Dev Chat July 23 2009  

Introductions

Raven: Greetings everyone and welcome to tonight's Zam EQ2 dev chat. I am Raven, your hostess for the evening. With me are Calthine, Spyderbite and Kain from the EQ2 ZAM site. And now I'll let the devs introduce themselves...

Brenlo: Hi! I am Alan "Brenlo" Crosby, the Captain of this motley crew

Frizznik: My name is Paul Carrico, I am the mechanics team lead. I have nothing clever to add.

Aeralik: I'm Chris "Aeralik" Kozak otherwise known as the class balance guy

Kaitheel: Evening all! I'm Nathan "Kaitheel" McCall, general quest monkey.

Fyreflyte: Hi, I'm Jason "Fyreflyte" Woerner. No I did not misspell my own last name this time. I create and ner... err, tune items =)

Rothgar: Hello, Greg "Rothgar" Spence, Programmer

Brenlo: Anyone have the Jeopardy theme music?

Brenlo: It took Greg that long to remember his name

Zoltaroth: Hello, I am Nandy 'Zoltaroth' Szots, Programmer

Rothgar: Hey, its been a rough day ! :)

Fyreflyte: I knew a guy who could play the Jeopardy theme song by flicking his teeth

Kiara: Because you were busy singing 80's hair band music :p

Raven: Thank you all for joining us, we're excited to have you here with us and we have a lot of questions for you tonight.

Questions and Answers

Dellmon of Unrest asks: The Templar spell, Reverance (52) does not write to the logs and cannot be parsed. Is there a particular reason for this? If not, are there any plans to change this behavior for this spell?

• Aeralik: This is something we can look into doing. A lot of feedback at fan faire was about adding additional logging information which has resulted in adding cure logging so far for gu53.

• Brenlo: We have lots of good Fan Faire stuff coming in an update soon. All from feedback you gave us in Vegas

Deson asks: With the new automated transfer system live, stable and seemingly bug free, can we get a free claimable token or make it a 60 day vet reward, 1 per character?

• Brenlo: This is not a bad idea and as we are working on new Vet rewards, we may take a look at it. So Maybe?

Xalmat asks: Is there an estimate to when the class changes announced at Fan Faire will be going live, and if so when will they be going live? There was only a vague sense that it was "Soon (tm)" and it was unclear whether they are tied in with the expansion, or will occur beforehand.

• Aeralik: Those were all topics that we want to address in the future but I don't want to commit to specific dates at this time.

Crabbok asks: When are Avatar Breastplates going to recieve the nerf to only 20 Crit Mit?

• Brenlo: Well Crabbock, unfortunately that is something coming pretty soon. We will be modifying the Avatar gear in the next Game Update.
• Brenlo: So next update the Avatar Gear will be "nerfed" to allow us to add better gear with Sentinel's Fate
• Brenlo: It will still be some of the best gear in the game but not as powerful as it is now

Katanallama: Will name combination ever be looked at? For example I'm Katana Llama, but because it does not support spaces, I'm katanallama, which has 'anal' in it, which is against the rules, but I did not intend my name to be shown that way, yet I can't make alts now on other servers with my name.

• Brenlo: We are having a debate over a particular word in one of the questions
• Brenlo: Ooops
• Raven: Apologies for the delay - we had to check about the PG rating for that question
• Frizznik: debates over
• Rothgar: Unfortunately this is just a side effect of the name filter that probably won't see any changes.
• Rothgar: We obviously can't allow certain terms in the names even if they aren't meant in a bad way because it would be abused.
• Rothgar: And there are currently no plans to allow for spaces in the character name.
• Brenlo: However I do think that sometimes our name filter is too Anal =P

• Raven: I apologize for yet another delay... the anal debate has caused some backstage chaos
• Kiara chokes
• Kiara: Stop it woman, you're going to have everyone convinced that we're all 12!!
• Kain: we aren't?
• Kiara: No, we aren't. We've very serious professionals * nod *

Aneova of Kithicor asks: Will there be an open forum for the Druid changes? or will that be under the NDA when Beta testing begins for the next expansion?

• Aeralik: I have a good portion of the priest changes planned but we are still working on the timeframe as to when they are going to be released. Once we get closer to that point we will start a post but I have been reading the forums as well for your feedback on it already.

Fendy asks: Regarding the balance of +SD effectiveness on gear between fast casters and slow casters. Currently fast casters will gain a larger DPS boost than a slow caster will from the same piece of gear with +SD on it. This is because will often cast 3-4 spells (or more) during the same time a slow caster casts just one spell and hence the fast caster will have their +SD applied many more times than a slow caster will. As well, while the fast casters have a lower +SD cap, this rarely if ever comes into play due to current itemization. Has there been any thought to normalizing +SD, perhaps something similar to how the proc chance is normalized?

• Fyreflyte: Spell damage from equipment actually used to work on a normalized scale, but that system had issues as well. We're aware that the current setup favors quick casters, and we've had a lot of internal discussion on this.
• Fyreflyte: We don;t have any current plans to change the mechanic, as we're focusing on other areas right now, but we may take a closer look at it in the future.

Dragowulf-Nagafen: Will there be any cool new mounts with the next expansion? If so what will we see?

• Kaitheel: The answer is yes, but you'll have to wait and see 'em.

Rocc from Unrest is quite persistant about asking: EQ3, to be or not to be?

• Brenlo: Well as we are the EQII team, and this is the EQII chat. . . I would suggest you ask the EQ3 team. If there is one.

Crabbok asks: How are Racial Respecs coming along? Timeframe?

• Kiara: Someone tell Crabbok he's off my christmas list...
• Rothgar: We are currently working on a race-change item for Station Marketplace. In fact Zoltaroth is working on it now. However, we don't have a timeframe to announce yet. Since this is a marketplace item, it will most likely go in as a hotfix when it is ready.

David L asks: Is there any chance of that weapons like the monk's/shaolin spade, two-bladed sword(blade on each end like D&D 3e), double headed spear and crossbows can be added into the game? Also would mechanics to allow attacking with both ends of some of the two handed weapons be possible?

• Fyreflyte: We'd love to see new types of weapons in-game, but they can be very expensive for art, since they require new animations. We were actually just discussing crossbows this morning, and there's a possibility we'll be able to put some of those in further down the road.
• Kiara: !!! I WANT A CROSSBOW!!!
• Fyreflyte: As far as 2-sided weapon mechanics, it's not something I'd considered before, but if you have any cool suggestions about them, hit me up after the chat is over.

Deson asks: Does the added focus on the live game mean we can expect more old content revamps and class issues? There is a lot of underutilized content like Felwithe and Rivervale, out of date content like Draftling Tower and class skills designed for a different era that are almost useless. All these things stick out to players old and new and in the case of classes like inquisitors and necro's, make a good amount of abilites utterly worthless.

• Frizznik: Existing content is being looked at; we are adding the system to level yourself down so you can experience any level of content that you want without having to mentor. We want to make sure that existing content is high quality and can accommodate the possibility of a lot of new players utilizing it. I wouldn’t expect total zone revamps, but things should function very smoothly for the "auto-mentored" players.

Ariven asks: What are the odds of being able to get some clear delination of how large a blue aoe is during casting? (not everyone has a meterstick, and not all blue AOEs have the same circumferance) For example some sort of targeting reticle drawn on the ground during cast would work well.

• Rothgar: Thats an interesting idea. Its something we can certainly consider for the future.

Pagengamer asks: Any plans on revamping player housing to bring the size of the rooms more inline with other cities, most notably Gorowyn housing which is huge compared to everything else?

• Brenlo: With the next update, Shards of Destiny, most housing will be getting an extra room. There are currently screenshots on the forums showing this off, so yes!

Amemyst asks: Is there anything in game you put in and it didn't get discovered? I ask as apparently last year there were these cool titles for the Erolisi even in giving away roses and we didn't notice until the SECOND year. I always thought that was kinda sad.

• Kaitheel: Yeah, the Erollisi Day titles didn't get widespread attention the first year they were in, though some players did find them. But I don't know of any other things hidden or off the major radar with the holiday events or recent Game Updates.

Elquinjena: I know they won't up the limits on guild housing but what about member housing.. would they at least allow us to use the dimensional pocket expander maybe a total of 2-3 times instead of only once? even if that means maybe buying it and turning it in along with large amounts of status and coin to be able to use one more than 1 time.

• Rothgar: With the upcoming house expansion, some of the houses that gain an additional room will see an increased item limit. But beyond that we don't have any plans to increase the limit further. We understand this is something you want, so we're always keeping it mind.

xilon of Nagafen asks: With the upcoming crit consolidation what will happen to classes like the Inquisitor? As they possess AA that are directly affected by how often you crit (Overwhelming Arms, Fanatical Devotion). What will happen to classes with several individual lines that enhance melee/spell/heal critical chance?

• Aeralik: We will try to do something appropriate for each of the classes that is inline with the ability and gives a similar bonus. I would expect something similar to how we handled the predator Intelligence AA in the past update with the proc changes. It stays true to the lines theme and ends up giving a similar overall benefit.

Dragowulf-Nagafen asks: As it stands there is no real Anti Aliasing support in game. AA only works when various conditions are applied. For example, if bloom and/or shaders are enabled, the AA functionality will be disabled. There are several more bugs related to AA, but I wont go into details.

• Rothgar: Drago, thats not a question. :)
• Rothgar: I'll try to answer your statement though. hehe
• Rothgar: Changing anything in our rendering engine takes a long time and can be very prone to errors. So we have to be very careful about what we change going forward. As you are probably aware, Imago-Quem is very busy with lots of graphic-related features. When his workload gets a little lighter, we'll talk to him about AA support.

Fendy asks: Will we ever get to raid into Freeport or Qeynos? I would love to battle through the town and finally into the castle to go after Antonia Bayle or Lucan D'Lere.

• Brenlo: I want to destroy the darned cities and turn them into adventure areas =P
• Frizznik: *thumbs up*
• Brenlo: We shall see if I can convince the rest of the team
• Rothgar: I'm convinced... ship it.

Sadres of Antonia Bayle asks: I know class-specific questions are frowned on, but this technically is applicable to a few classes besides rangers. Is there a possibility of adding a simple toggle to the UI to determine which Auto-attack you will use (or never use)? It's frustrating to have to rely on buggy macros that break during high lag to tell the game 'Never ever use melee auto-attack. No, really. Not even then. Never.' Please?

• Aeralik: This is something on my list of things to do. Having to rely on macros to constantly switch between melee and ranged attack isn't a fun thing to do. It's something we will talk about and look into finding a good solution to accomplish this without macros.

Fendy asks: Will we ever get more bag space? (pretty please with sugar on it?)

• Brenlo: I think you may see some new surprises for this coming in the next few months. =) Should be pretty cool
• Kiara: Just as soon as the team is done giving him a useful summonable pie on his halfling, that is...
• Rothgar: We're also looking at ways to increase bag space by finding more ways to consolidate items.

Baccalarium of Kithicor: There's still confusion about how gear degradation as one levels will work, does level gear start to degrade at level 83? or at 93? How much does it degrade? What parts of it degrade? Is any thought being given to the alternative ideas presented in the forum thread?

• Fyreflyte: The degradation is based off the wearable level of the armor, so if it says level 80 to use, it will begin to show lower stats at 81 and up.
• Fyreflyte: How much it degrades is still being worked out, and you'll see more of that when we begin testing it.

• Brenlo: Wait dont leave, more questions coming!
• Kiara: and while you wait...
• Kiara: here's a disturbing thread from the forums
• Kiara: http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=455569
• Rothgar: More IRC Karaoke?
• Calthine: nooooooooo
• Kiara: everyone please go and just say no to colbert on a bear skin rug. thank you!
• Brenlo: I'm never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and dessert you
• Brenlo: I guess that means I will not toss pudding at you

Fendy asks: Are their any plans to revisit some of the current AA choices which have become largely redundant? For example the Wizard's STR endline causes the next spell to be guaranteed to crit. With the large amounts of crit on gear now this ability is superfluous.

• Aeralik: I was going to look into some of these as we do the broader class balance adjustments. I don't have a specific eta as to when they will be done though. It is definitely on my radar to do though.

Atrimez of the Bazaar: Will we ever see zones scaled on playstyle (solo, normal group (4-6 players, average gear), difficult heroic (6 players, raid equipped), x2 raid, x4 raid) where the content remains the same but the mob difficulty is scaled as is the loot table for the zone based on the difficulty? We dont need scaling from 50-80. Having 80 zones that scale to playstyle would be great though.

• Brenlo: Well, we are introducing a new mechanic in Miraguls planar shard that allows players to encounter mobs at different difficulty levels, depending on the choices they make. This should allow us to scale some encounters for those "Ubah (with an H) Elite Guilds" while still having them available for the everyday raider.
• Brenlo: Whether this will scale down eventually to groups and solo remains to be seen but the magic 8 balls says. . . "shake" not in the near future

Farewells

Raven: And now for the final question, from myself... the one everyone is wanting to know.....

Raven: Are you bringing in beastlords with dyable armor via Station Cash?

Brenlo: YES! For 100,000 station cash, you will be able to import your Beastlord direct from EQ to EQII

Kiara: And sit in chairs!

Brenlo: It will come stock with a purple unicorn mount

Aeralik: thanks everyone for attending! :)

Kaitheel: As long as they get kilts.

Raven: OW!

Frizznik: =)

Kiara: Thank you for coming everyone!

Frizznik: Meeting time! Thanks for coming everyone.

Brenlo: Have a great night all

Fyreflyte wavies his armies

Brenlo: Thanks for playing

Rothgar: Thanks everyone!

Kaitheel: Night all! Thanks!

Calthine: Thanks for coming everyone! Logs will be up as soon as I can get 'em up, if you don't mind them unformatted.....

Raven: Thank you to all the devs who joined us tonight - and thank you to all the people who came along. Please feel free to hang around and chat.

FFA Chat

There's a lot of chatter in the unmoderated Free For All channel (imagine that). Here are nuggets of dev conversations culled from the logs.

brammator: Brenlo by 'Avatar Gear' you mean all kind of avatar loot or something

Fyreflyte: most avatar gear

Fyreflyte: I'll stick around after the chat to answer more questions about it.

Felishanna: hmm that question is meaningless to me as i dont know what +SD is hehe

Aeralik: sd is spell damage :)

ExilonNagafen: I have a bad feeling I will be shelving my Inquis with the next expansion lol

Aeralik: i have some nice changes to the inquisitors coming up :)

Aeralik: druids get soem nice changes as well to desirability ;)

pharone_com-Risiko: Degradation to armor is almost as bad of an idea as NGE was for SWG.

UntamedSpirit: that's going to really hurt mastercraft

andy2283: Turning off adventure xp would serve 1 more purpose with degrading armor.

Winky-AB: though honestly i'd prefer they scrap the idea all together

Aurelis: I don't want to get rid of my Arm of Mithaniel for soloing d:

Tkia: punished for levelling and spending half your game time trying to upgrade armour :(

Dranikos: I get the idea of encouraging people to upgrade from stuff like the choker or avatar gear or mythicals, but still I think degrading armor is stupid

Zonkerz-Befallen: yea but at lvl 80 how can you tell if your teir 1 armor is degrading?

Olyria: Actually it would HELP MC armor from other tiers

Olyria: because people couldn't just fly through 1-30 on junky armor

brammator: Aurelis for soloing? it's still unbeatable for raiding unless you farm avatars.

Dranikos: Especially in the case of the TSO signature quest Cloak, a level 77 item, that requires Outer Stronghold and Fherzul... So as soon as you get it, it's degraded by 3 levels of quality... O_o

Fyreflyte: There are a number of level 60 and 70 items that raiders still wear over any new gear available now. We can;t improve upon the effects offered by those items, because the effects themselves are overpowered.

Aurelis: sorry, I don't raid, so I don't know its usefulness there, hehe d:

ExilonNagafen: they seem to have to implement this because the bonuses they already allow players to achieve is near cap, so making them degrade will make you seek out armor that will once again give you back those stats

ExilonNagafen: I think it is silly, but an MMO is a time sink and this is one way to make you spend more time playing

Dragowulf-Nagafen: The answer is to nerf the items!

pharone_com-Risiko: Sorry, but it's just a really stupid design idea.

Felishanna: there are some good reasons for needing degradation to force people to upgrade. just needs to be smooth, without cliff edges hehe

Fyreflyte: Risiko: I disagree with what you said.

pharone_com-Risiko: There is NO LOGICAL REASON that armor should be WORSE because you leveled.

Kain: Risiko, it used to grey out and be worth nothing

Olyria: but really, not upgrading from armor that you out grew an entire tier ago is just lazy

brammator: Fyreflyte yeah, we always felt than someday all this free overpowered will fade away. but then again, not like mentioned earlier signature cloak..

Kain: so I disagree

Fyreflyte: Think about it this way: It's worse against higher level mobs.

pharone_com-Risiko: Kain explain to me why me being a MORE EXPERIENCED fighter (aka leveled up) makes the armor I use not as effective? How?

Fyreflyte: Because you're fighting more experienced mobs

pharone_com-Risiko: If I am more experienced at fighting, then the armor I am wearing should be even more effective.

Dranikos: I disagree with the idea that as soon as you put this in, my best cloak (the Antonia one from the TSO questline) suddently is nerfed by 3 levels. It's a level 77 item that requires the hardest grp zones currently in the game

Dragowulf-Nagafen: So what if I'm 80 and kill a boss because of my armor and then I ding 81 and can't kill him because my level 80 armor is dEGRADED?????

pharone_com-Risiko: This is oen of those design ideas that serves no purpose other then making things easier for the designers.

Dragowulf-Nagafen: The same boss at a higher level. That makes no sense.

pharone_com-Risiko: Easy does NOT equal better.

Olyria: I doubt it would drop off like that

brammator: Fyreflyte so when I'm 73 and fight 72 mob in 72 gear, it's not harder than beating him at 72?

Aurelis: I'd run away if I were you, Fyre

brammator: (dang)

Olyria: its probably a very slight degrading scale

Dranikos: IMO the degradation shouldn't start until 5 or 6 levels higher than the item IMO (a level 80 item starts to degrade at 85 or 86).

Fyreflyte: In theory, no. The underlying math is quite complex though.

Trista2: Would this mean that the shard armor my alts just got, will start to degrade once the level cap is raised. I spent over two months gathering enough shards for three alts for teir 1 shard armor, should I not waste time for the better shard armor?

Fyreflyte: Trista: You'll easily find better armor for those alts as you play into the new expansion

Dranikos: I STILL want a comment on the fact that the reward for the major questline for an expansion (TSO Signature reward) is below level 80, so it starts to degrade right away... That doesn't make sense, and I hope future Signature (and heritage, and ALL rewards / drops) are designed with this in mind...

Fyreflyte: I'll keep that in mind, Dranikos

Fyreflyte: Well crud, I have a meeting O.o I meant to stick around a bit longer. Any last minute questions for me?

Winky-AB: any chance you're making me an item to reroll my adventure side Fyreflyte?

Fyreflyte: hehe, doubtful Winky ;)

Dranikos: It doesn't make sense that SK's miti boost is on a spell they can't have up if there's more than 1 SK in the raid Dranikos: So if you bring 2 SKs, only 1 gets Miti, ya that makes sense...

Fyreflyte: Dranikos: not at the moment. SKs don;t need a lot of extra help in the item department atm ;)

Fyreflyte: however, what you just described sounds buggy Fyreflyte: i'll check that out

Aurelis: find me a dev that I can bug about my books, fyre! d; Aurelis: like, are they capable of magically falling into my inventory? hehehe no... just general stuff, I think Gninja is the dev I want to befriend, because many book quest starters are flat-out missing afaik ):

Fyreflyte: Aurelis: There's been a lot of discussion about book quest starters. We may add an easier way of acquiring some of them in the future. Maybe. Not my area ;)

Aurelis: score!! just talking about it is fine enough for me.

Winky-AB: Fyreflyte: any chance on tradeskill vitatility reset item like the ob of consentrated memories for vet reward 6 years? Winky-AB: *orb

Fyreflyte: Winky: Think we discussed that. I don;t remember what the answer was, but my guess is it's something we could do. I'll bring it up at the meeting.

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