TSS Rank 2 Spell Drops Increased

To address some issues with spell rarity and location I made the following changes to spell drops:

Effectively doubled the rate that spells drop

Changed it so that each NPC that can drop spells can theoretically drop 4 spells at a time (although the odds of getting 4 spells are very very very very remote)

Changed it so that each NPC that can drop a spell of a given level can now drop all spells from that level. So instead of one spot to get a level 72 Mage spell, you can now go to any spot that drops level 72 spells and potentially get a Mage spell.

We hope that this will address any issues with the spell drops. The expansion is still very young so it will probably be a while of watch-and-wait before we make any further changes to how spells drop in TSS for Teir 2.

- Nodyin, EQ Developer

Full thread is here.

Upcoming Changes to EQ

Rashere, Lead Designer, discusses some changes in the game coming with The Serpent's Spine.

Included are how you earn AAs, spell resists, 'hovering' over your body upon death, character creation, Endless Quiver and dark blue con mobs.

Read it here.

Rashere also talks about the new Out-of-Combat regen system here.

House of Commons Dev Chat Logs – August 23, 2006

Here.

9th Step in BiC Bugged, Fix Due "Soon".

We have a fix for the issues reported in the 9th step of this task currently on the Beta server. Beta players who were copied over and on this step report that they can now progress to the rest of the quest. After the fix is verified by QA we can look into getting this copied out to the Live servers. When I have an ETA I'll let you know.

- Nodyin, EQ Designer

Full thread is here.

A closer look seems to indicate that it will not be fixed until after the release of The Serpent's Spine on Sept. 19, so I would guess the end of September or so.

The Serpent's Spine due September 19

Most likely the next Game Update will be with the launch of The Serpent's Spine on September 19. - Raghnell, EQ Producer

Dev Chat from 8/10 (Unofficial)

News on the new out of combat regen coming and other issues.

Read about it here.

Patch: July 18, 2006

July 18th, 2006
_____________________

- /raid commands should now work appropriately.
- Added /decaycorpse command on The Combine and The Sleeper. You can now target and manually decay any of your own corpses that no longer have items on them. Please help us keep Norrath clean of unnecessary corpse litter.
- Fixed a bug that would cause ground items to not respawn appropriately.

The main reason for this mornings update was to upgrade our hardware (although we did slip in a few minor things). Our operations team is working very hard to get this done but we are going to have to push the server uptime another hour to 11am PDT. Sorry for the delay. - Raghnell, EQ Producer

Stealth Changes to Dain 3 Monster Mission

In the last patch I increased the distance from basecamp the Dwarves have to be before they return to full strength. It's about midway from basecamp to position one so if you move them to a position and then attack from there they'll be full DPS. If you pull the Giants to basecamp they'll do a lot less DPS.

- Nodyin, EQ Designer

Full thread is here.

More changes:

The Dwarves will now be unable to locate the Giants until the zone emote announces they are on the move.

- Nodyin, EQ Designer

The dwarves were never intended to hang out by the East Waste zoneline and perform a coordinated attack as soon as the giants stepped off.

Sound strategic use of the armies is still possible and is now, quite possibly, the only way to win the misison.

- Nodyin, EQ Designer

Full thread is here.

New Expansion Announced

SAN DIEGO, CA – July 10, 2006 – Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE), a global leader in the online games industry, today announced EverQuest® The Serpent’s Spine™, a new expansion for the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMOPRG), EverQuest. EverQuest The Serpent’s Spine will only be available via digital download beginning in September for the suggested price of U.S. $29.99.

“In an ongoing commitment to introducing new features into EverQuest, The Serpent’s Spine introduces the Drakkin, the first new player race since the Frogloks were added to the game seven expansions ago,” said Chris Sturr, Senior Brand Manager, Sony Online Entertainment. “In addition to the new race, players of all levels will benefit from this expansion, as we are including content for levels 1 to 75.”

Players will also be able to explore a new starting city, Crescent Reach, which contains merchants, quests and combat. As in the last expansion, there will be new dynamic features such as auras, traps and destructible terrain. Players will be able to reach level 75 with new spells, raids and abilities.

Read about it here.

More on NPC Changes

Some NPCs are likely hitting for more and others for less than before the patch. The change involved switching old world NPCs over to newer systems. Old NPCs all had hand-set values, which led to a lot of variance from NPC to NPC even within the same level range due to different designers making different NPCs (the dreaded "under con"). It also made it very difficult to tune since each individual NPC has to be tracked down and changed if you decide a certain range of NPCs needs to be adjusted.

Under the newer system, NPCs of the same level start with the same baseline values and modify from there based on the NPCs capabilities and class (warriors have more hps, giants hit slower and harder, werewolves are vulnerable to fire, golems have low intelligence, etc.) so depending on what the NPC was set at before, it may have gained or lost damage dealing capabilities in the conversion or it may be dealing similar damage, but in a different fashion (hitting harder, but slower for instance).

This only affected NPCs who weren't already on the new system, which is basically NPCs from Original EQ, Kunark, Velious, and Luclin. It was also limited mainly to NPCs below level 50 and excluded event NPCs, which have to be tuned case by case regardless.

If you come across any particular NPC that seems to be way out of line compared to other NPCs of the same level around it, feel free to call it out and I'll go have a look. I'll just need the zone and the full name of the NPC to find it.

Rashere - EQ Lead Designer

Full thread is here.

NPC Changes

As posted by Maddoc:

Hey everyone,

In the last few years, much has changed in the world of EverQuest, which is a great thing for all of us -- It's what keeps us all interested in the game and enjoying the time we spent playing.

In developing a server like this, we have to be mindful and aware of those changes such that we can make an informed decision on what course of action to take when addressing any issues as they come up. As you might imagine, there are years worth of content to be aware of, enough so that some of the changes require a lot of time.

The change that I'm about to explain makes huge strides towards dealing with what you guys feel is one of the biggest issues to overcome for this server. This same change is also why I've been largely unavailable for the last week or two. The change is not small, affecting a great portion of EverQuest and it's NPC's, nor is the change to be taken lightly, needing as much testing time as you guys are able to muster. If you have a character and haven't participated in beta for a week or two, I'd encourage you to please log in and test everything out.

With that said, the changes that have been made are going to affect a number of NPC attributes in an effort to address the power disparity between melee-classes and caster-classes in the early stages of progression on these servers. So, without further ado...

NPC Health - This has been increased on average for most NPC's.
NPC Armor Class - This has been reduced on average for most NPC's.
NPC Overall DPS - The overall dps done by NPC's has been reduced slightly on average for most NPC's.
NPC Damage - This has been reduced on average for most NPC's.
NPC Melee Speed - This has been reduced slightly (meaning they hit faster than previously) on some NPC's, though most will be roughly the same.
NPC Resists - This remains largely unchanged, staying the same on average for most NPC's.

NPC Effective Spellcasting Level - In the last year or so, PC spells got a pretty big boost in power, which means that NPC's also got a pretty good sized boost in power as well. I think the best way to address this is to get a means to specify an NPC's spellcasting-level independent of it's actual level.

As an example, this means that I can now tell a level 50 NPC to only cast level 42 and lower spells, without changing the NPC's level at all. With this functionality, I can reduce the spellcasting power of the NPC's without reducing anything else. With this change, you should see a very noticeable change in the NPC's spellcasting power, particularly in the level 25 to 40 range.

DISCLAIMER : Given the nature of these changes, I'm speaking of an 'average', so there will be situations where an NPC or small group of NPC's that now resist more now than they did previously, likewise you will see situations where an NPC or small group of NPC's will resist less now than they did previously. This applies to all of the information listed above.

I've made these adjustments to about 70% of the NPC's so far and that data will be hitting the server this afternoon. There are still some NPC's that have not been fully converted yet, so I'll post when those are done as well.

There's one more thing that I have on my plate to do to address some of the melee concerns (that I'm sure will be posted in this thread), so stay tuned and please throw as much testing as you can at this change.

This change has reportedly happened on all live servers, not just the progression ones. Changes have happened to many NPCs in most pre-PoP zones. Resistances are reported to have increased as well.

This quote taken from here.

Patch: June 28, 4am PDT

Patch message is here.

Patch: June 16, 5am PDT

Update Message - June 16, 2006

- Fixed a crash while trying to search the bazaar when not using the default UI.
- Fixed the problem with AA experience being reset when you enter monster missions or use a shroud.
- Fixed a bug with some tasks not being available to be given out to players.
- The ‘;’ chat commands should now work again.
- Setting a chat window's default channel to a chat channel (instead of say, group, raid, ...) will now broadcast the chat to that channel.
- Fixed a problem that was causing the Concentration AA to not function properly.
- We've reverted the fix to channeling made with the last patch. After much discussion, our general feeling is that channeling has been broken for long enough that players have come to rely on that broken behavior as expected gameplay. For the time being, we've reverted back to that broken behavior and will address spell interrupts in general at a later date.

New Hot Zone Itemization - June 2006

I hope that everyone is enjoying the new Hot Zones released with the update this week. Now that the first players to hit the zones have had a few days to run through the content I wanted to discuss what some of you have already noticed, namely that there are some new items dropping in each of the Hot Zones.

This is something that we've wanted to do for some time now. I very nearly was able to itemize the Hot Zones that went live when PoR came out but we just weren't able to complete the items before that set of zones went live. Rather than tack on the items partway through the Hot Zone period I decided to hold off until we released the next set of items. This is not by any means a complete re-itemization of these zones and does not mean they were "revamped" in any way. New items were simply added to the zones in a variety of ways that I will discuss below.

The first and most obvious source of items in the new zones are the new named NPCs to be found in all of the Hot Zones. Some zones have more new named npcs than others but each zone should have at least one new npc. These NPCs have brand new drops that should be a bit more level appropriate for current day EverQuest than some of the items that might drop elsewhere in the zone and are older.

The second source of items are global rare items. A number of the Hot Zones have new global rares. In some zones nearly any NPC can drop these items. In other zones the global rares are restricted by race so only certain types of NPCs drop these items.

The final loot mechanism I used in the Hot Zones is something new I came up with for these zones - feedback is welcome! I did something I call the "Call for Help" mechanic. Basically it works like this....

Some (not all!) npcs in the Hot Zones will, during combat, realize they are in trouble and are not going to win. If they decide to call for help at this point a new NPC will spawn somewhere nearby. This NPC will be the same race as what you're fighting but will be just a little bit stronger. This new NPC will then run over and, well, start hitting you. Obviously a new NPC hitting you isn't fun so the up side to this is that the new NPC is a Named npc with loot that essentially spawned just for you and your group.

The chance of this happening is about the same as the chance to get one of the global rare drops found in the Hot Zones.

I'm hoping that this will add a bit of excitement and danger to normal experience grinding while offering a chance at some nice items in the process.

I hope you all enjoy the items and the zones in this set of Hot Zones.

- Nodyin, EQ Designer

Full thread is here.

Channeling Changed and to be Changed Back

I posted this in another thread, but will mention it here as well.

We fixed a problem with channeling that was causing it to basically be backwards. If you had no AAs, you channeled through damage 100% of the time and as you got AAs, that decreased. It now scales like it should, and like how it worked in the past, where you start out low, channel more often as you gain channeling skill, and your AAs increase that even further. You're going to see more interrupts than before simply because you are no longer channeling 100% of the time (or close to that if you had AAs that were decreasing it). Your chance to channel is still really high at high levels (it caps at 90%), though, assuming you have maxed channeling skill.

One caveat to this...channeling doesn't apply to being bashed, stunned, or moving. Even with a high channeling skill, if you get bashed, stunned, or moved too far, you're going to lose your spell. That hasn't changed.

Rashere

Thread is here.

Update:

Ok, here's the scoop...

The bug dates back at least a year. For the time being, we're going to re-break channeling, putting it back to where it was before the patch, so you'll channel through damage 100% of the time if you have any channeling skill at all. Rather silly, but at this point its expected gameplay. The only difference from before the patch to after is that channeling AAs won't actively reduce your chance to channel...they just won't do anything at all for the time being.

In the near future, I'm going to take a look at the whole interrupt system and likely make some significant changes to it. At that point we can make channeling actually mean something again as part of the larger interrupt change.

Rashere

Name Reservations for the Combine (Progression) Opening on May 31st

The Combine (Progression Server) will be available on May 31st for all current subscribers to log in and reserve a name for the launch on June 28th. The Combine server will open between 10am and 12pm PDT for name reservations only and will remain open until June 26th. Only one character per account will be allowed.

When the server goes live you will be able to fill all 8 character slots but for the sake of fairness we are limiting the pre-launch naming to a single character per account. Keep in mind that until later expansions are unlocked, Iksar, Frogloks, Vah Shir, beastlords, and berserkers will not be available for character selection.

Naming Server Fact Sheet

Opening: May 31st between 10am and 12pm PDT
Closing: June 26th
Character Limit: Naming will be limited to a single character per account although the live server will allow the full set of 8.
Race Limit: Iksar, Vah Shir, and Froglok are not available.
Class Limit: Berserker and beastlord are not available.

You can get to The Combine to reserve your name once it is available as you would log into any other server on the main Live Server Select screen.

Message Edited by Kytherea on 05-30-2006 05:44 PM

Kytherea ~~wielding a giant hammer & a hairless War Hamster~~
"I'm late, I'm late...."

Original post here.

DirectX 9.0c update on Test and is going Live with the next update

Posted by Grumbuk, EQ Programmer, on 05-22-2006:

This post is just another reminder to folks that we've updated the Test server to use the April release DirectX 9.0c. Note there is a little bit of confusion about which specific version of DX9.0c you need; there happens to be a couple of different versions of DX9.0c and to make a long story short if you aren't sure which specific version of DirectX 9.0c you have installed, please just visit the microsoft DirectX update site to be sure your system is fully up to date. While it's a little confusing to everyone that there are multiple releases of DirectX 9.0c, it is a thankfully simple process to just go to the microsoft site and update automatically (I have no idea why Microsoft didn't update the visible version numbers, sorry).

Please note that with the next update to live servers players will be required to use a version of DirectX released in April or later.

For anyone interested in why we are updating, it is because there have been a good number of bug fixes in DirectX 9 since the version currently in use on Live servers. The latest version also provides some very useful diagnostic tools to help us continue to improve the stability & performance of EverQuest. This is not a significant update to the code; pretty much all that had to change from a code standpoint to support the latest DX was shader API related.

Our compatibility lab spent a lot of time testing all the the permutations of supported hardware (which is a lot of time & hardware) and so far neither QA or the players on Test have reported any problems with the DirectX update. That said, if you want to be certain your system will not have any problems related to the DirectX update when we patch live servers, I recommend you log in to the Test server and verify your system allows you to log in and play with no obvious visual artifacts. To the best of our knowledge, updating DirectX to the latest version will not affect your ability to play on Live servers and in fact we believe a significant portion of the player base is already using the correct version. We are optimistic this will be a smooth update, but it's always good to get more people confirming the results so if you're able to get on Test to check it out please do.

Thanks-

---------------------------
Eric Cosky - "Grumbuk"
Assistant Lead Programmer, EverQuest
Sony Online Entertainment

Full thread here with links to Microsoft for DirectX.

8th Year Veteran Reward Decided

Posted by Oshran, EQ Designer, on 05-22-2006:

Quick announcement: the 8 year veteran reward has been decided! It's called Throne of Heroes and will port 8 year vets directly to the throne room in the guild lobby. ToH will be similar to Origin in regards to its casting and reuse timers. To accommodate this new ability, the guild lobby and its amenities will be made available to everyone, even those who are not yet flagged for Dragons of Norrath.

Looking forward to 8 more,
Oshran

Full thread is here.

Stealth Update 05/03/06 at 4am PST

The following zones were updated early this morning:

Fanning the Flames (Tirranun raid) - The lava spout traps were removed.
Demi-Plane of Blood - Tether added to Mayong Mistmoore.
Deathknell - Ability to feign and stun the tank was removed from the Deathknell Enforcers.
Trakanon's Teeth - Can now launch and enter the Kunark monster mission raid with only one person needing to be flagged.
Hollowshade Moor - The war should be working again.

Let me know if you have any questions.

-Prathun

Full thread is here.

House of Commons Dev Chat - April 27, 2006

Read it here.