Feldon
Bristlebane Day (April 1st) always brings out festivities and a bit of zanyness to EQ2. In past years, we’ve seen /cutemode (also try /cutemode 3 ) and in EQ1, turning everyone into wireframes. But this year, Bristlebane Day has put practicality in the place of tomfoolery. Today, Bristlebane Day, a unique quest has appeared in the Enchanted Lands, offered by a Sphinx, which pays tribute to the father of Dungeons & Dragons — Gary Gygax. The folks at ZAM were first to note that 2 of the 3 riddles given were also found in a FreeRealms quest. Further exploration...
EQ2
A Story of Dark and Light Perhaps some Bristlebane Gremlins got into the works because briefly this morning, the monthly City Festival rolled into both Qeynos AND Freeport. According to this report, a few quick-thinking (and possibly light fingered) individuals snapped up a few Freeport furniture items before they vanished. The polished white marble of the regal Qeynos decorations have been countered by Freeport accoutrements with a decidely black color scheme. Alas, this was a short-term glitch and only those who were quick on the trigger were able to buy these items before the event reset and Qeynos became...
While Norrathians will get to celebrate Bristlebane for an extended time (March 30 -> April 12th), there is a special quest only available on April 1st. Kiara’s Bristlebane Day Preview @ EQ2Players Bristlebane Coverage @ EQ2 ZAM Bristlebane Crafting & Event Guide @ EQTraders
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...
The feature set for the Sentinel’s Fate expansion has always included a bullet point indicating that Sentinel’s Fate would contain “more new armor appearances than currently exist in the game“. Yet players have been surprised that a lot of the brand new armor, weapons, shields, etc. dropping in Sentinel’s Fate look exactly like existing items. Kander has shed some light on this issue: Yes, many of these items got missed on the appearance pass. I am unsure why or how. We will start changing them for newer appearances ASAP. Please PM me if you have any other specific instances...
Imago-Quem, who has long been working on the Shaders 3.0 project, has posted a new Shaders 3.0 FAQ thread summing up all the key details. Originally hatched as a graphical engine bump, and then expanded into an optimization of graphical performance, Shaders 3.0 are now slated for release with Game Update 56 in May.
Here are your update notes for March 30, 2010, after the jump:
From EQ2Players: EQ2 Artist Gary Daugherty does the effects for everything you see in-game. Everything from spell effects to the nifty mists and sparkles on epic weapons. Gary was kind enough to sit down and answer some questions! And the news that many players have been waiting for, regarding Spell Animations… Do you have any special (or just super fun) projects you’re working on now for EQII? I’m currently updating, optimizing and standardizing every class spell visual in the game. My hope is that players won’t have to turn the FX off when they group or raid and will...
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...
As you all know, this is “season 1” of Battlegrounds. Specifically, that the EQ2 team did not get the load testing they wanted to on Test, and so now this test is going on on live servers. But as much as we have gotten reassurances that Battlegrounds are having no significant impact on live servers, this seems to be exactly what is happening. We’ve heard reports of servers rebooting, inability to open instances, and Battlegrounds have been down several days a week for adjustments, tweaking, maintenance, etc. Hopefully this will all be worth it, but Rothgar did shed some...
We have been trying to get Google AdSense to display better ads, but after months of trying different settings, blacklisting hundreds of vendors our readers have no interest in (plumbing supply cos, wiring companies, really?), now all we’re getting is Plat Farmer and Account Selling ads. It seems Google AdSense doesn’t have any ads that you guys would like to actually see. I am currently looking for a banner ad company that will show appropriate ads, such as movie banners (non-flash, no scary music!), upcoming MMOs and other games, and just cool stuff people might actually click on. For...
Rothgar has advised on the EQ2 Forums, due to the extreme database loads continuing to be caused by Battlegrounds, the EQ2 team will be throttling back the number of concurrent Battlegrounds sessions that can be running at once.
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…
Y’all are cordially invited to the next exciting EQII ZAM Developers Chat! This chat was originally scheduled for March 4th and then postponed. Members of the EverQuest II Developer and Community Teams will be there, bring your questions! If you’d like to submit questions prior to the chat, send e-mail to Calthine@allakhazam.com (subject Dev Chat). Thursday, March 18 @ 5:00pm PDT (8:00pm EDT; March 19 @ 00:00 GMT; March 19 @ 01:00 Copenhagen) In the #EQ2 channel on ZAM IRC General chat during the actual event will be in #EQ2FFA You can bet EQ2Wire will be there as well! For instructions...
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.
Mages have been rather effective in Battlegrounds and PvP combat of late. Moreso than perhaps was intended. Timetravelling has laid out the details of the cause of this issue, what he intends to do about it, and how it will be tested in this EQ2 Forums thread. We’ve been digging through the code to track down the inconsistencies we’ve been seeing in spell resists and spell avoidance. We have some changes incoming that I’d like to describe briefly for y’all. Based on the old formulas, extremely high resists (if capped) would give players a 75% chance to avoid a...
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...
Brewday has arrived in Norrath! This celebration of Brell and brew will run from March 11 to the 22nd. For a guide to the updated events, collections, tradeskill recipes, and quests for this year’s Brew Day event, check out these sites: Brew Day Events at EQ2 Wiki Updated Brew Day Guide at EQ2 ZAM Brew Day Preview at EQ2 Traders Although the event is now available on live servers, Brell’s Bar remains closed until 10:30am PST according to an announcement I read in-game. For further discussion on Brell’s Bar, check out the EQ2 Forums.
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...
While not breaking news, some folks may not be aware that Sentinel’s Fate offers a Signature quest to level 85+ crafters who have completed the Quel’Ule portion of the Paineel crafting timeline. Two weeks after you complete the final Quel’ule quest for Researcher Tahar, you will receive an item in the mail from him. He’s actually entrusting a relic to you, though it needs a bit of repair. This is the Shadows of the Betrayed signature quest. The reward for this quest is a unique appearance weapon which matches your tradeskill class. As always, Niami Denmother is on the...
As we have reported, players have been abusing an exploit which allowed them to login to Battlegrounds and consume/transmute/craft items and then get those items back upon being returned to their home servers. SOE have stepped up and shown they take this sort of thing seriously with the following announcement from Brenlo: This weekend an exploit was found on the Battlegrounds server which allowed players to transmute items, and have those items returned when leaving the Battlegrounds. This occured due to a change we made in the code to speed up the return process. While we understand that this...