GENERAL

• Effects can once again proc on an AE autoattack.

DRUID RING EVENT

• Tunarian supply officers will now buy items for coin, like many other merchants.
• The druid portal to Nektulos Forest now lands adventurers closer to the druid ring.
• An issue preventing players from harvesting magiliths after they died has been fixed.
• The bug that prevented looting A Floret of Growth with certain group loot settings has been fixed.

SPELLS

• Ancestral Sentry can once again be cast on raid and group friends. It can no longer be cast on pets or NPCs.

ROYAL PALACE OF ROEHN THEER

• Plane Cracker should no longer occasionally cast if Approaching Equilibrium is slain before reaching Roehn Theer.
• Approaching Equilibrium should now despawn almost immediately upon being slain.
• Void-charged Soul and Star-charged Soul should now correctly be dispelled from both players when they successfully reach each other.
• Void-charged Soul and Star-charged Soul now have a 3s delay after being applied before they begin reacting to other nearby charged souls.

BATTLEGROUNDS

• Hook arrow will no longer cause the victim to drop the flag.

(Pictures will be coming soon)

The most asked question was, Why does the site look so different?

Well, There are two very good reasons why!

The first is that the WordPress theme I was using, is on the “bad theme black list” an unofficial list created by webmasters who use WordPress . The old them is not suggested to be used, because it may harm a websites growth potential.

The second and most important,  was to differentiate EQ2GU from Feldon’s great site, The EQ2 Wire! Some folks were confusing EQ2GU and The Wire. The old WordPress theme I was using was very close in color scheme to Feldon’s Wire. While I doubt Feldon had any issue with our sites design some of his users did (I got few hate mails)!

Today’s question submitted was from “The Great Garry” (okay…) who plays on Butcherblock  “How do I recover a heritage item that I had sold?”

A. The Great Garry, you can purchase your long sold off heritage items at The Shady Swashbuckler XVIII at the Nektulos Forest docks, Port Naythex.

Fixed an issue where possessing a creature would sometimes make your attackable target not attackable until you changed targets.

RESEARCH

You may now have all characters on your account researching at the same time.

USEABILITYONPLAYER COMMAND

The useabilityonplayer command now supports group and raid slot numbers in place of the player’s name.

For example, to cast Enduring Breath on the 12th person in the raid:

/useabilityonplayer r12 Enduring Breath

To cast Enduring Breath on the 3rd person in your group:

/useabilityonplayer g3 Enduring Breath

ALTERNATE ADVANCEMENTS

Focus: Death March now adds 10% damage reduction to On the March in PVE Combat and 5% damage reduction in PVP Combat.

QUESTS

The Flames That Cannot Die Quest has been altered. It was not intended that you have to go through the library several times for that update and as such the quest has been updated. Those who have completed at least one part of that stage should petition to have it updated.

ITEMS

Leather Breastplate of Divine Equilibrium and Vest of Divine Equilibrium now have Critical Vigor as an effect.

PERAH’CELSIS’ ABOMINABLE LABORATORY

Arkatanthis’ benthic freeze curse now has a max duration of 60 secs, rather than lasting indefinately.

Arkatanthis’ curse of destruction now lasts 20 secs, giving players more time to remove it. The benthic warlord and defiler adds associated with Arkatanthis now have significantly lower max health.

Arkatanthis will no longer cast curse of destruction or benthic freeze on players actively fighting the benthic warlord adds. Players with curse of destruction on them will no longer be chosen to fight the benthic warlord adds.

YKESHA’S INNER STRONGHOLD

Ykeshan Footsoldiers should now drop Ykeshan warbeads in both the Field General Uktap and Ykesha encounters

While we  were fighting Waansu he was able to diagnose the lag after seeing a 6 second lag spike in during one of our pulls. After doing some research he found that instances from Butcherblock were being loaded on to servers already heavily loaded due to an issue with the load balancing server.

Rothgaar explained the following during our raid.

Rothgar Shouts, “It appears that all of butcherblocks instanced content is being routed to an overloaded dynamic cluster, but all of the overland zones seem to be on the standard cluster.”

“I have looked at many butcherblock instances and they all are running on the same overloaded cluster while the normal cluster has available processing power. So its defiantly an issue with the world manager balancing zones in the wrong place.”

Later he posted on the official forums the following:

The fix is complete and I’m seeing instances for Lucan and Butcherblock being properly load-balanced now.  Any existing instances will need to shut down and be restarted for them to get moved to less-busy servers.  New instances will be starting up just fine and should enjoy a somewhat lag-free environment.

It generally takes an instance about 20 minutes to shut down after everyone leaves so if your zone is currently unplayable and don’t mind a 20 minute break, you should be able to resume shortly.

We’re very sorry for the poor performance this undoubtedly caused over the weekend for BB and LDL players.  I’ll see if I can put Brenlo on the spot for some bonus XP.

Unfortunately, he followed his post in the forums with this:

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this issue was something that started on Friday.  We’re aware that there are still lag issues and I by no means meant to imply that this last fix “fixed lag”.  There was a definite problem with load balancing that was making the problem much worse and that has been fixed.  You’ll probably still see lag issues that were there prior to Friday and we are working on tracking those down.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?start=75&topic_id=476210

I would like to thank Rothgaar for his time to come to our raid to view the lag issue  and be able to put the fix in so we can raid again!

I hope a fix to the remaining lag issues get resolved quickly as possible, such as the long zone times, the periodic broker lag and worst of all, the lag while fighting contested mobs in overland zones.

This is a PM from Rothgaar to a Dracos Argent member with some insight of the server system architecture:

We actually do have tools in place to monitor server health. It’s a pretty amazing tool and would be fun to show it to you and what all it can do. We also have people monitoring server status 24 hours a day so you’d think they would be made aware of this type of issue. Unfortunately with so many games to monitor and so many different types of health conditions to watch for, we have to create specific alerts to notify the Operations department when something is outside of ideal working parameters. We have many alerts created for things but in this particular instance, there was no alert that would have caught the problem. The first thing that came to mind when I saw the issue was “why don’t we alert on number of processes per machine?” So today you can bet I’ll be working with Operations to get that alert created so this won’t happen in the future. I’m sure there are other situations out there that we could be watching for as well, but its difficult to imagine some of them until they happen. This particular problem was a new one that had never occurred before. Ideally the quad-core servers should be running around 4 processes per machine so they each have their own dedicated CPU. But in this case some machines were running as many as 16 processes. It was pretty insane and no wonder why those processes were starved for CPU cycles.

Join SOE in Las Vegas for three days of revelry and celebration atFan Faire 2010. We’ll be returning to Bally’s Las Vegas Hotel & Casino from August 5th through August 8th, 2010!

Join SOE in Las Vegas for three days of revelry and celebration at Fan Faire 2010. We’ll be returning to Bally’s Las Vegas Hotel & Casino from August 5th through August 8th, 2010!

We are pleased to offer a new pricing structure this year, with more options to suit everyone’s individual needs.
Day Pass – $39* per day, Friday and Saturday

• Fan Faire T-shirt
• Fan Faire Gift Bag
• Access to all forums and roundtables scheduled for that day.
• Eligible to participate in any live events taking place that day.
• Day Pass does not include a special in-game item for your primary game

Silver Pass – $89*

• Fan Faire T-shirt
• Fan Faire Gift Bag
• Special Fan Faire in-game item for your primary game!
• Eligible to participate in the costume contest, forums, gaming roundtables, welcome reception, grand banquet, game-specific live events and any other special daytime or evening events!

Gold Pass – $109*

• Silver pass plus…
• Priority access to special events and registration!
• One complimentary green screen photo with the background of your choice!

Platinum Pass – $139*

• Silver and Gold pass plus…
• Second Fan Faire in-game item for your primary game!  Yes, this means you get two items with a Platinum Pass!
• Unlimited green screen photos with the backgrounds of your choice!
• VIP Check-In Lounge for Platinum Pass holders only!
• Premium Gift Bag with special giveaways (to be announced).
• Private VIP events for Platinum Pass Holders only!  You don’t want to miss out on this — Details to follow!

*plus any applicable taxes
*supplies are limited for Gold and Platinum passes
*Attendees must be 21 years or older with valid identification to attend certain evening events.
Silver, Gold, and Platinum pass holders will also receive a complimentary copy of the upcoming 17th expansion for EverQuest and the 7th expansion for EverQuest II!

We’ll bring you more info on schedules and events soon, so please stay tuned! Check here for answers to frequently asked questions!

Are you registered for Fan Faire 2010? Stop by the Official EQII forums to see who else will be there!

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/sony-online-entertainment

• Guild status has been added for Heroic zone boss kills and raid boss kills.
• Personal Supply Depots can no longer be “returned to owner”.
• New Mounts are available for purchase in North Odus (Scions of the Deepwater Knights), South Odus (City of Paineel) and from horse merchants in the cities of Kelethin, Freeport, Neriak and Qeynos for 90 level guilds.  In addition, a chance to obtain a mount is available in both the group and raid portion of Erudin Palace.

BATTLEGROUNDS

• You will now automatically unmentor when a battleground match ends.
• Going to a battleground and returning should not change the setting of roleplay or anon on your home server.

ITEMS

• Red Adornments are now Heirloom.
• Yellow adornments are now flagged heirloom.
• The Erollisi Day crafted masks, Face of Love and Mask of Passion, are no longer Lore, or No-Trade.
• The Runed Victim’s Skull has had its resists lowered.
• The minimum block chance on the Brawler Enervated weapons has been moved to the mythical spell.
• The Venomous Chain Legs of the Plague now have Torrent II rather than Fatal Lifetap II.
• Rune of Blasting can no longer critically hit.
• Many raid dropped bows have been changed from short bows to longbows.
• Two new bows have been added to drops for hardmode raid encounters.
• Resists added to many accessories.
• A small number of accessories had a higher-than-intended amount of spell reuse. The amounts have been lowered to be in line with non-BG items
• The resists and physical mitigation on the Indomitable jewelry set from Battlegrounds now only applies in PVP Combat.
• Merchant of Discord and Sisters of Battle items have been updated to match their Battleground or Open PVP counterparts.

SPELLS

• Berserker “Whirlwind” now persists through death.
• Monk “Dragon Rage” should function in PVP combat as a target lock.
• Torrent and Pestilential Rain effects should no longer break Mesmerize.
• Brawler’s Tenacity has a slightly longer duration.
• Deathward can now crit and can now be cast on the Defiler.

QUESTS

• The final encounter in the Heritage quest, “A Source of Malediction” will now reward AA experience.
• Players are no longer required to be inside the Necrotic Asylum when reading Dread Exarch Mordek’s journal to progress the quest.

KALADIM

• Gonga barrels cause much less damage now, an appropriate amount for the dungeon.

LAIR OF THE DRAGON QUEEN

• When a player summons Sherra everyone in the zone should now get a message telling you who summoned her.

ROYAL PALACE OF ERUDIN

• The disc associated with Gloom Chevalier Faris should no longer occasionally stop working if players leave the instance and return later.

THE HOLE: DEMITRIK’S BASTION

• Demitrik should no longer get stuck with his heal buff on if players spam click the machine before he teleports. This was also causing him to call his buffs at the incorrect times.
• The trash mobs in the zone have had their hitpoints reduced slightly. This does not include the specters in the first area although they have been made easier to pull without having to clear the first area.

THE HOLE: SPIRIT’S RESONANCE

• Nortlav the Scalekeeper should no longer possess players quite so many times and should have slightly more hitpoints so players fighting him can work on lowering his health while the possessed player worries about the books.
• Nortlav the Scalekeeper should no longer set his class to the same class as the person who he copied. This is to avoid some potential damage loops causing the fight to bug out.
• The Possessing Spirit of Kyrenna should no longer resurrect her minions or herself more than twice. Her health has also been adjusted.
• Players doing the quest “Entomologist Ally” can no longer target the Gargantuan Graveyard Stinkbug so the key can be looted.

VASTY DEEP

• The zone to Vasty Deep is now a clickable zone portal and no longer a zone line. You will need to click it to enter!