EQ2U: Gear Sets, Gemmed Gear Gadget, and Gear Report

Here are our recent updates to our EQ2U Players site which are all about keeping up with the Joneses!!

Gemmed Gear Gadget

The Altar of Malice expansion builds upon the itemization changes begun with Tears of Veeshan. The number of “stat packages” gives players more choices in their gear selections, especially for fighters and certain priest classes. Also with the introduction of upgrade gems, it’s more important than ever to keep all the sets of gear straight! To respond to this need, we’ve introduced a “Gemmed Gear Gadget” page to EQ2U.

This new Gemmed Gear Gadget page lets you pick a Class, an AoM Gem Color, and either a Slot or a Stat Package and then see all the matching item examine windows for all the max gemmed gear. The Stat Package buttons change based on which archetype you choose. As soon as matching armor pieces are discovered by players, they’ll be added to this page.

NOTE: Dethdlr is not to blame for the banner graphic or naming of this feature. That would fall to me and my fond memories of a certain Disney afternoon TV show. 😉

After the jump Gear Sets and Gear Report updates…

Gear Sets

A great new “Gear Sets” feature was introduced with the expansion as an interim way to allow players to deal with our overflowing bags of adventure, tradeskill, and appearance gear. Eventually, a Wardrobe feature will be added, but in the mean time, this new in-game Gear Sets feature is allowing us to swap out gear without relying on klunky macros. We’ve personally started using this feature to swap in DPS vs. Survivability gear, Resist, and Tradeskill gear as needed.

Today, we’re happy to introduce support for this feature on EQ2U. A new row of buttons has been added just inside the Character Details window which allows you to view your Adventure or Appearance gear sets as they would appear in-game.

We also took this opportunity to standardize the position and names of all the character tabs.

Gear Report

When Gear Report was introduced to EQ2U, Adornments came in white, blue, red, and yellow colors. Itemization had been streamlined to a point where there were few choices outside of your archetypal gear set. Finally, the “you must be this tall to ride stats” were mostly Critical Chance and Stamina. Two years later, with Resists and Mitigation being meaningful again, Stamina reverting to being just one of a number of stats, and with the shift to Purple Adornments for all gameplay styles, Gear Report has gotten a bit long in the tooth. Fortunately we’ve been able to update the feature and roll out these changes to you…

The old Adornment bubbles weren’t particularly useful any more, so in their place, I’ve added Gem info to the armor slots. If an equipped armor piece has 3 out of 4 blue gems from a previous expansion, then it will display a crossed-out 3/4 above that slot. Hovering over the gem count will show a more specific tooltip.

As you can see above, I’ve also added Arcane, Noxious, and Elemental resists as well as a Mitigation column.  By the way, I’m continuing to evaluate what it would take to add Reforging, Refining, and Experimentation to the Gear Report. I believe it would require a complete rewrite of the feature. Further, the extra computations could increase the time needed to generate the report by 300% or more.

Dungeon Maker

On December 16th, all EQ2 players were granted nearly all Dungeon Maker spawners, and we’ve now reflected this change on EQ2U.

Weapon Damage Types

Since High Keep Contested, EQ2 game designers have been providing ways for players to change the damage type of their weapons to Fire, Ice, Mental, Magic, Divine, Disease, Poison, etc. EQ2U has now been updated to support the display of weapons which have been modified (through an Essence or other means) to output a specific Damage Type. We now display this information in item popups in a very prominent way:

Because of how ranged weapons (Bows, Satchels, etc.) work, it’s the actual ammunition used which has the damage type. So this is why Bows and other ranged weapon’s don’t show a damage type. However Spell Autoattack Wands (Focus Ranged items) SHOULD show this but are not currently exporting with Weapon Damage Type info. We’ve asked for this to be remedied.

Conclusion

We hope you like the new/updated features and we’ve been anxious to get them out the door while we’re working on even more stuff!