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Well, it seems that Sony got something wrong with the patch today. Zones were crashing and they finally pulled the servers down around 9:45 PM CST for a quick update. We’ll see what they fixed.

The patch said that ranged auto-attack was improved — not so far as I’ve seen. Using Level 60 arrows (adamantium or whatever) and Gizzfazzle’s Bow (80dmg) I’m not seeing much in the area of damage. Arrows are hitting for 700-900 on average, which seems like I was hitting for that much with indium when I was still level 50. And this was against green plants in TT. Of course, the mobs were not debuffed so maybe that is the difference. I’m going to try it on a raid against debuffed mobs. I’d love to stay out of the AOE and get full autoattack style damage from a distance, so this is a yet-to-be-determined upgrade from my perspective.

I changed all my achievements around. I think the INT line in garbage aside from the increase in intelligence. I switched to the first two levels of STR (giving me an increase in strength and bladeturn so I can try to avoid AOE’s). They changed the recast to one minute making it very worthwhile. I then picked the agility line for the first two levels to gain Bump. To me, Bump seems extremely valuable in combat. Basically, it’s a zero casting time stealth that does damage as well. I can now seriously justify Scream of Death and other stealth-based attacks since I don’t have to deal with the Shroud casting time. I’m pretty excited about it, I can Cheap Shot, Bump, Scream of Death without the mob turning back around. Very sweet.

I can’t wait to get a T7 slasher that is useful (55+ damage rating) for Bladeturn. I wish I could get the Sabre of Anuk, but we keep putting off another FoL trip. Hopefully we can get in there this weekend and finish it up.

I managed to get on last night and get a group for the GrizzFazzle’s Errands quest. I’ve been needing this major bow upgrade since I hit 65 and the timing was right last night. We went into the Den after finishing up the last few Ravesect thoraxes and proceeded to work our way through the zone. From the start of the night, loot drops were horrible. I think they seriously reduced the Legendary rate in here as when the expansion first launched I recall guildies pulling out piles of Legendary loot every night.

The run went quick and without any real problem, the Devourer was happy to die for us and I got the quest update. I’ve now got a real nice 80 damage bow to replace my previous Ironwood unit that I got when DoF came out. It’s nice to see a decent bow in this expansion, the last one was real light in the ranged weapon department.

I also managed to pick up 30% experience, pushing me closer to 66.

We did this zone last night. I was late and almost missed it, we’re doing this zone in less than 90 minutes now it seems. We’ve just about looted it out, but it’s good coin for the guild bank and even better guild XP on the rush to 50. After that, we helped some guildies with the Mark of the Awakened quest by zoning into Halls of Fate and then the Trials of Awakening. There are a few critical bugs in this zone, but we understand how to work around them now and can hopefully take it down the next time we visit the place. The trick is having four people on the quest at the same spot to get the orbs to spawn.

Tonight we start raiding T7, so that should be VERY interesting. We’ll see how it goes!

Well, play time has been limited the last couple of days, but Wednesday night we went into Court of Al’Afaz and cleared it. I got a radiant torque (mainly because nobody else wanted it and it represented a minor upgrade from my Amulet of the Swords of Ro). I think overall we managed to get some good loot, including some masters that aren’t upgraded until after 70.

Thursday night we went into the Pedestal of Sky to face the two dragons. After one failed attempt, we got the DPS under control and managed to keep them withing 2-3% of each other all the way down to zero. It was a great victory and showed some serious focus by the entire guild. After we finished with the two dragons, we went to Bonemire to attempt some epic encounters there. Results weren’t as good, we were mostly just learning to find out what to expect. We found a T7 encounter that appears to operate a lot like the Kra’Thuk did back in Everfrost. We’ll expect to experiment more with that later.

After the guild raids, we put together a group to hit Halls of Fate. It took a few hours, but we cleared it to the end resulting in a quest update for the dirge hat. After the run, I was exhausted and fell off the stupid chains like eight times in a row. I seemed to think that I was seeing things. The next time I logged on I discovered the problem that I had not noticed before — they changed the max distance you can zoom out your character. I was just a tiny spec on the screen compared to the previous limit, and that was throwing off my entire sense of distance. So today, I ran up the chain, did the last step and got my dirge hat. Now I just need two more levels to wear it.

Two? I’m only 64, but I’m so close to dinging 65 it doesn’t matter. I just ran out of time today. I’ll ding and get to try out Oration of Sacrifice soon. I’ve read mixed reviews, but I think there has to be a combo that makes this spell very useful. Otherwise, Sony would just be nuts for making it and Sony doesn’t do things without a reason.

Wait, what am I saying. It is SOE we are talking about.

Last night, Mob Squad rolled into the Fountain of Life with a band of 24 ready to take this encounter down. We had a snag at first, a guild was doing the ring event for the Hand of the Godking and actually got it to spawn. However, they seemed unable to beat the encounter. In the interest of time after they wiped, we took the encounter and burned it down hard. As a courtesy to them, we gave them the fabled discovery that dropped — a very nice mage bracelet. We took the eye, which was fortunate as we need to go back in (more on that later).

Once we got into the zone, FoL bugs came out strong. There were a ton of problems placing the eyes, resulting in our main tank Zyxlin actually DELETING the Wrapping It All Up part of the quest to try and get the eyes to place. In the end, we had to get everyone to zone out and all 24 zone in at exactly the same time to reset the zone. Talk about major pain every time we try to go in here things don’t work smoothly.

Fortunately for us, the encounter portion of the raid went flawless. We mowed down the encounters like they were nothing, even the Godking got a nice ass whipping. We got a master 1 spell (level 60 Templar, nice) and three fabled item drops off the Godking himself (including the bard breastplate which I got)! So that within one week that I got the bard shoulders (Drape of Silent Screams) and breastplate.

That, however, was the start of the second problem. Due to some confusion amongst the guild officers and leader, not everyone got their update. We had problems with too many adds being spawned, people dying to a respawned Armor/Power and a few other miscommunications. As such, only a few of the guild members got the Prismatic 2.0 and Manastone 2.0 updates. We’re going to make another trip in a week to make it up for those who didn’t get their updates with a solid understanding of what has to happen from the moment the Godking dies. For those that are unclear, you have exactly 30 minutes from the time the Godking himself dies (not the entire encounter). Anyone who tries to update after that will be greeted with disappointment. But in the end, it’s just a game and no need to get upset over a week delay on something that has taken months to finish.

So overall it has been a solid week of good adventuring, both in KoS and the older DoF zones.

Coming soon, I’ll be posted my opinion of the crap that dirges get for AP’s.

Last night we put together a group of folks and started the profession hat quest Blood of the Brood. Our goal was to finish it. In short, we got damn close.

We started off in the Barren Sky, climbing the chain to get up to the quest starter. It took a couple of times falling into space, but once I got the hang of it I didn’t fall again. Which is good, because you have to climb the chain between every step of the quest. The first part of the quest involved killing a few birds. Once completed, another trip to the quest NPC and we needed to go find some bird with a scroll. Then we had to head to Freeport to get a scroll from the Arcane Science building. Then it was time to find all the parts to complete the quest.

First, we went to the Sanctum of the Scaleborn to get an update. We actually got the update on the first kill, but one of us was out of group at the time and we had to kill about 150 more to get the update for the last person. Once we had that, we had to go to the Palace of the Awakened. This was tough, a very hard zone. We got up to the top and did a ring event that spawned the required mobs for the quest. Once done, we took down the named and got some seriously sweet loot. After that, we went to the next spot, which we determined to be the Halls of Fate.

The Halls of Fate is an extremely cool zone. In fact, it’s probably one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. The level designers did an absolutely great job on it. The speed of the crawl, the difficulty of the mobs (highest in group was 66, I’m only 63 at this point) and the layout of the zone was awesome. We spent a ton of time in here trying everything and got all the updates except for the very last one. We eventually were in broken gear and out of time, having played all night to get this far.

I think we’re going back after Fountain of Life tonight to complete the quest. Hopefully with fresh minds and fresh gear we’ll be able to finish the quest and get our class hats (that some of us likely won’t be able to wear yet!). Here’s to good luck!

Well, less than a week on the expansion and I’m at level 62 so far. The grind isn’t too bad with all the stuff there is to do with the expansion, so that’s a good thing. I actually went around the old zones and got a ton of new discovery experience (I swear I’d been there before though). I’m up to 5 APs, but I think I’m going to have to change my choices, what I have so far totally sucks. In fact, they all suck for dirges, but hopefully they’ll change them and allow us to remake our choices again.

I’ve gotten a few nice gear drops and I have four of my new spells. Unfortunately, many of them are not upgrades compared to the Master I versions of the previous spell, so until I get some rare gems, I won’t be upgrading any spells for the time being.

I dinged 61 last night, in the sanctum, of course. I feel like I’ve been there for days, and I’ve still got another 75% of 62 to deal with as well. I’m a bit concerned about achievement points, they don’t seem to be free-flowing as I had hoped. I went to every isle in TT and BS, but only have three points to my name. I guess it’s just going to take some time.

I did start the Wurmslayer signature quest (imagine that will spend some time in my journal for sure) and tried to find the gnomish crash site to no avail, so the tink bag quest will have to wait. Hopefully I can get into enough action this weekend to be 62 by Monday. I’m a bit concerned about some of the T6 raid content, seems that some unintended changes caused by LU20 affected some of the innate abilities of certain key NPC’s in the zone. Hopefully the servers will stabilize to the point it is worth doing another run. Last night was actually pretty good, never had a crash and lag wasn’t horrible.

I found that turning lighting to minimal made a huge difference FPS-wise in the KoS zones. Even on a 6800 Ultra certain things just choke the system when you have three groups in the same room fighting multiple targets at one time. Might as well suffer visually so that the game remains playable through the new population increase.

PS: The signature generator is suffering some occasional glitches as Sony tunes the EQ2Players site to support the new content. So certain areas may be wrong/mismatched at times until all the changes are worked into the site. Sony, how about an XML feed now so that we can (a) reduce the load on your web site and (b) get consistent reliable information on a single call to the site. We promise, we’ll cache the results for at least 24 hours in return.