Game Update Notes - March 13, 2024

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/game-update-notes-march-13-2024.296788/

 Highlights

• Starting March 16th, seek out Alta the Frightened in Crescent Reach to start the 25th Anniversary quests!

Items

• The names, icons, and lore text have been swapped for the Guardian's Girdle and Assaulter's Belt.
• Type 7 augments available from Miacallie Herlsas in Tides of Time have had stat adjustments where applicable.
• Fixed an issue that caused Selyrah mounts to disappear and their buffs to misbehave.

Quests & Events

• Reduced the price of mounts on the anniversary merchant.

Spells

• Cleric - Increased the damage of ranks 2 and 3 of Unrelenting Hammer of Zeal.
• Enchanter - Increased the HP and damage of ranks 2 and 3 of Flariton's Animation.
• Shaman - Increased the HP and damage of all ranks of Suja's Faithful.
• Shadowknight - Increased the HP and damage of all ranks of Minion of Fandrel.
• Wizard - Increased the damage of ranks 2 and 3 of Kindleheart's Pyroblade.
• Wizard - Irae Faycite Shard: Glacial Ice Cascade will now also focus Wildice Cascade XI rather than Rimeclaw Torrent.
• Monk - Moved all abilities in the Clawstriker's Flurry line of abilities from timer 9 to timer 12.

Mercenaries

• Fixed a bug where mercenaries suspended after a persona swap would unsuspend after zoning without the mercenary window reflecting the unsuspension.

Progression Servers

• Modest Illdaera, Elegant Oseka, Stately Ladrys, and Ostentatious Ryken armor are now marked as quest items.

Miscellaneous

• Doubled the maximum number of allowed players per pickzone for Laurion Inn.
• Increased the Dragon's Hoard cap to 500.
• Optimized the processing performance of the client log file to reduce hitching and stuttering.
• The per-kill Alternate Advancement experience cap is now applied before most server and character-based experience modifiers to be more consistent with leveling experience.
• Corrected an issue that caused a player's level and class to not get updated in the Guild Window after leaving a monster mission.
• Made several changes to improve client and zone performance.
• Refined the tuning of Memory.ini for smoother framerate: Balanced and Most memory modes have pre-loaded textures. Least memory mode has always had deferred texture loading.
• You will no longer be able to bind in Nagafen's Lair, Permafrost Keep, Kedge Keep, Plane of Sky, and Plane of Fear.

The EverQuest Team

Darkpaw explains Windows Display Calibration

Many players have complained about EverQuest being too dark after the DirectX 11 upgrade on January 17, 2024. Darkpaw has now created a document explaining how to calibrate the display settings of your Microsoft Windows PC. 

This may (or may not) help your EverQuest gaming.

Read it here.

Hotfix Notes: February 22, 2024

February 22, 2024
_____________________

*** Miscellaneous ***

- Corrected an issue that prevented players from creating or swapping personas on some servers. You will need to re-patch your client for this fix.


- The EverQuest Team

Game Update Notes - February 21, 2024

 

Items

• Loading an equipment set now properly removes the appearance of an ornament from other items.
• Corrected an issue where identical augments would not load properly in an equipment set.
• The Northern Desert Outlook Device should now fit into the Teleportation Key Ring.
• Forsaken Weapon Ornaments no longer have a Free Storage tag.
• Charms available from Laurion's Song that are associated with Hunter achievements should now be calculating stats more accurately.
• The various Charms of Distant Echoes have had their type 9 augment slots replaced with a type 25 slot. Additionally, the various type 9 Shards of Distant Echoes augments have been changed into type 25 augments.
• Serene Pluot Fruit Splash and Serene Succulent Mango Iced Tea are no longer flagged as tradeskill items.

Tradeskills

• A new recipe for Myrmidon's Sloth XIX using Laurion's Song items has been added.

Quests & Events

• Fixed spelling errors in the Final Fugue mission.
• Reduced the damage done by non-raid NPCs in the Return of Kanghammer instance.
• Year of Darkpaw Heroic Adventures will no longer consume the repaired keys on entry to the tower rooms.
• Year of Darkpaw Heroic Adventures now have the standard 6-hour lock-out timer.
• Coin is no longer temporarily granted in monster missions.
• The Tides of Time anniversary tower can now be located using the Zone Guide and Find Window.
• Changed the final three raids in Laurions Song to use the old reward system. Note: This system is less reliable at delivering rewards if you are zoning at the time the event ends.

Spells

• Fixed an issue that caused hidden players to remain visible after casting an invisibility spell.
• Unhiding no longer removes invisibility buffs.
• Fixed a bug where changing personas or shrouding did not correctly apply a previous illusion.
• Renamed all spells with both a Roman Numeral ordinal and a letter-designated rank (Azia, Beza, or Caza) to have a consistent order. They should all be in the form of "Spellname IX Caza" now.
• Added zone-based monsters to the Magician monster summoning spells for Veil of Alaris to Laurion's Song zones.
• Beastlord, Magician, and Necromancer focusable pets from level 116-120 have been rebalanced. Base pets and focused pets below Enhanced Minion XXVII will be stronger than they were, but focused pets of Enhanced Minion XXVIII or higher will be weaker.
• Shaman - The Spiritual Surge line of spells can no longer be twincast.
• Cleric - Corrected the Resist Poison and Resist Disease values for Hammer of the Remembered.
• Cleric - Corrected an issue where several spells in the Rallied Rampart of Vie line were casting the wrong version of Light of Vie on fade.
• Rogue - Corrected a pronoun issue in the spell landed message for the Toxic Blade line of abilities.
• Bard - Fixed an issue where many songs in the Veshma's Crescendo line were not as powerful as intended.
• Berserker - Fixed descriptions for the Rage Strike ability line.
• Shadowknight - Fixed some descriptions in the Touch/Gift line.
• Shadowknight - Fixed a few spelling issues with the description of the Unholy Guardian Spell line.
• Beastlord - Reduced the power of pets summoned by the Howling at the Moon line and increased the chance for two pets to be summoned.
• Necromancer - Reduced the power of the pets summoned by the Call Skeleton Swarm line to bring them back in line with Magician pets. Renamed the spells in the line to reflect that only one skeleton is summoned.

AA

• AAs granted via rewards should now correctly apply to all personas. This includes Banestrike, Essence of the Dragon, Hero's Barracks, Hero's Fortitude, Hero's Resolution, Hero's Vitality, and Trophy Collector.
• Paladin - Updated the Focus AA, Extended Preservation of Marr, reducing the current max rank to 19 and the bonus it provides the Preservation of Tunare spell line to 96 seconds additional duration and 62 additional charges at rank 19.
• Paladin - Added a new Focus AA, Extended Rejuvenating Steel, that increases the duration and available charges of the Rejuvenating Steel spell line by 36 seconds and 12 charges at max rank.
• Paladin/Shadowknight - Updated the Focus AA, Extended Steely Stance, so that ranks 6-7 are now free but no longer increase duration beyond the 25 ticks added via rank 5.
• Berserker/Warrior - Updated the Archetype AA, Battle Leap, to provide its base melee damage bonus as an always-active passive effect starting at rank 8.
• Additionally, added a damage component to all ranks of the activated leap that hits for up to 95k at max rank. A new rank has also been added for Laurion's Song, available at level 125, and an issue with the Auto Grant expansion check for ranks 4 through 7 has been fixed.
• Berserker - Updated the Focus AA, Hastened Mangling Discipline, to provide up to 10 minutes of reuse reduction at max rank to all ranks of Mangling Discipline.
• Necromancer - Updated the Class AA, Hand of Death, so that rank 11 is an upgrade over previous ranks.
• Necromancer - Updated the Class AA, Blood Magic, so that the duration of the rank 15 and 16 spells match rank 14 (36 seconds) and updated the cast time of the rank 16 spell to be 2.5 seconds.
• Necromancer - Updated the Archetype AA, Critical Affliction, so that ranks 18-20 are upgrades over previous ranks.
• Enchanter/Magician/Wizard - Updated the Archetype AA, Arcane Whisper, to actually reduce hate. Additionally, all ranks have been rebalanced, culminating in -420k flat hate and -10% current hate at max rank, which is now rank 21 instead of rank 18.
• Shaman - Updated the Archetype AA, Malaise/Wind of Malaise, so that Rank 38 of Malaise and 15 of Wind of Malaise now require level 122 to purchase, the same level required to learn Malosinera.
• Shaman - Updated the Class AA, Union of Spirits, so that ranks 22-33 provide stat buffs equivalent to ranks of Ancestral Aid available at the same levels (100-115).
• Bard - Updated the Class AA, Rallying Call/Solo, so that the endurance regen (which is intentionally much lower than the mana regen) is listed as a separate value in the AA and spell description. Also slightly increased endurance regen at ranks 8-11, to 2100 at max rank.

NPCs

• Pets will now attempt to equip items given to them into the left and right version of their ear, finger, and wrist slots.
• Fixed an issue with erroneous spells being cast from blight speakers in Bloodmoon Keep.

Mercenaries

• Zones will no longer auto-suspend mercenaries due to being over capacity.
• Corrected an issue that caused a mercenary's buffs to expire when their level changed.
• Mercenary slots from the Hero's Barracks AA should now properly update when changing personas.
• Fixed an issue where mercenaries would die when zoning from floating zones after entering the new zone.
• Unsuspending a mercenary with a higher-level persona than they were suspended at sets their health to the maximum level.

Progression Servers

• Vaniki: The achievement for defeating Sendaii, the Hive Queen now has a one-level grace.
• Removed the loot lockout enforcement on the Hive Guardians in Arthicrex.

Miscellaneous

• Corpses are tired of standing around.
• Corrected an issue that caused upgrading a Heroic character to fail after recently deleting one.
• Fixed issue where the Map window would be blank after swapping personas.
• Players will now have full health after swapping personas.
• Made it so all max-level personas on an account count towards the legacy XP bonus and fixed a bug where camping with a non-max-level persona would cause a max-level character to not count.
• Corrected an issue where secondary weapons could proc for characters without dual-wield skill.
• Added a single slot Hero's Forge keyring slot option in the marketplace.
• Tuned Memory.ini settings to improve graphics memory usage and performance. Improved deferred loading of textures and animations.
• DirectX 11 Changes:
  • Additional fixes for kaleidoscope-like rendering artifacts.
  • Fixed Windows 10/11 display flickering caused by FLIP mode.

UI

• Fixed an issue where new UI engine windows sometimes didn't load their default position.
• Added Center Vertically and Center Horizontally options to the window arrange menu.
• Fixed an issue that caused new UI engine windows to not scale properly between play sessions.
• New chat filters related to critical hits should now properly save.
• Moved many combat related chat filters to the Combat tab by default. Note that this will only affect a new UI.
• Fixed an issue where direct damage of players hitting themselves would incorrectly go to the Direct Damage (Yours) filter.
• Added a warning to the surname change confirmation dialog to inform the player that if their existing surname was granted by a GM they will not be able to switch back.
• When a player is invited to a group and then swaps personas the Follow button in the Group window will now remain enabled.
• Updated experienced-based chat messages to use the Experience chat filter.
• Removed Heroic Character options when creating a new Persona. Personas can still be upgraded using the options in the Inventory window.
• Fixed character creation after canceling creating a new persona.
• Added HTML attributes to new UI engine windows so they can easily be centered in any screen resolution.
• Fixed tooltips not working on disabled buttons in new UI engine windows.
• Removed flashing and hitching during ALT-ENTER and ALT-TAB full screen transitions.

Changed

• CastingWindow.html
• SelectorWindow.html
• EQUI_DragItems.xml

 

Previously Updated

• DirectX 11 Changes:
  • Fixed 2.0 Pixel Shader usage.
  • Applied a speculative fix for some kaleidoscope-like rendering artifacts.

The EverQuest Team

January 17, 2024 Game Update Possible DirectX 11 Fix

Many players have had issues since the January 17, 2024 game update brought DirectX 11 to live servers.

If you suffer from lagging, frame rate issues, stuttering, and/or slow zoning, the follow may (or may not) help.

Start up the LaunchPad. From there go to the gear icon Advanced Tools. Then Validate Game Assets. Which will probably find nothing. It will take a while.

Then go to Game Configuration.

A box will pop up titled Video Card. Even though I only have one video card, this always shows two entries. This is where you can pick the one EQ uses. If the highlighted one (should be the top one) is your video card, click Next.

If the highlighted one is not your video card, click the one that is your video card to highlight it and click Next. Note: You do not want to use Microsoft Basic Render Driver. If your choices are confusing or none of them match your video card, you should ask for assistance from Daybreak technical support or post on the Daybreak forum asking for help.

Having clicked Next, now it will say up top Model Selection. You can pick whatever you want.  You likely will be fine with checking them all.

Click Next.

You can check Sound and Social Animations if you wish or not.  That should not matter for this.

Mip Mapping - Uncheck

Dynamic Lighting - Uncheck

Texture Caching - Check

Texture Compression - Check

Resolution - You might want to have this set to your normal EQ resolution setting.  If you change it you might have to rearrange your UI windows.

Texture Quality - Set this to Low. You can always go back and change it if you are unhappy with the game's appearance and willing to try it higher.

Now click Finish.

Start up EQ, change the Resolution if needed in the in-game Options > Display tab as described above. You might also have to re-arrange your chat boxes and UI windows back to normal.

See if this has fixed your problems. It worked for Fanra. Your mileage may vary.

The idea behind this comes from this thread on the EQ forum by FrankTheNotTank.

If this does not work, you might want to make a new eqclient.ini file as well.  Note that the eqclient.ini file has important settings and you should back it up first and be aware of possible issues.

To read about Fanra's journey and for more information, read his thread From Crawl to Tall: eqclient.ini Changes and DX11 on the Daybreak forum.

*FIXED* LaunchPad Broken for Windows 7 - Workaround Offered

 If you are using Windows 7, the LaunchPad may not open. Attempting to run the launcher will get the error:

The procedure entry point GetSystemTimePreciseAsFileTime could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dl

Niente, EQ Developer, has posted this work-around until it can be fixed:

Create a file named StartEQ.bat or whatever you like.

Put the following in the file, replace accountName with your account name.

cd "C:\Users\Public\Daybreak Game Company\Installed Games\EverQuest"
 
start eqgame.exe patchme /login:accountName

You can also start with just eqgame.exe patchme.

If your EQ install is not in C:\Users\Public\Daybreak Game Company\Installed Games\EverQuest, you'll need to replace that with the correct path as well.

Double click StartEQ.bat and the old login client will start. You can log in without LaunchPad in this way.

 

UPDATE (from Angeliana, Daybreak Senior Community Manager):  

This is now fixed, for people on Windows 7 that are still getting this error, get the latest installer from our website: https://launch.daybreakgames.com/installer/EQ_setup.exe?v=9 and install it over their existing installation folder.

Laurion's Song Release to Be Without DirectX 11

 From this Daybreak forum thread by Angeliana, Senior Community Manager:

The Direct X [11] API Port will not be shipping with the expansion release on December 5, 2023. We will keep you all updated when we plan on its release and appreciate the continued feedback and testing on it.

Daybreak: How to revert to the old UI

 From this post by Angeliana, Daybreak Senior Community Manager, on the Daybreak forum:

If you have encountered issues with the new UI engine affecting your gameplay and would like to use the old UI, here is a workaround that will allow you to bypass the new UI engine:

• Log completely out of EverQuest
• Make a copy of the C:\Users\Public\Daybreak Game Company\Installed Games\EverQuest\uifiles\default folder and name it something else, like “old_ui”
• Log back in and type “/loadskin old_ui”

After that, you will be back on the older UI each time you log in. You will need to type the command for each character once. If you want to try the new UI engine again, you can use “/loadskin default”.

We appreciate your patience while we continue to improve and expand the new UI engine.

Daybreak Comments on May Update UI Issues

From this post by niente, EQ Developer, on the Daybreak forum:

Hi,

We are aware of the issues with the UI and working as best we can to fix them as soon as possible. I do apologize for the quality of the new UI engine and have been reading a lot of the feedback. I understand very well that messing with the UI can and will cause people to quit playing the game. I guess I'm just trying to say that I take your feedback very seriously, even if it doesn't feel that way, your response(s) are taken into consideration when we make decisions about things like this. We appreciate your patience as we work things out and please understand that no one on the development team wants to make players miserable, or is happy/apathetic about releasing a feature with bugs in it. I know if we don't say things it feels like no one is listening, but I promise that isn't the case.

Thanks

May 17 Game Update Brings Problems.....and Solutions

The May 17, 2023 Game Update is causing issues for a number of players. It seems to be due to the new UI engine.

Here are some solutions:

If you are unable to launch EQ due to a file or entry point not found, first run the LaunchPad/patcher again. If that doesn't fix it, you can try to update your Windows. Go to this Microsoft webpage and download the Visual Studio 2015, 2017, 2019, and 2022 - X64 file and run it.

If you have a white background in your Inventory window, see this post on Daybreak forum. You can try updating your graphics driver which might or might not help, however, the Daybreak forum post idea should work.

 Update: More through instructions on how to revert to the old UI windows is in this post on the Daybreak forum.

No Ring of Scale AAs Auto-Grant Confirmed as Bug

With the launch of Terror of Luclin, it was expected that Ring of Scale AAs would be auto-granted to those who checked that option. However, they were not.

From a Daybreak forum post by Adam "Ngreth" Bell, Senior Designer, EverQuest

It's a bug. It, unfortunately, takes a server down patch.

No Loyalty Tokens Being Awarded

It seems for the past few weeks that people are not getting Loyalty Tokens.  This bug has been confirmed by Darkpaw in the Daybreak Forum EverQuest Bug Reports thread.

No word on when this will be fixed.

UPDATE by Ratalthor, EQ Developer:

Since this is fixed, I am closing this thread. Please write in to CS if you are missing any tokens from weeks when the issue was Live. 

Jan. 20, 2021 Patch Time Also Unannounced DGC Forum Lockout

 Not announced by Daybreak is that you cannot log into the Daybreak forum at this time. It just tells you "Invalid credentials.".

Sometime during or after today's eight hour patch I would guess you will be able to log in there again.

UPDATE:  Login now appears to be open. 

Avoiding Lost Dragon's Hoard Items

 Posted on the Daybreak forum on January 6, 2021 by klanderso, EQ Developer:

So here's what's happening generally when a player's Dragon's Hoard is loaded:

1. You open your Dragon's Hoard window and it sends a message to the server, asking for a list of the items you have in your hoard
2. The server asks the database for the items in your hoard
3. The database loads those items and sends them to the server
4. The server receives that data and sends it down to your window

In these cases, it looks like the server is still waiting for a response from the database and an item is deposited before getting that response (somewhere after step 1 and before step 4). When this happens, the server goes, "hang on, we got data from the player, we're not waiting on the database anymore!" and ignores the response from the database. This results in the items that were previously in your hoard being lost.

The only reason this is an issue is because we don't see much lag on internal environments. However, we've narrowed down the cause and have a fix slated for the next update. If you contact our customer support team (https://help.daybreakgames.com/) they'll be able to re-add your missing items. When implementing the system, I made sure to have extremely verbose logging. And no, I didn't expect an issue like this to occur, but it's far better to be prepared with all the information, just in case.

In the meantime, the best way to avoid this is to wait for your Dragon's Hoard items to load, count to five, and then you can do whatever you'd like with it.     

EQ Anniversary T-Shirts May or May Not Include In-game Mount

Some T-Shirt packages included a claim card for a Royal Antonican Sokokar Mount.

According to dreamweaver, EQ Community Manager:

This is definitely not something I am aware of, if it was something we had done I would have announced it with the original announcement.

He also commented:

I am going to have to look into it, I would say for now if you've purchased a shirt on Amazon handle everything through the systems there.

I am not clear by what he means by, "handle everything through the systems there".   We are still awaiting word on what happened, and if you did not get the mount if you can get one.

Fix for: Error: The downloaded file is incomplete. . .

On December 20, 2019, attempting to patch EQ left people with an, "Error: The downloaded file is incomplete of was corrupted", error message.

As of 1 p.m. EST on December 21, it still has not been resolved.

To fix it, go HERE and click Download in the upper left corner. Save it in your EverQuest folder. Then start the Launcher.

No word from Daybreak has been seen on this issue.

UPDATE: Daybreak has fixed this error.   There is no longer a need to use the file that was linked above.

Daybreak Bans "Farming" Missions/HAs

In a hotly contested thread on the Daybreak forums, Ngreth, EQ Developer, states:

Purposely avoiding a lockout or replay timer is an exploit, especially when doing so to repeatedly farm something, be it items, exp, faction, whatever. — Ngreth, EQ Developer

Another post by him with more details is here.

A great many questions are still being posted in the thread here.

UPDATE:  Ngreth corrected his statement when the following was brought up as being said previously by EQ developer Phathom:

We want to move some of the Experience gains to the completion of a Heroic Adventure. Currently, the lion's share of the experience obtained from a Heroic Adventure comes from killing relatively easy NPCs and we'd rather it be from the more meaningful components of completing the task's objectives. It will still be possible to chain a particular Heroic Adventure to look for a rare or collection item so long as the task is dropped before completion, but that shouldn't also be the best way to get experience.

The Burning Lands NPC Difficultly to be Lowered

Amid complaints of over-tuned NPCs, Daybreak has announced they will be making TBL base NPCs a bit easier.

We are looking at reducing the general Base NPC melee damage and health. We are likely to reduce the saves as well. I have no exact ETA.

This will affect general basepop, rares, and most mission NPC's, and raid basepop, but not necessarily all. Some NPC's get hand tuned stats... and this change will not affect them. This change will not alter raid bosses and raid adds with hand-tuned values (the majority are hand tuned)

We understand that some folks like it hard, but we believe that it should be at least somewhat more accessible.

— Ngreth, EQ Developer, December 13, 2018

Mage Pet Bug to be Fixed in October Patch

From the Daybreak forum:

"There is a known bug causing Theft of Essence to slow pets rather than haste them. It will be fixed in the next full patch." — Dzarn, EQ Developer

Next Expansion "Launching at the End of the Year"

From a post by Roxxlyy, Daybreak Community Relations, on the EQ forum:

Though we haven't announced any details yet, the next expansion will be launching at the end of the year.