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Fan Faire Day 2 in Review

I know a lot of this has been posted elsewhere by now but due to traveling and having to upgrade my main computer to Windows 7 when I got home – the beta build is expiring so I have to upgrade to the RC – I never managed to get this stuff posted. Still, I want to get it out there and I hope I can help clear up some of the confusion that I’ve seen here and there over the last couple of days.

The first session we attended on Saturday was the premier of EverCracked, the Jace Hall documentary about the creation of EQ. I can strongly recommend that you grab a copy of this when it comes available it as hilarious as well as an interesting look at the people behind the game.


Next up was the Mechanics panel:

  • There will be a major changes coming for ore/gems as well as tinkerers and transmuters, I believe this will be in GU53 but it may be after that. First of all they are changing which spells use what. The spells/combat arts will come from the gem nodes with the softmetal being used for Fighter/Scout and the gem being used for Priest Mage. The ore will now be used only for armor and weapon crafting and it’s not clear but I’m assuming that the loams will just be used for potions and tinkering. The other major change is that they’re moving the gem nodes onto their own spawn table so that they’re no longer sharing a spawn with the ore nodes – so if you harvest a gem another gem will spawn.
  • After the change you’ll be able to be both a tinkerer and a transmuter on the same character. This is being done because Domino would like to move the majority of the adornment stuff to the transmuter and off of the various other tradeskillers. This will allow you to do adornments and tinkering no matter what your tradeskill class.
  • The expansion will also see more tradeskill quests added, including more Far Seas quests. Domino also mentioned that she’s working on making the Odus tradeskill faction be more quest oriented than grindy as the Kunark faction was.
  • No new spells will be added with the expansion you’ll just get upgrades to existing lines.
  • Some spell effects, for example haste, are already approaching 100% so spells with those effects may get an additional effect added instead of just increasing the amount of haste.
  • There won’t be a new AA tree but the Archetype and Class trees will be extended downward.
  • The Class tree will be reorganized to look more like the Shadows tree from TSO to make it easier to extended and follow.
  • Any new AA abilities will be innate and will trigger off of combos instead of requiring more room on your hotbar to use.
  • Combining effects such as ranged crit and melee crit into just a crit effect. Along with this they are adjusting the crit multiplierers for the core job of the class. This will allow you to use a wider variety of weapons and armor as it will only have +Crit on it and your multiplier will make it appropriate for your class. In other words a piece of armor with +Crit on it will provide a bonus to both ranged and melee crit but a Ranger would get a bigger bonus to ranged while the Berserker will get the bonus to melee. This is especially helpful with jewelry.
  • They would like to consolidate buffs where it makes sense, especially self only buffs. It doesn’t make sense for you to have to cast 3 different buffs on yourself when you could just cast one and be done with it. Standing around a buffing is NOT what they consider a fun part of the game.
  • New items (and possibly retrofitted to older items as time permits) will have a rated value. This value will decrease as your level increases beyond the level of the item. This probably won’t play much of a factor until post level 50. This will encourage you to upgrade to newer gear as you level and it will also allow you to clearly see that a new piece of gear is better than your existing.
  • Class Balancing:
    My notes are not as strong on this section for several reasons, mainly I was busy trying to follow what was going on and also, most of this stuff really only applies to raiders so I didn’t fully understand some of it as that’s not my interest.

    Priest Balancing:

  • Balance heals vs amount of health players have. Some of the heals are extremely weak for well geared players.
  • Make sure every priest has the tools to do the job of main healer so that raids don’t feel they HAVE to have a plate healer.
  • Evaluate the stun heals so that priests feel involved. These are useful spells that heal a large number of HP but stun the priest for a time basically taking them out of the fight. This isn’t fun so they want to come up with a different trade off that will keep the priest involved in the fight while still making them think about when to use the spell so they’re not just hitting it as fast as it refreshes.
  • Improve heal over time for the druids. As it is on a raid the druid HoT sits behind the shamans ward and the clerics reactive heal so that by the time it actually triggers there is little for it to do. As such druids aren’t sought after for raid healers. What they’re looking at is saving the heal if the tick comes and the player isn’t damaged. Then on the next tick if the player is damaged they will get 2 ticks worth of healing. If the spell wears off without using all of its healing they’re looking at having that healing jump to another member of the group.
  • Rogue/Summoner:

  • They want the rogue and summoner to work together for debuffing. The rogues will debuff melee while the summoners will debuff spells.
  • They’re also looking at improving the scout pet for summoners so that they can actually stand in close to AoE mobs and survive long enough to be useful.
  • Dumbfire pets ill be come a damage/debuff based attack spell and no longer a pet. I’m sure if you ask nicely you could get them to at least keep the pet spell effect for it but I don’t know
  • Bard/Chanter:

  • Adjust key buffs to make group buffs raid wide so raids don’t feel the need to have multiple bards and enchanters just to keep each group buffed. This is part of trying to make all classes wanted on a raid, they need to free up spots for those other classes and not have 8 of 24 spots taken up by 2 archetypes.
  • Also looking to allow limited casting of unique buffs (those you can only cast on 1 person at a time) being castable on 1 person per group on a raid.
  • With these changes they’re also looking to balance support vs DPS. Again, this is trying to make all of the classes useful on a raid.
  • Fighter:

  • Adjust taunt and hate gain.
  • Consolidate block & deflection.
  • Brawlers gain a clear advantage to the avoidance proxy buffs since they are the masters of avoidance.
  • Improve the desireability of defensive stance.
  • Balance defense and damage.
  • Sentinals Fate:

  • There is a plan for the Mythical even though you’ll be outleveling it. They’re going to be adjusting effects so that you’ll want to use it even though there will be better weapons available. My take was that they’ll be adjusting it so that you’ll want to hang on to it for certain encounters.
  • This will wrap up the Void story line and introduce a new villain
  • It will also explain the change in the Erudites more fully.
  • They will be adding to the Ratonga lore as well.
  • The Hole will be coming back as a contested dungeon, the players seemed to really like this idea.
  • There will also be a return of contested raid mobs, again the raiders really seemed to like this change.

3 replies on “Fan Faire Day 2 in Review”

So no new classes OR races – again? 🙁 it should be every other expansion, hell it’d have been over 2 years since the last one (Sarnak) was put in. If not a new race (heres what I was rooting for) some new classes. SOE said they’d not do that until classes were balanced.. well I kinda think they are now. So WTF? And if not, why is it taking them YEARS? New race or new class for this expansion is desired, I don’t think theres enough (And I play an erudite main)

I’m pretty sure from what they said that new classes are never happening. 24 is already too many to 1) balance and 2) make desirable on raids. I would like to see a new race (and there was some begging for pandas to be playable) and think it more likely — but, I’m not sure what they could add as playable that would make sense at this point. It’s always worth /feedback if you have an idea for one though!

I’m always up for new races but I’m actually hard pressed to think of any race they could make playable that would make any sense. People were cheering for the idea of the new panda race to be playable but it really doesn’t make sense at this point since we don’t have any of the lore for them yet. Buranyi have been mentioned as well but, again, we don’t really have the lore to make them a viable player race yet. Still the only game that comes close to the number of races in EQ2 is Vanguard so I don’t expect they’re in a hurry to add more yet, though as Lore mentioned it never hurts to /feedback, I know they read those daily.

As for new classes, I don’t expect to see any ever. As Lore said they’re a pain to balance and really what class can you add that isn’t just another version of a class that’s already there? I think they’re wishing they didn’t even have 24 classes to mess with right now trying to make 6 different priests classes all a viable main healer while still being different enough to justify being called a separate class is one of the things they’re fighting with now.

Still, as an alt-aholic I would love to see more classes/races too 🙂

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