EQ2

Fan Faire Poll Open!

SG_01 — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 06:52:38 GMT

Today Sony Online Entertainment set up a preliminary poll for their next Fan Faire. Now, as anyone can guess, I can hardly wait! Unfortunately though, there are three options in there for the month of June, in which I am scheduled to graduate, so I would not be able to attend. Soo, all vote for Vegas! (Well, if you really don't want to, I guess I can't blame ya if you choose otherwise.)

Aside from all that, I'm sure it's going to be great fun once again. I know it was last year. If you've never gone to a Fan Faire of theirs before, I can definitely recommend going. It's both interesting and fun!

So, everyone, please vote!

Yet Another New Year!

SG_01 — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 05:16:13 GMT

Soo, I have been bussy since the last time I blogged here, but I figured I would make another post to give you all an idea about what's going on.

Mainly I have been playing EverQuest 2, in the new expansion Rise of Kunark. I managed to get to level 73, and go around a couple of the zones. I must give kudos to the EverQuest 2 team, as this expansion is awesome! Very well done. Lot's of new quests, including some big general quest lines, and quite the faction game around it. So far I have managed to do nearly every quest in the Kylong Plains. Some of which were very funny, cool, or otherwise interresting.

A rather long quest I have been working on the last couple of weeks was the quest line which starts with "A Fistful of Metal". The first quest has you run around the Kylong Plains to find and destroy a number of items, and enemies. The second quest is a little more interresting, as you are accused of a murder you did not commit. As you fight your way through to prove your innocense, you find the real murderer. The last quest has you run around the Fens of Nathasar in an attempt to get a big bounty. The result of the quest line is a fabled jewelry piece, and quite some coin earned in the process. Definitely a nice quest to do.

On the Vanguard front I have not done too much, since for a good three weeks I had to send my laptop in for repairs. I did get some pieces of the winter celebrations in there, however. Though it felt a bit empty compared to EverQuest 2, it did have a nice touch to it. Especially the free flying mount was fun to ride about the world of Telon with.

On the more real life front, I have been busy, working an internship with Playlogic Game Factory, a Dutch game development studio. A lot of fun, overall. Unfortunately though, the commute time is rather long, leaving few time for me to blog, and do other things. In the weekend I still game and do stuff. I picked up Guitar Hero 3, which has been a blast. So far I am working my way through hard. (At work though, we have someone playing on Expert, mad I tell you!)

And nop, I don't do new years resolves or any of that stuff. Though I do hope to finish my Bachelor this year, move somewhere closer to where I work, and such. No need for any resolves there though ;)

GU38, and blog spam?

SG_01 — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:32:27 GMT

Well, last week EverQuest 2 had their game Update 38. I have to say, there's some things I like about it, and some things I don't. To start off, there's the new "intro" to Kunark, which has you travel on a boat. Definitly kinda neat. Nothing complex or mindblowing, but a nice little tidbit that has you help discover the way to Kunark. If you havn't tried it out, even though you're playing EQ2? Go try it out now ;) It only takes like 10 to 20 minutes to finish it all the way through.

The next piece is something I both like, and don't like. There's a new "Appearance" tab in the game. On this tab you you put stuff you want to appear to be using (but arn't really). You need to really take care though, cause if you try to auto-equip anything, while you last were on the appearance tab, it will try to equip the item there, and will fail if the appearance slot doesn't exist. (Or put it in your appearance slot, not giving you any of the resists/etc). This will cause some confusion I think.

The reason why I both like and dislike it though, is the concept itself. It allows a tank wearer to be an effective tank while appearing to be in rags. "ha ha, funny", well for the first time maybe, but it gets old quickly. I like it, cause now I don't need to switch out my gear if I want to look different, and I can use my Fan Faire cloak as appearance (cause it looks awesome), while using a handmade cloak with stats for the stats.

Then there are the new recipies. If you havn't read about them, I sugest heading over to the EQ2 Traders Corner. They had an introduction about the new rare proffisioner recipies, and other tradeskill related changes over there. One of them I wanted to touch on briefly are the new Adept III spells related to the first Adventure Pack. They have put upgrades in for some of the spells, making them a whole lot more useful at the high level. I still envy the druids though, they get a mana regen spell upgraded!

Well, ofcource there's a bunch more changes. But you'll have to read about them yourself in the patch notes ;)

The second subject I wanted to talk about is the spam blogs receive. I never realized it myself, but blogs are usually open systems that can be spammed easily. Today when I was looking at my admin area, I found that I had 2 comments that had been filtered out because they were spam.

I'm glad Subtext has the anti-spam featured built right in, cause that could become very annoying, if you had a popular blog.

The irony of it too, it was gold-spam. *sighes* Can't get rid of those guys now can you? Well, at the very least they got filtered out, and I had the priviledge to remove them for good!

Well, that's it for now,

- SG

Time for an update

SG_01 — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:19:33 GMT

Well, sort of. Things have slowed down, since school started again. Well, depending on how much you can name the final year in a Bachelor of Science "school". Basically it's just finishing up stuff, mopping it together. Then there's the internship that I'll be doing at the PlayLogic Game Factory.

So, all in all, busy busy busy arranging stuff.

Ofcource all the while still playing games. Had some fun in Vanguard in the beginning of the week, and tonight I've been playing EverQuest 2 and Legends of Norrath.

Legends of Norrath, by the way, finally launched this Wednesday. They reset all the scenarios, so I've been working at getting them all checked again. Interesting thing though: The reward cards now actually work. So, if you play the scenarios, you get new cards. It's all very nicely done.

Some of you may know Winter. If not, she's in a number of pictures in my Fan Faire '07 album. She just started a blog, but has yet to make her first post. Definitly looking forward to it though. I've added a link in the menu, you can find her blog at http://thewinwinsituation.blogspot.com/. Hopefully she'll be a better blogger than me! (Yea, I know I'm a bit sporadic sometimes)

Anyhow, for EQ2 I'm looking forward to GU38. We'll get a new tab on our inventory for appearance items. Should be nice enough. Ah well, if you want to know more about that, I sugest you listen to the last podcast from EQ2-Daily, where they outline the update.

Well, see you all later! Time to head to bed.

- SG

Help! What are they doing to my achievements this time?

SG_01 — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 00:52:43 GMT

Yep, the next Game Update is coming up, and there's going to be more changes to the achievement system. This time the subclass specific ones, so there's a lot. Though there's some great stuff coming, there's also one group who's not as happy with all the changes: The scouts. And with that, to some extend the fighters. This because they're hitting hate transfers accross the board with the nerf bat. I say this will affect raids slightly, people will just have to adjust to the new settings, there's no man overboard.

Anyhow, on to the achievements. They're in the second post on the test update notes for Friday, June 20th. This might not be how they go live, but this is how they are on test now.

Safehouse

There is a lot of uproar over this change. They're changing this spell so that instead of a feign death abiltiy, this now becomes an ability that saves you from death and puts you in a "bleading" state (the state that you lie uncontious on the floor, bleeding to your death), and reduces aggro with the mob. While this definitly won't save a raid from a complete whipe, it might save yourself. I say it's an interesting change, and the brigands should be able to adjust to this.

Luck of the Dirge/Blessings

These two spells both got a small hit. Basically they are the same achievement, so it makes sense that they got changed in the same way. Both from a 25% increase in trigger chance to 20%. Truely I don't think we'll notice a lot from this change, as it's 5% of the original percentage. Say your spell has 20% originally, the difference in this spell's effect is exactly 1% (from 25% to 24%). While there are some higher trigger chances in game, most of them are in fact lower than 20%.

Magnetic note

The only reason I'm listing this is because of the change to aggression. Some dirges seem to be having trouble with their aggression, getting resisted too much on spells on this. What of this is true, only time will tell.

Double Arrow - Double Attack - Unabate - Time Compression - Energy Vortex

All of these achievements had bonusses reduced. Take a while and doublecheck these, and see if they're worth keeping is my advice.

Raid Armament

While this buff got reduced in per-person effectiveness, it got an overall boost, as it now stays on everyone on the raid. As such, it looks like Paladins are the first to get a raid-wide buff in their armament of abilities.

Reaver

This ability got a slight nerf as the health returned from this buff got reduced from 2.5 to 2. I don't know how this spell works, but apparently this is quite a big deal (Shadow Knights wheren't happy about it). Complaining they couldn't solo / duo effectively without this achievement. I find this wierd as they should be able to solo and duo without any achievements, but that's just me.

Lifeburn

The ratio on lifeburn was decreased. In other words: it'll take more life to the same amount of damage you did before. I'm thinking this may be a prep for Kunark, but that's just a wild guess.

Soul Ward

Can no longer be cast out of combat. So no prewarding with this one! Shouldn't be a big deal, probably.

Conclusion

The big conclusion here is that even though all of these nerfs above make for a big negative inpact, there's also a lot of positive things coming in the achievement lines. You may want to respec and change things around, or you may wish to keep your current loadout. Whatever you do, take your time and evaluate whether you need to change your tactics around a bit, to keep fighting efficiently.

Also, there's a lot of things outside the achievement tree that are changing. Take a good look at the notes and take your advantages out of it. There are a lot of fun things coming, and I'm sure you can't wait to try them.

- SG

EverQuest II: Game Update 36 Achievements

SG_01 — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 02:06:06 GMT

With GU36 we'll be seeing some changes to the Achievement system. I thought I'd give them a quick look per class:

Bard:

Overall buffs, there's a couple in there that are changes to the way things work. For instance Shield Focus (changed to Lend Shielding) now allows you to block an attack rather than get you stun/root immunity. Harmonized shot (changed to Messenger's Letter) now increases someone's hate rather than lower yours. These changes look to be more in favour of grouping and raiding rather than soloing, but it should add to the class overall.

Brawler:

Some major boosts in this tree, with the only real downside being that the starter no longer gives mounted speed. However, there is one uncertainty, which is Relentless Punches (now named Eye of the Tiger). From the way I read it, it now no longer requires you to be unarmed, and adds 0.75% combat art damage overall. However, whether that last effect is replacive or not, ask your local tester ;)

Cleric:

Some big damage nerfs in here. Divine Castigation was reduced, as well as our 100% crit chance reduced to 80%. Some positive things though: the wards now take in account mitigation when testing for 50% damage, added shield effectiveness is probably a good thing for both yourself, and your Shield Ally target, Holy shield now a toggle skill: permanently shield one target from AEs: no more AE stuns, or bad raid AEs is always a good thing!

Crusader:

Overall a positive note here. Two slight minus points: Fearless Morale loses casting and reuse time increases, but instead buffs up the rest of it's foci by 2%. Legionaire's smite got set back to 30s recast due to symbol requirement removal. Lance looks like the big winner here, as it can no longer be reposted, and got sped up as well.

Druid:

You can now choose your shape, for shapeshift, rather than have it dependant on your weapon. Overall in this line a good increase in abilities. Natural boon seems to be rebalanced so that it procs more, but heals less per proc. Hierophant's obfuscation no longer de-aggro's you, but now negates 1.5% of hostile spells heading your way. Good? Bad? You determine!

Enchanter:

Some improvements, some changes in the way things work, and one nerfishly thingy there. Quickening got rebalanced to make of for the loss of the Free hand requirement. Perpetuality will now only show 1 icon at a time, rather than up to 5 (the effect has not changed). Sever Empathy has been changed to Sever hate, and now wipes off hate positions of a target ally to some enemy (not 100% sure how this'll work).

Predator:

All increases in abilities, and relatively few changes at that. Consider yourself lucky this time ;)

Rogue:

Mostly, an overall rebalance of the tree. There are some increases in damage, but that's countered by some increases in casting time elsewhere. The best change here is that Pick Pocket now also adds an automatic chance to pick-pocket people while using CAs.

Shaman:

Mostly due to some requirements disappearing, it seems a number of things have been reduces. One of these is, like the Clerics, the 100% crit chance has gone down to 80%. The spell Immunities has been granted a very nice effect: the ability for nearby allies to outright prevent hostile effects of a spell. Also, looks like they made a typo here, in Inteligence 2: Rabies. It states "Is not", rather than "Is now a single target DoT that triggers a bigger DoT when the first one expires".

Sorcerer:

Though things like Static Shield, Freehand Sorcery, Ward of Sages and Brainstorm got rescaled due to the removal of their specific requirements, there are a lot of nice updates here as well. For instance, Manashield got improved to be twice as effective, Sagacity stacks with other buffs now, and Convusion blast instantly lowers your hate position rather than your current hate ammount.

Summoner:

Many buffs became permanent buffs that are automatically applied to your pet, also the ability called Shadowstep (now called Reanimate) looks very interesting, which other spell can you name that can be cast while casting a spell?

Warrior:

Some nice upgrades here, though I'm not quite sure what they all do (don't play a warrior myself), I'm not seeing any direct nerfs in this collection, which is always a good thing. Enjoy your new AE avoidance too ;)

Well, that wraps it all up. Time for me to head to bed!

- SG