From the EQ2 Forums:

From the EQ2 Forums:

From EverQuest2.com:

MEMBERSHIP UPDATES
The following restrictions have been removed on Free and Silver accounts:

• Class selections (Beastlord still requires Age of Discovery)
• Race selections (Freeblood still requires purchase)
• Bag slots
• Shared Bank slots
• Active journal quests allowed

GENERAL

• There is no longer a broker fee for buying Krono from the broker.

Logo mockup by EQ2Wire

From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale on the EQ2 Forums:

To all Norrathians,

The Velious saga continues! New lands and adventures will be uncovered on April 30 with Game Update 66 entitled EverQuest II: Scars of the Awakened!

Ever vigilant, Norrathians march united under the banner of the New Combine army, deeper into the perilous continent of Velious.

Finally, the army breaches the borders of a region known as Cobalt Scar – a majestic, lush, but tormented region. And from within dark passages in the surrounding mountains, the inhabitants of Sirens Grotto beckon to all.

From the EQ2 Forums:

NEW RAID ZONES

• New x2 raid zone Wurmbone’s End: Nox Incessit (with normal and challenge versions). Entrance located in Jarsath Wastes.
• New x4 raid zone The Dreadcutter: The Pirate Kings. Entrance located in Obol Plains on the dock.

NEW BAG SORTING, SWAPPING AND DUMPING FEATURES
Bag Sorting:
Open up the Bag Options window from the button on each bag to access the filters that you’d like to set for a respective inventory bag. After setting your options, hit the “Sort” button on your Character window. This will send a command up to the server with “/sort_bags name”.

• In addition to sorting by “name”, you can type the sort_bags command yourself and put “level” to sort by level of the item instead.
• Any option that you set for filtering items will also affect which bag the item goes to upon looting!
• If you’d rather a bag not be sorted, feel free to mark the bag as a “Skip”.

From the EQ2 Forums:

The update on February 26th was discussed in Podcast #143, as well as in articles about the PvP Updates and Bag Sorting Abilities. Now, it’s time to take a look at two more major features that round out the update: new raid content and guild achievements!

X2 and X4 Raids

On February 21st, SOE Podcast #143 was posted and it includes a brief interview between Colette “Dexella” Murphy, EQ2’s Community Manager, and Kyle “Kander” Vallee, EQ2 Lead Designer, Brian “Omougi” Ferguson, EQ2 Systems Design, and Kenneth “Terrogaunt” Roecks, EQ2 Programmer.

After the jump, we provide a transcript of the EQ2 part of the Podcast including:

• Wurmbone Crag: Nox Incessit [x2 Normal and Challenge Raids]
• Dreadcutter: The Pirate Kings [x4 Challenge Raid]
• Bag Sorting — one-click sort bags by Level or Name into 14 categories
• PvP Balance — continued tweaks
• PvP Blue Adornments — new slots
• PvP Guardian — buffed!
• confirmation of Cobalt Scar in Game Update 66 at the end of April

Download SOE Podcast #143 [15:31 mp3]

From the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• The Legends o Norrath store should be functioning properly again.
• Fixed an issue where false duplicates of items could appear in the claim window.

ZONE PROGRESSION

Harrow’s End [Raid]

• Fixed a zone crash that could happen when a raid force wiped to Drinal.

Although we’ve already been advised that the era of “Pre-Adorned Items” isn’t coming to an end any time soon, we can look forward to a new vendor being added next week in Game Update 65.5 which will allow us to purchase some of the more run-of-the-mill Red and Yellow Adornments for [eq2u]Obol[/eq2u] and [eq2u]Greater Spirit[/eq2u].

Greater Spirits -> Obols

If you happen to have an abundance of [eq2u]Greater Spirit[/eq2u] but are running short on [eq2u]Obol[/eq2u], you’ll be able to trade them in. A [eq2u]Crate of Obols[/eq2u] will also cost 7p and 1 Greater Spirit in exchange for 18 Obols.

NOTE: Greater Spirits drop from heroic zones. Obols drop from any Chains of Eternity zone including overland trash.

Game Update 65.5 Red and Yellow Adornments Vendor

A new NPC named Dulgur Bindmagic is being added next to Drinal’s Steward in the village of Cardin Ward in Obol Plains.

As posted by Praetorian, owner of the Raid strategy discussion site EQ-Raiders, on the EQ2 Forums:

It is now official that EQ-Raiders will be hosting a brand new Raid Guild Progression website.

This new website will have both manual kill submissions (For guilds that fall out of the realm of accurate auto-updaters) as well as automated kill verification updates through a unique RaidHub interface being created by Mecrab, the author of RaidHub. The website is being designed and coded by Mecrab and should be launching this weekend. RaidHub will not be required by any means but with the added capabilities and the already large amount of guilds that utilize RaidHub, it only seemed natural to make that the platform of choice. The website will also take full advantage of kill verifications with the upcoming new SOE Data Feeds that feature guild kill updates as well.

Holly “Windstalker” Longdale has posted on the EQ2 Forums:

Hello again intrepid Norrathians,

We are inching closer to our February 26 Update and we have some news to share.

In my Producer Letter in our forums on Feb. 5, I listed the features we had planned for our Feb. 26 update. One of them I referred to as a Loyalty Program that centered around daily, weekly, and monthly objectives. We have been working on the feature and don’t feel it’s up to snuff yet. We want more time for testing, feedback, and iteration to ensure it’s fun. That in mind, we are going to hold this back for a while.

That said, we hope to have an unexpected addition to the February Update!

Guilds, take notice! We are introducing Guild Achievements to track and reward your guild’s accomplishments. In the new guild Achievements window, we list raid targets and their point value and we will track — including time stamps down to the second – the achievements for your guild. And if your guild wants to participate by including its achievements in our data feed, the information will be shared with the community at large. We are working on solutions for displaying the data and sharing this news with the fan sites.

Sincerely, as always,

Holly Longdale
Producer, EQII

I expected fierce responses to yesterday’s article about Drinal and the issues raiders have been facing in Harrow’s End. I wrote about issues that players have faced since the expansion launched, with a focus on the issues that still seem to exist based on player reports in the two Drinal threads I linked on the EQ2 forums. It was absolutely my intention to push some buttons and try to get some traction on fixing the Boss of the Chains of Eternity expansion. As to whether I went too far, that will be up to the reader.

Let’s get some clarifications out of the way…

UPDATE from Gninja on February 21, 2013:

From the EQ2 Forums:

Enough is enough. It has been three full months since the launch of the Chains of Eternity expansion and the bosses of the expansion are hopelessly broken.

During the Chains of Eternity beta, there were warning signs that something was seriously amiss. On one hand, the Skyshrine and Chains of Eternity raiding ended up being so easy that the top 10-15 guilds per server had cleared nearly ALL the content within 48-72 hours of release. On the other hand, Drinal launched essentially unkillable. Not challenging. Not difficult. Broken.

From the EQ2 Forums:

UPDATE: This article has been corrected to state that this is not Game Update 66, which is expected later this spring, but a mini-update which is internally being called Game Update 65.5.

From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale, Senior Producer of EverQuest II on the EQ2 Forums comes news of a game update which we can expect on February 26th, 2013.

If you’ve been flopping, leashing, or feign deathing past the second and third-from-last named encounters in Wurmbone’s End [Advanced Solo] to save time on your way to the boss of the zone, you’ll be seeing a change today. Now, you must kill at least 2 names before the final named will spawn. The popularity of this zone, specifically the last named (Prime Magnate Mrelg), derived from the fact that, when allowed to go into Challenge mode (by not clicking on his smoky “breath”), he drops three loot chests when killed. This was not an unexpected change.

The bigger inconvenience/bummer for me is, you will no longer be able to use the red clicky [eq2u]Celestial Fragment of Subversion[/eq2u] item on him to take off his last 30% of health. I used this item regularly, and only on some occasions was I able to kill him without it. The only “loot” that I cared about from any of the lesser names in any of the Chains of Eternity zones was the red 30% damage clicky. All the other items were pretty much fluff. So with this change, I am even less enthused about the time spent killing the subbosses of each zone.

From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
General

• Scout shields should now drop much less often from Avatars.

Chelsith: The Ancient Vault

• Corrected a bug that was causing items and obols to not drop off trash encounters.

Wurmbone’s End

• You should now be less likely to fall through the world when zoning into any of the Wurmbone’s End zones.

Wurmbone’s End [Advanced Solo]

• [eq2u]Celestial Fragment of Subversion[/eq2u] can no longer be used on Prime Magnate Mrelg once he has become the challenge version.
• All-Blocker Mohngu must now be defeated in order to spawn Necromunger Garrkk.
• Necromunger Garrkk must now be defeated in order to spawn Prime Magnate Mrelg.

After 2 weeks in Miami, it seems Drinal has returned to the Ethernere for more afterlife mayhem. From the EQ2 Forums:

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Harrow‘s End (Raid)

• Targets marked with Transfiguration by Drinal should no longer be affected by Exhaustive Souldrain.
• Drinal should now be awarding the correct achievement for killing him in any soulwell.
• Drinal should no longer occasionally drop an empty chest.
• Drinal should once again reset properly when he defeats players.
• Corrected an issue that was causing a zone crash when Drinal defeated players.

What makes people competitive? What makes people want to put their reputation on the line and be compared and judged by others?

At the conclusion of any sports event, one team experiences the euphoria of victory while the other is left asking themselves where they went wrong with their offensive or defensive strategies and what they could do better. But while sports are the obvious example, competition can be found everywhere. In academics. In Barbecue. In growing the largest tomato. People will make fools of themselves on national TV just for the chance to win a few bucks. So it’s not unexpected that pockets of competition would develop even within the humble Massively Multiplayer Online game.

Today’s update is all about Itemization, specifically Group and Raid zones in Chains of Eternity.

Heroic Itemization

Players have been clamoring for Chains of Eternity Heroic zones to drop items even as good as some of the powerful items found in Advanced Solo zones, and it looks like those sentiments have been heard. (Don’t worry Soloers, the solo zones still drop a ton of loot).

Sleeper’s Tomb (Contested) has had a bigger problem as players quickly abandoned it when they found that the loot was hardly better than that from the much easier instanced heroic zones.

Pre-Adorned Items

After 3 expansions with Yellow and Red Adornments being sold by vendors, Chains of Eternity tried something new with Pre-Adorned items. The most desirable adornments are now found in dungeons and raid zones already attached to items (often of a different class/spec to the adornment). While this is an intriguing concept, and it has the potential to extend gameplay, it has also led to player confusion and frustration.

But one slice of the EQ2 playerbase who have yet to see the silver lining in this concept of Pre-Adorned loot are Raid Leaders who have been given the unenviable task of deciding whether Pre-Adorned items will go to someone who needs the gear upgrade, or someone who needs the adornment.

While Kander isn’t yet ready to throw in the towel on pre-adorned loot by slapping all the adornments on a vendor, it seems he’s recognized the inherent difficulties and is now providing an alternative to dividing the child:

There will not be a merchant for CoE adornments. We are adding green adornment removers that will remove green adornments without destroying the item, they will be available for plat from a merchant. We are also adding adornment removers that will remove any one adornment without destroying the item. These will be very costly, plat wise from a merchant, but will be rare drops in all CoE heroic and raid zones.

After the jump, the full Update Notes, including the pricey new Adornment Dislodgers which don’t destroy the items…

Even the most jaded player must admit that the EQ2 team have spent a lot of time in the last 18 months tweaking and balancing the classes, both in PvP and PvE situations. Every class in EQ2 now has a role to play, and the tools necessary to play that role, even if that role may not be the most engaging or fun to play.

On Friday, Mike “Xelgad” Ganz, EQ2’s Mechanics Lead, posted threads in each of the Class forums seeking feedback not for further balancing, but what tweaks could be done to make each class less tedious and more enjoyable to actually play. This message was posted on the EQ2 forums under the Priests, Mages, Scouts, and Fighters subforums:

We’re requesting focused feedback on the current state of each class. We’re particularly interested in suggestions on how to make the classes more enjoyable, such as improving tedious abilities to be more user-friendly. Balance issues are always a concern, but numbers tend to spotlight those issues, while it’s easy to overlook problems that simply make the classes less fun than they should be.

We do read your normal forum feedback, but we have had the most success with feedback during betas and in the testing forum. However, it’s difficult to address existing class issues when the focus is on new additions. The idea here is to put the focus on the classes as they exist on live, including everything from the new Prestige Abilities to the spells and combat arts granted at early levels. We’re going to close this thread at the end of next week, but we’ll do more focus feedback threads if they are successful. The goal is to get some improvements to live with the next game update.

Thanks!

From the EQ2 Forums:

GUILD HALL AMENITIES

Depots

• The maximum number of different resources that you can store in a Guild Harvest Depot has been increased from 200 to 1000.
• Several new Depots have been added as guild amenities! Check the “Depot” tab in your guildhall amenity list for details.
• The maximum number of items in a single depot stack has been increased from 20,000 to 99,999.
• Set Access now works with storage containers for the purpose of withdrawing items from the containers. Deposit remains open to all.
• Storage containers will now show the minimum level to use an item instead of the item level if there is one specified.
• You can now use the Deposit All button on depots to deposit every valid component from your bags.

Here are your Update Notes for Thursday, December 13, 2012. This update is expected to take 2 hours. From the EQ2 Forums:

GENERAL

• Mounts will no longer show the locked icon on them when you can use them.

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION
Harrow’s End x4

• Bastion’s pillars should regenerate energy nearly equally as fast as they get drained. The draining should also be slightly lessened.
• Drinal should no longer be casting his curse repetitively while the curse is already active on a raid member.
• Drinal’s Power Over Death curse should once again be at the appropriate duration.
• Oligar should resummon his protective golems regardless of the order they are killed if he feels he is not adequately protected.

Altar of Abhorrence x4

• The Enraged Imp should be a bit more forgiving with his DPS checking.

• Mark of the Ireblind should no longer persist through death.

So while we’re crossing our fingers that EQ2U will get access to Loot Tables someday soon, I wanted to take our new Item Popups for a spin and put together a collaborative loot article. We’ll be covering loot from Advanced Solo, Group, and Raid Zones, and even Collections as I know there are some good reward items out there.

What do I do?

Please post item names below and who the item is from (as well as any adornments that are bundled with the item), which zone, and whether it was the EM or HM version. I’ll be reading through the comments and updating this article.

Surround each item’s name with {eq2u}and {/eq2u} (replacing the { and } with [ and ]) and it will automagically turn into an item popup.

From EQ2’s Twitter:

The US Servers will come down on Thursday, December 6, 2012, at 4:00 pm Pacific* for a hotfix. The expected downtime is one hour. [Dexella]

— EverQuest II (@everquestii) December 6, 2012

Time Zone Conversions

• PST: December 6 @ 4-5:00pm
• EST: December 6 @ 7-8:00pm
• GMT: December 7 @ 0:00-01:00
• CET: December 7 @ 01:00-02:00

Full Update Notes after the jump…