dev chat dec 11 2008
| Contents [hide] |
Welcome & Introductions
Calthine: Welcome to the EQ2 Allakhazam Dev Chat!
- Kiara waves at Jindrack!!!
Ilucide: Hey everyone! I'm Noel Walling, aka Ilucide. (with one L!). I'm Lead Content Designer on EverQuest II.
Rothgar: Hi there, I'm Greg Spence aka Rothgar, Sr. Programmer on EQII
Domino: I'm Emily "Domino" Taylor, mostly tradeskills designer, supplier of cookies, and jack-of-all-trades
Kaitheel: Heyya all! I'm Nathan McCall, aka Kaitheel. Live event wrangler and general quest monkey.
Fyreflyte: I feel so awkward and on the spot now. Jason Woerner, Item Designer on EQII
Aeralik: Hi, I'm Chris "Aeralik" Kozak and I'm the hybrid programmer/designer
Calthine: Your Zam staff today are Bludwyng, your Host, Draknorr, moderating over in EQ2-FFA, Spyderbite is your Question Guy, and I'm generally panicing. Bludwyng, over to you!
The Questions and Answers
Random chit-chat and emotes have been removed for clarity
Bludwyng: Alrighty, here we go with our first question...
Rivers of Venekor: As somebody who manages the resources that come in and out of the Harvesting Depot, I would very much like to see a log similar to the Guild Bank implemented. As it stands now, if somebody removes a large quantity of resources from the Depot there is no way to determine who did it and/or if they later replaced what they withdrew. Would that be doable?
- Rothgar: This was something that we certainly thought about during development but decided not to implement due to the amount of time it would take to develop. We could consider it in the future, but what I’d rather do is spend time on a more robust permissions system for housing that gives you more control over who can do certain things. With this in place, it might not be as critical to provide detailed logging.
Anon: Are we going to see monthly live events all summer in 2009?
- Kaitheel: We certainly hope so, but it is too early to promise anything at this point.
Diknak of Butcherblock: It has been stated that the skeletal revamp project has been canceled. Since the goal of this project was to enable more flexibility with armor creation, are there any plans for an alternative to meet the same goal? If so, what is the expected timeline?
- Kirstie: The actual goal was the enable us to create wearables faster and the technology we wanted to use to do so failed to enable that result. It was unfortunate that it was announced before it was priven to work. Now on the birght side, the character team has now started devoting a larger percentage of their time to making more wearables. As far as a timeline, you will see these new wearables that we have made and will make trickle in through out the year.
Fendy: Recently critical hits were for melee were changed to use the same system as spell casting, providing a boost for melee damage; especially for classes doing high CA damage, such as assassin's. Can they explain more about the effects of this change? Did the developers feel melee damage was lacking and in need of a boost?
- Aeralik: This has actually been a longstanding bug that was difficult to find. Changes to the critical system brought it back to the forefront and the issue was resolved. It wasn't fixed because of balance, it was fixed more to keep things consistent since melee attacks worked one way while combat arts worked another way.
Varshik: Some of the easier TSO instances are a little rough. While I understand this expansion is supposed to be harder, do you have any plans to tone them down?
- Ilucide: Difficulty is something that we'll be continuing to monitor as time goes on. We continue to make tweaks based on feedback. There probably won't be some huge patch to make them all easier, but changes to make them more playable or approachable will happen as time goes on.
- Ilucide: Certainly though, we want to keep a very good set of difficult group content available for group players who aren't interested in raiding, but still like to challenge themselves.
SynterVenekor: Will the swashbuckler mythical concerns be addressed? The primary ones being that the hate transfer is a proc instead of constant, and that the damage proc is the only scout weapon with a dot proc, the dot breaks swash mez and produces lower dps than a DD proc due to overwriting itself.
- Aeralik: The swashbuckler hate transfer is changing as part of GU51 so that part of the epic will need to change. We can evaluate the rest of it but there are no guarantees of any changes. Look for a description of the changes in the GU51 Test notes next month though.
Anon: Will there be any holiday live event for Anashti Sul? Somehow Easter seems appropriate.
- Kaitheel: That would be interesting indeed! It's springtime for Anashti, and Norrath! Hehehe... But no such plans have been set in stone at this time.
Feldon: A lot of people were very pleased with Haunted Mansion and are excited about the coming Frostfell dungeon which can be done easy or medium. It gave 2-3 player groups something to do. Do you plan to make any versions of the TSO dungeons that address the duo and trio crowd?
- Ilucide: Right now, we don't have a plan in place to create 'easier' instances of TSO content. The dungeons are designed for 4-6 players. Level scaling is one thing, but re-creating scripted events that work with fewer players isn't something that we can easily accomplish.
Diknak of Butcherblock: Are we ever going be able to see the inside of Kurn's Tower?
- Ilucide: Yes, but I can't say exactly when at this point. It wasn't something we were able to do in either RoK or TSO, but I'm hoping we'll be able to let everyone in eventually. =)
Deson: Is there a "Luclin" in the works for Eq2? Could there realistically be one?
- Ilucide: It's blown up! The gnomes don't have rockets powerful enough to get there right now either. =(
- Kirstie: or barrels
- Domino: I'd like to point out you can visit scenic Luclin now ... in scenic craters all around Norrath
Anon: Is there any plan to at Raid x 2 content to TSO?
- Ilucide: Yeah, absolutely. Though not necessarily 'part' of TSO, we will be adding a pretty nice sized chunk of x2 content in the not-so-distant future. Keep your eyes peeled, it will be part of a larger content release with a new x4 zone, and a whole bunch of new solo content in Lavastorm for level 80ish players.
- Ilucide: Timetravelling and Kander are hard at work on the x2 zone, and it's shaping up beautifully!
- Ilucide: (Addendum: Domino totally reminds me that she's got something special for tradeskillers as a part of that content update too.) *ducks*
Jerath: A lot of the leather healing gear appears to be mostly for offensive-type priests (with heal proc on offensive spell). Are there any plans to alter or add more gear that proc's on heals?
- Fyreflyte: Due to the wide number of playstyles and AA specs available to priests, there is a much wider range of gear available to them than most other classes. The tradeoff is that finding the specific gear you want can be more difficult. From your question I gather that you are asking about items with procs similar to Overloaded Heal, and it's true that you'll find quite a few less of those in our newest zones. Healers developed a large dependencHealers developed a large dependency on AE heal procs during RoK, and we wanted to try to move away from that and put more emphasis back on the healers' actual spells.
- Fyreflyte: I have no plans to change the balance between offensive and defensive priest gear, as I think variability is one of the things that keeps the game fun, but there will certainly be new gear available on the shard merchants and in future zones that will be focused on improving healing (likely some with healing procs).
Jevv of Nektulos: What is being done to resolve the crashing of EQ2 due to it not releasing, and subsequently running out of memory - any chance of a /flush command similar to the one in Vanguard? It often seemed to help, and even though it's not the optimal solution, if we could at least do a /flush whenever we zoned, it might alleviate a lot of the crashing caused by EQ2.exe grabbing more and more memory.
- Rothgar: I have the answer for Jevv's question. :)
- Rothgar: EQII is actually pretty good about dynamically loading and unloading resources as needed so a /flush command wouldn't really help. The problem is that in many cases we just require too many resources to be loaded at once. We are actively working on crashing issues and memory usage and have some changes in the works that should help.
Bludwyng: Currently disabling quest xp does not disable xp from collection quests. Is this a bug? Rothgar: I don't know if its technically a bug since they are different types of quests... but its probably logical to ignore xp from collection quests if you have quest xp disabled.
- Rothgar: We'll talk about it and see if we can get that fixed.
Anon: The lag on Antonia Bayle in Moors has been pretty rough. Any plans to lower the amount of people needed in the zone before we get another instance and hopefully combat the lag?
- Kirstie: Since the launch of TSO we have lowered the number of people required to spawn up a new instance of Moors twice. However, we are still working on resolving the underlying problem(s) with the lag and we'll get that out to live as soon as we're sure it will help.
Bludwyng: Miragul's Phylactery: The Crucible... the entire final fight centers around 2 torches that must be used to burn 2-4 books, pages or scrolls in 5 seconds or everyone dies. The torches are no-rent, and do not respawn. If a torchholder goes LD or zones out (quits) without handing off his torch, zone over. Just leave, you are screwed. Is that "working as intended"?
- Ilucide: I'll talk with Kander and see if we can't do something about this. I've got a few ideas in mind of how we can address that. So, 'working as implemented', not necessarily 'working as intended'.
Anon: All the live events are great, but the token system, where you repeat a quest interminably to earn rewards of your choice, is getting a little... repetitious. Has any thought been given to mixing it up a bit?
- Kaitheel: Of course. In fact, it wasn't even planned to be used with Frostfell, but became a clear choice due to player feedback on the Test servers. The first time it was seen was GU46, and used as the main reward system for GU46, 47, and 49. It was not used for either GU48 or Nights of the Dead.
Anon: Currently most raids include 4 enchanters ( 4 illusionists or 3 illusionists and 1 coercer). Do the devs feel this is balanced or are they hoping to address this in some way? The same can also easily be said about bards desirability raiding.
- Aeralik: Raids can be done with any number of setups. The 4 enchanters and 4 bards is really the players min/maxing to come up with the optimal setup. It's not just enchanters or bards though, you see many raids running multiple brigands or favoring certain classes over others for their buffs or specific spells. Our goal is definitely to make all 24 classes desirable to a raid but at the end of the day players will set things up in ways they perceive will maximize their efficiency.
Vyrsha: Will we see any further dual/multi-core support soon?
- Rothgar: We're always looking for ways to get the most "bang for our buck" when it comes to performance enhancements. Currently we are working on other graphics-related enhancements that should hopefully increase client performance a good deal.
Diknak of Butcherblock: The only TSO instances that don't give void shards are zones that are in the void. How does that make sense lore wise? It would increase the desirability to complete those zones if there were at least a void chest in them. Are there any plans on adding missions/chests to these zones?
- Ilucide: In the future, we'll probably look at adding on missions to go into those zones.
Anon: With all the new crafting equipment it's possible to get your harvesting quite high. Is there a hard cap on harvesting skills?
- Ilucide: There isn't a hard cap per se, however, there are certainly points at which having more harvesting skill no longer benefits you.
Panix of Venekor: There are a lot of guilds collectively raiding together these days in an Alliance style format. When can we see a /alliance chat? I've seen it requested many times but I'm not sure its ever been addressed.
- Rothgar: Being able to form guild alliances is definitely a subject we've talked about and I think it would be a great addition to the game. Now with guild halls, creating the ability to form alliances has other benefits as well. We don't have anything currently planned but we will talk about it again internally and see if we can work out some details.
Anon: What other sort of items, if any, are being considered for purchase with Station Cash?
- Kirstie: We're working on providing real life posters of your character that you can purchase with Station Cash. I've seen some of the mock ups and they looked very cool.
Anon: Has any thought been given to allowing players to earn any kind AA via crafting (not tradeskill quests, actual item creation).
- Aeralik: Achievements currently enhance your ability to adventure. So the experience gains should come from something related to adventuring like questing, running your daily mission or killing creatures in dungeons.
Armmiller: what efforts are they making to balance raiders against pvp'ers?
- Aeralik: The newer pvp gear should make an effort to reduce the gap quite a bit. It has critical mitigation to reduce critical damage done to the player and most raiders have a high chance to critical.
- Aeralik: It also exceeds the base raid set in hitpoints and stats and has some similar item set effects. So in all, a player who wants to focus on pvp can get pretty close to the raider in base armors. The raider will have an advantage from jewelery and weapons but even then there are good items available to the non raider throughout the world.
Fendy: What classes are up to be addressed after Fighters?
- Aeralik: Once we are done with fighters, we will discuss and prioritize which classes get the next balance pass. I don't really have a definitive answer or timeframe for any particular class though.
Ivar: Theres a lot of confusion/misinformation out there about betraying on pvp servers. My main question is, can I betray freeport as an Inquisitor, ALIGN myself WITH Qeynos and still maintain Inquisitor status, getting their spells etc all the way to 80? I don't even want to play the guy right now without a clear answer. I'm totally new to eq2 and this whole betrayal business seems really cool, but most confusing.
- Aeralik: If you betray Freeport and go to Qeynos you finish up at the templar trainer and there will be an option to become an Inquisitor instead. You will still have your spells reset but you do in fact become a Qeynos Inquisitor.
Anon: Any chance of getting some kind of commission-type feature for Transmuting?
- Ilucide: We have no current plans for a Transmuting commission system, because it would remove the desire to have more than a very few number of Transmuters on a server.
Maladict: Are we likely to see a mini-content update this year with a story to save the Brokenskulls from the influence of the Shadows? will we then be able to gain faction with the Brokenskulls and, hopefully, discover Faction Missions and a faction merchant for them?
- Ilucide: We don't have any specific plans for following the Brokenskull storyline right now, but that's not to say that we won't in the future. Currently our focus is on a slightly different content update, the one I discussed lightly in a previous response.
KurtH: I was wondering if you could tell us what the point of losing all your masters was when you betray from one city to another. The reason I ask, is because some people have been building up master I's for years, and would rather cancel their account then swap cities and lose all of their masters. Would it be possible to make it so you only lose your spells/combat arts if you change classes..but if you stay the same class
- Ilucide: There are no plans right now to change the system. If you'd like to make the choice and betray, then that is, in fact, a choice. But allowing relatively free transfer between the two cities isn't something we're considering.
Gaktar: How about lag in T3 guild halls? Just moving from one side to another requires quite a long time to reload everything.
- Rothgar: The lag issues in guild halls are due to the large number of house items all using different resources that your computer must load in order to display them. There really aren't any major changes we can make here at the moment. One thing you can do to help the lag is to reuse the same items as much as possible to decrease the number of unique resources required.
nahhh: Any chance of a bag update? What i'm asking for is a list view instead of an icon view, for those icons that are the same, recipe scrolls they all blend together in icon view, i'd like a list of names instead of icons... does that make sence?
- Rothgar: We feel your pain too. As it is, players have tons of bag space and finding items can be difficult sometimes. We've been talking about options to make it easier but haven't decided on anything yet.
nahhh: I'm a "goodie" character, i'd like to buy a gorwyn house. Any chance of this changing? I read something about all classes being allowed in any town on the pvp servers.
- Ilucide: Gorowyn is aligned with the other evil cities - as such, you would need to become a citizen of Freeport, Neriak or Gorowyn itself. There isn't anything in the works that would change this, however we did recently open up the ability for players of any allied factions to buy houses in any cities allied with their own.
Bludwyng: What all is new this year in Frostfell?
- Kaitheel: There's so much new! House items to be crafted, slippery ice, collections, a frozen dungeon instance, a very pretty Frostfell tree quest given in each player city. And new rewards for the old quests that can be done again this year.
Felishanna: Currently, people are selling open and cleared instances to TSO zones for shards. Is this going to be addressed soon? Can you reassure us that how it is addressed wont harm normal mentored groups?
- Ilucide: We've been addressing these missions on a case-by-case basis, and expect to have the last of them addressed by the end of next week.
- Ilucide: And no, the changes will not harm normal mentored groups. =)
Savne: Is there any chance of being given more quest journal space?
- Ilucide: The original reason we had a 75 slot quest journal was hardware related, though not because of data storage. Zone performance suffered when too many people with too many quests were playing in the same space. Some of that can probably be addressed now, but the gameplay impact is such that even it's difficult to track which quests you're on even with 75 quests.
- Ilucide: So we don't have any plans to increase the size of the quest journal.
- Ilucide: But I wanted to give a little bit of insight as to why.
- Ilucide: It's also worth noting that EQII's quest journal is 3x the size of most other MMOs, and we keep around all of the old data for you so that you can go through and read about your past adventures. =)
Bardo: Question for Fyreflyte: There seems to be a lack of +crush gear in tso while there are lots of +pierce and +slash, any plans to add more +crush items soon?
- Fyreflyte: I'm reviewing some of the raid drops and will be adding some crush in there (probably soon). There should be a fair amount of +crush gear scattered throughout the single group instances, and I may provide some alternate options on some of the void shard gear for +crush as well. No timeframe on that, however.
Goodbyes
Bludwyng: We would like to thank all of you for attending our last DevChat of 2008. I hope you learned the answers to some of your questions, and I hope you liked the answers you got.
Bludwyng: And thank you to our devs for caring enough to be here.
Bludwyng: Happy Frostfell to you all.
Rothgar: Thanks for having us!
Bludwyng: You still make the best game out there.
Calthine:Happy Frostfell! Transcripts will be up Soon(tm)
- Kiara <3's Vhalen and Jindrack
Ilucide: Happy Holidays, folks!
Kirstie: Happy Frostfell, have a great holiday everyone.
Domino: Happy holidays all! =)
Bludwyng: Please, feel free to join us in #eq2-ffa for a mixer. ''' Aeralik:''' Happy holidays everyone :)
Bludwyng: I am sure some of our devs will join us over there for a nightcap.
- Ilucide waves
Kaitheel: And a very merry Festivus to one and all!
FFA Chat
What follows is from the FFA room after the chat. Relevant QA and interesting dev statements have been picked form the general banter.
Poxx-Befallen: plans for appereance slots for weapons/offhands?
- Rothgar: we're still kinda split on appearance slots for weapons
- Fyreflyte: Poxx: Nothing in the works atm. It's been under discussion a lot, but I don;t think a decision has been made either way.
- Rothgar: plus its not as easy as armor since your animations are tied to the weapons you're using.
Savne: Are you guys planning on making any changes to do TSO gear patterns or are they going to stay as is?
- Fyreflyte: Staying
- Fyreflyte: we have a lot of really cool new stuff being made though :D
Poxx-Befallen: i know its not easy, but i mean, for example here is one thing: use forms, that you reshape your weapon into appereance of another item
- Fyreflyte: There's no code support for aliasing appearances. Though oddly enough that topic came up in a conversation I had with one of our artists yesterday
Poxx-Befallen: so should where should i send my ideas?
- Fyreflyte: If any are item related you can start a post in the Items and Equipment Forum. or just PM me on the forums
KurtH: how about capping dispersion gear so you can't ignore a 100,000 damage attack :)
- Fyreflyte: I'm going to modify dispersion a bit to prevent the badness it's currently causing
- Fyreflyte: the big problem actually isnt dispersion. it's the VP effect that has 2 triggers and stacks with it
- Fyreflyte: between the two, mages can become almost invicinble
- Fyreflyte: I think the effect is called Displacement
- Fyreflyte: so basically someone can have 3 stoneskin triggers up at once
- Fyreflyte: and during those 3 hits they have a chance to trigger more triggers
- Fyreflyte: I'm going to fix it by disallowing it to proc while the effect is already up. also going to give Dispersion and Displacement the same spell slot so they don;t stack
Poxx-Befallen: for warlock fabled set gear, is it intended to have absolution on 4 set AND on chest?
- Fyreflyte: They're different bonuses to Absolution though, yes?
- Poxx-Befallen: i got a feeling you try to tell us to use absolution more
- Fyreflyte: Poxx: Hehe, wasn;t trying to tell anyone to use anything ;) Just trying to pick out useful spells that players would actually like upgraded
Poxx-Befallen: whats drop ratio for dark hood of dealing?
- Fyreflyte: Poxx: Low :D
- Poxx-Befallen: aparently
- Fyreflyte: and yeah, not upping the drop rate on that hat anytmime soon
- Savne: great :D
Fyreflyte: The Umbral Exchange Merchant is there to swap out items that I changed in a patch so that GMs don;t have to do it
Fyreflyte: I edited several shields that were priest-usable kite shields. Since making them bucklers will be undesirable to tanks, and making them non priest usable would screw the priests who took them, I made 2 versions and put in the merchant to allow players who had acquired them already to swap them out
Fyreflyte: I will use him in the future as well if I change something and need to be able to reimburse players who have already acquired it
Fyreflyte: And possibly for other things as well... secret things...
Fyreflyte: I'm revamping the raid set gear somewhat. The cuffs may be changed
Fyreflyte: haven't looked at caster gear just yet. still working on fighters and scouts
Poxx-Befallen: as long as you dont take away the cast haste im happy :)
Fyreflyte: O.o
feldon30: So is it too early to start drooling for new void shard items? I don't want to run out of drool. :)
feldon30: I know TSO is less than 1 month old
Fyreflyte: There will be new ones in a few months ;)
Poxx-Befallen: here's another crazy idea, instead of having to chose to have what race to show in what standard (normal/soga) why not have an option in details sayin show me as alternative or show me as normal, then remove the option in the game to select, that way the others see you as they want them to be seen
- Fyreflyte: Poxx: The issue with showing soga or non models is that your computer has to load them into memory. If we allowed others to choose the way they were shown it would cause everyone to have to load twice as many models and textures.
- Fyreflyte: except that it would lag others who didn;t want to be lagged. mind you, we could put in an additional option to allow peope to view others as their settings were set
- Fyreflyte: but that would have to be an option on the end of the viewer. not on the end of the viewee
feldon32: is there a Fabled revamp in the pipeline? T4 and T5?
- Fyreflyte: fabled items?
feldon32: and the mastercrafted armor and weapon revamp from 1-60
Seliri: is feldon asking if fabled/legendary from 1-69 will be revamped?
Seliri: cause that would be an excellent question
- Fyreflyte: Ah that... It's something I want to do, but at this point I honestly don;t know when I'm ever going to have time
- Fyreflyte: You know we lost the two other people on the team that did items. For most of TSO I was doing them all by myself
- Fyreflyte: I had a bunch of help right at the end when they finally realized that I wasn;t lying about having 3x too much work to complete it by myself ;)
- Fyreflyte: So it's still on my mind, and something I'd like to do, but I need time
- Fyreflyte: I have to get cracking on making a bunch of new gear for those already, and that's not even next expansion
- Fyreflyte: plus I'm still fixing/tuning a bunch of the gear from this expansion
- Fyreflyte: yeah I'm lookin forward to it also ;) I'm not a fan of large raids, but I'd love some 2 group stuff
- Fyreflyte: I put in some art requests for some really kickass appearances for the upcoming stuff. Will have to see if they have time to do it all
- Fyreflyte: New class helm for Conjurors that isn't a cloth sack! ftw...
Seliri: even though you may have never heard of stacking particle effects being on a priority list, would you ever be interested in making them appear on such a priority list?
- Fyreflyte: I can certainly bring it up
- Fyreflyte: I think the main reason it's never been done is that it causes lag for a lot of folks. But if there were a way to limit it in your personal options it might not be too bad
- Fyreflyte: I don;t know what that entails codewise though. we currently have 2 effect "slots" and I dunno what they'd have to change to increase that or display multiple effects per slot
feldon32: ok item question.. City Relics purchasable with Status. any plans to revamp? speed up cast time? maybe make the ones that rez people NOT burn up if they are already rezzed by someone else? :)
- Fyreflyte: I don;t have any plans for the city relics. which is not to say we won't ever look at them, but I have a lot of other pressing stuff to deal with for now (and like the next year ;))
Bludwyng: is warbear gonna scale any time soon?
- Rothgar: scale up to the race size?
- Rothgar: I beleive thats been fixed internally and will go out with the next GU
Seliri: will the AA cap ever be removed on PvP servers?
- Rothgar: Not sure on that oen.
- Rothgar: you mean the caps at each level?
Seliri: if you could ask around or bring it up somewhere that'd be cool, but np if not =p
- Rothgar: I think thats there to keep the power level somewhat in check based on level. Since PvP combat is controlled by level.
Seliri: a lot of their efforts get squelched due to the cap, but understandable if it's to make the difficulty fair for casual players
- Rothgar: yeah, maybe it could use some tweaking.
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