EQ2: The Item Revamp Continues and Continues

My crafted gear continues to have changed every time I check it. This picture gets ever more difficult to read, so you’ll need to click it, then hit the little expand arrow to get a good look. Ignore the yellow numbers and the difference in procs, as they’re just from adornments I plugged in. It’s the green and blue numbers that are of interest. In the latest instalment the shield got better, while the other two pieces got worse.:

My gear continues to mutate

You can’t plan when everything keeps changing like this, and the chaos seems set to continue.

We’ve had a hotfix today:

ITEMS

Djinn Bracelet of the Sky can once again be placed in your mount tab.
The Sublime Staff of Deathdealing should now be classified as a staff and do crushing damage.
Items with the effect “Dragonslayer’s Fury” should now correctly proc.
Many charms that were missed in the update should now be updated.
Elements of War hard mode items have been bumped up in power (Known issue about resists not showing. This is being looked at.)

Updated the following zones that were missed in GU61 launch:

• Shard of Hate
• Icy Keep: Retribution
• Tomb of the Mad Crusader
• Palace of the Ancient One
• Ykesha’s Inner Stronghold
• Zarrakon’s Abyssal Chamber
• Odus North Raid Mobs
• Odus South Raid Mobs

I’m not well placed to know what was wrought upon those zones, though I am told that existing gear was restatted, rather than creating all-new stuff. That’s a good thing in my book.

Charms also got updated. The only change I’ve noticed personally is that Jin’tu’s Gift, a high level crafter reward, has become godly. It used to be a charm wearable by any 80+ crafter who gained it during their Hua Mein questline. It had 50 wisdom on it, so it was pretty great for a priest. Thus it was that I wore it with pride. This is what it has become:

And no, I'm not taking it off.

OK, it lost some wisdom, but I’ll take that :D. It’s all a horrible mistake of course, and it is only due to the fact I was already wearing it that I can still use it, as you now have to be a level 80 adventurer to put it on. I *could* take it off, but I would not be able to put it back on, and if I can’t have my old Jin’tu’s Gift, I’m going to keep on wearing this one til they pry it from my cold crafting ratonga claws. Jin’tu’s Gift is one of many items that should never have been allowed anywhere near the stat generating script. I honestly don’t believe that whoever is behind all this has much of an understanding of EQ2.

Is there hope? Maybe, but I’m not holding my breath. These following announcements sound all well and good, but if they’re still relying on scripts and people who don’t know enough about the game to not assign adventurer stats to crafter gear, or remove class stats from Heritage rewards, it could just as easily make things worse.

Anyhows, the following statements are from Smokejumper:

Additionally, we’ve been combing all /bug and /feedback reports made since Tuesday’s update to comb out other issues and many of those are being fixed tomorrow also.

In the continuing raid vs heroic discussion, here is new info:

a) We agree with many of you that the bandwidth of item progression is too compressed between the heroic PoW options and the intended normal and challenge modes of the raid. Therefore, we’re not going to release the “normal” mode of the PoW raid and instead release only the challenge mode. The logical progression of content within PoW then becomes normal mode Heroic, challenge mode Heroic, and then challenge mode Raid, however raiders that have been plundering challenge mode Drunder x4 will be well-equipped and can move directly to challenge mode raid of PoW, if desired. See below for details.

b) Normal mode, Heroic content, Plane of War : Items are balanced to be normal mode raid tier 1 items (similar to items dropped in Temple, Throne, and Kraytok’s).

c) Challenge mode, Heroic content, Plane of War : Items are balanced to rest between hard mode raid tiers 1 & 2. (Between Kraytoc/Kael x4 HM and Drunder x4 HM.)

Future near-term updates (not all-inclusive, just a couple notes of interest):

• Kunark overlands are being fixed and items will drop there again soon.
• Heritage Quest rewards are also being increased in power and will be updated soon, as well.

And:

There are a number of things that we’re going to revisit on items:

a) The green stats matter. Progression of green stats will be attended to in the new pass.

b) There will be more variability between the value of stats on items. This was removed erroneously at the last minute. It will be returned. (Getting rid of the “all items have +29 STR on them in the same zone” effect.) There will be more “min/max-ability” on the items.

c) The dev team will be playing a lot over the weekend to assess item strength in the earlier zones. (Complaints we see are that low-leveled items are now overpowered.) Those zones had such outdated itemization previously that players are now seeing a huge increase in power in drops…we *think* at least partially because the items have been changed to be actually useful now. However, we’ll be assessing this over the weekend and then meeting first thing next week to discuss what will be done, if it’s out of adjustment.

NOTE: The items a, b, and c above will not affect the discussion of the balance of power between raids and the new heroic content. (Although “a” will have some affect on that.) That’s a separate discussion mostly.

ALSO PLEASE NOTE: These items will go to Test first. They are likely to be on Test before the end of the week (possibly even tomorrow). We *will* be listening to comments about them on the “In Testing” forum and responding to comments. Please *do* post if you test on that server.

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