the new official page for the expansion http://www.riseofkunark.com  mentions 13th nov as planned release date in their faq.

and it also ahs some design graphics for sarnak.

Originally posted by Ironman2000
Oh and incase you haven't figured it out by now, the players in EQ II (I played from beta to about 4 months ago myself) have really high opinions of their opinions and will fully insult and degrade anyone that disagrees with them lol.  I personally felt like a second class citizen, as a level 70 paladin and 64 troubador when I was told to be able to enjoy the dungeon content of the latest expansion pack, EoF, that I would have to go back and RAID all the dungeons in Kingdom of Sky to get gear that would keep me alive in the dungeons of EoF.  I was blasted on the official forums when I talked about how silly this seemed to me, by the hard core raiding crowd there.  Thats a large part of why I don't play anymore.  Its my opinion, and with that said, take it for what its worth.

its absolutely no problem to do eof group content without ever raiding kos. I have seen enough secondary chars in our guild play in eof instances with only "mastercrafted" equip even tanks (n the classes on which equip groups rely most in eq2), you might need 2 healers sometimes where you only need 1 with a fabled tankt but you can do it. also kaladim, mistmore catacombs or new tunaria are no problem for groups in mastercrafted equip.
castle mistmoore is maybe an exception as its a very hard zone with raid parts in it, but once you gto good legendary equip form eof instances you can even play there. even for players equipped with kos raidgear castle is a hard zone and it is meant to be that.

Besides that  if you compare eof legendary and kos fabled equip the differences are often very small, and in some cases eof legendary is better than kos fabled.

the 2 english languae PVE eu servers are quite busy, especially in european evening times. But a lot of the grouping and nearly all raiding happens in the guilds so getting a good and nice guild is an important factor for getting most out of EQ2.


Both EU PVE servers should  have guilds for most playstyles and community overall is friendly so it should not be that hard to get into the game.

No idea how the PVP servers are cause i am not a real fan of pvp

you can only access vanguard before tuesday if you have a preorder key and entered it for your account, the standard cd key wil just allow you to enter after official release on tuesday.

To answer the original poster SOE reserved the right to delete unused characters after the account has been inactive for  longer than  6 months. But as far as i know they only deleted some of the placeholder chars that were on inactive accounts (level lower than 10, not much money on them) and that was mainly to free some names up again.

Like in most MMOs you can play on the server you want. All servers are in same list, so you can choose free and even play on both server types if thats what you want.

In my opinnion the expanision is really nice, it will be a lot fun to start a new char there and level through all the new zones.

a few answeres to all the negative things mentioned before: yes removing imbues was not a good idea but they put them back in and i don't think there will be any new problems with imbues, and emand for dem will be decreasing more and more in future cause imbued items cannot be adorned. So i think they won't be adding new imbued items if they expand max level to 80.
Guild level change is not the best but i don't see it that much as a problem. the active accounts thing was causing problems with guilds rotationg members. the 5% flat was a try for a fix, but it would have been much of a disadvantage for small guilds (would not havce changed much for big guilds). 10% is better for small guilds but might make large guilds level too fast. Any other more complex system would also have had its disadvantages, so i don't see any real way to solve this problem.

I have to agree with you that the webbased CS System is a big step backwards for Customer Service in most cases, the only advantage is that i also can check if any interaction from me is needed when i'm at work. It might get better if they would improve the ingame browser to the point that the ingame browser is used to flll out the webbased CS form from inside the game.

Boats are highly liked by a part of the community and also disliked by another part. The current wait and travel times on beta server seem to be ok, i did not feel them to be more of a slowdown that the spires. And i think the portals are a nice addition, and yes i know this will lead to portal classes trying to sell portals to earn money. But we will see how this turns out.

The effect of the combatchanges on the actual gameplay is not really big, actually i hardly noticed any real difficultyy differences playing my char on beta and on live server. The biggest difference was that the numbers shown on stats page were different now. Soloing and grouping on same mobs did not change much, i cannot say too much on raiding as i did not raid the same mobs on beta and live servers.

What i hate most about that expansion are the new achievements. most of them are just not worth anything and look like spacefillers. and some classes do not get more than 1 or 2 really usefull achievements. From that part definitely expected more.
Also the transmuting skill like it is atm is a real pain to level, beghn said that it will be changed before launch to have treasured, legendary and fabled adornments to level easier on treasured ones but that change is still not on beta servers so i cannot comment on that. Like it is now it will be really hard and so also expensive to get an adornment made. i like the general idea of the system but right now all adornments require a part that you only get from breaking down a fabled or a master spell. i don't see a problem to have rare adornments that require that but there must also be adornments that everybody can get and crafters can level on (without having to spend tons of money on brokers).

Overall i am positive about this expansion and i just hope they can stillimprove a bit on my 2 negative points.

the patch will propably hit servers on 14th day, and anyone that has eof acivated on 14th can play the expnasion no matter if you preordered or not.
the game should be in stores at that day, but that also depends a bit on the store where you want to buy it.

the only advantage in preorders is that some stores give you better offers on preorders, and from soe the digital download preorder is $35.99 instead of $39.99 (but digital download does not include the other expansions).

for high level game race choices don't make much difference as most of stats comes from equip but if you start as a gnome guardian you will have a harder start than if you start as a ogre guardian. but its still doable and you still can solo its just a bit more difficult in the first 10-20 levels.

if you buy EOF boxed version it includes the original game and all 3 expansions. so all you need is in this box (except the adventure packs that are optional)

these changes change the numbers you see in your stats window but they are in now way anthing like the SWG CU. The game still plays like it did before (i have a char in EOF beta and from playing you do not notice any real differences, and yes i can say that i have a char on beta cause te NDA allready was lifted some time ago).

What this change does is it removes the problem that most raiding chars allready had at least 1 stat over the cap in raids or good groups. And even characters in nonraid gear could reach stat caps, so these cpas were too low.
It also might make some other items more desireable than before, and some items less desireable.

But overall the game still plays like it did before the change and you do not notice any major differences (maybe a mob got slightly harder and another one got slightly easier).

on the other question about pvp i cannot say much, i never really play eq2 pvp and also have not played on beta  pvp server so cannot compare here. But i can remember that somewhere in the past (i think short after pvp release) they changed mitigation, resists and avoidance to work slightly different in pvp than in pve so this might still be true.

I personally have a lvl 70 paladin so my infos on paladin are propably a bit more detailed than the infos on SK.

First the similarities: Both classes can be good group tanks, i say can cause good tanking depends a lot on how the player uses the abilities he gets. With good equip and when they are played by a player that knows how to do it both classes also can tank at raids (not allways as good as a guardian, but good enough). They also have a nice Mitigation Buff that they can place on another player which often brought them into maingroup as tankbuffer at least for the current content.(we will see how that changes with the new combat and stats changes).

ok now the differences:
Pally can keep aggro really good cause of his aggro transfer abilities. Good pallys can even keep aggro over a mad Warlock with a deathwish. Pally also have some heals which makes them a good backup healer. And they also sometimes can be the only healer for not too hard encounters. You just should not expect that you can do every hard fight with only a pally as healer. (even if it sometimes works ). tanking and healing at same time works sometimes too, but on hard mobs interrupts can be a problem so betetr be sure to have another healer too.

Sk is more offensive and with right achievemnts selection and good equip he can go quite high on dps scale. I cannot go much more into the details of a SK as i never really played one.


Also i'm not sure how they perform in PVP as i don't play on a pvp server.

assasins can deal out more damage with single abilities, but overall dps of brgands is really high too. if you have both in raids it usually depends on equip and acheivement choices which class has higher dps. Both can use poison and gain a good dps boost from using good poisons.

Brigands have the nr 1 debuff to increase group/raiddps cuase it reduces mitigation against all damage types, so everyone will do more damage. They have a nice achievement ability to increase the recasts of the aoes of mobs. and they can be immune to untargeted aoe. all this together which makes them a very usefull class in raids.
Also the group stealth which they get relatively early makes them very usefull in all different situations.
Brigand also has a taunt and makes a passable tank for standard groups that don't have to kill the hardest mobs in the game.

Assasin on the other side is pure dps with (nearly) no other usefull features.

So the decission is if you want a pure dps class or a class that is very helpfull and might be a bit lower dps (but i also have seen brigands outdpsing assasins so thats not allways the case).

i have not much knowledge on eq2 pvp so cannot compare how they work there

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Originally posted by Farakon
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yes echoes of faydwer expansion will include the original game + both older expansions if you buy the boxed version (for about 40$).  the download version will be a bit cheaper if you preorder but only include the new expansion. its in the FAQ on the official eof homepage (www.echoesoffaydwer.com)

So if you want to get into EQ2 and get all expansions 3 expansions for best price it will be best to wait till November and buy the boxed version.

first i want to say all healer classes can heal quite good in group situations (at least if the player knows how to use the abilities), so if you mainly want a healer for grouping then you should take the one that you like most.

If you want to get into a hardcore raiding guild there is also the problem what they are recruiting.  a search on eq2census on healerclasses over all servers between lvl 65 and 70 yields:

Defiler	1248
Inquisitor	1591
Mystic	1684
Warden	1965
Fury	3122
Templar	3150

so a defiler will might have it easier to get a spot in a raiding guild than a fury or templar. (but that doesn't mean it will allways be this way).

I am in no hardcore raiding guild but my guild does some raiding and we have collected some experience over a long time.
we are a casual guild so we often have to use different strategies depending on who shows up to the raid, so we had allready raids in which we had noone of a special healerclass. In my opinnion a raid without a shaman is nearly undoable, a raid without a druid is much more likely to have success. In ideal cases you have all classes but as i said in a casual guild that does some raid you don't allways have a ideal class setup.

there exist some quite good maingroup setups without a druid in it. guardian as mt, templar, defiler, dirge, crusader, conjurer as an example works quite good, you have high HP, high static mitigation and guard also has his short time mit buffs.

if you want to duo a lot in eq2 the best combos include a healer. you will get much more xp and faster xp if you can go after heroic content later and that only really works with a healer in higher levels.

but if you want one of the mentioned classes then i'd go with swashy, brigand(i know you did not mention brigand) or dirge depending what you want more. Swashy is good dps and also has some utility, brigand has great resists/ac debuffs so would help you both doing more dps, and dirge has lots of melee buffs and some debuffs.
troub buffs are more usefull for casters than for melee classes so i would allways take a dirge over a troub if you want to combine it with a melee class.

overall your duo will have more dps and faster kills if you take a swashy or brigand. the dirge will be more effective in bigger groups as he buffs all group members.

and for the one that complains about SK. A good played SK can be a good tank, in our guild we have some SK that tank often and good. (sometimes also in raids).