Everquest 2 Game Update 49 Preview

Bateluer

Lifer
Jun 23, 2001
27,730
8
0
GU49

Raising the Banner (GU #49)

SPECIAL EVENTS

* During "Raising the Banner," a team of dedicated excavators and researchers have begun to uncover a remarkable find in the dunes of Sinking Sands. They have numerous tasks for any recruits willing to help defend the site, excavate relics, maintain their assisting clockworks and provide crafted supplies for the team. They cannot fathom how important this project is and how it is fated to reshape the world of Norrath for years to come!


GUILD HALLS

* Construction of the Guild Halls has been completed. Guilds of qualifying levels can now purchase halls in a variety of locations. Smaller halls can be found in North Qeynos, South Freeport, Kelethin, Neriak, and Gorowyn. Medium halls are found in South Qeynos and North Freeport, and large halls are found off the shores of Antonica and Commonlands. Click on the corresponding doors, or mariner bells on the docks, to access these new structures.
* With the work completed on the coastal fortresses in Antonica and Commonlands the involved parties have retired to their cities and the guards have been recalled to the barracks.


MULTICORE SUPPORT

* EQII now runs better with more than one CPU.
* The game automatically detects if you have more than one CPU.
* There is an option to control whether the game uses multicore mode in the Options Window under Display -> Performance.
* If you're running multiple clients on the same computer you may want to disable multicore mode.
* Game clients prefer running on CPUs other than the first CPU.
* Setting the multicore option has no effect on machines with one CPU.

HOUSING & HALLS

* You can now pay upkeep on your house or guild hall up to 12 weeks in advance.
* Wall-placed house items now use a different method to stick to the wall that should keep them from disappearing into the world geometry.
* The payments tab has been renamed to "History" and will now display payments and credits to the escrow account.
* The deposits tab will only display contributions to the escrow account from players.

GAMEPLAY

* The experience requirements for levels have been significantly lowered primarily affecting the 20 thru 70 level range. Along with the experience changes, the drop rate for Adept I spells has been increased slightly.


QUESTS

* The Invasion of the Vale quest is now a more appropriate level for its difficulty. The Shattered Vale in Antonica now has an escape point inside it.


GUILD RECRUITMENT

* Guilds will no longer appear in the guild recruiting list if they don?t have any recruiters online.


MENTORING

* Mentoring other players now grants greater achievement reward for the mentor.
* 0-5 level difference: 0% bonus
* 6-10 level difference: 50% bonus
* 11-20 level difference: 100% bonus
* 21-30 level difference: 150% bonus
* 31-50 level difference: 200% bonus
* 51+ level difference: 300% bonus
* This bonus is only applied to achievement experience gained through combat or loot items, not through quests or exploration.
* Mentors will now receive experience when their apprentice has disabled combat experience.


ITEMS

* Most house items can now be scaled in size, by using shift + mousewheel while moving or placing them. Picking them up again will reset the size to default. Shift and the + and - keys on the numpad also work.
* You can no longer turn auto consume on while using a griffon or sokokar.
* Bayle?s Amulet and the Trinket of the Venerated Fanatic can now be mounted and used as a house item.


SPELLS

Spells which do not expire have been made uninterruptable. There are some exceptions which include spells which summon pets or have limited uses.

Bruiser

* Divide and Conquer should now properly apply hate to the entire encounter.

Fury

* Natural Mask should now gray out when casted.

Ranger

* Thorny trap should now work properly for evil rangers on pvp servers.


ACHIEVEMENTS

Defiler

* Enhance: Fuliginous Sphere will now work correctly.

Sorceror

* Ward of Sages should now toggle properly.

Templar

* Blessings is now toggleable and has a recast of 2 seconds.


SHADOWS

* Shadows should no longer disappear unexpectedly.


TRADESKILLS

Merchants in the Maj'dul courts are now selling a wider range of ancient teachings recipes.

Alchemy

* Rare cure potions have been removed and standard cure potions have been upgraded to cure the appropriate levels of effects. This in turn should help reduce some of the demand for dusts.

Carpentry

* With the advent of scalable furniture, carpenters no longer require recipes that make items of different sizes. The following redundant recipes were removed: comely teak table, small teak table, large light cedar table, vale briarwood guest bed, large vale briarwood corner bar, small redwood room divider, small tynnonium brazier, small purple lilies, small white lilies, embellished rug, eccentric alder chair. Existing items will not be affected.
* Carpenters studying the architecture of Unrest have designed a number of new recipes for furnishings in a similar style, to replace the redundant recipes that have been retired.

Tailoring

* Artisans have designed some new recipes for threadbare and sackcloth vests, and will continue to work on more vest-type cloth armor appearances for the future.

Scholars

* Merchants in the courts of Maj'dul are now stocking some additional "Ancient Teachings" recipe scrolls.


PVP

* Illusionists on their epic quest should no longer take lose faction with Freeport when using the Lucan illusion and then removing it.
* The additional experience multiplier for PvP kills has been reduced slightly.


USER INTERFACE

* Status values on the housing window will now display separators so large numbers are easier to read.
* There is now an option in the Persona window to block voice invites.


ZONES

Veeshans Peak

* The gem drop rate of Veeshan's Peak has been slightly increased to account for the more frequent patterns.
* Each of the bosses in Veeshan's Peak now drop an additional gem.
* The Taskmaster in Veeshan?s Peak has made new use of his arcane knowledge! Raiders Beware!


Kelethin

* A few of the fae in Kelethin react to a good aligned arasai now.

FAN FAIRE FEEDBACK

* Tunare's touch has reached the door step of the Teir'dal. The druid ring in Darklight Wood has sprouted a Blessed Shrubbery. Druids and adventurers alike should seek out the ring to extend their travel possibilities.
* Better search filters for the Recipe window and Tracking window:
o Instead of a direct match, each word must be present
o Words preceded with '-' (hyphen) must not be present to be matches
o i.e. recipe filtering with "rigid bow" would show 'rigid scale bow'
o i.e. recipe filtering with "gno -therm" would show 'gnomish level' but not 'gnomish thermometer'
* If you find a Lore and Legend item for a Lore and Legend quest that you're on, the tooltip will indicate whether you've already examined it or need to examine it.
* Sir Valinayle in Stormhold now corrects himself after calling Stormhold Befallen.
* Removed the option to go to Prize of Prexus and The Maid for the Mist on the mariner bells unless someone in the group is on that part of the quest.
* Deleting a quest from your quest journal will now select the next quest in the list.

 

Saga

Banned
Feb 18, 2005
2,718
1
0
Pretty sure this will (eventyally) be burried. I don't think anyone gives a rats ass about EQ2. Even EQ1 with it's limited population still has a higher playerbase and better experience.
 

CKent

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2005
9,020
0
0
Originally posted by: Izusaga
Pretty sure this will (eventyally) be burried. I don't think anyone gives a rats ass about EQ2. Even EQ1 with it's limited population still has a higher playerbase and better experience.

/hate off

I've heard EQ2 has really turned around and can be an enjoyable experience these days. I guess after so, so many years of banging their heads against a wall, SOE finally bought a clue.

/hate on

F Sony/SOE, boycott them.
 

Bateluer

Lifer
Jun 23, 2001
27,730
8
0
Originally posted by: Izusaga
Pretty sure this will (eventyally) be burried. I don't think anyone gives a rats ass about EQ2. Even EQ1 with it's limited population still has a higher playerbase and better experience.

I think EQ2 has more subs than EQ1, though it has been a few months since I had an active sub to EQ2. I just don't have the time to really play it now, plus I don't know anyone who plays other than myself. Most of my friends either ceased playing MMOs or are stuck raiding the same dungeon in WoW or Diablo 2 over and over and over and over and over. . . :(
 

skace

Lifer
Jan 23, 2001
14,488
7
81
I'd still be playing EQ2 if the engine properly supported recent hardware as good as it does old hardware. I read about people stating that if you like playing EQ2 you should just pull out your 2nd video card, or get an older one, blah blah blah. What a waste of time, my system should have run the game with a constant 90 FPS but instead I was getting 12 w/ SLI. Was a shame too, I was getting into it.
 

darkrisen2003

Senior member
Sep 13, 2004
382
0
76
Cannot access that link from work and it'll be like 10 hours before I make it home. Any chance someone can copy and paste the notes from the update? Ive been waiting for multi core support for a while now!
 

Bateluer

Lifer
Jun 23, 2001
27,730
8
0
Originally posted by: darkrisen2003
Cannot access that link from work and it'll be like 10 hours before I make it home. Any chance someone can copy and paste the notes from the update? Ive been waiting for multi core support for a while now!

So in LU49, SoE has added the ability for certain renderings to take place on a secondary cpu if your computer has one.

The EXE is still not a true SMP program as work units from the program do not get put onto multiple core, only directed pieces of the animation rendering is allowed
to go to the second core. It appears that if you having more than 2 CPU, none of the work units will be allowed to stream to the other cores.

This seems to have helped out the shadows issue a lot, fps with shadows on has been greatly improved.

The multi-CPU support is auto-detected and has a checkbox to turn on/off under Performance.

Its not live yet, but it has been deployed on Test.
 

Linflas

Lifer
Jan 30, 2001
15,395
78
91
Originally posted by: Bateluer
Originally posted by: Izusaga
Pretty sure this will (eventyally) be burried. I don't think anyone gives a rats ass about EQ2. Even EQ1 with it's limited population still has a higher playerbase and better experience.

I think EQ2 has more subs than EQ1, though it has been a few months since I had an active sub to EQ2. I just don't have the time to really play it now, plus I don't know anyone who plays other than myself. Most of my friends either ceased playing MMOs or are stuck raiding the same dungeon in WoW or Diablo 2 over and over and over and over and over. . . :(

I re-activated my sub back in June and have really been enjoying it. Most of my gaming group from UO and EQ that are still playing are in WoW but I got bored with that pretty quickly when I hit the level max and all that was left was raiding.
 

Bateluer

Lifer
Jun 23, 2001
27,730
8
0
Bump . . . I'm thinking of resubbing to EQ2 in Nov when the next expansion arrives myself.
 

Bateluer

Lifer
Jun 23, 2001
27,730
8
0
Bump . . . I resubbed on a whim this morning and was playing my Arasai warlock in Darklight. Those multicore options really helped out the performance a lot, I've been getting pretty solid 45 to 50 frames per second with max'ed out visuals at 1920x1200.