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...
Itemization
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...
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.
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:
An unintended consequence of today’s Hotfix seems to be that certain players have been unable to equip their Mythical weapons. Players affected include those who have not progressed in the Epic Repercussions quest. Xelgad has posted this comment: We’re aware of the issue and looking into a fix. In the meantime, please use the /petition command to contact Customer Service if your weapon cannot be equipped. They’ll be able to fix your weapon for you. UPDATE: This issue is related to the Balanced Ayr Stone adornment which used to provide +3% Parry and was applicable to weapon slots. On...
Today’s Hotfix include some anticipated tweaks to Itemization and Battlegrounds, such as resists and fixes to adornments. It also includes a cutback in the amount of damage put out by the 3-headed dog in The Vigilant: Final Destruction x2 raid zone. Even during the Beta, this particular mob was completely out of progression for the difficulty of the zone, gear players are expected to have at this point in the expansion, and intended audience of the zone. The complete April 7, 2010 Patch Notes after the jump:
Dethdlr
Been saving up your T8 shards for armor? Soon you’ll need less than you do today. Frizznik writes on the EQ2 Forums: Tier 1 will cost the same amount of shards as it did before (38 shards crafter-made, 44 shards vendor-bought) Tier 2 will cost the same amount of shards as it did before (112 shards crafter-made, 126 shards vendor-bought). It will also cost around 5 platinum. It will no longer require the tier 1 armor piece. Tier 3 will cost the raid dropped mold, the same void shards it did before, and around 9 platinum. You will no...
During the Sentinel’s Fate beta, many of us were surprised at just how powerful the armor and jewelry available from participating in Battlegrounds were. Many of us warned SOE during beta that having Battlegrounds gear that’s better than TSO raid jewelry would make Battlegrounds an expected/required part of progression for guilds. Battlegrounds gear launched with a new stat — Toughness — which is a type of Critical Mitigation that only works in Battlegrounds. Later, the most powerful effects on Battlegrounds gear (i.e. +10% Base Damage) became PvP-only. With the March 30th Update, the Resists and Physical Mitigation on the...
Here are your update notes for March 30, 2010, after the jump:
In an unusual move, Alan “Brenlo” Crosby, Senior Producer of EverQuest II, has posted some high level updates on what we can expect from Game Update 56 coming in May. As many of you know, several items planned for the expansion and corresponding Game Update 55 slipped: New Halas, Shaders 3.0, New Spell Animations, Thundering Steppes revamp, etc. Also, there have been major performance problems with many of the live servers, which have been alternately attributed to Battlegrounds, Database Issues, or the expansion itself. After the jump, you can read Brenlo‘s response to these issues, copied from the EQ2...
The previous Thursday and Tuesday hotfixes have brought some itemization changes, specifically with the increase in the number of items holding Red Adornment slots, the introduction of Yellow Adornments for heroic gear, and the addition of Resists to Legendary and Fabled gear (previously, players were expected to run around with 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry). Now, we are starting to see the second prong of these changes, intended to fix the itemization mess that Sentinel’s Fate launched with. Frizznik brings us: Thanks for your patience with us as we look at items, spells, and combat arts. We are reading...
Thursday night saw the first post-expansion developer chat of 2010. Hosted by ZAM, this chat had previously been scheduled for March 4th, but was postponed to March 18th as developers focused on issues with Battlegrounds. You would have assumed, with the key issues of Battlegrounds and Itemization consuming a great deal of development effort in the month since Sentinel’s Fate launched, AND the 2 week postponement in the EQ2 Developer Chat, that Calthine at ZAM would have received an avalanche of hardball questions. Instead, we saw just a few of these critical issues raised, with the rest running the...
Your Hotfix notes for March 18th include tweaks to Tier 3 (raid armor). NOTE: Make sure your EQ2 client patches before trying to log into EQ2. Due to an oversight, EQ2 servers are allowing out-of-date clients to login, resulting in bugs with the Broker, Group window, etc. After the jump…
Today brings the first part of a two part story about how we got to the Itemization situation we are in now. Part history lesson, part recap. Part 2 will try to sort out the Sentinel’s Fate Itemization picture as we have it so far. I assure you that Part 2 will be MUCH shorter. 🙂 After the posting of Part 2, we will be posting a survey to get your feedback on these long-form articles.
Today’s Hotfix notes for March 16th, 2010. Yellow Adornments also made it in, but they’re not in the notes… GENERALMost of the guards in Freeport, Qeynos and Kelethin have had their levels reduced to what they had previously. Exceptions to this include palace guards and patrolling knights. ITEMS All jewelry from the Vigilant: Final Destruction (x2) has had resists added. Summoning the mount from the Ykeshan Warbear whistle will now work if you are level 80 in either adventuring or tradeskilling. The valuable, Onayan staff of the waves, should now be on the Vasty Deep collection tables. QUESTS The...
Most of the Sentinel’s Fate raid and heroic gear has had no Resists (vs. Arcane, vs. Elemental, vs. Noxious), presumably with the intention that players would have to wear 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry. Also, all but the highest level raid gear in Sentinel’s Fate has lacked Red Adornment Slots. This made most of this gear a poor upgrade over TSO raid gear. If you’ve been following the Equipment Adjustments thread on the EQ2 Forums, as well as yesterday’s Hotfix notes, you know that Resists and Red Slots have now started to appear on Fabled and Legendary gear. However...
EQ2 servers will come down for a Hotfix on Thursday, March 11th, 2010. This hotfix takes place at 6am PST for U.S. servers and 5am GMT on March 12th for Runnyeye and Splitpaw. After the Hotfix notes, you’ll find some good news about the Guard levels in Qeynos, Freeport, and Kelethin.
If you’ve been thinking that the pieces of the Sentinel’s Fate itemization puzzle just have not fit well together, you are not alone. While we have not spent a lot of time covering itemization in SF, it is because things have continued to be in such a state of flux during, and after the Beta. The smooth progression of TSO gear was seemingly replaced by a scattershot approach, with some of the x2 raid items being the best in the game, the x4 Hard Mode gear being only 1-2% better than the x2 Easy Mode gear, and Battlegrounds gear...
Posted by Kiara: We’ll be having our usual Tuesday hotfix starting at 6am for the US servers and at 9pm (5am GMT Wednesday March 10) for Runnyeye and Splitpaw.The downtime will be the usual hour or so. and your March 9 Hotfix Notes after the jump…
Battlegrounds are currently closed due to a Transmuting exploit which has allowed players to duplicate items. In short, items which you transmuted or scribed on Battlegrounds were returned to you upon exiting Battlegrounds.
Here are some end-of-week news items which I’ve noticed on the EQ2 forums that readers may find useful… Scale of Flame Players have been having trouble advancing/completing the quest Scale of Flame. In response, Gninja has responded: I found the issue causing the spirit to not spawn and have corrected it. You should see it come to live server early next week with our next build. Breaking Combat on PvP/Battlegrounds Rothgar has made some further adjustments in how combat is broken on PvP/Battlegrounds. It has been tweaked so that you must be at least 1000m from the other player...
Timetravelling created a thread on the EQ2 Forums regarding the Sentinel’s Fate Mechanics Changes. With all the changes to primary stats, lifting of various caps on bonuses, etc. there have been a lot of questions and this thread has started to answer them. Here are some updates: Updated the Aggression question with info about other skills (yes, they work the same way) Updated the base stat uncap section with more detailed information (new curve starts @ 1200, after that a 30% stat increase = ~ a 10% gain in effectiveness) Added several more questions to the end of the...
Several players have reported that Xilaxis the Explorer in the new Labs x4 raid zone is not dropping any loot other than small wooden chests of plat (not a bad reward, but some armor would be nice). Fortunately, timetravelling is on the case: I found the issue with both his normal- and challenge-mode item tables and corrected them. Should be hotfixed soon, apologies for the frustrations! No words on those pants though.
One of the unique characteristics of the Ranger mythical bow Eagle’s Talon is that it allowed the user to do ranged auto-attacks at point blank range (zero meters distance). Once a ranger has completed the Epic Repercussions quests, they are awarded an enervated version of Eagle’s Talon with all of the special effects stripped off, and then zero-concentration spells are added to their Knowledge book to get all those unique effects on whatever bow they decide to use. The issue is that those persistent buffs do not grant the ability to use other bows at point blank (0m) range....
There has been some talk on the EQ2 Forums both in PvP circles and elsewhere, in the Beta forums, not to mention EQ2 Flames, with a lot of concerns about how fairness is going to play out in the Battlegrounds. There have been suggestions that people will exploit and game the system as a stepping stone to progress further in raiding. I am not taking sides in this, but so far I am reasonably happy that these issues are being watched like a hawk. Parts 1 and 2 of what should probably be a 2 part post. 😉