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.
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 tiles, the idea of running multiple characters through each of the 5 Grottos throughout Norrath may be rather daunting. While each of the 5 grottos offer different types of quests and a variety of rewards, sometimes you just want to grind. Fortunately with the change to the Root Beer quest, if you want to just make barrels of root beer and get as many tokens as possible, now there is such an option!
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.
So anyway, Cloudrat pushed the issue to get a dev response one way or the other and we got one from Rothgar:
This was an unintended side-effect of the multi-housing change. As far as I know we aren’t planning a fix at the moment, but we may re-evaluate the policies surrounding AA respecs in the future.
My interpretation of this is — they’re gonna let it ride — but we may see some changes in the future. But just as easily, a “patch” could be figured out that would prevent players from using multiple AA mirrors. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Multi-classing would be a great addition for EQ2 but in the mean time, making AA swapping easier seems like a smart move to me. Only a few classes really benefit from it anyway.
So if you plan to take advantage of multiple AA mirrors, you’ll probably want to spend some time playing with Beetny’s AA Calculator for EQ2.
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:
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 in Velious — Thurgadin, Ry’Gorr, and Drunder — who via faction and crafter recipes offer a full selection of armor, jewelry, cloaks, charms, and weapons. The one thing excluded from Thurgadin, Ry’Gorr, and Drunder armor sets is Chest items. Fortunately, we have a Guide to Destiny of Velious Chest armor that covers those choices and where they drop.
Crafters: Before going any further, if you haven’t already explored Niami Denmother‘s EQ2Traders website, specifically her Special Armor guide, I highly suggest it. This article also owes its history to an article posted by Whilhelmina shortly after Velious launched.
On October 11, 2011, Primal Velium Shards were removed as a primary component from Thurgadin and Ry’Gorr armor. Also Drunder armor pieces now drop within Drunder zones. As a result, crafting Drunder armor is now optional and reserved for those with particularly bad luck. Fortunately for them, the materials used to make Drunder armor have been made much more prevalent. This guide has been updated to reflect these changes.
This is a multi-page article so please use the navigation below to select a section.
Jump To: Intro | Thurgadin Armor | Ry’Gorr Armor | Drunder Armor | Pattern Jewelry/Cloaks | Velious Chest Pieces
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.
With so many changes and strategies combos based on what you are doing as the game grows this is an exciting new aspect
Now maybe there will be more raiders looking into the housing market and portals to them
This is a happy bonus to owning more houses.
So far, EQ2 developers have taken extraordinary measures to prevent more than one Mirror of Reflected Achievements from being used per character, despite the obvious benefits (and parallels to multiclassing games like Rift). AA mirrors are LORE NO-TRADE, preventing players from crafting them for their alts or using more than one in a house, but with multi-housing, who knows what the EQ2 dev team will do. I would wait a few days to see if there is a reaction before tracking down a crafter to make you a spare mirror.
If this side benefit is allowed to stand, maybe raiders will complain a bit less about the development hours spent on getting Multi-housing working? 😉 Ok, not very likely…
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, hotfix procedures before it will appear on live servers.
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 for the changes to Crusader’s Faith and Spirit Tap.
When asked if this would affect MultiAttack damage (which Dirges rely on), Spell Double Attack, Procs, etc., Xelgad dashed those hopes:
The same rules apply – so Multi Attacks, Spell Double Attacks, DoTs and Procs will not count toward the recorded damage.
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 update notes for today, June 14th, 2011.
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 today. This is a mixture of bonafide bugs, and also outstanding issues which rise above simple griping into things that are causing significant gameplay problems.
Details after the jump…
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 knockbacks. Other players feel that the changes went too far, with players now able to solo the giants or at least do battle with barely a click from a well-geared healer. For players desparately needing gems from Kael, the changes will certainly speed up the process, but has the challenge been removed?
More Options for Guild Hall Standard Bearer
Now that even heroic dungeons require 100’s of Crit Chance and Crit Mitigation just to either fully hit, or fully avoid hits from mobs, players are looking at every way to boost these numbers. Players posted a thread requesting Crit Chance and Critical Mitigation buffs as options from the Standard Bearer Guild Hall Amenity.
Gninja gave some positive news:
I plan to be adding more standards to this amenity with GU61 so keep the ideas going
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 post about this until Fan Faire. No more responses on this subject. Sorry, folks.
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 not missed anything. Please keep an eye out for this and thanks in advance.
When faced with a smarmy response from a player that no adjustments to quest or dropped gear will be made to match the stat changes, Silius confirmed what SmokeJumper said in a previous post:
Who says this is not being done?
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 expansion packs to create content for the game, and what we’re going to do is create lots and lots of content and put it out there on a quarterly basis for free.”
As we already learned in the last Producer’s Letter, Destiny of Velious will continue to be released/completed as free quarterly content updates rather than as a followup “part 2” expansion.
This means that the game’s next expansion will concentrate more on adding features to the game while the team will deliver the content through free updates. “People need new challenges on a regular basis,” he explained. He even speculated on a future model by which expansions are completely done away with, leaving players to purchase features on an individual basis.
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, but we had no idea just what they were planning. If you saw the screenshots of Hua Mein pandas mounted on T-Rexes, you probably thought it was a joke with no intention of seeing the light of the day. Turns out that’s exactly what was planned. Tom has been working hard to modularize characters and mounts so that when a new mount is created, all races of all sexes just “fit” on the mount without weeks of hard-coding locations, and now we know why.
From EverQuest2.com:
Later this month, we’ll be debuting two new types of mounts in EverQuest II.
Leaper mounts can jump up and forward in tremendous bounds before falling, moving at speeds similar to flying mounts. You can control how high you jump, and you can steer while jumping using the movement keys. Obviously, you don’t take falling damage when landing. Leapers require Level 30 to ride.
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 eventually all classes will be Neutral, and we’d eventually see Freeport and Qeynos merged into a single megacity):
Freeport gets an overhaul first, bringing Big Evil back to the world. (And yeah, guards will almost certainly get bumped at that time.) Then next summer, we revamp Qeynos to bring back Greater Good. You’ll see.
MUCH more detail will be forthcoming at the start of next month when we unveil everything at Fan Faire.
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 casting speed compared to pre-GU60 numbers.
- Negative Casting speed debuffs will now apply the correct amount of increases instead of max increase at all times.
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 adornment name in the tooltip is a valid concern that we will talk about. The main reason for going to an icon-based system was to make the examine description more visual and to reduce the overall amount of space required for adornment information now that items can receive multiple adornments of the same slots. You’ll start to see items with more adornments, especially two-handers, and the examine description was getting awfully long. You’ll see we’ve done other things to try to reduce the compexity of the examine window like converting “+10 crushing, +10 piercing, +10 slashing” to just “+10 weapon skills”.
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 mobs on the PVP servers until the fix is patched to live.
We currently plan on pushing this fix live tomorrow along with some balance adjustments for the all servers. Once again we are sorry for the inconvenience.
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 already upgraded late last summer to new 64-bit hardware.
Traduction française à EQ2Artisans
