Kander’s Candor: Rum Cellar and Beyond

EQ2 Lead Designer Kyle “Kander” Vallee has posted more details on the upcoming Rum Cellar DLC, as well as a peek at the large fall update which the EQ2 team has been careful not to describe as an expansion, yet will have an overland zone, quest lines, and numerous dungeons.

I’m relieved to read some of the details and this paints a better picture overall of what we can expect this year. If I had to ask for “one thing more” in the statement, I’d have liked to see the Echoes of Faydwer Fabled dungeons mentioned by name. They’re a nice summer holdover for players who can run the Altar of Malice instances in their sleep, and it helps us stretch out the content until the fall update. The announcement doesn’t touch on pricing, but I think it nudges in the right direction that we’re not going to be nickel-and-dimed for single dungeon updates. Players just want to know that the overall cost and rate of content release isn’t going to unexpectedly jump. Without that assurance, it’s understandable that some players are hesitating about the Rum Cellar DLC.

For many of them, it’s not the pricing of Rum Cellar so much as the total pricing for all the content coming in 2015 that players are curious about. If the overall number excluding extras such as prestige houses, mounts, and mercs is reasonable, then I think people will get on board. I plan to buy Rum Cellar on my main account, and will evaluate the Octoberish update when it’s around the corner. So without further ado, let’s read up!

From the EQ2 Forums:

Greetings Fellow Norrathians!

I was asked by Windstalker and a few other prominent Norrath citizens to come and expand on the information about the Rum Cellar Campaign as well as give some hints about what we have in store for the future.

Some of the big questions we received were asking about the play styles that the Rum Cellar zones will be concentrating on, and the sort of drops that’ll be inside the 6 different zones. I will start off by saying we really felt that our original release of Altar of Malice was a little light on content for casual to mid-skill level players. So this release is really concentrating on that. Although there should be something for everyone, the heroic, advanced solo and raid content is more concentrated on those play styles. The Rum Cellar raid is meant, as far as difficulty and itemization, to supplement those who are finding it difficult to get through the tier 1 and tier 2 level raid targets. This raid should be able to support some pick-up raiding and really add a good amount of loot to progression.

So what will be dropping in this Rum Cellar campaign? The heroic content should have drops for everyone, solo, casuals, heroic, and hardcore players alike. There are new green adornments that will be dropping in the solo/advanced solo zones as well as new heroic green adornments located in the heroic and event dungeons. Expect to be able to obtain both blue heroic and green heroic gems. We have made some really cool rare drops as well as additive drops [In the Ill Will, Rancor, Nox Incessit style accessories], along with new armor and appearances, and some new very special additions to armor adornment sets. Collections for Rum Cellar have a very nice end line reward, very much in the spirit and power of the Mithril Ring of Amplified Power.

Some other specifics are:

Solo and Advanced Solo drops:

• Blue Malice Shards for purchasing tier 1 heroic armor.
• Heroic collections drop from named encounters.
• High end armor piece via a new quest.
• Chance for rare elite mercenary.

Heroic specific drops:

• Red zeppelin flying mount (obtained through collection drops from a named encounter).
• High end armor piece via a new quest.
• Special War Rune that add an 8th bonus to current armor gems.
• Chance for rare elite mercenary.

We’ve also got tons of achievements, many of which are hidden, and a bunch of new titles.

Also, a live update releasing alongside Rum Cellar will include quality-of-life improvements to Scouts and Fighters and Summoners. Scout and Fighter improvements focus on increasing ability damage as well as making backend changes to allow for dynamically adjusting each archetype independently for continued tuning. This will be the first pass of several aimed at bringing interactivity and fun to Scouts and Fighters and moving away from an over-reliance on auto-attack damage. Summoner changes focus on improving the functionality of pets, including both UI customization and the long-awaited pet tab on the character information window.

We invite you to check out the Rum Cellar Campaign before it launches, and you can help out our team by beta testing this now. Information on this can be found here.

So what are we doing now and what is in the future? As far as the content for the future, we will most definitely be expanding the world of Norrath! We are currently in development of a substantially larger campaign release for later this year that will include a new overland zone (all new Geo courtesy of our terrain tool) and new dungeon themes that will include heroic, advanced solo and raid zones – as well as new signature lines, quests, collections, achievements and more. Fabled and agnostic zones are still on our list of things to do, but we aren’t scheduling those yet. Right now our focuses are performance, class tuning, and new campaign content and features.

Speaking of features, did we also mention that All Access members will be able to pull AA points in and out of stacks without having to respec their entire trees? Oh yeah!!

We appreciate everyone’s honest feedback and we appreciate those of you who have joined us at the EQ2 subreddit to chat with us about this upcoming content. We’ll see you on April 28 with the release of the Rum Cellar Campaign

Kyle “Kander” Vallée
Lead Designer, EverQuest II
Daybreak Games, LLC