Hello raiders of Norrath! We would like to thank everyone for their continued patience with the current issues that have plagued many of the Blood of Luclin raid zones. Our hat is off to all those who pulled together to send in /bugs enabling us to quickly diagnose the problems and get back on the road to fully functional and fun raid zones. We are almost there! In the spirit of communication, let’s start with a little about what has happened and/or is happening right now with regards to raiding. As always, we are trying constantly to raise the bar and keep content feeling fun, engaging, rewarding, and hopefully be something you might not have seen before. This means zones and encounters are becoming increasingly complex with each subsequent expansion to keep things fresh. This year it was no different however, some issues and their subsequent fixes had unforeseen side effects which led to more bugs, and things got a bit unstable. We are currently working on reverting back a lot of the more complex scripted systems dealing mainly with stat calculations and buff packages applying. The biggest areas of impact were areas that ran long scripts to change out buffs on creatures and those scripts were being affected by latency. In some cases, wrong buffs would apply or buffs would not apply at all, leading to either tiny harmless flora turning into lethal killing behemoths calling everyone “Seymore” for some reason and some major personalities turning into utter pushovers. These encounters went through a vigorous QA phase and persisted to have issues afterwards that were not seen in QA testing. This is just one example of the joys of working on a game that has grown as expansive as EverQuest II has and we don’t have any plans to stop anytime soon! To correct the current situation we will be splitting the zones much like we have in the past few years rather than making it an option in the same zone as it currently is. Normal Mode raiding will have its own zone and, when unlocked, the challenge zones will have a completely separate zone with its own lockout. This means we can apply buffs directly on the characters instead of needing to look at what difficulty is selected and hoping the buffs apply correctly. As you can somewhat see on live servers right now, many raid targets have had to have stat tweaks in order to make the content survivable. We will continue to monitor the raids to make sure they are performing as best as possible. These changes are a step in the right direction and it will make the encounters more reliable in terms of knowing what you are getting into when engaging a boss in a zone you have done before. Again, thank YOU, the players, so much for all the reports of which raids were having problems and which were not. We are constantly impressed by the level of dedication many of you have and we respect that immensely. Here’s to hoping these changes will make a positive impact on the current situation. As always, we are here if things go wrong and we will react swiftly to anything that comes up down the line. Happy Raiding! EverQuest II Development Team UPDATE: Due to some unforeseen issues with our testing servers (Hardware issue) we will not be able to get the majority of the raid changes in for Tuesday. I'm not sure when they will be able to make it in but I don't feel comfy putting them on live servers without time for me and the QA team to test them. Having said that, if you have certain encounters that are just brutal and need adjusted I can do another pass on them to hopefully make them doable until we can get those updates in. If you want to just Private message me here and give me the name of the boss and server I can take a look at their settings and adjust if need be.
Thanks for the update Gninja, do you have a rough timeline when we will see the door changes? Somewhere at the end of Feb or something?
Entry raids being bugged or completely changed almost 2 months after the expansion launched should not happen in ANY MMO game. Completely screws up the "race". Yes there is a race, yes there are very few raiders, 1500'ish but some people still care about this and its just super frustrating at this point.
any plan to get a similar update on itemization and class balance, for raiders and non-raiders players have waited for the whole beta and the last two months to have anyone explaining what is happening and the plans for the furtur some example: mages are disapearing in profit of more and more scouts, with itemizations and ability upgrades lacking for mages casual players being forgotten in the altar of p2w with raiders potency ranging from 145k to +180k, and crit bonus ranging from 5.5k to +8k, making game balance and progression almost impossible for any near futur ( = players doing 5x to 15x the dps of similar with same equipment, 30x times in heroics) - content will either be too easy or too hard for the whole expansion red adornments needed to progres in raid and heroics impossible to get reliably and there are much more to discusss we could already see in the first opened raids t1/t2 fights that willl be impossible for casual players for months (dps check, max hp/healing check), with the current item progression if they are not greatly nerfed to allow more players to open the following raid zones, how is raid progression going to be adjusted in the next tier with the current balance? Gninja and Kander latests posts make us hope updates are going in the right direction, so hopefully we will see the same about itemization and class balance
I cannot speak for the items folks or class balance. However, I can tell you that the DPS/HPS checks that are prior to the t2 zones (Fordel, Wracklands, and Ssraeshza) are completely obtainable without gear from the zones they unlock. If you feel they are NOT obtainable please send me a PM with your explanation on why this is not possible as I have not yet found anything that would hold players back outside of the few times the health was unintentionally too high.
UPDATE: Due to some unforeseen issues with our testing servers (Hardware issue) we will not be able to get the majority of the raid changes in for Tuesday. I'm not sure when they will be able to make it in but I don't feel comfy putting them on live servers without time for me and the QA team to test them. Having said that, if you have certain encounters that are just brutal and need adjusted I can do another pass on them to hopefully make them doable until we can get those updates in. If you want to just Private message me here and give me the name of the boss and server I can take a look at their settings and adjust if need be.
The are now issues with Raid progression and the T2 Raidmobs as they didn't execute their scripts or art/environment wasn't correct and thus having some Raidforces killing them in unintended ways ( I use the wording unintended way instead of exploited). Even Gninja labelled some of the Kills as "non legit". Now those RFs have the advantage of having "handed" out the Red Rune (Recipes) very easily and quick while other Raider may have to wait way longer for it. Secondary those RFs could Progress faster with the Raidquest as they otherwise would have. On top RFs behind can't progress at all at the moment. My question to Gninja is how he wants to tackle the (unfair) advantage to have a more level Progression.
Any kills that were gotten while the bosses were severely underpowered were already reset. Beyond that I cannot control what the various websites that track boss kills do with awarding progression values.
I think the previous comment was aimed more towards the achievements that rewarded people with powerful and rare red runes for killing content with no active scripts and/or low hp or damage output such as the Seru raidzone. Whereas now the scripts for those raid targets are active/broken/unintelligible, making the content unkillable or unavailable. Personally I'd like to see a review of all the raid content where essential information is added to encounters that actually explain whats happening such as during the Xi Xia Xius fight where a random raid member is ported and dies almost instantly when I have worse stats and take less damage. Instead we have to wipe over and over and over in the hopes that the victim of the port doesn't expire before a healer can reach them. So much more to say but the only other things I want to see changed are the re-integration of Armour patterns because we cant use half the loot we receive due to it being Brawler only or Leather wearers only. Its ridiculous! So little chain gear and when something drops that is usable it has rubbish meaningless stats better for other archetypes.
Would it be possible that every named chest has 1 armor patteren in it? on top of whatever else It doesnt seem right that we kill a named for the chest to only have 1 item in it either
Has anyone addressed the fact that the item that drops to progress the raid questline is 1 per zone. The only difference between the person who gets access to the next zone and the other 23 raiders is they had better RNG. Seems like the whole raid should get the quest update so that we have more than 1 person who can lead us into the next progression zone.
Can you change it around so we dont need the previus same patterens to upgrade it? Like last expansion just any t1 patteren for next not exact same?
Would it be possible to reevaluate the current raid loot tables? The most consistently dropping items from the raid chests are the player crafted waist red adorns. Why are the rare VIII adorns not routinely part of the raid tables, even if just the final names in the raid zone? One piece of raid armor, one worthless infuser, a weapon to be broken down and player crafted adorn for a raid fight of 24 players is sad. Let’s make raiding great again! Increase the loot tables for additional numbers of armor drops and included the VIII adorns into the final names!
You get a choice of VIII runes for Flawlessing all of Arches. And I have heard rumor of other Flawless rewards.
