Aidis Darvidas
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...
EQ2
Feldon
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%...
Test Copy has always been a temporary server, subject to complete wipes of all characters and guilds. In fact, the Test Copy server started out as a PvP Test server, and while it has been a PvE server for over 2 years now, the PvP switch has been “flipped” a few times for testing of Battlegrounds and PvP content leading up to Sentinel’s Fate. Despite all cautions to the contrary, some players have built up characters and guilds on Test Copy, so they may be interested to know that another wipe is happening. Test Copy is currently down (we’re...
From the EQ2 Forums: The US servers will come down on July 14, 2010, at 7am PDT for a hotfix. The Update Notes will be posted in the Update Notes forum when available. Runnyeye and Splitpaw will be patched at 9pm PDT (4am GMT) on July 14, 2010.
The second opportunity for players to submit their own artwork to be turned into in-game EQ2 paintings has come and gone, and the results have been announced! From EQ2Players: Greetings, Norrathians! We are thrilled to make the highly-anticipated announcement of the winners of our Notable Norrathians Forum Challenege! It was not easy to choose just ten out of the amazing entries we received. The talent and creativty displayed were truly wonderful and there’s a certiain very-jealous dark elf in the office right now! We’d like to thank everyone who submitted an entry (the dark elf made note that she’s...
So we just had a Double XP weekend over the July 4th holiday. It was heavily promoted, and featured in an e-mail and on the forums. EQ2 Senior Producer SmokeJumper posted about spending almost the entire weekend playing and how quickly he earned levels, AAs, and how many groups he got. Now, apparently, it’s time for the pendulum to swing the other way. Yesterday’s Test Server Update Notes include the following details which will eventually make it to Live servers: GENERAL Many instances from Deserts of Flame and Kingdom of Sky are now persistent. This includes Ancient’s Table, Cazel’s...
There are just two weeks left to register for Fan Faire and the number of Gold and Silver passes available is limited! Platinum passes have been sold out for some time now. You can read more at EQ2Players. Plane ticket prices are already rebounding fast, so if you are on the fence, either buy your tickets now, or roll the dice and wait another week. That’s not a bet I’d take! As we have for the last 2 years, EQ2Wire will be providing Continuing Live Coverage of EverQuest II and Fan Faire.
Oh hey, we had a hotfix! The July 7, 2010 Update Notes include several fixes to raid targets and live events. After the jump…
UPDATE: Blizzard has cancelled their plans to require real names to post on their forums. Unable to handle the avalanche of trolls overloading their community support forums (with 11.5 million players and over $20 billion in revenue after 5 1/2 years, you’d think they could afford to hire a few Kiara’s), Blizzard has decided to not just touch, but grasp firmly the third rail of MMORPGs — online anonymity. The Blizzard Announcement: The first and most significant change is that in the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so...
The Icy Keep (an easy x4 raid zone added in Game Update 56) seems to have taken its place as this expansion’s Ward of Elements. We’ve received reports that, with the exception of the final boss, this zone is appropriate for raid groups of as few as 11 players seeking to gear up and work their way into more difficult raiding. There have been some issues with later bosses which Gninja has just submitted some fixes for: [I’ve] just checked in a fix that cleans up the Vrewwx fight as well as fixed the respawn points. Now once you...
Today’s hotfix included some additional lag fixes. Here’s Rothgar: With this morning’s update we made a fundamental change to how our zone servers throttle their frame rate. Our hope is that this change will allow busier processes to consume more of the server resources and increase performance (reduce lag). Whether or not this change has a noticeable impact will depend on many variables that can only be observed in the live environment and under a significant load. We’ll be watching things on our end as we ramp up to primetime tonight but I’m also looking for your feedback as...
Our friend Farrel over at Epic Slant has done a great article on player expectations for the Destiny of Velious expansion. Velious is not something you do lightly. It was the defining expansion of EverQuest and to put it on such a short product cycle is dangerous. Velious was one of the largest content additions ever to hit EverQuest. The whole expansion was simply massive in scale. Three major cities were added, several open world zones, shared access dungeons and a raid zone that could support more than a single guild at a time. The EQ2 trend of “two...
From the EQ2 Forums: The US servers will come down on June 29, 2010, at 7am PDT for a hotfix. Runnyeye and Splitpaw will be patched at the usual 9pm PDT (4 am GMT on June 16, 2010, provided that Kiara’s gnomish time zone converterizer didn’t lie).
From the EQ2 Forums: Starting at 4:45am PDT on Tuesday, June 29, 2010, the Guk, Najena and Blackburrow servers will come down for an estimated 5 1/2-hour downtime, expected to be online again around 9:15am PDT. During this time the servers will be undergoing maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience. If any additional downtime is needed, we will update this post accordingly.
Breaking News: Christine “Kiara” Renzetti is hopping the fence from EverQuest II to a new role as EverQuest Community Manager. More after the jump…
Interviews with the EQ2 team have been popping up everywhere, but while interviewing Dave Georgeson (EQ2 Senior Producer) would seem the obvious choice, EQ2Wire prefers to take the road less traveled. Although never officially announced, Xelgad has been appointed the go-to guy for Class Balance and Mechanics changes, filling the position hastily vacated by Aeralik last fall. We submitted 11 questions to Xelgad and are thrilled to be able to share the results of that exchange. There have been some gameplay changes of late that haven’t had a lot of developer response on the forums, so for our first...
Due to the streamlining of spells and combat arts from levels 1-20, specifically several changes to fighter spells and arts, Fighter classes are finding it difficult or impossible to complete Heroic Opportunities. Game Update 57 will see some changes to fighter classes to resolve this issue. From Xelgad on the EQ2 Forums: Fighter heroic opportunities have been changed from requiring a taunt to complete them to requiring a ‘Fist’ icon to complete them. Paladins and Shadowknights should soon see that one of their primary spells is now a Fist rather than a sword (Judgment and Malice) and Berserkers will...
On Friday June 4th, 2010, Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO) made news by announcing that the entire game was going to a Free-to-Play (F2P) model. Players can maintain a subscription, and receive most of the game and game items, but they’ll need to spend real money to get access to new items which appear on their marketplace. This begged the question of whether other games such as EverQuest, EverQuest II, or World of Warcraft would move to a F2P model, and if they did so, whether it would be gamewide or if we would see the addition of...
Game Update 57 could be a big update, based on some notes already posted in the Test forum, and hints of other changes coming down the wire. The biggest change thus far is the removal of certain group spells from the various player classes from levels 1-20. Because level 1-20, and especially levels 1-10 are considered solo play, those spells which are only useful in groups are being postponed to later levels. From Rothgar: These changes are PART (notice the emphasis on the word “part”) of a bigger change that wasn’t fully rolled out to the Test Server. As...
Imago-Quem continues to work nose-to-the-grindstone on Shaders 3.0, improving not only the look, but the performance. A month’s worth of tweaks to Shaders 3.0 since Game Update 56 are now on Test. These improvements fix tons of issues with objects being too dark, too shiny, or just the wrong color. From SmokeJumper: Shader 3.0 optimizations! Shader 3.0 is now way faster than it used to be. In most cases, it will outstrip Shader 1.0 by 10 fps or more. Very cool. (Okay, we snuck this one out already, but I’m talking about it now because we never really said...
Ten Ton Hammer interviewed Dave Georgeson at E3. It’s very difficult to follow the interview, since it’s not clear whose comments are Georgeson’s and whose comments are those of the interviewer. But nonetheless, it’s worth a read. Hopefully they’ll post the video soon. Meanwhile Stratics (which recently merged with TGN) has posted a video of their own interview with Dave Georgeson.
Despite some valiant attempts, players on UK servers are not yet able to jump into Battlegrounds against US players. Hopefully this will change next Tuesday. From Rothgar: We will try again with the next hotfix which is scheduled for Tuesday.
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...
Dethdlr
Overview Welcome to the first installment of Dethdlr’s Dungeon. This is my little place on EQ2Wire to post my commentary on EQ2. Unlike the news items, this is more for opinion based articles from my own perspective. For my first article here I’m going to tackle: How to figure out an encounter. I’m sure some of our readers know all of this information already but there’s probably a tidbit or two in there that may help someone out. Here goes…