Here is my labor of love for our hearing-impaired community. Sourced from Spotify. Dreamweaver: Alright. Welcome to Episode 10 of Kander's Candor. Uh, I think it's Episode 10. It's been a while since we had our last episode. We've been super busy. If it's not Episode 10, I'm not sorry because I'm not going to correct this. As every previous episode, I am joined by Kyle "Kander" Vallee, the Creative Director of Everquest 2, and I'm Dreamweaver, your sometimes oft-forgetful Community Manager, and we are here to kind of give an update on where we're at with live servers and Kaladim, and talk about a few things. We aren't answering really any questions this episode. Hopefully some of your questions will be answered, but we're going to do an update as we kind of get back into our regular update schedule for Kander's Candor. So Kyle, thanks for joining me again this week, and let's talk about Solusek's Eye - The Calling, which is one of the biggest updates that we've ever done, along with Fabled Plane of War. Kander: Right. We've been working on this one for a while. Yeah. But, the Solusek Eye raid was something that I actually started on eight years ago, and that got side-barred because we just didn't have the time to do it. So we've brought it up here and there. Finishing it, actually doing it, and so, I talked to Chrol, who's really looking forward to doing a raid. He wanted to do a full big raid, so we decided to go for it. And it was also like, like some quest content that was halfway done for that dungeon and other stuff. So we, we finished up some of the quest content too, and it ended up taking a lot more time than we anticipated, because we're really trying to make sure that, you know, you get this stuff out quality and tested, but I feel like, I feel like we did a good job. Dreamweaver: Now, so, obviously, there were some minor issues and some other ones when the content launched. The Devastation of War bug, and things like that, which we rectified fairly quickly. Kander: Yeah. Dreamweaver: But over all, do you feel like we got it, the, we got the content out and (some loud banging, little hard to make out) it's as intended? Kander: Well, we did have some, we did have some unanticipated problems with Plane of War. The, the Devastation of War thing was something that was so far lost in our memories that, you know, so I mean, we reset the achievements there and fixed some of the healing issues that people were sending feedback on. We're still working on fixing some of the issues with reactive heals. Code has a fix for that, which I believe is going out on, well it'll probably already be out when this comes out. (Kander laughs) Dreamweaver: I mean, I mean, fingers crossed, we get it, we get this episode out before it already comes out, but you might be right, the fix may already be in by the time this episode comes out. So another thing that players have kind of been talking about quite a bit, is the Fire Pearls drops. Are we going to be seeing any changes with that? I know, I know I told them that there would be no changes, but I feel like...I feel like, pretty confident in that, so? Kander: Yeah, so, obviously you told them there wouldn't be any changes cause I told you there wouldn't be any changes, but I do believe we are going to shorten the lock-out timers for the raids, so the raids should be coming down to 5 days. I believe we're going to shorten the heroic down from 7 to 5 days also...or it might be 5 to 3. I don't remember. Dreamweaver: Okay. I was going to say, I believe it's currently at 5, so maybe we were shortening it from 5 to 3? Kander: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure we're bringing those down, and then we're also shortening lock-out timers for the last GU stuff, so you'll be able to do the, the Showdown zones more often, I believe, the heroic and the solo are going down to like, 90 minutes, or something like that. Maybe the heroic's gone down to 18 hours and the solo's down to 90 minutes. Something like that. Dreamweaver: Gotcha. Kander: But yeah, we're shortening the lock-out timers. That should change some of the, you know, how quickly people can get that stuff, and obviously, we'll review it later if it turns out, you know, like, we're not, we're not like, at a point that like, nothing's ever going to change. We're just, we are listening to feedback. We are upgrading raid loot, so the raid loot is getting bumped up. The, the story with that was, when we were getting ready to launch, we had reviewed the loot, and it was, we thought it was too good at the time, because it was going to end up being a complete gear reset, and so some of this stuff kind of happened separately and out of sync, and I'll explain why into depth the way it did. So I was concerned because I didn't want to hand raiders a complete gear, you know, reset three months before the expansion. But at the same time, we were removing most of the infusing from most of the items, so had we thought about it, then people would have been able to put on 90% of the gear and not have to worry about infusing it, so it wouldn't have been as big of a deal if it turned out to be a gear reset, and it was also something for everybody to do. So, at the cost of trying to be considerate to the raiders, we ended up, you know, putting out stuff that wasn't as awesome as we anticipated, so... Also, probably by the time you're hearing this, that stuff should get, should be upgraded also. The main feedback was the stamina and the crit bonus were a bit low, so we'll be upping that to like, the full amount that you would have been able to get if you had fully infused it. So, that stuff should be awesome and exciting and everybody should want it right now. There's a lot of feedback on the gear. But what we did, is we put in the Fire Pearls as something that, keep in mind this is something that literally everyone in your raid after 5 weeks can earn something. You can earn a, you know, best-in-slot item. So, if you're there on the kill... Dreamweaver: So I've seen... Kander: Yeah, go ahead. Dreamweaver: Sorry. So, from players, I've seen, and I feel like maybe there's a difference between our math and their math, that we might be able to explain right now, about the Fire Pearls and the gear earning. Players right now, at least the way they're doing the math on it, don't see themselves getting a piece of gear for almost 10 weeks, for that first piece of gear. So is there something you think they're missing? Cause your math is about half that, almost exactly. They're, they're projecting about two and a half months, where we're saying five weeks. Kander: Well, they've factored in the fact that they can reset the zone every other week also, right, so, and it's for both zones, so if you ran each zone an average, you know, of 'x' times a week, you should be able to get, like, the first item within five-, six weeks. Five or six weeks. But with the lock-out timers being reduced, now you can run it more like twice a week, if you put the effort and your guild wants to do that. Dreamweaver: And do we think that's where the math is getting mixed up between the two? Is the, that every-other-week reset? Kander: Yeah, possibly. I mean, they, you know...I'm not sure where, I'm not sure where they're confused. But again, we want people to be able to earn the stuff, you know, not by, by the time the expansion launches, well before that. So if it turns out that we have to adjust the numbers or...something, then you know, that's a possibility. Dreamweaver: Okay. I mean. Yeah, I can see that. I think, I think the important point there, is that we're going to continue to look at these as we see people playing them and as we see people doing what they need to do to engage with the content. Kander: Yeah, I mean, so, this whole thing was supposed to be fun right. I mean, Sol Eye, the Calling, the Gathering...what did we call that zone? Is supposed to be super fun. You know like, Chris put an amazing out of work into it and the feedback has been super good. People are enjoying it, they enjoy the zone. We also wanted to put in fabled Plane of War just because that's kind of a popular zone in the past, and probably most players don't even remember playing in it, so we thought that would be cool. I will say that, Plane of War's, you know, a bit more script-heavy. So, there's a bit more, a bit more complication there. I know we made some adjustments to kind of bring down the difficulty a bit. But you're still going to be dealing with the scripts. But I mean, they're also known scripts that, you know, people have, they know and they've defeated those bosses in the past. So it should be good. They shouldn't have too much trouble, you know, getting through there. Every, I mean, everyone should be able to kill something in each zone, right? Like, I don't know how far your guild's going to get, but there's definitely stuff in each zone that you should be able to kill and progress on so... Dreamweaver: Alright, cool. Kander: And when I say stuff that you can kill, I'm not talking about clearing the zone. You know, like, whenever I say 'there's stuff in each zone for everybody', people assume I'm talking about everyone's going to be able to clear each zone, which that's probably not the case, but the idea is you can make progress, right? You can go in and kill, you know, the first six bosses in Sol Eye and get lots of gear, and gear up and get better, and then make further progress, and that's kind of the idea with this, you know? Both zones weren't meant for everyone to just blow through in a week and be bored, so you know, there's definitely stuff for people to get. You know, we tried to meter out some of the better stuff. Which I mean, like, a lot of that stuff, people won't see upgrades, especially the best-in-slot stuff until, you know, Tier 2 raids in the expansion, which means those items are good for quite a while. Dreamweaver: Right. Okay. So, sort of moving off that, unless there's more you wanted to say about Sol Eye and Plane of War, but I think that kind of covers a lot of our updates for it that are happening in this upcoming patch. Kaladim players, obviously there's a lot of stuff that's gone on with Kaladim over the course of it's life, but most recently, they've been asking for double coins, and we've talked about it, and we did not end up giving them double coins for this event, for the Labor Day weekend event, and a lot of them would like to know why, pointing out that we have in the past, given out double coins close to the opening of Hunter's, so I just wanted to give you a moment to kind of explain how we look at Hunter's from the aspect of Kaladim, and how we look at, or how - at least- we try, to look at when we give currency multipliers to Kaladim. Kander: Yeah, I mean, the whole idea with the Hunter's quests was that it was something to do and we added it for mid-content, so a lot of that, also, is reflective on how much mid-content there was for each expansion, right? Like for the expansions that had one zone, you know, for mid-content, like the Hunter's quests were, are there to give people something to look forward to, and something to work on and something to do, and typically, we try not to put double coins out as soon as the Hunter's coins go in. One of other problems with Kaladim is that we don't have as many - I'll say it the way Caith says it - we don't have as many levers to pull to give them cool stuff when we do events, so we have to try to be selectic-, you know, selection-able, what's the word? We have to be selective about, like, what levers we pull cause we don't really have a lot of stuff, and then later on, we do something else and there's nothing new to give them, so...and also, people if you know, if we give double coins all the time, it's basically, it's there and then you're done and then there's nothing else to work on. So, it's, it's just part of...honestly, it should be, it should be...more...consistent, and I agree with that, with that feedback. So, but we are, we are actually working on other levers to pull so that we have more stuff to do for, for the TLE server. So, like, we are looking at you know, setting up double loot and some other cool stuff, so when we have events that there's more cool stuff for, for them to do. Dreamweaver: Ok. Awesome. Do you have, like I said, this is kind of shorter, this is more of an update for players to listen to really quickly. Do you have anything else you want them to know before we sign off on this one? And we'll, once we get back into the normal swing of episodes, we'll start answering a lot more specific questions guys, I promise. This one is just kind of a, "We have time, we're gonna get this out!" Kander: Yeah, I mean, we're...it's the very beginning of September, we're 100% on the expansion now, on Expansion 17, which we'll be getting out more information very soon in the next months to come. So, we might be a little less, spending less time in Discord, spending less time interacting because we're going to be super busy, so just keep that in mind. We are still, you know, listening to feedback and taking, you know, that sort of thing, but you can probably expect to see a lot less of us, or get a lot less questions answered, or reactions, because we're going to have our nose to the grindstone for the next 3 months. Dreamweaver: Yeah. And, and you know, you're going to continue to see, as much as you see of me. So no worries, everybody! I'll still be around! Alright, and I think that's it for, Episode...I believe 10? It's probably gonna be wrong, I'm gonna be honest. And I have no regrets, of Kander's Candor So this is me being "candor" with all of you. (both laugh) I hope you had a fun time listening. Thank you for being fans of Everquest 2 and this game, and it means a lot to us guys. Once again, I'm Dreamweaver, your friendly Community Manager, and I'm here with Kyle "Kander" Vallee and we're done. See you in game.
Currency you get from clearing Solusek's Eye and PoWar.. or at least the later bosses. We haven't cleared either yet, but maybe someone who has can confirm exactly what they drop for.
Pearls are currency used to purchase new celestial bp or celestial weapons. 5 pearls per kill from general teku and scald
