Curing Whack-a-mole
——-
Effects that if you cure, it switches to a different effect
Some effects you don’t have to cure
Some effects you shouldn’t cure
——–

Rays of disintegration = annoying for enchanters
Will be reconsidered as a more Mage-centric spell

Scaling mobs in raid zones

Scripting completely changes for certain mobs like on ‘normal’ will send underlings instead of killing the actual boss

Might use new Achievement system to say you cleared the zone on hard

Miraguls planar shard in gu53 will have scaling

Final boss plays completely different depending on the choice made on pull.

Smart loot
Lock boxes in mistmyr already have mini smartloot for each person that loots

Auto mentoring system
Hail an NPC in the cities to mentor in 5 level increments
No aaxp bonus

Aaxp slider

Upgraded quest window

Let enchanters do crowd control on raids

May make T9 version of some TSO dungeons

Well one of my big notes got eaten. Sorry guys.

Stonebrunt mountains

——-
End of the void storyline

What happened to the Erudites and Odus

Ratonga lore

——–
Contested dungeon
The Hole
82+

3 different wings. Spawn in the middle.

Brenlo directly addressed Gage about rumors. 🙂

Raid mobs in new zones will have a choice of difficulty so no zone will be completely unbeatable

Some mobs will have multiple loot tables

——–
No new deities with expac
——–

Guild level 90
More amenities and more slots

———
2 overland zones
1 contested zone similar to sanctum of scaleborn by twice the size
12 group instances

Level by grouping or soloing
——–

Back to linear raid zone progression. Be able to clear raid zones and then progress to the next zone.

—–
New Halas free download gu55
Streamlined new player experience
Rework thundering steppes as next logical zone after Halas for 20+ characters.

——–
Will see Erudin and Paineel explained in new expac
——–

Shouldn’t be any one class that is required to raid

Swash and brigands pick up some of each others class abilities.
——–

Deity quests will not get updated.
Deity miracles might get looked at.

Halas starting race — Barbarians? Not 100% confirmed

Friznik is back on dev team.

Gu53 shaders 3.0 graphic upgrades to eq2 engine.
*moved to GPU for any shaders 3.0 card
*3,000 shaders upgraded so far
*Same performance at high res
*Higher framerate at lower res
Flora displacement on GPU performance getting further tweaks
*textures are not changing, So it won’t be a large download. just the old 1.0 shaders (bump mapping, reflections, item/gear glows, etc. are being batch replaced.

Nek Forest looks awesome now. The whole idea of a torch in the darkness, lighting up trees, rocks, and enemy mobs, rather than a flat pea soup grey haze and flat colors on everything.

When eq2 devs say first screenshots, they thought it was another game.

Metal armor with glow effects is particularly striking.

Would like to move particles to GPU but due to some design decisions, particles are tied to animations. Will have to go back and separate them out.

Torch slot on the to do list
Would like to do HDR in a future update

Mythical will not be #1 weapon. It will be usuable in another way.

Ore nodes will respawn as ore nodes
Gem nodes will respawn as gem nodes

Summoner dumbfire pets will just be a spell with a debuff, won’t be something that has survive.

Heal over time is third place behind wards and reactive heals, so Druids are getting another component to heal over time.

Re evaluating emergency heals and stun-and-heal

Plan to keep mythicals relevant in T9 without 1.5

Questions
——
Rangers — would like to re evaluate stream of arrows. Originally intended as a fillin between auto attacks, but auto attacks are so big now.

No immediate plans to adjust auto attack damage.

Drag, thought snap are so overpowered we have to disable them or mobs are trivialized

Raids that take advantage of enchanters

Conjuror mythical pet will reach cap in mid-80s so limited effectiveness in exp6 as currently designed. Will evaluate further.

Summoner pet survivability will be addressed

Will look at swarm pets

Extend eof and kos trees
50 more AA points
250 cap

End abilities at bottom of eof and kos trees will be combinations instead of additional buttons

Aa xp slider

Spell ranged melée heal taunt crit merged to just crit
Double attack and RDA merge to just DA
Each class has crit coefficients
Same gear adds diff crit % for diff classes

Reduce mitigation types to
Physical. Elemental. Nox. Arcane

Consolidate common self buff lines

Gear scaling system — old gear scales down

Druid heal over time with expiration heal for groupmate
Druid should be viable healer

No need to bring 8 support classes
Raidwide buffs for chanter and bard
Illy time compression 4 ppl – 1 per group

Summoner debuffs spell dmg
Rogue debuffs melée dmg

All of these changes will be on test for a long time
—-

Rare Loams are going away for T9

Level cap 90
2,000 recipes to raise cap

Ore nodes and gem nodes
Demand is unbalanced for loams

Gem nodes
Mage, fighter, jewelry

Can be both Tinkerer and transmuter.
Would like to completely overhaul adornment system.
Most new adornments recipes will be made by muter only rather than 9 main tradeskills.

EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate
Odus

February 2010

All Fan Faire attendees get Beta and The Expac
*Level cap to 90
*Self-mentoring System
*EQ2 Achievement System (20 HQs, 5,000 orcs, etc.)
*gu55 (feb 2010) New Halas good starting city
*gu53 shard of love zone — Erolissi Marr

EQ2
Auomated character transfers $25 in 2 weeks

FreeRealms
3.9 million players
Streaming system allows them to add content any time
A story line/lore
Guilds
Soccer this Summer

Customer service
Eliminated outsourced India support
Focus on strengths of CS employees in San Diego
Folks who actually play the game
Better answers than ‘working as intended’ replies

NUGIT team established to fight plat sellers
275,000 plat sellers banned, not just trial accounts

Community address starting now.

Brenlo getting the crowd riled up for Smedley.

SoE game montage.

Parsing Gravitas, Cures, CoB, etc.
Will consider it.

Determining where guild rally flag is located? Some coming has already been done for this.

Auto mentoring – hail an npc and mentor to a level in 5 level increments. Old quest completion missions. Probably not on PvP.

Daily double shard zone in Welcome window or MOTD? Possible.

Achievements (like CoH or Xbox Live) like 500 kills, 20 heritage quests, etc. In a new tab in the quest window.

Current tier upgrades are coming for bone clasped gridle. Not so much for the bloodthirsty choker. 🙂

Streamling buffing for classes. Buffing while running was the first part.

Harvester Npcs could auto-deposit in Harvest supply depot in the future.

Lavastorm elevator to WoE will be fixed to continue to it’s destination. This one got a lot of applause. 😉

Teaser of Shaders 3.0 — Nek Castle before and after.

Some seriously funny, cool, and creative new mob designs and revamped appearances to some existing mobs. More interesting animations.

* fighting pandas
* displacer beasts
* two headed giants
* stalagmites
* scarecrows

Random illusion appearances driving you crazy? Looking at a possibly a Magic Mirror house item to save illusion setups.

Npcs only have about 50 animations.
Players have about 1,000 animations.

Kelethin houses will get a transparent window. Both Kelethin and Neriak houses will have more rooms.

Male ratongas with whiskers but without glasses? We’ll look into it.

Illusion picker UI to switch illusions in development.

Devs would like to add more mannequin choices ie ratonga.

More magic user clothing options is in production.

The comprehensive writeups on Fan Faire and the events and photos are always worth a read if you couldn’t make it. I admit I’m all about the details and the expansion news. I don’t try to cover the whole event as others do that better than I can… One writeup I want to mention is CompleteHeal. Calthine (great to meet her of course!) has a writeup at Zam as well.

I took some pics of the event last night, some general Fan Faire pics, and of course lots of pics from the EQ2Flames gathering last night. Hope to get them up soon. Meeting BigRon was cool as hell, as well as meeting a bunch of Saints of Norrath folks which is of course Lord Pantz’ guild. Oh, and Gage was there too. 😉 Hell, he went up and talked to Aeralik who was out and about and nobody died. 😉

So what am I doing now? I’m logged in right now helping a guildie get their epic after betraying.

Gonna catch as many EQ2 panels as I can. Of course the big announcement will be tonight at 7 as far as the name of the expansion and then tomorrow from 4-6 will be the epic panels with nearly everyone from EQ2 telling us what’s coming and when. I know there is quite a bit a lot more content coming before the expansion.

If you caught this video at MMORPG.com, you know that there is some big news at Fan Faire with regards to Shaders 3.0 in EQ2. Namely boosting the look of the game and taking a lot more work off the CPU and putting it on the graphics card where it belongs. Already the new GPU shadows look awesome outdoors (indoors will require more work as I’m sure most instance zones lack point lights and use ambient light which doesn’t cast shadows). I will post some comments as soon as I see some side-by-side comparison screen shots.

If there is one awkward element to the event so far, I am kind of wondering why Bruce Ferguson is so publicly visible at Fan Faire, especially around EQ2 events. It’s clear that we’re moving in a different direction, so I guess I just don’t understand. I don’t have any ill will towards the guy, but he shepherded some decisions which are now being backed out of the game now. Maybe I’m overthinking it. 🙂

I’ll post more goodies about the future of EQ2 as soon as I have it…

An interesting day indeed, talking about the game. As much as people may doubt it, most of the Devs really do listen and want folks to play the game. It would pretty dumb if they didn’t.

They know the mistakes of Kunark, and the issues (to a lesser extent) in TSO.

Oh and talking to Pantz, Crabbok, Atan, and more isn’t too shabby either.

Record turnout for the eq2flames mashup. WTF are you Gage? 😛

A line of folks stretching out into the casino, ready to head into the main Fan Faire hall. Then at 8, the welcome by Brenlo, who couldn’t resist havimng a little fun, using every opportunity to hawk the game he is now Exec Producer for — EQ2.

Prizes included Turtle Beach headsets, 3d display goggles, and PNY 8800gts video cards. Well, if you could do an emote (you’d think folks would practice by now ;)).

My 4th Cirque de Soleil — Ka — freakin sweet!!

The engineering that went into the 360 pivoting tilting stage is incredible. And of course great performers.

Awesome!

While i do not feel entitled to special treatment (even though I’ve been asked enough basketball and weather inquiries to last a lifetime), in the end it came down to a stewardess getting me into a seat less likely to induce leg cramps. 😉 Thanks. 🙂

Now to get situated…

Getting ready to board the sorriest excuse for an airline around. First airline I’ve ever dealt with that cannot offer an exit row to a 6’9″ passenger online, at the ticket counter, at the gate, and when the gate rep made a rude comment about my height not being his fault, I notified customer service.

Maybe there is some small satisfaction in getting a cocky employee of the most customer-hostile airline in trouble. But as I stand in a completely backed up jetway, because three gate attendants haven’t learned the fine art of staging an aircraft boarding, I realize there can be no satisfaction.

See you in 4 hours.

GENERAL

• The Order of Rime illusion no longer has a minimum level for use.
• Fang the direbear has received some additional defensive bonuses.
• The Eggstractor should now only work on its intended target (which is, of course, eggs).
• There is a new EQ2VoiceService.exe from Vivox that should resolve some crash issues that players were experiencing.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Coercer

• Coercive Healing will once again apply properly to reactive heals.

KURN’S TOWER

• A cinematic event when slaying Ione (with a quest requirement) has been turned on. Fear Kraytoc’s wrath!

MUNZOK’S MATERIAL BASTION

• The void sapper adds associated with Ozyk in Munzok’s Material Bastion have reduced health, and don’t spawn as quickly as before.
• Umzok will not automatically sacrifice his adds to gain their buff as quickly as before.

QUESTS

• It should no longer be possible to gather every available reward when completing the Shadow Odyssey signature quest line.
• The Order of Rime barrel of fish and box of bones in Kunzar Jungle will now offer the quest “Fishing for Faction” and “Set of Bone Plates” correctly, when you have completed Kellaen Mednevn’s quest “Stockpiling Stone Mucus” and have the Rime illusion cast.
• Kallaen Mednevn in Kunzar Jungle now consistently offers her quest “Task of the Rider” to only those that have enough Rime faction and are masking themselves with the Rime illusion.

SPELLS

Necromancer

• Nylph’s Misty Image has been reverted to its previous illusion state.

Moonlight Enchantments is a new recurring World Event in the forests of Norrath which will only be available the 20th of every month. I apologize for not getting this information up before June 20th, but it should be available for the 20th of every month hereafter.

This event is now known as Moonlight Enchantments (formerly known as the Enchanted Grottos of Norrath).

Essentially, there is a mushroom ring in each of the forests of Norrath which can be entered once per month (on the 20th) to visit five unique hidden instances. Each has purple shinies and quests to be completed. Both offer house items, charge-based mounts, and illusion forms. The mounts in particular have some…unique choices. Between magic mushrooms, brownies, and sunshine yellow carpets that bloom flowers and belch mushrooms, it was quite a trippy day let me tell you. 😉

For those with a scientific mind who wish to know what these instances look like, here is my best guess:

• Emerald Halls entry
• Lower Guk entry
• Lesser Faydark
• ? – mushroom area — dig up compost
• ? – fawns and brownies — make root beer

As always, EQ2Traders is on the ball with a full accounting of these five new forest-based instances and the rewards they offer. It’s quite a selection of house items if you are looking to spruce up your terrarium or take the plunge with a more interesting looking guild hall aquarium. 🙂 Ok, no more bad humor I promise. At least until Wednesday…

If your guild has been experiencing heavy lag in Palace of the Ancient One and perhaps noticed that you are seeing combat logs from another guild that is in their own instance ‘leaking’ into your combat logs for this zone, you’re not alone.

There is an amusing screen snapshot that shows partial combat logs that demonstrate this ‘cross-talk’. It seems likely this is the cause of some of the lag in this zone.

There is also another issue with regards to adds continuously spawning, to the point of hundreds of adds appearing if the zone bugs out.

It’s being addressed by timetravelling.