Dethdlr
I’ve got big hopes for EQ2 itemization and what we’ll see in the “Everquest II: Itemization Evolves” panel at SOE Live this year. For me, there are several things that go into itemization. It’s more extensive than just the items themselves. Here are a few notes on itemization that I hope will be included in that evolution: Go back to the days when gear was less cookie cutter. The days when you looked at more than just the Stamina stat to see if you were already wearing better. Bring back heroic zone progression meaning make the top level heroic...
Dethdlr’s Dungeon
Articles written by Dethdlr.
Editor’s Note: A week ago, Dethdlr sent me a draft of an article that he had the intention of posting to EQ2Wire at some point in the future. It hasn’t been polished or edited. But in light of today’s announcement, it’s timely and provides an interesting contrast to my article. For many years in EQ2, I was a casual raider. What I mean by that is, I would primarily run group zones with guild mates but from time to time I would join a pickup raid or tag along when another guild needed to fill some raid slots. Several...
Tank and Spank vs. Complex Scripting vs. Fun In recent years, I’ve seen numerous posts from people complaining about how the different group/raid encounters work. A lot of the complaints say that they don’t want simple “Tank and Spank” encounters. But they also don’t want encounters with complex scripting, fail conditions, cure fests, etc. They want encounters that are fun and challenging without any of those things. So it got me wondering, how do you do that? How do you make an encounter without complex scripting, fail conditions, cure fests, etc. without turning it into a tank and spank...
Last week, SOE released their new server status page. I took a look at this to see if there was anything there that I might be able to use myself. There was. I’ve put together three different versions of an EQ2 server status page, two of which can be embedded into your own website.
Having used my adornment calculator for a while now, there have been a few times where having the short descriptions in the drop down lists instead of the name of the adornment has been frustrating. Usually, this is when I’m trying to put in what I currently have adorned, rather than starting from scratch. The descriptions work well when you’ve never adorned a particular slot, but there are times when you don’t need them and would rather see the adornment names. For example, if I wanted to send a link to someone that shows my current adornments, I would...
Class-specific red adornments have been added to the EQ2Wire Adornment Calculator by Dethdlr. That’s 221 adornments added to the existing 175 for a total of 396 T9 adornments. And I still haven’t added the ones that drop from the public quests. Choose your class in the class dropdown to have that class’ adornments added to the proper dropdowns. Rather than converting the class specific red adornments from their names to what they do, I’ve just included the names in the dropdowns. For one thing, this should help with those that don’t stack. For another, it means you don’t have...
Dethdlr’s Adornment Calculator now has the non-class specific, non-raid dropped red adornments up as beta. Let me know if I got any of the numbers wrong and I’ll see about getting them fixed. I believe I’m going to wait until after GU60 to do the rest since there may be changes headed our way from SOE. Hope you like it. 🙂
I recently spent several hours researching what adornments I wanted to put on my new gear. This required going to multiple pages on multiple sites and manually calculating all the information I needed to know about adornments. This led me to think, there has to be a better way. What resulted from that thought was Dethdlr’s Adornment Calculator. Details after the break.
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...
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...
I’ve been helping Feldon out here at EQ2Wire for about eight months now. My first post was on April 4th 2010 so I haven’t quite been here a full year. In that time I’ve sifted through over seven thousand items to bring you almost 100 articles here on EQ2Wire. Hopefully you’ve found at least a few of them useful. I look forward to continuing my work in 2011 and bringing you all the latest highlights of what’s going on in the world of EQ2. Happy New Year Everybody!
Ever wonder what programmers do in their off time? Sometimes, we program. I write programs for my own use, apps for my guild’s website, even wrote an editor for the raid abilities for Fetish Nightfall a while back. If you’re Greg “Rothgar” Spence, the Lead Programmer for EQ2, you wire up over 30,000 Christmas lights and program them to go on and off synchronized to Christmas music!
A Bow to Pull With Any good plate tank needs a good pulling bow. You know, one that can hit mobs from way across the room. You may not use it all the time, but you at least have it on your hot bar. They come in handy for all sorts of things. Once you’ve used one with an extra long range, it’s hard to go back to using anything else. They even make questing easier since you can hit the mobs from so far away (less running around).
I remember several years ago preparing to raid Deathtoll. The first thing I did was ride a cloud up on Bonemire and jump off at just the right spot so I could land on the floating island containing Arbiter Selek. But before I could talk to him, I had to speak Draconic. That’s right, first I had to do the quest Speak as a Dragon that started with a raid and then sent me all over Norrath looking for items.
Fan Faire is now over and one thing seems to be clear: SOE does not have a plan to balance the new players coming into the game between EQ2X and EQII Live, at least not one they are willing to share with us…
E3 took place this year from June 15-17. SmokeJumper was interviewed and said that the current subscription model would not change. When asked after the announcement of EQ2 Extended about that interview, he had this to say: Yes, at that time, we were discussing the concept. No, we were not ready to commit to it, nor did we have any details of what we might be doing. On July 27th, EQ2 Extended was announced. I counted up how many work days passed between the interview and the announcment. Guess how many work days went by?
Overview Welcome to the first installment of Dethdlr’s Dungeon. This is my little place on EQ2Wire to post my commentary on EQ2. Unlike the news items, this is more for opinion based articles from my own perspective. For my first article here I’m going to tackle: How to figure out an encounter. I’m sure some of our readers know all of this information already but there’s probably a tidbit or two in there that may help someone out. Here goes…