgad says that they aren’t in a rush to get this to live and that they will take the time to get it working right.  Hopefully this means tweaking other things if needed, like mob damage output.  Xelgad writes:

You may have noticed that currently on test mitigation numbers seem lower. There was no notes in the Test Update notes because it was pushed to Test a little sooner than we expected.

We’ve been evaluating all of the systems in the game to find out what is working and what is not working correctly. During this investigation, we found that there was a bug with the blue stat “Mitigation Increase” causing it to give noticably more than the listed amount of mitigation. This bug has been fixed and is currently on the test servers.

A mitigation increase of 10% was increasing plate mitigation by about 30% and leather mitigation by about 54%. This has been fixed so that the mitigation increase that says 10% will increase your mitigation by 10%. The addition of mitigation to the brawler self buffs was to be in tandem with this bug fix. This change is important because reaching the cap on mitigation causes some abilities, advancements and gear options to become irrelevent. That is obviously detrimental to gameplay and it can be detrimental to balance as well. If some classes have been balanced around having abilities to boost their mitigation and players end up capping out that stat then that element of balance is lost.

This bug has been in the game for a long time so the fix will reduce the mitigation of most tanks. For the sake of being able to balance the tanks in the future, we needed to correct the formula that was used to calculate the effectiveness of “Mitigation Increase.”

We’ll try to address questions and concerns regarding this fix and we aren’t in a rush to get this change to Live. If it looks like there may be problems with it, we’ll take the time to get it working right.

Update: Xelgad just posted this on the official forums:

As stated earlier in this thread, we’re taking our time with this change. It is looking like it is going to wait all the way until the expansion, and we’ll have the expansion beta to test the changes. Of course, we’ll still be looking into Sentinel’s Fate content, gear and alternate advancements in conjunction with the fix.

Here are your hotfix notes for September 1, 2010 after the break:

What’s on Test this weekend? Here are just a few items:

• UI: The XP bar will now stay put between logins.
• UI: Designers of custom UIs can now set the XP bar to not “snap” to top/bottom.
• UI: The Character window has seen multiple improvements.
• UI: The Implied Target arrow now reflects the ‘con’ color of the enemy, and can have its opacity adjusted.
• Items: 2-handed Weapons and Ranged Weapons have had their damage ratings increased. Ranged weapons will also have a bit of a damage penalty in PvP to compensate.
• The Guardian class has had over 25 changes made.
• Resident’s of Omen’s Call (Fens of Nathsar) now have a World Travel Globe on their dock.
• Items: The Wicked Wand of Malice effect has been changed to on-equip.
• The Palace of Roehn-Theer zone-in bug has been fixed.

If you’re wondering about other announced changes which aren’t on Test yet, they will come later. For instance Ranged Flurry and Ranged AA Auto-Attack changes are still in the queue. Remember, Game Update 57b is still 4-7 weeks away.

If you haven’t tested out these changes yet on the Test server, check em out!

Complete update notes after the jump…

When you target another player (say your group’s tank, or the raid Main Assist) to channel your damage through, it is sometimes helpful to not only see the Target Arrow (who you have selected), but the Implied Target Arrow (the enemy which your target has chosen). This can be especially important for scouts.

So players have asked for a way to customize or more easily distinguish the color and opacity of the Implied Target Arrow.

Rothgar’s comments after the jump…

From Xelgad on the EQ2 Forums:

As a quick update, internally, we have changed Crane Twirl to grant a total of 20% AE Auto-Attack in addition to the proc it currently grants.

Xelgad has responded to a detailed thread on Illusionist Class Issues:

Hey guys, long time no see! We got some good feedback at Fan Faire which I wanted to share.
I agree that Time Warp ended up being more annoying than it is fun or rewarding. Unfortunately, it was one of those things that looked okay on paper but didn’t work in practice. We have it changed internally so that there is no longer an immunity timer associated with the spell, and it now grants the Illusionist the buff as well as the target. This should be coming to the test servers with (or before) GU58. If you want, you can just macro the spell to a group member and spam it as a self-buff, but I envision some players being more tactical with it. You can even spam it on yourself, but you don’t get double benefit – unless, of course, you cast it on your pet. We also changed the icon so that the warning icon looks different than the actual buff, and the buff now looks like the Tsunami (Monk ability) icon, so that it shouldn’t be shared with any other mage abilities.

Some of your other issues, such as buffs providing no benefit due to being capped, will be addressed with the upcoming expansion. There are some other changes that we hope to make before the expansion, but I can’t promise anything yet.

Please feel free to continue to post constructive feedback.

In response to a detailed list of issues with the Monk Class, Xelgad has provided an unexpected commentary:

Thanks for the up to date thread!

I can’t give an ETA, but we are looking for ways to make Monks more viable in AE-oriented content, especially with heroic content in mind. If the change benefits both brawlers, all the better. In that light, Crane Twirl would seem like a great candidate for a change, but I think the advancement is, at worst, balanced compared to other alternate advancements in the slot, and forcing everyone to take that one would not be an ideal solution. We may end up bitting the bullet on that, but a class ability change similar to the changes planned for Recapture and Plant would probably be a better way to go. If you have ideas for changes like that to the monk class, we’d love to hear them.

Again, we’re very busy here with all the mechanics changes we’re trying to get live and the upcoming expansion so I can’t give an exact time frame but Monks are on our radar.

You can provide your feedback on Monk issues and Xelgad’s response in the EQ2 Forums thread entitled Monk Changes Discussion.

Xelgad has posted a flurry of responses to specific class issues today.

This one, in regards to Critical Heals which have been removed from all fighters. For some fighter classes, critical heals might have been overpowered, but for Paladins (joshingly referred to as Healadins), losing all crititical heals has had class altering effects not only in solo situations (which this nerf was intended to fix) but in group and raid setups.

We’ve been hearing about some ranger love for about 3 expansions now, but at Fan Faire, we heard the first concrete info. Xelgad has elaborated on just what we can expect in an update falling between GU57 and GU58 (hopefully 4-6 weeks from now:

Greetings, Mighty Forces!

AE Auto-Attack and Flurry are indeed on the way for bows. We’re also removing the 20% damage penalty for bows, and we’re increasing the damage rating on all 81-90 bows (along with throwing weapons) by about 10%. The intent is to allow you guys to get full benefit from buffs and gear, not to make the class entirely focused on Auto-Attack.

You know how you get more auto-attack damage from your melee weapons in many cases than from your bow? These changes should fix that, unless your melee weapons are simply of much higher quality than your bow. At most, your auto-attack may jump from ~20% of your parse up to ~30% on raids, but I’d be surprised if many people end up with it higher than that.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

You can join the discussion on this issue in the thread What’s this all about? (bow changes) on the EQ2 Forums.

Ah… the Shadow Odyssey. The land of milk and honey… The lost dungeons of… ok I’ll stop now.

Ask players of EQ2 during the Shadow Odyssey what they thought of the expansion, and you’ll get many different responses.

Ask a developer of the Shadow Odyssey for their frank opinion, and I bet you’d get something like “Ah yes, every level 80 player fully decked out in T2 heroic gear, fabled jewelry, and all carrying bagfuls of platinum coins.”

UPDATE: This article has been superceded by an article at EQ2 ZAM which explains the bug. In short, with the exception of Recruit-a-Friend, current XP earning rates are being restored to the same levels as before Game Update 57.

Today marks the introduction of Game Update 57 to the live servers. Key features of this update include:

• The EQ2 User Interface has received a facelift, with a new toolbar, a refresh of various windows, and a merged Character/Inventory/Profile window. The default theme is red, but easily switchable to blue by typing /loadui and choosing the Blue graphic set.
• More character classes are now neutral and may start in either good or evil cities.
• Spell animations and effects have been revamped.
• Intrazone travel now supports path linking. Travel within Kingdom of Sky has been improved.
• Erudin group instances (level 86-90) are now easier to reach.
• New tradeskill quests have been added in the level 10, 20, and 30 tiers. These quests reward a mount as well as access to what have previously been overpriced Advanced recipe books.
• Starting areas in Greater Faydark and Darklight Wood have received substantial revamps. Gorowyn has received further architectural rebuilding to improve navigation.
• All classes have had some group-specific spells postponed until later levels to reduce the number of spells new players get in the first 20 levels.
• Fighter heals will no longer critically heal.
• The “Notable Norrathian” contest winning paintings are now available within Norrath but only during the monthly City Festivals (next is Sept 1-7). They are guild hall placeable.
• Lucan D’Lere has returned to Freeport.

• Today’s update contains no new dungeons or raid zones.

EQ2X

Also going live today is the public beta for EverQuest II Extended, the Free-to-Play alternative to a monthly EQ2 subscription. Game Update 57 will arrive simultaneously on both servers. EQ2X, as it’s being abbreviated, may be discussed on the separate EQ2X Forums.