Feldon
In an unusual move, Alan “Brenlo” Crosby, Senior Producer of EverQuest II, has posted some high level updates on what we can expect from Game Update 56 coming in May. As many of you know, several items planned for the expansion and corresponding Game Update 55 slipped: New Halas, Shaders 3.0, New Spell Animations, Thundering Steppes revamp, etc. Also, there have been major performance problems with many of the live servers, which have been alternately attributed to Battlegrounds, Database Issues, or the expansion itself. After the jump, you can read Brenlo‘s response to these issues, copied from the EQ2...
Raiding
The previous Thursday and Tuesday hotfixes have brought some itemization changes, specifically with the increase in the number of items holding Red Adornment slots, the introduction of Yellow Adornments for heroic gear, and the addition of Resists to Legendary and Fabled gear (previously, players were expected to run around with 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry). Now, we are starting to see the second prong of these changes, intended to fix the itemization mess that Sentinel’s Fate launched with. Frizznik brings us: Thanks for your patience with us as we look at items, spells, and combat arts. We are reading...
Thursday night saw the first post-expansion developer chat of 2010. Hosted by ZAM, this chat had previously been scheduled for March 4th, but was postponed to March 18th as developers focused on issues with Battlegrounds. You would have assumed, with the key issues of Battlegrounds and Itemization consuming a great deal of development effort in the month since Sentinel’s Fate launched, AND the 2 week postponement in the EQ2 Developer Chat, that Calthine at ZAM would have received an avalanche of hardball questions. Instead, we saw just a few of these critical issues raised, with the rest running the...
Your Hotfix notes for March 18th include tweaks to Tier 3 (raid armor). NOTE: Make sure your EQ2 client patches before trying to log into EQ2. Due to an oversight, EQ2 servers are allowing out-of-date clients to login, resulting in bugs with the Broker, Group window, etc. After the jump…
Today brings the first part of a two part story about how we got to the Itemization situation we are in now. Part history lesson, part recap. Part 2 will try to sort out the Sentinel’s Fate Itemization picture as we have it so far. I assure you that Part 2 will be MUCH shorter. 🙂 After the posting of Part 2, we will be posting a survey to get your feedback on these long-form articles.
Today’s Hotfix notes for March 16th, 2010. Yellow Adornments also made it in, but they’re not in the notes… GENERALMost of the guards in Freeport, Qeynos and Kelethin have had their levels reduced to what they had previously. Exceptions to this include palace guards and patrolling knights. ITEMS All jewelry from the Vigilant: Final Destruction (x2) has had resists added. Summoning the mount from the Ykeshan Warbear whistle will now work if you are level 80 in either adventuring or tradeskilling. The valuable, Onayan staff of the waves, should now be on the Vasty Deep collection tables. QUESTS The...
Most of the Sentinel’s Fate raid and heroic gear has had no Resists (vs. Arcane, vs. Elemental, vs. Noxious), presumably with the intention that players would have to wear 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry. Also, all but the highest level raid gear in Sentinel’s Fate has lacked Red Adornment Slots. This made most of this gear a poor upgrade over TSO raid gear. If you’ve been following the Equipment Adjustments thread on the EQ2 Forums, as well as yesterday’s Hotfix notes, you know that Resists and Red Slots have now started to appear on Fabled and Legendary gear. However...
EQ2 servers will come down for a Hotfix on Thursday, March 11th, 2010. This hotfix takes place at 6am PST for U.S. servers and 5am GMT on March 12th for Runnyeye and Splitpaw. After the Hotfix notes, you’ll find some good news about the Guard levels in Qeynos, Freeport, and Kelethin.
If you’ve been thinking that the pieces of the Sentinel’s Fate itemization puzzle just have not fit well together, you are not alone. While we have not spent a lot of time covering itemization in SF, it is because things have continued to be in such a state of flux during, and after the Beta. The smooth progression of TSO gear was seemingly replaced by a scattershot approach, with some of the x2 raid items being the best in the game, the x4 Hard Mode gear being only 1-2% better than the x2 Easy Mode gear, and Battlegrounds gear...
Posted by Kiara: We’ll be having our usual Tuesday hotfix starting at 6am for the US servers and at 9pm (5am GMT Wednesday March 10) for Runnyeye and Splitpaw.The downtime will be the usual hour or so. and your March 9 Hotfix Notes after the jump…
In our March 5th End-of-Week News, we neglected to post a link to the thread discussing Raid Mob Damage Output and some fine-tuning that will be happening to mobs as a result. From Rothgar: This sounds like it was maybe due to another bug fix. Sometimes when we find a bug with a profession spell and fix it, the fix also “fixes” bugs that were on NPC’s that we didn’t know existed. It may have been possible that those NPC’s were bugged too and during beta tuning they were made harder and harder because no one knew that a...
Here are some end-of-week news items which I’ve noticed on the EQ2 forums that readers may find useful… Scale of Flame Players have been having trouble advancing/completing the quest Scale of Flame. In response, Gninja has responded: I found the issue causing the spirit to not spawn and have corrected it. You should see it come to live server early next week with our next build. Breaking Combat on PvP/Battlegrounds Rothgar has made some further adjustments in how combat is broken on PvP/Battlegrounds. It has been tweaked so that you must be at least 1000m from the other player...
Several players have reported that Xilaxis the Explorer in the new Labs x4 raid zone is not dropping any loot other than small wooden chests of plat (not a bad reward, but some armor would be nice). Fortunately, timetravelling is on the case: I found the issue with both his normal- and challenge-mode item tables and corrected them. Should be hotfixed soon, apologies for the frustrations! No words on those pants though.
With every expansion, a few of the guards in Qeynos and Freeport, especially the “stronghold” or most-defended area of each city, in this case North Qeynos and East Freeport, are dinged to a level that would make them perilous to invaders of the opposing alignment. So imagine our surprise when we logged in after Game Update 55 (coinciding with Sentinel’s Fate) and found that every man, woman, and child guarding the cities of Qeynos and Freeport, in every area of the city, all magically dinged level 95. These guards are packing heat!
One of the unique characteristics of the Ranger mythical bow Eagle’s Talon is that it allowed the user to do ranged auto-attacks at point blank range (zero meters distance). Once a ranger has completed the Epic Repercussions quests, they are awarded an enervated version of Eagle’s Talon with all of the special effects stripped off, and then zero-concentration spells are added to their Knowledge book to get all those unique effects on whatever bow they decide to use. The issue is that those persistent buffs do not grant the ability to use other bows at point blank (0m) range....
Once everyone logs back into EverQuest II with the launch of Sentinel’s Fate and Game Update 55, you will face many choices. Do you reset your AAs and spend them differently to take advantage of the new endline abilities of my Class and Subclass Trees? We already know that your Kingdom of Sky Class page will be reset on your first login, because points are spent differently on it. Do you start solo questing from level 80-90? Don’t forget to move your AA slider back from 100%! You cannot spend more than 200 AAs until you reach level 81....
I’m sure a lot of you are wondering. Where’s the good stuff? Where’s the shard gear? Where’s the raid gear? Where’s the Battlegrounds gear? Where’s the detailed analysis of class changes, the new AAs, racial traits, etc.? The meat and potatoes of groupers and raiders that my readers have come to expect from EQ2Wire? Frankly, I’d like to know too. 🙂 However even at this late date, all of these items are in such a state of flux on Beta, that it seems to document ANYTHING at this point would be foolhardy. Beta veterans assure me that there’s plenty...
Mythicals present a significant challenge to EQ2 developers trying to create desirable weapons for players at level 90. Some of the Mythical effects are uniquely powerful and no player would even consider replacing them without getting the same effect with another weapon. For this reason, it was announced at Fan Faire that mythicals would become either an equippable charm, or a clickable item. Already, in Beta, players have discovered that, when equipped, Mythicals would not modify level 81-90 spells (eg. Chimes of Blades III, etc.). The Truth Comes Out Frizznik has posted in the Beta forums that owners of...
Sentinel’s Fate Group Dungeon & Raid Zone List by Difficulty Difficulty Rating Key Easy Easy to Moderate Moderate Moderate to Hard Hard The Hole contested (82-90) Sprawling dungeon with 3 wings of difficulty, most content tailored for 2-4 players. Old Paineel Dartain’s Fortress Tower of Serilis The Hole instances Demitrik’s Bastion (85+) The Outer Vault (88+) Spirit’s Resonance (88+) Vasty Deep The Conservatory (86-88) The Abandoned Labs (90) The Vestigal Cella (90) Erudin Erudin Library (87-89) Erudin Research Halls (90) Erudin Royal Palace (90) The Vigilant The Vigilant: Incursion! (90) The Vigilant: Infiltration! (90) The Vigilant: Rescue! (90) Sentinel’s...
From EQ2Players: Raiding is an important part of gameplay for many and is a part of every MMO. Roger “Patherpanchali” Uzun designs the raids for EQII and Brett “Timetravelling” Scheinert often works with him on these. Timetravelling was kind enough to sit down and give us an overview of the new raids coming with Sentinel’s Fate. We have three x4 raid instances launching with: Sentinel’s Fate: Lair of the Dragon Queen (x4) Perah’Celsis’ Abominable Laboratory (x4) The Palace of Roehn Theer (x4) For x4 content players will discover the Lair of the Dragon Queen first, then Perah’Celsis’ Abominable Laboratory,...
While we don’t have all the details on what perks will be available to Guilds reaching the new level 90 cap, we know that Game Update #55 will add 2 new Guild Hall Amenities. The first is pretty straightforward. It’s a Wizard Portal NPC with all the destinations available from the Ulteran Spires. It does not include the Kingdom of Sky zones of Tenebrous Tangle, Barren Sky, or Bonemire: Realm of Dawn. You’ll still need that amenity if your guildies are making regular use of these zones. The second new Guild Hall Amenity is the Guild Standard Bearer. If...
And just to bring out tour of the UI improvements in Game Update #55 full circle, the lowly Zone Timers (Lockouts) window has been the bane of many a raid leader, as they remind players over and over to reset their group/raid persistent zone timers. While I didn’t see a /resetallzones command (there might be one, I’m just not aware of it), the new Filter function at the bottom of the Zone Timers window should help considerably at raid time.
Rothgar has reported in that those changes to prevent large Macros have been pulled out, and a fix is going in which should hopefully resolve the issues in Munzok’s Material Bastion.
For those of you lucky (or unlucky 😉 ) enough to be raiding MMB, the zone is currently difficult or impossible to complete due to the January 28th hotfix. More information about this issue can be found in this EQ2 Forums thread.
A new Achievement has been added for Raiders who are able to clear the original Shadow Odyssey raid mobs without dying (earning a Flawless Victory at least once on each mob). These are some pretty amazing awards, commensurate with the effort required to get them. \aITEM 92894355 -1176837326:[Flawless Charm of Combat]\/a \aITEM -625928716 1415794346:[Flawless Symbol of Stealth]\/a \aITEM 1132459187 -1244409981:[Flawless Gem of Healing]\/a \aITEM 1381090014 420207800:[Flawless Stone of Destruction]\/a