Feldon
As we reported last week, raid zones have been ‘freaking out’ with players suddenly doing massive amounts of damage while all other players on the raid are frozen. Rothgar‘s on the case from this post on the EQ2 Forums: We have a fix for this problem and it should be going out soon. There is one downside to this fix going in: Brigands won’t be doing 400k DPS with a mysterious unexplained tank pet.
EQ2
Moonlight Enchantments is back, as it is every month on the 20th and 21st, but for June there are two interesting developments. First are 10 new items including house/guild placeable tiles which are rolling white, red, or blue clouds, a tile which looks exactly like a plowed garden, and tiles for fallen leaves and coolest of all, a tile of wooden shingles, perfect for those house breakouts when you want to make a clubhouse. More importantly, there’s been a change to the Strong Brew Root Beer quest such that 1 character can repeat it indefinitely. If you need 30-40...
So as we reported yesterday in our article Side Benefit of Multi-Housing — Multiple AA Mirrors? , the introduction of multiple houses has inadvertently allowed players to install and use multiple AA mirrors. In fact, several readers made a point of rubbing our nose in the fact we didn’t figure out this trick sooner. Well, daring goes before wisdom and if I’d been apprised of this capability, I still probably wouldn’t have bothered because knowing SOE, they’ll eventually get around to closing said exploit, probably right after I spend a whole day getting 2 different AA setups perfectly configured....
It’s now 2 weeks since players have been reporting some strange glitches with Velious raid zones. There seem to be 2 problems. The first is zones “crashing” and resetting back to their default states. This means all trash mobs must be killed again. The second issue seems involve players suddenly becoming all powerful and casting spells their class is not capable of, doing hundreds of thousands of points of damage, all while the entire raid force is frozen in place. It’s truly a bizarre bug to hear explained and yet several have reported it in 3 different threads: Very...
Players who have explored the depths of Velious already know that crafters have a bigger role to play this expansion than in many years. In addition to saving players time and money, in Destiny of Velious, tradeskillers are integral to transforming raw materials looted in cellars, caves, and other dark places into the shiny new armament that players actually want. Although most of this information has been posted on other websites, it hasn’t all been available in a single organized article, so that’s what I’ve set out to do here. We cover the biggest purveyors of armor and weapons...
Cloudrat of Test has discovered that players can place an AA mirror in each of their houses and thus save more than one AA setup. Today I put a second AA mirror in a second home of mine and saved another AA setup. I am thinking now with mulit housing I can fine tune my saved AA setups with one for soloing , grouping , raiding, harvesting and one for crafting. I will just need to have a house for each setup to hold the mirror and have to pay for several resets to get them all into place....
If you have been wanting to pledge your allegiance (and likely your immortal soul) to Anashti Sul, former prime healer of Norrath, you’ve no doubt been perplexed by her top disciple’s insistence that you be of a good alignment before taking the blood oath. Fortunately, Prathun is on the case and has a fix in the works: This has been fixed. Plumator Dul’Sadma should rebuff you if you’re aligned with a good city, but allow you to continue her dialogues otherwise. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Standard disclaimer: This fix will have to go through the standard testing, approval,...
tfetterman noticed a change in the June 13 Test Update Notes affecting the description and behavior of the Bard ability Rhythmic Overture. Bard Rhythmic Overture now applies as a buff to the bard. All damage inflicted by the bard will apply toward Victorious Concerto. Lemilla of Permafrost described the change: As it’s a buff on yourself instead of a debuff on the mob, it would mean that it will track damage inflicted upon multiple enemies instead of just one. This change makes it possible to charge a proper VC on fights where the mobs die within 10 seconds. Same...
SmokeJumper has posted some time estimates for the server upgrades (which may naturally change based on circumstances) on the EQ2 Forums. I believe this includes Guk, Everfrost, Unrest, Butcherblock, Valor, and Splitpaw. Hey, folks, Just a quick update to let you know when the hardware upgrades are scheduled to happen. Amsterdam and Valor should be upgraded in about two weeks from now (end of the month). The remaining servers will get upgraded about two weeks beyond that. It’d be great to have everything upgraded by Fan Faire, but we might miss it by a week or so. Soon!(tm)
From the EQ2 Forums: The US servers will come down on June 14, 2011, at 7am PDT for a hotfix. The expected downtime is 2 hours. and: Beginning a 7:00 AM PDT on Tuesday, June 14, 2011, subscription and commerce services will be unavailable for maintenance. We expect this maintenance to take approximately 2 hours. This may also cause some forum accounts to temporarily lose permissions, due to the inability to verify account status while the maintenance is taking place. This is only temporary and normal permissions will return automatically once the maintenance is complete. After the jump, your...
Note: This article will be periodically bumped to the top of EQ2Wire. UPDATED: JUNE 18th, 2011 If you miss the pre-Expansion Zone Previews, Interviews with Artists, Animators, and Developers, as well as the quarterly Question & Answer , Developer Chats, and ‘What Bugs You Most?‘, you’ve got company. We’re not sure that 20 minute Stickam videos fully replace all those forms of communication. That said… There have already been several hotfixes tackling some of the bigger issues introduced by Game Update 60, but there are others which have yet to receive confirmation from developers. We delve into this category...
Slow Combines We understand that the completion times on those extremely tedious combines for certain Velious quests will get trimmed back to a normal time. Currently, they take as long as Coldain Prayer Shawl updates (up to 3 minutes per combine!). Dojo Prestige House Not Getting Outdoor Area From Gninja on the EQ2 Forums: There are no plans to add an outdoor area to the personal Dojo, Sorry! Kael Drakkel Contested Changes Delight Some, Bore Others Some players were very happy, overjoyed even, at some changes to Kael Drakkel contested dungeon which reduce or eliminate some frustrating stuns and...
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: I rarely, and I mean once-every-few-years, make slips when talking to the press. But I had done tons of internal presentations about it and it slipped in the heat of conversation with the journo. But that being said, we’re not going to reveal anything else until Fan Faire where it will get its great unveiling, as planned. However, I will say this one thing to squash the rumor. This is not introducing a “Marketplace Class” and this new class will not be sold for SC. That’s it. That’s really all I’m going to...
From Silius on the EQ2 Forums: Hey everyone, I just wanted to let all of you know that in the next few weeks I will be pushing tradeskilled items to test with updated stats. This push should make all the current crafted items relevant. Their new growth is derived from the growth established in Velious. This means they will all be modified to give appropriate stats based on the new mechanics of attributes and other stats. I will need some help from all of you when we push this to test so I can make sure that I have...
Massively.com is in Los Angeles covering this year’s E3 and spoke to Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, Executive Producer of EQ1 and EQ2 about the future of EQ2. We have already heard some about the revamp of Freeport and Qeynos which will evolve these starting cities into full-fledged quest hubs that will drive character development from levels 1-90. The breaking news for today is that we can expect a 25th character class and the ability to group cross-server. So what’s next for the game? Georgeson laughed when we asked this and said, “We’re going to start relying a lot less on...
Two years ago, if you asked me my top 10 list of things that are missing from EQ2, a decent selection of mounts would have been nearly at the top of said list. We’ve seen the expansion of cat mounts, horse mounts, and all variations in between, with floating discs, and more recently the flying mounts which have been restricted to level 85. What comes in between? Well, we’ve kept an eye on smarmy silly tantalising comments from Tom Tobey (ttobey) and Dave “Covic” Brown suggesting that they’ve been working hard on something to do with more mount options,...
From Kaitheel on the EQ2 Forums: Tinkerfest has been activated on both Test and Test Copy. Like clockwork, Tinkerfest has returned! Take up your favorite wrench and celebrate all things gnomish, be they metal, combustive, mathematical, experimental, or a combination thereof! Adventures, rewards, buyables and crafted items await you, both new and familiar. You won’t want to miss all of the fun at Gnomeland Security, your headquarters for all things Tinkerfest, in Steamfont Mountains.
An enigmatic comment from Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, newly minted Executive Producer of the EverQuest franchise including EQ1 and EQ2: There’s also going to be a very cool feature announcement this week. Wednesday. Look for it. and regarding Server Upgrades: The other servers are coming. We intend to get them all installed in the very near future, but I don’t have details yet. I’ll find out and post something soon (after I get back from E3 probably…early next week). and regarding the future of Freeport and Qeynos (in response to a smarmy, but not off-base supposition by a player that...
Today’s update addresses numerous complaints about the difficulty of the Drunder heroic and raid zones as well as the Citadel of V’uul x2. In particular the Drunder group zones seemed to require Raid gear to attempt, yet lacked any progression of itemization from that gear. We also see some ease-of-use changes to Kael Drakkel contested. The full notes after the jump…
From the EQ2 Forums: All U.S. servers will come down for a hotfix at 7am PDT on Friday, June 3, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The Splitpaw server will have its hotfix at 5am London Time on Saturday, June 4, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours. Here are the patch notes: COMBAT MECHANICS Casting Speed increases will work the same as before GU60. Reuse and Recovery will once again apply adders *after* multipliers. Additionally: Casting Speed will also now apply adders *after* multipliers (this was not the case before) so you should see a slight *increase* in...
Rothgar took a moment to respond to almost universal derision of the new Adornments display scheme introduced in Game Update 60: Thanks for your feedback on the adornment changes. However, from some of the feedback it certainly sounds like you’re not seeing everything based on an out-of-date UI. I do understand that some of you are using Default and still have issues with the changes, but before we can have a rational discussion about it, we need to make sure people are seeing the changes how they were intended and not looking at broken UI windows. Not seeing the...
All U.S. servers will come down for a hotfix at 7am PDT on Thursday, June 2, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The Splitpaw server will have its hotfix at 5am London Time on Friday, June 3, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours.
Due to a bug which is robbing Raid mobs of their Crit Bonus, most of them have been permakilled on PvP servers until a bug fix can be rolled out. [EQ2 Forums] UPDATE: You can read more about this issue in a thread started by Silius EQ2 Forums. We have found the problem and will be hotfixing it as soon as we can. There is an issue on PVP servers causing NPCs to get 0 crit bonus benefit resulting in an unintended reduction in challenge. As a result of this discovery we will be permakilling all current content raid...
Lemilla of Permafrost have done some research to confirm what appears to be an undocumented nerf to Casting Speed which is resulting in significantly slower results. This is not the only thread on the EQ2 forums on the topic. One originally about Swashbucklers also investigated the Casting Speed issue.
A surprising post from SmokeJumper yesterday caught our attention regarding New Hardware: The server hardware is coming in in chunks as we ship it to the various data centers around the world. But the good news is…Permafrost and Oasis are now upgraded, as of this morning. More are coming soon! We’ve already received indication that the rest of the hardware is already on order. Russian servers will not be upgraded as the hardware is relatively new (2007) while the current EQ2 servers were on 2004 hardware. Note these are the game servers and zone servers. The database servers were...