All this, and Frostfell starts tomorrow too. Wheeeee. I’ve already dug out my bag of Frostfell hats and cloaks.
Maltheas is looking forward to popping over to Freeport to point and laugh at the Overlord’s ex-flying fortress. He only ever visited it once, in an ill-fated attempt to assassinate The Overlord (the original Freeport to Qeynos betrayal quest). It is a fine thing that such a symbol of Lucan’s oppressive dominion over Freeport has been laid low.
The most relevant fix in this mighty bugsquashing patch for our Extreeeme Questing Ratonga is:
* Many collections from Sinking Sands that were originally on the Kunark Burynai and then later removed have been added back to the tables in this zone.
That’ll help me catch up with folks who’d gotten them done via Burynai. I never had a Burynai :( there’s obviously a lot of fixes for quests I’ve not gotten to yet, as well.
I’m hoping that the drop rates for some quest starters might have been sneaked up. I was also sure I saw a fix for Et’sipe Ymeresh’s failure to spawn somewhere, but it doesn’t seem to be in the notes. I’ll check in on him anyway, as I’ve had the quest “Where will this lead me?” for far too long.
It’s also great to see “The Path of the Sun Wolf” making a return to the Peat Bog. Maltheas did it years ago before it vanished, but it’s an interesting little quest that I’m sure a lot of newer players will enjoy.
Everquest 2 : Will of a Tyrant patch notes follow, after the leap.
The 6 year pack will include a rather natty matching cloak and hat set. Not too keen on the colour scheme (Green is my colour), but it’s still a quite nice appearance only set. If we could choose a colour for it, that would make me even happier. Red + chains makes it look kind of evil.
EQ2 Veteran Reward: The Shroud of Fate
There is a gadget called “Call of the Veteran” which lets you teleport to a group member from anywhere in the world once per day. Handy indeed.
The pick of the pack, for me, is the Hammer of Adept Hands, a wondrous gadget that will refill your tradeskill vitality once per week. Somehow crafting feels wrong when you don’t have any vitality, so this will mean a whole lot more crafting from Maltheas’ fine support staff team.
It might seem a little weird that 6 year veteran rewards are becoming available when we only had EQ2’s 5 year anniversary celebration last week. The solution to this mystery is the bonus veteran time that has been gained through purchase of expansions over the years, meaning that some people have already hit 6 years worth. I hit year six in a couple of weeks.
Update: Turns out the Call of the Veteran is slightly cooler than we thought. Rothgar spilled the beans on the forum earlier:
The teleporter actually has two functions. First it summons a portal that only you can see. Right-clicking the portal gives you two options. One option is to port to a group member anywhere in the world. The second option is to summon a group member from anywhere in the world to your location. Once you use an option the portal goes away. I think the recast time on it is 60 minutes.
Yes, this works across zones and yes it works in dungeons. A player must meet the requirements for the zone before they can be summoned to you. So this means they have to have access to the zone and can’t possess a lockout timer for another instance of that zone. Our goal with the summoning ability was to allow veterans to share the “coolness” of this item with other players that might not have it yet.
February 2nd, 2010 will be a date marked in every Trekker’s diary. Cryptic Studio’s Star Trek Online will be unleashed upon the universe. I can’t wait, but I suppose I shall have to!
It was also revealed this week that Cryptic had made the wise decision to change their design regarding modelling the ship bridges. Now we’ll be able to move about our bridge, and invite other players into them. A great boon for roleplayers, and the designers have done themselves a big favour in the long run, as the various bridges will be excellent areas for the plot-centered episodes to utilise.
“We didn’t want to have interiors at launch,” said “Star Trek Online” executive producer Craig Zinkievich. “We thought it was just a little bit too much. We really wanted to make sure we delivered a really deep experience, but your bridge not being in the game, it really felt like a hole in the game, and it was just something that we had to put in.”
Aye, I know, Champions Online was rather bad so I ought not to be getting too excited, but the clack is that after Cryptic lost the Marvel license for the game that became Champions, they kind of lost heart in it, and moved most of the best folks over to STO, as it had much greater potential for success. Star Trek fans can only pray to the Q that, just this once, we’ll get a Star Trek game that doesn’t suck.
In celebration and hope, here is Dark Materia’s utterly awesome Picard Song.
Everquest 2’s Game Update 54 is mostly a bugsquashing release, with an eye to dealing with as many long-standing niggles as possible before the next expansion, Sentinel’s Fate, arrives in February.
Alongside that, we of course have the return of the Frostfell celebrations (Yay!), and a new monthly event which will celebrate each city of Norrath in turn. Frostfell is Maltheas’ very favouritiest time of the year, and he’ll be digging out his special Frostfell hat and robe very soon.
The patch notes are below. Hit “More” if you’re on the front page.
DDO, for the most part, follows D&D’s paper rules quite closely, but there are a few glaring exceptions that can catch folks out. Such is the case of grazing hits.
Grazing hits occur when you have not managed to roll high enough to beat your opponents AC, but have still rolled fairly high. Players do grazing hits on a roll higher than 10, but far more important is that monsters also do grazing hits.
How often a monster does a grazing hit depends on the dungeon difficulty. The threshholds have been tweaked a few times, but at the moment appear to be:
Normal: 17 or higher
Hard: 15 or higher
Elite 13 or higher
As you can see, on Elite, 40% of monster attacks are going to do you some damage, no matter how high your AC is, (as a roll of 20 is an automatic proper hit).
A grazing hit only does base weapon damage, such as d6 for a shortsword, even if it’s a +5 shortsword of flaming, it still does just d6. If it’s a greatsword, it’ll be 2d6. Some monster’s physical attacks are very substantial, even when just considering base weapon damage.
Fortunately, players get some respite from grazing hits, as we are born with a feat that reduces our damage received by 50%. Shields and centred monks also get a % reduction in grazing hit damage. These reductions take place after Damage Reduction has been applied.
However, especially on elite, if you are being stabbed at by several enemies, each of whom is going to score a grazing hit if they roll 13-19 for half base weapon damage, you are in very real danger of being rapidly nibbled to death.
While we might argue over the maths, at the least it is very useful to all to have some source of damage reduction, as even a single point of DR can make a very real difference to how well you deal with the regular smallish amounts of damage from grazing hits.
You can read more about this subject here, and here.
By all accounts Free to Play (F2P) Dungeons and Dragons Online has been a roaring success. In my own investigations I have found multiple packed low level instances filled to the brim with folks asking foolish newbie questions. Counter-intuitively, DDO subscriptions are up 40%, presumably because the F2P model allowed players enough time and content to get a bit hooked, and be sure they liked what they’d be getting. Myself, I am sticking with an F2P account, though I confess I spent some money to buy enough Turbine Points to unlock the Warforged and Monk, and grab a couple of adventure packs. I shall be endeavouring not to spend any further cash, and perhaps the free points you get during gameplay and the free content will be enough to keep me in adventures for now.
To my mind DDO has been brought back from the dead, with a second chance at glory. It had a lacklustre launch with insufficient promotion, never really making the splash it deserved. An awful lot like Everquest 2, in fact. Both games have been hiding in WoW’s shadow for far too long. I can only hope that the influx of money to Turbine will be put to good use feeding an ever-expanding DDO live-team. I’ll give Turbine one hint: If you’ll finally sort out Gnomes, and their Dragonmark, I’d be willing to spend a few points on unlocking that.
There was a time when EQ2 also sold adventure packs. Sundered Splitpaw, Bloodlines, and the Fallen Dynasty (the Isle of Mara) were all sold as online-only mini expansions for the price of $7.99 (if memory serves me right) These days they come as part of your core install, and they were sizable chunks of content worth their asking price. At some point, SOE realised that they could get that much money for a single appearance-only hat, which took a lot less effort. There have been no adventure packs since Legends of Norrath and the Station Cash shop opened.
Recently there has been a great deal of unhappiness with a new development in EQ2’s love affair with RMT (Real Money Transactions). In the next set of Legends of Norrath cards, there will be a loot card which grants one-time access to a special dungeon. Given how difficult it will be for anyone to get that card, it must be pretty awesome in that dungeon.
In DDO when you buy an adventure pack, which grants you access to a set of dungeons forever, you know exactly how much it will cost you. Everquest 2 expects you to gamble, buying packs of cards until you are lucky enough to get the one you want. I do not know the exact odds, but my experiences with getting loot cards from my free packs suggests you would need to buy a great number to stand a good chance of getting the specific loot card which opens the dungeon. This will restrict the number of people who get to experience this dungeon to the extremely lucky, and the obsessively addicted.
It is about time that Everquest 2 ended the charade that most people buy Legends of Norrath to play the card game. They do it for the loot cards, and it is a cynical exploitive way for SOE to make money. They should just remove loot cards from LoN, add them to the shop, and sell them honestly with upfront pricing, rather than forcing its customers to buy lottery tickets in the hopes of getting to experience new content. It should be noted that EQ2 also has a subscription fee. I do not think that having both extreme RMT AND a mandatory subscription charge is sustainable. I’d be happy for the RMT to go away, but I think that is not the way the MMO winds are blowing these days
Given the success of Free Realms, I have a feeling that EQ2 may be making the leap to being Free to Play, supported by RMT, with an optional subscription like Free Realms and DDO have. The streaming technology used by Free Realms has been adapted for use in EQ2 (and was responsible for the dreadful memory issues many people experienced after Live Update 53), and will be enabled at the time of the next expansion to make for a smoother new player experience. We have been promised that there will, at that time, be a great influx of new players, and I doubt that’s going to happen just because they get to start in Halas. My prediction is that Everquest 2 is going F2P. Feel free to poke fun at me if I turn out to be wrong.
Update 29th July, 2010: In the end, EQ2 did go F2P, though not in the way I hoped for. You can read about that here.
Wheee! Still struggling with the character creator, I’ve had another try at Spelling Bee. Mostly working on his body shape, to make him somewhat less hideous to the eye, and fiddling with his haircut, I finally came up with something reasonably decent to be getting on with.
There was something about his face though. It was nagging away at me. Imagine my dismay when about five minutes into the tutorial I suddenly realise:
That my majestic literate bee has ended up looking like a manga Michael Jackson. He’ll be taking a trip to the tailor as soon as practical, for a new head.
