Feldon
Game Update 56 is looking to be a huge update, with many tweaks and adjustments throughout Norrath. In brief… a substantial Travel Revamp more quests in Stonebrunt Highlands to hopefully fill that level 87-90 solo questing gap a new Storyline feature a new Icy Keep x4 Raid Shaders 3.0 Graphical Revamp Research Assistants can help all your characters Blue PvP Adornments Yellow Adornments on T9 Mastercrafted gear Level 90 Character Traits PvP Warfields new Training Dummy options in your guild hall (solo, group, raid, and AE group) and of course New Halas Also of note, is that a vendor...
Game Updates & Maintenance
Domino has posted some background and lore regarding the new tradeskill society, the Ravens of the North, in New Halas. From the EQ2 Forums:
The focus this week has been on new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson, and EQ2 Server Performance, which has been a persistent black cloud over EQ2 for the last 2 months. Test Copy Test Copy is getting some major use as it is where PvP and Battlegrounds changes are tested. Gninja advised us: We will be working out a schedule as to when the test_copy server will be pvp vrs pve. We are working it out now and will get back to you guys shortly. Stuck at Character Select An issue with being stuck at Character Select on Thursday...
From Rothgar on the EQ2 forums: We’ve located the issue that was causing the slow performance last Tuesday. This problem had ZERO to do with battlegrounds but they were taken down as a precaution anyway. I know that battlegrounds tends to get the bad rap because it’s new, but they are not always the cause of problems. In fact, we’ve got the character loading issues under control now so that there are no performance spikes as a result of characters going to and from the BG world. We’ve been making some general performance improvements that will help lower the...
Dethdlr
After the widespread outages of the EQ2 servers the night prior, a thread was created on the EQ2 Forums to solicit an explanation from the EQ2 Developers, and/or new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson, on the cause, and to seek reassurances that the issues are being identified and on track to be resolved. As they tend to do, the thread branched into speculation on the origins of Dave Georgeson’s forum handle — SmokeJumper. Skywarrior posted his theory: Hmmmm. Smokejumpers are extremely brave (or crazy) and well-trained individuals who jump out of airplanes in order to reach remote areas involved...
From the EQ2 Forums: Greetings all. An update on Battlegrounds and server issues. Battlegrounds will be down until at least tomorrow. While the BGs are down, we’ll be collecting data on the current server issues as an aid to tracking down what is causing the the lag and slow zoning times. We’ll be tracking the data with the BGs both off and on. If they appear to significantly affect the issues we’re seeing on the live servers, we’ll have them off over the weekend. We’ll let you know any further information we can share when we have it. We...
With the powerful buffs and bonuses of our Mythical/Fabled Epic Weapons safely squirreled away to a separate permanent spell (thanks to the Epic Repercussions quest), we’ve been able to divert our attention towards finding other, better weapons. While the choices are not plentiful (even with their buffs stripped, our Mythical weapons still have some formidable stats), the Sentinel’s Fate expansion is nonetheless supposed to offer us a variety of replacements for our now Enervated Weapons. Thus far, there have been a scant few upgrade choices for healers. Fortunately Kander has responded to these concerns: There will be some new...
Battlegrounds For Levels 30-79 We’ve gotten some more details on the format that Battlegrounds from levels 30-79 will take from timetravelling: After Game Update 56 the Battlegrounds tiers will be: 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, and 90 Players in each tier will be auto-mentored down to the lowest common level (30, 40, 50, etc.). Players in each tier will also have armor sets and accessories available for purchase from the existing PvP Merchants in the major cities. The BG ‘starter’ sets will be the already-existing Mastercrafted armor sets (from levels 30 -> 70). Each has had a small...
If you have been poking and prodding the EQ2 forums hoping for even a brief Producer’s Letter from Dave Georgeson, you’ll be surprised to read the in-depth exclusive interview at EQ2 ZAM with new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave Georgeson who replaced Alan “Brenlo” Crosby last week. EQ2 ZAM Interviews Dave Georgeson
Gninja wanted to get the word out that the quest Tending to Toxxicology will be getting a revamp which will result in quest progress being reset by anyone still on the quest. If you are on this quest, get it completed before Game Update 56 hits (late May). Or you can just wait until the change when the quest requirements will be reset to resolve the bugs people have been facing in trying to complete it. We are aware of the issues with the quest in Sundered Frontier “Tending to Toxxicology” becoming gated if someone summons Sherra prior to...
Today’s Hotfix grants Research Assistants the ability to research for all of your characters at once, instead of just one per account. Also included are tweaks to the UsabilityOnPlayer macro command, some adjustments to the Labs SF raid zone, and a change to the Focus: Death March adornment so that its effects are different between PvP and PvE. We’ve been advised that some Database maintenance will be performed at the same time, so the Hotfix and associated downtime may exceed 1 hour.
It turns out yesterday’s news on changes to the Training Dummies guild hall amenity was just the beginning. Xelgad has updated us with news that one of the choices on the menu when summoning a Training Dummy (in addition to Solo, as well as Heroic and Epic which are new to GU56) will be an Encounter: We’ve added a new set of dummies for GU56 that come as a linked encounter of a total of eight heroic training dummies. Enjoy! This should provide many more options for players wanting to work on what order they cast spells and/or combat...
In addition to the bigger content additions, Game Updates always include smaller, but no less desirable changes and tweaks. Research Assistants Learn to Multitask UPDATE: Oops! Despite appearing in the headline, this item somehow got left out! UPDATE #2: This feature is in the April 20, 2010 Hotfix. Bunji, member of the EQ2 QA Team, has posted this info on the EQ2 In Testing Feedback forums: With the new Test server build, each character on an account can research a spell at the same time (this should not affect existing research). Research times are also being tweaked (lowered). Floating...
EQ2Players has a new video showcasing Halas Reborn. Check it out below. And in case you missed it, here are Screenshots of Halas Reborn Housing.
Game Update 56 is coming soon to the Test and Test Copy servers, and in addition to the expected New Halas starting zone and city, which will have 2, 4, and 6 room housing as well as Tier 1 Guild Halls (unknown if it will be the same or different artwork), and in addition to a new raid zone, some substantial changes are happening to Battlegrounds and PvP combat in general. Battlegrounds in particular are being expanded from level 80-90 to level 30-90. timetravelling gave this Battlegrounds preview: Brand new 1st Campaign armor sets and accessories Many of the...
Guild halls have an amenity available that allow a person to click on a chest and recieve a training dummy in their inventory. Right clicking and choosing “use” places the dummy in the guild hall as an attackable object. This is useful for trying out different casting orders, AA specs, gear, etc. to see what parses better. The problem is that the training dummies don’t have enough hit points. If the training dummy dies in 15 seconds, it doesn’t give you much time to determine anything. Some people have used the training wall in Kunzar Jungle instead since it has more...
When Sentinel’s Fate was released, it introduced a change in the way the /target_previous command functions. This change broke some cure macros. Lets take a cure macro that did this: /target_group_member 3 Cure spell /target_previous If you had group member 1 targeted and clicked the macro for group member 3, all would be fine. The macro would target group member 3, cast the cure, then go to the previous target which would be group member 1. All is well. If you had group member 3 targeted and clicked the macro for group member 3, problems occured. The macro would...
EQ2Players has a preview up about the housing in New Halas. Andres Rodriguez is the artist responsible for designing the new houses and he took the time to answer some questions and share some pictures. The houses will be available in two, four and six room layouts and there will also be access to T1 guildhalls. They will include some built in bookshelves and even a fireplace. And all the houses in New Halas will include windows with a view to the sea. New Halas Housing @ EQ2Players
Here are your hotfix notes for today, April 13th, including adjustments to group and raid zones, as well as spell resists in PvP combat. After the jump:
In a break from the stock answer that has been given in regard to server merges for the last few years, Rothgar says server merges are something they are considering a little down the road. The EQ2 world isn’t exactly in the best shape it’s ever been in at the moment with zoning issues, instance lag, contested named fight lag, and broker lag so the dev team has a few issues to take care of before they can move forward with this idea. But this tells us that the idea is at least back on the table. Rothgar writes:...
Since Sentinel’s Fate went live, many people have been reporting issues with Guild Events not showing properly. Some report guild levels not showing up in the guild log and AA points from 201+ not being announced and/or logged. Those days may be behind us. On 4/12/2010, Bunju from Quality Assurance posted on the EQ2 Forums: A fix for this issue went in with the last Hotfix. Are you all seeing the 80-90 ts/adv level and 200-250 AA event notifications now? Thanks. Hopefully this is now fixed.
We wrap up another week in Norrath with some posts from the EQ2 forums from developers and players alike which you may have missed. Also, although no date has yet been announced, work on Game Update 56 has likely reached a feverish pace and we’ll start hearing more about it soon. Waiting for Zone Info The EQ2 and SOE teams have been putting in long hours trying to resolve the database and server lag/performance issues since the expansion. Zoltaroth has weighed in with this update: We are also internally testing some additional updates that should furthur improve zoning (specifically...
Rothgar has been working closely with the Database folks trying to solve the Server Performance Issues, specifically Server-side Lag, and extremely long Zoning times which have become a major problem facing EQ2 since Game Update 55, the Sentinel’s Fate expansion, and the introduction of Battlegrounds. These Database and Server Lag issues have been so disruptive, that they have largely drowned out discussion on other issues facing EQ2. Fortunately, Rothgar brings us an update on the situation regarding some long-needed caching being added to how character data is transmitted and stored: Right now we are addressing the database-related issues and...
We missed this EQ2Players post from Friday but considering the excitement leading up to New Halas, we thought we’d post it. Nathan “Kaitheel” McCall has posted some of the Lore about what we can expect from New Halas and the twists and turns of the storyline. Meanwhile, Stacey Norman, Zone Artist, posted about her experiences in designing the city of New Halas. New Halas Lore @ EQ2Players By the way, this EQ2Players writeup has a thumbnail image of some of the concept art for New Halas. We wrangled up a link to a large version of this image.
Here are your update notes for March 30, 2010, after the jump: