Feldon 
So far, at least from the in-game comments I’ve seen, Altar of Malice has been well-received. Not everyone agrees about the difficulty of the heroic zones, but there’s a clear progression that players can strive towards. With any expansion, there will always be balance tweaks needed and a bug fix or two. We saw such a fix just last night with the missing textures in Zavith’loa zones turning parts of the zone black or white. This has been addressed with a client patch. Some other fixes and features coming up soon:
- Scout Poisons overwriting each other
- Weekly Heroic/Raid Gems
- Heroic Green Adorns (Spirit Stones)
- More Level Agnostic Dungeons
Scout Poisons
Editor’s Note: Oops. We quoted a private forum which we’re not supposed to do! However the gist is, Hemotoxin poisons are currently overwriting each other. This bug has been documented here and will be fixed soon. That’s good news!
Weekly Heroic and Raid Gems
So far, Red gems for raid gear have been rarer than a pregnant nun, and requests to make them craftable or “convertable” from green gems or some other rare item have thus far been rebuffed. Now, it looks like the EQ2 team may be opening the floodgates a sliver. Kander has this update which will also benefit heroic players:
We are going to be adding Armor gems to the weekly missions here soon, so you will be able to earn 1 heroic [Your choice] and 1 Red raid gem a week by doing those missions.
As to conversion will will most likely be adding that with the next big update. We are also looking at the red gem gear to bump it up so it is clearly better. It had been done and something stepped on it apparently.
And no, it was not intended to have gem conversion at the beginning. Kander again:
We had no intention of putting in conversion items at the beginning. Never did. We aren’t fixing it. We are adding it.
Heroic Spirit Stones
If you are a fan of Spirit Stones (green adornments applicable to Necklaces and your two Ring slots), you might have noticed a bit of an itemization hole with the Altar of Malice and the lack of level 96-100 choices. You aren’t alone. Fortunately, Afista has posted this update:
We wanted to let you know that we are planning on introducing some heroic dropped green adornments in the near future. Thank you for all of the feedback in this thread!
We’re planning to introduce the heroic dropped green adornments with the upcoming content update. The date isn’t set in stone yet, but we’ll have some more information about it soon!
Red 2 Gem Gear
In the recent Tears of Veeshan expansion, the second tier Heroic gear initially accepted up to 3 Green gems, putting it just a step below Raid gear with 0 Red gems. Later on, a method was introduced to “overclock” or add a 4th Green gem to Heroic gear, making it actually better than the naked Red-gemmed raid gear.
With Altar of Malice, Heroic gear with 4 green gems once again surpassed Raid gear with 0/2 gems, so players didn’t complain. Apparently we should have! According to Caith on the EQ2 Forums, even naked Raid gear was intended to be an upgrade for Heroic gear, but due to some kind of glitch during the Altar of Malice beta, this didn’t happen. Here’s a consolidation of his posts:
All red gem armor should be above all green gem armor, and below all purple gem armor. In other words, it should have the expected progression. It seems a change in beta overwrote those values with default values. It’s being worked on currently, and barring any unforeseen delays it should be in next week’s hotfix.
5 New Agnostic Dungeons Coming
If you’ve grown bored of the five available Level Agnostic Dungeons, don’t fret. That number will soon grow to ten. From Kander on the EQ2 Forums:
We have 5 new agnostic dungeons coming soon. We just need to figure out when we can get them out.
Glad to see update news about development on this game after hearing about SoE being sold and renamed. I didn’t NOT believe it when Brasse said development and current games would stay for now. I just thought a restructure in priorities to make money for this financial firm may have outweighed working on current content.
Gives me hope!
Sadly, it’s too early to draw any conclusions.
don’t forget the massive bug fixes that Vanguard did, only to sunset the game a few months later. I agree with Feldon take a wait and see attitude.
Actually Homex and Mogrim Told darkon about the poison problems. But I guess we’ll let darkon shine 😛
How on earth does it take 3 months to simply even notice this stuff being wrong? That is something I’ll never comprehend, do they just sit around eating hot dogs all day and watching tv? Accountability, it isn’t an ugly word. Oh, and in the end, they didn’t notice it…..they just read weeks and weeks of customers commenting on it.
I’m thinking they were busy working out the details of the new owners’ acquisition of SOE and these fixes took a bit of a backseat . . .
My issue with the coming changes to Scout Issues to dps (50%+ damage from AoE, another 20%+ from poisons) is, I’ve already chosen and set up my gear, spending hours getting raid gear, getting red gems spending my DKP, and setting up my character already a few months into the expansion. NOW they want to change things . . . am I going to be able to change my armor out? Or do I have to start from square one with the new changes?
I’m getting tired of SOe . . . errr, Daybreak making an expansion which changes everything (which is fine, gonna have to re-gear anyway) then changing things again in the middle of an expansion and, for those that chose wrong . . .screw you.
I remember back in beta they didn’t even give us higher tier armor until the last couple of days, most of us were running around in mastercrafted or TOV raid gear. Then they put the armor merchant out but locked him so all you could do was look so not a lot of testing or input was applied to this gear.
Looking back it seemed like the dev team was MIA with the exception of hosting their pals in raid zones for testing which is why I would LOVE to see Kander and his gagglee get canned by Daybreak and a new team with fresh ideas brought in.
I’m sick of 5 expansions worth of progression blocking with broken zones and gear, let’s get back to the TSO/ROK style where the only block was the players.
Kunark also had 25 designers, multiple animators and character modelers, zone artists, a dedicated raid designer (Roger), etc. Right now we have 11 designers, 1 animator, 1 character modeler, zone artists, doing everything.
My feeling is that they really need a change as well. There hasn’t been any real innovation in expansions for a while now. Everything is the same formula. Two overland zones that contain lots of dead space to make it seem bigger. A fairly over looked stat suddenly raised to the top of the food chain. A new set of tokens to grind if you want to be fully equipped. A signature line that has a somewhat muddled story and little else in the way of quests. However, very little that is new or different when you strip away the paint job. It just seems like their is a lack of real imagination as far as pushing game mechanics on the EQ2 team at this time.
Yah…. canned.. cause we know this is the best time to have a bunch of newbie programmers replace our experienced ones and everything get completely screwed up… Are you saying you WANT eq2 to be “sunsetted”? -.-
I was so happy when I was reading poison fix. Then I came to realize that it was making it to where all scouts are op insteading of dropping poison damage a bit.
You realize they also said they are nerfing scouts autoattack so don’t go yelling OP till you see the final result.
Scouts have to pay money to maximize dps, in the form of hiven roots……I don’t play magi, so I wonder what they have to pay cash for to up their dps.
The only thing they ever have to buy is the same as all other classes. Int pots, food and drink, temp adorns. but yea, no poisons for sure.
All so nice. Now if they would just do something about the <strong>soul crushing lag in all zones… 👿
@Kruzzen … Then you did not read the rest of the change. They said they would be increasing scout abilities to compensate for the auto loss; therefore, everything remains unchanged except that now their large %age will be spread out across all abilities making the class look less lazy, still op. You should check the official forums more instead of partial posts here. 😀
@Carnifex I play magi and I pay 1k-2k a week to maximize my dps. My guild split cant even pay for me to potentially maximize. With the lack of population on my server and all current content possible is killed, noone is around to buy loot.
Not sure why you would spend 1 to 2 k a week but more power to you if that is what it really takes to maximize your dps. Might want to look at some better ways to optimize. 🙂
Would be nice if they fixed the crashing upon zoning. Damn does that mess up raid time.
To think that mechanics choices are more to do with designer choices than decade+ old game engines demonstrates a profound level of denial, ignorance, or stupidity.
My only desire to see our EQ2 devs leave is related to have them progress their careers. The amount of change and innovation they achieve (given what they have to work with) is amazing. Their biggest mistake is listening to very vocal fans who can’t separate what they “think” they want from what they actually enjoy playing.
… and finally, to wish people would get sacked, then posting it, changes a personal opinion to douche
@Oxy
We only tend to get crashes on zoning when someone pulls in the raid while you’re still not fully loaded.
Also ET seems to be causing some serious lag with moderately large encounters that occasionally crashes people.