Notes from Destiny of Velious Feb 11 Webcast #3

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.

Destiny of Velious Webcast #3 Notes:

Waters: [Velious] is a lot to tackle. Players have a lot of expectations. People who enjoyed the first Velious in EverQuest 1, there’s a lot of story to tell there. We had to split it into two parts, there was so much we wanted to cover. We’re really happy this time that we’re touching on the story of the giants and the Coldain dwarves, old favorites such as the Othmir. We had to save a big chunk of the story for the next one. We focused on the quality and getting this right.

Greg Aguis asked “The Othmir, that always strikes me as funny as someone who is newer to the game than certainly you guys. What is the fascination with an otter player race?”

SmokeJumper: “You can break oysters on your stomach.”

Waters: “That’s a good question. We look at our race stats a lot. People seem to want to play pretty people, like elves, and little furry people. Don’t know why that is, but yeah people want to be ratongas, people want to be othmir, people want to be cat men. I don’t know why people necessarily do.”

Greg Aguis: We’re at how many placer races with the addition of the vampire race?

Waters: Vampires made 20.

Greg Aguis: Will Icepaw Gnolls be a faction, become a player race or at least an illusion with lots of animations?

Waters: You’ll see Snowfang Gnolls immediately as you get into Velious. You start in an Othmir camp and the first thing you see is Snowfang Gnolls and quests for them. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an illusion available for them.

Greg Aguis: Will we see Nature’s Defender as a heritage item or drop, as it was one of the more unique weapons in Velious?

Silius: We weren’t able to get this in for launch, but it’s planned to be in post-launch. This is one of the items that we definitely want to get in as part of our post-launch content cycles related to Velious.

Greg Aguis: Did you go back to items in Velious for inspiration?

Silius: Absolutely. We brought key things like the Coldain Ring, the 10th War. Part of the armor process in getting your armor involves gems that are drops. We got a lot of inspiration from Velious.

Waters: We got a half dozen heritage quests. We’ve been planning out the game updates for the year after Velious. There will be more dungeons in the first Game Update, more raids being added throughout the year, and more heritage quests being added as well.

(A few minutes ogling the Destiny of Velious retail box and talking about how the features on the back of the box aren’t all the things we’re getting)

Itemization

Greg Aguis: What changes can we expect going from Sentinel’s Fate gear to Destiny of Velious gear?

Silius: There’s a lot we’ve changed with the game mechanics-wise. We’re evaluating items and we wanted to make items a little more straightforward. We wanted to allow players to customize the more specialized parts of items like procs. We ended up taking yellow and red adornment slots and moving them to other items that didn’t have them. We introduced charms that have adornment slots now.

Silius: Players will be able to easily recognize that one item is better than another without having to do a bunch of crazy calculations.  On the high level, the game is way more straightforward, but for those people who really like to get into the number-crunching, there is a sort of mini-game (?) with up to 7 adornments that they can mix and match different procs that we’ve brought from SF and other expansions.

Silius: Our raiders and top-end players get this degree of customization that’s really cool and hasn’t been seen before, and also lets the player retain effects if they see a new gear upgrade drop from a harder mob, they’ll be able to repurchase that red adornment and move it to the next item (?).

Silius: The number of procs on people’s gear was becoming a big problem for performance and it’s hard to make items unique when ever item has a proc on it. How do you make an item unique? You add another proc to it. Literally, an item is better because it’s examine window is larger. That’s just something we thought was not good for the game. We think that what we have now, although it’s a lot different, will end up being a lot better in the end and be a lot more straightforward to our playerbase while offering our more involved players a good degree of number-crunching and min-max.

Waters: The thing I like about it is the foundation stats you need, like Strength and health (STA), come on the armor, which is a piece you build on after that. All the other things like Resists, effects, damage, etc., are all customizations, things you add on.

Greg Aguis: When you’re starting work on an expansion like this, thinking about items, where does that process start? Do you say there’s ‘this amount’ of content that you need to add, or what’s the starting point?

Silius: It depends on the type of expansion. This being a high-level expansion, we had to sit down and evaluate what changes we wanted to make. Any mechanics change that has to do with player stats is going to affect itemization to some extent, so we had to make those decisions first. From there, we evaluate what kind of content we’re going to have, how many dungeons we’re going to have, build a distribution plan, what slot is going to drop where. On top of that, you start working on growth, track the stats, which stats are more important, which stats can be folded into other stats, project where you want players to end.

Waters: There are a bunch of constraints we’ve had to work with. We’ve run into some issues where we can’t give you more of a stat because we’ve hit the cap. If we gave you more, it wouldn’t actually do more for you. On some stats, we’ve already given out all the headroom we can. This was a hard thing to plan 5 years ago. Salim had said that procs had to come off. Procs were a problem because every item had at least 1 proc, leading to performance issues and also items being more generic since everything had an effect on it.

Waters: The game systems have a limited amount of growth potential and that’s something we’re working on. But then our work causes some changes in how things work, we have to change the game mechanics, and people aren’t always that receptive to things working differently. You know how health worked yesterday, you want it to work that way tomorrow, you don’t want to have to relearn it. It’s a balancing act. Before we run out of headroom on something, or we have to force a rules change that people may not enjoy.

Group and Raid Progression?

Greg Aguis: What’s the overall progression of gear from Sentinel’s Fate legendary and fabled vs. Destiny of Velious legendary and fabled (raid)?

Silius: We had to define where we wanted the players of various tiers from Sentinel’s Fate to enter the Velious expansion. If you’re a top-end raider from Sentinel’s Fate and doing Underfoot Depths, you can pretty much insert yourself into our easy mode Raid content and start gearing yourself up that way. Optionally, you could do the group Kael Drakkel contested content which is just before the easy Raid zones if you wanted to get some cool items there. More casual raiders from SF will probably want to do Kael Drakkel and try out the easy mode raids.

Silius: Someone who is grouping in SF in legendary gear should be able to start right from the beginning and adventure in the Tower of Frozen Shadow. It’s going to be challenging obviously. In general, we try to pair and recognize that group players get a full progression and a chunk of content to play. And raiders may not necessarily group, so we want raiders to have a solid progression. We wanted to make sure players can insert themselves into the gameplay style they are most comfortable.

Procs and War Runes

Greg Aguis: Talking about gear mechanics…Any large gear mechanics changes from the Sentinel’s Fate gear? For example, Sentinel’s Fate gear had an abundance of procs. Any changes to streamline procs? (We touched on this earlier.)

Silius: We were noticing performance issues. Items were becoming relatively generic, because the only way we could make them better was to add another proc, or make a proc that was so insane it would never be replaced. All effects or procs are now linked to adornments. Players are already familiar with this, but yellow adornments are for group gear, red adornments are for raiders. These particular ones are your 3 weapon slots, 2 charm slots. Easy mode raids will have belts that have a red slot. Hard mode raids will have cloaks that have a red slot. So hard mode raiders can add effects to 7 total slots, on top of having red slots on their raid armor as well as any yellow slots.

Silius: Basically, we have a set of procs which we brought from Sentinel’s Fate and other expansions that are more generic. Damage procs, Damage Over Time (DoT) procs, specialty procs which are more situational, debuffs, things like that. Then on top of that, we have War Runes. These are raid-only dropped adornments. Whoever loots them and clicks on a War Rune gets flagged so he/she can go to a War Rune merchant and buy that adornment for raid shards. He/she gets permanent access to them.

Silius: War Runes are the more specialized procs, custom-made procs, a lot of which are upgraded from Sentinel’s Fate procs that players have noted as being their favorites, the procs that make an item their favorite item. With this new system, I’ll be able to take 7 War Rune procs and put them on these 7 slots as I see fit. There are upwards of 40 War Runes.

Battlegrounds? PvP?

Greg Aguis: Will there be new Battleground armor?

SmokeJumper: The next Game Update. PvP stuff won’t be in Velious, it will be in the next Game Update.

Critical Avoidance

Greg Aguis: At Fan Faire, it was mentioned that you had future plans for Critical Chance. Is this going to be meaningful beyond 100%? Can you explain how this works? Will this effect offensive abilities only or healing as well?

Silius: We have a new mechanic called Critical Avoidance. NPCs have a percentage Critical Avoidance which is subtracted from your current Critical Chance stat when engaged with that particular mob. If you are fighting a mob with 50% Crit Avoidance, you’re going to need 150% Crit Chance to crit 100% of the time. There’s a steady progression here, so Crit Avoidance is a helpful bar to know if you have enough Crit to be visiting a higher tier dungeon or raid zone. This affects healers, this affects everyone. This is our answer to Critical Mitigation being more important to tanks. In this case, every class will need to pay attention to their Crit stat. This will make crit buffs more important, as well as guaranteed crit abilities more important. This breathes new life into the Crit Chance stat.

Uncapping Stats?

Greg Aguis: Are there any plans to uncap any other percentage-based abilities such as AE Auto-attack during Destiny of Velious or later?

Silius: We recently uncapped Multiattack [previously called Double Attack].  We are definitely looking into our cap situation, so things like Attack Speed you may see us uncap. Those are things we have to sit down and discuss the ramifications first.

Flying Mounts

Greg Aguis: What is the minimum level for flying mounts? Is there a similar quest in the lower tiers that can be done to get flying mounts? Can you hide flying mounts like other mounts?

Waters: The initial flying mounts are level 86 in the Velious overlands. This is the first way you’ll be able to get flying mounts, at least in the short term.

SmokeJumper: No, they won’t be available at lower levels.

Greg: Can you hide them?

SmokeJumper: No, mostly because we don’t want players running across the sky. If you looked like this (Superman pose) we’d probably be better at liking it than if you look like this (running in place), so no we’re not doing that.

Greg: I think we have another MMO that can suit that need if you desire.

Silius: The reason it’s level 86 is because the quest is level 86.

Greg: Can you PvP on flying mounts? Or is it a safe place to hang back and watch what’s going on, only diving in when you’re ready?

Waters: If you were floating over a battlefield on your mount and someone could reach you, they could attack you. It won’t knock you off, so you can either sit there until you die from them attacking you, or you fly away or you attack back. It’s semi-safe. If you’re flying too high for anyone to reach you, then you’re probably ok, but if they can reach you with a fireball or an arrow, then you might be in trouble.

Velious Launch Celebration Week

(talking about the Velious Launch Days celebrations, including a reminder about those who login on launch day getting access to Othmir as an illusion)

SmokeJumper: There are four different kinds of Othmir. Tom Tobey ended up creating something like 30 different animations and emotes, including getting Othmir working on flying mounts.

Greg: Flying otters in EverQuest II. It’s what it’s all about.

Greg: We’ll be talking more about the launch events in next week’s Webcast for President’s Day weekend.

Greg: Tuessay, March 1st is the last day of the Velious launch events and we have a special event planned for that day.

SmokeJumper: We wanted to do something cool, something special for the last day of our launch week. One of the things we realized is that because we level-locked our flying mounts, a lot of people weren’t going to get to try it right away, so what we wanted to do was create an event so that almost anyone who wanted to fly could fly.

SmokeJumper: So for the last day, we’re going to do aerial race tracks. The gnomes have put together 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. There are all different kinds of obstacles. If you complete it within a certain time, you get a title of Test Pilot. And you’ll unlock that as an appearance mount once you complete your flying mount quest. Everyone can fly on March 1st. If everyone really likes this event, we’ll probably tie it in with Tinkerfest.

Greg: We’ll have one more Webcast back here on Friday. Don’t forget the Digital Collector’s Edition pre-order at a special price ($59.99) which goes up after launch. We look forward to seeing you next week.