Test Update 19A: Part II

Alright, here's my final look at Test Update 19A.

You can now jump off a flying carpet or griffon at any point along your path by hitting your jump key. Beware, as you may take considerable falling damage.

Haha, how cool is that? It's something I've daydreamed about from time to time while on a long griffon ride but I never thought it would actually be implemented. Talk about freedom. I'm already thinking of "paratrooper" PvP raids in which a group of players use the griffon towers to ambush players from the sky.

By popular request from those unfortunate souls who are prone to meeting an untimely demise, potion, poison, and totem effects will now persist through death.

From LU18: "Poisons and potions will no longer drop when you die." Okay, for real this time. We mean it! Scouts are my dps arch-enemies but I'm willing to give them a break on this one. I don't think they should have to re-apply poison after every death.

Going more than 50 meters away from an encounter will cause the active Heroic Opportunity for that encounter to disappear for you, freeing you to perform other Heroic Opportunities on other encounters. Returning within range will cause the Heroic Opportunity to reappear as long as you aren't participating in any other Heroic Opportunities.

A minor annoyance but a noticeable one. You'll be traveling to meet some groupmates and the HO wheel pops up even though you're halfway across the zone. Nice job in fixing it.

Small obstacles and minor changes in elevation should now be less likely to prevent attacks from landing on a target. As long as your character has line of sight to most of a target's body, attacks should be likely to hit it. Please note that having the camera in first-person mode provides the best way to judge whether your character has clear line-of-sight to a target.

Again, it seems minor, but if it fixes an annoyance, I'm happy. The other day, my line of sight was broken by a table that went up to my knees. Silly. I hope this fix is addressing that issue.

The amount of status awarded by writs is now based on your level in relation to the writ's level rather than your guild's level.

This seems to make sense but I'm actually not sure about this one. You see, I view guild writs as something you do after you reach max level and you want to help level the guild. With this change will leveling the guild when you're at max level be much harder? Or does this only refer to personal status?

Have friends on other servers or in other games? Great! You can now add friends from other games or other servers in much the same way you would send them a tell (For example, you can /friend unrest.blackguard to add Blackguard from the server Unrest to your friends list).

I'd like a little more specificity on this one. Other games are mentioned. Does that mean I can add an SWG player to my friends list? That would be very cool.

You can now quickly change to a different character on your account by using the following command: /camp character_name

Sometimes little things can make a big difference. Switching from an alt two minutes before the raid is set to start without the hassle of going to the character select screen is one of them.

There is now an option to pop up a confirmation box when making expensive purchases from the Broker window. The default price is 10 gold, and the slider for the minimum price can be set from 1 gold to 5 plat. This is to prevent the accidental purchase of an expensive item. The option is available in Options -> User Interface -> Game Features -> Broker Window.

I'm not ashamed to admit I've done this once. It happens. Every week or so you see an angry exclamation in guild chat from someone who mistakenly bought an item they didn't want. What's worse, the people who get the profit are usually players who price their items intentionally high counting on mistakes like this. So I like this option. However, I will set it to a minimum of 1 plat so it doesn't annoy me too much and I suggest you do something similar.

You can now Buy Stacks or Buy Quantities of items on the Broker window.

The broker window is really getting to be a more pleasant experience and this will improve things even further.

Anonymous characters will not show up for any specific searches made by players.
Roleplaying characters will not show up in class, level, or race searches, but will still show up in LFG and LFW searches. They will also appear in guild and name type /who searches.

Okay, I definitely understand the anonymous portion of this change. In fact, it is long overdue. However, do players with the roleplay tag on really want to be filtered out of artisan class searches? I've sought out artisans in the past using this search and they have always seemed happy to get work. And, yes, I know you can still do a LFW search but I think keeping the LFW tag on all the time is annoying and I know others do to. If the majority of RP'ers like this change, I accept it. I'm just not sure this is what they want.

NPCs just got smarter. They will now use abilities only from their subclasses and have a larger selection of abilities and spells to choose from as they level.

Hmm. This seems like a rather major change that I haven't heard much forum commentary on. I really like the idea but I'm curious to see how it affects combat. Hard for me to comment without seeing it in action but it sounds like it could be fun.

You can now search for a particular recipe by name from the recipe window.
The maximum stack size of all tradeskill-used fuels is now 100 instead of 20.

I'm preparing to take another run at tradeskilling in the near future. Changes like this encouraging greatly. Making recipes easier to find is a big plus. And what really drove me nuts during tradeskill sessions was running out of ingredients. I hated having to go back to the vendor to get more coal or whatever. In our LU19 discussion, Nazeroth did mention that this might make the life of a botter a bit easier, and I think that's a valid point. I still like the convenience though. Now add a special tradeskill vault so I can keep all my tradeskill junk in one place and have access to it without zoning.

Also, don't forget that the revamped newbie zones are in testing. If you're interested, you can check out the In Testing forum.

Edit: Just noticed this post by Beghn that there are some pretty big tradeskill changes incoming as well.

I have to say that this Update really impressed me. What it tells me about the EQII team is that they play the game a lot and take notes about things that annoy them when they do. Either that or they really listen to feedback, even on minor issues. I hope they continue to keep up the good work.