Tinkerfest is a wonderful time each year that players get to experience the zany background of the gnomes and their kooky inventions. What will go boom this time, who will be the new victim or merciless tests with flaky machinery!? When will the madness end?

Starting Friday July 23rd at 12:01am PDT Tinkerfest will be in effect. Bringing to you several quests, lovely house items and fluff and yes, the shinies are back! Be quick to jump on this upcoming weeks event as it will only be available for a short time, ending on August 2nd at 11:59pm PDT this event will wrap up like one of Cinderella’s pumpkin carriages and vanish till next year!

For a complete quest/event list there are writeups at EQ2 ZAM and EQ2Traders.

The most difficult part of a raid encounter can be managing the Adds or additional enemies that come at predefined moments during the fight. EQ2 has a storied history of people trying different methods to manage, crowd control, confuse, or completely reset Adds during challenging fights. Clearly, the desire to beat more difficult enemies is a powerful temptation to cheat.

Manipulating the outcome of a fight through timely brawler death feigns or leashing certain mobs by fighting at a distance are tactics which have existed in EQ2 from the very beginning. Such exploits were very publicly documented in Veeshan’s Peak. But while it is one thing to participate in such tactics in a private instance. It is quite another to do so in a contested environment with plenty of witnesses!

EQ2Wire is not in the habit of pointing out particular guilds or players, but the controversy will likely be brewing until this exploit in the Klaaktuus Unbound fight can be closed.

With the recent attention to exploitation and penalizing players for various BattleGrounds exploits; the publicity of this event leaves one unanswered question, “Will SOE penalize guilds for exploiting a contested encounter, preventing others from enjoying its content legitimately?”

For those players interested in the exact details, the full transcription can be found on EQ2Flames from pages 124 to 129 (and continuing) (NOTE: Coarse language).

Procs. We’ve all seen them.

“On a successful healing spell.”

“On a successful attack.”

“On a successful melee attack.” (this one makes Rangers cry)

But how often do they really trigger? How big a part do they play in actual healing, spell damage, combat art damage?

Aidis, newly minted EQ2Wire contributor has crunched the numbers and found that one such special effect — Flash of Intuition — isn’t so special:

After a review of several healing procs, and how important base is for healers, many items that proc a temporary increase to base [for the players next ward or heal] have been sought after. However, there is a problem with Flash of Intuition. It effects other heal procs before main healing abilities.

After one test of 500 casts, Flash of Intuition activated 32 times. Out of those 32 activations only 3 were used by a main healing ability, as the rest were used up by other heal and ward procs. This is counter productive some say, and have tossed these items to their backpacks in hope of some fix to these procs effecting procs issues, while others continue to gamble on luck.