EQ2U Introduces Ascension and Item Compare, Plus a Word on Autoattack Stats

For level 100 characters who complete the Signature quest line, the Kunark Ascending expansion introduces four new Ascension classes of Elementalist, Etherealist, Geomancer, and Thaumaturgist. These new “classes” are not tied to your current class, and with enough patience, you can eventually level all four of them up to Ascension level 10. Ascension also grants powerful new spells/abilities which can be upgraded through Crafting, Research, or by spending Daybreak Cash.

We are happy to announce that EQ2U has gained an Ascension tab to let you chart your character’s progress on gaining Ascension levels and abilities.

Speaking with one of the four Ascension trainers starts you on level 1 of the chosen class. Understanding exactly how you acquire Ascension XP is complicated, using a mixture of scrolls and Ascension vitality, so we wrote an Ascension FAQ which hopefully demystifies some of it.

All of the Ascension spells are automatically granted at Apprentice and can be upgraded all the way to Ancient. To see the recipes to craft Journeyman, Expert, Grandmaster, or Ancient spells, just click the recipe buttons on the right side of the display. Note that the Ascension class “stances” are replaced at level 5 and 10 so there’s really no reason to upgrade the level 1 (or 5) spell.

A Word About XP Bars

So the in-game Ascension XP bar behaves differently than the other XP bars displayed within EQ2 such as Adventure, Tradeskill, or Guild XP. When you ding an Adventure or Tradeskill level in EQ2, the XP bar goes back to empty (0%) and you start filling it again. However when you ding an Ascension level in EQ2, the XP bar does not go back to zero. Instead it shows your total progress from level 1 to your next level.

Looking at the XP bar above, this character has gained 61 million Ascension XP and must reach 69.4 million to ding Ascension Level 8. 61 million works out to 88% of 69.4 million. When this character dings level 8, they will already show as being 45.5% towards level 9, which has been a source of confusion for some players.

Now looking at our EQ2U XP bar for this same character, we show that it takes 13.6 million Ascension XP to get from level 7 to level 8. The character has gained 5 million XP at level 7 out of the needed 13.6 million, so they are 37.2% of the way to level 8. I hope you find our way of displaying this information to be intuitive.

Item Compare

Every major feature on EQ2U is discussed, debated, designed, and developed as a collaboration between Dethdlr and I. Sometimes we don’t see eye-to-eye on how something should be designed, its data stored, or how it should be presented. There is no greater example of this than Item Compare. We could never agree upon how the data should be shown. I was influenced in how item comparison happens in the game Final Fantasy (with green and red arrows depicting increases and decreases) while Dethdlr had a more structured, columnar view. I’m sad to say that some version of this feature has been languishing in a testing state on EQ2U for over 4 years now. It is with a sigh of relief that this feature no longer appears on our To Do list and is now available on EQ2U.

Item Compare allows you to compare any item to the items you’ve equipped on a character. As you can see above, there are new Compare icons next to each of your characters in the My Characters group. Clicking the scales icon next to a character shows the item in comparison to what is equipped on that character. Let’s look and see if Dola’s Mother’s Locket is an upgrade over Felodic’s currently equipped Glowing Lavastone Focus or Twark Outrider’s Battle Totem…

Autoattack Stats

So I’ve already been getting e-mails and messages on Discord about this one. Nearly three years ago, players noticed a concerted effort by the EQ2 devs to reduce the effectiveness of Melee and Spell Autoattacks and to encourage players to cast Combat Arts and Spells instead to do the majority of their damage. This was initially seen by most players as a good move. However as with anything else, the pendulum swings hard and doesn’t stop until it has completed its cycle.

In the last few months, even the most casual Advanced Combat Tracker user has noticed that Autoattack damage now accounts for less than 2% of total damage. A melee-oriented player who dutifully ensures they have 100% Flurry, 200% Multiattack, 300 Weapon Damage Bonus, 800 DPS, and decent Accuracy and Strikethrough values is now left in the dust by a player who throws everything into Potency and Ability Modifier.

At this point, the only purpose of your weapon swinging is to Proc effects on your weapon, armor, jewelry, and adornments. The only two stats that affect that is Haste (at 200, you swing your weapon 125% more frequently) and AOE Autoattack (when you autoattack, you hit up to 4 additional targets other than your primary target, and each of those hits can Proc).

The primary damage stats for all 26 classes are now Potency and Ability Modifier. It still makes sense to have 30-40% Accuracy and Strikethrough to ensure that you are hitting the mob and thus your Procs are triggering. But every other Autoattack stat is now demonstrably useless and I feel it is my duty to inform players of this change by styling these deprecated stats differently on EQ2U.

Other Updates

In the last couple of weeks, we have done several updates to EQ2U and have more planned. You can view the EQ2U Update Notes in the right column of the EQ2U homepage, but here are some key points:

• Character Tabs have been rearranged to better suit a “Choices” vs “Achievements/Appearance” grouping. Hopefully the change is not too jarring!
• Collection and Alternate Advancement data has been updated for Kunark Ascending.
• Recipe data has been updated to include ~900 new recipes from Kunark Ascending, Nights of the Dead 2016, Frostfell 2016, etc.
• Characters who have chosen more than one Heroic Endline in their Alternate Advancements will now see the correct points calculated on the Tooltip and Total Points spent.
• Fixed a longstanding caching issue where Recipe data for characters NEVER updated.
• Manually added the Kunark Ascending Signature Quest rewarded Ethereal Off-hand Weapons with Overcap Crit Bonus, since these items are still not in Census.

If you’d like to post a suggestion, comment, feedback, etc. about EQ2U, feel free to send us an e-mail using the Contact Us form on EQ2U, or post in our new EQ2U Support Forums!