April 7, 2009

EQ Hotfix Notes

stargrace April 7, 2009 0Comment

HotFix 4/07/2009

*** Highlights ***

New Veteran Reward: The 11th year Veteran Reward has been created. Those who are eligible will now be granted the AA “Summon Clockwork Banker.”

Make poison has new recipes and items. You will find the instructions on new vendors.

A series of Rogue-only quests are now being offered by the Rogue Guilds of Norrath. Seek out the Poison Masters in your starting city for more information.

New types of Defiant armor have made their appearance across Norrath.

*** Items ****

Increased the bard instrument mod values on many SoF and SoD group and raid equipment pieces.

Created a method for converting the original roboboar to the shiny roboboar and vice versa. The polishing and rusting devices can be found on the Geerlok Clockwork Merchant in Crescent Reach.

Low-level Defiant armor will drop much more often.

New types of Defiant armor have made their appearance across Norrath.

Modified the Required and Recommended levels of the “Pet Proc” weapons from Fabled Planes of Power to be consistent. The Required level is now 75 for all of these items and the recommended level is now 79 for all of these items.

The Brell’s Party Plans book gives a bit more information about how to make the woven basket.

Irae Faycite Shard: Tjudawos’ Chant of Flame and and Irae Faycite Shard: Zeixshi-Kar’s Chant of Frost have been changed to increase the duration of their respective spells by 1 tick instead of increasing their damage. Their names have been changed to “Durus” to match other Type 3 augs of similar effects.

Modified the the naming of bard type 3 augs to be consistent with other type 3 augs.

Removed all casting times and mana cost from Earthen Mud so it will proc for classes without mana (and not consume mana of those with it.)

*** Spells ***

The Contact Innate in Battle Frenzy and Combat Frenzy now shares the slot with the Third Spire of Elements.

*** NPCs ***

Fixed a bug that could cause the Fabled Tribal Leader Diseranon to stop spawning in Vegarlson, the Earthen Badlands.

*** Quest ***

A series of Rogue-only quests are now being offered by the Rogue Guilds of Norrath. Seek out the Poison Masters in your starting city for more information.

*** Raids ***

Corrected the faction issues in the Queen Malarian raid.

Beware the clockwork devices in the Plane of Innovation! They pack a lot more punch during the Fabled times!

*** Tradeskills ***

Wood strips recipe will now return the planing tool on success and failure. Additionally wood strips will now stack to 20, allowing the recipe to give you 4.

Make poison has new recipes and items. You will find the instructions on new vendors.

*** AA ***

The 11th year Veteran Reward has been created. Those who are eligible will now be granted the AA “Summon Clockwork Banker.”

The Advanced Pet Discipline AA and Animation Empathy AAs have been modified to match the new pet control functionality.

Modified all 3 ranks of the Monk AA Five Point Palm to properly credit the Monk who used the Five Point Palm ability with the damage that results from this effect. You should now see a damage message, etc, indicating that the target took damage from the Player that cast the spell, rather than having the target of the AA silently do damage to themselves.

Removed the Endurance cost from the Monk AA lines Eye Gouge, Stunning Kick, and Crippling Strike.

*** Zones ***

Guild Banner summoning has been turned on for Solteris (note that all usual restrictions apply).

*** Pets ***

Guard and follow are on separate buttons again. Guard and follow states are independent of stop and sit. Stop and sit are overrides for guard and follow. Pressing guard or follow when stop or sit are engaged will automatically turn them off.

Changed the behavior of the stop command. It is now a toggle-able state. When activated, your pet will stand still and stop attacking, but remember who it hates. Stop can be turned off manually, or is automatically turned off whenever follow, guard, attack, qattack, or back off are used.

Added the greater hold state (ghold). Greater hold is granted by pet discipline. It works very much like regular hold except that regular hold allows opponents to be added to the pet’s hate list when the pet already has opponents on its list. Greater hold only allows NPCs you specifically add via attack or qattack to be added to its hate list. Hold and ghold are mutually exclusive.

Pet help has been updated with the new information about these changes.

*** Miscellaneous ***

Fixed a crash with certain custom UIs with custom hot bars.

Fixed a problem that caused the quest level ranges for quest givers to not be displayed under their name.

Lockout timers can once again be sorted in the expedition window.

*** UI ***

Optimized the raid window to get rid of the long pause when opening it when there are a large number of people in the raid.

A new update in EQ has me excited – especially the 11th year veteran rewards and all of the rogue only quests and new poisons. Yum! Also curious about that new defiant armor.

Gaming

EQ2 Hotfix Notes

stargrace April 7, 2009 0Comment

Hotfix April / 7 / 2009
GENERAL

An issue that was causing UI icons or elements to look blurry and low-quality has been resolved.

An issue that was causing low-quality textures on player characters after switching from third person to first person view has been resolved.

EVERNIGHT ABBEY

Marcus Thex should turn aggro now once all five clan leaders have been slain.

ITEMS

The Dancing Satyr has learned how to dance and is anxious to show off his new moves.

Bite of the Wolf will now trigger properly and apply to the warden.

Restitution Master 1 should no longer drop from spell tables.

The Signet of the Flame Disciple has been changed from +3 spell critical bonus to +3 spell critical to be more inline with the other quest rewards.

Vampire and Void Bane proc stacking has been fixed such that additional pieces of gear will increase the damage and proc rate, but will not add additional procs. This is the originally intended functionality.

The Stone Tower void shard jewelry set now has Deflection Chance as its 3-piece bonus instead of deflection skill. The block and deflection bonuses should now be roughly equivalent.

Corruption of the Elements should now proc on offensive spell casts.

MYSTMYR MANOR

Rhul’maldis should no longer occasionally never respond to the volatile liquid.

PVP

An issue that might cause no infamy gain when multiple players are attacking a single target has been fixed.

SPELLS

Tortoise Shell will once again work properly on group members

An issue that would cause Surging Tempest to get into an unusable state has been resolved.

TRADESKILLS

The Advanced Armorer Service quest now requires the new improved version of fulginate kite shields.

Scholars’ volume 12 books now once again contain recipes for idols, symbols, tomes, and orbs.

Jeweler Far Seas writs now correctly accept the new secondary items.

An issue where Adornments would disappear when upgrading or imbuing items through tradeskills has been fixed.

WARD OF ELEMENTS

Najena should respawn when players watch the flythrough then leave the instance and return.

Aiden’s banishes have been re-timed to be closer to the beginning of a land phase, giving players more time to get back to the tower.

Aiden’s adds have been linked into sizable groups instead of all in separate encounters.

Digg should no longer chain-kill players that die and are rezzed during his fight.

I’m glad to see the changes being added today, especially the warden epic portion, that one was causing a lot of anger for some druids out there. The fix to Evernight Abbey is another good one, I wanted to write about that dungeon for a guide but it was quite frustrating since for the weekend it wasn’t functioning properly.

Gaming

Halls of the Forsaken

stargrace April 7, 2009 1Comment

The cloak pictured above is a quest reward for one of the Commonlands TSO dungeons – the image on it is new, at least to me, I’m fairly certain that the graphic used to be of something else. I love seeing things revamped like this. Thanks to Wpus for modeling it for the screen shot. He’s been having a lot of fun adjusting his colourful outfits lately. It’s nice to see so many new options in EQ2 as far as gear goes, even without dye. It has taken a little bit to get there but it’s coming along.

Since last night was LotRO night, I didn’t have a lot of time to play in game. I did managed to get the Commonlands instances done for shard updates though with my mystic and coercer – and the coercer managed to ding level 79 at the same time which I was really happy about. While we were defeating the final boss in Halls of the Forsaken, we stumbled upon an interesting body drop. It was the head of Gynok in a crate (fabled item). Apparently not all of the trophies come from raid instances which was a great surprise to me. EDIT: Or, and this is probably the more likely culprit – the raid version of Gynok and the instanced version for some reason are sharing the same loot table for this particular trophy, and that’s why it is dropping. Ack! Well, glad I got one in that case!

Of course, my guild on Kithicor doesn’t have a guildhall at the moment, and we don’t have one of the player crafted bases to attach the head to yet but it’s nice to have this trophy waiting for when we do get those things. I’m sure we will even if it takes a bit of time.

Today is the day that the new station market items get implemented. I think the costs are fairly reasonable, and they’ve been a long time coming. You can rename your character for $15. You can change their gender and appearance (though the barber shop already changes appearance for a gold) for $15. You can also change your character’s name, gender, and appearance for $25.

I’ve already written about these new SC items over here, and I really don’t think that it’s going to be as big a problem for keeping track of ‘bad eggs’ that some forum users made it out to be. There are always preventative methods and just good common sense when it comes to recruitment. On that same note – I DO wish that the automated server transfer service had been restored instead of implementing these new automated gender and name changes. The service has been down almost a year now and it’s very frustrating to deal with the petition system and days of waiting for the transfer to take place. I understand there’s only so much manpower and there’s always lots of things on the ‘to do’ list and my list certainly doesn’t match those of the SOE employees, but it’s a little personal wish of mine none the less.

Once I had completed the three instances with Wpus, it was time to spend the evening in LotRO which is experiencing it’s own number if bugs and issues lately. It was still a nice evening, hanging out with good friends always makes things much better.

Gaming

Hanging Around Bree

stargrace April 7, 2009 2Comments

My (now) 17 Minstrel hanging outside of Bree last night. It was one of the few ‘safe’ places to be that didn’t involve “rubberbanding” as they’re calling it on the forums and in game.

The issue is quite simple. I’m not sure if it’s present on all servers but it’s certainly on Nostalgia’s. Eventually as you’re walking along, at particular points you’ll meet up with an invisible wall that pushes you backwards each and every time you try to push forward. It slings you back, like a rubber band. There was one such wall on the outskirts of Bree, heading towards the Shire. It also happened to be exactly where Kasul and I needed to go to progress our epic line. No worries though, we worked around the area by using swifttravel, even though it took us a huge distance out of our way. When the quest sent us back to that area again we decided to move on to other things.

Needless to say neither of us gained very much experience.

We did still have fun though. No office supply is going to stop that! So we spent the majority of the evening wandering close to Bree, picking off bears and searching for mines. Once we’d filled our bags with goodies we headed back to the crafting area to gain a few skill ups. While crafting in LotRO takes a LOT of resources, I also enjoy it. Crafters rely on one another for components, much like VG does and EQ2 used to do. With an active Kinship (and Nostalgia is active for the members we have) this is hardly an issue as we’re constantly trading things between one another for use. Combines are done much the way they are in World of Warcraft, nothing too fancy about it. It’s not a mini game like EQ2 and you can’t (as far as I know) fail the combines like EQ, thus losing all of your material. I’m attempting to save up for a house (some day) but dang are they expensive. I can barely afford my skills each time I level, let alone a LOT of gold for a home. It’s a (far) future goal of mine though.

Lately I have had a HUGE ache for some role play. When I had these cravings before I used to satisfy them in EQ2 as a guide – but I don’t have the time to dedicate to the program any more. There are no D&D groups that I know of around here (here being Ottawa) so I’m trying to think of a little project I can do that would take care of my desire to be a story teller or my need to listen to other people’s stories. One idea I’m tossing around is creating an alt on Antonia Bayle (the most populated server in EQ2, also happens to be one of two RP servers) and write about an adventure of hers once a week leaving her for only role play. There are LOTS of guild events that happen on AB for RP purposes, and I could easily lose myself in one of those.

Aside from that, I’m not sure what other games out there offer a strong RP community. I’ll have to search a little bit. It’s like an itch that needs scratching, creative juices that are eager to flow (or some such thing. It’s late and I can’t come up with flowery words right now).

Hopefully LotRO is fixed back to normal by Thursday, which is the 2nd day of the week designated for some play time (during the day this time). I’m looking forward to inching towards level 20 – and appearance slots. Kasul got himself a really nice pirate hat and eye patch tonight, and I’ve been looking for ‘fluff’ armor for just such a reason.

Hope everyone else had an amazing night!

EQ Hotfix Notes

EQ2 Hotfix Notes

Halls of the Forsaken

Hanging Around Bree

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The Search For Hrada-Oki Bivouac

Personal EVE Economic Update (October)

Expensive Month (preparing for fun)

Locked Out (again)