In addition to the upcoming launch of The Serpent’s Spine, we are working on a number of improvements to EverQuest at the same time. I wanted to give everyone else a head’s up on some of the changes that are coming your way. These changes are still undergoing testing so may change before they go live. We are attempting to get these out in the same patch that introduces The Serpent’s Spine, but they are not part of the expansion and if deemed necessary, may be introduced at a later date.
AA System – With the increase to level 75, we’ve run into a problem with AAs. AAs are built around a static amount of experience, roughly what is required to get level 51. As levels have gone up, the amount of experience you get for killing a creature goes up too and we’re at the point now where a few kills at level 75 would be worth an AA point. To avoid this problem and the problems associated with continually inflating AA costs to compensate, we’re moving the AA system to a more relative system so the amount of AA experience you gain will be based on the difficulty (con level) of the NPC you killed rather than its level (quest XP and other ways of getting AA are likewise converted over to the new system). The amount of experience required to get an AA is based around what a level 70 player currently requires in the old system, so players at level 70 shouldn’t see much difference. Players below level 70 will gain AA at a faster rate than before the change because they were previously gaining at a much slower rate than a level 70 can.
Spell Resists – We’ll be introducing a new spell resist formula that will make spell resists much more lenient than they have been in the past. The old system was built for the original game when the levels were capped at 50 and the resists were under 300. It wasn’t built to be very flexible and as the levels have gone up and the resists have gone up, it has maintained the same narrow range of values that meant a spell was unresisted as it had back then. In a good system, appropriate level spells should land most of the time, but not all of the time, against appropriate level NPCs. Because of the narrow range on the older system, that isn’t the case currently. Most spells these days tend to be all-or-nother. They either land or they don’t and you don’t see much deviation from that. The new system introduces a formula that scales a lot better and will result in more spells falling into the right realm where spells can land, but don’t always land.
Death – We’ll be changing death so that when you die, you will be “hovering” over your body and can choose to stay that way while waiting for a resurrection instead of immediately zoning to your bind point. This is being done to help players on slow connections who take a big hit from having to zone twice when they die.
Character Creation – We’ve changed character creation to make it more graphical, allow characters to be created from a single page, and update it to include features associated with the new Drakkin race. As part of this, we’ve set up some character defaults so starting point allocation, starting city, and starting deity all have defaults now which can be changed if you wish.
Endless Quiver  – A longstanding issue we’ve had with ranger itemization is the inability to create specialized arrows because they are never expended due to the Endless Quiver AA. This has led to arrows become a bit stale over the years. To resolve this issue, we’ve introduced the ability to create new arrows that are not affected by Endless Quiver. These arrows will specifically be marked as “Expendable”. It’s important to note that old arrows will not change and we will continue to create new arrows that work with Endless Quiver. This just allows us the flexibility to create arrows that have a big effect without the balance issues associated with them sticking around forever.
Dark Blue Con – The concept of a dark blue con NPC has existed in EQ for a while now. It represents a range of blue con NPCs that give a bonus to their experience due to being very close to your level, generally within 5 levels. We’ve decided to change the con system to include this range as well so you can visually see when an NPC falls into this “sweet spot”.
Rashere
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