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.

In February, former EQ2 Senior Producer Alan “Brenlo” Crosby created a thread “What is the Golden Path?” It included this provocative passage:

The golden path is the first step in a larger revamp of our new player experience.   We took a look at the starting areas, other than Qeynos and Freeport as we plan to move away from those, and reworked content so that it had a better flow.  We wanted the quests in Darklight, Timorous and Greater Fay, to give you a better progression path.

When asked in the EQ2 ZAM Dev Chat to clarify this position, Brenlo responded further:

We plan to only allow new characters to start in the newer player areas. Timorous, Greater Fay, Darklight and soon Halas. The new player experience in Qeynos and Freeport are just not up to snuff anymore and do not provide as solid an experience when you enter the game for the first time.

Any hopes that this change would be canceled with the introduction of new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, were dashed with his indication that he would “not be changing anything that was short-term” (short-term plans). So it seems this change was destined to go in one way or the other. Here are today’s Test Update notes which will not apply to Live Servers until Game Update 56 in mid- to late-May:

Test Update April / 27 / 2010
GENERAL

Qeynos and Freeport have been disabled as starting cities.

We’re now less than 3 weeks from the release of Sentinel’s Fate. There has been no sign of Halas on Test. We’ve already been told that Halas is important to SOE, that they want it to be a starting zone to win new players. And I just don’t see them adding a starting zone with 20 levels of content with less than 2 weeks of testing. So at this point, EQ2Wire is now ready to call Halas for for Game Update 56 a few months after the Sentinel’s Fate expansion. This is purely speculation on our part until there’s an announcement, but we feel confident enough to post it.

I understand there are folks who are nostalgic for Halas after playing it in EQ1 and have really been looking forward to starting new characters there. I know I was looking forward to seeing what the Art department could turn out after seeing preliminary artwork at Fan Faire.

But Halas not being in-game for the expansion won’t ruin my life. Timorous Deep and Darklight Wood are still excellent options for leveling toons from 1-20. Really that level range is pretty saturated. The Golden Path we’ve been hearing about will be a polishing of existing zones (the changes to Sinking Sands were the first part of that) to make a smooth progression from 1-80.

More news on Battlegrounds and Sentinel’s Fate as we have it… This has been a busy news week and next week will probably be even busier!