The following additional info regarding the upcoming Everquest 2 expansion Sentinel’s Fate, was posted on our guild site by our member Shinn Asuka, thanks Shinn. 
I am not sure of the original source as Shinn was given the info by a friend so if anyone knows feel free to drop a message in via the comments or our contact form. I’ll put a link in the post to the original source If I find it.
Details below, along with some info about Game Update 53.
EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate
The new expansion will be entitled Sentinel’s Fate.
It will be based around the EQ1 continent of Odus and will cover Erudin, Paineel, and Ratonga lore. The void storyline will be ending in 2009.
Adventure, Tradeskill, and Guild Level caps all increase to 90
EQ2: Sentinel’s Fate will be released in February 2010.
2 large overland zones (Stonebrunt Mountains?)
The Hole – a large level 82+ contested zone (similar to Sanctum of Scaleborn) with 3 wings, you spawn in the middle
12 New Group Instances
Some existing TSO group instances will be available in a T9 (level 80-90) version.
Guild Level increases to 90. New Guild Hall Amenities and Amenity Slots.
No new deities with expansion, nor will there be T9 solo deity quests.
Deity miracles may be reconsidered.
Group and raid zones will scale to level to some extent. A choice will have to be made when pulling or fighting certain mobs that will set the encounter difficulty to easy, normal, or hard. The difficulty level will be set by the manner in which you start the encounter (i.e a boss may have a narrative, depending on your choice, you may get ‘easy mode’ where he sends his minions and escapes, or hard mode where you fight the boss himself)
AAXP Slider, when earning xp, you will be able to set a ratio that is earned as AA instead.
AA cap to 250. New abilities are going to be added to the bottom of the Class (KoS) and Subclass (EoF) AA Trees, below what is now the end abilities. Some of these endline abilities will be passive, triggering based on specific chains of other abilities being cast.
Mythical weapons will not be the ‘No.1′ weapon, but will have another, important, use. Perhaps usable as a clicky item to get the unique class-defining abilities, or equippable in a charm slot.
Grouping, Soloing, and Questing will all be viable leveling options.
Server Transfers, Artwork-by-Mail, and StationCash
Automated Server Transfers will be available on the Station Marketplace within the next couple of weeks, price will fall to $25.
HP will be offering — through StationCash — high quality EQ2-related artwork (paintings of Antonia Bayle, Lucan, etc.) prints and eventually in-game items and your character sent directly to your door. This will include a hardback book containing pictures of all of your guildmates.
The plan is to make it possible, in the future, to purchase expansion packs and new game keys through station cash.
Auto-mentoring
Hail an NPC in one of the home cities and you will be able to mentor down in 5 level increments (20, 25, 30, 35, etc.) and complete quests, kill named encounters, etc. at the appropriate level. This does not require mentoring another person and will not offer the extra bonuses given to folks who naturally mentor one of their friends.
To prepare for this feature, a list of named mobs on long spawns in existing zones is already being assembled to have their timers tweaked. Also, low level contested zones will instance themselves (Sinking Sands 1, 2, 3, etc.) in case of large populations.
EQ2 Achievements
Similar to XBox Live, EQ2 is getting an Achievements system. The expansion will launch with 500-700 achievements. This will merge the old Slayer titles (kill 5,000 Orcs), plus adventurer titles (complete 20 Heritage Quests), and introduce new titles. For example, number of level 80 characters you have. Whether you defeated a dungeon/raid on the hardest difficulty, Going back and completing old zones while mentored, etc.
The Alternative Achievement system in EQ2 (currently 200 points) is officially being renamed to AA to avoid confusion.
Shard of Love & Miragul’s Planar Shard
Scheduled for GU53 is Miragul’s Planar Shard, a raid zone which will use the new mechanic of difficulty scaling on certain bosses.
Another zone expected this year which will join Shard of Hate is The Shard of Love. The storyline for this zone will relate to Erolissi Marr.
New starter experience and new starter zone
Halas is being added as a good starting city in Gu55 to coincide with the release of the new expansion, Sentinel’s Fate. Gu55 will be a free download whether you choose to purchase the expansion or not.
The starting race has not been confirmed, but in EQ1 this was Barbarians.
Incidentially, this new area will be considerably streamlined and will be built out as the new EQ2 Trial. The existing EQ2 Trial is a massive download and really not that great a tool at recruiting new players. The new EQ2 Trial will be optimized for download size, will have streaming download, and will really act as a marketing tool for new players.
Extremely preliminary zone art was shown of the new Halas.
Incidentially, Thundering Steppes will be getting a revamp as it will be the stepping off point for level 20 characters leaving Halas.
Who Gives a Crit
Critical damage stats including Spell, Melee, Ranged, and Heal are being merged into a single ‘Crit’ statistic. Each class will have a critical coefficient. So the same item will offer taunt and melee crit to a fighter, ranged crit to a ranger, and heal crit to a healer.
Double Attack and Ranged Double Attack are being combined into DA, with an appropriate coefficient as RDA is c0nsidered more powerful to a ranger than DA is to other scouts.
Resistance types are being streamlined down to just Noxious, Elemental, Arcane and Physical. Naming on items will not change for variety/lore reasons.
Out-leveling gear
Once considered for the Rise of Kunark, items will now scale down in effectiveness, eventually “greying out” when the item is 10 levels below your adventure level. The effectiveness of such items will be reduced by 33% at 10 levels.
Legends of Norrath
Set 7 of the LoN cards, Storm Break, goes live on July 9th. This will be the final part of the void series. New loot cards include a cloak with a, once-per-day, clicky effect that completely repairs your gear.
Buffs
The number of buffs and casting time of buffs is being considered, especially for support and healer classes. Certain classes always use the same self-buffs and these may be consolidated. Having buffs persist after death was requested several times, but no confirmation was forthcoming.
Class Balance (Bards, Enchanters, Summoners)
Typical raid lineups currently include 3-4 illusionists, 1 coercer, 3-4 dirges, and a troubador. Yet they often do not offer ANY slot to summoners or druids.
Some Enchanter and Bard buffs will become raidwide or applicable to one person in each of the 4 groups. The example given was an illusionist giving Time Compression to one member of all 4 groups. Other buffs could go raidwide. This will be done in such way so that having 4 illusionists will not be a significant advantage over having 1 or 2.
Currently, Brigand “Dispatched” and other debuffs are crucial for raiding and some group situations. Meanwhile, Summoners are finding they rarely get a seat at the table. As a result, Rogue debuffs are being refocused to work on melee, while Summoners step into a new role of debuffing spell abilities.
Also, with regards to Rogues, Brigands and Swashbucklers each have irreplaceable abilities such that most raids have 1 of each. Some of these abilities will become common between the two classes so that any Rogue can be effective in raid situations.
Summoner pet survivability is going to be looked into. Dumbfire pets will now act like a spell with appropriate graphics, rather than being affected by AoEs. These pets will also do spell debuffs in line with Summoner’s new role as spell debuffers.
Class Balance (Druids)
It has been recognised that Heal-over-Time spells come way behind wards and reactives when dealing with large spike damage (mainly in a raid and the hardest heroic settings).
A new component is going to be added to Heal-Over-Time spells for Druids which will save up the heal after each tick if the target is at full health, and further, any leftover heal will transfer to the group member with the lowest health on expiration.
Tradeskill
Over 2000 new recipes for Tier 9.
No Rare Loams in Tier 9. Instead, Ore and Gems will be used to make Expert (Adept III) spells. Ore nodes will always respawn as ore nodes, gem nodes as gem nodes.
Would like to completely revamp Adornment system, but at the very least, new adornment recipes will be Transmuter-crafted only.
Players will be able to be a Tinkerer and Transmuter.
Shaders 3.0
EQ2 is getting a graphical facelift!
Shaders are small pieces of code which take the textures and apply an effect to them, providing metallic appearances, glows, bump mapping, caustics (rust, decay), lighting effects, etc.
These are being upgraded from the ancient Shaders 1.0 to Shaders 3.0. Nearly any graphics card since GeForce 3 will be able to handle the new GPU Shaders. At higher resolutions, preliminary tests have shown that framerates stay largely the same. At lower resolutions, framerates of GPU shaders seem significantly improved.
This will not be a substantial download. Each shader is just a few kilobytes. So far, 3,000 shaders have been upgraded.
Nek Forest looks awesome now. The whole idea of a torch in the darkness, lighting up trees, rocks, and enemy mobs looks head-and-shoulders above the current “flat” pea soup grey haze and flat colors on everything.
When the EQ2 developers saw the first screenshots, they thought it was another game.
In addition, Flora Displacement which moved to the GPU last year will still get further performance tweaks (known issue on nVidia cards).
Finally, he’d like to move particles to the GPU but due to some design decisions, some particles are tied to animations. Will have to go back and separate them out.
There is developer interest in a torch slot, so this is being considered. Devs would also like to do High Dynamic Range (HDR) in a future update, but nothing is immediately planned.
EQ2 Potpourri
It is known that emergency “Stun-and-Heal” is a real detriment to healers and is required for too many encounters. Will be reconsidered.
Wizard “Rays of Disintegration” is very disruptive for Enchanters who must maintain a certain casting order and rhythm to do their jobs. Will be reconsidered as a more Mage-centric spell.
Rangers — would like to re evaluate Stream of Arrows. Originally intended as a fill in between auto attacks, but auto attacks are so large now that using it reduces DPS output.
Although it is higher than intended, there are no immediate plans to adjust Auto Attack damage.
Bruisers/Coercers – Drag, thought snap are so overpowered we have to disable them or mobs are trivialized
Conjuror Mythical Pet – This pet is class-defining for Conjurors. However with the current mechanic, that pet would stop leveling at low-to-mid 80’s. Will look at this going forward.
Certain raid encounters will benefit from crowd control, giving enchanters another job besides power regen and buffs.
The Quest Window is getting a facelift. Namely side-by-side quest list and quest details.
Revamped Player Inspect window will show regular and appearance slots and many more stats.
Smart Loot is being implemented over time. Lock boxes in Mistmyr already have mini-smart loot for each person that loots.
Out-of-Control Curing
It is recognized that Curing is perhaps getting out-of-control. Casting time of individual cure potions may be considered. In addition, certain detriments are getting different effects on them such that curing that detriment can be worse than leaving it, or may cause another detriment to trigger. The intention was never to stare at the Profit Cure bar the entire fight.
Related posts:
MMOYeti:
mmosymposium:
WodgeFTW:
MMOSres:
I think making enchanter/bard buffs raid wide is stupid. That's part of making raids hard…is getting the right set up…Each class has its special uses. Doing this would eliminate most of the needs for bards. You're being stupid SOE!!!
I can see your point, but surely this just means you would have to have one of each class in the raid? Without raid wide buffs you could have more than one of each class in the raid as long as they were in different groups.
I don't raid often enough for this to bother me too much though I can see how it will annoy some people. Pickup raids will take longer to form if people don't want more than one of the same class in the raid due to the now raid wide buffs.
I do however think that the idea will help conjurers get into raids more than before which is a good thing as it makes the raid more diverse and helps those playing conjurer classes. The part about changing rogue class specific buffs to be dual class and their debuffs just affecting melee also makes sense.
I read over the details again after your comment and I do think it will actually be a benefit in the long run. From the sound of things a lot of the buffs that will become raid wide are 1 target buffs. So an enchanter would be able to cast those outside the group they are in, this isn't a bad thing.
The example they give of raids having 4 enchanters, is something I've seen and taking that down to 1-2 is a good thing as it allows more classes the chance to get a slot. Every class has something useful so should have an equal chance at getting in a raid.
"I don’t raid often enough for this to bother me too much"
there really is no diplomatic way to put it.
If you dont raid often enough then your opinion is completely irrelevant. You probably have a nice a very subjective way of looking at raids on a lower level but you lack the insight in high level hard core stuff. Difference mainly beeing success.
There is no room for politeness when setting up the winning raid.
Following your logic it would be equally plausible to do a raid with 24 healers in it or 24 shadowknights and so forth.
That could be done for fun by very skilled players but would never work for the casual raiders or guilds. Everyone pick their class for the fun or the specific skills involved in playing that particular toon. In the end it is about maximising damage with survivability and having 10 – 20 – 30 classes that would be alike or with equal strenghts and weaknesses would be boring and no fun for anyone.
I think you missed my point. I said that making a raid go from having four chanters to 1 or 2 is a good thing. This means you are using more classes not more of the same.
As for my opinion not been worth anything, maybe not to you. However I am entitled to my opinion and entitled to voice it.
Yes I am not a hardcore raider, though I have been on tso raids and other pre tso high end raids. Not all through pickups, I have raided with my friends guild when an additional healer was needed.
This is so typical. "Hardcore" raiders, which make up a smaller portion of the player base than "average" players, trying to dictate to everyone else how the game should work.
I raid the higher end content 4-6 days a week with my guild. I think it is brilliant to allow more slots for other classes by making single key or core classes able to use their abilities raid wide or across groups with multiple targets. It allows more people to play their favored class within a raid.
I get sick of hearing the elitist snobs chiming in that they are allowing the "common" folk to enjoy the same content that they enjoy. SoE will introduce new ways to make content challenging without making it too easy, it is just going to do so for a larger audience. This way people can play their favorite classes in a raid without the need of people playing their favorite class but having an illy or other such class as a primary secondary for these situations.
People with weak arguments always go the extremes. Your comments about a raid with 24 healers or 24 Shadowknights is obsurd and in no way does this post suggest you will be able to do it. Besides, getting 24 healers or even more absurd, 24 Shadowknights together is WAY more difficult than gethering 16-24 different classes for a raid.
Bottom line, almost anyone with the right gear and a clear idea on what the script is to win an encounter can raid top end content. This ideal that your better than everyone else because you do it is just a way for people to feel they are special. Your not special, you just have enough time to get there and found other people with enough time to do it with you. You most certainly don't get more of a say than anyone else because you have done it. Your $14.95 a month isn't more valuable than anyone elses.
Welcome to our blog Annabrie.
I'd just like to say a big "well said" in reply to your comment.
I try to make my posts or comments fair and to see an issue from more than my own angle, so while I'm not a raider I think I still have the right to post my own opinion of how this might affect raiders.
Orly is entitled to his views too, though I think they could have been put across in a better manner. I have a job and a life outside MMO's so I don't have the time or the will to raid for hours every night of the week. I have raided with a friends guild with success and on the odd occasion have been complemented on my healing skills.
I have nothing against those that do want to spend all their time raiding, some of my good in game friends are full time raiders. A player saying they are better than another because they can complete these raids just reflects poorly on the raider than the player he/she is looking down upon.
Thanks again Annabrie for your comment. Maybe you'd be interested in doing a guest post or two here on mmo-symposium? Drop us a mail via our contact form if you are.
@Annabrie
Well said indeed!
This was a very interesting and informative read. Overall I too agree that the changes are for the better, however I hope they do not merge the classes too much, I like that each class plays a very specific role. =)
SOE is making this game too easy mode with the crit and da and such.. i like the idea how your making abunch of classes having a specific role, but to the classes your not helping out, they will start being usless. if you do somthing to one class, you should do somthing eles to the other
Honestly, to me, all that raidwide TC says to me, is…."HELL YES! 12 members in our raidforce can have TC now" I don't think that just because illies can put this buff on 1 person in each group will make them any less wanted to have 3-4 in a raid. And tbh, i think its kinda ridiculous that they couldn't come up with a new idea to make summoners work, so they just strip half of what rogues bring to a raid/group and give it to them……did they think more than 10 mins on this idea? I mean really, I am very unimpressed with these announcements
Hi Annabrie!
I agree that this game will become very easy if they combine crits and da into one stat. Frankly I like the challenge of trying to improve multiple stats and find a balance with them. Shows skill with your class. (along with actually playing well of course with whatever gear you have)
To be honest I am not all the impressed with the changes posted here as well and I hope they are very preliminary. These changes are a very small step to class balancing that is really needed.
For instance my current main is a warden, but the only thing I can offer to raid is cures and heals…which are both behind most healers in a raid (I.e. inq with mythical or manacure from templar. and wards/reactives). Making our HoTs save up wont fix us fully…sure it will make us more useful when the crap hits the fan…but we can do that already! Although this will help somewhat, buffs are the real problem! anyway done complaining! at least they are taking steps.
As for the other class changes, I am happy about the rays change, though they could have made it more interesting rather than just another nuke. Drag/thought snap disabled? thats just dumb, change it then if its too overpowered. Removing part of what made those classes useful is stupid. There is no spot for bruisers anymore without drag (though bruisers tank better than monks now) making conjy have a dispatch for spells was an awesome idea though.
Overall these changes are somewhat good…but there is still a ton that needs to be done to balance the classes and make them equally useful groups/raids. (if that is even possible) heh
Ranger Auto Attack damage too high. LOL LOL LOL LOL LOL
If it wasn't for Auto Attack range damage rangers wouldn't have any dps what so ever. As it is now Rangers struggle with dps in higher end raids. Utility classes just kill rangers(conji's, Chanters). Last I checked a ranger is suppose to be a pure dps class. That is all a ranger has is DPS and if you can't be one of the top dpser then maybe rangers should just be removed from the game. The assassin shouldn't ever being blowing a ranger by on dps. Both classes should be on equal footing. One is just ranged/melee and the other is straight up melee. Equally geared ranger and equally geared assassin should do similar dps. Not one doing 5 to 10k more dps.
To be completely fair, Sin's and Rangers need a revamp – I've never been outparsed as a swash by any other scout, or have not even become close to it.
On a sidenote –
I hope SF has some sort of flagging relations or keying. I am sick of not having to work for anything except the actual fights themself. We should have to earn our way into zones, not be given it – this will stimulate players and activity and actually make people want to get on. At some point, shards become irrelevant. I've been at that point for a long time now, and my account is only 40 days old. Now I recognize not everyone is like that, but honestly – play long enough and they become obsolete.
Being able to access Planes zones back in PoP from EQ1 was GREAT. If its a HUGE problem, people can be willed in and loot a Key mob for the flag in the future, just like EQ1 allowed in a later update. This doesn't make new players obsolete or make established guilds going back and having to push people through progression, but obviously 90% of the raid force should be keyed/flagged already before this is allowed.
"You('re) not special, you just have enough time to get there and found other people with enough time to do it with you."
Well put Anna.
I understand raiders point that they put all this time into the game and should get something extra, but I also don't like punishing people that can't put tons of time in. I have been on both sides of the coin, and it is not an easy task for Sony to balance this.
"Sin’s and Rangers need a revamp". Yes they do, if you can take a ute class that can do as much (or even closely as much) DPS as an Assy or Ranger then why take a "pure DPS" class? TBH Sony has never understood what a Ranger is, and ranger/assy traditionally require special situations to operate well, which doesn't translate well into a "MMORPG" which is more technically a fantasy world base FPS game.
Changes are changes and most wont work out right anyhow. As far as making some zones having to be "flagged" to get into is certainly more difficult for the casual player. I think SOE wont really care about the casual player and will want to get the people that play all the time what they want since they are the ones putting in the time and will stick with most likely compared to casual players that come in, play and leave for a few months..come back… complain its too hard and leave again. Sticking to one side or the other would the best way to go and everyday players should be rewarded more than the casual player…time in game = greater rewards imo
New starter zone WOOT! I might re-sub for a month to check it out.