Feldon
Tradeskillers who selected the Frost Gryphon, rather than the Boreal Gryphon, as their level 85+ tradeskill flying mount are experiencing an issue after today’s Game Update. Namely, the Frost Gryphon seems to have been flagged Guide-only. It’s not immediately obvious in the following screen shot, but we have confirmed this. Domino is aware of the issue and hopefully we’ll get a fix ASAP. This is being discussed on the EQ2 Forums.
EQ2
Looks like the contested Kael Drakkel group dungeon just got some more reasons for people to go back! From Kander on the EQ2 Forums: Due to the hotfix schedule, we should have everything listed in by Tuesday March 15th. The stuff in bold is in now and the rest will be in next Tuesday. PoI Quests have been made repeatable once a day (6 quests) and grant faction and shards Trash drops, including rare fabled drops are being added to the zone tables. Bosses now have a chance to drop shards. Trash now has a chance to drop shards....
When Velious was announced, lots of folks asked for Faction to matter. Wish granted! 🙂 Faction must be acquired with the Othmir, Snowfang Gnolls, Thurgadin, and Ry’Gorr to buy their adornments (unique to each faction) and gear, and it can be rather slow-going! The Othmir, Snowfang Gnolls, and Ry’Gorr all have daily (18 hour repeatable) quests to kill overland mobs and gain faction. Crabs for the Othmir quests occasionally drop an item which provides an additional faction boost. Alas, Thurgadin faction must be gained by running dungeons. A variety of rewards become available once faction milestones of 10,000, 20,000,...
Two weeks after the release of Destiny of Velious we see a rather hefty patch that tackles many of the issues we’ve seen on the EQ2 Forums with dungeon and quest progression. After the jump, your March 8, 2011 Update Notes…
Players have been surprised by a change in Thursday’s Game Update affecting the Critical Mitigation of Fighter armor received from Public Quests. As we know, both Public Quests award armor upgrades for hands (gloves) and legs. Storm Gorge PQ’s also award armor for head and feet (boots), while Ring War PQs award armor for shoulders and wrists. There are also rare drops from these events, including Fabled chest pieces and Weapons. During Beta, Othmir solo quest givers offered a full set of armor which was essentially Sentinel’s Fate Tier 1 raid armor minus adornment slots. After Beta concluded, this...
Although there are many things we can do on our end to reduce poor performance when playing EQ2, Public Quests have really pushed things to the limit both on the client and AND the server end. Especially in Storm Gorge which has some 60 combatants in the highest difficulty setting. In the past, there have been some tit-for-tat arguments about people’s slow computers vs. issues on the EQ2 servers themselves. While there is a lot players can do to reduce graphics performance aka “client lag”, it is up to the EQ2 devs to tackle any issues on the SOE...
Kwill
Some players have noticed everquest2.exe instances keep running in the background after they have logged out. Aerendar from Quality Assurance would like to get to the bottom of it, and asks: Could we get a little more info from you regarding your system specs (DXDiag and MSinfo would be extremely helpful in looking at this further and to see if we can determine a commonality between users)? He adds: We’re also interested in how you’re getting into game (which launcher/portal). If you have experienced this problem, please post in the relevant thread. If this is an old issue resurfaced,...
The rewards from public quests have been a hot topic on the community forums lately, with a few players wondering if just healing or playing a support role results in a lesser chest than all out DPS.  As the rumor that only good dps’ers would get the best loot swept the community, some support classes have resorted to dealing out pure dps and not healing, which doesn’t make for a very successful raid. We may yet hear from the Devs on this issue, but until then, the only information available is from the core design of public quests. Our understanding of...
As you may know, in Destiny of Velious, certain dungeons reduce your Critical Chance by a fixed amount. You thus need to go over 100% just to reach 100% critical chance. Thanks to Buffrat for collecting this information and posting it on EQ2Flames. You need the following crit chance in velious to crit 100%: Estimated Crit Numbers: Heroic Tower of Frozen Shadow (ToFS) Zones – 150% Crit Heroic Kraytoc Zones – 150% Crit Heroic Kael Drakkel (KD) Zones – 200% Crit
From Kaitheel on the EQ2 Forums: Brewday 2011 has been activated on both Test and Test Copy. Grab a stein and celebrate Brewday! The shouts of rowdy patrons located near every player city will lead you to The Bar of Brell where adventures and crafts await those thirsty and foolhardy enough to enter. Meanwhile, the Avatar of Below has returned to Antonica. Help him find the best sampling of drinks from all around. And as you’re crawling through the bars and drinking holes throughout Norrath, be sure to keep your eyes peeled for special items of interest to collect!...
A topic is raging on the EQ2 Forums about PvP and Flying Mounts. Rothgar has waded hip-deep into this one, asking for player feedback. Rothgar posted this: If we changed it so that players have a chance to knock other players off their mount, would that alleviate some of the issues? I realize it probably doesn’t solve the entire issue, but perhaps its a move in the right direction. A player responded: Please no knee jerk reactions like just giving people the ability to knock others from the sky. Those that cannot melee, bow shoot, or bring mage pets...
Great news if you have been running Public Quests and been rather puzzled at Legendary (or Fabled) gear with Yellow adornment slots, yet receiving Red adornments (which only go on Raid gear). Now, you will get a select window/choice for Yellow or Red, and it’s based on archetype. After the jump, your update notes for March 4, 2011:
Dethdlr
Intro With the release of Destiny of Velious, the starting instances seem to be a bit tougher and the encounters require a bit of strategy to take them down. This can make it a bit rough on the casual players/guilds. I previously wrote an article on how to figure out an encounter that includes lots of tips on figuring out a strategy for a given MOB. However, the best strategy in the world isn’t going to work if your group setup is awful. There are 24 classes in EQ2 but only 6 slots in a group. How do you...
Today’s Update Notes fix a variety of quest and zone issues, as well as some issues with Public Quests, not to mention a fix for the quest Ominous Hints and the Twins in Thurgadin. The detailed Update Notes for March 3, 2011 after the jump…
We heard about this in Beta, but Windslasher intends to add more Public Quests in future updates, possibly even to older zones. From the EQ2 Forums: The Eastern Wastes public quests were pulled from the expansion for use in game updates. I can’t reveal what I’ve created for Pit of the Awakened yet. Sorry! Also, Gninja has heard our pleas and will be adding zone portals near the Public Quests allowing players to join each other in the same zone for PQs, as well as our personal preference: spreading out into different instances of the Great Divide. I will...
For the last day of the Destiny of Velious launch celebrations, every EQ2 and EQ2X player from level 1-90 is able to travel to Lavastorm, Butcherblock Mountains, or Tenebrous Tangle and fly around using a Tinkered flying machine. The quest and event has been placed near the entrance of the zone, thus the level of enemies should not prevent celebrations by all players of all levels. Once you compete in a race through airborne rings in the allotted time, you receive a temporary flying contraption which is NO ZONE but which you can use to fully explore the entire...
Kael Drakkel is making Contested Dungeons in EQ2 sexy again. With 15 names, and the largest zone ever added to EQ2 (it’s larger than Solusek’s Eye), there is a lot to live up to here. The zone is intended to be difficult, with loot somewhere between the hardest Velious instances and beginning raids. It’s a new way of approaching contested dungeons compared to The Hole, Karnor’s Castle, Sebilis, and Chardok which all struggled to keep our attention after a few weeks. Players have been looking for an old school dungeon crawl and Kael Drakkel seems to deliver. It shows...
Now that we’ve seen Tuesday’s Update Notes, we can talk about a few issues we’ve seen which remain unresolved. These may have been fixed today, but they don’t appear in the Update Notes. If you know of a specific bug affecting quest progression, zone progression, etc., please post a comment! Eastern Wastes Flight Discoveries Uncooperative Twins Forgotten Pools Zone In/Zone Out Stat Changes Nerf Level 20-60 Gear Nektropos Castle Door Missing Many Instances Not Spawning Mobs Public Quest Lag Call of the Veteran More Broken Than Ever Disruptive Students in Shadowed Corridors Raid Invites Autoconsume Items in Flight Spam...
It’s one week since the launch of Destiny of Velious and there are always bugs and issues that make it through from the Beta. Today’s update tackles many of them. With today’s update, many of these issues are fixed. Tradeskillers can now equip their Boreal or Frost Gryphon as a flying mount at level 85 tradeskill. Freebloods who have completed their Cloud of Bats quests can now use it. And the Collector’s Edition (still available as a $25 upgrade today until 10am PST [18:00 GMT] ) Stormfeather Brood Guardian is now usable by 85 tradeskill and 85 adventurer. The...
Tomorrow marks a week that Destiny of Velious has been live. I’ve had time to run through the Icy Fingers quest series on three characters, get my flying mount, check out Thurgadin, and even run through the first quest area in the Eastern Wastes. I’ve also poked my head into the Tower of Frozen Shadows: Shadowed Corridors. I’ve learned a few things during this time that I’d like to pass on. This is mainly meant for the non-raiding portion of our audience since the raiders most likely know all of this information already or have the level of gear...
From EverQuest2.com: February 26: Double XP Day Adventure, tradeskill, and AA XP gain are doubled. Saturday only! February 27: Loot Bonanza Day Today only, all named monsters will drop loot at 100% probability. Rare mobs will have doubled loot drop chances. February 28: Expansion Upgrade Day If you already own the Standard Edition, upgrade to Destiny of Velious Collector’s Edition for $25 on this day only. Pick up the Digital Collector’s Edition and enjoy the bonus items; Cryomantic Armor, the Stormfeather Brood Guardian Mount, Tserinna’s Wedding Present, and the Everfrost Summer Home (seen at this link).
A syndrome that I think many people who write about MMOs experience is that find ourselves actually PLAYING the game less and less. I’m certainly guilty of this myself. We get interested in a game, start writing about it based on our experience, and next thing you know we aren’t catching groups or raids anymore. So with Velious I made a commitment to get back in the game. So one of my first experiences has been getting into Public Quests, which spawned the article yesterday. The concept certainly makes for an interesting type of content, one that was popular...
Since the launch of the Destiny of Velious, there have been nearly 250 posts by Developers, Producers, and Animators on the EQ2 Team. While we appreciate this degree of feedback (it’s refreshing after the tight-lipped Velious Beta), it has been challenging to keep with it all, much less compose it into news stories that have context and are useful for our readers. No doubt if you are already familiar with the EQ2 Dev Tracker, you check it out on occasion. I personally follow the EQ2 Dev Tracker at EQ2Flames because it’s easy to read, however the comments and feedback...
Tom “ttobey” Tobey is asking for feedback on what emotes players would like to see added to the game. Head over to the official forums and let him know your ideas. Pretend I got sitting working… What 5 emotes would you want to see? Roleplaying type emotes I mean…. After seeing a few suggestions, he added the following: i thinking more on the lines of /sit /sleep etc… /read is a good one.
From EverQuest2.com: The U.S. servers will come down on February 25, 2011, at 7am PDT for a hotfix. The expected downtime is 2 hours. UK worlds will be updated at 5:00 AM London Time on February 25, 2011, with an estimated downtime will be 2 hours. Here are the notes: GENERAL Depth of Field, SSAO and Sunshafts should be working correctly now. Fixed a crash bug.