Feldon Here are your Update Notes for December 20, 2011 from the EQ2 Forums:
DUNGEON / PLAYER HOUSING RATINGS
- The house and dungeon leaderboards have now been converted from the previous 5-star rating system to a new “Like” system.
- When visiting a house or completing a dungeon maker zone you now have the option to “Like” the zone in either of the two categories.
- The leaderboards are now based on the accumulation of likes.
- Awards continue to work as before and are given to the players at the top of the leaderboard.
POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Tower of Tactics x4 raid [Challenge Mode], and Tallons’s Stronghold x4 Raid [Challenge Mode]
- Several of the raid bosses have had effects in their raid wide debuff spells lowered.
- Mystikus Terrorwing toxic elementals have lower health, and their venomous mist spell is now dispellable. Mystikus will not retaliate damage with lethal consequences until 3 secs after he ports to the center of the room, giving players time to cancel their spells etc. Ambassador Grindstone – geonid warrior adds have lower health. Players now have a warning regarding the bullseye target and a bit more time to remove it before the bull will charge.
DUNGEON FINDER
- Dungeon Finder should now include contested dungeons at all tiers starting at 20.
DUNGEON MAKER
- The amount of power that Dungeon Maker Avatars have has been significantly increased.
- Players may now publish a base of 3 Dungeon Maker zones. More publish slots are earned as players unlock more templates.
TRADESKILL APPRENTICE
- Tradeskill Apprentice items now display who created them.
MERCENARIES
- Gaeri Tallspire and Firus Scorchtouch have abandoned their job as a mercenary for a short time.
- The “Back Off” command will now work for Mercenaries, it will set the assist to “none” for you.
- Fixed a bug where doing a dungeon finder group with mercs could put your character into an ungroupable state.
- Mercenaries will now count towards the 3 member minimum for Bloodletter.
BEASTLORDS
- Enchanted warder spell’s default appearance has been changed to a flying snake.
- Fixed an issue with the Meatbeast that allowed players to tame it. If you have the appearance, your warder spell will reset to the original appearance for that spell.
QUESTS
The City of Freeport
- The result of finishing the quest “How the Mighty Fall” should now be apparent within the Temple of War.
- The Codex of the Khati Sha should now be available on the sages in South Qeynos, and in the Academy of Arcane Science in Freeport.
- Dropping the dialog with Maldreya in” A Dismal Discovery” will no longer prevent you from completing the quest.
- If you have “Descent Into Madness” but have already completed “Searching the Sewers for the Strix” you should be able to complete “Descent Into Madness”.
- Going forward, if you have “Descent Into Madness” you will not be able to complete “Searching the Sewers for the Strix” unless you complete or drop “Descent Into Madness”.
- The Truth Extractor in “A Dismal Discovery” is now Treasured.
South Qeynos
- Selwyn Oakheart in South Qeynos will now offer level 20 armor quests to beastlords.
Beastlord Epic
- A Chance for Redemption: Players can now speak to Velarryk and re-spawn Viax Fauli unlimited times as needed.
SHADER 3.0
- Shader 3.0 has been disabled.
Our implementation of Shader 3.0 has had a spotty history since its debut last year. To be frank, it’s cool in some areas and it’s an eyesore in others. Worse, it occasionally crashes users completely. It’s going to take us quite a while to make it work they way it should, and until we get that work done, we don’t want users to be crashing while using it. So we are disabling this feature for now. We have every intention of bringing it back (or some version of a graphics shader improvement that’s even better than this one), but it won’t be soon. EQII still looks fantastic with the original shaders, and in fact, it often looks far better than when using Shader 3.0, so we hope this inconvenience will be very minor for you.
Also these changes are currently ONLY on TEST:
Elements of War [Challenge]
- Terrinon Bloodclaw has had his flurry chance removed. Health and damage has been slightly adjusted and adds should come a little less frequently.
Throne of Storms: Hall of Legends [Both Challenge and Normal]
- Legatus Prime Mikill should wait longer before unleashing his Killing Blow if he is stationary.
The City of Freeport
- There is now only a single patrolling wraithguard within the passage way of the Overlord’s Plaza. The static wraithguards that were blocking the entry way from North, East, West Freeport have been removed.
COMBAT
- Fixed an issue where your character would sometimes spin and face away from an NPC they were fighting.
TRADESKILL APPRENTICE
- Tradeskill Apprentice items now display who created them.
QUESTS
- You no longer need to complete your Freeport racial questline to receive the final Freeport quest “Your Eternal Reward.”
- The “Agent of Freeport” achievement for completing the entire Freeport questline will now work properly. This fix is retroactive – if you’ve already completed the final quest you will get the achievement.
Steamfont
- Caustic Action now requires fewer updates, and Mazkeen witch doctors are easier to find.
Qeynos Harbor
- Good-aligned Beastlords can now speak to Ian Cathlan in Qeynos Harbor to begin their level 20 class armor quest line.
It’s probably appropriate that they’re changing the Enchanted Warder icon for Beastlords from something we’ve never been able to tame (Cerebus, aka three headed dogs):
to flying snakes.
The only two Enchanted warders I’ve found are Hellhounds and Lashers.
By the way here’s a Cerebus. Note also that if you sound out “Philuphii” with the ph as a soft ‘f’ sound, it’s Fluffy, care of Harry Potter:
So lemme get this straight: It is no longer to tame a meatbeast for a pet? And those that have it will be defaulted to a flying snake? Yeesh.
All Meatbeast pets are getting changed to something else, probably a cow or whatever you had before the Meatbeast.
The icon for the Enchanted spell is being changed from this:
to a flying snake icon. Never mind that we can’t charm flying snakes.
All I can say is its about time they owned up about shader 3.0 and quit blaming folks video cards as being the problem.
All one has to do is look in tech support forums and read the threads, and see the comments it has to be your computer , or your video card.
Having sent multiple dxdiag info to them, and dump info to them.
To bad it took them a year to go hey it really is a problem.
The silver lining is, in the process of adding Shaders 3, they rewrote the Shaders 1 pipeline which was like a 50% performance boost. But yeah, I doubt Shaders 3 will ever return.
Fixed an issue with the Meatbeast that allowed players to tame it. If you have the appearance, your warder spell will reset to the original appearance for that spell.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
(By the way, the Meatbeast is the only bovid most of my guild has… 🙁 )
A big shame about Shader 3.0 as the game can look like absolute ass without it. (
And with it, it can look ever worse. I mean its ok if you like your game to look like nice shiny plastic BlecH ! Good ridance to Shader 3
And what about those of us who had that as our only warder of that family and had it fully grandmaster?
They also took out the poisons that beastlords had been able to use… now not usable.
Nice, I posted on the forums ages ago asking for a Like system instead of the arbitrary star ratings for housing. I wonder what finally got that moving, but I’m glad it’s in!
Thank god for the implementation of the Like system for Housing. Let’s hope it puts a stop to the rampant harassment and plain mischief-making that dogged the star-rating system from day one.
240 hours into Skyrim.
Admittedly, there’s bugs. Also, there’s a great console for the PC players, that allows us to reset those bugs.
In terms of EQ2, I am pondering what to do with my accounts. 80% of my friends have left for other games now (30% into Rift, the rest into SWTOR).
I really enjoy EQ2. Loved playing it for hours and hours. Had yearly subscriptions for six accounts, and occasionally had 12 accounts running. Did every epic quest I could stomach (a few multiple times) and enjoyed helping other players.
In terms of the most recent expansion:
I did not enjoy the game play of beastmasters in EQ1, and I know that I do not enjoy the game play of most pet classes (only have one necro and one conjy). Additionally, knowing how they have recently been closely copying another game, I really did not enjoy the game play of hunters.
Mercenaries are useless to me, as I play with all six of my accounts at once.
The only thing of marginal use for me is the 20 extra AA that I would have to grind on over 60 characters (10 characters/account). At $40/account, that’s $240 invested for hours of extra work.
I understand of course that I am an edge case. But this “expansion” brings me nothing but extra work
In terms of this and other recent patches:
The recent patches strike me as nerfing difficult content to make it easier for other non-uber guilds to progress, and adding content to make the world “prettier” or more SC infested. The average player will be a free player, using SC more and more frequently. The edge cases will be the hardcore raiders, as they always have been, and will continue to be the loudest voices heard. The positive thing that I see in this patch is changes to dungeon finder for shared instances.
In terms of the overall game state:
Makes me sad, really, as this game was a vibrant community. Enjoyed going to Fan Faires and discussing things with the developers, seeing just how much I really could do with my rigs, and challenging the curve.
I’m rambling. Point is, I am lacking inspiration from the latest expansion, and am losing hope. Will have to check back near the end of my year on the accounts, to see if there is anything great.
After reading this over before posting it, I was struck by my word choice above being “work” not “fun.” That is frankly, the most damning part of the entire post for me.
Changing the appearance of your Bovid warder, or indeed any warder, will not affect the Grandmaster level.
@ Feldon I think his point was that meatbeast was his pet of choice for looks, and that maybe none of the other bovids interest him. It was mine fore sure. I grabbed him almost the first day. This is lame, and I can not understand the change. It is a look, and for those who wanted him, and had him it does nothing but spoil the game. The dumbfounding thing Feldon is that the mob was on your list of warders that can be tamed. From my understanding that list was formed from your time in beta. This means it was known during beta that he could be tamed. The fact they allowed the game to go live with Meatbeast still tamable is down right idiotic.
As it is the only things that have been keeping me logging in was playing my beastlord which I was enjoying, and raiding two nights a week. The raiding has been getting harder and harder to get motivated to show up for, with starwars out now, and the last thing I needed was for them to bork around with my warder’s look. It may seem trivial to others, as they could care less about their warders look, or have other favorites. But for those who play, and liked meatbeast’s look it really is that bad of a change.
And for the devs who shrug this off as a “what ever”, you have lost touch with your player base. That is why we are leaving the game in droves. Its a game, make it fun. So if your players want Meatbeast, it hurts nothing to give it to them.
Anaogi said:
I think you mean…”had”.
That does raise a question, though…do petamorph wands work on warders? If so then I smell a meatbeast petamorph wand opportunity (if one doesn’t already exist).
Yes, petamorphs work on warders… tried the frostfell Cerberus one yesterday.
Raiding is harder and harder to get motivated for.. Most HM X4 raid pieces are now replaced by superior crafted items.. Which does come from a rare grouped material and takes a while to research but still.. Little point in raiding.
I am glad they did something about shader 3.0 … never worked well for me and I’ve even had crashes lately.. Now I would have prefered it to be in working order but deactivated is the next best thing for me.
I personally don’t have the energy for any dungeon maker related things so .. meh.
Mercenaries as a concept still bothers me but it looks like I’ll have to live with it 🙂