We’ve got Today’s Hotfix Notes straight from the Patcher for you. They include the aforementioned changes to various instances in Desert of Flames and Kingdom of Sky, some itemization fixes, and tweaks to raid mobs in Underfoot Depths and Icy Keep.
Hirofortis has posted a thought-provoking thread on the EQ2 Forums regarding Critical Mitigation on raid gear and pondering just how much Crit Mit is needed to proceed in raiding. Just looking at the Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 raid gear available in-game, a player can acquire critical mitigation amounts of 110%, 127.8%, and 141% respectively, not including any critical mitigation achieved by having high numbers in the necessary stats.
Critical Mitigation from Raid Armor Sets
T1 T2 T3 Head 10.00% 12.00% 15.00% Chest 20.00% 20.00% 20.00% Shoulders 10.00% 12.00% 15.00% Forearms 5.00% 9.60% 12.00% Hands 5.00% 9.60% 12.00% Legs 20.00% 20.00% 20.00% Feet 5.00% 9.60% 12.00% Sum 75.00% 92.80% 106.00% Max from Gear and Adorns 110.00% 127.80% 141.00% Max with Gear and Stats 120.00% 137.80% 151.00% Increase Critical Mitigation (Red Adornments)
Head 5% Chest 5% Gloves 5% Boots 5% Shoulders 5% Bracers 5% Leg 5% Total Crit Mit 35% Critical Mitigation from Intelligence/Agility
AGI/INT 500 5% AGI/INT 1000 10%
Critical Mitigation is a measurement of how much your armor (plus a small amount of innate protection from Agility (for scouts/fighters) or Intelligence (for mages/priests) reduces the Critical damage abilities of the enemies you are fighting.
There is a lot of useful information in this thread already — it’s worth a read.
Oh hey, we had a hotfix! The July 7, 2010 Update Notes include several fixes to raid targets and live events. After the jump…
The Icy Keep (an easy x4 raid zone added in Game Update 56) seems to have taken its place as this expansion’s Ward of Elements. We’ve received reports that, with the exception of the final boss, this zone is appropriate for raid groups of as few as 11 players seeking to gear up and work their way into more difficult raiding.
There have been some issues with later bosses which Gninja has just submitted some fixes for:
[I’ve] just checked in a fix that cleans up the Vrewwx fight as well as fixed the respawn points. Now once you have defeated the Corrival you can respawn in his room. Once the Brothers have been killed you can respawn in there and once D’Ina has been killed the respawn resets to the front entrance since its a faster run from there.I also made the front keep doors allowed to be openned if you have completed the quest “Knocked Out Cold” Thus having killed the dragon before in either normal or challenge mode and completed the questline from the zone. This means those wanting to fight the dragon can do so by openning those doors killing D’Ina and going after the dragon.
Hopefully these changes should make it live next hotfix.
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%.
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.
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.
Current Description:
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Updated Description:
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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:
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:
After the jump, we’ve got the complete Game Update 56 Notes for May 25, 2010:
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.
An interesting topic has popped up on the EQ2 Forums asking the question:
Is there Raid Progression for Small Guilds?
The Shadow Odyssey ended up offering many choices for Casual Raid Guilds. Sentinel’s Fate has not been quite so generous with such progression choices. Game Update 56 will add two raid zones, but both are intended for 24-person raids. We compare the expansions in today’s commentary.
The Underfoot Depths from EQ2Players:
Halas Reborn, scheduled to launch at the end of May, brings us two new raid zones. The first of which is the Underfoot Depths, accessed via The Hole.
Brett “Timetravelling” Scheinert gave EQ2Players a brief interview about this new raid zone.
Players have cleared all of Sentinel’s Fate’s normal-mode encounters and all but one of the challenge-mode encounters…just in time for us to add 20 more normal-mode encounters and eight more challenge-mode encounters (which practically doubles the raid content available at level 90). I am very excited at the chance for players to test their mettle against both the Underfoot Depths and the new Icy Keep raid!
A new website has been added to EQ2Players with the skinny on Game Update 56: Halas Reborn, introducing the player city of Halas, as well as a new character starting area with level 1-20 content. Halas is essentially a neutral-good aligned city, as evil-aligned characters can visit and complete most of the same quests.
Game Update 56 includes substantial features and changes:
Visit the EQ2Players GU56: Halas Reborn page for numerous details and
screen shots of this coming update!
Raid Targets in Sentinel’s Fate continue to receive nips and tucks in their behavior and strategies. Today’s change to the 3 Sages fight is not without controversy. Check out the discussion thread on EQ2 Forums.
Here are your Hotfix Notes for May 4th, 2010:
THE PALACE OF ROEHN THEER
- 3 Sage Encounter (Challenge Mode)- If the incorrect character class (according to the Idolic Stone that sage possesses) keeps agro on that sage for more than 3 secs after that sage has lost it’s prismatic sphere, that character will be hit by a bolt of slaying.
SANCTUM OF THE SCALEBORN
- The Trial of the Reaver no longer requires a Trial Stone to start. The statue that starts the event, “Rites of the Scaleborn,” now becomes usable right after it spawns.
Game Update 56 is looking to be a huge update, with many tweaks and adjustments throughout Norrath. In brief…
Also of note, is that a vendor has been added to Moonfield Hamlet selling some of the rare Heroic drops from Sentinel’s Fate zones. It will be interesting to see if this is like the vendor added late in the release of The Shadow Odyssey, where only the lesser Fabled items were available, and for a whopping 150 shards/marks each.
With the Test Server being updated nearly a month before we are estimating Game Update 56 will hit live servers, hopefully there will be plenty of time to test out all the changes.
Today’s Hotfix grants Research Assistants the ability to research for all of your characters at once, instead of just one per account. Also included are tweaks to the UsabilityOnPlayer macro command, some adjustments to the Labs SF raid zone, and a change to the Focus: Death March adornment so that its effects are different between PvP and PvE.
We’ve been advised that some Database maintenance will be performed at the same time, so the Hotfix and associated downtime may exceed 1 hour.
It turns out yesterday’s news on changes to the Training Dummies guild hall amenity was just the beginning.
Xelgad has updated us with news that one of the choices on the menu when summoning a Training Dummy (in addition to Solo, as well as Heroic and Epic which are new to GU56) will be an Encounter:
We’ve added a new set of dummies for GU56 that come as a linked encounter of a total of eight heroic training dummies. Enjoy!
This should provide many more options for players wanting to work on what order they cast spells and/or combat arts in for maximum DPS output.
Here are your hotfix notes for today, April 13th, including adjustments to group and raid zones, as well as spell resists in PvP combat. After the jump:
We wrap up another week in Norrath with some posts from the EQ2 forums from developers and players alike which you may have missed. Also, although no date has yet been announced, work on Game Update 56 has likely reached a feverish pace and we’ll start hearing more about it soon.
Waiting for Zone Info
The EQ2 and SOE teams have been putting in long hours trying to resolve the database and server lag/performance issues since the expansion. Zoltaroth has weighed in with this update:
We are also internally testing some additional updates that should furthur improve zoning (specifically long wait times at “waiting for zone info”). These changes aren’t through with internal testing yet, and they are pretty big so I can’t give an exact date but they are in the pipeline.
As we posted earlier, Rothgar is keeping us informed on the progress:
We have many more improvements on the way, this is just the first of many.
Efforts to stop Speed Hacking tagging Innocents?
For some time now, certain players have been making use of hacks and external third-party programs for EQ2 which increase the run speed of their characters beyond the maximum limits, or walk, harvest, etc. ‘under the world’, or outright teleport from one part of a zone to another.
EQ2 developers have rarely commented publicly about exploits and their ongoing efforts to curtail them, but a thread was started and followed up on by players who have experienced character or account suspensions through innocuous acts such as harvesting and using zone teleporters.
Rothgar indicated that
“We know when someone is warping or using a speed hack program and you can bet that those players will be contacted soon enough. Something appears to be triggering false positives and it could be something as simple as the teleporters in South Odus for example. We are looking into this and will make a fix for it.”
and wanted players to know that account bannings are taken seriously
“We’ve set a threshold high enough that normal gameplay should not trip [the detection code]. So in this instance, if you’re getting kicked, we’ve logged enough significant activity to make that decision. Obviously the false positives are unintended and will be solved.”
and later, Rothgar indicated that this problem had been discovered and fixed:
Status Update:
I’ve found the issue triggering the false positive and some teleporter devices like those in South Odus would have triggered it. We’ve disabled the checking for this behavior until we can hotfix the issue.
Some Old, Some New Zone Lockouts
timetravelling has changed some zone lockouts:
Munzoks Material Bastion and Shard of Hate should now both be 2day20hour lockouts once Game Update 56 hits =)
Item Appearances
covic and Kander are continuing to work on getting those Sentinel’s Fate armor/weapon/shield appearances hooked up to items. Apparently work on all those new unique appearances that Sentinel’s Fate was supposed to include continued right up to, and possibly after the release of the expansion.
It looks like a lot of the Sentinel’s Fate armor, weapons, and shields went live with placeholder graphics with the intention of replacing them. This is now happening.
Kander said:
Many of these items got missed on the appearance pass. I am unsure why or how. We will start changing them for newer appearances ASAP. Please PM me if you have any other specific instances of gear that looks like noobie gear dropping from Sentinel’s Fate raids or even group zones, we will see what can be done.
covic followed up with:
I am seconding Kander on this. I know we made a lot of gear this expansion. All the screens in this post look like old stuff. I will talk to him at work on Monday to see what everyone has been sending for screens.
and after the April 7th patch, covic said:
I just talked to Kander today and he said he has been working really hard on getting new item appearance hooked up. I hope the changes are starting to be seen.
End of the Weekenditis
That’s enough for the end-of-the-week. Hope you are having a great weekend and we’ll be back with more news.
An unintended consequence of today’s Hotfix seems to be that certain players have been unable to equip their Mythical weapons. Players affected include those who have not progressed in the Epic Repercussions quest. Xelgad has posted this comment:
We’re aware of the issue and looking into a fix. In the meantime, please use the /petition command to contact Customer Service if your weapon cannot be equipped. They’ll be able to fix your weapon for you.
UPDATE: This issue is related to the Balanced Ayr Stone adornment which used to provide +3% Parry and was applicable to weapon slots. On March 1st, it was changed to a less powerful adornment. In Today’s Update, this adornment was internally changed to a Neck Only adornment, but someone forgot to make the adornment auto-remove itself from main hand weapons.
Today’s Hotfix include some anticipated tweaks to Itemization and Battlegrounds, such as resists and fixes to adornments. It also includes a cutback in the amount of damage put out by the 3-headed dog in The Vigilant: Final Destruction x2 raid zone. Even during the Beta, this particular mob was completely out of progression for the difficulty of the zone, gear players are expected to have at this point in the expansion, and intended audience of the zone.
The complete April 7, 2010 Patch Notes after the jump:
Over a year ago, the EQ2 Guild window gained a new column — Guild Points. This often misunderstood feature allows your guild leader and management to award points for anything they (or the guild) decides to track. Some guilds award players who earn a certain amount of status, help level the guild, assist other players, or any number of ‘gold star’ type measurements of players. Of course, some guilds don’t use Guild Points at all.
DKP in-game or website?
Raid Guilds have the unique challenge of divvying up the limited amount of Loot acquired each night to 24 (or more) players. Some Raid Guilds use a Loot Council or some variation on guild leadership choosing which players will get which items, it’s arguable that most raid guilds instead use a DKP (Dragon Kill Points) system. DKP is a score or measure of raid attendance, specifically the number of hours each player has participated in raids. Loot that drops during a raid is auctioned off to players who bid with DKP and are in good standing with their guild.
Every guild that makes use of a DKP or DKP-like system has the choice of using this relatively new Guild Points system, or if that guild has an established website, the infrequently updated eqdkp website script.
For those guilds that use the in-game Guild Points system, they may not be aware that there is a command to automate adding and removing points for the entire guild, the raid, a specific group, etc. Rothgar posted the info for this command today:
The /guild command does support a set of commands for manipulating the points system.
If you type “/guild points” and hit enter, you should get the following usage line.
Usage: /guild points [add|subtract] [point_value] [name|all|online|group|raid] [comment]
You should be able to add or remove points from a specific person, all guild members, only members that are online or only members that are in your current group or raid.
Here are your update notes for March 30, 2010, after the jump:
From EQ2Players:
EQ2 Artist Gary Daugherty does the effects for everything you see in-game. Everything from spell effects to the nifty mists and sparkles on epic weapons. Gary was kind enough to sit down and answer some questions!
And the news that many players have been waiting for, regarding Spell Animations…
Do you have any special (or just super fun) projects you’re working on now for EQII?
I’m currently updating, optimizing and standardizing every class spell visual in the game. My hope is that players won’t have to turn the FX off when they group or raid and will still be able to tell what is going on. It is also my goal to help better visually identify what class a player is by what spells they cast. In addition I’m setting spell visual tiers so an apprentice spell will have less bells and whistles than an adept or master spell visual. This update has not been officially announced and no release date has been chosen.
Most folks who raid must disable spell animation particle effects as they otherwise dramatically slow down the client. This is primarily due to them being tied directly to the character models and thus rendered on the CPU. Hopefully they are being decoupled and moved to the GPU, which should allow players to use spell effects even during raids.
