March 2010

Latest Round of Patch Notes

(( 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.

Lets Talk Exploits

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?

Nice Try

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.

Are you a Faction Fiend?

Faction!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!

Nomadic Gamer