GU106: Seeds of Vengeance Arrives May 24th!

The rightful god of Hate, Innoruuk, has recovered his seat atop the throne of Hate.
Woe to any traveler who dares to explore the revitalized Shard of Hate, the celestial home to the divine father of spite and malevolence. Your presence is unwelcome, no matter your blood, your alignment, or your past actions. All will meet merciless resistance at the hands, claws, and teeth of the newly reunified minions of Hate!
…But the unique treasures and great power that await inside beckon the bravest and the boldest Norrathians, as they have in ages past. Will fate see your name added to the ranks of victorious heroes or those of the defeated insurrectors?

GU106: Seeds of Vengeance is coming to EverQuest 2 on Thursday, May 24th, 2018! This game update is packed full of new content, including a return to the Shard of Hate where solo players, groups, and raiders will all be confronted with new bosses, puzzles, and locations within the plane that have never been seen before! There will also be new expert dungeons, a revamped item examine window, new missions, and more!

We'll be sharing previews of the coming content all the way up until GU106 launches, so keep an eye out more sneak peeks! This week, keep reading to learn more about the Item Examine Window Revamp.


Item Examine Window:

As EverQuest 2 has grown over the last 13 years (and counting!) the variety of stats on items has grown substantially, leaving the current item examine window rather cluttered. We figured it was time for a revamp of the item examine window to streamline and simplify the information.

When GU106 rolls out, the item examine window will have the following changes:

The item examine window now uses a column layout for item stats, the item tags have moved to the bottom of the window.
Next, certain groups of stats that are always granted together on items, such as your Primary Attributes, will now be grouped together. If an item possessed was any single one of these stats previously, it will now grant you all of the stats in that item group. You can mouse over the item group to see what stats it grants.

Any item that has a serialized bonus (like those granted by an item infuser or by reforging) will now only show the current stat on the default window. To see the item's base stats you can click the “Base” checkbox on the top right under the item icon. This checkbox will only be visible if you have a modified stat.

You can also click the silver arrow (seen on the right side of the window) to toggle the details about an effect description on or off.
The item mouseovers have gotten a similar update - you can press the alt-key to view base stats, as instructed at the top of the mouseover image.

Finally, effects on an item have been separated and centered out from the blue stat groupings. You can even hide the effect description if you so desire, as shown in the first and second pictures in this article.
Here are the stat groupings currently implemented in the system (which you'll be able to check out on the Test Server):

• Primary Attributes: Agility, Intelligence, Strength, Wisdom

• Resistances: Arcane, Elemental, Noxious

• Defensive Skills: Defense, Deflection, Parry, Aggression

• Offensive Skills: Crushing, Piercing, Slashing, Ranged

• Spell Skills: Ordination, Ministration, Subjugation, Disruption, Focus

• Crafting Skills: Artificing, Artistry, Chemistry, Fletching, Scribing, Sculpting, Metalshaping, Metalworking, Tailoring

• Harvesting Skills: Gathering, Foresting, Fishing, Mining

Keep checking back on the EQ2 website to see what else is coming to Norrath in GU106 - you won't want to miss any of it!

Nice to see some quality of life improvements. I am sad however, that a stat comparison wasn't added to tooltips (i.e. when hovering over an item, it shows you how your stats would change if you equip the new item). But nice job nonetheless!

Proofread, edit...

"GU106 launces"

I take it this only affects level 100+?

Also, "sneak peaks" should be "sneak peeks," since you're not referring to mountain tops, but to stealthy glimpses before the main reveal. ;->

Unfortunately, both usages are spelled correctly, according to any spellchecker/dictionary out there... :-/

Uwk

Possibly; that's the example they used, the freebie thing you could get with the CE+ level expacs. We'll check all the items out on Test.

Uwk
who doesn't have any 100 level adventurers on Test, so it should be easy to spot ;->

I realize that we should be expecting more GU announcements, but this seems underwhelming.

There will definitely be more content in this game update than there has been in the last few. Once more information starts rolling out, I think you'll be a lot more excited for what's coming Expect about 1 update a week!

Thanks. And I hate to sound so negative, but I liked to see the base stats and the infused stats at the same time. Typically let me know if I needed to drag it over to the deity window and infuse it or not. I guess I will have to wait and see how it actually looks/feels. Being the first GU 106 announcement, I just thought it should have more of a selling point for people to play over the summer. Restructured the views of items isnt going to help. What may have been better is to write the tooltips for CA's/spells to actually state what it actually does.

This just confirms what people have been saying for years, there will never be a stat crunch and this is an attempt to band aid fix yet another system.

While I applaud the devs doing this, instead of doing absolutely nothing, I feel like the player base is split down the middle in regards to continue adding stats and having even higher numbers and the people who prefer a stats and ability crunch.

Will the ethereal event launch the same time? any info if it will be like last year ? i really hope its changed to a daily and weekly instead of what we had last year.
I hope the way to get max coin pr day will not be locked behind expert dungeons.

To me, this is a concession that the stats are nearly identical, and a true ability crunch won't come. How many years has it been since STR, AGI, INT, and WIS were declared "primary attributes", and only one would ever affect your class? I remember spec'ing my Paladin for extra WIS for the larger power pool. Just run any zone from the last few expacs and you'll see jewelry with all four stats when it was clear meant for a tank who can't use three of them. The current itemization is the same as if the game simply had "primary" as a single stat from day one.

Even as the blue stats get ever more convoluted, the ability crunch already occurred in the green stats. The primary attributes, resists, defensive skills, weapon skills, and magic skills are all distributed equally with nearly the same value on all characters. It is far easier to re-itemize with equal amounts of each attribute than it is to rewrite such a core part of the game mechanics. While the full stats are still visible in your character window, this is a real step forward to simplifying stats for casual players.

I blame the TLE servers for a lot of it (though it's not the fault of the participants; I just think it should've been handled better [see the World Bell Snafu for further evidence]); while there was a time, long, long ago, when all the stats counted for at least something (I miss those days, back when the AA tree for your class actually meant more: a WIS-based Monk? Sure! An AGI-based Illusionist? Why not! A STR-based Conjurer? That's--hmm, the only way to do it nowadays...), now it's confusing when an item that used to be rather obviously STR/AGI for a non-caster (or vice versa, INT/WIS, for a caster) now has STR/AGI/INT/WIS stats across the board, even though three of them don't count for anything. :-/

And I'm not so brilliant a crafter that I've memorized which each item did for which user, back in the day... ;->

Uwk

But not so easy when it comes to translating into another language (See for French translation at https://www.guerrier-celeste.fr/for...engeance-arrivent-le-24-mai-2018.html#2866).I got my head handed to me to figure out what a "peak" (even a sneak one) might have to do in the story ...

PS : in comparison understand that "launces" was actually "launches" was merely a formality

The new view isn't going to give any indication of reforged/improved stats... I don't mind mimicing the new format as long as I can still come to eq2u and see the reforge and imbue stats easily

Should be able to; they had some Technical Difficulties(TM) in the past, but it should be relatively cool now.

Uwk

You know everyone was looking forward to getting a glimpse of upcoming content, not cosmetic changes to windows. So, next week will we get to see new fonts coming our way, or the week after new color schemes, and for the 3rd week pre-view will we get to see new pics coming to the launcher? Just sayin'

So many complaints ....

Good job clearing up some of the clutter.

If next weeks preview is just more Familiars and better Mercs you may aswell turn off the lights and be done, people are waiting for class balance, spell fixes and engagement with the upcoming GU lets see something that may get all the people not playing excited enough to log in.

What the stats did was the same for every class:
agi = affected damage with ranged weapon / ranged CAs + avoidance
str = affected damage with melee weapons / melee CAs + carry weight
wis = power and resists
int = spell damage