Have you accidentally attuned a piece of armor, jewelry, or weapon to a character? On first thought, this might seem a perfectly reasonable Customer Service request to Unattune items and move them to desired characters. But, this is one of those innocent requests which is subject to abuse.

Recent unconfirmed boasting suggests that players have  successfully transferred attunable gear from one character to another via CSR requests. While the idea of transferring gear that’s no longer available (Those few T7 or T8 avatar items which are still valuable) is a tempting one, the thought that someone might be contacting multiple Customer Service reps at different hours of the day, plaing “CSR Roulette” to make an end-run around the Attuning mechanism is appalling.

But we have received reassurances that SOE Customer Service reps have had a policy for some time now to not honor such Unattune requests. In fact this is now posted in the Message of the Day:

Here are your update notes for 21 September 2010:

ITEMS

• Torrent and Pestilential Rain no longer gain damage from attributes.

PALACE OF ROEHN THEER

Roehn Theer will now lock you into your rune choice should you lower his health below 75%.

For a while now, there have been items that give a bonus to mitigation.  These bonuses are shown as the blue stat on gear that says +x% Mitigation Increase.  Apparently, for a long time now, there has been a bug with how this bonus is calculated which has been granting more of an increase than intended.

A fix for this has crept its way onto the test server which is lowering the mitigation of most tanks.  So, on the test server, if you have any of this gear and yesterday you were barely able to survive during a given fight, chances are, today you’ll go splat.  Xelgad posted an explanation on the EQ2players.com forums.

Xelgad says that they aren’t in a rush to get this to live and that they will take the time to get it working right.  Hopefully this means tweaking other things if needed, like mob damage output.  Xelgad writes:

You may have noticed that currently on test mitigation numbers seem lower. There was no notes in the Test Update notes because it was pushed to Test a little sooner than we expected.

We’ve been evaluating all of the systems in the game to find out what is working and what is not working correctly. During this investigation, we found that there was a bug with the blue stat “Mitigation Increase” causing it to give noticably more than the listed amount of mitigation. This bug has been fixed and is currently on the test servers.

A mitigation increase of 10% was increasing plate mitigation by about 30% and leather mitigation by about 54%. This has been fixed so that the mitigation increase that says 10% will increase your mitigation by 10%. The addition of mitigation to the brawler self buffs was to be in tandem with this bug fix. This change is important because reaching the cap on mitigation causes some abilities, advancements and gear options to become irrelevent. That is obviously detrimental to gameplay and it can be detrimental to balance as well. If some classes have been balanced around having abilities to boost their mitigation and players end up capping out that stat then that element of balance is lost.

This bug has been in the game for a long time so the fix will reduce the mitigation of most tanks. For the sake of being able to balance the tanks in the future, we needed to correct the formula that was used to calculate the effectiveness of “Mitigation Increase.”

We’ll try to address questions and concerns regarding this fix and we aren’t in a rush to get this change to Live. If it looks like there may be problems with it, we’ll take the time to get it working right.

Update: Xelgad just posted this on the official forums:

As stated earlier in this thread, we’re taking our time with this change. It is looking like it is going to wait all the way until the expansion, and we’ll have the expansion beta to test the changes. Of course, we’ll still be looking into Sentinel’s Fate content, gear and alternate advancements in conjunction with the fix.

Here are your hotfix notes for September 1, 2010 after the break:

What’s on Test this weekend? Here are just a few items:

• UI: The XP bar will now stay put between logins.
• UI: Designers of custom UIs can now set the XP bar to not “snap” to top/bottom.
• UI: The Character window has seen multiple improvements.
• UI: The Implied Target arrow now reflects the ‘con’ color of the enemy, and can have its opacity adjusted.
• Items: 2-handed Weapons and Ranged Weapons have had their damage ratings increased. Ranged weapons will also have a bit of a damage penalty in PvP to compensate.
• The Guardian class has had over 25 changes made.
• Resident’s of Omen’s Call (Fens of Nathsar) now have a World Travel Globe on their dock.
• Items: The Wicked Wand of Malice effect has been changed to on-equip.
• The Palace of Roehn-Theer zone-in bug has been fixed.

If you’re wondering about other announced changes which aren’t on Test yet, they will come later. For instance Ranged Flurry and Ranged AA Auto-Attack changes are still in the queue. Remember, Game Update 57b is still 4-7 weeks away.

If you haven’t tested out these changes yet on the Test server, check em out!

Complete update notes after the jump…

Xelgad has posted a flurry of responses to specific class issues today.

This one, in regards to Critical Heals which have been removed from all fighters. For some fighter classes, critical heals might have been overpowered, but for Paladins (joshingly referred to as Healadins), losing all crititical heals has had class altering effects not only in solo situations (which this nerf was intended to fix) but in group and raid setups.

We’ve been hearing about some ranger love for about 3 expansions now, but at Fan Faire, we heard the first concrete info. Xelgad has elaborated on just what we can expect in an update falling between GU57 and GU58 (hopefully 4-6 weeks from now:

Greetings, Mighty Forces!

AE Auto-Attack and Flurry are indeed on the way for bows. We’re also removing the 20% damage penalty for bows, and we’re increasing the damage rating on all 81-90 bows (along with throwing weapons) by about 10%. The intent is to allow you guys to get full benefit from buffs and gear, not to make the class entirely focused on Auto-Attack.

You know how you get more auto-attack damage from your melee weapons in many cases than from your bow? These changes should fix that, unless your melee weapons are simply of much higher quality than your bow. At most, your auto-attack may jump from ~20% of your parse up to ~30% on raids, but I’d be surprised if many people end up with it higher than that.

Thanks for all of your feedback.

You can join the discussion on this issue in the thread What’s this all about? (bow changes) on the EQ2 Forums.

Marks of Manaar are the heroic armor/jewelry/weapon-buying “currency” of Sentinel’s Fate. Much like the Void Shards of The Shadow Odyssey, Marks of Manaar allow players to buy baseline armor, jewelry, weapons, charms, cloaks, etc. although those players should continue to run dungeons in the hopes of finding rarer, more powerful items.

Today marks the introduction of Game Update 57 to the live servers. Key features of this update include:

• The EQ2 User Interface has received a facelift, with a new toolbar, a refresh of various windows, and a merged Character/Inventory/Profile window. The default theme is red, but easily switchable to blue by typing /loadui and choosing the Blue graphic set.
• More character classes are now neutral and may start in either good or evil cities.
• Spell animations and effects have been revamped.
• Intrazone travel now supports path linking. Travel within Kingdom of Sky has been improved.
• Erudin group instances (level 86-90) are now easier to reach.
• New tradeskill quests have been added in the level 10, 20, and 30 tiers. These quests reward a mount as well as access to what have previously been overpriced Advanced recipe books.
• Starting areas in Greater Faydark and Darklight Wood have received substantial revamps. Gorowyn has received further architectural rebuilding to improve navigation.
• All classes have had some group-specific spells postponed until later levels to reduce the number of spells new players get in the first 20 levels.
• Fighter heals will no longer critically heal.
• The “Notable Norrathian” contest winning paintings are now available within Norrath but only during the monthly City Festivals (next is Sept 1-7). They are guild hall placeable.
• Lucan D’Lere has returned to Freeport.

• Today’s update contains no new dungeons or raid zones.

EQ2X

Also going live today is the public beta for EverQuest II Extended, the Free-to-Play alternative to a monthly EQ2 subscription. Game Update 57 will arrive simultaneously on both servers. EQ2X, as it’s being abbreviated, may be discussed on the separate EQ2X Forums.

Here is the 6-part Question & Answer panel for EQ2 from Saturday at Fan Faire 2010.

[EQ2Wire] Fan Faire 2010 – EQ2 Q&A Saturday Panel (playlist)

Apologies for any typos. They jacked up the AC in here!! Remember folks, lots of EQ2 t shirts, hoodies, and polos.

Live blog from Fan Faire with q&a on EverQuest II.

No doubt the best part of Fan Faire is talking to the developers. So far I’ve gotten to ask Rothgar both serious and geeky questions about the new UI, server upgrades, guild halls, and of course free-to-play.

I’ve made no secret of my concerns about the logistics of free to play seemingly cutting off the flow of new players to the live subscription side of EQ2.

Procs. We’ve all seen them.

“On a successful healing spell.”

“On a successful attack.”

“On a successful melee attack.” (this one makes Rangers cry)

But how often do they really trigger? How big a part do they play in actual healing, spell damage, combat art damage?

Aidis, newly minted EQ2Wire contributor has crunched the numbers and found that one such special effect — Flash of Intuition — isn’t so special:

After a review of several healing procs, and how important base is for healers, many items that proc a temporary increase to base [for the players next ward or heal] have been sought after. However, there is a problem with Flash of Intuition. It effects other heal procs before main healing abilities.

After one test of 500 casts, Flash of Intuition activated 32 times. Out of those 32 activations only 3 were used by a main healing ability, as the rest were used up by other heal and ward procs. This is counter productive some say, and have tossed these items to their backpacks in hope of some fix to these procs effecting procs issues, while others continue to gamble on luck.

We’ve got Today’s Hotfix Notes straight from the Patcher for you. They include the aforementioned changes to various instances in Desert of Flames and Kingdom of Sky, some itemization fixes, and tweaks to raid mobs in Underfoot Depths and Icy Keep.

Hirofortis has posted a thought-provoking thread on the EQ2 Forums regarding Critical Mitigation on raid gear and pondering just how much Crit Mit is needed to proceed in raiding. Just looking at the Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 raid gear available in-game, a player can acquire critical mitigation amounts of 110%, 127.8%, and 141% respectively, not including any critical mitigation achieved by having high numbers in the necessary stats.

Critical Mitigation from Raid Armor Sets

	T1	T2	T3
Head	10.00%	12.00%	15.00%
Chest	20.00%	20.00%	20.00%
Shoulders	10.00%	12.00%	15.00%
Forearms	5.00%	9.60%	12.00%
Hands	5.00%	9.60%	12.00%
Legs	20.00%	20.00%	20.00%
Feet	5.00%	9.60%	12.00%
Sum	75.00%	92.80%	106.00%
Max from Gear and Adorns	110.00%	127.80%	141.00%
Max with Gear and Stats	120.00%	137.80%	151.00%

Increase Critical Mitigation (Red Adornments)

Head	5%
Chest	5%
Gloves	5%
Boots	5%
Shoulders	5%
Bracers	5%
Leg	5%
Total Crit Mit	35%

Critical Mitigation from Intelligence/Agility

AGI/INT 500	5%
AGI/INT 1000	10%

Critical Mitigation is a measurement of how much your armor (plus a small amount of innate protection from Agility (for scouts/fighters) or Intelligence (for mages/priests) reduces the Critical damage abilities of the enemies you are fighting.

There is a lot of useful information in this thread already — it’s worth a read.

Here are your June 22, 2010 Update Notes:

DRUID RING EVENT

• The druid rings in Feerrott and Loping Plains are now safe destinations for newbies to zone in.
• Kurista, Elwe, Dalarim and Tolla Clorto no longer change appearances every time they zone.
• The Defender of Growth guards are now much more powerful, to better protect the druid rings.
• A couple harvest nodes near the Stonebrunt Highlands druid ring were left floating when the terrain was adjusted. This has been fixed.

PVP WARFIELDS

• Antonica will once again broadcast the call to arms.

PVP ITEMS

• Fallen Foe Charms can now be used by Wardens.

PVP POPULATION

• The Priest of Discord in New Halas now resides closer to the PvP merchants.

UNDERFOOT DEPTHS

• Vaclaz Encounter: Crippling Nausea no longer stuns players.  Instead it causes their actions to have a chance to impede those around them.  Players hit with keen insight no longer can be hit with crippling nausea.  Players with crippling nausea will never be picked to handle the keen insight adds.  Roekillik beastmasters now have more health.
• The Taehric Construct and Vaclaz no longer debuff player’s physical and Noxious mitigation levels.
• Rathgar will now hit players with Deathblow once per 55 secs rather than once per 45 secs.
• Master Syfak’s Roekillik Deathbringers will not cast festing plague as quickly as they did before.

The Vigilant: Rescue

• Amahn Prime Nirel now summons flames and fire more quickly during the fight.

Xelgad has created a thread on the EQ2 Forums laying bare some of the mechanics that go into stats, resistances, and gear.

Today’s Hotfix (Patch) fixes a bug in the Druid Ring Live Event, and includes tweaks to itemization, the new PvP Warfields, and numerous bugs in the Icy Keep raid zone. We also include the hotfix notes from May 27, 2010 which somehow got left out.

May 27th’s hotfix notes make mention of a change to Procs which were not working on spells. However, this change resulted in certain procs, specifically Pestilential Rain and Torrent, no longer working properly for melee. You can read more about this issue on the EQ2 Forums. Xelgad has responded:

Thanks for all of the information. We’ll take a look and see if we can’t get this working.

Players noticed that the cap on Arcane, Noxious, and Elemental Resists was seemingly lowered from 80% to 75%.  Xelgad has clarified this change:

The cap was always 75%. The 80% you all were seeing when your resists were high enough in the persona window was a display error. The display error has been fixed, so it is now showing 75%.

Do note that that 75% is against a target that is your level. A higher level target will require higher resists to reach the 75%. Also, some spells are harder to resist than normal (you should see this effect in the spell’s description) and will need even more resists to get to 75%.

It was only a matter of time.

Ballads has reported in from EQ2Flames that the Reinforced Slippers of Balance ( \aITEM -1095264150 2115375301:Reinforced Slippers of Balance\/a ) have been nerfed with Game Update 56. Despite being level 70 items, these were the best foot items in the game for tanking certain encounters due to the possible number of stoneskins this item could generate. We had already heard from developers that this item would not be replaced and that the effect would not be copied to other items. Indeed, a nerf was anticipated by players in fall 2009.

Instead of proccing (triggering) potentially dozens of times per minute providing dozens of stoneskins, this change means this item will only be able to absorb 3 attacks per minute.

Over two years after the introduction of Mythical weapons, Furies and Mystics logging after today’s Game Update 56 will notice a change in their mythical weapons which has neither been documented in any Update Notes, nor commented on publicly by any EQ2 developer.

Previously, the Mystic and Fury mythical weapons have added 10% of the character’s Wisdom to the character’s Potency. With today’s stealth change, furies and mystics will instead receive Ability Mod from their mythical weapon.

The result of this change, as per several players who have experienced the changes on Test and have thoroughly documented the results through statistics tracking software (ACT), will be a 15-30% decrease in healing effectiveness for most players, especially on Heal-over-Time spells.

Based on a Fury with 1,400 wisdom, this change will result in:

• -17.2% potency from the single target Heal-over-Time
• -17% potency from the group Heal-over-Time
• -27.4% potency from Death Swarm
• -26.7% potency from Tempest
• -2.9% potency from Thunderbolt
• -3.3% potency from Starnova

According to a player on the EQ2 Forums (Frametree) who contacted developers by PM and received a response this change is a “global bug-fix affecting more than just the healer classes weighing in here.”

You can read more about this change here:

• Fury, Mystic Mythical Nerf

• Just How Big a Nerf is Coming to your Healer?

• Mythical Nerf, again

After the jump, we’ve got the complete Game Update 56 Notes for May 25, 2010:

The notes for upcoming Game Update 56 included this notation:

Many rare drops from the heroic Sentinel’s Fate Zones are now available by speaking to Kaliba Des’Sers in Moonfield Hamlet!

Once Game Update 56 was patched onto the Test Server, we were provided screen shots of some of this loot:

New Fabled Loot Vendor on Test

What’s on the Menu?

While a similar vendor was available during the Shadow Odyssey expansion, 150 void shards only gave you access to the most common Fabled drops from each zone (with the exception of the Mistmoore Battle Drums).

So this time around, the vendor is picking up all the current rare Fabled loot, but only because more powerful Fabled loot is being added to these zones at the same time. From Kander:

All of the current rare drops for the heroic zones have been added to a Manaar merchant for (Game Update) 56.

New rare drops have been also been added to all heroic bosses that will not be on the Manaar merchant. These new rare drops and the old rare drops are on separate tables, so you will have a chance at both.

You can see how a comprehensive Itemization article has been nearly impossible to write. We may resort to a Wiki or collaborative article on Itemization taking feedback from EQ2Wire readers.

The Promise of Battlegrounds

The promise of Battlegrounds has been the opportunity to meet players from other servers and challenge them in meaningful PvP combat. It has been a great time-killer while attempting to form up groups. It has been a fun exercise for guilds from different servers wanting to face off in battle. And it has been an opportunity (perhaps too good of one) to gear up. However this promise has largely gone undelivered to the European community.

Aside from localization issues (language, number and date formats), European servers almost always undergo software upgrades at a different time (and sometimes different date) than Stateside updates. If the software does not exactly match between two copies of EQ2, then these two players facing off in Battlegrounds could lead to character corruption or exploits. As a result of these concerns, Battlegrounds are isolated by language and country. Thus, the French, German, Russian, UK, and US Battlegrounds clusters cannot talk to each other.

The issues caused, and solutions posited on this subject can all be found in this prominent thread on the EQ2 Forums: Battlegrounds and EU Servers

Lessing (known on EQ2Flames as mafoe) has taken screen snapshots of the FABLED loot offered by the new Vendor being added in Game Update 56.

Here are links to these screen snapshots:

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_XvWh6xG4qE0/S9LAenf-rcI/AAAAAAAAAKQ/2KuKWlshkgY/EQ2_000868.jpg

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_XvWh6xG4qE0/S9LAe1IsMHI/AAAAAAAAAKU/Ttdtjvu6500/EQ2_000869.jpg

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_XvWh6xG4qE0/S9LAfTEriRI/AAAAAAAAAKY/MaEJl-oV8RM/EQ2_000870.jpg

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_XvWh6xG4qE0/S9LAfsymb7I/AAAAAAAAAKc/HmsbcyoJvm0/EQ2_000871.jpg

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_XvWh6xG4qE0/S9LAgXpQbpI/AAAAAAAAAKg/0g0DOHH5GSk/EQ2_000872.jpg