I take my time playing. After five years of playing (divided betweeen soloing cautiously with a halfling Ranger and grouping with my boys with alts created to help them. ), I finally reached lvl 81 recently, and my AA is already nearly maxed out.
The content has always mattered more to me than the status.
That being said, my halfling seems furious and confused.
He sees all these Lvl 85 noobs running around, and is ranting something in Stout that I'm not sure can be tranlsated. (Something about horrible diseases of the feet to someone, I'm not sure...)
Yeah, so ..........it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
As long as they don't make instant level 85 anything in tradeskill. But who would buy that, since most things you can craft, you can just buy in the marketplace anyways? The player driven economy has been centralized and nationalized like a third world country.
Like a bad king, selling knighthoods......tsk, tsk.
Heroic Characters Come to EverQuest II
We discuss the new instant level-85 character feature with Longdale and Georgeson.
To celebrate the new Heroic Character feature, SOE is running a promotion starting today, October 1, 2013 and ending on October 15, 2013. During the Hero’s Call promotion players may create one free Heroic Character. Some rules apply; existing accounts created on or before September 22, 2013 may create (or upgrade) one free Heroic Character per account, while newer accounts created on or after September 23, 2013 may only create (or upgrade) one free Heroic Character per household. The free character will be treated as a purchased version of the feature and will always remain playable even after the promotion ends.
When asked if Heroic Characters could be created on any server, including the regular Test server, we were told yes, these characters can be created on any server. Our next concern; would the cost of a Heroic Character include a character slot? Holly answered that character slots are not included in the purchase of a Heroic Character so, if you are not upgrading an existing character, be prepared to shell out an extra 1000SC ($10USD) if your character slots are filled.
Digging deeper into some of the quirks of Heroic Characters we found out that, in the time consuming process of backtracking into years-old content to obtain epic weapons, the team has “made a few adjustments, but we don’t want to trivialize those items.” New Heroic Characters will find themselves automatically teleported to Iceclad in Great Divide. According to Holly, “Each Heroic Character comes with a bag of equipment that includes some potions that will allow a teleport to Iceclad. There is also a tutorial that indicates – for those who upgraded to a Heroic Character – that they can find level-appropriate content in [Great Divide].”
If you were looking to fast-track to level 85 on a Channeler when the class is introduced in the upcoming Tears of Veeshan expansion, you are out of luck. We just got word that the team is “a long way from allowing Channelers as Heroic Characters.”
One long-demanded service has been for the feature-only expansion pack, Age of Discovery, to be broken up into a-la-carte purchases. The EverQuest II team has been listening and starting today players can now choose to purchase the individual features that they are interested in or the entire AoD bundle for Station Cash in the Marketplace. All players will benefit from this change as “the 20 AAs originally granted with AoD will be included as part of the base game available for all members,” raising the current maximum amount of Alternate Advancement points from 300 to 320 for everyone. One more service now available for purchase is a 280AA bauble (instant 280 AA for level 10+ characters), which was previously only granted in limited quantity to Chains of Eternity purchasers.
Deviating from the topic at hand for a bit, we discussed when the long-running Ages End prophecy would finally conclude. "We had big plans this summer to end it," Holly said, "but given where our expansion is going, and we really wanted to make Kerafyrm a legitimate bad guy in this game, because we haven't really done that successfully so far. With Tears of Veeshan you're really going to see some things happen where he actually does develop as a character, and really becomes a bad guy. It's really going to be worth us extending the story with him and hopefully it will culminate into a big event next summer." Holly also began to mention that they have some ground-breaking plans for next year, but quickly halted and said they can't be discussed yet, but that "it's going to be amazing."
The mysterious dinosaurs we saw at SOE Live are planned for "future, future, future content," according to Holly. "You could probably make an educated guess if you know our storyline." Unfortunately, this Norrathian lore nut is at a loss, as the only dinosaur-like creatures introduced in EverQuest franchise history have been raptors and EQII’s version of Allizewsaur. We touched briefly on Tears of Veeshan and got confirmation that there will be a Collector's Edition for the expansion.
Listen to the call of the hero and create one free Heroic Character today in EverQuest II! Check out the full patch notes for this update and we'll see you in Norrath!
Ann "Cyliena" Hosler, Managing Editor
Follow me on Twitter: @Cyliena
