Destiny of Velious introduced an unparalleled strict progression to both its group and raid zones. Players wanting to group up in Velious instances have discovered that there are 3 sets of group zones which each require completing the one before it in progression before being granted access.

For instance, you must clear Tower of Frozen Shadow: Shadowed Corridors to gain access to ToFS: Umbral Halls, which must be cleared to gain access to ToFS: Haunt of Syl’Tor. And aspiring raiders must clear all 3 of these group zones in order to gain access to the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone. And as we also saw in The Shadow Odyseey expansion, raiders who wish to take on the most difficult x4 Raid content in Velious must first acquire a clickable debuff item by clearing the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2.

With such a daunting interdependency on all Velious zones from group instances through x2 raid and onto the x4 raid zones, you would think that Progression Quests would have been fully tested through QA and ready for players on day 1 of the expansion. Alternately, you would expect that if bugs were discovered, some of these quests would have been passable through other means. Any MMO is going to have adjustments, tweaks, nerfs, etc. after the launch of an expansion. But it’s quite another to release content that MUST all work smoothly end-to-end, yet doesn’t.

Necretia the Widowmaker

Tuesday’s Update restored Necretia the Widowmaker, a boss of Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 nearly a week after she was removed from the game due to two problems. First, it was noticed several weeks ago that she could be killed and respawned. However it was when an extraordinary item on her loot table, the Necretia Bow of Webs was discovered that she was despanwed. This bow had inflated stats and effects such that it was equivalent to a “level 300 item”. However the issue here is one of progression. Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 cannot be completed without her.

It took several days to get this resolved, and guilds who had already started the zone must wait for their zone to reset and start over to get a chance at fighting her. Until then, certain guilds remain unable to raid Velious x4 content through no limitation of their own.

The Storm Gorge Public Quests are currently denying eligible participants the ability to loot a chest, apparently as a result of the recent changes to weed out PQ slackers.   Gninja has acknowledged today there is a problem:

We are aware of the problem and are working to fix it.

In the meantime, players are reporting lag and the possibility you will not get to loot a chest even if you are participating fully. 

Today’s update includes tweaks across the board of grouping, raiding, and itemization.

Chronoportal vendors are back until April 10th. They have several paintings, furniture, and replicas of the enemies fought in the 12th anniversary EverQuest event.

After the jump, your Update Notes for April 5, 2011.

After today’s update, players have been checking out the re-structured Storm Gorge to see how the fights have changed, and how server lag has been reduced.

Players generally reported improvements in lag, and also shared their strategies on dealing with the changes in the fight, which in some cases make it more challenging and interesting.

Windslasher‘s response:

It’s great to hear that the latest lag fixes worked! With that game-breaking issue mostly solved, I can now turn more my attention to other important issues.

For example: Goredeth Maulhammer has always had the ability to heal himself while enraged. His fight is certainly not “impossible to win” but I’ll take a good hard look and see if it needs to be tweaked.

I’m also going to try and optimize performance on the Ring War a little more, and take care of some uncommon but serious glitches that many of you have reported. Thanks!

Raid Zone Lag can add randomness to an already challenging fight. There are many causes such as how an encounter is designed, unintended interactions in the zone code itself, etc. This issue is of particular importance in Velious because the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone drops a Clicky item which is required to take on most of the Velious x4 raid content. Players receive an item which must be clicked by certain classes at certain times in certain named fights in Velious hard mode raid zones in order to make them defeatable.

Although some guilds have been unable to progress due to lag specific to certain zones/encounters, compounding a consistent level of lag already present on their server (Unrest, etc.) I have received word that guilds on every server have managed to get these items, albeit with a lot of extra runs and some luck.

That said, while we wait for new server hardware, Rothgar and his team have been working on fixing specific issues within the raid zones to reduce lag:

All Velious raid zones should be running much better from now on. We’ve also found a few other performance improvements today that should hopefully make it out next week.

We are focusing very hard on performance along with the features for GU60.

added another quote:

Please do try the zones again and let us know how its working for you. We do have plans in place to resolve issues like these and we were able to make some changes last night without taking the servers down that should have helped tremendously.

We have additional plans in place to improve server performance even more over the next few weeks and months.

If you have run a few Destiny of Velious dungeons (and raids), compared the loot/gear to Public Quests, and said aloud “no me comprende”, this should be a good week.

From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:

We are bumping up the power of Velious dungeon and raid items. We’re doing this to make those items more competitive when compared with Public Quest items, because instances are tougher than the PQs and deserve better rewards. This does include shard armors.

We are also going to bump up the power of hard-mode raid loot so hard modes are even more rewarding, as they require significant time and effort to beat. NOTE: This doesn’t include war runes since they are already quite powerful.

The net result of these changes makes dungeons and raids a bit more rewarding and also balances things out so that people with a full public quest set will be able to find solid item upgrades in dungeons.

These changes will occur next week sometime. If they happen sooner than that, we’ll let you know.

Let’s Be Honest…

Public Quests completed even at the highest “x4 raid” level demand neither the coordination nor the discipline of any of the raid content in the last 3 expansions. Storm Gorge requires a little more focus than Ring War, but generally speaking, 24-40 players standing in the right place, killing the right mobs, in the right order, stand to inherit a wagonload of Legendary gear with Yellow adornment slots, all without such challenges as timing AOEs, switching to an Off-Tank, agro-juggling, or any complex strategy. The biggest enemy encountered is usually Server Lag.

Public Quests offer a speedy alternate route to gearing up for players who largely skipped Sentinel’s Fate, are gearing up alts, or just aren’t interested in more solo questing (although as we found, the Othmir questline writing, structure, and payoff are all above average and keep the obvious time sinks to a minimum).

So what’s to stop players from logging in alts, parking them near the scene of a Public Quest, and going to get a coffee while their toon “earns” amazing gear? Apparently not enough. While we have taken issue with certain players who spend an awful lot of time critiquing how others play the game and all the ways in which those methods are unfair or unbalancing, even we would be foolish to defend standing around AFK in a Public Quest all while earning Legendary or Fabled gear. We believe its in everyone’s interest that your favored MMO have a long-term plan besides “More dungeons and more lootz in the next Game Update!” Gameplay that allows leapfrogging most of the content progression is disruptive for the game. Velious has got to last us the next year, and as robust as the Game Updates may end up being, the end of the treadmill should never be visible.

Your updates notes for today, March 24, 2011, include several crash fixes, problems linking items in chat, Auction channel spam, and also some substantial nerfs to Critical Mitigation on Destiny of Velious gear.

Yesterday marked the one month anniversary of the launch of Destiny of Velious. Over the last month, we have seen an avalanche of bugs impacting progression with dungeons and raid zones alike throughout Velious. While these have been steadily fixed during the nearly daily updates, at least one issue remains unresolved: The series of doors in Kraytoc’s Fortress of Rime x4 raid zone. It seems that these doors can get locked due to wipes, zone resets, etc.

Discuss this on the EQ2 Forums

In response to a concise Berserker Class Issues post-Velious thread created by Bremer, Xelgad said that we should see some of these fixes hopefully before but at the latest by Game Update 60:

Hey guys, thanks for the thread!

We’ve got a bunch of quick fixes for these issues on the way. They’ll be live by GU60 at the latest.

Most of the changes are pretty straightforward and some are exactly as suggested here.

As we first discovered in our Critical Oversight in Public Quests Gear? article, the progression from solo quest gear, to Public Quest gear, to Group Instance gear, and on to Raid gear, has not made a whole lot of sense. In particular, Critical Mitigation has been all over the map.

Silius has announced some upcoming changes in the Critical Mitigation numbers of various gear throughout the Velious itemization range.

After the jump, your Update Notes for today, Tuesday, March 22nd 2011 include the addition (for real this time) of loot to trash mobs in Kael Drakkel, and the removal of Yellow Adornments from some items.

Zatozia has posted our update notes for Thursday, March 17, 2011. They include numerous tweaks and fixes to Velious instances and Public Quests.

Public Quests have been keeping Windslasher rather busy and he had posted some detailed answers about just how Public Quests difficulty are set. The Ring War seems fairly straightforward, but the Storm Gorge PQ (which will possibly see some changes in the next few days) has sufficient complexity to worth a more in-depth analysis.

From Windslasher on the EQ2 Forums:

Loot is not totally and completely random. It is only partially random. I posted a complete breakdown of the baseline loot at this link:

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?start=30&topic_id=495127#5512456

Whether you get a humming, pulsating etc. cache is not random, but whether you get exquisite is. In addition, the fabled items have a fixed rare drop rate, but only for players who qualify to get a humming cache.

In response to players asking why Storm Gorge PQ lag fixes can’t be implemented ASAP, Windslasher had these responses on the EQ2 Forums:

There are multiple lag sources, some of which are obvious and unavoidable (Large numbers of players in combat at the same time = lag), some of which are interesting and somewhat fixable (30 players vs. 30 encounters is worse than 60 players vs. 1 encounter) and some which are too subtle & complicated to describe in one sentence without using jargon (There are scripts & abilities that load up the server at O(n^2)).

I’m going through all of these issues slowly & carefully so as not to break anything. The next hotfix will bring some improvements, and as I dig deeper there will be more.

EQ2 Designer Windslasher is working on the lag issues in the Storm Gorge public quests, but apparently it’s not an easy problem to solve:

I am working on changes to reduce lag. I’m very aware of how bad it is, and I consider that the #1 problem to fix. It also happens to be the hardest, which is why the going is slow. That is all.

Here are your Update Notes for today, March 9th. Of note, Frost Gryphons acquired by crafters are now usable without being a Guide, and a mysterious note that Critical Mitigation values are being reduced on some items.

The March 8th Game Update Notes contain an interesting item:

The anti-slacker threshold has been raised on all PQ’s [Public Quests].

The Developers are serious about this! Windslasher said:

Freeloading was not part of the public quest design and will not be allowed. I’m approaching the problem slowly and carefully, to avoid denying loot to players who deserve it, but measures are being taken to tighten up the participation requirements.

The next hotfix [March 8]  will make a slight change to address the problem, and depending on the response, I may take progressively stronger measures.

We reported earlier this week that some players were already complaining about missing out on chest drops due to healing and buffing, or even lag problems, as opposed to doing straight damage during an encounter.  Surprisingly, it seems that a significant number of players are actually getting unfairly rewarded, since Windslasher found it necessary to raise the threshhold on the participation calculations.

It will be interesting to see what this change will do to support classes, as well as traditional damage dealers. It is still unclear what the parameters are for “participation scoring,” so it’s anyone’s guess what the new threshholds will be.

When Velious was announced, lots of folks asked for Faction to matter. Wish granted! 🙂

Faction must be acquired with the Othmir, Snowfang Gnolls, Thurgadin, and Ry’Gorr to buy their adornments (unique to each faction) and gear, and it can be rather slow-going!

The Othmir, Snowfang Gnolls, and Ry’Gorr all have daily (18 hour repeatable) quests to kill overland mobs and gain faction. Crabs for the Othmir quests occasionally drop an item which provides an additional faction boost. Alas, Thurgadin faction must be gained by running dungeons.

A variety of rewards become available once faction milestones of 10,000, 20,000, and 40,000 are reached. After completing all of the solo quests in Velious, most folks will end up with at or above 7,000 faction with each so the first items should be available in just a few days, with the better rewards taking a couple of weeks to earn.

Public Quests drop Cloudy Velium Jewels which can be sold to any of the 4 factions for +500 faction. Also, mobs inside the contested Kael Drakkel can be killed for a small amount of faction gain as well. If you’ve only done the Othmir quests at the arrival point in Velious (Great Divide), you’ve only gotten half the story (and are missing a good chunk of faction). Head to the Eastern Wastes once you’re done.

Thurgadin also has their own crafting faction, the Forgemasters of Thurgadin and you’ll want to befriend them if you are interested in acquiring the Coldain Prayer Shawl. And there are plenty of opportunities to work on Far Seas Supply Division faction, as well as Order of Rime faction if you are one of those people. 😉

UPDATE: This article has received a substantial rewrite since its original publication and is now part of a series of articles about Faction in Velious.

After the jump, we talk more about what else you can get for your hard-earned faction in Velious…

Two weeks after the release of Destiny of Velious we see a rather hefty patch that tackles many of the issues we’ve seen on the EQ2 Forums with dungeon and quest progression.

After the jump, your March 8, 2011 Update Notes…

Players have been surprised by a change in Thursday’s Game Update affecting the Critical Mitigation of Fighter armor received from Public Quests.

As we know, both Public Quests award armor upgrades for hands (gloves) and legs. Storm Gorge PQ’s also award armor for head and feet (boots), while Ring War PQs award armor for shoulders and wrists. There are also rare drops from these events, including Fabled chest pieces and Weapons.

During Beta, Othmir solo quest givers offered a full set of armor which was essentially Sentinel’s Fate Tier 1 raid armor minus adornment slots. After Beta concluded, this was changed to be more of a progression from Sentinel’s Fate heroic gear. You’ll recall that we were cautioned that Critical Mitigation would be necessary to participate in Velious, even when killing solo mobs.

Although there are many things we can do on our end to reduce poor performance when playing EQ2, Public Quests have really pushed things to the limit both on the client and AND the server end. Especially in Storm Gorge which has some 60 combatants in the highest difficulty setting. In the past, there have been some tit-for-tat arguments about people’s slow computers vs. issues on the EQ2 servers themselves. While there is a lot players can do to reduce graphics performance aka “client lag”, it is up to the EQ2 devs to tackle any issues on the SOE servers.

Fortunately, Rothgar has stepped up and posted this about Public Quests performance (ironically the thread started on the topic of Gazebo placement griefing):

We are lowering the hard population cap on Great Divide to keep people from working around the soft limit.  We may also change the group teleport mechanic to use the soft cap limits in the near future to keep people from circumventing these limits.

As far as the lag goes in Great Divide, its definitely server lag and isn’t caused by mounts, pets or gazebos.  These things might contribute to your client FPS, but changing your visual settings to a lower option should more than make up it.

We are working on several angles to improve the lag situation in these zones but for this weekend the only thing we’re able to do is reduce the population cap.  We’ve also tweaked the load-balancing settings on this zone so it should get a larger percentage of server resources.

The rewards from public quests have been a hot topic on the community forums lately, with a few players wondering if just healing or playing a support role results in a lesser chest than all out DPS.   As the rumor that only good dps’ers would get the best loot swept the community, some support classes have resorted to dealing out pure dps and not healing, which doesn’t make for a very successful raid.

We may yet hear from the Devs on this issue, but until then, the only information available is from the core design of public quests. Our understanding of the dynamics of public quests is that rewards are awarded to stop players from hitting the bad guys a couple of times and then going AFK,  and to reward those people who participate fully.  Instead of the normal loot drop system, public quests use “participation scoring” to determine what reward each player gets at the end of the encounter.   The game keeps track of everything a player does during the encounter, which includes contributing to a kill, spells cast, and noncombat interactions.  The players with the most activity get the best loot.  It’s not competitive, either, so if everyone contributed equally, everyone gets a good individual reward.

As you may know, in Destiny of Velious, certain dungeons reduce your Critical Chance by a fixed amount. You thus need to go over 100% just to reach 100% critical chance. Thanks to Buffrat for collecting this information and posting it on EQ2Flames.

You need the following crit chance in velious to crit 100%:

Estimated Crit Numbers:
Heroic Tower of Frozen Shadow (ToFS) Zones – 150% Crit
Heroic Kraytoc Zones – 150% Crit
Heroic Kael Drakkel (KD) Zones – 200% Crit

Great news if you have been running Public Quests and been rather puzzled at Legendary (or Fabled) gear with Yellow adornment slots, yet receiving Red adornments (which only go on Raid gear). Now, you will get a select window/choice for Yellow or Red, and it’s based on archetype.

After the jump, your update notes for March 4, 2011: