Originally posted by Servase

 

In WOTLK, you will be able to queue to BG's anywhere. You will be able to earn EXP from PVP and obtain random gear drops from PVP. They're adding a whole zone just for PVP as well as siege weapons.

i think all these features allready existed in games before war, enter pvp ,mingame queues form anywhere was in aoc, xp form pvp kills is in eq2 and probably some otehr games too. whole zoens for pvp and siege weapons there is lots of games with this, daoc was probably the first with pvp dedicated zones (so maybe a mythic first but not in war).

looting in pvp exists in so many flavor in the different games from actually looting the player you killes over some limited looting rules to looting new items/totems from pvp, not sure if exact this version existed before but it might have.

overall i find the population to be ok, but as said before that depends a lot on server and your playtimes.

if you play peak times then each server is ok, but if you play offpeak then it might be hard on some servers.

also playing on  antonia bayle has not only advantages, the server had severe stability problems after last expansion release cause too many players were on that server. also for big highend raiding a too heavy populated server is also a downside since you have a lot less chances at contested mobs (thats why some raidguilds / serious raiders move to less populated servers).

not saying that antonia bayle is a bad choice but going to he highest population server is not allways the best choice, it depends more on your playstyle and what your goals are in game.

Originally posted by Moirae

Totally agree. This is very cool.

 

Guild hall screenshots.

eq2norrathianhomeshow.blogspot.com/search/label/Guild%20Halls

sadly no t3 guildhall screenshots. t3 halls are really huge, will take a few weeks for our guild to get them at least partially decorated.

found this video form the antonica t3 guildhall on youtube:www.youtube.com/watch that can give you a bit of an impression ho huge they are.

Originally posted by HeavySigh

Originally posted by ZeppelinJ0

Also would love to see some new classes down the line and more mid-high level content! If I can get my mac to run EQ2 I'll definitely try a re-sub for a month!

 

I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for new classes or content as one of the changes was to significantly increase the speed of characters leveling (adventure-wise only!):

"The experience requirements for levels have been significantly lowered primarily affecting the 20 thru 70 level range."

It appears the complaints of the players that actually like to Quest (in Everquest, surely not!) were ignored and no change was made to be able to turn experience off (the combat XP switch still works but all other xp gain has been increased significantly).  This means that there's no point in adding new low-, mid- or mid-high level content as no-one will be of a level long enough to enjoy it.

If you read between the lines of the SoE comments it looks like the game is being directed towards end-game only (i.e. "we'd love to revisit old content but ..." comments).

Personally I think that if they continue in this direction then they will lose subs as players will stop playing inbetween upgrades and expansion packs, as the end game is limited and repetitive.

new classes is very unlikely, there is allready 24 classes and that amount is allready very hard to balance, adding more classes will only make balancing worse.

about the increased xp gain i don't like it too, but on the other side its the point that a new player joinning often doesn't want to play for months till he can play with his friends at lvl 80 and do the "cool things" they do. i noticed it when a friend of me started earlier this year and he almost lost interest on the way to high levels. I personally think that any level based game needs to adjust leveling speeds form time to time to allow new players to enter teh game (which is also a point why i don't really like the classic class/level idea anymore).

next expansion should bring lots of group content if i remember right it ws about 20 group zones for high end content,so i think it should be not so repetitive as now rok which had only a very limited amount of group content.  they announced 4 new raidzones so the question is how they will fit in with the current rok zones and how big they are will determine how repetitive raiding will get (4 zones and 1 of it a small one looks a lot like the amount of raiding eof added). 

overall i think they are on the right path for the new expansion and the recent updates, new group content was really needed and nearly noone wanted a level increase. Also the game engine improvements and other things show that they know where the current problems are. depending on the quality of the zones next expansion might be a nice addition to the endgame, but in the end it will depend on the quality (that i cannot judge yet) of the new zones, just adding the quantity (20+ zones) will not really help them.

Since EoF all expansions include base game and all previous expansions. so you basically just have to buy the newest expansion and you get all.  Right now Rise of Kunark is the newest expansion, but in November they will release the next expansion.

So if you want to play now then buy Rise of Kunark you should be able to get it for ~30 dollars, maybe a bit less depending on where you buy.

They also gave awaqy some free game time to old customers a few times, so if you got an old account try logging in to account management check if you got some free time, if you don't have any then it might be worth activating a new account since if you just use the expansion code to activate expansions on an old account you won't get a month free time like you would get on a new account. (but it also depends on if you want to keep your chars).

Originally posted by Dravok

Thanks for the help.  I will give EQ2 a try and I hope I like it.  Any advice on being a human SK?  Also, I like your name Amon Amarth.  I like the bank too.

there is a free trial which will allow you to see the first levels of the game (it limits you to make a fae as first character, if you want to play another race just create a random fae charcter first and then the real character you want to play).

differences in races are mostly noticable in the low levels, later on in game the race doesn't make too much difference, differences betwen stats of the races are maximum 20 points, while in the endgame you will have about 30 points as avaerage stats on items, there is some racial skills too but these also don't make too much difference and you won't gimp your character by picking any race/class combination.

Originally posted by Dravok

I have been playing WoW and it has some good things to it but I just do not get that same feeling of enjoyment that I got when I played EQ.  I have been thinking of trying out EQII and would like to ask others about the likes and dislikes to the game.  I was a shadowknight on EQ and would like to ask how this class is in the game and if the game is holding up strong against other games like WoW and WAR.

I personally really like the group parts of eq2, also raiding is fun (at least if you don't do it too often and too hardcore). But i think the main thing that keeps me in game still after nearly 4 years is my guild and to some parts also the rest of the community. Also if you are new to the game you will find that there is lots of different things to do (big bonus of a game thats on the market for nearly 4 years now and has allready had 4 expansions).

what i don't like now is that it got too much solo questing oriented over time, especially having to do solo quests for the biggest part of the lvl 70-80 did not make me happy. I started playing at launch and back then you had to group most of the time if you wanted to make any noticable progress, i can understand that this was too much group oriented for many people but now they went too far to the opposite.  Eq2 at launch was also less pushing you through the way with quests, it was more about going to different spots and exploring these and maybe doing some quests while you are there, but now it feels a lot more like a guided tour where you follow a fixed way through the zones. you still can decide to skip this and do dungeon runs instead and its still feels like more freedom than what i noticed in some other games, but the forced guiding is a lot more present than it was at start.

about the shadowknight, they are a good solo class especially at starting levels, cause they can do quite good damage for a plate wearing class (in higher levels the damage differences get bigger and they also get slower at soloing). they are also a good group tank (at least if the player knows how to play the class), and they can also tank most raidcontent (but they usually are not the first choice for raidtanks. guardians, berserkers and paladins are usually the prefered picks). also in high end raiding there is a balancing problem between the need for classes, there is nearly never any use for more than 2 plate tanks (and there are 4 plate tank classes) in  any eq2 raid, while on other side most raidguilds are using 4 or more bards  (only 2 bards classes) in their raidsetups as an example.

so if you want to play an ok-good solo class with some good group usage then sk might be a good choice, but if your maingoal is endgame raiding then i would stay away from plate tanks.

about holding strong against wow, eq2 never came even close to the comercial success of wow but the population stabilised good enough at a niveau where soe can do free monthly gameupdates with new content. additionally they are releasing an expansion every year which usually gets a lot players that played less and elss in the end of the expansion cycle back to being more active. So till now i think eq2 did not loose too much population over the last few years (but it also did not gain much). We will see more when the enxt expansion gets released this november if numbers on servers will be about as busy as they were last november or not.

newer games like aoc, vanguard and others usually did hit population temporary when they got released, but most of these players came back a few months later. it will be interesting if war release also follows that pattern, till now i did not see any big changes in populations (but on other side its only in the early access phase now) so we won't know more till later this month.

Originally posted by Angelbound

How do I know? Well for one reason is because I followed eq2 ever since I first heard its been in development, I can think of plenty of evidence that the game was rushed. For the longest time, and im not sure now eq2 has a memory leak, not antiscoptic or antialising filtering which deffinatly has an effect on the graphics if you look far away and etc. They had a bug with nvidia espically the 6800 gt for the longest as long as I played it and long before me, im not sure if its still going on though. The game does not perform as good as other games do with the same specs not even close, the models are good but do not look like they where full designed some of the animations even look rushed.

many of the performance issues now are results of the design decission that they wanted to support gefoce 3 cards as minimum requirement. with that decission they had to build all shaders as SM1 so the game is basically a direct x8 game. if you look at any other direct x8 game it won't gain much additional performance from the most modern graphic cards, and all these don't profit from dualcores.

It was a big problem back then that even with geforce 3 support there was many people that didn't have graphic cards capable of running eq2 at launch, and now they are stuck with the old SM1 which is not really compatible to more modern shader models (HLSL was not introduced before shader model 2.0).  if eq2 had the population of wow i am sure that soe would allready have a seperate team working on a new engine to improve performance, but if you run a mmmo with more limited subscrinber numbers you have to keep the team that works on improving the mmo also smaller. this means that we get small improvements in performance over time but probably will never get a completely new engine (especially since soe decided to stop developing own engines for their newer projects and instead rely on unreal engine and other finished engines).

 

They had to change eq2 drasticly just to get more customers because the game was seriously unfinished it was not only to compete with wow, regardless of what you think there is plenty of evidence that this game was a rushed design in some areas.

the most drastic changes happened short before dof witht he big combat update, but overall these changes were percived rather positive since some things did not work out as good as planned (some classes very overpowered, tanks were able to get to a point where they were nearly invincible...). the problem with mmos is that even in betas you cannot find all these issues cause people will mabe get to max level but there is usually not that much raiding and min/maxing going on like later in hardcore guilds.

Its a lot easier to balance a single player game cause you don't have that many factors that come to gether giving you nearly infinite possiblilites to combine things if you take into account 24 characters of unknown classes with about 20 equipment slots and some thousend possible itmes for each slot.

i don't want to say that soe works perfect, they are making a lot mistakes. but i too work in software developement and i know how hard it is to make software that is tested for all eventualities. I also have had many points especially in the last expansion (rok) where i did not agree with the devs (itemisation, too much solo based leveling), but for now i am still having fun in the game, and the short excursions i made to other mmos in this year only got me back to eq2 again.

Finally i want to say that I personally like that mmos are evolving and as long as changes are reasonable and the devs communicate them good enough to the community i am in favor of needed "nerfs". if imbalances stay in game too long then the game is hurt much more than by a class that gets a bit less powerfull (and in the end most people getting hit by a nerf in any mmo that i plaied had to confess that things before the nerf were too overpowered, even if they did not want to say it out loud)

Originally posted by Hrica

My family loves EQ2. Nothing with gameplay was ever the issue to us.

It was/is the performance

We finnaly have computers that can run the game on highest settings all to find out that it will crash instanly. Even on the second highest setting it will crash.

I hear it is because the game does not support more than one proceccer or sli/crossfire.

BUT I have heard that they hired a guy this summer to start work on the engine to support more than one processer and sli/crossfire. If this does happen, and the game is fixed, its good bye WAR hello EQ2, again.

its not true that the game does not support more than one procssor core, it supports them but does only use really one of the cores.  it got a bit betetr over time and now under windows vista 64 i can see that eq2 is usually runnning at about 55% cpu load on my dualcore with peaks going up to 60% (which means that its running full load on one core and doing some minimal load on 2nd core).

not sure on sli/crossfire support if its really not working. If its really not working then its a thing that ati and nvidia have to fix with their drivers. But i personally think that technically its working but cause eq2 is heavily cpu limited people just don't see any improved framerates cause one gfx card is allready fast enough tocatch up with cpu's.

what eq2 really neeeds would be a switch from old Shader model 1.4(or was it 1.3) that they using to SM 2/3/4 (these are more compatible between each other). but thats a whole lot work to do this since you have to rewrite all shaders that are in game now.

Originally posted by bahamut1

Antonia Bayle is the most populated, and there are several well populated servers. I believe the least populated would be Mistmoore and Befallen(?) and probably the European servers. Don't quote me on that as I'm on Butcherblock, and we're well populated, and that's the only server I know well.

population on english uk servers is quite ok, its not like antonia bayle. but if you play european times then they are probably a good choice, but they can be a bit lonely outside standard eu playtimes, so if you are not from europe or play strange times cause of jobs then i would not fully recommend them.

Originally posted by arctarus

Hi, my last expac that ive bought is " kingdom of sky" so if i wana play again, do i need to buy any new x-pac?

Thank you

 

 

if you played before then best check if you got some free playtime on your account, they had a big promotion his summer which included giving all previous players some free time (but not sure if it was limited till when you could reactivate).  also i think people that reactivated in that time got all expansions free. so best check that out before buying anything.

if you don't get anything for free then, theoretically you wouldn't need RoK till you are lvl 70 and want to get higher, but EoF is nice to have on lower levels too cause it adds a lot areas for lower levels and the 2nd achievement tree. 

If you end up buying anything then best buy  RoK boxes cause they include all previous expansions, you could also buy digital downlaod but the box seems to be cheaper atm (amazon.com sells it for 20$ atm)

Originally posted by heremypet

Hello, I had played EQ for a long time, is EQ2 very similar to EQ1? 

Is the game more difficult than other MMO's like EQ1 was?

Are most players at max level?

Are most equipment crafted or looted?

How does PVP servers work? is it FFA or racial?

Whats the coolest thing about the game and what do you not like?

Thanks alot!

the games have a lot similariies and differences. in storyline there are 500 years between eq and eq2, in taht time luclin exploded which had very big influences on norrath and also a lot other things happened to the world. so while you will find some things to be still the same, a lot areas did change and while they often still remind you on the eq1 versions they are not exactly the same.

difficulty is a bit hard to rate, espcially cause eq1 also got easier and more casual over time. Also eq2 started out more hardcore than it is now (but even then it was never as hardcore as eq1 was at early times). difficulty in most areas/especially in early game of eq2 isn't really harder than in wow, but in my opinnion the complete game is a bit more complex than wow. 

most players that play for longer times have at least 1 char at lvl 80, and while there is a few newpeopel joining from time to time there has not been a big influx of new players besides the big recruit a friend event they did this summer and for this its still hard for me to say how many of these will stay as subscribers (the free playtimes ended last weekend).

especially at medium levels many people use crafted equip. in low level you usually level so fast that its often not worth to find a crafter to craft some thinsg for you, and in high level balance shifts more to looted items (but crafted items are still a good baseequip till you find better drops).

pvp is faction based, you can choose to play good or evil aligned chars (some races have the choice some are fixed unless you want to do the betrayal quests). you also have the 3rd option to become an exile thats aligned with no faction and end up with more open pvp (exiles can be attacked by anyone and can attack anyone in their level limits).  The pvp also has level limits how much lower a player can be that you still can attack him (so no lvl 80 ganking a lvl 1, unless the lvl 1 attacks the lvl 80 first), these limits depend on the zone you are in, in newbie zones they are only 4 levels i think and in highend zones there is no level limit at all in place.

for me the best thing about eq2 is the community in general and my guild especially, but that can also depend on playtimes, servers.....

you can allways register the trial to a new station account. but probably registering teh living legacy key locked that account to the trial so you just would have to create a new account to do a trial.

Originally posted by Geeky

14 /played days on my Assassin to get to 80.

But I started him a year ago.  My buddy has an 80 dirge with 3 /played days and he started him 2, 3 months ago.

Just depends.  Honestly, if your new to the game it'll take you longer and I'm glad for that.  The game is already to easy to get to 80 and too many times I find myself in a group with the worlds stupidest players who have reached 80 because it too easy.

my dirge is now at 36 days /played and has lvl 80 with 140 aa has done the fabled epic and got a good selection of instance and raid equip allready now. guess i got him to 80 with less than 20 days /played.

bruiser is a nice class for a first char, its rather easy to solo, and mastercrafted armor usually is cheaper for them than for plate/chain classes.

but its definitely true that there is level ranges in the middle of the game where mastercrafted items get very expensive cause people do not harvest these ranges that much. so often the highend raws can be cheaper than the lower ones. (and the rare drop rates are not that high like they are in the first 1-2 tiers)

the next gameupdate will also have a revamp of everfrost (think some new quests there too)  so that might help with leveling from 40 to 50.

40-50 actually has quite a few areas to go at the start you can go to feerrott/rivervale/steamfont - then later on everfrost/lavastorm (not much solo options there for most classes)/dof areas and in the high 50s you could allready start in lesser faydark too.

also there is lots of dungeons and instances for this level range sadly most are hardly ever visited anymore. But as suggested before try starting a group yourself if you are lfg for a bit and noone else does it.

personally i never had big troubles to get up to 50, but i hate the 50-60 range most (and don't like 70-80 too cause its too much solo questing)

Originally posted by zelahe

No i didnt try the game. And reading some of the posts i thought there were actually pvp servers thus pvp..

 

But again as i never did try it because of reasons listed... Fundementally the possibility of starting on a fresh European/American server does not exist..

Of that is the game producers perogative but I and many others just wont bite i guess..

 

Zelahe

this game has pvp servers but not many (3 out of 25 servers are pvp) which means the mainfocus of the game is pve. they had more pvp servers but had to merge some of them caus epopulation on them was too low, so starting a new pvp server is not likely to happen or it will not last too long till it gets merged again with another server.

even starting a new pve server probably won't work out in the long term and they might have to merge it with another server later on (but it might have a better chance). But on other side the problems with twinks are not that big on pve servers, so the only bonus that this would give would be that all players would be low level at start (but that will probably change fast too) and first hardcore players will probably  be lvl 80 in less than a month anyway.

not sure yet what to think about the expansion. i like that there is no level cap increase, just more aa. i also like that its more focused on dungeons. but i'm not sure yet on that ldon system and the amount of content they add. 20 new zones (1 overland, 4 raidzones, + rest dungeons and instances), i guess it will all depoend how big these dungeons/instances are. Also 4 raidzones sounds a bit low amount especially cause they said one of these will be small (probably a only 1 boss zone), guess it will depend how big the others are and how hard its to progress in them, but on other side eof also only had 4 raidzones and one of these was small too. 

as i said at start i am still unsure about the expansion after the announcement, i will hope to get into beta or wait till they lift nda and we heaar from players about the expansion before i will decide if its a good one or not.

Originally posted by Hrica

I wish they would fix the game for high end (well normal these days) computers, But I am kinda excited about this new stuff. It won't make me shell out $15 to fire up my account but still its nice.

in the last year they made a lot smaller improvements to the engine which in sum helped my performance a lot. in raid fights the fps are still horrible but now i get a lot better fps in quenos harbour as an example like i did about a year ago.  about a year ago the cpu usage on my dualcore was allways below 50% now its regulary at 55% and can go up to 60% which also means that they added a few optimisations for dualcores.

there is still a lot to do but if they continue to do these smaller improvements then i'm happy too.

not completely sure about this expansion. but i guss they are at least trying to give players what the wanted most after rok. people complained a lot that rok was too much solo focused so this expansion is focussing most about dungeons which usually need groups.

many players did not want a level  increase, so adding new achievemnt tree and increasing achievement cap is also mainly what people wanted.

raiders probably won't be too happy about only 4 raid instances (3 bigger zones and 1 small one) and only one new avatar as only new contested,  it will depend on difficulty and size of the 3 bigger zones how much raiding content it has.

overall  the announcement wasn't that much a thing to get me excited as eof or rok anouncements. but rok sounded much better in theory than it was in reality for me so maybe this one will be better once it goes live than the anouncement made it.

I am waiting for expansion beta and hopefully i get a space there, if not then i will wiat till nda gets dropped and i can hear from players that played before i make my judgement on this expansion.

Originally posted by wertax

Hi There,

i read that Sony created the Voice chat not primarily for EQII, but as well for their other games they
are running.

On a side note to that i think they did an Awesome job , i realy have a lot of fun with it,
 most of the people figure out pretty fast how to set things up. And for me the Quality is fantistic.

Greetings,

Wertax.

yes sony is slowly integrating that same voicechat system in all their games, so you can expect it to be included in all their future games too.

Its a good aproach cause it offers some additional value to current gamers, and also gives them a good way to test the voicechat with lots of users (probably much more users than you would have if you would test it in the beta for a new game).