Feldon
If nobody in your guild wants to run the Tower of Frozen Shadow progression quests, especially killing Tserinna in the Haunt of Syl’Tor for your access to the Tower of Frozen Shadow x2 raid zone, you’re not alone. The Quests If you aren’t REALLY paying attention and doing things in a certain order, it is almost a guarantee that you will get gated on pretty much EVERY quest in the 3 Tower of Frozen Shadow zones. I spent one night doing all the quest updates in sequence, and we had to repeatedly tell people “Wait don’t click that item...
Game Updates & Maintenance
A fix has been found for the AoE Double Casting that many Velious raid mobs have been guilty of. This required in-depth analysis of the logs which have been generated especially to determine why these mobs were exhibiting this behavior. From Maevianiu on the EQ2 Forums: We were finally able to reproduce this and a fix for it will be in the next hotfix. Thank you for the detailed descriptions when it happened it really helped dig into the logging to find the cause. It was related to people dying and rezzing. Accepting a rez while he is casting...
This news comes to is via EQ2 ZAM who got it from the FreeRealms forums: Sony Online Entertainment will perform maintenance beginning at 6:00 AM Pacific on February 16, 2012. This will impact the following services: Account management will be unavailable starting at 6:00 AM to approximately 7:00 AM Pacific. Commerce transactions, including purchases on our websites and in-game marketplaces will be unavailable between 6:00 AM to approximately 7:00 AM Pacific. Forums will be read-only starting at 6:00 AM to approximately 7:00 AM Pacific. Login for our games will be affected from 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM Pacific (players already...
From the EQ2 Forums: ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION Vallon’s Tower [Challenge] Players should get the correct message when entering the blue shielded dome in the Vallon Zek fight. During the final Vallon Zek fight, only 2 Vallonite Aces will spawn per wave of adds. Fighters will no longer be hit with Tactical Dilema during the fight. DUNGEON MAKER Fixed an issue with vitality not applying correctly in dungeon maker instances. ITEMS Gnomish Anti-Camo Goggles can now be equipped by any class. LIVE EVENTS Erollisi Hearts a’Flutter: Antonica – The Essences of Erollisi should no longer spawn within unreachable tree...
From the EQ2 Forums: GENERAL Travelling from Great Divide to Eastern Wastes via the Griffon mount should no longer drop players randomly into the water. Travelling to Kylong Plains using the Global Travel Bell should no longer drop players randomly into the water. Fixed a bug where the client could get stuck in a “sending mail” mode making it impossible to send additional mails until restarting the client. ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION Vallon’s Tower [Challenge] Adds that spawn during the final Vallon zek fight spawn less frequently and have less health. Warlord’s Fury and Siphon cast during the final...
From Zoltaroth on the EQ2 Forums: We are working on the memory issues, though they are not memory leaks. There was actually a change that went live on Tuesday that should help with the memory footprint increase we saw with AoD. There are some other fixes as well still in the pipeline. Pathing should be coming to live fairly soon. It was enabled on test for certain zones but not all zones had the new pathing built for them yet. There were also some issues we found on test that we want to fix before it goes live. They...
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: Hey folks, Lots of you know Rothgar (Greg Spence) who has been the Lead Programmer for the last few years on EQII. Well, he’s moving over to “EverQuest Next” now to help us move that game along, and Zoltaroth (Nandor Szots) is taking the reins. Zoltaroth has been a Sr. Programmer on EQII for years now also and the transition has been completely seamless, mostly because Nandy and Greg have been a team for a long time now and they both know everything there is to know about the code base. We’re looking...
From EverQuest2.com: We will perform maintenance that will affect account management and commerce transactions beginning at 7:00 AM Pacific* on February 8, 2012.
After getting called to the carpet for a revised Game Update schedule that won’t see new level 90 content coming to EQ2 until April, nearly 9 months since last year’s Game Update 61, SOE has laid out a gameplan for February events. From EverQuest2.com: February Publish Plans – More to Play, Your Way! February is here already, and the team is hard at work on Game Update 63! We’ll have some “behind the scenes” videos for you in the coming weeks to give you a sneak peek at the art of some of the exciting new zones coming up,...
From EverQuest2.com: GENERAL You can now access your mail without a mailbox! You can either click the mail buff in your buff window, select mail from the EQ2 menu, or use the /start_mail command! (NOTE: You will only be able to send and receive items and coin by actually clicking on a mailbox in the world.) ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION Tallon’s Stronghold [Challenge] Players have more time to defeat Decorin Deathbringer in the Tallon Zek fight before Tallon empowers him. Vallon’s Tower [Challenge] Players have more time to defeat Kulaxis in the Vallon Zek fight before Vallon empowers him.
We’re not sure what’s going on, but the DNS servers that drive everything under station.sony.com seem to have forgotten that they’re supposed to be doing something. A post has just appeared on Twitter/Facebook which suggests maintenance tomorrow: Account management, Commerce transactions, In-game marketplaces, forums and login will be impacted on Feb 8 from 7-8:30 Pacific Time [Ashlanne] Maintenance Notice: Wednesday, February 8, 2012 forums.station.sony.com Important: We will perform maintenance beginning at 7:00 AM Pacific* on February 8, 2012. This will impact the following services: UPDATE: [SOE-MOD 02] Todays issue is something different then the planned downtime for tomorrow. It...
From EverQuest2.com: Oasis will be undergoing maintenance beginning at 12:00 AM Pacific* on February 7, 2012. We expect this downtime to last for approximately 18 hours. (Updated to extend by 6 hours, due to unexpected delays.)Chat will also be down for the Freeport server during this time. We apologize for this interruption and will bring the servers back online as soon as the maintenance is completed. Also, we have noticed some problems with forum logins which may be related.
The announced removal of Critical Mitigation will coincide with the conversion of Yellow and Red Crit Mit adornments into Health adornments. So why will the replacement adornments have less Health (less than 250 points each) than White health adornments? According to Omougi, it’s because the EQ2 team thinks we should have other viable choices, like DPS. Adornments should be about choice! From Omougi on the EQ2 Forums: Our goal with these adornment and spell conversions is to give you guys something in the place of nothing essentially. Before, you were playing a zero-sum game if you had enough crit...
From Silius on the EQ2 Forums: Just to clarify some confusion. Crit mit as a mechanic is being removed. NPC crit bonus was countered by crit mit and we are reducing crit bonus to 0 across the board. Critical avoidance is staying around. Critical avoidance is an NPCs way of contesting your chance to critically hit them. Replacing the adornments with HP is not to compensate for anything. Since the critical mitgiation stat is no longer useful we are converting to a stat that benefits all players. The goal is for this change to not change the difficulty of...
In what may go down as the best decision in EQ2 history, or a total overreaction to a problem that could have been solved with a 15-20% reduction across the board, Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has announced that in the very near future, the Critical Mitigation stat will be COMPLETELY GOING AWAY. First introduced in The Shadow Odyssey, greatly expanded in Sentinel’s Fate, and then becoming the most important stat within Destiny of Velious as an alternative form of progression to raising the level cap (which is technologically challenging), here’s the announcement of this revelation from the EQ2 Forums: We’ve...
A selection of Velious raid mobs have been doubling up on Area-of-Effect attacks since the expansion’s launch nearly one year ago. Atan (of Unrest) summed up the issues: Condition 1: Modifieable timers line up such that a mob casts 2 different abilities simultaneously. Condition 2: Ability that normally comes ever 40 seconds comes twice in a row with no delay. Seems they are both bugs to me, but condition 1 is probably just a result of your design. Maevianiu is getting serious about addressing the AoE double-casting by raid mobs in Velious raid zones and had these responses: I...
Here are your Update Notes for January 31, 2012: GENERAL Fixed a bug where some characters wouldn’t show on character select. ZONE PROGRESSION / POPULATION Tower of Frozen Shadow (Raid) Tserrina’s spell “Wing Buffet” should no longer cause priests to become knocked back. Adds spawned from shadow doors should no longer spawn quite as quickly. The number of adds that spawn from shadow doors has been slightly reduced. Tower of Frozen Shadow: Umbral Halls Demanti Sheda should no longer have issues resetting his encounter. Demanti Sheda’s spell “Paralyzing Fear” should now stun instead of fearing and has been reduced...
We reported last week on the double-casting of AoEs by Destiny of Velious HM (hard mode) raid targets, making many fights either nearly impossible, or requiring exceptional luck. According to Kander, this is now being looked at: It is definitely a bug and we definitely intend to fix it. We have code looking at it right now. Meanwhile, Gninja remains our point man on all things Mercenaries. At the prodding of players, he has nailed down some issues, first with Defiler mercs not taking advantage of wards: Took a look at this. It seems they are still warding but...
From EverQuest2.com: Crushbone and Permafrost will be undergoing maintenance beginning at 4:00 AM Pacific* on January 31, 2012. We expect this downtime to last for approximately 8 hours.Chat will also be down for the Freeport and Oasis servers during this time. We apologize for this interruption and will bring the servers back online as soon as the maintenance is completed. Time Zone Conversions PST: 4:00am-noon EST: 7:00am-3:00pm GMT: 12:00-20:00 CET: 13:00-21:00
Last week, MMORPG posted an interview with Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson. The article is a bit light on revelations and threw a few softballs like “The Dungeon Maker is a brilliant addition to the game. Can we expect more functionality now that it seems like the community loves the feature so much?” , it could still be an interesting read, especially players looking for any scrap of information about the upcoming fourth game in the EverQuest franchise (you didn’t think we forgot about EQOA, did you?). Great ideas only really shine if you’re first to market with them. So we’re...
It is now two weeks since the announcement that ProSiebenSat, a TV and radio broadcast firm based in Germany, will become SOE’s ‘Exclusive Partner’ in Europe. ProSiebenSat’s gaming division, Alaplaya, is mostly known for poorly supported region-locked free-to-play browser games. The announcement immediately raised fears which, to date, have received no official (or unofficial) response from SOE beyond two posts from SmokeJumper asking for more patience: I can’t give you the official answer yet. I’ve been specifically asked to wait until the full FAQ and everything is created for this. However, this should be really big for EQII in...
Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson has posted a bit of a Twitter followup after his rather abrupt pronouncement that we should only expect three Game Updates this year, with the next one not arriving until sometime in April: Funny how when you come back from relaxing, you always run real hard to catch up. Does this make sense? Really? Humanz iz odd. DoV, Book 2, Chapter 1! (GU 63) : Withered Lands and Skyshrine. A big new overland, group instances, a contested dungeon, raids, and more! Sometimes things go right. And then because of that, they keep going right because that...
If you like posting on the EQ2 forums, you’ve probably been seeing a lot of the above screen. Over 2 weeks ago, the SOE forums lost the ability to store login information using cookies. In other words, anyone who was not actively browsing an SOE forum or website was logged out after 15 minutes of activity. At the time, this was explained as a temporary glitch. However last week, EQ2 Community Manager Amnerys (who returned to work at SOE in early January) had this unbelievable update on the issue: The forum auto logout has been changed to 3-hours now....
During Fan Faire 2011’s “Freeport and Beyond” panel led by EQ2 Exec Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, a slate of exciting plans was laid out. The announcements outlined Game Update 61 (War of Zek), GU62 (Freeport Reborn), GU63 and GU64 which would each contain new Destiny of Velious content, and Game Update 65 slated for August 2012 which would bring about the revamp of the City of Qeynos. Here’s a transcript of SmokeJumper‘s Fan Faire 2011 presentation (watch video here) from 13:58 to 14:36: What we’re concentrating on is making sure that we have not just new content to chew...
Optimization of the Broker is something that’s been on EQ2 Lead Programmer Rothgar‘s long term To Do list for quite a while. So it was a surprise when a change we first heard about in September 2011 partly arrived in yesterday’s Update Notes. All of those ‘vendor trash’ items with a description like “You might be able to find a merchant who would give you a few coins for this item.” are now NO BROKER. This change should help clear tens of thousands of items off the broker whose sole purpose has been to provide some flavor to players...