EverQuest Test Server Update Notes: March 7, 2016

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These are the patch notes, released to Test server a few moments ago.

March 9, 2016
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*** Items ***

- Corrected an error that allowed some items to ignore recast timers when they were placed in a key ring.
- Fixed an issue with the Dragonscale Skystrider Scales familiar that allowed more than one of these to be summoned at a time.
- Corrected the spells attached to the Fabled Ball of Golem Clay so that it stacks better and obeys the recast timer.
- Transmogrification Scroll is now named Race Change Scroll. Hero's Forge Armor Crate is now named Hero's Forge Suit Consolidator.
- A lore conflict has been resolved with augs inside of key ring items and the parcel system.


*** Quests & Events ***

- Anashti Sul, Enslaver of Souls (Group & Raid) - Added messaging to the Aura of Pain mechanic. The characters struck by the auras will see a custom message and a raidwide message will also indicate which two characters were targeted.
- Anashti Sul, Enslaver of Souls (Raid) - The event will now reset properly.
- Anashti Sul, Enslaver of Souls (Raid) - Corrected a bug that would cause Anashti Sul's corpse to vanish on success, again, for real.
- Anashti Sul, Lady of Life (Raid) - Corrected some typos in the names of the achievements.
- The Mechanical Fortune Teller in the Plane of Knowledge has information for you regarding the 17th Anniversary events!


*** Spells ***

- Fixed a bug with the shadow line of no affect spells being overridden by spells with AC in the first slot.
- Beastlord - Changed Scorpion Venom, Turepta Blood, Chimera Blood, Diregriffon's Bite, Malaria, Festering Malady, and Fever Spike to instant cast like the rest of their spell lines.
- Beastlord - Converted poison DoT lines (Scorpion Venom), disease DoT lines (Malaria), and cold DoT lines (Edoth's Chill) to a new system. All spells will now do more damage per tick, but a single caster can no longer stack other spells in the same line on the target. This change will increase DoT damage overall while using fewer debuff slots.
- Monk - Increased the skill damage percentage and minimum damage amount added by Eye of the Storm.
- Monk - Increased the damage amount added to attacks by Dichotomic Form.


*** NPC ***

- The Keeper of Lost Things in Shadowrest has retired, permanently.


*** Progression Servers ***

- After some historical review, we have changed the expansion at which the Temple of Cazic-Thule becomes the Accursed Temple of Cazic-Thule from Velious to Luclin.
- Removed the requirement to wake the Sleeper in order to start the countdown to open the Shadows of Luclin.
- The version of Mitigation of the Mighty on Kunark bosses will have a less severe Spell Threshold damage reduction. The version of Mitigation of the Mighty on Velious bosses will have no Spell Threshold damage reduction.
- Test Server: Original era, Kunark, and Velious bosses should now spawn on the Test server in the same way they would spawn on progression servers.
- Bosses in Phinigel instances have regained their Mitigation of the Mighty buff.


*** Miscellaneous ***

- PvP is now disabled in instances on the Zek server.
- - Some instances may still have PvP enabled.
- In raids, you can now set all items to automatically be marked as free grab when using the advanced looting system.
- - This is done by setting the loot type in the raid options window to ""Entire Raid"".
- - The other settings in this window are currently ignored when using advanced looting.
- Added the 'Increase Windowed Gamma' option to the advanced display options window.
- - This setting will apply dramatically increased brightness when the client is in windowed mode with 'Windowed Gamma' disabled.
- - This is intended to correct the brightness of the game for desktops with relatively dark default settings.
- - This setting is off by default.
- The music that plays between launching the game and entering the world from character select is now randomly selected and will change each time you return to character select.
- The following sound settings will now be saved on a per character basis. If a character does not yet have their settings saved they will default to the values already set by the last character that was logged in:
- - Sound Volume
- - Music Volume
- - Sound Realism
- - Combat Music Enabled
- - Environmental Sounds Enabled
- Cleaned up how all INI files are handled in the client to use a more efficient method.
- Corrected a zone crash that could occur when players were under the effects of Fear.
- Unusual precipitation isn't just for the Plane of Fear anymore. You may notice strange rain in other zones as well.
- Found and corrected many zones that had never had their experience modifiers reset from when they were Hot Zones. The following zones have had their Zone Experience Modifier lowered to match other zones in their era: Acrylia Caverns, The Burning Woods, Crypt of Dalnir, Dragon Necropolis, Dreadspire Keep, The Great Divide, Iceclad Ocean, Mons Letalis, Nagafen's Lair, The Overthere, Ssraeshza Temple, Stonebrunt Mountains, Valdeholm, Wall of Slaughter
- The following zones have had their Zone Experience Modifier increased to match other zones in their era: The Temple of Cazic Thule (both versions), Chardok, Dranik's Scar, Frontier Mountains, Grieg's End, Kurn's Tower, Najena, Riwwi, Coliseum of Games, The Ruins of Sebilis, Solusek's Eye, The Estate of Unrest, Velketor's Labyrinth


*** UI ***

- You can now opt out of the automatic master looter calculation for grouping and raiding in /advloot's loot settings window.
- - This will not prevent you from being designated the master looter by the group or raid leader.
- - If everyone in your group or raid deselects the master looter candidate check box, the master looter will be chosen as if everyone has the candidate checked.
- When a zone repops due to a scripted event, items in the advanced loot window will now properly clear out instead of remaining until they expire.
- The color and filters tabs of the options window have been replaced with a single Chat Settings tab which can now be sorted and filtered.
- Removed support and UI for the old EQ Players service.
- The Max Results Per Trader field in the bazaar window will no longer reset itself between opening and closing the window.
- Fixed an issue causing Drakkin player characters of any heritage other than Atathus the Red to show as that heritage to other player clients.


- Changed -
EQUI_AdvancedDisplayOptionsWnd.xml
EQUI_KeyRingWnd.xml
EQUI_LootSettingsWnd.xml
EQUI_OptionsWindow.xml


*** Previously Updated ***

- Corrected an issue that caused some early-game raid bosses to spawn without their loot.


- The EverQuest Team

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I think the weirdest thing that came with this update that wasn't mentioned, is a new bazaar.mp3. We're getting some groovy music for hanging in the bazaar now.

Your thoughts on the update?
 
*Corrected an error that allowed some items to ignore recast timers when they were placed in a key ring.

does this mean no more tin foil cap?
 
More Details On Patch

Looks like they are patching Wednesday March 16th.

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Our March patch is scheduled for Wednesday, March 16, 2016 (the day of EverQuest’s 17th Anniversary!). Here are some highlights on what players can expect from this patch:

DoTs Improvements

Over the past few months, we've been reviewing the way DoTs work and how we would like to improve them going forward. As most of you know, there's a limited number of debuff slots available on any given NPC, which conflicts with DoT classes wanting to layer as many spells as possible on any given NPC in order to maximize damage. This layering has contributed to a lot of problems over the years; most notably, it takes a lot of spell slots away from players who want to maximize DoT damage, and it uses up many of the limited debuff slots available on raid targets.

In order to improve the way this works, we're starting this process with Beastlords, but we're planning to continue with it through all classes that use DoTs regularly. Here's what we did for Beastlords:

We went back to the first DoT in any given line, and doubled it (or more). This step may not happen for every class, but Beastlords in particular haven't been able to use DoTs for as much reliable damage as we'd like, so they needed the boost.
We looked at updates to those lines and increased their damage in a much more aggressive scale than we used to. This should mean that a new DoT will perform better than itself plus two previous levels of the same spell under the old scale.
We increased damage/mana efficiency over the entire line in a progressive manner. At each level you should be getting more damage per mana than before.
We categorized the new DoTs into lines which will prevent the same player from stacking multiple levels of the same DoT line on the same target. Other players can use DoTs in the same line on the same target, and the same player can use DoTs in the same line on different targets. The increase in damage should mean that a single player is dealing more damage with one DoT than they formerly did with three spells.

So, let's look at some numbers. The current level 101 Beastlord poison DoT, Glistenwing Blood, currently deals a raw total (with no focus effects or any other enhancement) of 14395 damage over its duration at a cost of 1285 mana. Stacking the previous two levels of that spell will deal a total of 43349 raw damage for a total of 3460 mana. As a superDoT, the current level alone will deal 121154 raw damage for a total of 8532 mana, and will only need one debuff slot to do it. While, yes, that is a very high mana cost, it's also far more damage. It's worth noting that the level 91 spell, Binaesa Blood, will now deal 45210 damage on its own for a cost of 3799 mana.

We're planning to make this same transition for all classes that use DoTs over the next few months. Other classes probably won't see the same boost in base damage that Beastlords have, since they have fewer innate boosts to DoT damage than other classes, but we expect everyone to be doing more damage, ramping that damage up faster, using more mana (though more efficiently), and using fewer debuff slots on their targets.

Hate's Fury Sails Again

For our 17th Anniversary, we've added a hybrid event to Norrath called “Hate’s Fury: Seventeen Pieces of Silver.” Krasnok's ship, Hate's Fury: The Scorned Maiden, has set sail once again, and this time he's got friends. Sixteen of them, in fact. Each of them will give a reward of Commemorative Coins, and if you defeat all of the crew members, you can unlock the door to Krasnok's cabin and face the Captain (#17!) himself for raid-quality rewards.

We've added a new gnome race that starts in Ak`anon that runs several times a day on EVERY server during the anniversary and a few new items to the jubilant merchant in the Plane of Knowledge as well. Head over to these spots to have a look!

Zone Experience Modifier Changes

This part gets a little bit "inside baseball," but bear with me. Way back when we started our first Hot Zone project, we increased experience within the zones by increasing the raw data, and then setting it back down to what it used to be once we rotated to a different set. We did this for the first several years before we realized it was a very error-prone process and developed a better one. A few days ago, some players expressed a concern that Burning Woods had a very high experience modifier, making it outstrip the experience available in any other zone available in that era. We looked into this report and discovered that Burning Woods had its ZEM raised when it was one of the original hot zones, but it wasn't ever reset. A few years later, when it was made a hot zone again, the ZEM was raised again... and again never lowered back to what it was. Under our current hot zone system, on non-progression servers, it was getting yet another boost to the ZEM, in effect making it a triple hot zone there, and a double hot zone on progression servers.

So, yeah…we had to change that. As we investigated, we realized this had happened to varying degrees to a lot of zones. Though Burning Woods was the only zone to have been boosted twice with no reset, many other zones had either been set to an incorrect value after being used as a hot zone at some point in history. We ended up with about 20 zones that were set too high, and another group of about twenty that were set too low. With the upcoming patch, we're setting those back to where they were supposed to be. Dungeons in the same era now have similarly higher-than-average ZEMs, and outdoor zones in the same era will have similarly lower-than-average ZEMs. While we know it's not very fun to have to leave a zone you were comfortable in, we're excited that zones like Sebilis, the Crypt of Dalnir, the Temple of Cazic Thule, and Velketor's Labyrinth will be returning to give better experience rewards to the players who are brave enough to enter them.

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As always, we value your feedback on these upcoming changes, but we hope you’ll check them out for yourself first (on test or on live servers) before passing judgement. We’re grateful for your support!