Fastidious crafters took advantage of yesterday’s update and trundled back to the daily Tradeskill Group instances for a chance to loot one of the two volumes of the new Far Seas Strategic Pricing 3rd Edition. As with past editions, these recipe books allow crafters to create shard armor and jewelry for players with a reduced number of tokens/shards. Interestingly, neither players nor crafters must have faction with the Ry’Gorr to make or receive this armor or jewelry. They do however require the designated dungeon-dropped crystals.

With yesterday’s Test Update Notes, we found out that the current Velious shard armor will be dropping from 70 to 52 Primal Velium Shards per piece.

However it seems the recipe book to craft shard armor has been partially updated to reflect the new shard prices. Assassins, Berserkers, Brigands, Bruisers, Coercers, and Conjurors (all classes starting with A, B, or C) are asked to pony up 63 shards per piece, while all other classes pay 40 shards per piece. Nindaene, the player who brought up this issue, also noticed that crafted armor has more mitigation than Ry’Gorr purchased armor.

Domino posted on the issue:

As you may have noticed from the Test server update notes today, we are in the process of lowering the shard costs of the armor. However, it looks like some of the recipes were pushed live with a lower cost than they should have been set to yet. So yes, these prices are an error and will likely change again as we are still in the process of adjusting the prices based on feedback. We’ll get that corrected as soon as possible (hopefully Thursday) but in the mean time it might be safest to hold off on crafting the items, since the final shard cost is not yet finalized. Apologies for the error, and thanks for pointing it out!

Today’s update includes tweaks across the board of grouping, raiding, and itemization.

Chronoportal vendors are back until April 10th. They have several paintings, furniture, and replicas of the enemies fought in the 12th anniversary EverQuest event.

After the jump, your Update Notes for April 5, 2011.

After today’s update, players have been checking out the re-structured Storm Gorge to see how the fights have changed, and how server lag has been reduced.

Players generally reported improvements in lag, and also shared their strategies on dealing with the changes in the fight, which in some cases make it more challenging and interesting.

Windslasher‘s response:

It’s great to hear that the latest lag fixes worked! With that game-breaking issue mostly solved, I can now turn more my attention to other important issues.

For example: Goredeth Maulhammer has always had the ability to heal himself while enraged. His fight is certainly not “impossible to win” but I’ll take a good hard look and see if it needs to be tweaked.

I’m also going to try and optimize performance on the Ring War a little more, and take care of some uncommon but serious glitches that many of you have reported. Thanks!

Players have expressed concerns that the changes in the difficulty of dungeons this week will make Kael Drakkel far too easy. However SmokeJumper seems to be backing up the designers on wanting to keep the contested Kael Drakkel sufficiently difficult:

(Making the zone super easy is) not our intent at all. And I’m glad that your group is able to play through those areas. But it must have been verrry lonely in Kael, because we know how many people were playing it…and it’s not many.

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 these changes and that this we’re likely to do a second pass after judging the impact of the first changes. Hang in there.

When cornered about why today’s update included all nerfs and no buffs:

I’m the wrong guy to try to answer your questions, but I’ve forwarded this thread to those in charge of itemization and they’ll write a response soon. There weren’t supposed to be nerfs, so I’m trying to find out why that occurred.

The full explanation, and our commentary about EQ2 Itemization after the jump…

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 trick, we’ll probably do another round of small changes later. But the overall goal is to make the dungeons more attractive for everyone.

P.S., These are not the only fixes we’re making for tomorrow’s hot fixes, but we wanted to call these changes out specially because those of you that gave up on dungeons because they were too challenging for the payoffs you were getting may want to give it another go now.

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, as they require significant time and effort to beat. NOTE: This doesn’t include war runes since they are already quite powerful.

The net result of these changes makes dungeons and raids a bit more rewarding and also balances things out so that people with a full public quest set will be able to find solid item upgrades in dungeons.

These changes will occur next week sometime. If they happen sooner than that, we’ll let you know.

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 speedy alternate route to gearing up for players who largely skipped Sentinel’s Fate, are gearing up alts, or just aren’t interested in more solo questing (although as we found, the Othmir questline writing, structure, and payoff are all above average and keep the obvious time sinks to a minimum).

So what’s to stop players from logging in alts, parking them near the scene of a Public Quest, and going to get a coffee while their toon “earns” amazing gear? Apparently not enough. While we have taken issue with certain players who spend an awful lot of time critiquing how others play the game and all the ways in which those methods are unfair or unbalancing, even we would be foolish to defend standing around AFK in a Public Quest all while earning Legendary or Fabled gear. We believe its in everyone’s interest that your favored MMO have a long-term plan besides “More dungeons and more lootz in the next Game Update!” Gameplay that allows leapfrogging most of the content progression is disruptive for the game. Velious has got to last us the next year, and as robust as the Game Updates may end up being, the end of the treadmill should never be visible.

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.

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.

As we first discovered in our Critical Oversight in Public Quests Gear? article, the progression from solo quest gear, to Public Quest gear, to Group Instance gear, and on to Raid gear, has not made a whole lot of sense. In particular, Critical Mitigation has been all over the map.

Silius has announced some upcoming changes in the Critical Mitigation numbers of various gear throughout the Velious itemization range.

After the jump, your Update Notes for today, Tuesday, March 22nd 2011 include the addition (for real this time) of loot to trash mobs in Kael Drakkel, and the removal of Yellow Adornments from some items.

You may have noticed this little tidbit in today’s patch notes:

Kael Drakkel

• Base Population in the contested dungeon now has legendary and fabled drops.

With this information you may be thinking of heading in there and trying your hand at killing some of the level 92 mobs to see what kind of trash drops you can get.  Not so fast!  Raviel on Guk apparently had the same idea and didn’t have the best of luck

Raviel@Guk wrote:

so ive been in here for about 2 hours now. wheres the trash gear we were promised?

Kander responded with this:

The hotfix said it was added, however it was not. We will try to have that corrected as soon as possible.

I am extremely disapointed myself.

Sorry about that all.

Guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer before seeing those trash drops.

Zatozia has posted our update notes for Thursday, March 17, 2011. They include numerous tweaks and fixes to Velious instances and Public Quests.

Public Quests have been keeping Windslasher rather busy and he had posted some detailed answers about just how Public Quests difficulty are set. The Ring War seems fairly straightforward, but the Storm Gorge PQ (which will possibly see some changes in the next few days) has sufficient complexity to worth a more in-depth analysis.

From Windslasher on the EQ2 Forums:

Loot is not totally and completely random. It is only partially random. I posted a complete breakdown of the baseline loot at this link:

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?start=30&topic_id=495127#5512456

Whether you get a humming, pulsating etc. cache is not random, but whether you get exquisite is. In addition, the fabled items have a fixed rare drop rate, but only for players who qualify to get a humming cache.

In response to players asking why Storm Gorge PQ lag fixes can’t be implemented ASAP, Windslasher had these responses on the EQ2 Forums:

There are multiple lag sources, some of which are obvious and unavoidable (Large numbers of players in combat at the same time = lag), some of which are interesting and somewhat fixable (30 players vs. 30 encounters is worse than 60 players vs. 1 encounter) and some which are too subtle & complicated to describe in one sentence without using jargon (There are scripts & abilities that load up the server at O(n^2)).

I’m going through all of these issues slowly & carefully so as not to break anything. The next hotfix will bring some improvements, and as I dig deeper there will be more.

Today’s Update Notes include bug fixes for progression in group zones, and a fix for the Missing Mask quest in Nektropos Castle.

The zone crashes occurring in the x2 Tower of Frozen Shadow instances involving boss Tserrina have been identified by the development team, but cannot be immediately fixed, says Gninja:

We have found the crash issue with Tserrina and it should be getting cleared up within a patch or two. For now if you do not cure the curses it should not crash.

Looks like Tserrina found a way to make her curses stick!

EQ2 Designer Windslasher is working on the lag issues in the Storm Gorge public quests, but apparently it’s not an easy problem to solve:

I am working on changes to reduce lag. I’m very aware of how bad it is, and I consider that the #1 problem to fix. It also happens to be the hardest, which is why the going is slow. That is all.

The player base has started a very interesting discussion thread on how long the Public Quests will remain popular.  Currently, everyone is scrambling to get gear — raiders, non-raiders, casual players.  The PQs are packed, players are complaining no one wants to group or do anything else, and for most people who are participating, they are getting most of their gear slots filled with the best upgrades. Being nearby a successful raid seems all that is necessary.  But how long will the gearfest last?  Once everyone gets what they need, why would they continue to join the PQs?  The AA gain for choosing the AA reward is only 6-10%, and currently, the lag is bothering a lot of people, with the end result being an attitude of “get my gear and get out,” not a great formula for longevity.

The Update Notes for March 10th, 2011 address a series of issues with progression, encounters, and quests with the Destiny of Velious dungeons and beyond.

Here are your Update Notes for today, March 9th. Of note, Frost Gryphons acquired by crafters are now usable without being a Guide, and a mysterious note that Critical Mitigation values are being reduced on some items.

The March 8th Game Update Notes contain an interesting item:

The anti-slacker threshold has been raised on all PQ’s [Public Quests].

The Developers are serious about this! Windslasher said:

Freeloading was not part of the public quest design and will not be allowed. I’m approaching the problem slowly and carefully, to avoid denying loot to players who deserve it, but measures are being taken to tighten up the participation requirements.

The next hotfix [March 8]  will make a slight change to address the problem, and depending on the response, I may take progressively stronger measures.

We reported earlier this week that some players were already complaining about missing out on chest drops due to healing and buffing, or even lag problems, as opposed to doing straight damage during an encounter.  Surprisingly, it seems that a significant number of players are actually getting unfairly rewarded, since Windslasher found it necessary to raise the threshhold on the participation calculations.

It will be interesting to see what this change will do to support classes, as well as traditional damage dealers. It is still unclear what the parameters are for “participation scoring,” so it’s anyone’s guess what the new threshholds will be.