Feldon
It appears the Game Update 56 notes left out an interesting and (for players with many alts) fortuitous quest tweak. The quest To Speak as a Dragon needs almost no introduction. It’s a crucial language quest which is key to completing many other quests in EQ2, including Epic Repercussions. This quest requires crawling the depths of 26 different dungeons to find the necessary runes to learn the language of Draconic. Despite dramatic improvements in travel since EQ2’s launch, it’s still a tedious quest, especially if you have done it with 2 or more characters. So this quest received some...
game update 56
Dethdlr
Sentinel’s Fate brought us The Sundered Frontier and Stonebrunt Highlands but also brought some new quests to the Kingtom of Sky zones. Many of the islands have received new quests near the cloud stations. There was also a questline added called The Lost Drednever Team. With GU56, this questline is now listed in the Storylines tab of the quest journal. EQ2 Wiki has writeups for the whole questline and we’ve got links to get you started. In Tenebrous Tangle on the Temple Grounds there is a gnome named Bilgeron Cogsworth IV. Bilgeron is a L.O.S.T Explorer. He will explain...
Believe it or not, the hard work of bolting Shaders 3 onto the antiquated EQ2 engine is done. What remains is polish and cleanup. With all the combinations of armor, weapons, and with as many zones as there are in EQ2, this final bug sweep must take place with the help of the player. Players have been diligently posting screen shots and even videos demonstrating the numerous areas of the game including guild halls, armor sets, etc. where Shaders 3 stumbles — it’s too dark, it’s washed out, there are halos on objects, or the colors are just plain...
So you’ve got a tradeable Lore item that you’d like to pass from one of your characters to another on the same account. How do you do it? You could hand it to a friend, change characters, and have them hand it back to you. If you’re in a guild, you could put it in the guild bank, change characters, and hope its still there for you to pull it back out. Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could just put the item in your own shared bank? Well now you can! In response to a player query...
It seems that U.S. EQ2 servers are back up after today’s Game Update 56 patch. Once the thread is unlocked, you can post your feedback about GU56: Halas Reborn on the EQ2 Forums. How do I get to New Halas? New Characters: Create a new character in New Halas from the Character Select screen. Existing Characters: To travel to New Halas, take a Gryffon from the Butcherblock Mountains docks. How do I get the new Kitten? Log into EQ2 between May 25th and May 28th, 2010 and type /marketplace to open the Marketplace. The kitten is a free item...
It was only a matter of time. Ballads has reported in from EQ2Flames that the Reinforced Slippers of Balance ( \aITEM -1095264150 2115375301:Reinforced Slippers of Balance\/a ) have been nerfed with Game Update 56. Despite being level 70 items, these were the best foot items in the game for tanking certain encounters due to the possible number of stoneskins this item could generate. We had already heard from developers that this item would not be replaced and that the effect would not be copied to other items. Indeed, a nerf was anticipated by players in fall 2009. Current Description:...
The Sentinel’s Fate expansion (and its associated Game Update 55) opened the door to each character becoming a master of Tinkering, Transmuting, and Adorning. At least on Butcherblock, this change promptly doubled the price of all transmutable materials on the open market. Treasured weapons and armor, as well as Adept spells are now trading at record prices. As a result, tradeskill societies of all major cities have received a visitor named Londiar Inygad who is interested in offering Adorning work to players. These are daily quests, appropriate to your Adorning level which allow you to make 10 adornments per...
After the jump, we’ve got the complete Game Update 56 Notes for May 25, 2010:
From Kiara: As you know, our game update Halas Reborn, goes live May 25, 2010. This will happen at the usual time of 7am PDT for the US servers and 9pm PDT (4am on 26 May GMT) on European servers. The update notes are available here and the feedback thread will be unlocked for feedback once the update has been completed on the US servers.
EverQuest 2 does not natively support Anti-aliasing, however determined players have managed to enable it by adding “r_aa_blit” to their EQ2 INI file. Unfortunately, players will have to wait a bit longer if they want to experience Shaders 3.0 and Anti-aliasing at the same time. Players attempting to use both will see zones which are entirely blacked out. From Imago-Quem: I just submitted a fix for this. Hopefully it passes QA and can get out to you in a hotfix here soon and you can run AA with Shader 3. And as for the prospect of using CPU Shadows...
Upgrading a 9 year old game engine to support a feature it was never designed for is a daunting task. No-one knows that better than Ryan “Imago-Quem” who has been busting his butt since before Fan Faire 2009 to revamp the graphical pipeline of EverQuest 2 to support Shaders 3.0.
One of the preamble events leading up to the Destiny of Velious expansion will be the reconstruction of several dilapidated and corrupted Druid Rings. Read the article on EQ2Players. As we reported in April, we are expecting the druid rings in Nektulos Forest, Loping Plains, Zek, and Feerrott to be rebuilt. Windslasher has posted extensively about how this event will work and what participants can expect…
In preparation for Game Update 56, some of the art assets (and likely music) for Game Update 56 are being pushed in an update today. This update is approximately 200MB. From EQ2 Senior Producer “SmokeJumper“: [Today’s] update includes a lot of the files needed for the upcoming Halas feature set. We’re splitting the download into two parts so that the pain is a bit less each time.
A prelude quest leading up to Game Update 56 and the introduction of the city of New Halas has been available for some time now, if you could find a Guide or in-game GM or CM. But now in the last week leading up to this update, NPCs have been added throughout Norrath for those players who want to do this quest. This quest is A Vision of Valor. Follow the link for a list of NPCs and locations.
EQ2Players has a preview up for one of the two new raid zones coming with GU #56: Icy Keep: Retribution. This one was designed by Carlos “Gninja” Mora with help from Cyndi “Xadrian” Johnson. From the Gninja: Which raid zones are of a comparable difficulty? The difficulty should be aimed at the same difficulty as Lair of the Dragon Queen or slightly tougher in the later areas. How many named mobs are there? There are ten normal encounters and one challenge mode encounter. However some encounters might have to be unlocked in order to gain access to them through...
After Game Update #56, you may wonder why your mount is disappearing during combat. As reported earlier, there’s a new setting coming to the game. In Options -> Display -> Animation, there will be a new setting called “Render Mounts”. This has three options: Show mounts always Hide mounts during combat Never show mounts Hide mounts during combat is the default which may lead to some confusion on launch day. If you want it to work the way it used to, just set it to Show mounts always.
Game Update 56 next Tuesday will include a new scenario specifically for the PvP servers. Antonica and Commonlands will become home to Warfields, a scheduled PvP campaign with specific rewards. Here’s PvP developer Olihin‘s update notes: PvP WARFIELDS Antonica and Commonlands have once again become hotbeds of conflict! Will your lands be overrun or will your forces prevail against the siege? Warfields are Good vs. Evil faction based. Rewards will be Discord Tokens with a higher quantity to the winning team. The event will stagger between Antonica and 2 hours later in Commonlands and last for 30 minutes. The...
The Underfoot Depths from EQ2Players: Halas Reborn, scheduled to launch at the end of May, brings us two new raid zones. The first of which is the Underfoot Depths, accessed via The Hole. Brett “Timetravelling” Scheinert gave EQ2Players a brief interview about this new raid zone. Players have cleared all of Sentinel’s Fate’s normal-mode encounters and all but one of the challenge-mode encounters…just in time for us to add 20 more normal-mode encounters and eight more challenge-mode encounters (which practically doubles the raid content available at level 90). I am very excited at the chance for players to test...
Game Update 56 will contain minor tweaks to Betrayal and changing one’s Citizenship. Changing citizenship is being streamlined, as some cities require more busywork from players than others to switch between cities of the same alignment. Contacting one of the new Ambassadors in each city is your first step. No changes to the actual betrayal quests are being made (changing alignment ) are being as far as we can tell, but an Ambassador NPC is being added in every city who must be contacted prior to deliberating the Betrayal process. You can read more about these Betrayal changes which...
From EQ2Players: One of the exciting features coming with Halas Reborn is the revamp of the travel system. Salim “Silius” Grant has made traveling throughout Norrath smoother and took a few minutes to explain in detail some of the changes that adventurers will see.
This information was part of our Game Update 56 post on May 4th. However considering the importance of its content, we have reprinted it as a separate article and rewritten it for clarity. GU56 Travel Revamp Travel in Norrath has been substantially consolidated. Changes and bugfixes continue to be applied on Test, so this information may change before May 25th. Worldwide Travel Revamp Players may travel from and to nearly every zone in Norrath by using the Worldwide Globe system, which have consolidated all existing bells and gained many unexpected destinations. Flying carpets, boats, and airships are now entirely...
The tireless Niami Denmother of EQ2Traders has turned in another great preview, this time New Halas.
Free Item Players logging into EQ2 in the days immediately following the launch of Game Update 56: Halas Reborn (specifically May 25 ~ 28) will receive a free item, a Frostpaw Kitten.
A new website has been added to EQ2Players with the skinny on Game Update 56: Halas Reborn, introducing the player city of Halas, as well as a new character starting area with level 1-20 content. Halas is essentially a neutral-good aligned city, as evil-aligned characters can visit and complete most of the same quests. Game Update 56 includes substantial features and changes: Halas Reborn — new player city with new housing options (2, 4, and 6 room houses) Frostfang Sea — new level 1~20 starting area leading to Halas The Underfoot Depths — A new x4 level 90 raid...
The Halas Prelude event is now available on Live servers. Currently, this quest is only available from Guides (a sanctioned group of volunteer players), GMs, CMs, and other SOE staff. Stay tuned to open chat channels! It’s a brief quest, dealing with the rediscovery of Halas. The quest rewards 2 books. We’ll post a link to a writeup of the quest soon. How to Get the Quest From Domino: The Halas Prelude Event will initially be given out by Guides and SOE staff until shortly before the update launch. Although there are no guides on PvP and exchange servers,...