Everquest - Live Servers

Tuco · Apr 11, 2024

Yeah the patch notes have a lot of good changes this month.

Test Update 04/09/2024 - Patch Notes and Discussions | EverQuest Forums

April 9, 2024 _____________________ *** Highlights *** - Fixed full screen mode and windowing behavior. The game can again be launched in full...

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April 9, 2024
_____________________

*** Highlights ***

- Fixed full screen mode and windowing behavior. The game can again be launched in full screen mode.
- Weapon base damage and backstab values have been increased to bring them back in line with original intentions. This affects weapons from Night of Shadows back to The Burning Lands.

*** Items ***

- Extra Planar Potential Shards will now drop in Laurion Inn zones, as well as mission zones going back to Torment of Velious.
- The Legacies Lost and Selenelion evolving items no longer have class restrictions.
- Weapon base damage and backstab values have been increased to bring them back in line with original intentions. This affects weapons from Night of Shadows back to The Burning Lands.

*** Quests & Events ***

- Reduced the experience granted by the 22nd-anniversary heroic adventure Unity.
- Fixed an issue that would cause the Inner Turmoil raid to reset if a construct of agony is charmed.
- 25th Anniversary achievements that referenced "Katta Castrum" as the zone for Ghrald McManus should now correctly reference "Katta Castellum."
- Barren Coast, Tempest Festival – Lessons of Madness – The area of the 3rd & 4th steps of cleansing the pearl has been increased.
- Barren Coast, Tempest Festival – Lessons of Madness – The final fight has been changed to killing one scrykin and how the pearl is changed from corrupted to cleansed. It should no longer remove everyone in the group's pearl.
- Year of Darkpaw: The Broken Key of Forests quest now has expansion requirements for the higher level enslaved miners.
- The Mechanical Fortune Teller will now mention 25th anniversary events.
- Final Fugue raid: the Plucked achievement will now be granted properly and will notify anyone that failed to qualify as well as those that succeeded or failed.

*** Spells ***

- Paladin and Shadowknight - Corrected the degeneration values for the Steely Stance line of spells.
- Druid and Wizard - Teleportation spells for Shadow Valley no longer refer to Laurion Inn in their description.

*** AA ***

- Merged the DoN Progression AA lines, Gift of the Dark Reign and Gift of the Keepers, into a new faction-agnostic line called Gift of the Nest. The new line is functionally identical to both of the previous lines and is still earned in exactly the same way. However, the new line is no longer lost when switching faction. Additionally, the new line is now shared between Personas. The Advancement achievements associated with these AAs have also been updated so that level 60 characters with the proper faction and progression criteria can see them.
- Paladin - Added a new activated Class AA, Champion's Oath. See the in-game AA description for details.
- Shadowknight - Updated Reaver's Bargain ranks 1 and 2 to now absorb 5% of all incoming damage with mana at a rate of 100 to 40 mana, but reduced the amount of melee damage absorbed on those ranks. Added 4 new ranks at levels 110 / 115 / 120 / 125. The buff now ticks down in no-combat zones.
- Magician - Fixed an issue with the class AA, Host of the Elements, which prevented the rank 40 pet from attacking.

*** NPCs ***

- Added a speculative fix for NPCs pathing under the world and becoming unhittable.

*** Mercenaries ***

- Fixed an issue where mercenaries would not load with the additional health from Improved Health AAs when zoning or unsuspending.

*** Progression Servers ***

- Set some 15th and 16th anniversary NPCs in Plane of Knowledge and the 15th anniversary event to activate in Rain of Fear.

*** Miscellaneous ***

- Fixed kaleidoscopic rendering artifacts and related crashes.
- Fixed full screen mode and windowing behavior. The game can again be launched in full screen mode.
- Improved client log file processing performance.
- Fixed the write frequency of LogInterval=0 setting so that it's truly immediate, instead of at 1 second intervals. Please check your eqclient.ini setting for LogInterval=0 as this setting could adversely impact performance. As a reminder, the default setting is LogInterval=1 (or via the game command /loginterval 1).
- Instanced zones will again attempt to suspend mercenaries if there are too many players in the zone.
- Corrected an issue that caused some quests from the most recent expansions to reward less experience than intended.
- ClientCore variables in eqclient.ini now set affinity to a physical core (two virtual CPU) for improved performance. Legacy values that conflict with other EQ client instances are reset to -1.

*** UI ***

- Updated /copylayout functionality to include new UI window positions, Alternate Currency list column widths, and Persona Auto Load/Save Equipment Set checkbox values.

- Added -
NameReservationWnd.html
EQUI_NameReservationWnd.xml

- Changed -
EQUI.xml
main.css
TargetOfTargetWindow.html

*** Previously Updated ***

- Chasing What's Not Real: Made a speculative fix for an issue where the task would not update when examining the empty meeting room.
- Optimized NPC respawn processing and reduced its contribution to per-frame spikes by at least 50%.
- Pressing the ESC key during the tutorial cut scene no longer hangs the client.
- Fixed several client crashes.
- Fixed screenshot alpha for BMP and PNG formats.
- Fixed spell descriptions on Silver Protecting and Silver Warding Magic of Jubilation augments to indicate they offer resists to magic spells rather than cold.
- Players on Oakwynd will no longer be disconnected for being AFK for an extended period.
- The alternate currency server bonus should now affect adventure points.

Mahes · Apr 11, 2024

So when I started playing this game in 1999, I would have guessed 10 years maybe 15 tops. Kind of amazing that this game is still being kept up 25 years later. I am not sure if that is a credit to the game or the fact that later games have recently just been ho hum with the exception of World of Warcraft that was well done initially. Cannot believe another game has not taken programming to the next level.

Rajaah · Apr 11, 2024

Tuco said:
I use pre-Luclin models for everything, which means I can't tell any level of prestige from armor since everyone has long ago dyed what they want. Like Rajaah said ornamentations killed any prestige from weapons because even if you loot a mega weapon from a raid expansion and chose not to put an ornament into it, few people will probably know (or care tbh) what it is.

In live EQ the only source of prestige is finishing an evolved items, completing Vanquisher and maybe doing some impressive things with soloing. The evolved item is kinda dumb because it's way more sensible to ignore it and just finish it by doing normal stuff in the next expansion or by grinding AAs for glyphs between raids instead of grinding mobs for no other reason to level it. Ironically personas would be a good vehicle to level it, except they are archetype locked so you can't even use the damn things on many personas.

I never finished the evolving Zek earring from the 115 expansion. I did all the quests for it and got it up to the final stage (level 8 or so) only to find out that I had to grind out yet another 0-100% for it to actually reach max power. This one took forever (like an hour to move it 4%) and at that point I couldn't be arsed anymore, kinda like the Artisan's Prize.

Wonder if it levels faster in later expansions or if it can only level in the Velious remakes. Would be nice if at least it could be powered through at 125 or something. I never really went beyond level 115, think I played the 120 expansion for a few weeks and got the levels / some of the AAs from it but didn't engage with the content.

Mahes said:
So when I started playing this game in 1999, I would have guessed 10 years maybe 15 tops. Kind of amazing that this game is still being kept up 25 years later. I am not sure if that is a credit to the game or the fact that later games have recently just been ho hum with the exception of World of Warcraft that was well done initially. Cannot believe another game has not taken programming to the next level.

Yeah I expected the same. In 2004 I was fairly sure that Omens of War was going to be the final EQ expansion and end things at level 70. Thought the same when Rain of Fear got it to level 100, thought that was it. Maybe they'd add a couple more expansions at that level cap but nothing else.

The fact that it's still going is kind of wild. The fact that the vast majority of the playerbase only plays the early content on TLPs is also kind of wild. There's a lot of good stuff later on.

Druss · Apr 12, 2024

Rajaah said:
I never finished the evolving Zek earring from the 115 expansion. I did all the quests for it and got it up to the final stage (level 8 or so) only to find out that I had to grind out yet another 0-100% for it to actually reach max power. This one took forever (like an hour to move it 4%) and at that point I couldn't be arsed anymore, kinda like the Artisan's Prize.

Wonder if it levels faster in later expansions or if it can only level in the Velious remakes. Would be nice if at least it could be powered through at 125 or something. I never really went beyond level 115, think I played the 120 expansion for a few weeks and got the levels / some of the AAs from it but didn't engage with the content.

Yeah I expected the same. In 2004 I was fairly sure that Omens of War was going to be the final EQ expansion and end things at level 70. Thought the same when Rain of Fear got it to level 100, thought that was it. Maybe they'd add a couple more expansions at that level cap but nothing else.

The fact that it's still going is kind of wild. The fact that the vast majority of the playerbase only plays the early content on TLPs is also kind of wild. There's a lot of good stuff later on.

I think if they made it possible to solo/molo all Group content including current with most if not all classes it would bring back alot of old timers like me that would like to see the newer stuff. Its just too hard otherwise. and i think it would extend EQ for more years to come. They could limit this to just solo/molo and leave raids alone, once a char added to a Raid thier power levels drop back to normal. Just an idea.

Borzak · Apr 12, 2024

I thought you were uber when you got a last name.

Rajaah · Apr 19, 2024

Aside from the terrible framerate, this is pretty awesome and I'd love to see EQ actually get some sort of visual overhaul like this. In 2006 we got a bunch of zones overhauled (the desert, commons, Innothule, etc) and I don't see why it can't happen again.

"No! That costs money!" said DPG when reached for comment. Well, still... would be awesome!

Pharone · Apr 19, 2024

Rajaah said:
Aside from the terrible framerate, this is pretty awesome and I'd love to see EQ actually get some sort of visual overhaul like this. In 2006 we got a bunch of zones overhauled (the desert, commons, Innothule, etc) and I don't see why it can't happen again.

"No! That costs money!" said DPG when reached for comment. Well, still... would be awesome!

Reminds me of how we were told over and over that they absolutely positively can NOT add anymore armor models to the game because there just is not enough memory left to handle it. Fast forward a number of years, and the heroforge system was put in the game that added new armor models and you had to pay for the feature for every single character you wanted to use it.

Apparently, there is enough memory for new armor models IF they can make money off of it.

That being said, I think the Luclin models are an abomination to the overall character design of EverQuest. I would have rather they improved the original character models, added new armor models for them, add mount riding animations for them, and scrapped the whole Luclin-era character models all together.

The thing that people don't get when they make fun of the boxy original character models is that they may have been boxy, but they were a specific design aesthetic that defined the game. Replacing them with the luclin-era character models was a horrible decision in my opinion.

moonarchia · Apr 20, 2024

Pharone said:
Reminds me of how we were told over and over that they absolutely positively can NOT add anymore armor models to the game because there just is not enough memory left to handle it. Fast forward a number of years, and the heroforge system was put in the game that added new armor models and you had to pay for the feature for every single character you wanted to use it.

Apparently, there is enough memory for new armor models IF they can make money off of it.

That being said, I think the Luclin models are an abomination to the overall character design of EverQuest. I would have rather they improved the original character models, added new armor models for them, add mount riding animations for them, and scrapped the whole Luclin-era character models all together.

The thing that people don't get when they make fun of the boxy original character models is that they may have been boxy, but they were a specific design aesthetic that defined the game. Replacing them with the luclin-era character models was a horrible decision in my opinion.

There was a memory issue when they were still supporting ancient video cards. It had to do with how many textures could be loaded into the global textures. Once they dropped support for that ancient shit the issue went away, but them being greedy cock goblins meant they wanted to squeeze more $$$ out of people, so of course they did it that way.

Muligan · Apr 21, 2024

Anyone have suggestions on some good level spots for a group that's 95-100? We are still doing Gribbles mission but we are burned out. We've tried Gnome Memorial Mountain, HoT, and a few other places but its either worse experience or not quite high enough.

We have a SK, 2 Mags, Shaman, Druid but also have access to a Bard, BST, and just about anything else.

moonarchia · Apr 21, 2024

Muligan said:
Anyone have suggestions on some good level spots for a group that's 95-100? We are still doing Gribbles mission but we are burned out. We've tried Gnome Memorial Mountain, HoT, and a few other places but its either worse experience or not quite high enough.

We have a SK, 2 Mags, Shaman, Druid but also have access to a Bard, BST, and just about anything else.

Everquest Leveling Guides

almarsguides.com

arallu · Apr 21, 2024

Muligan said:
Anyone have suggestions on some good level spots for a group that's 95-100? We are still doing Gribbles mission but we are burned out. We've tried Gnome Memorial Mountain, HoT, and a few other places but its either worse experience or not quite high enough.

We have a SK, 2 Mags, Shaman, Druid but also have access to a Bard, BST, and just about anything else.

Here's another guide:

Tuco · Apr 21, 2024

Muligan said:
Anyone have suggestions on some good level spots for a group that's 95-100? We are still doing Gribbles mission but we are burned out. We've tried Gnome Memorial Mountain, HoT, and a few other places but its either worse experience or not quite high enough.

We have a SK, 2 Mags, Shaman, Druid but also have access to a Bard, BST, and just about anything else.

My recommendation is to just bounce around the different zones and try to enjoy the process.

Rajaah · Apr 21, 2024

When I played live, Gribbles missions were the best EXP until like...EoK maybe? So people did those nonstop for like 3 years. One of the things that made me quit. Those missions are so incredibly dull, not to mention pretty fugly.

sukik · Apr 21, 2024

I did gribbles 4 or 5 times before it got boring. I tried to do as many different missions as possible before I leveled out of needing that cotf gear. I'm 110 now and I've made it through the end of the almar's guide. Currently wandering around EoK zones because there seems to be a big jump between it and RoS.

Rajaah · Apr 22, 2024

sukik said:
I did gribbles 4 or 5 times before it got boring. I tried to do as many different missions as possible before I leveled out of needing that cotf gear. I'm 110 now and I've made it through the end of the almar's guide. Currently wandering around EoK zones because there seems to be a big jump between it and RoS.

Yeah, EoK was designed to be done for a while (think it still might have the record for amount of AAs in an expansion). RoS is for 106-110 but expects you to have EoK gear.

Burning Lands is actually a surprisingly great expansion with some interesting content, but it's basically for just 110, expects you to have RoS gear, and gets superceded by ToV pretty much immediately as it is. So it's probably just a TLP expansion at this point, but it's worth seeing once.

sukik · Apr 22, 2024

Rajaah said:
Yeah, EoK was designed to be done for a while (think it still might have the record for amount of AAs in an expansion). RoS is for 106-110 but expects you to have EoK gear.

Burning Lands is actually a surprisingly great expansion with some interesting content, but it's basically for just 110, expects you to have RoS gear, and gets superceded by ToV pretty much immediately as it is. So it's probably just a TLP expansion at this point, but it's worth seeing once.

I picked up some ToV armor for my tank this weekend that has given my group a pretty big boost, and the rest nearly have full EoK. I think I'll wrap up my tour and move on to RoS. Exp has substantially slowed down, so I think I'll just take my time and do a RoS > TBL > ToV tour, and hopefully be 115 by the time I finish.

I haven't been working through expansion questlines, except to unlock some zones. Does progression apply to the character or persona? I'd really like to do some of the expansions questlines while working on other personas. If not, I'll probably just do them when I get to max level.

moonarchia · Apr 22, 2024

sukik said:
I picked up some ToV armor for my tank this weekend that has given my group a pretty big boost, and the rest nearly have full EoK. I think I'll wrap up my tour and move on to RoS. Exp has substantially slowed down, so I think I'll just take my time and do a RoS > TBL > ToV tour, and hopefully be 115 by the time I finish.

I haven't been working through expansion questlines, except to unlock some zones. Does progression apply to the character or persona? I'd really like to do some of the expansions questlines while working on other personas. If not, I'll probably just do them when I get to max level.

If it's cheevo based like HoT is then character based.

DickTrickle · Apr 22, 2024

Achievements are shared with personas, so it's a big FU to personas given the modern leveling paradigm.

Rajaah · Apr 24, 2024

Yeah, ToV achievements give huge EXP boosts (and are pretty much the only way to level at 111+) but you can only get them once per character. IIRC doing all of the merc/partisan/missions on Phinny got me from 111 to half of 114 and I had to grind the rest of the way to 115. So it isn't like you have a big excess of them to spend some on other personas.

No idea how people will handle 111-115 now. I guess do CoV achievements on a different persona, that might work...for one. If they give big exp like ToV. Not sure about 116-125 or if grinding ever becomes feasible again.

sukik said:
I picked up some ToV armor for my tank this weekend that has given my group a pretty big boost, and the rest nearly have full EoK. I think I'll wrap up my tour and move on to RoS. Exp has substantially slowed down, so I think I'll just take my time and do a RoS > TBL > ToV tour, and hopefully be 115 by the time I finish.

I haven't been working through expansion questlines, except to unlock some zones. Does progression apply to the character or persona? I'd really like to do some of the expansions questlines while working on other personas. If not, I'll probably just do them when I get to max level.

A few thoughts on the last few expansions:

-I liked RoS a lot but it very much feels like the back half of EoK (probably because it is). Like it should have all been one big expansion. Veeshan's Peak III is pretty cool. Not sure what level you are now, but TBL probably better at like 108. Could also just spend some time in every zone and just leave when you've seen enough, with whatever levels you got. Leveling above the next expansion's level cap isn't the worst thing for keeping things moving along.

-TBL is probably the most interesting of the late expansions. Unsure how it'll fit into the leveling paradigm since it was an AA-only expansion on TLPs. But worth seeing, and if it gets you to like, 112 or something, then great.

-ToV is fine but I really wasn't into the exp changes. Also the overall look of the whole thing is #NotMyVelious. Everything's all dirty and gross compared to the pristine environments of original Velious. The levels fly by here with the achievements.

-CoV continues the trend of Nu Velious being underwhelming compared to the Kunark remakes. Another level-capped AA expansion like TBL so I'm wondering if it'll be a big boost to normal exp on a regular level path. Found this to be kind of a soulless bunch of zones with a ton of empty space, the low budget really comes through here. However it has new dragon models for the first time in ages and some of them look awesome. Outside of raids, though, you might not see any of them. NTOV has some rare spawn group-level dragons (that I never actually got to see) and hopefully Sleeper's Tomb isn't raid-only because it was pretty cool.

-ToL's achievements can pretty easily get you from 116-120. If anything you'll have to slow levels down by AAing a lot just to not miss out too much. ToL's okay, didn't light my world on fire.

-Night of Shadows (forgot this was a thing) and Laurion's Song, I have no idea about.

sukik · Apr 24, 2024

Progression achievements, collections or both? I've got so much ground to cover I've bot paid them any attention thus far.

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