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 changes with Game Update 56. From Domino (clearly branching out from tradeskills):

As of the launch of Game Update 56: Halas Reborn, any character that completes “To Speak As A Dragon” will receive an heirloom Tablet of Draconic Runes in addition to learning the dragon language.

While this is an important quest and was a very exciting and community-building event in its time, it is not longer necessary for every alt to do the quest individually. At least one character on your account does need to do the quest the “full” way, but all subsequent alts can simply acquire the quest in the normal manner, then study the tablet when they are on the step to learn the runes. In essence: your first character made excellent notes on the runes s/he studied, it allows him/her to teach your alts the runes directly.

Of course, if your alts prefer to finish the quest the long way by collecting all the runes, they can still do so.

Any character who had already completed “To Speak As A Dragon” before this change can obtain a copy of the Tablet of Draconic Runes from Shady Swashbuckler in Nektulos Forest if they wish.

Apologies that this somehow didn’t get into the full update notes, but hopefully this calls it out so everyone will be aware of it now.

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 to you what L.O.S.T. stands for.

Bilgeron will give you the quest Cogs on the Droags. This is the first in a series of 20 solo level 57-70 quests that take you through all three Kingdom of Sky zones. Through the course of the questline you are rewarded with seven class specific armor pieces. The look of these items is similar to the T7 relic armor from Kingdom of Sky, and is unique to each of the 24 classes in the game.

When you have completed the entire questline, your final reward is your very own Self Contained Cloud mount.

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 wrong.

Imago-Quem needs your help now to finish the last mile of the race so he can move onto upgrading other things in EQ2. Don’t give up or just accept that items and armor you worked hard to get won’t look right with Shaders 3 enabled, bug it, or post screenshots on the EQ2 Forums.

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 about this, TimeTraveling responded:

Tis intended, and apologies for it getting missed on the release notes!

So it’s official! You can now put LORE items in your shared bank!

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.

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.

Instead of proccing (triggering) potentially dozens of times per minute providing dozens of stoneskins, this change means this item will only be able to absorb 3 attacks per minute.

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 day using materials provided to you by Londiar. These daily adorning quests can be picked up in West Freeport, Gorowyn, Kelethin (at Tunare’s Pages), Neriak, New Halas, and North Qeynos.

Completing these quests will reward you tradeskill experience, a city token, coin, and increase your faction with your city’s primary tradeskill faction.

Optional

These quests are completely optional and only add to the existing means of skilling up your Adorning, which is to transmute items, to make enough powders and fragments, to complete the standard Adorning recipes.

Max Skill Level

NOTE: Your maximum transmuting, tinkering, and adorning skills are based on your highest Adventure or Tradeskill level.

• A level 80 adventurer or tradeskiller has a maximum transmuting/tinkering/adorning skill of 400.

• A level 90 adventurer or tradeskiller has a maximum transmuting/tinkering/adorning skill of 450.

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 with Shaders 3.0, Imago-Quem gives us the backstory after the jump, and it’s not promising:

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 the questlines or various puzzles in the zone.

What do you think is the most impressive part of the zone?

The Chessboard by far is the most impressive. The art team did a fantastic job really capturing what I was going for in there.

Read the entire article at EQ2Players.

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 Antonica and Commonlands zones have been CHANGED to 10 level ranges from 4 to allow a wider range of skirmishes.

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 their mettle against both the Underfoot Depths and the new Icy Keep raid!

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 have been extensively documented by Domino at the EQ2 Forums.

These changes are likely an additional safeguard to reduce the number of customer service tickets resulting from accidental betrayal.

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 optional means of travel. The destinations offered by these modes of transport have been added to the Worldwide Globe system.
• Individual mariner’s bells which connect to only one or two zones (i.e. Everfrost, Lavastorm, Isle of Mara, etc.) have been removed.
• Travel within cities is maintained through the City Mariner’s Bell.
• Worldwide Gryffons continue to provide travel between Butcherblock Mountains, Neriak (Darklight Wood), and Gorowyn (Timorous Deep), and have gained a new destination — New Halas (Frostfang Sea).
• Druid Rings no longer require players to have visited them prior to use. Rumor has it, a live or prelude event will rebuild additional druid rings and connect them, allowing travel between the Rings.
• Wizard Spires, as rebuilt in a previous Game Update, continue to provide access to over a dozen interconnected wizard spires. With GU56, six additional Wizard Spire destinations have been added that players can travel directly to (previously these spires could only be reached with the help of a Wizard or Warlock).
• All Call of Qeynos, Call of the Overlord, Call of Kelethin, etc. spells have had their cast time reduced to 10 seconds.

Intrazone Travel Revamp

• Sokokar posts within the 4 Kunark zones no longer require having visited each post prior to using them and the sokokar item requirement has been eliminated (players must have completed either the tradeskill or adventure sokokar quest).
• A Gryffon Tower has been added to the Gorowyn Beach so that players may easily reach the newbie area.
• A Gryffon hitching post has been added to the Butcherblock Mountains dock so that players may easily reach the cliffs.
• Gryffon Towers in Thundering Steppes and Nek Forest no longer require your assistance in gathering gryffon eggs before allowing travel.
• Flying Carpets within Sinking Sands and Pillars of Flame have learned all of the intra-zone routes available to them.
• Horses have been added to the Steamfont Mountains, Zek, Feerrott, Enchanted Lands, Everfrost.
• Gryffon Towers in Greater Faydark and Nektulos Forest have been updated with additional destinations.
• Guild Hall decorators will be interested to note that the various (now redundant) Mariner’s Bell amenities have been given unique appearances as a player choice. Choices include a boat captain npc in front of a large steering wheel, and a sculpture of the Worldwide Globe item.

Performance Motivation?

For the last 2 1/2 months, players have been reporting severe delays when traveling from one zone to another. Players have reported 20-30 minute delays when switching from zone to zone, a process normally taking 20-30 seconds. So it seems likely that these changes are being made for player convenience, or to put nearly every zone in the game into the reach of players with just 1 zoning screen!

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 zone added to The Hole
• Icy Keep: Retribution — A new x4 level 90 raid zone similar in theme to Permafrost and the Icy Keep.
• Storyteller System — Major quest lines within EQ2 which have widespread impacts on the characters and world of Norrath can now be followed in the Storyteller system.
• Druid Ring Live Event — An in-game event to rebuild some of the Druid Rings throughout Norrath which have fallen to neglect. This questline is slated to resolve some of the mysteries regarding the forthcoming Velious expansion.

Visit the EQ2Players GU56: Halas Reborn page for numerous details and
screen shots of this coming update!

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, the CS and Community staff are able to give out the quest on these servers. So keep your eyes open, you never know who might be around!

The last week before Game Update 56 launch, NPCs will be added to give out the quest on all live servers, since it’s not possible for guides, CS, and community to catch every last person who may want the quest.