Rothgar has advised on the EQ2 Forums, due to the extreme database loads continuing to be caused by Battlegrounds, the EQ2 team will be throttling back the number of concurrent Battlegrounds sessions that can be running at once.
continue reading Battlegrounds Leaving Servers Ridden Hard and Put Away Wet…
The previous Thursday and Tuesday hotfixes have brought some itemization changes, specifically with the increase in the number of items holding Red Adornment slots, the introduction of Yellow Adornments for heroic gear, and the addition of Resists to Legendary and Fabled gear (previously, players were expected to run around with 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry).
Now, we are starting to see the second prong of these changes, intended to fix the itemization mess that Sentinel’s Fate launched with. Frizznik brings us:
Thanks for your patience with us as we look at items, spells, and combat arts. We are reading your concerns and are trying to make adjustments where we can. This week we have been hard at work on raid item changes. Those changes should happen in the next hotfix, so please don’t transmute those drops, you may want them after the changes hit. After the changes next week, we are going to be looking at resistances on Legendary drops and some other things as well.
Please understand, we have a lot to think about. The expansion, battlegrounds, and the golden path added a lot of content that we have to keep an eye on. The content team did an excellent job with the golden path and if you haven’t tried it, you might want to talk to a chronomage or roll a new character to check it out. Battlegrounds are a lot of fun too, even if you don’t like PVP combat you might want to give it a shot because the cooperative team play is a lot of fun. I am not trying to make any excuses, but instead I am trying to say that there are only so many hours in the day.
Defense/Parry — Useless?
An interesting thread, which I’ve been following, on whether the +Defense and +Parry skills have any utility whatsoever.
Additional
Yellow Adornments
A handful of Legendary items from level 80-83 received Yellow Adornment slots, however Yellow Adornments were all initially flagged level 84. This has been remedied in the March 18th hotfix, as they are now level 80 adornments.
Flurry, Double Attack, and AE AutoAttack
When you Auto-attack with your mainhand weapon each of the following has their own independent chance firing off in addition to that mainhand attack (from EQ2 Forums):
AE Auto-Attack is primarily an AA line that points can be spent in. Double Attack has a cap of 100% and now appears widely on gear of all kinds. Flurry is much rarer to find, and is mostly found in AA lines, but look for it on items.
Making Sense of Tier 2 & Tier 3 Raid Gear
Whether you are rewarded Tier 2 or Tier 3 raid gear is dependent upon which raid mob you are killing, and whether you are taking on the “easy” version of that mob, or the “hard mode” version of that mob. Hard mode mobs typically have more adds, more hitpoints, unique effects, stronger detrimentals, etc.
I have to tell you, even after reading this thread laid out by established raiders, I’m not clear on every single mob and Tier. 
Moonlight Enchantments
Don’t forget that Moonlight Enchantments start tonight!!
Itemization Puzzle Pt 2
We’re still working on part 2 of the Sentinel’s Fate Itemization Puzzle. SF Gear is still in a state of flux, and we now know that the “Tier 3″ Sentinel’s Fate raid armor, which drops from the hardmode version of each mob are all being upgraded, loot tables adjusted, etc. so it’s hard to get an accurate picture of the gear at this point.
Development
Fyreflyte, itemization lead for EQ2, has been conspicuously absent from the EQ2 Forums in the last couple of weeks. Further, Xander, Frizznik, and timetravelling have all been stepping in to answer itemization-related questions. It is unclear what, if any conclusions can be drawn from this.
Meanwhile, a former EQ2 developer, Aeralik, has been posting some of his perspectives on how the Shadow Odyssey expansion played out behind-the-scenes. He still holds forth that he fought the good fight for the players against the Fighter Revamp and other sweeping, ill-considered changes. EQ2 team members I’ve spoken to on the condition of anonymity dispute this viewpoint.
Thursday night saw the first post-expansion developer chat of 2010. Hosted by ZAM, this chat had previously been scheduled for March 4th, but was postponed to March 18th as developers focused on issues with Battlegrounds.
You would have assumed, with the key issues of Battlegrounds and Itemization consuming a great deal of development effort in the month since Sentinel’s Fate launched, AND the 2 week postponement in the EQ2 Developer Chat, that Calthine at ZAM would have received an avalanche of hardball questions. Instead, we saw just a few of these critical issues raised, with the rest running the usual gamut of comfortable questions.
continue reading Dev Chat Covers Wide Range of Issues, Offers Few Revelations…
Your Hotfix notes for March 18th include tweaks to Tier 3 (raid armor).
NOTE: Make sure your EQ2 client patches before trying to log into EQ2. Due to an oversight, EQ2 servers are allowing out-of-date clients to login, resulting in bugs with the Broker, Group window, etc.
After the jump…
Y’all are cordially invited to the next exciting EQII ZAM Developers Chat! This chat was originally scheduled for March 4th and then postponed. Members of the EverQuest II Developer and Community Teams will be there, bring your questions! If you’d like to submit questions prior to the chat, send e-mail to Calthine@allakhazam.com (subject Dev Chat).
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For instructions on how to connect to the chat using mIRC, Trillian, or other chat client, check out the EQ2 ZAM Chat Instructions @ EQ2 ZAM. |
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If you are not able to run chat software at work, or you just want to jump into the chat through your web browser, you can use the ZAMCHAT Portal here on EQ2Wire. |
Check out this Time Zone Converter to help you find what time to sign in. NOTE: Due to America being on Daylight Savings early, please double-check your time zone.
source: EQ2 Forums
Today brings the first part of a two part story about how we got to the Itemization situation we are in now. Part history lesson, part recap.
Part 2 will try to sort out the Sentinel’s Fate Itemization picture as we have it so far. I assure you that Part 2 will be MUCH shorter. 
After the posting of Part 2, we will be posting a survey to get your feedback on these long-form articles.
Mages have been rather effective in Battlegrounds and PvP combat of late. Moreso than perhaps was intended.
Timetravelling has laid out the details of the cause of this issue, what he intends to do about it, and how it will be tested in this EQ2 Forums thread.
We’ve been digging through the code to track down the inconsistencies we’ve been seeing in spell resists and spell avoidance. We have some changes incoming that I’d like to describe briefly for y’all.
Based on the old formulas, extremely high resists (if capped) would give players a 75% chance to avoid a spell AND a 75% reduction in the damage when it landed.
At level 70+, spell avoidance chance was being multipled by 0.6 (reducing your overall chance to avoid by 40%) and spell resists were being multiplied by 0.65 (reducing the damage reduction applied to spell damage by 35%). This has been contributing to the … ah … very high combat effectiveness of spell-damage based classes. We have removed all of these mults internally.
Once internal testing has been completed, we plan on pushing these changes to Test-copy (and temporarily flagging it as PvP). Once that happens, we’ll update the thread here and ask for y’all to jump over there and help us test the crap out of the changes. We’ll leave it up there for at least a week or two to give time for balance tweaks and such before considering a push to Live.
Our intention is *not* to make any classes unbeatable or make others unable to kill opponents.
However, spell resistances and high STA should be contributing to survival as expected instead of at a greatly reduced effectiveness.
Your feedback is encouraged, and hopefully lots of people will test these changes. In case you missed it, for PvP and Battlegrounds purposes, Spell Resists are now calculated using Stamina (STA), a stat that all classes have some of, and can gain more of, rather than Wisdom (WIS), which due to Stat Consolidation, is now much harder for certain classes to get in any quantity.
Today’s Hotfix notes for March 16th, 2010. Yellow Adornments also made it in, but they’re not in the notes…
GENERALMost of the guards in Freeport, Qeynos and Kelethin have had their levels reduced to what they had previously. Exceptions to this include palace guards and patrolling knights.
ITEMS
All jewelry from the Vigilant: Final Destruction (x2) has had resists added.
Summoning the mount from the Ykeshan Warbear whistle will now work if you are level 80 in either adventuring or tradeskilling.
The valuable, Onayan staff of the waves, should now be on the Vasty Deep collection tables.
QUESTS
The Footsteps of Dartain: Observation – The projected erudite will no longer disappear during conversation.
In Search of Lucan – Fyr’remd Lorak should no longer disappear during conversation.
“Confronting the Godslayer” requires the raid lichform version of Perah’Celsis in order to update. The prose is now more specific about this.
Delinah now properly updates “The Footsteps of Dartain: Emergence.”
Players who delete or decline the various “Footsteps of Dartain” signature quests can now re-obtain them.
Stage 3 of “Whispers from the Past” now correctly mentions Silent City instead of Living Tombs.
PALACE OF ROEHN THEER
Kendis and Penda United now have lower maximum health.
The 3 sages in challenge mode now synchronize their use of prismatic sphere with their exchange of stones (tank switching).
SUNDERED FRONTIER
Neophyte Sairal in the Hall of Necromancy seeks adventurers 80 and higher for a special task.
VASTY DEEP: THE ABANDONED LABS
Adds on the Kadara’Mola fight in Vasty Deep: The Abandoned Labs should now de-spawn should she reset or the encounter breaks.
Most of the Sentinel’s Fate raid and heroic gear has had no Resists (vs. Arcane, vs. Elemental, vs. Noxious), presumably with the intention that players would have to wear 2-3 pieces of Mastercrafted jewelry. Also, all but the highest level raid gear in Sentinel’s Fate has lacked Red Adornment Slots. This made most of this gear a poor upgrade over TSO raid gear.
If you’ve been following the Equipment Adjustments thread on the EQ2 Forums, as well as yesterday’s Hotfix notes, you know that Resists and Red Slots have now started to appear on Fabled and Legendary gear. However there are some outstanding items, specifically the x2 raid (The Vigilant) items.
We are continuing to watch the changes in Gear Itemization, including Yellow Adornments which should appear in Tuesday’s Hotfix.
Brewday has arrived in Norrath! This celebration of Brell and brew will run from March 11 to the 22nd.
For a guide to the updated events, collections, tradeskill recipes, and quests for this year’s Brew Day event, check out these sites:
Although the event is now available on live servers, Brell’s Bar remains closed until 10:30am PST according to an announcement I read in-game. For further discussion on Brell’s Bar, check out the EQ2 Forums.
EQ2 servers will come down for a Hotfix on Thursday, March 11th, 2010. This hotfix takes place at 6am PST for U.S. servers and 5am GMT on March 12th for Runnyeye and Splitpaw.
After the Hotfix notes, you’ll find some good news about the Guard levels in Qeynos, Freeport, and Kelethin.
continue reading March 11 Hotfix Notes, Guard Level Adjustments…
If you’ve been thinking that the pieces of the Sentinel’s Fate itemization puzzle just have not fit well together, you are not alone.
While we have not spent a lot of time covering itemization in SF, it is because things have continued to be in such a state of flux during, and after the Beta.
The smooth progression of TSO gear was seemingly replaced by a scattershot approach, with some of the x2 raid items being the best in the game, the x4 Hard Mode gear being only 1-2% better than the x2 Easy Mode gear, and Battlegrounds gear the red herring, providing a confusing shortcut to skip instance gear altogether. In short, the “plan” has not been clear. Until now.
After the jump, check out what Frizznik has posted regarding the EQ2 Team’s itemization plans:
continue reading A Light at the End of the Itemization Tunnel?…
While not breaking news, some folks may not be aware that Sentinel’s Fate offers a Signature quest to level 85+ crafters who have completed the Quel’Ule portion of the Paineel crafting timeline.
Two weeks after you complete the final Quel’ule quest for Researcher Tahar, you will receive an item in the mail from him. He’s actually entrusting a relic to you, though it needs a bit of repair. This is the Shadows of the Betrayed signature quest.
The reward for this quest is a unique appearance weapon which matches your tradeskill class.
As always, Niami Denmother is on the case about all things crafting at EQ2Traders.
As we have reported, players have been abusing an exploit which allowed them to login to Battlegrounds and consume/transmute/craft items and then get those items back upon being returned to their home servers. SOE have stepped up and shown they take this sort of thing seriously with the following announcement from Brenlo:
This weekend an exploit was found on the Battlegrounds server which allowed players to transmute items, and have those items returned when leaving the Battlegrounds. This occured due to a change we made in the code to speed up the return process. While we understand that this was a bug of our creation, some players chose to take advantage of it, knowing it was not meant to work in that fashion.
Many players took advantage of the bug, to varying degrees. Some of our community however went to great lengths to abuse the bug. For those accounts that abused this obvious bug, we have taken action. Some have been removed from the game altogether, while others are losing all of the items on their characters. All will face at least some time removed from the game as we sort through the various logs and track down their ill-gained platinum and items.
While we hate to remove anyone from our community, our family, there are times that for the good of the servers, the in-game economy and the community we do find ourselves forced to take action. Unfortunately, this was one such occasion.
Thanks all for being a part of Norrath.
This action is not just limited to Transmuters:
We tracked spells, transmutations, abuse of Mender Bots, etc. We are taking action against all who reached a specific threshhold of abuse.
The most egregious offenders, who I have learned made thousands of plat off of this exploit, will find themselves suspended from the game for several days or possibly a longer ban.
Posted by Kiara:
We’ll be having our usual Tuesday hotfix starting at 6am for the US servers and at 9pm (5am GMT Wednesday March 10) for Runnyeye and Splitpaw.The downtime will be the usual hour or so.
and your March 9 Hotfix Notes after the jump…
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:
Customer Service will be investigating reports of players making use of a duping exploit. If you’ve been found using this exploit, your character may be rolled back several days.
You should always be aware that using an exploit can result in suspension or bannings regardless of what the exploit is. If you’ve stumbled across something on your own or heard of an exploit from a friend, your best bet is to petition CS about it right away and cease that behavior.
We have gone ahead and pulled an article we had posted about the possibility of transferring from a PvP to PvE server by way of using a Server Transfer Token while logged into Battlegrounds.
We have not been able to substantiate reports that players had been able to perform such a transfer.
It seems that the Antonia Bayle EQ2 server is experiencing some kind of database corruption and is undergoing an emergency downtime at the moment. Details remain elusive at the time of this writing, but we’ll be watching this thread on the EQ2 Forums:
Brewday returns to Norrath from March 11th through the 22nd! Come on out and celebrate Brell Serilis! It may be a holiday started by dwarves, but everyone is welcome!
Battlegrounds are currently closed due to a Transmuting exploit which has allowed players to duplicate items. In short, items which you transmuted or scribed on Battlegrounds were returned to you upon exiting Battlegrounds.
In our March 5th End-of-Week News, we neglected to post a link to the thread discussing Raid Mob Damage Output and some fine-tuning that will be happening to mobs as a result. From Rothgar:
This sounds like it was maybe due to another bug fix. Sometimes when we find a bug with a profession spell and fix it, the fix also “fixes” bugs that were on NPC’s that we didn’t know existed. It may have been possible that those NPC’s were bugged too and during beta tuning they were made harder and harder because no one knew that a spell wasn’t critting properly or something wasn’t procing correctly.
I’ll pass this info along so they can take a look at it. The proper fix may be to go back through the mobs that were affected and tune them down.
And a report from Sinat:
The AE’s themselves seem to be doing more damage, even on noncrits. If I compare it on something with virtually no mit, like my spiritual circle, the noncrit of AE’s were higher on it Thursday than it was on Tuesday. Even examining the AE spell information it’s much higher Thursday than what it was on Tuesday. It’s possible the crit bonus is higher as well, but the AE’s, at least on Maalus, appear to be doing more damage regardless.
I guess using /bug does pay off, even if you are a dragon.
The elusive SOE Marketing Dept. took a moment today to pat itself on the back for its “successful launch” of EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate. They also made a point of thanking “our great fans have responded with overwhelming support“. It is unclear what aspect of the Sentinel’s Fate launch players give “overwhelming support” to, but no doubt this will be a key point on a Powerpoint presentation somewhere soon.
EQ2Wire does not think it is too soon to start our campaign for NO retail launch of the next EverQuest II expansion. It costs too much money, diverts too many resources, and ultimately confuses and frustrates players to have retailer exclusives, head starts, and regional lockouts on who can buy the Digital Download when and where.
Did the Retail Push Work?
Marketing will point to retail figures saying “It worked!” but the reality is, these are customers who felt forced to buy the product in a certain way, at additional cost and hassle, just to get the same customer experience they have had in past years with a Digital Download.
There is such a thing as a false economy here regarding players who would have ordinarily purchased the Digital Download over a span of the next 2-3 months, as they had completed all the content they desired to in the previous expansion converted to the new product. No doubt some of these players felt pressured into buying Sentinel’s Fate retail version on launch day, so as not to be left behind, or to get the best possible game.
It just seems to us, although we have no sales figures to back up our theories, that making loyal customers jump through hoops just to add a few boxes on retail shelves is not worth it in the long run, and we feel that a true cost-benefit analysis of how the Sentinel’s Fate retail launch played out (provided it is not merely a self-serving exercise) would bear this out.
And there is no tangible way to measure the ill will created in the European community by the Sentinel’s Fate launch lead up chaos, missteps at DLGamer and Steam, and now almost daily Hotfixes during primetime Europe hours. These players have a right to be doubtful.
I have had some very harsh words for the SOE Marketing Dept, yet I feel like I am on pretty solid ground with my opinions. So far, this department has demonstrated that it does not understand its customers, does not value their feedback, and further, has gone out of its way to insulate itself from criticism.
EQ2Wire is extending an open invitation to any member of the SOE Marketing Dept who wishes to grant an interview on these and other subjects.
EQ2Players has checked in with another great Artist Highlight, this time for Stephanie Young. One of my favorite parts of Sentinel’s Fate has been the zone artwork. It has taken everything to another level.
Here are some excerpts from the article:
How did you get started in the industry?
I started out as a graphic artist for a subcontractor to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Gradually the company started incorporating more 3D simulations into the products we developed and I became the primary developer for the 3D assets used by the engineers. Eventually though I found it difficult to “love” what I was creating in 3D.
So I decided to get more formal training at the Vancouver Film School in British Columbia so that I could pursue a career in 3D that created, shall I say, art depicting the happier side of life. After school I landed a job in Lake Tahoe working under contract for a gaming company based in the UK. It was there that I fell in love with environments both in game and out on the Tahoe Rim trail. When that company folded I was offered a job here at SOE and I’ve been happily making environments ever since.
What are some of the other areas you’ve done the art for in EQII?
I created Sebilis, Charasis, and Befallen.
Here are some end-of-week news items which I’ve noticed on the EQ2 forums that readers may find useful…
Scale of Flame
Players have been having trouble advancing/completing the quest Scale of Flame. In response, Gninja has responded:
I found the issue causing the spirit to not spawn and have corrected it. You should see it come to live server early next week with our next build.
Breaking Combat on PvP/Battlegrounds
Rothgar has made some further adjustments in how combat is broken on PvP/Battlegrounds. It has been tweaked so that you must be at least 1000m from the other player as well as a timer based on activity.
Raid Mob Damage Calculations
There has been some wonkiness, to say the least, in how raid mobs have been putting out damage. Players have noticed these issues and been reporting in this thread on the subject. Rothgar has provided an update:
Yesterday’s patch fixed a bug that was causing many of a mob’s special abilities to not be applied correctly. So technically the code is working as it should be now and all buffs are being applied to the mob. However, this bug has only been in since the first hotfix after the 24th of February. So the mobs should be the same as they were on release, but unfortunately no one was probably raiding them that much during the first week or the people that did expected them to hit this hard.
I’ve spoken with our raid designer and he’s going to take a look at the mobs on a case-by-case basis and determine what needs to be changed. We don’t have any ETA’s on changes yet, but please continue to post your feedback on the ones that you think are way too hard.
Keep in mind we’re only a few weeks into the expansion and that mobs SHOULD be pretty tough until people get caught up on gear, levels and AA’s.
Battlegrounds Cloaks for Testers
For those folks who tested out Battlegrounds, there was an announcement that these players would be getting an appearance cloak. Kiara weighs in on the status of this item:
It hasn’t been entitled yet. Yes it will be very soon. The department that handles this particular sort of situation has been swamped under with another project.
Itemization Issues
We are continuing to follow a story about Itemization issues with the new EQ2 expansion. Players are reporting that Battlegrounds armor is far better than shard gear (Marks of Manaar), quest items are far better than Mastercrafted gear, and most notable, jewelry and charms from the Vigilant x2 raid zone have so far been far superior to the 24-person raid zones and contested x4 raid mobs introduced with Sentinel’s Fate.
We will be tracking this story to see how this all shakes out.