Feldon
If you have been remiss in venturing in the past in the EverQuest 12th anniversary Chronoportals event to get all the items your characters may need now and in the future, today is your last day! If you haven’t checked these out and the loot available from them, check out the Portal Event Treasure thread (scroll down a bit for the list of loot). If you need help with the locations and strategies for these events, check out the Chronoportals Event Guide. Also, there are several books, paintings, and of course house replicas of the nameds monsters from each...
Feldon
Players logged in yesterday morning to find that their Ranged items, including bows and thrown weapons, had rejected their adornments. Those adornments ended up back in the Overflow slot. Rothgar responded: This appears to be a bug related to some item changes. Our QA department is working on it now and we will have the items fixes asap.
From EverQuest2.com: Jesters, thieves, bards and fans of mischief are invited to enjoy the adventuring and new crafting festivities that surround Bristlebane Day! You never know what riddles, laughs and pranks are to be found during this enjoyable time of year. Celebrators are present in every home city, and the oddest of objects have been spotted in Antonica, The Commonlands, Darklight Wood, Timorous Deep, Greater Faydark and Frostfang Sea! Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for special events, especially in Enchanted Lands, occurring only on the Highest of Silly Days, April 1st, 2011!
If you just can’t wait for Thursday to see what (if any) changes you’ll see to your gear, you may be interested in these additional Test Update Notes (beyond the notes already posted on Tuesday): ITEMS Dungeon dropped loot has had its power increased. Dungeon shard armor has had its power increased. Raid items have had their power increased. The gap in power between easy and challenge mode raid items has been increased. The power of a few War Runes has been increased. Silius brought this to our attention: Just a heads up that test server should have the...
After posting a promising thread on Friday entitled “Upcoming Itemization Changes (No Nerfs)“, it seems SmokeJumper has gotten egg on his face today. Players logged in after today’s Tuesday Game Update to find sweeping nerfs and huge reductions in the effectiveness of Velious gear across the line, especially Fighter items. In a cantankerous discussion on the EQ2 forums, players linked numerous items which underwent substantial losses in stats and desirability. SmokeJumper initially tried to defend the changes with: Please go back and take a look at my original post. I did say that we were being “intentionally conservative” with...
If you are a level 80+ Master Crafter who has completed the Tradeskill Epic, this post by Domino may interest you: Epic crafters, you might want to visit the tradeskill society in your home town while Bristlebane Day is with us. The grand jester has been having some fun with red collectibles for the season… Players immediately noticed that every red shiny was dropping just one item. It seems there’s something else you have to do to get the others.
From SmokeJumper the EQ2 Forums: These itemization changes did *not* happen today, on Tuesday. Instead, they will happen on Thursday morning’s hotfix. Sorry for the delay. Soon!
All U.S. servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT on Tuesday, March 29, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The U.K. worlds will have their update at 5am London Time on Wednesday, March 30, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours. The full reformatted patch notes are available after the jump….
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: We’re making some changes to make dungeons more attractive to players in DoV. We’re adjusting base pop and boss health so that the dungeons take less time to complete so they’re more fun for folks, as well as to allow more frequent chances at boss loot drops on revisits. We’re also making a few changes so that bosses don’t wipe parties so easily since they seem to be a bit tougher than we’d originally planned. We’re approaching these changes conservatively so that we don’t overshoot the mark. If these changes don’t do the...
UPDATE: This event has been extended until April 1st. Edited from EverQuest2.com: From Friday, March 25th through Monday, March 28th Friday, April 1st, our players will be invited to purchase specially created Cherry Blossom items via the in-game marketplaces in their preferred games. These Cherry Blossom items can be displayed in player in-game homes, as a sign of ongoing support and to raise further awareness amongst our deep player communities. For every Cherry Blossom item purchased between March 25th and March 28th, SOE will donate $10 to the American Red Cross* in support of ongoing relief efforts.
Client Crashes FIX! If you have had your fill of “EverQuest2.com has stopped responding” errors, Rothgar seems to have finally gotten to the bottom of this one: We think we’ve finally tracked down a bug that has been happening for awhile and leading to client crashes and the “EQ2 has stopped responding” problem. I can’t guarantee that this fixes EVERY problem out there, but it certainly fixes the most common crash we’ve been seeing lately. This should get pushed out with next week’s hotfix along with some performance improvements to public quests!
EQ2 PvP Guru Olihin has given PvPers a taste of Game Update 60: GU60 will bring lots of changes to PvP. Fame is being reworked Fame and title gains will now have their own EXP BAR, no more trying to figure out how long or why you gain/lost a title New armor and adornments Ongoing balance changes (this will never stop and will never be perfect in any realistic way) New Battleground Enhancements to the Matchmaker for Battlegrounds Cross faction communication There will be more details as we get closer to GU60.
When prodded about upgrading the graphics engine of EQ2, if not to improve the graphics, at least to address the spate of flickering graphics and shadows which seem to have plagued the game for some players (including me) since the launch of Velious. SmokeJumper addressed this concern and others including graphical glitches and performance slowdowns in Public Quests: We redirected our efforts yesterday to trying to resolve some of the PQ issues. We fixed one issue last night, and although I had been getting similar behavior to what you describe on my home rig, I couldn’t make that duplicate...
If you have run a few Destiny of Velious dungeons (and raids), compared the loot/gear to Public Quests, and said aloud “no me comprende”, this should be a good week. From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: We are bumping up the power of Velious dungeon and raid items. We’re doing this to make those items more competitive when compared with Public Quest items, because instances are tougher than the PQs and deserve better rewards. This does include shard armors. We are also going to bump up the power of hard-mode raid loot so hard modes are even more rewarding,...
Let’s Be Honest… Public Quests completed even at the highest “x4 raid” level demand neither the coordination nor the discipline of any of the raid content in the last 3 expansions. Storm Gorge requires a little more focus than Ring War, but generally speaking, 24-40 players standing in the right place, killing the right mobs, in the right order, stand to inherit a wagonload of Legendary gear with Yellow adornment slots, all without such challenges as timing AOEs, switching to an Off-Tank, agro-juggling, or any complex strategy. The biggest enemy encountered is usually Server Lag. Public Quests offer a...
If $25 for a set of armor, furniture, or mount seemed to stretch your definition of microtransaction, you’re not alone. Many items in the EQ2 Marketplace have had their prices permanently lowered by an average of 35%. Additionally, a Marketplace Sale which shall run until April 4th has temporarily reduced some items by 65%. SmokeJumper started a thread entitled Massive price cuts in the marketplace: If you like the items in the marketplace, but never felt like they were in your price range, be sure to check it out now. We’ve been thinking a lot about the prices there...
Today came down to a choice: Write or Play? So tomorrow we’ll be back with lots of news about Itemization, Server Performance, and continued roadblocks in Zone progression.
Many of EverQuest 2’s most dedicated players owe their gameplay roots to the original EverQuest and still carry strong memories of the patience and community the original game required. Soloing was almost unheard of. Camping mobs for hours (or days), the difficulties and perils of travel, and contested spawns of much-needed named mobs were all experiences players would not soon forget. It sure was a different game before WoW forced all MMOs to become approachable and remove any aspect that might be considered as a “waste” of the player’s time. When we heard about Chronoportals, a live event running...
Your updates notes for today, March 24, 2011, include several crash fixes, problems linking items in chat, Auction channel spam, and also some substantial nerfs to Critical Mitigation on Destiny of Velious gear.
As revealed last night, the 12th anniversary celebration of EverQuest brings an event to EverQuest II which allows players to step into the past and remember encounters from before the Shattering. Q: What are Chronoportals? A: They are instances ranging from level 20-90. Each one is a nostalgic area or enemy from EQ1. Some can be be done solo, others require a small group, and still others require a full 6 person group. You and your group will be automatically mentored down when zoning in. Q: What are the rewards? A: Outside of the Antonica portal is a vendor...
If multiple updates per week have been getting on your nerves, SmokeJumper has something to say: I’m sorry that these updates have been bothering you. We’ve made a conscious decision to be as responsive to issues from our recent release as possible, fixing any issues or exploits found as quickly as possible and then getting those out to the Live servers so that your gameplay is as great as possible. They will be reducing in frequency after this week.
In the run up towards Game Update 60, there are several things of note regarding Player Housing and Graphics that we’ve been meaning to cover. These include House Item Limit Expanders, Prestige Houses, the Network Status Page, and also a tip of the hat to Ryan “Imago-Quem” F. who has moved on to PlanetSide 2 and incoming graphics guru Alex “GermInUSA” who continues to polish up the EQ2 graphics engine while adding new features.
Yesterday marked the one month anniversary of the launch of Destiny of Velious. Over the last month, we have seen an avalanche of bugs impacting progression with dungeons and raid zones alike throughout Velious. While these have been steadily fixed during the nearly daily updates, at least one issue remains unresolved: The series of doors in Kraytoc’s Fortress of Rime x4 raid zone. It seems that these doors can get locked due to wipes, zone resets, etc. Discuss this on the EQ2 Forums
From EverQuest2.com: From Wednesday, March 23rd @ 10:00am PDT [17:00 GMT] through Wednesday, March 30th @ 10:00am PDT [18:00 GMT]*, log in to EQII and take part in a week-long look back at Norrathian days of yore. The EQII Team has created this fun event as an homage to EverQuest in honor of the momentous occasion, and although the lore doesn’t exactly fit the current story of EQII, they decided to make it extra enjoyable for those who were around for the first iteration of Norrath. Adventurers who take part in this journey through time will find some silly...
In response to a concise Berserker Class Issues post-Velious thread created by Bremer, Xelgad said that we should see some of these fixes hopefully before but at the latest by Game Update 60: Hey guys, thanks for the thread! We’ve got a bunch of quick fixes for these issues on the way. They’ll be live by GU60 at the latest. Most of the changes are pretty straightforward and some are exactly as suggested here. and later in the thread, Xelgad posted that he was able to make Death’s Door a more prominent effect to allow healers to more easily...