Feldon While SOE and by extension EQ2 were offline during the 12 day downtime, what were the devs doing? Scrapbooking? Needlepoint? Actually, they continued work on Game Update 60 (now slated for a May 31st debut according to SmokeJumper) as well as looking ahead to Game Update 61 and beyond.
While players were not able to test Game Update 60, the developers have continued to polish it up and add new things while the servers were down, as well as addressing the feedback from players during the short testing period.
Game Update 60 Testing
Game Update 60 is still on test, and will see more changes and improvements over the next few weeks, as well as bugfixes and tweaks from player feedback. Already there have been some new update notes for Test. Of interest to mages will be these changes to Spell Multi Attack, and a corresponding change to Illusionist‘s uber Time Warp buff:
Alternate Advancement Abilities
- Spell Multi Attack now works on damage over time abilities. If a damage over time spell multi attacks then each tick of the damage over time will multi attack as well.
Illusionist
- Time Warp no longer adds additional ticks to damage over time abilities since those abilities can now Spell Multi-Attack.
There are numerous fixes to quests and zones, such as a fix for the long-standing issue of some active participants in Public Quests getting nothing. The biggest changes are further refinements of major PvP and Battlegrounds changes (including the new Battlegrounds Lobby) and tweaks coming with Game Update 60.
This is not to mention new Quests and the new Drunder and Crystal Caverns zones also on Test.
Lower Level Itemization
Regarding itemization of levels 1-85 which was disrupted by the Mechanics and Itemization changes in Velious, a player named Sambril asked what many of us have been wondering:
I would be interested to know if the itemization changes will include lower tier gear (particularly crafted gear) as well as Velious items. A lot of lower tier gear was effectively nerfed with the change to primary stat + stamina and the removal of +health and +power mods.
SmokeJumper responded:
These fixes are on our near-term lists of things to do.
Seeing at least crafted gear but hopefully more items from 12-82 getting some attention in Game Update 61 (slated for late August) would be welcome news.
Lower Levels and Flying?
Speaking of lower levels, SmokeJumper has posted more enigmatic comments about his plans for the entire level range of the game (not just 86-90):
While it’s true that Velious content releases will be level 90 content, we’re also expanding our vision to include multi-level content.
Freeport and Qeynos are all about multi-level content, and we intend to backfill lots of good ideas back into the older content as we move forward this year.
Also, the mysterious flying mount thing I promised to explain…well…I don’t want to build it up too big, but it’s aimed at lower-level characters also.
So after enough whining and moaning from the lower level players after giving in to all of the ‘easy button’ requests they are gonna give in here too.
I got a suggestion Smokey why don’t you make the lower level flying mounts give some stats boost too, make them a lot nicer than the higher level ones.
Why is it such a terrible thing for higher level players to have perks that you don’t get at lower levels?
There are no changes in plans posted there, Smokejumper posted just after launch of DoV that there were “cool” plans for flying mounts coming in a month or so.
So its likely something more then just appearing on the marketplace, or just being given out, my guess is a sort of temporary rental.
Either way I’m interested to see what comes out here as the only real news is that they seem to have tipped towards revamping older content rather then pushing people into high level stuff faster. I’m guessing also the backfill will involve PQ’s at lower levels as they have really been a hit with DoV.
Hopefully by this time next week we’ll be seeing the server populations back where they were pre-hack, I was surprised myself that things went backup without an email even (and that so many people found things were working without needing to be told!). I’ve also seen quite a few returnee’s in the game, DoV has a good vibe for sure.
It’s been said that flying mounts are restricted to high level characters because of the things which are coming… and now we hear that the things which are coming are also aimed at lower levels? I’m confused.
I’m please to read those lines. Gu#60 and #61 are going to rock. Thank for the hard work!
Hmm Spell Multi Attack on Lifeburn? 😀
if or i guess when they add flying mounts to lower levels they will prob make them slower then the t9 mounts.
t9 mounts are what 150% ?
if they gave the lower levels the same speed mounts it would sorta be killing a entire t9 quest line and making it useless . because ya could get the same thing by chronoing down and doing what would then be a much easier quest line.