Seen this pop up on various boards and promptly be nuked by mods for NDA. I assume that's less of a concern here...
Feel free to burn me if I've been bad...
As mentioned in my welcome letter, along with the TSS beta, we are also testing a range of different system level changes to EverQuest. For the moment, I’m going to briefly run through the changes here. I’ll post more details as they go into the game. Please note that most of these changes are not directly tied to TSS and are still under development. While we would love to get them out as soon as possible, there is the possibility that they may not be complete before the launch of the expansion.
Character Creation – We’ve overhauled character creation to make it more graphical and to be contained all within one page. As part of this, we’ve set up some character defaults so your starting points, city, and deity will be pre-selected for you. You can change them if you wish, but you don’t to if the pre-sets are to your liking.
Downtime – We’re changing the way that downtime works in EverQuest in order to reduce how long you have to sit around between fights. The core idea is that your character will have two distinct states: in-combat and out-of-combat. This is a pretty basic idea, but something that EverQuest has no concept of currently so it is brand new to the game. While you are in a combat state, and for a period after that, regen will work just like it does currently. After you have been in an out-of-combat state for a period of time, you will regenerate at a much higher rate.
Spell Resists – We’ll be introducing a new spell resist formula that will make spell resists much more lenient than they have been in the past. Under the current system that range is very narrow and tends to result in spells that always land or never land. After the change, there will be a much wider range of values where a spell has a chance to land, but won’t always land.
Resist and Stat Caps – Going hand-in-hand with the above, we’re looking into removing the hard cap imposed on both resists and stats. We’re still working out the specifics on this, but will likely move the hard cap to a soft cap where every point over the current cap will “cost” a number of points of resist. For instance, if you’re currently capped at 600, but have 700 points worth of resist from your gear and we decide that the points over the cap are at a 2 to 1 ratio, after the change you’d have a 650 resist. This change is to bring back some value to stats on gear.
Spell Ranks – Spells in TSS are being done a bit differently than in the past. Most of the new spells will be available in different ranks. This is generally independent of spell level so you may have a level 72 spell that has 3 ranks and a level 75 upgrade to that spell which also has 3 ranks. The lowest rank of the spell is typically very easy to get, being either vendor purchased or a common NPC drop. Additional ranks increase the difficulty of obtaining the spell, but also increase its performance. Most spells will have 3 ranks: common, single-group obtainable, and raid level. A few spells will also have a 4th rank, the equivalent of an ancient spell. The various ranks upgrade different features of the spell. This can include the core functions, such as the damage of a DD, but will generally involve other aspects such as resist mods, casting times, range, etc. This system is being introduced so that we can make sure casters have access to their basic spell functionality early on and can then seek out the upgrades through progressively more difficult content.
Death – We’ll be changing death so that when you die, you will be “hovering” over your body and can choose to stay that way while waiting for a resurrection instead of immediately zoning to your bind point. This will particularly help players on slow connections who take a big hit from having to zone twice.
Invisibility – Players will be able to cast greater invisibility spells starting with spells given out in TSS. These spells will make you invisible to NPCs who can only see through normal invis. More advanced NPCs may still see through these greater invisibility spells, though. To go along with this, Shroud of Stealth will give rogues an innate additional rank to the invisibility granted by their hide ability.
Endless Quiver – A longstanding issue we’ve had with ranger itemization is the inability to create specialized arrows because they are never expended due to the Endless Quiver AA. This has led to arrows become a bit stale over the years. With TSS, new arrows will become available that are specifically built to only be used once and will not be affected by Endless Quiver. They will specifically be marked as “Expendable”.
AA System – With the increase to level 75, we’ve run into a problem with AAs. AAs are built around a static amount of experience, roughly what is required to get level 51. As levels have gone up, the amount of experience you get for killing a creature goes up too and we’re at the point now where a few kills at level 75 would be worth an AA point. To avoid this problem, we’ve moving the AA system to a more relative system so the amount of AA experience you gain will be based on the difficulty of the NPC compared to you rather than some set amount. We’re shooting for about an hour’s worth of XPing in a group killing even con creatures to get an AA point. We’ll be adjusting the costs of abilities downward to compensate. This change should also make it more viable to gain AA points at lower levels instead of your best bet being to level up as fast as possible and then gain AA points.
Dark Blue Con – The concept of a dark blue con has existed in EQ for a while now. It represented a range of blue-con NPCs that get a bonus to their experience due to being close to your level. We’ve decided to change it into an actual con color so you should see actual dark-blue colored con text for NPCs now.
New Starting City – In addition to Drakkin, any other race/class combo can also choose to start in Crescent Reach. TSS is meant to be a great new starting place for players and we wanted to open it up to as many people as possible. When testing things out, please try starting in Crescent Reach as a non-Drakkin and make sure everything you need as a new character is there.
Rashere
Feel free to burn me if I've been bad...
. Will just have to figure out how far you need to be.
