Feldon
If you thought the Itemization threads on the EQ2 Forums have been harsh, they really took a turn for the worse after players took Silius‘ advice and checked out the changes on Test and Test Copy, only to find that several items had lost upwards of 75% of their MultiAttack, 4.0 weapons received additional boosts (leaving out 6.0 weapons), and most of the ‘boosts’ were upwards of 0.6% increases on just a handful of stats. SmokeJumper came to Silius‘ defense: Silius has made huge strides into setting things up so that the completely haphazard systems of yore, where half...
EQ2
Players have expressed concerns that the changes in the difficulty of dungeons this week will make Kael Drakkel far too easy. However SmokeJumper seems to be backing up the designers on wanting to keep the contested Kael Drakkel sufficiently difficult: (Making the zone super easy is) not our intent at all. And I’m glad that your group is able to play through those areas. But it must have been verrry lonely in Kael, because we know how many people were playing it…and it’s not many.
SmokeJumper has assured players in a thread “Where did my adventure go?!” that not only does EQ2 have a long-term plan besides the standard game updates and expansions, but that much will be revealed soon. If you have taken for granted that next year’s expansion will be Velious Part 2, raising the level cap to 100, you may want to read on! Watch this space. I’ll be posting stuff soon to describe this year’s slate. Probably next week sometime, maybe the week after. We’re going to be doing some VERY cool stuff this year and I think you’ll start...
There have been many reasons in the past not to allow PvP to PvE or PvE to PvP server transfers. Over the years, with itemization changes and server merges, some of those reasons have become less important. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: We’ve created a poll and asked for feedback related to PvP and PvE transfers over in the PvP forums. Since many players may not watch that forum, I wanted to make a post here because this decision can impact PvE servers as well. Please feel free to vote and post your feedback/opinions in this thread. PvP...
SOE is looking for your feedback on two recent changes that went in on Tuesday. From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: Today’s hotfix introduced a couple of fixes and I’d be interested to hear how it has affected you. First, we’ve made some changes to improve the performance for public quests. We still expect them to contribute towards a higher level of lag than other types of content due to the sheer number of people that participate, and we are working to make them even better. However, you should hopefully notice an improvement after today’s hotfix.
Players logged in yesterday morning to find that their Ranged items, including bows and thrown weapons, had rejected their adornments. Those adornments ended up back in the Overflow slot. Rothgar responded: This appears to be a bug related to some item changes. Our QA department is working on it now and we will have the items fixes asap.
If you just can’t wait for Thursday to see what (if any) changes you’ll see to your gear, you may be interested in these additional Test Update Notes (beyond the notes already posted on Tuesday): ITEMS Dungeon dropped loot has had its power increased. Dungeon shard armor has had its power increased. Raid items have had their power increased. The gap in power between easy and challenge mode raid items has been increased. The power of a few War Runes has been increased. Silius brought this to our attention: Just a heads up that test server should have the...
After posting a promising thread on Friday entitled “Upcoming Itemization Changes (No Nerfs)“, it seems SmokeJumper has gotten egg on his face today. Players logged in after today’s Tuesday Game Update to find sweeping nerfs and huge reductions in the effectiveness of Velious gear across the line, especially Fighter items. In a cantankerous discussion on the EQ2 forums, players linked numerous items which underwent substantial losses in stats and desirability. SmokeJumper initially tried to defend the changes with: Please go back and take a look at my original post. I did say that we were being “intentionally conservative” with...
If you are a level 80+ Master Crafter who has completed the Tradeskill Epic, this post by Domino may interest you: Epic crafters, you might want to visit the tradeskill society in your home town while Bristlebane Day is with us. The grand jester has been having some fun with red collectibles for the season… Players immediately noticed that every red shiny was dropping just one item. It seems there’s something else you have to do to get the others.
From SmokeJumper the EQ2 Forums: These itemization changes did *not* happen today, on Tuesday. Instead, they will happen on Thursday morning’s hotfix. Sorry for the delay. Soon!
All U.S. servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT on Tuesday, March 29, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The U.K. worlds will have their update at 5am London Time on Wednesday, March 30, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours. The full reformatted patch notes are available after the jump….
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: We’re making some changes to make dungeons more attractive to players in DoV. We’re adjusting base pop and boss health so that the dungeons take less time to complete so they’re more fun for folks, as well as to allow more frequent chances at boss loot drops on revisits. We’re also making a few changes so that bosses don’t wipe parties so easily since they seem to be a bit tougher than we’d originally planned. We’re approaching these changes conservatively so that we don’t overshoot the mark. If these changes don’t do the...
Client Crashes FIX! If you have had your fill of “EverQuest2.com has stopped responding” errors, Rothgar seems to have finally gotten to the bottom of this one: We think we’ve finally tracked down a bug that has been happening for awhile and leading to client crashes and the “EQ2 has stopped responding” problem. I can’t guarantee that this fixes EVERY problem out there, but it certainly fixes the most common crash we’ve been seeing lately. This should get pushed out with next week’s hotfix along with some performance improvements to public quests!
EQ2 PvP Guru Olihin has given PvPers a taste of Game Update 60: GU60 will bring lots of changes to PvP. Fame is being reworked Fame and title gains will now have their own EXP BAR, no more trying to figure out how long or why you gain/lost a title New armor and adornments Ongoing balance changes (this will never stop and will never be perfect in any realistic way) New Battleground Enhancements to the Matchmaker for Battlegrounds Cross faction communication There will be more details as we get closer to GU60.
When prodded about upgrading the graphics engine of EQ2, if not to improve the graphics, at least to address the spate of flickering graphics and shadows which seem to have plagued the game for some players (including me) since the launch of Velious. SmokeJumper addressed this concern and others including graphical glitches and performance slowdowns in Public Quests: We redirected our efforts yesterday to trying to resolve some of the PQ issues. We fixed one issue last night, and although I had been getting similar behavior to what you describe on my home rig, I couldn’t make that duplicate...
If you have run a few Destiny of Velious dungeons (and raids), compared the loot/gear to Public Quests, and said aloud “no me comprende”, this should be a good week. From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums: We are bumping up the power of Velious dungeon and raid items. We’re doing this to make those items more competitive when compared with Public Quest items, because instances are tougher than the PQs and deserve better rewards. This does include shard armors. We are also going to bump up the power of hard-mode raid loot so hard modes are even more rewarding,...
Let’s Be Honest… Public Quests completed even at the highest “x4 raid” level demand neither the coordination nor the discipline of any of the raid content in the last 3 expansions. Storm Gorge requires a little more focus than Ring War, but generally speaking, 24-40 players standing in the right place, killing the right mobs, in the right order, stand to inherit a wagonload of Legendary gear with Yellow adornment slots, all without such challenges as timing AOEs, switching to an Off-Tank, agro-juggling, or any complex strategy. The biggest enemy encountered is usually Server Lag. Public Quests offer a...
Today came down to a choice: Write or Play? So tomorrow we’ll be back with lots of news about Itemization, Server Performance, and continued roadblocks in Zone progression.
Many of EverQuest 2’s most dedicated players owe their gameplay roots to the original EverQuest and still carry strong memories of the patience and community the original game required. Soloing was almost unheard of. Camping mobs for hours (or days), the difficulties and perils of travel, and contested spawns of much-needed named mobs were all experiences players would not soon forget. It sure was a different game before WoW forced all MMOs to become approachable and remove any aspect that might be considered as a “waste” of the player’s time. When we heard about Chronoportals, a live event running...
Your updates notes for today, March 24, 2011, include several crash fixes, problems linking items in chat, Auction channel spam, and also some substantial nerfs to Critical Mitigation on Destiny of Velious gear.
If multiple updates per week have been getting on your nerves, SmokeJumper has something to say: I’m sorry that these updates have been bothering you. We’ve made a conscious decision to be as responsive to issues from our recent release as possible, fixing any issues or exploits found as quickly as possible and then getting those out to the Live servers so that your gameplay is as great as possible. They will be reducing in frequency after this week.
In the run up towards Game Update 60, there are several things of note regarding Player Housing and Graphics that we’ve been meaning to cover. These include House Item Limit Expanders, Prestige Houses, the Network Status Page, and also a tip of the hat to Ryan “Imago-Quem” F. who has moved on to PlanetSide 2 and incoming graphics guru Alex “GermInUSA” who continues to polish up the EQ2 graphics engine while adding new features.
Yesterday marked the one month anniversary of the launch of Destiny of Velious. Over the last month, we have seen an avalanche of bugs impacting progression with dungeons and raid zones alike throughout Velious. While these have been steadily fixed during the nearly daily updates, at least one issue remains unresolved: The series of doors in Kraytoc’s Fortress of Rime x4 raid zone. It seems that these doors can get locked due to wipes, zone resets, etc. Discuss this on the EQ2 Forums
In response to a concise Berserker Class Issues post-Velious thread created by Bremer, Xelgad said that we should see some of these fixes hopefully before but at the latest by Game Update 60: Hey guys, thanks for the thread! We’ve got a bunch of quick fixes for these issues on the way. They’ll be live by GU60 at the latest. Most of the changes are pretty straightforward and some are exactly as suggested here. and later in the thread, Xelgad posted that he was able to make Death’s Door a more prominent effect to allow healers to more easily...
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: We’re always looking at ways to improve the fun factor on PvP servers and one point that comes up occasionally is how we handle cross-faction communication. Currently each faction has their own language and there’s no way to communicate other thing minor things like pet names, etc. We are considering opening up public channels to cross-faction chat and wanted to find out how the community would feel about that. We understand that chat in PvP can get pretty heated but also feel that taunting your opponents and being taunted is part of the...