Feldon
From EverQuest2.com: With all the new Heroic and Raid content being released in Game Update 63: SKYSHRINE, we just had to go over and get the inside scoop from Assistant Lead Designer Kyle “Kander” Vallee. Piestro: How difficult is the heroic and raid content available in Game Update 63: SKYSHRINE? Is this targeted at only the more advanced players or will this content be suitable for every skill level? Kander: We are really making an effort to see that heroic content is broadly accessible to everyone and try to cover every play style, from the causal solo player to the group player who wants...
From Lyndro on the EQ2 Forums: The new AA curve is mostly based on the amount of AA experience most people earn when they reach 90. For people who start up new characters (new players or alts), we’d much prefer they have fun playing the game rather than mentoring down to grind their way up to 280. This isn’t really compelling gameplay, and we don’t see a whole lot of value in perpetuating it. We’d much prefer that when the bulk of people “finish” (Finish is a tough term to define and is loaded and open to lots of...
From EverQuest2.com: Spring Special! Get two times the SC when you buy Station Cash® between April 6th and April 8th*! * Valid from 12:01 AM PDT 4/6/2012 and 11:59 PM PDT 4/8/2012 only. Excludes purchases of Station Cash by SMS. Cards Too! We have confirmed with several players that StationCash Cards also apply to this Double SC event. Time Zone Conversions PDT: Friday April 6 @ 12:01am ~ April 8 @ 11:59pm EDT: Friday April 6 @ 3:01am ~ April 9 @ 2:59am BST: Friday April 6 @ 8:01 ~ April 9 @ 7:59 CET: Friday April 6 @...
In preparation for Game Update 63: Skyshrine (arriving April 17th, 2012), EQII is having a Double XP Weekend. Starting at 12:01 pm Pacific (Noon) on Friday, April 6, 2012 and lasting until 11:59 pm Pacific on Sunday, April 8, 2012 we’ll offer Double Experience in EverQuest II! Take advantage of these three days and watch those XP bars fill up! Time Zone Conversions PDT: April 6 @ 12:01pm ~ April 8 @ 11:59pm EDT: April 6 @ 3:01pm ~ April 9 @ 2:59am BST: April 6 @ 20:00 ~ April 9 @ 7:59 CET: April 6 @ 21:00 ~...
New Drakota Mounts with Game Update 63: SKYSHRINE! Everyone loves mounts, and Game Update 63: SKYSHRINE does not disappoint in this regard. With the inclusion of the new Drakota Mounts, players will have new choices for their steed to convey them throughout Norrath. Available in a number of different ways, everything from Collections and Quests to drops in Heroic and Raid instances, you’ll want to pick the Drakota that is right for you. There are even some named Drakota for those of you who are searching for the truly unique and most prestigious of mounts! Discuss this on the...
When the ProSiebenSat.1 deal was announced, it was indicated that some EQ2 servers would be IP locked. Existing EU players would be grandfathered into continuing to play on US servers, but US players would not be able to continue to play on EU servers. The IP locking (SOE was careful not to use this term) applied to the servers. After this announcement went over like mustard-flavored ice cream, SOE went away for 2 1/2 months and came back with a different approach. Servers will NOT be region-locked, accounts will be. So if you try to login to your SOE...
From Piestro on the EQ2 Forums: As to PvP changes, at one time these were tenatively planned for GU63. Unfortunately the scope of GU63 meant that PvP changes would not be feasible to include, because GU63 has so much in it already. I don’t want to go ahead and promise they’ll be in GU64 (because it’s too early for that), but this is a matter I will continue to discuss with the Development team. I’ll continue to note feedback we recieve and bring issues up on a regular basis.
From the EQ2 Forums: Important: We will perform maintenance that will affect the Nagafen server beginning at 4:00 AM Pacific* on Thursday, April 5, 2012. We expect this maintenance to last approximately 6 hours. We apologize for this interruption and will resume all affected services as soon as the maintenance is completed.
If you’ve been concerned about how much AA XP grinding you’ll have to run this upcoming Double XP weekend to prepare for Game Update 63, it looks we’re about to be graded on a curve. As per a Test Update Note and discussion thread on In Testing Feedback, it looks like the AA Experience Curve is being flattened: We have modified the AA XP tables reducing the amount of experience necessary for advancement levels 1 to 280. When you log in your character they will be converted from the old tables to the new tables this will cause most...
And we thought they’d forgotten… From the EQ2 Forums: GENERAL All single group instances now have a lockout of 90 minutes. Fixed a bug where lingering dot effects from dead and looted NPCs could start critting. PLAYER HOUSING Marketplace housing deeds will now include the maximum number of placed items, prior to using house expanders, in the description. Increased item limit for Researcher’s Sanctum to 600. ITEMS Drunder x4 priest breastplates (non-Challenge mode) can now proc Celestial Restoration III.
A detail we missed in the April Update: Spring Fever Over the Easter holiday, we will have some fun Spring items for sale in the marketplace as well as some pretty big SOE holiday promotions. Everyone will get to enjoy double experience over the weekend too! If you’re short on AA (you’ll need 280 AAs before you can start leveling to 91 and 92), this looks like a good time.
From the EQ2 Forums comes a recap of what we can expect in April. With the exception of a Double XP weekend over Easter, there’s little new to of note except some vague comments about bug fixes. And no word on DOV Dungeon Timers being Reduced to 90 Minutes, which was promised for March. Here are the April Update Plans for EverQuest II! The Skyshrine update (GU 63) is taking the lion’s share of the team’s focus right now (launching in mid-April), but other things are still happening as we continue to smash bugs, improve systems, and look to...
From Brasse on the EQ2 Forums: Friends, We promised that all players would be able to play together, to play on the servers of their choice. This was a huge undertaking, technically, but vital to keeping our players together. Accounts will necessarily be handled separately as games transition. We are working very closely together and we are all are fully committed to serving their customers well. While it will be impossible to address each and every post here, I would like to answer a few.
Five weeks after posting a Frequently Asked Questions that left many questions unanswered, today brings a revised FAQ which fills in some of the gaps. We’ve highlighted in blue the sections which contain new and notable information. From the EQ2 Forums: Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) recently announced a new multi-year partnership with ProSiebenSat.1 Games Group to license eight of its online games in Europe, including DC UniverseTM Online, EverQuest® II, Star Wars®: Clone Wars AdventuresTM, Free Realms®, Magic: The Gathering – Tactics®, Pox Nora®, the upcoming PlanetSide® 2, and the next installment of the EverQuest® franchise. This new partnership...
Eric “Piestro” Cleaver interviewed Brian “Omougi” Ferguson on the EQ2 Forums about the upcoming Game Update 63: As we continue on towards the release of Game Update 63: SKYSHRINE, I sat down with Game Designer Brian “Omougi” Ferguson to talk a little bit about tradeskills. Tradeskills are a big part of GU 63 and he had a lot of exciting information to share! [Piestro] So tell us a little bit about tradeskills in GU 63. What can tradeskillers expect to see once the Game Update is released? [BF] Game Update 63 contains the first step into the 10th tier...
From EverQuest2.com: Skyshrine, the ancient city of dragons, will make its way to the EverQuest II world in Game Update 63. In this week’s webcast your host Linda “Brasse” Carlson (Director of Global Community Relations) chats with Holly “Windstalker” Longdale (Producer), Akil “Lyndro” Hooper (Lead Designer), and Dave “Smoke Jumper” Georgeson (Director of Development) about the level increase, the prestige system, tradeskills, and more! Join us on Thursday, March 29, 2012, at 4:00 p.m. US Pacific Time* on Twitch TV! The webcast is expected to last about 20 minutes. Be there to hear about some of the exciting content in Game...
From EverQuest2.com: Get a first glimpse of the next EverQuest II Game Update – Skyshrine. Our talented Senior Artist, Tad Ehrlich, takes you through the Skyshrine courtyard giving a taste of this exciting new content coming this April. The Destiny of Velious saga continues as adventurers breach the barriers of the Withered Lands seeking entrance to Skyshrine, the glorious ancient dragon city! The great citadel of Skyshrine has long housed the group of dragons known as the Claws of Veeshan behind its massive walls and arcane protections. Now, the unthinkable has happened — it has become besieged by powerful...
From the EQ2 Forums: ITEMS The following items no longer have duplicates of the same stats, they now have the sum of the duplicated stats: Magi’s Bracelet of Eradication Hammer of Divine Retribution Zealot’s Breastplate Magi’s Earring of Eradication Magi’s Belt of Eradication Shoulder Pads of Meditation Magi’s Necklace of Eradication Spinestaff Magi’s Ring of Eradication
From Karen Bryan at Massively: As Massively reported this week, EverQuest II Game Update 63 is inching closer to going live, and it’s bringing some exciting changes. There are new zones, instances, quests, and lots of dragons on the way. For old Velious fans, the return of Skyshrine will be a welcome sight, although there’s new danger and turmoil both inside the city as well as through the land that surrounds it. We’re beginning to get more specifics on what is included in this update, and this week’s Tattered Notebook offers a rundown of what’s revealed so far. The...
A recurring controversy in EverQuest II is the ability to sell or gift looting rights to a player who was not present at the time the mob died. This could be an alternate raider who was sitting out, a player who went linkdead at the crucial moment during the fight, or it could be a player who “buys” the item in auction. Last night two forum topics were created on the EQ2 forums suggesting that SLR had become impossible on Test, and that only players who had been present at the time of the kill could loot items from...
Confirming rumors we’d heard last week, Blue’s News and StrategyInformer are reporting that SOE is renaming its annual fan gathering from “SOE Fan Faire” to “SOE Live“. Sony has announced the debut of a new convention devoted to Sony Online Entertainment MMOs, SOE Live. The convention will be located in Las Vegas, NV from the 18th through 21st October this year. The convention will take place at the Bally’s Casino. The games that will be showcased at the convention include DC Universe Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Free Realms, Magic: The Gathering – Tactics, Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures and...
On January 12, 2012, Sony Online Entertainment announced an exclusive publishing and distribution deal with ProSiebenSat.1, a German TV media company whose gaming division Alaplaya has previously known for its pay-to-win browser games. After 2 weeks, we raised some questions about the deal. Yet it would be another four weeks before any official response would come. And if SOE hoped that a vague Frequently Asked Questions about the ProSiebenSat.1 deal would allay fears and reassure players, it couldn’t have had a more opposite effect. Never has the EQ2 playerbase been more united behind one issue than ensuring that ALL...
From the EQ2 Forums: GENERAL Fixed a bug where some NPCs were still critting on players. Charmed players will no longer crit at all.
Dethdlr
Akil “Lyndro” Hooper has posted a followup to his interview with Piestro on the official forums: Hey folks, I know that much of this is information that you already knew, but we wanted to get everything in a centralized place, so people don’t have to dig around to try and find the answers to these questions. The AA requirement won’t be 320 for sure (We don’t want to require AoD), the bar for earning XP in 90 is going to be 280, because you have your heroic endlines at that point (and I hate large primes so 277 wasn’t...
Lead Designer Akil “Lyndro” Hooper was interviewed by Piestro about Game Update 63. From EverQuest2.com: With the announcement of Game Update 63: SKYSHRINE, players have been speculating on the details. In the interest of answering some questions that were on players’ minds, I sat down with Lead Designer Akil “Lyndro” Hooper to ask a few questions about general design related topics for GU 63. We’ll continue to get into the meat of this game update in the coming weeks with specific subjects like Tradeskilling and more. Piestro: I’ve been looking over lists of items included with this Game Update,...