Patch 4/17

[WaringMcMarrin]

Here's a sneak peek at Thursday's Game Update. Please note that changes may or may not be made to these before the servers reopen.



*** Highlights ***

- The 10th Veteran Reward, Summon Resupply Agent, is now available!

- Alternate Advancement experience has been accelerated significantly for those with fewer AAs spent and will scale back down to the normal rate as more AAs are earned.

- Many keyed zones from the Ruins of Kunark, Scars of Velious, Shadows of Luclin, Planes of Power, Gates of Discord, Omens of War, Depths of Darkhollow, and Prophecy of Ro have had their key/flag requirements modified. All players that have obtained the key/flag will still be allowed entry into the zones, as will players that have met minimum level requirements for the zones. The zones and minimum level requirements are as follows:

- Required Level 46 -
The Howling Stones
Old Sebilis
Skyshrine to Cobalt Scar

- Required Level 55 -
Sleeper's Tomb
Veeshan's Peak
Vex Thal
Locked areas of the Temple of Ssraeshza

- Required level 57 -
Bastion of Thunder
Halls of Honor
The Temple of Marr
Tower of Solusek Ro
Drunder, The Fortress of Zek

- Required Level 60 -
Plane of Water
Plane of Air
Plane of Fire
Plane of Earth
Ikkinz
Uqua
Yxtta
Kodtaz

- Required Level 62 -
Plane of Time
Inktuta
Qvic

- Required Level 65 -
Txevu
Tacvi

- Required Level 68 -
Anquish

- Required Level 70 -
Dreadspire
Demiplane of Blood

- Required Level 72 -
Theater of Blood
Deathknell

- The Season of the Fabled has come to an end. The Fabled NPCs have packed up their camps and are riding off into the sunset for another year.


*** Items ***

- Added new spell drops to Meldrath's Majestic Mansion.
- Increased the drop rate slightly for some spells in Crystallos.
- Added recommended and required levels to some trade skill drops to help clarify their use. This does not change their actual use as trade skill containers do not pay attention to the recommended and required levels of items put in them.
- Added a set of new vendors that sell many of the spell research components. The cost of these have been adjusted so that they sell to an NPC closer to the price it cost to make them, but merchants will sell them at a premium. This means that you can save money while gaining skill. Also when you make spell combines you can choose between saving money, or saving time. You save money by making the sub-combines yourself, you save time by buying them.
- Chromatic focus is now available for slot 12 augments for Cultural armor.
- The engineer steamworks that work within the guardian have developed devices that help them move within the beast. Fortunately for adventurers they can be a bit absent minded about them and adventurers can find them lying about.
- A vial of raging heartblood is not as vile as it was previously.


*** Quests & Events ***

- Rylin Coil will now show and give all three tinkering mastery books for the tinkering mastery quest.


*** Spells ***

- The Shadowknight spells Touch of Kildrukaun and Touch of Severan that were linked together to share the reuse timer with a previous Game Update have been unlinked.
- Secrets of Faydwer's Talisman of the Puma has been renamed to Talisman of the Cougar.
- Cast time on Quellious' Word of Tranquility has been reduced from 4 to 2 seconds.
- The Adrenal Boost focus effect has been changed to Life Line, which is a mana cost reduction on Pure Life.
- The Closefisted Claw focus effect has been changed to Ethereal Breath, which is a damage increase on Ethereal Conflagration.
- Breastplate worn effects that enhanced one rank of a spell or discipline now enhance all three ranks.
- Reuse time reduction bonus on Assassin's Efficacy, Impenetrable Body, and Fit of Berserking Rage have been set to 25%.
- The Rage of Tri'Qaras effect triggered from Bulwark of Tri'Qaras is now a damage bonus that stacks with other effects.
- The recourse from the Challenge for Honor line will now appear in the bard buff box.
- The Vinelash Ensnare effect triggered from Vinelash Cascade will no longer overwrite the highest version of Entrap.
- The efficiency of Secrets of Faydwer direct damage spells now scales up on higher ranks of the same spell.
- Improved Block and Improved Parry have been merged. Any item that previously had Improved Block or Improved Parry will now have Improved Parry / Block.


*** NPC ***

- Halima in Crescent Reach can now be found in the find window.
- Henrik O'Danos no longer sells Hypericum twice.
- Ralfin in Bloodmoon keep will now cast his heal spell less frequently.


*** AA ***

- Added Rangers to the Critical Affliction line of AAs.
- Increased the range of the Wrath of the Wild AA line to match other Damage Shield spells that Druids have.
- Increased the hitpoints and resists of all "Wards" for all classes to make them better able to resist ambient damage.


*** UI ***

- The tracking window can now be sorted alphabetically and reverse-alphabetically. Also, there is now a check box to set whether you want the tracking window to auto-update every six seconds.
- Our UI xml schema has changed. If you are using a custom UI you may need to update this file in your custom UI directory.

- Changed -

SIDL.xml
EQUI_FindLocationWnd
EQUI_TrackingWnd.xml


*** Miscellaneous ***

- Situation where double length timer was given on events has been fixed. This occurred specifically to people who dropped out of the expedition and hadn't been kicked out of the zone yet.
- Changes have been made to the way the client is notified about other entities (players, NPCs, etc.) in the zone.
- Changed NPC summon behavior to summon the player right in front of their current heading at 1/2 their melee range. Calculations used to determine when the NPC should summon have been made a bit more accurate.
- Iksar and Wood Elves should be able to increase their forage skill caps after purchasing the forage AA.
- Corrected a problem with hate generation from skill attack abilities such as Hail of Arrows and Decimator's Volley. They were generating considerably more hate than they should and have been returned to their previous, lower hate generation.
- Zone-wide /who commands now use a similar code path to server wide /who all commands. Note that this will impose a similar time limit to how often it can be used.
- The bobbing effect of levitation has been removed. A new effect that pushes you off the ground about a foot and a half has been introduced.
- Fixed an issue with the "Public if Usable" permission in the guild bank.
- Fixed an issue that could place levitated players below the world when entering certain zones.
- Fixed an issue that would cause levitate to fail if a player's mount was hit by a spell (usually an aura).
- Stacks of two items in the guild bank can now be split.


*** Previously Updated ***

- Fixed an issue with the reset of the Kildrukaun event in Crystallos.
- Lockout timers linked on many similar long-reuse spells of the same line.



- The EverQuest Team

[Macnair]

[dindaur]

finally they've implimented the levi change! i'm curious as to what will be the fate of the bazu's parry and block, whether they will remain two seperate items or whether they will be merged into one, which i'm a bit worried about in case i end up with two lore bazu's. I like the new vet aa! I also like the flagging relaxation for all those older zones. it opens the door for many many pickup raid oppertunities!

someone posted this on the veterans lounge forums about the aa change:
AA_EARNED PERCENT_TO_AWARD
5 225
220 200.287
420 150.789
750 100

[Tordail]

I don't see the fix for Fortified Intervention on the list of AA fixes. I hope they just left it off the patch notes accidentally!

[Khael]

The way I understand it, they're simply changing the spell effects of Parry and Block, meaning that any item that has the effect of Parry or block becomes a similar item that carries an Improved Parry/Block rather than just the singular. The same would be true for seals - meaning there would be two seals with the exact same effect, but different names.

Uh, by the way, why would a pally want improved block? Or, why would a monk/bst want improved parry? Whichever one it is

[dindaur]

the block is one of the bazu's with hefty amounts of +shielding on it. after you get all the effects you need, then sometimes you have bazu's left over that get used for their mods.

[Khael]

Oic. I haven't had the chance to dive into the TS armors yet, I was under the impression they all had the same stats, that only the focus changed. Nice to know!

[dindaur]

i believe the spell focus ones have more avoidance on them

[Zorbee]

I find it interesting that you can get into Anguish at 68, but can't get into RSS until 69. Heh.

[GheffGutterbrains]

[Zorbee]

[Ughbash]

[Fenier]

[Fenier]

[GheffGutterbrains]

[Zorbee]

Well that should reduce lag which is great for us old school dial up users!

[Khael]

Before taking my words as fact, I warn you; I'm only interpreting the patch notes as I see them written here. That said, the way I see it, this is a change made to how entities are drawn. For clarification, when I say entities I mean everything that moves in a zone (like players, NPCs, etc). Previously, you could sit down near a wall when shrunk in first person mode and you could see through the wall and see what NPC might be hiding on the other side. You could virtually "see through" the world with this small "bug". I'm thinking what they've added is some simple code to make the server determine when said client is actually within viewing distance of each entity, and only tell them "what they need to know", so to speak.

It shouldn't change /who at all, as that works separately from how graphics are drawn. The downsides are that the client might not have time to "react" to new NPCs/players poping into your drawing range until they've been there for a while (making it appear like npcs/players are 'warping' into view, or suddenly appearing out of nowhere). It all depends on how well it's done, whether the client is told where people/NPCs are ahead of being in viewing range of them, or simply reacting to them when they reach that point. It also depends a lot on your latency. There are many things that can go wrong, but if done right, and in all but the craziest of lags, it should only be beneficial.

I base this on some minor experience working with 3d environments, so if I'm completely off base here, see the first sentence of this post.

edit: As a side note, this should render 3rd party programs such as SEQ rather useless \o/
edit2: Actually, I just realized that SEQ would probably still be able to see what mobs are up in a zone, it'd just not be able to tell you where they are. Else it would mess with regular Tracking. While you can make a special case for the client requesting the movement information for the currently tracked entity, making such a request for every entity in the zone (when your tracking list updates) seems a bit overtaxing. Your client is probably aware that they are in the zone, just not where they are (until they are close enough to be seen, or you're tracking it).

[dindaur]

strike one for the good guys then eh?

[Fenier]

[GheffGutterbrains]

[Zorbee]

I always wondered what the tables are for the DoN zones.

I mean there used to be 15 some useful items in the forage table, and now only a handful are even usable anymore. Are those items in the third table or would it be more useful to have a more mediocre skill so that you get Scale Ore and Air-Infused Spring Water more often instead of Sky Vine and Camphor leaf etc etc.

Ok, really what I want to see is the exact foraging tables for Broodlands. =P

[Macnair]

[Khael]

I see. That's pretty cool actually, then the client could be made completely unaware of what entities are in the zone with the exception of those that are in range (discounting track). I didn't think about tracking being server-side

That puts completely disabling 3rd party programs back in the mix then!

And regarding the forage thing;

I believe it's faster, computationally, to simply random an item from a given table, rather than weigh the items with percentage chances depending on the skill of the forager. The tables are pre-made so they don't require any computational power to manufacture once they're up.

[Macnair]

Heh, thanks for posting Ngreth's comments, that provides some help. Not all the explanation I want, though; I don't know how to interpret "you just may not see a drastic change, but there will be a change."

Raising your skill by 50 or 75: how much of a chance does that give you of landing on the best loot table?

And, as Zorbee points out, how have they decided which of the 15 or 20 items is "rare" in a place like the Broodlands?

[Zorbee]

WTB Open Source on foraging infos!!!

Also, can someone link me the old foraging tables lists? I thought that at some point a few years ago I saw one floating around.

Or if necessary I'll make one but will take some time to get my druid into every single zone heh.

[Brohg]

Items used in higher-skill combines are more rare, is the rule of thumb.

[Zorbee]

Is it? Or do you just assume it to be?!

Also, that may mean the less valuable items are higher! Like Jungle Pineapple is used to make Ogre Foot (triv 228) but Scale Ore makes Prismatic Palladium Bar (triv 26).

But who really saves the Jungle Pineapples?!

[dindaur]

glad i don't track

[Brohg]

The products eventually made with Scale Ore triv up to 294. Those products earn Scale Ore its place in the forage tables.

[Walknot]

From what I read, Ranger tracking will be updated every tick so their info should be pretty solid as long as they are running snared.

[WaringMcMarrin]

I hear there is a check box to turn that on or off.

[Fenier]

Except the check box for non-rangers is broken.

[WaringMcMarrin]

well that sucks

[Zorbee]

[Khael]

Umm, checkbox worked fine on my bard actually.

[Walknot]

So the point of the check box is to turn off tracking updates?

Does this improve pc performance?

[Khael]

The point of the checkbox is to update the tracking list every 6 seconds without having to press the Tracking button over and over, like you had to in the past to update the list.

[Kriyn Nutzforcatnip]

It's somewhat similar to what they have in EQ2 for tracking. Tracking in EQ2 is almost a live update for whenever you get in range of an npc or pc. At least for EQ this does save you from having to refresh it manually.