Feldon
While we don’t have all the details on what perks will be available to Guilds reaching the new level 90 cap, we know that Game Update #55 will add 2 new Guild Hall Amenities. The first is pretty straightforward. It’s a Wizard Portal NPC with all the destinations available from the Ulteran Spires. It does not include the Kingdom of Sky zones of Tenebrous Tangle, Barren Sky, or Bonemire: Realm of Dawn. You’ll still need that amenity if your guildies are making regular use of these zones. The second new Guild Hall Amenity is the Guild Standard Bearer. If...
EQ2
The Adornments system in EQ2 has always been pretty confusing. And so far, there just have not been a lot of options for certain classes in certain slots for adornments. Each of the 9 tradeskill classes and the 2 secondary tradeskill classes have each made a handful of adornments. necessitating adornment websites to keep it all straight. We are thrilled to see that the Kanga will be updating her fantastic EQ2 Adornments site for Game Update 55. With Game Update 55, adornments have been rebuilt from the ground up. In fact some prized adornments (Parry) can no longer be...
EQ2Wire is providing continuing coverage of Game Update #55 (now on Test) and the Sentinel’s Fate expansion. News is coming hot and fast now, so we’ve improved how news items are labeled and have added a News Ticker at the top of the site. Don’t forget the UStream Sentinel’s Fate Beta Tour which will be led by Alan “Brenlo” Crosby. This is tomorrow Friday at 4PM PDT. We are currently working on articles about the new Adornments, Guild Amenities, Leveling Tweaks, and a Zone List for the expansion.
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And just to bring out tour of the UI improvements in Game Update #55 full circle, the lowly Zone Timers (Lockouts) window has been the bane of many a raid leader, as they remind players over and over to reset their group/raid persistent zone timers. While I didn’t see a /resetallzones command (there might be one, I’m just not aware of it), the new Filter function at the bottom of the Zone Timers window should help considerably at raid time.
Many of us have been faced with the prospect of trying to find a spell or combat art out of our Knowledge book, only to be frustrated by a wall of all our spells from levels 1-80. This will only get more difficult when another tier of spells is added with the expansion. Fortunately, the Knowledge book has gotten a great new Filter feature that lets you choose to only show the highest level version of each spell you have. This doesn’t just mean all the spells from 71-80. Some classes have abilities which do not get updated beyond...
You’ve probably already seen screenshots of the Updated Quest Window. We saw it way back in November when Brenlo posted it as a twitter picture. It’s great to finally see it coming to the live game. If you’ve ever been frustrated with having to constantly open the Quest Journal and flip through your quests to see what steps you need on all the quests you are working on in a certain area, you will be relieved to see the multi-quest tracking feature of the new Journal. Now, you determine what quests appear in your Quest Helper floating window by...
Consolidating Stats Sentinel’s Fate consolidates many separate stats in an effort to simplify itemization. Developers have been hounded on the EQ2 forums for “ignoring” healers, hybrid classes which need both spell and melee abilities, etc. in designing gear. Stat Consolidation is a huge step in making a smaller set of gear usable by a larger player population. Here is the list of changes: Crit = Damage Spell Crit, Melee Crit, Range Crit, Heal Crit Crit Bonus = Spell Crit Bonus, Melee Crit Bonus, Range Crit Bonus Double Attack = Double Attack, Ranged Double Attack Potency = Base Spell Damage,...
I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what changes we’ll be seeing to Transmuting come February 16th. So I thought it was worth a rehash as Transmuting is changing quite a bit. The Way It Was Transmuting started out as a secondary tradeskill. It granted the ability to not only break down unwanted Treasured, Legendary, Mastercrafted, and Fabled gear, but also make certain adornments. But the drawbacks have been many. Transmuting could only be skilled up to 100 by breaking down items. Reaching 400 skill could only be achieved by crafting (at great expense) hundreds of worthless low level...
Everything you know about the main Character Stats is about to change. For the past 5 years, in addition to the primary stats that each class uses: Predators have focused on STR to do melee and ranged damage and INT to increase poison damage. Druids have focused on STR to do more melee damage. Crusaders have focused on INT for spell damage and WIS for healing. These are just the most obvious examples, but all 24 classes had some unique benefits from the different Stats. Starting with Sentinel’s Fate, each class now benefits significantly from just ONE statistic, even...
It looks like SOE have renewed their partnership with nVidia for the launch of EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate. When firing up the EQ2 Test, I was presented with the NVidia: The Way It’s Meant to be Played logo.
Erollisi Day festivities started at midnight, February 4th (after a brief hotfix) and will run until the expansion (February 16th). Erollisi Day is the celebration of the goddess of love and all things related to the emotion that sets hearts to galloping! With the return of Erollisi Day, many of your favourite activities from previous years’ celebrations are making comebacks with new rewards! Erollisi Day @ EQ2Players Erollisi Day 2010 Event @ EQ2 ZAM Erollisi Day Crafting @ EQTraders
From the EQ2 Forums: Crushbone, Befallen, and Permafrost will be brought down Friday morning for some upgrades to address the lag issues. The estimated downtime is four hours. We’ll be bringing down the servers at 6am PST and will update this thread with details as needed. Rothgar has been communicating what steps the server team have been taking with regards to this issue. You may be interested in some of those details he’s posted, after the jump.
The EQ2 Test Server has just been updated with most of Game Update 55. GU55 will be the free content available to all EQ2 players on February 16th, to coincide with the release of the expansion. The biggest part of GU55 (with the loss of New Halas, Shaders 3, and the TS Revamp) are Battlegrounds. Players are being asked to run dungeons, etc. to see what effect combat changes may have had. Rothgar @ EQ2 Forums
From EQ2Players: You’re invited to SOE’s first ever Ustream Beta Tour, on Friday, February 5, 2010, hosted by Alan “Brenlo” Crosby, Senior Producer of EverQuest II. Beginning at 4:00 p.m. PST (7:00pm EST), tune in to SOE’s Ustream channel to get an exclusive guided tour of EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate, through the eyes of the game’s producer. Sentinel’s Fate, the sixth expansion of the groundbreaking EverQuest II franchise, transports players into a universe of legend and lore where adventures are just the beginning. The fabled lands of Odus, filled with epic quests, magnificent dungeons and limitless content provide the...
We’re a bit late on this, but EQ2Players has the latest preview leading up to the Sentinel’s Fate expansion, this time covering the 3 parts of the airship Vigilant. All three of The Vigilant instances (the Incursion, the Infiltration, and the Rescue) are geared for adventurers level 90+. EQ2Players Preview of The Vigilant.
Last week, we reported our suspicions about New Halas being delayed, but we now have official confirmation. New Halas will be released as a free content update in Game Update 56. This would likely be in May based on the current GU release cycle. Here is Brenlo‘s official announcement: Halas is indeed delayed until GU 56. We (read I) were a bit ambitious in our grand plans for the year and despite my constant whipping, we could not squeeze in everything we had on the agenda. Thus we are taking our time to get it right and get it...
Last month, the first ever City Festival camped outside the Kelethin gates and provided a selection of both local and traveling rewards, house items, and temporary costumes (I want that Gi as a permanent item!!). When it pulled up stakes, we had no idea where it would end up next. Early this morning we caught wind of the news that the traveling City Festival had arrived in Gorowyn. The theme for Gorowyn seems to be all things in a deep crimson. Here’s a sneak of what you can purchase with City Tokens for the next week, before the event...
While we’re speculating, Sigrdrifa has put together a writeup of what we know about New Halas so far. It’s a nice preview while we wait for more official news about this level 1-20 starting zone which we are now expecting in Game Update 56 along with Shaders 3.0. It should be an interesting May. New Halas Demystification on EQ2Forums
Rothgar has reported in that those changes to prevent large Macros have been pulled out, and a fix is going in which should hopefully resolve the issues in Munzok’s Material Bastion.
For those of you lucky (or unlucky 😉 ) enough to be raiding MMB, the zone is currently difficult or impossible to complete due to the January 28th hotfix. More information about this issue can be found in this EQ2 Forums thread.
We’re now less than 3 weeks from the release of Sentinel’s Fate. There has been no sign of Halas on Test. We’ve already been told that Halas is important to SOE, that they want it to be a starting zone to win new players. And I just don’t see them adding a starting zone with 20 levels of content with less than 2 weeks of testing. So at this point, EQ2Wire is now ready to call Halas for for Game Update 56 a few months after the Sentinel’s Fate expansion. This is purely speculation on our part until there’s...
Tomorrow’s Hotfix will include some changes targeted at server performance/lag. These changes will affect the number of spells and combat arts which can be linked together in 1 macro. We are trying to determine the maximum number of spells or combat arts which it will be possible to put on a single macro. Thursday, January 28th Hotfix GENERAL Ability commands such as “useability” are now being throttled in an effort to cut down on server lag. This means that “mega-macros” that attempt to cast many spells will no longer work as expected. Housing zones and persistent instances will now...
As we now know, EQ2 will be getting Battlegrounds in Game Update 55 in February to coincide with the release of the Sentinel’s Fate expansion. If you are wanting a closer look at the Maps of the 3 Battlegrounds zones, look no further than this EQ2Players writeup. Battlegrounds are NOT intended as “end-game” or high-level only content. Although at launch they will be limited to level 80-90, there will be continuing effort to make Battlegrounds available to lower levels, complete with unique armor awards for these level ranges. Kiara posted about it here.
Kiara is continuing to give us detailed previews of every zone we’ll be seeing in the Sentinel’s Fate expansion. Today’s preview is the third of the Erudin zones — Erudin Royal Palace. The last of the Erudin group instances is the Erudin Royal Palace. It is the central stronghold of the corruptive influence on Erudin and Odus as a whole. Stephanie Young is one of the artists who worked on the Erudin zones. She [has a history with these zones as] also worked on Erudin in EverQuest and EverQuest Online Adventures.