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.
Fixed potential corruption of character statistics.
Fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator.
Fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable Character Creator.
Made Easy difficulty easier.
Slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty.
Fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays.
Fixed an issue with Dragon Age and Windows Game Explorer.
Updated Visual C runtime libraries.
They’ve been holding back the toolset patch til this game one was released, to ensure they matched up correctly, so hopefully that’ll be along real soon.
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.
It is possible that I have just become a lot more stupid than I used to be, but try as I might, I couldn’t get Dragon Age’s editor to do ANYTHING without something going horribly wrong. Even though I’d not even changed anything, I somehow managed to break the main campaign and corrupt my saves. Weirdness abounded, with my party just standing about, refusing to follow me, and greeting me as if we were meeting for the first time. Talking to my dog (Chompy) teleported me below the ground. All around there was misery and gnashing of teeth.
Turns out I wasn’t the only one, and there was actually quite a good reason. The toolset’s database is mismatched with that of the live game, so without jumping through a few hoops it’s very hard to make a mod that isn’t going to be having some issues. As I am a very strong believer in not releasing buggy mods, I have decided not to make any until the toolset is patched sometime next week. Sorting out my own bugs is one thing, but I need to be able to trust the toolset to not be throwing in some extra ones. Modding is hard enough without faulty tools.
If you’ve found your game is broken after trying out the toolset you may be able to get things working again by following these instructions. They worked for me at least.
How to fix Dragon Age if the Toolset broke it.
1. Open up the toolset. Go into File, Manage Modules, and create a new module. Don’t ever open up the Single Player module again, as just opening it is enough for it to start writing files and causing trouble. As the toolset automatically loads up the last module it had, and the Single Player one was it’s default, that’s why just opening the toolset was enough to break things. With another module loaded now, you should be safe from that issue going forward.
2. In the Tools menu in the toolset select “Empty Export Directories”.
3. Go into your My Documents/Bioware/Dragon Age/Modules folder and rename the Single Player folder.
With any luck Dragon Age is now fixed and your regular campaign game will now be working properly, though any save games you made while you had mismatched data will still be messed up. Hopefully you have a recent save from before that happened!
I’m looking forward, once the toolset is fixed, to making a few modules of my own. We’ll see how that goes.
Aye indeed. I’ve picked up Dragon Age: Origins, and am hoping to do a spot of modding for it if it turns out to be within my abilities. I never really got into Oblivion, but I greatly enjoyed the Morrowind and Baldur’s Gate 2 modding scenes.
Bioware have just set loose their first post-release bug fix, which you can download here. It performs the following works of wonder:
* fixed potential corruption of character statistics
* fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator
* fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable Character Creator
* made Easy difficulty easier
* slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty
* fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays
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.
