EQ1 - September House of Commons Chat : EQ1 EverQuest 1 News

Naithin: Welcome to another great Stratics house of commons with the developers of Everquest! Tonight questions regarding Secrets of Faydwer or general topics are welcome.

Rashere: Good evening everyone and thanks for coming. I'm Travis McGeathy, the lead designer for EverQuest.
Ngreth: Ahoy!. Welcome t' chat. I be Adam "ngreth" Bell, Game designer o' general content and tradeskills
Zatozia: Ahoy! Arrr! Every man-jack. Arrr! I'm Zatozia th' Torturess, Community Relations Manager fer EverQuest. Elated Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Nodyin: Hello everyone, my name is David Ford and I work on the AA system and general content.
Maddoc: Welcome to the chat, everyone! I am Jason Mash, one of the assistant lead designers, and I deal with a lot of the systems related design / development in EQ.
Merloc: Hello, I'm Keith Turkowski, designer dealing with items, factions, and various content.
Elidroth: Good evening all. My name is Doug Cronkhite, and I wear a kilt. I am also a designer on EQ focusing on content at the moment.
Prathun: Arrr, me hearties! I'm first mate Jonathan Caraker. I'm the designer in charge of the spells system, raids, swabbing the poop deck, loading cannons, and general swashbuckling.
Elidroth: oh.. and I don't talk like a pirate.

Tharkis: My question is reguarding the solteris breatplates. Is there a chance they can be re-addressed, because right now the effects on them are just copies of what we've already had on our BP's in TSS (and in my case as a shaman since OOW) with nothing unique. The lack of a useable focus makes them undesireable other htan pure hp/mana upgrade.

Merloc: It's possible, I'm adding in the TSS focus effects to the Solteris BPs for the next patch. If people have issues with a specific effect, I can probably look into that more easily than all 16 of them. I don't currently have any plans for major changes though.

Ronda: From Fitz, "Is rogue poison revamp coming with the new expansion? When are rogue daggers going to get the much better ratio to be in line with monks and other melees?

Ngreth: For t' first question thar. No. Merloc be answering t' second question In clear english. No poison revamp in SoF.
Merloc: I'm currently working retuning weapons in certain tiers of TSS and TBS, as part of that I'm retuning several rogue daggers, the changes should go in with an upcoming patch in the next month or so.

Nolrog: Would it be possible to change requirements for apprentice pottery trophy by taking out the Ceramic Bola Weights and in its place using either Blue Diamond Powder, or use Small Protection Deity and change the recipe for it to use a dropped gem such as Black Pearl instead of Carnelian. The reason being that the component that is dropped and used to make the bola weights is out of line with the rest of the apprentice trophies.

Ngreth:It is something I can consider. I just have to get the time in there somewhere.

Kela: The Kiss of Erollisi Marr item from LoN is incredibly overpowered. Even though I play the class that it will benefit the most, I don't like this item being in the game. Has there been any discussion about changing this like EQ2 changed their version of it?

Rashere: It's a decent effect, but we evaluated it and decided that it wasn't overpowered enough to warrant reducing. There are already similar effects in game and as mana pools continue to grow, the total percentage of the mana pool that is able to be refreshed once a day will diminish.

Kristin: Many current subscribers and retired refugees from both the Veteran's Lounge and The Newbie Zone have been eagerly awaiting feedback from SoE regarding the possibility of new alternate rule set servers; both threads created in response to the Producer's Letter are packed with great ideas, feedback, and requests. What type of progress
has the team made regarding this endeavor and could you share any information with us?

Rashere: The EQ dev team is currently focused on completing Secrets of Faydwer. Once we've wrapped that up, I expect we'll have the time to start looking into alternate rule servers and the feedback in those threads will be invaluable.

Nolrog: Are there going to be better tradeskillable weapons? While culural armor with (with raid augs) make some of the best in the game, weapons seem woefully behind (or in some cases limited to the wrong level...see Velium Gemmed stuff).

Ngreth: I have no current plans to implement new Smithed Weapons, mostly because my plans go way out already. It is something I will consider at some point when there is more time.

Xislaben_The_Rising_Sun: Prathun - can you please add the +STR line to the necromancer pet haste since All DMG Mod on TSS haste is a dps downgrade from the PoP haste with +STR?

Prathun:Sure, this is something I believe we did for mages already. It makes sense to make the same change to the other pet hastes as well.

sarcous: When will we be told of the new hot zones and approximately how long until they are released?

Nodyin: Eldiroth and I have been collaborating on the next set of Hot Zones. We're still figuring out when we'll be patching in the next set of zones and unfortunately I don't have that date yet but they're almost ready to go out. I'm pretty excited about the zones we picked and the events we have planned for the zones for this set.

Ronda: Can we please get an update on when (other than soon (tm) ) will we see any changes to our 2h soltaris weapons and bps? Are our 1h weapons from soltaris being left the same or is there any chance we will see a form of "elemental damage" added in the near future? Thank you very much, Merloc

Elidroth:The new Hot Zone stuff should be fun
Merloc: I'm working on them now, they should be done next week, and go out with a subsequent patch.
Merloc: That includes rogue weapon changes as well.
Merloc: Part of the issue with 2h weapons we are planning to address with an AA, so there will be less of an upgrade in weapons directly.

QuinnotetiquanBrell: Are there any plans to address Beastlords Ferocity and possible add something to it?

Prathun: It's difficult to add in melee enhancing effects since nearly all the options for effects are capped, don't stack, or don't work for all classes equally. We are attempting some core game system changes that should make attack power and resistances more valuable.

Chanaluss: are there any plans for 2 handed piercing, hand to hand ornamentations in LoN? they were the only 2 weapon styles ignored.

Merloc: It's not set in stone, but I plan to introduce new ornamentations in the future for LoN, including hand to han dand two handed piercing.
hand to hand

Nolrog: Is it possible to create greater variation in the Cultural Augs based upon the deity? Some slight variation or advantage in different areas based on the god? (Attack for Rallos Zek, for example) It seems that having them specific to a god serves only to limit their marketability if they are otherwise identical.

Ngreth: It is something I am leery to do. We start getting into "I want those bonuses, that is not fair" and "Now I want to change deities" which is still not going to happen. Though it does add more flavor in introduces many other problems. At this time I have no plans to add variation.

Jaro: If there is a new progression server, would the devs consider putting back in all the removed drops (rubicite, manastones, etc)

Maddoc:That was actually something that I was considering for the original Progression Servers, so it's safe to say that it is definitely a consideration for a future version of the Progression Server (if we make a new one).

QuinnotetiquanBrell: Would it be possible to look at lowering Demiplane raid time for casual raiding guilds? Most casual raiding guilds cant get to Mayong within the week. There was a discussion about this on the boards. Would any of the ideas mentioned on the boards such as putting trash on lockout timers or extending lockout timers be acceptable to implement?

Prathun:When Demi-plane was originally introduced, my intent was for it to last for several days worth of raiding. It was supposed to keep end-game players busy for the better part of the week between lockouts recycling. As that content has matured into a hunting ground for up and coming guilds, it might be a bit harsh for the current crowd. I haven't read the thread on the matter yet, but I'll take a look at it when time allows. Depending on the implementation of a solution, it might be something quick and easy. Or it might be something that takes too much developer time to look into anytime in the foreseeable future.

Croix_FV: One for Merloc: With content supposedly seeing a large jump in difficulty ((Yay, btw)) will we see a better option for shield AC augs besides the few 30's and one rare-LDoN era 35?

Merloc: I'll probably add in some shield augs with higher AC than has been previously available, but due to the power I probably won't increase them by a large amount.

Treniesto: Is there any progress with the crashes occuring in Solteris? They seem to be happening almost nightly at this point, and I think the raiding playerbase would love some kind of update on the situation.

Rashere: Unfortunately, we haven't been able to nail down the cause yet. It's tricky since the zone doesn't actually crash, which would give us logs to look at to see what's happening, but instead is lagging out and disconnecting from the world. This also doesn't seem to be caused by any particular event, but by a culmination of events being done by multiple guilds in multiple instances. I'm hoping to get a similar situation up and running on our beta server where we can watch it in a debug mode and see exactly where the stress points are.

Nolrog: Being very happy with the new zones for cultural armor drops/quests ... is this something we are going to see become a standard for this type? I understand the need for raid/instance drops in some cases, just not when the item is race/diety restricted.

Ngreth: If this question means "Will more tradeskill drops be made trully global" the answer is yes. But not all. Some drops will continue to be very specific while some will be global.

Tulisin: A while back we used to have polls at the server select screen for certain topics (post-merge server names were notably one of these). Any chance we can see more of those? They're a great idea for getting feedback from the community, and could even be used to poll more serious topics such as what the majority of players are looking
forward to in new content.

Rashere: We try to reserve those polls for things where its important to get feedback from a large majority of the playerbase. They tend to cause some grief among players who feel that they are intrusive, so we don't use them too often. Instead, we use the forums for the more day-to-day information gathering needs.

Tulisin: There have been recent innovations in short-term damage shields on the druid side. Namely, they have a semi-"crit" mechanism, and are insta-cast. Will these innovations be extended to the older mage line of short-term damage shields?

Those changes, as well as the addition of Nature's Blazing Wrath, were aimed at closing the gap between Druid's burst dps and Mage's burst dps. While damage shields are typically a mage forte, I'm not sure if I want to make the same change to the Pyrilen Skin line and untip that balance.