EverQuest II Community Summit -- Voice Your Concerns Here

You're probably right, but although the devs ARE different for EQ2, I just think it'd be WAY too easy to fall into the "it's easy to make it an AA" mentality, rather than actually fixing things, and thus better to stay away from temptation.




And btw, is summoner's tower down Xal? Been trying for the last 10 minutes and can't get into that or the eq1 forums. Maybe just my connection, but obviously this works. Just hangs at "waiting" in Firefox.

No, it's definitely down. Nothing I can do about it at this time.

Try to get them to put a little more effort into fixing lich while leaving armor on rather than just ditching the armor. I prefer the undead caster look to, once again, just looking like one of my pets.

Also, necromancers have no use for the Essences of Anguish we start recieving in our 20s until level 48. And since these items no longer disappear when we relog, we end up deleting stacks all the time because we don't need them for 20 more levels. They removed the summon component of our rez spell..maybe they could add in a Corpse Summon spell at level 30 or so that requires essences to cast.

The Lich issue, see if they can just make it a toggle or something. Lich with my gear is something I've been asking for for the last 3 years(Eq1) And I don't want to lose it. I'd rather they introduce the fix proposed as an option instead of just changing it for everyone. It's the only reason I play with illusions on.Heck, the Adept 3 Lich with gear is so cool I've almost never been without it on even when not fighting and as a matter of style refuse to upgrade to themaster until they change that graphic.

I don't see why fixing it is such a big deal. The reason it's bugged is because it is a humanoid illusion they make it dependant on your starting configurations. That is why some races have issues while others do not. It's possible to make the illusion depend only on the sex of the character. I don't see lion/lioness forms having oddities based on the player's starting configuration. So why not make Lich the same way? Make two lich models, one for males one for females. If they can, make it so that the model wears the armor of the player so that they turn into a cool looking undead caster. Then add slightly different looks based on the type; app, adpt, or master. App could just have the model, Adept has Green Flames, and Master has Black/Purple flames. Ever seen the skeleton warriors in D'Morte's? Similar concept but with robes instead of armor.

Having now used Drawing of Souls for abit, I've figured out the intention and am quite pleased with the spell as is. I withdraw any complaint I had about this spell and actually say it was quite brilliant in design and execution. Relay the Kudo's if you could.

I'm only 35 at the moment, but agree with what everyone has posted so far from my limited expertise.
Had a necro in eq1 since beta, quit playing because the guild needed a cleric (p.s. ... always play what you want, not what others need, hehe, hard lesson learned there). Anyhoo, as Deson just mentioned, please relay kudos from many of us who enjoy the CU much more than the old system. Letting them know we appreciate their efforts may open their ear to hearing all of our suggestions better than just saying what we dont like.
On that note, i'll just say that i LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE the way my pet holds aggro now!!!!!
Thank you SOE!

Maghantah, glad you're enjoying the post-CU13 game. Those of us in Beta put a lot of work into making sure things worked out great

I'm here in San Diego now. Though I have nothing to report at this time, you can read my progress at the Summoner's Tower. Expect updates as time goes on (possibly Friday night, definitely Saturday night)
*EDIT* Forgot the URL
Message Edited by Xalmat on 09-29-2005 05:29 PM

Oh yes, thank you for reminding me Xalmat.
Thank you to all the beta testers too!!!

Message Edited by Maghantah on 09-29-2005 04:32 PM

Xal, the graphic problems and response from a dev regarding lich are covered in this thread:

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=grph&message.id=13104

The proposal of removing the armour altogether from Lich to leave just a basic skeleton illusion is a bad solution. Bit of a kick in the teeth actually.

Would be great if the dark heart line was made easier for people to use. Like the summon goes straight into activatable slot or a hotkey appears in a free hotkey square of the target. People like me always have loads of junk in the inventory. :smileyhappy:

Edit: Black Robes for Necros!
Message Edited by Uanelven on 09-30-2005 03:24 AM

Yes for the love of God please see what can be done about getting some BLACK ROBES. Hard to look evil in solid white or zebra striped and some of the robes like the Invoker make you look more like a **** than a master of the undead, all that is missing is a big hat with a feather. I'm a necro please help me at least look the part.

How bout as a fun spell for necros. Blacken Armour?


How about increased effectiveness of fear/stun line.


How about a lvl 60 necro spell: mistform. Turn necro to a form of mist, makes necro invulnerable but cannot move during duration.

Wouldn't mist form be essentially similar to feigndeath but without potential exploits?

I really like the idea of sac hearts showing up on bars instead of in inventory, sort of like how our drawing of souls works.

Here's my Summit report:

People that showed up for the EQ2 Summit round tables:

*Myself
*Guild Leader of Ascendance (I can't remember name)
*Tamat from EQ2Vault
*Gaige from FoH
*Tstorm, a heavy forum poster
*Guy who runs TenTonHammer (I can't remember name)
*Niami Denmother from EQTraders
and about 4 or 5 other names that I flat out can't remember Sad

The round table discussions were a blast. It was great to see much of the team actually there to field questions from us and speak candidly about it! As far as my list goes, I handed it to four people: Scott Hartsman (Gallenite), Ryan Schwayder (Blackguard), Lockeye (I can't remember his RL name Sad ) the guy in charge of the combat revamps, and some other dev going around making sure bugs are discovered and fixed. Here is pretty much everything there is to talk about:

Expansion 2 is in the works. They aren't ready to discuss any details on it whatsoever, but my personal guess is it will be out in probably March 2006.

As far as expansions go, they want to add some sort of Alternate Advancement to the game, but definitely NOT to the degree that it is in EQ1. They are not going to fall into the trap of fixing balance issues by AA simply because if there are balance issues, they need to be fixed at the class level. One challenge with AAs though is balancing encounters around AAs is even trickier than balancing around levels.

Level cap increases per expansion? Maybe, maybe not. They might come out with a Velious-style expansion that is all content, no level cap and no AA.

To keep the game fresh between DoF and Expansion 2, they will continue to add new things to the game. Expect a Halloween event (yes!), the new goblin casino currently on Test, more raids added, more zones added, and even some additional minigames to keep you occupied.

In-game unlimited /respec is coming, but it will come at a price. They haven't decided how they want to implement it, but several ideas are floating around: A quest you perform, money sinks, kill an NPC, whatever. They want to do it, but they haven't figured out how they want to do it.

/claim items for expansions are getting a change. Right now they can only flag items as once per account, or unlimited per account (and restrict to being LORE). Supposedly around Live Update 16ish or so, they'll be able to flag items as specifically once per character, which means things like the Collector's Edition dragon will be /claimable on all characters.

Tradeskill item desirability is this: Using Spells as an example (because they're the easiest to relate to), you can look at it this way. Apprentice 2 is what you get when you are too lazy to get anything else. There is no reason not to get Apprentice 2 other than laziness. Apprentice 4 is what you get if you want all of your spells now without killing monsters, since there are Sages out there that can make your spells for a reasonable price. Adept 1 is your reward for going out and killing monsters. Adept 3 is where the money is for tradeskillers; if you're a tradeskiller and you want money, make Adept 3. Anything above that is pretty much uber territory.

In Desert of Flames, as far as instanced/contested raid content goes, they were shooting for basically a 50-50 or 60-40 split for instanced and contested raid targets. Contested mobs will, by far, drop better loot, but at the same time contested mobs are also, by far, the hardest monsters to kill in the game.

The Summit invitees did express a desire for more single and double-group content.

One thing that was brought up near the end was a complete reenvisionment of the low level game. The idea floated around was: Instead of being a refugee picked up at sea, you are a hero of some sort, and you are treated as a hero on the Isle of Refuge and in your home city. I went as far to suggest they get rid of the Isle of Refuge outright and just have players start in your home city, and it wasn't met with too much opposition. The citizenship quest is definitely getting adjusted (no more zoning 6 times just to get told to kill rats in the sewer), a more helpful in-game tutorial is in the works.

Along those lines, they asked us what made Desert of Flames so good. We tossed around ideas, and we came to the conclusion that the whole faction system in Maj'dul, Pillars of Flames, etc, was fun and it made us feel that we have much more of an impact on the game. So we tossed around the idea, what if faction was important at, say, level 10? What if you were able to kill the guards in your home city in order to get faction with Orcs or Gnolls? What if the newbie guards or quest NPCs in Freeport and Qeynos actually attacked rival players and killed them rather than just kicking them out? What if doing the betrayal quest meant killing tons of NPCs all around Qeynos before the Qeynos guard finally has enough and attacks or chases you out of the city? What if there were full fledged raids that occured in West Freeport where you take out the Freeport Militia with other players watching?

As Gallenite put it, they are greatly interested in "removing [the] game with safety scissors" aspect of EverQuest II. As far as the summit attendees go, we were ecstatic at the idea! So, expect to probably see some of that come into the game not far into the future.

I don't know exactly what all is happening, but the newbie game is getting changed a lot. They have a full team working on it right now.

Armor dyes: As Gallenite himself said, "EQ style free-for-all armor dyeing will not happen in EQ2." If they add dyeing, it will make sense (IE: A red robe vs a blue robe), but it will not be as the same scale as EQLive currently is.

Along those lines, the art team is adding new appearances soon. If you consider that they have to work with 64 character models (16 races, 2 genders, US models and SOGA models), it's a lot of work.

SOGA models are getting close to completion. An ETA I got was probably early November, right on time for the 1st anniversary. Definitely not an absolute date (still subject to change), but if they make that deadline then all the better. I saw them in action and, while I don't like them personally, they are definitely quite polished overall (a few still need a little work). One interesting thing I learned is that the SOGA models are almost identical in polygon counts to the US models, so they should have virtually no performance impact either way. They also use most of the same animations.

I will cover the things on my list later today, but I will leave one more loose quote from Gallenite:
Robe of the Invoker is being nerfed as far as what classes can equip it.

So, after looking at what people had put together for you to bring to the meeting from a necro point of view, then what did you actually bring to discussion?

It sounds like they used you guys for cheap PR to promote new changes as opposed to actually discussing bugs/issues....or am I wrong?

No, we discussed class issues. I personally talked to Lockeye, the guy in charge of the combat revamp in a 1-on-1 setting. I just haven't had a chance to post my notes.

I hope you hurry up and post the notes, I just want to see what they said to all the problems, bugs and issues pertaining to necros. Hopefully you got good news.

[Delete. What I want to see just hasn't been posted yet. Sorry.]
Message Edited by Kuvala on 10-03-2005 11:57 AM

Well he said he handed out copies of the information he compiled in this thread to several devs, thats alot more than any of us could do. He also said that he was going to go through his notes and add to this later - perhaps with some necro specific stuff. Either way your post was tactless and less than helpful in anyway to the thread.
Message Edited by Eirgorn on 10-03-2005 12:01 PM