More news trickled out yesterday at SOE Live and I thought I’d post it below with a few comments here and there. I’m commenting on notes that Feldon has written up on EQ2wire, as he live blogged the panels.
- If you buy Chains of Eternity, you get an item you can claim 2 per account (not 1 per character) that if you are level 90 it dings you to 280AAs. [A lot of people are upset about this, and a lot of people are happy. I don’t think grinding 280aa takes any skill and most people simply grind older zones and don’t actually obtain AA the way they were ‘meant’ to be obtained. The 280AA cap in order to reach level 92 is steep for people who have been away from game, and unless they remove that requirement – OR – use this item, I can see people not returning. Honestly, if someone doesn’t want to use it, they don’t have to. I don’t personally see it as game breaking.]
- The addition of incremental spells. These are new abilities that have stages. It was a bit confusing but basically the more you cast a spell, it will enable you to eventually cast a new bigger / better spell. Perhaps completely different than the spell you had been casting to begin with. [Sounds neat, and I wonder if the quality of the spell you’re casting affects the result of the new spell (ie: adept, mastercrafted etc).]
- Traderskillers are getting prestige abilities, and tradeskill AA will be their own point system now and not tied to the adventuring total AA. They’re also adding mass production, but no idea if this will be for everything, or only certain items, or consumables, or what. Will wait to hear more information. [VERY happy to hear this]
- Spirit Stones. Items that grow in power when you do what it says on them (ie: the more you heal your allies, the more passive abilities the stone gains). These sound neat, like a new type of adornment.
Of course there’s a lot of content coming, two massive overland zones, a bunch of dungeons, raids, solo and group content. Beta apparently starts on Monday, and a tentative release date has been set for November 13th (that seems quite soon, so I would expect this to change). Are you excited about the expansion? The last few have been slightly lack luster for me, and I haven’t decided quite yet how I feel about this one. The EQ expansion on the other hand, I am VERY excited about.
As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!
I’m holding judgement until the full transcripts are posted – or even until the thing comes out if it’s really going to be here in three weeks – but I am skeptical of what I’m hearing about the new systems in this year’s EQ2 expansion.
Each of the new changes – spells you have to practice, adornments you have to level, crafted gear you have to make out of extra-rare rares from the harvesting tree and then modify using the other crafting tree – sounds time-intensive. Spending time to make interesting choices for your character would be one thing, but SOE’s track record does not suggest that any more than one of these various options will actually be optimal. If that’s the case, we might just be looking at more time to get our characters up to the intended baseline – and possibly another artificial barrier that will need to be lifted with an auto-granted AA token in a year or two.