Players have expressed concerns that the changes in the difficulty of dungeons this week will make Kael Drakkel far too easy. However SmokeJumper seems to be backing up the designers on wanting to keep the contested Kael Drakkel sufficiently difficult:

(Making the zone super easy is) not our intent at all. And I’m glad that your group is able to play through those areas. But it must have been verrry lonely in Kael, because we know how many people were playing it…and it’s not many.

All U.S. servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT on Tuesday, March 29, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The U.K. worlds will have their update at 5am London Time on Wednesday, March 30, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours.

The full reformatted patch notes are available after the jump….

You may have noticed this little tidbit in today’s patch notes:

Kael Drakkel

• Base Population in the contested dungeon now has legendary and fabled drops.

With this information you may be thinking of heading in there and trying your hand at killing some of the level 92 mobs to see what kind of trash drops you can get.  Not so fast!  Raviel on Guk apparently had the same idea and didn’t have the best of luck

Raviel@Guk wrote:

so ive been in here for about 2 hours now. wheres the trash gear we were promised?

Kander responded with this:

The hotfix said it was added, however it was not. We will try to have that corrected as soon as possible.

I am extremely disapointed myself.

Sorry about that all.

Guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer before seeing those trash drops.

Looks like the contested Kael Drakkel group dungeon just got some more reasons for people to go back! From Kander on the EQ2 Forums:

Due to the hotfix schedule, we should have everything listed in by Tuesday March 15th. The stuff in bold is in now and the rest will be in next Tuesday.

• PoI Quests have been made repeatable once a day (6 quests) and grant faction and shards
• Trash drops, including rare fabled drops are being added to the zone tables.
• Bosses now have a chance to drop shards.
• Trash now has a chance to drop shards.
• The experience has been raised significantly.
• Most if not everything loot oriented is tradeable.

Also all named in Kael Drakkel are now flagged to give AA experience every time you kill them. That went in this morning I believe.

Kael Drakkel is making Contested Dungeons in EQ2 sexy again. With 15 names, and the largest zone ever added to EQ2 (it’s larger than Solusek’s Eye), there is a lot to live up to here. The zone is intended to be difficult, with loot somewhere between the hardest Velious instances and beginning raids. It’s a new way of approaching contested dungeons compared to The Hole, Karnor’s Castle, Sebilis, and Chardok which all struggled to keep our attention after a few weeks.

Players have been looking for an old school dungeon crawl and Kael Drakkel seems to deliver. It shows a new commitment to creating dungeons that aren’t irrelevant or abandoned after the first week of the expansion. This is the kind of danger and contested experience we haven’t really seen since Castle Mistmoore and Sanctum of Scaleborn and feedback both during Beta and since launch has been surprisingly positive, even from the most jaded raiders.

Kander took a leading role in designing Kael Drakkel, and seems cautious about making any major changes to it. This seems wise, as subtle changes may be all that is warranted here.