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Further Down the Line Those of us behind the scenes here on the EverQuest team have plans for the future of the game. Further Down the Line is where we will keep you informed about what those plans are. Please understand that these are our long-term plans and may require a fair amount of research or development time.
1) Partial Zone Revamps
These consist of improvements in the experience gain, monster density and/or item rewards in some of the older zones. The goal is to improve the playability and reward for adventuring in these zones without completely remaking the contents of the zone. We plan to do several of these, and we'll keep you updated as we move through these. We recently finished Veeshan's Peak, the Temple of Droga and the mines of Nurga. Currently we are working on a partial revamps of The Deep, Charasis (Howling Stones), Dragon Necropolis, Sirens Grotto, The Hole, The City of Mist, Cazic-Thule, and Velketor's Labyrinth.
2) Updated Character Creation Descriptions
EverQuest has evolved and improved a lot over the last four plus years. With four years of updates and enhancements, sometimes your information gets outdated. One of the things we will be doing soon is updating the character creation information both in game and on the web site.
3) Damage Over Time Spell Foci
We are working on implementing focus items for Damage over Time (DoT) spells. Focus items improve aspects of certain spells when they are cast. Originally, DoT spells were included in a group of other spells that some focus items affected. But the nature of DoT spells is very different than other spells, and the affect of these focus items on DoT spells was not what we wanted it to be. A new class of focus items needs to be created to increase the effect of DoT spells.
4) Items in the Planes of Power
We will be looking at the quality of Planes of Power item rewards and improving them where appropriate. Items for many of the lower tier gods will be upgraded and more rare items and NPCs will be added to the following zones as needed:
Crypt of Decay
Plane of Torment
Halls of Honor
Plane of Tactics
Plane of Innovation
Bastion of Thunder
5) Class Balance
We're still planning to take a look at improving the damage capabilities of melee classes, as they've fallen behind their magic-using counterparts at the very high end of the game. Finding the proper solutions for this situation will take some time. Some options being considered are:
Improve melee damage-increasing disciplines ,br> Improve Planes of Power melee weapons
Additionally, we're looking at the concerns from players about their spells, and changing them where appropriate. The goal here is to remove annoying issues with spells, not necessarily to increase caster power overall.
6) Shields and blocking
We're planning on reviewing the possibility of giving an innate chance to block when using a shield. We've been hoping to do this for a while, and it should be getting a realistic review in the near future. We'd like to increase the value of shields, and make it a worthwhile choice for players who might normally dual-wield weapons or use a two-handed weapon. We plan on balancing this against classes which use shields by default, and therefore wouldn't be making any trade-offs to equip a shield.
7) Tradeskills
We will be looking at the chance of failure for tradeskill recipes. We are aware of the concerns of trades folk in EverQuest, and it is on our schedule to review things such as the fact that masters of trade skills can fail the easiest recipes. That doesn't necessarily mean that we plan to change it, but we will most certainly look it over - and probably will change it  ">
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