(( Have you read the latest round of patch notes for EverQuest II? I’ve highlighted those that were of particular interest to me, if you have any comments please leave them below! ))

GENERAL
Wild Swings will now persist through death.
The switches that open and close doors and barriers on the Vigilant: Final Destruction should now function on PvP servers.
Killing several Dreadnaught guards in South Freeport will now cause them to learn some respect. The same applies to Thexians in North Freeport.

BATTLEGROUNDS
Effects that can only be obtained on PVP Servers will no longer work in Battlegrounds.

ITEMS
All raid dropped armor now has red adornment slots.
Critical Mitigation on many raid dropped armor pieces have been changed to be more in line with TSO numbers.
Many of the high tier armor sets have been renamed to reduce confusion.
Brellium resist jewelry items have been improved.
All raid dropped jewelry now has resists.
Many raid drop weapons and jewelry items have had additional effects added.
Some of Waansu’s items have had class restrictions added.

QUESTS
The quest “Swiping Scrolls” can once again be successfully completed.
The quest “Shroom Prune” now updates off of killing Coercer Pittles and Shroombis the Coerced.

PERAH’CELSIS ABONIMABLE LABORATORY
Waansu should no longer appear inside a test tube if he has spawned as an encounter

GENERAL
It should be more difficult to get out of PvP combat after engaging someone in PvP combat.
You can no longer break PvP encounters by using /yell.
All raid mobs have had their damage and melee reduced by 10-20%

BATTLEGROUNDS
You will now only get a death credit in a battleground if you actually die.
Ungrouped members on the same team should be autogrouped after a few seconds.
The old group icons are back. So custom UI group icons should work normally now.
Russian names now display properly in the battleground leaderboard window.
Healing from wards will now count as healing given and healing received in the battleground leaderboard.

ITEMS
The descriptions for Clarissa’s Content Countenance and Criggle’s Chaotic Characteristics have been updated to resolve some confusion issues.
The following items have been changed from heirloom/lore-equip to no trade/lore:
exquisite woven boots
exquisite woven pants
exquisite woven shoulder pads
exquisite woven tunic
female tradesman boots
female tradesman gloves
female tradesman pants
female tradesman tunic
male tradesman boots
male tradesman gloves
male tradesman pants
male tradesman tunic
striking woven boots
striking woven pants
striking woven shoulder pads
striking woven tunic
dragon fastened robe
exquisitely stitched robe
female gold blouse
female gold skirt
formal wear female ensemble
formal wear male ensemble

QUESTS
Rewards from the ‘Shadows of the Betrayed’ signature quest are now correctly flagged as one-hand weapons.

TRADESKILLS
Tradeskilled adornments would not work on a large number of low-level items. This has been fixed.
The Hua Mein daily crafting missions now include only 1 mission that requires harvesting, equivalent to the Kerra and Quel’ule factions.

LAIR OF THE DRAGON QUEEN
Toxxulia should do less damage with her spells and melee.

PALACE OF ROEHN THEER
Maalus Shadowfyre will now cast his AOE spells at least 12 seconds apart from one another, rather than 8 seconds, giving players more time to recover after the previous AOE spell ticks.

PERAH CELSIS ABONIMABLE LABORATORY
Perah Celsis should do slightly less damage with his spells.

I am a firm believer in the fact that there is a difference between exploiting, and “taking advantage of a game mechanic” that is NOT exploiting. Let me specify. Killing a ring event over and over again so that you can get the drops from it doesn’t constitute as exploiting in my books. You’re standing in one spot, not doing anything outside of the realm of the game. You’re not manipulating anything, you’re not being sneaky about it. You probably should report it because you know it shouldn’t work this way, but you’re not doing anything specifically WRONG standing there killing encounters. If for some reason said ring event goes through a fix so that it only spawns every 4 hours instead of every 10 minutes that is a result of a game mechanic that has been fixed. If you stand there all day and get reported for it (we’re not talking about using any third party programs here) chances are you’re not going to get in trouble.

Now. An exploit. Lets say with the newly released battlegrounds you figured out that if you transmute an item on the battleground server from your inventory, it would then clone itself as you returned to the regular server and you’d end up with the item back in your inventory along with the transmuted result. In this case you are blatantly abusing a game mechanic,  manipulating it in order to make the game do something that it shouldn’t be doing. Cloning items is bad m’kay?

Lets take it one step further. Lets say you figured out a friend from your guild was taking advantage of this exploit, and heading off to battlegrounds every chance available so that they could clone items and mute them then sell them on the broker for huge sums of cash.

What do you do?

Do you bother reporting them? Do you just wait for the game company to look into it and take care of it? Does your opinion of your guild mate change at all?

Whether or not to exploit something is always a personal choice that every individual has to make for themselves. The truth of the matter is that in pretty much every game if there’s a way to break it or find a way to gain an advantage over someone else, there will be people looking to take advantage of it. Whether or not they actually get caught at it, is another issue.There are always stories about raid guilds trying to break the avatars in order to find an easier way to kill them, or break a raid encounter (pulling Veeshan’s Peak mobs through the barriers anyone?) in order to accomplish their “goal” easier. How do you decide whether or not you’ll participate in something like that? Are the risks worth the rewards?

Above is a scam. If you get a tell like this in game, do the smart thing and do NOT go to the web site linked (which I have blocked out here). Block the person, and report them. It’s NOT NCsoft telling you that you’re about to be banned. I’d like to say that no one falls for these sort of things, but they do. Be smart about it, please.

There’s no such thing as having too much storage space…

EverQuest II boasts a LOT of different factions. Each expansion comes with its own drop down menu that you can use to sort by, and figure out who likes you (and of course who does not like you). Some of them there’s nothing you can do about, as there’s no way to work the faction up from the negative standing, but then there are the factions that you almost feel obligated to work up for whatever reason (a lot of this relates back to my ‘do you enjoy dailies’ post).

This is the faction standing for my tailor. It differs from my jeweler, and my carpenter, because they’re each working on faction differently. My tailor needs faction with the Kerra Isle Outfitters in order to purchase special recipes. The jeweler needs faction with the Researchers of Quel’ule, and my carpenter needs faction with the Hue Mein Craftsmen.

When the daily quests only reward 2,500 craft faction, and you need to climb to 40,000 it can be pretty slow (and boring). Especially when you have multiple crafters to log in every day to make sure they all get their faction taken care of.

One very neat thing SOE has done is allowed almost all of the faction items to be heirloom (minus the recipes, which is why I’m working each character individually) which means you can put them in your shared bank, and you don’t have to work faction on every character you own (unless you’re like me, and you need those recipe books). I love this idea. I love that I don’t have to grind a whole lot of faction across every character if I don’t want to.

I’m getting there. Slowly. At 30,000 faction my tailor can purchase one of the books available, it’s casual wear, which I think is just appearance gear but I’m not certain about that. At 40,000 she can purchase battle secrets gear. I’m hoping that’s PvP gear but I’m not certain. I know I could probably find everything I want to know at EQ2traders, but I would rather wait and find out on my own, leave a little surprise after all this faction work I’ve been doing.

How important are factions to you in your game of choice? Do you spend hours working on them for achievements or other rewards or could you care less about who hates you? I want to hear below!

Sentinel’s Fate has a lot of instances, which is something I quite enjoy. Although I don’t like having a billion different type of tokens clogging up my shared bank. That’s a story for another day. Today I got to adventure through Spirit’s Resonance, which is basically an instanced replica of “The Hole” (which is contested). One of the great things about this zone is that there are a LOT of quests associated with it.

• Advanced Astrology
• Cause of Death
• Entomologist Ally
• Picking Pollen
• My Dear, Deloris..

Plus the Mark of Manaar quest, which grants you a token (of course).

There are a few things to make note of as you explore through this instance. Number one. You’ll have a quest that requires you to trap a bug – you get a bag in your inventory in order to do this. Well. DON’T TRAP THE KEY MOB which also happens to be one of those little beetles in the graveyard. Woopsie. That’s what happened to my group yesterday as we made our way down there.In fact the more people who /bug this the better, so that we can have the key mob flagged differently and people can’t go scooping it up as a quest update.

The last mob in the instance was probably the one I enjoyed the most (SPOILER INC):

Every 20% the mob will discombobulate someone and you’ll have to run to the back of the room where you’ll see some book shelves. You’ll be in the form of another creature, much like the void beast fight in TSO where each group member takes possession of a different creature. You’ll have to kill 3 rounds of books, with 3 mobs in each encounter. If you don’t, bad things happen to your group. It is a random person who is selected every 20% so have fun with that. I was chosen twice on my bard, and the healer was also chosen twice. The best part is that as you’re morphed into some other creature, the group gets to kill a version of you. Mean while, the “mob” speaks as you, much like they do in Unrest. So I’m working on killing the books in the back of the room, and my NPC version of me is asking who is parsing the encounter, and if anyone wants to head to Blackburrow afterward. It was great.

I managed to gain a few more upgrades for the troubador as well. She’s slowly inching her way away from being an int / str based caster, and over to the new agi scheme that was implemented for scouts with the release of Sentinel’s Fate. I’m also just a smidgen away from getting UT finally, so maybe I won’t be so disliked. Ok so my guild has been pretty great at letting me tag along despite the fact that I don’t have UT, but it’ll still be great to have.

Happy gaming, I’ll see you in Norrath!

I’m torn on the subject of daily quests. On one hand, sure who doesn’t want a reason to log in every day. The daily missions in EQ2 that reward shards for armor were one such example of this along with the hot zone (meaning the zone has an increased chance to drop loot). On the other hand working towards a goal via daily quests like faction really makes me annoyed, because I don’t want to have to wait day by day in order to purchase a faction item, I want it RIGHT NOW. Or at least 10 hours from now once I’ve grinded the faction out the ‘regular‘ way.

Examples of this are the new daily crafter quests available in Sentinel’s Fate. In order to purchase any of the armor recipes (I’m speaking from a tailor perspective specifically) you need 40,000 faction with the kerra isle folks AND faction with the crafter division of that same island. If you’re an adventurer you’ll be able to gain one of the factions quite easily by completing the chain of adventure quests, but you’re still left with a whole lot of craft faction to work on at the end. The daily quests only give you 2,500 faction a day and you’ll be around 12,000 or so after the chain of crafter quests. That’s a fair amount of dailies to complete before you’re able to purchase the recipes you may want.

It seems that these days every game wants to add a ‘come log in’ factor for players – WoW has had daily quests for quite some time, and now even Aion is jumping into it with their new 1.9 patch that is in the works. It’s certainly not the first time we’ve seen it in EQ2 either, the Isle of Mara craft division has been giving daily (and weekly) craft quests for some time.

I’m a little burned out on EQ2 lately, I’ve been playing quite a bit since the release of Sentinel’s Fate and so my attention has wandered over to other games (like EVE, and Darkfall). If you’re looking to read some of my posts about those games please visit Nomadic Gamer, which is a 2nd web site I started up – and keep in mind that I’m also always looking for volunteer writers for that site. If you’re looking for a place to post your opinion (about games, mind you. They don’t have to be MMO specific) just let me know and I can get you set up. Anyhow, I’ve been logging in to EQ2 to complete my daily quests but other then that I’m taking a small break, I don’t want to burn out completely after all. This is where playing so many games actually comes in handy, they all seem to remind me why I love my ‘main’ games.

What do you think about daily quests? Are they a good thing? A bad thing? Would you like to see more creative ways to entice players to log in every day? Let me know in comments!

Safe travels, and happy gaming!

Having spent very little time in any instances that went live with Sentinel’s Fate, I was excited to join up for four of them yesterday. We started with the two that I have already been to, the Erudian Library, and the Research Halls. Afterward we decided to head to the Vasty Deep zones, Conservatory was our first mark, and then Labs. Unfortunately labs is still currently broken, one of the named refuses to spawn and it’s required in order to reach the final named, but it was still quite fun.

One thing I really love about running these instances is that it’s an alts dream come true. Pretty much every piece of scout related gear that dropped was an upgrade for my troubador – specifically because SOE changed us from being int / str based bards to agi which is a stat I have never focused on. It was very nice to be able to replace a great deal of my int / caster based gear for agi, and I also managed to inch my way closer to getting UT which is the only thing anyone ever seems to want from a troubador. Since this is my alt (and one of many) I admit that I’ve neglected her achievements quite severely, but I’m about 6 away from picking it up thanks to the plethora of quests available in Vasty Deep.

When I wasn’t running instances, I dove back into battlegrounds. It’s getting to the point now where people are gearing themselves up with ‘toughness’ gear which is mitigation / critical mitigation for PvP. In other words it means it makes them harder to hit. I don’t like where this is going, because eventually for anyone who didn’t get in on the ground floor, you’re going to have to face a large number of loses until you can save up enough tokens to also gear yourself out with that critical mitigation gear.

I also really wish the numbers meant something. When the game ends you see a screen pop up with number of death blows and healing done etc. I wish there was a (even small would be alright) coin number associated with the locations on that list, so if you topped the killing blows and damage dealt list, you would receive some coin for your troubles. Since Battlegrounds can prove to be an effective method of leveling from 80-90 and also even grant achievement experience, I think that awarding a coin value to doing well in them would be great and then you wouldn’t feel obligated to go quest in order to earn money.

As it is now those stats are for nothing but bragging rights, since you earn 1 token for losing, and 3 for winning. There’s nothing else to be gained.

In the mean time I hope everyone is enjoying their game of choice, and I’ll see you in Norrath!

I decided some time last weekend that what I really wanted was a battleground character. A character who would do nothing but battlegrounds (there for 80 is my goal) and not have to worry about too much more. Most of my regular characters are support classes, and aside from the illusionist I find them a little difficult to play in battlegrounds. The mystic casts very slow, and aside from run speed I haven’t really found a use for the bards. A lot is due to my gear and lack of achievements on these smaller alts, and the fact that for PvP they’re simply not suited for it. I know that ranged casters have an easier time of things because they can stand back and nuke, and scouts can stealth, assassins can put out some massive dps and stun (especially if you’re using poisons) but none of my characters are those classes.

When I finished moving all of my characters to Oasis I also did a little spring cleaning. That left me with three character slots on my main account. Something I haven’t seen in quite some time. I decided to create a necromancer, and level her up (power level to be exact) to 80 so that I could start doing battlegrounds with her. I managed to inch my way to levle 40 yesterday, which was the half way mark at least.

I’ve been having fun in the battlegrounds, it doesn’t matter if I win or lose. I’ve found the 24 person to be a lot more fun then the smaller versions, and I like going with an 80-89 character so that you’re not dealing with level 90 mains. It’s hard to fight against the Nagafen players because they’re used to constant pvp and they have toughness on all of their gear already, but I managed.

I’ve only managed to win one of five battles so far, but since you’re rewarded (although at a smaller level) either way, at least your time is compensated for. I wish that corpses had a chance to drop coin or some sort of other reward for spending your time in a battleground as opposed to say – leveling, but maybe that will come in some where down the road.

I haven’t played the smaller battlegrounds yet, but I do know that if you come up against a guild group and you’re in a PUG your chances of winning decrease drastically. Organization is a killer in battlegrounds, and the more organized you are, the more likely you are to win.

Other then that, I’ve still just been taking my time and exploring Sentinel’s Fate. It’s a beautiful expansion with a lot to do. I hope everyone else has been having fun, I’ll see you in Norrath!

I don’t consider myself a very hard core raider. Even back when I was raiding full time I never joined a guild that used call lists to gather members, and I’ve never fought an avatar. I enjoy raiding a great deal, but with so many games on my plate some times it’s simply not in my best interest to spend that much time in it. Thankfully Paradise Lost is quite aware of my unique hours, and I’m able to raid with them casually. Last night they were off to Perah’Celsis’ Abominable Laboratory which is one of the new Sentinel’s Fate raid zones. No, I’m not about to post strats here – but.

I did want to make a comparison between TSO raids and SF raids. First of all, developers had already stated that they didn’t want Sentinel’s Fate to be a repeat of The Shadow Odyssey where healers paid more attention spamming cures then anything else. If someone asked me what Zarrakon looked like I would have to check the guild hall trophy because I spent most of my time curing and running for red and blue pools (and trying not to fall off the edge of his platform). SF has a little less curing, but a lot more jousting (at least what I’ve seen from it so far). Jousting to avoid massive “bad things” that will happen to your raid if you don’t joust.

My favorite encounter by far was Perah’Celsis himself for one very specific reason. First of all, the fight is intense. Understatement actually. He has a buff that has a chance for random raiders to become charmed. The charm can’t be cured for a specific duration, once that passes you can cure it. There’s nothing more fun then having healers, mages, scouts, and fighters of your own raid all running through the ranks and killing everyone. In so many encounters it is the mobs who get to do the smushing, but this time around I think the guild got more kills then the named.I love learning a new encounter and being able to explore a new zone. It’s refreshing. It’s also exceptionally nerve wracking.

My mystic managed to land two pieces of gear (sure, no one else wanted them but that’s besides the point) which was nice and I really did have a good time even though I spent most of the night doubting my healing capabilities. It’s hard when you’re in a full raid of people who are geared up properly and who have been playing together for years. My character is still sporting T2 from TSO and some pretty poor jewelery slots. I did the best I could, and hopefully that was enough. It also comes in handy that mystics are armed with a whole lot of buffs for their group, so even if my healing wasn’t top notch, I was at least providing some awesomeness for everyone else.

Happy gaming, and I’ll see you in Norrath! I have a post in mind about Battlegrounds, but until things are a little more ‘fixed’ and not so ‘broken’ I’ll be holding off on that. The few that I managed to get into were actually a LOT of fun, and I’m looking forward to talking about them!