The EverQuest II Expansion preview took place Saturday afternoon at Fan Faire. SOE staff attending were:

Jason "Fyreflyte" Woerner, Jennifer "Kirstie" Gerull, Emily "Domino" Taylor, Jeremy "Jindrack" Gess, Bill Yeatts, Chris "Aeralik" Kozak, Joshua "Autenil" Kriegshauser, Roger "Patherpanchali" Uzin, Greg "Rothgar" Spence, Carlos "Gninja" Mora, Lindsay Morgan "miss doomcookie" Lockhart, Paul "Cronyn" Molina, Noel "Ilucide" Walling, Bruce "Froech" Ferguson.

Ilucide presented the main points of the expansion with an accompanying slide show. Of note was an explanation of "The Shadow of Odyssey " which was trademarked accidently. The fifth expansion's name is "The Shadow Odyssey ".

The backstory, from the slide is :

For those who haven't been following the lore we've been releasing, the story of the expansion revolves around you, the players, studying the intrepid Ethernaughts and their exploits more than 4,000 years ago.

The void storms opening now have appeared before, and it's up to you to figure out how to close them once more.

You won't simply be retracing the Ethernaughts' steps though - you'll be tracking down a new way to close the portals, and perhaps even meet the old heroes and earn some of their treasures yourselves.

"Ethernaughts" is apparently not spelled correctly; Ilucide muttered something about trusting your spell checker.  The correct spelling is "Ethernaut".

 

Slide 1: So What's new?

• First - no level cap increase.
• When we looked at what we had in front of us we decided that a new max level would spread new players too far apart from older characters.

Slide 2: Renewed focus on group content

• 20 single group instances
• All with their own unique feel *Different named and boss events (like VoES, Maiden's & Runnyeye 2
• Reasons to return multiple times for everyone, not just for loot in the zone - more on that later.
• Unique themes include: Befallen, Droga/Nurga, Guk, Miragul, Mistmoore, Najena, and the Void.
• Dungeons will be level-scaled to the level of their outdoor attached zones (ie: Najena is 50-80)

Ilucide said that some of the dungeons will scale and some won't; it depends on the outdoor level of the zone.

Slide 3: Overland?

• One massive new overland zone - The Moors of Ykesha.
• Filled with content for 77+, solo players will find great stories and rewards by adventuring here.

Ilucide said that this is the former Innothule Swamp, and it looks *so* much better.

Slide 4: 4 new raid zones

• 3 zones set up like Shard of Hate - progression in difficulty within the zone means that there's something for everyone to cut their teeth on.
• One shorter single-boss zone *These including Befallen, Mistmoore, Guk, and of course, the Void
• Some folks who followed the Desert of Flames lore might remember someone who was banished to the void. Would we leave a story left untold?

Ilucide hinted that the DoF storyline relates to the final boss.

Slide 5: Achievements? Yep, we've got those

• 60 points to spend in an all new tree
• No new points in the old trees.

Slide 6: Deities Two new Deities

• Following the introduction of the prophet, Rodcet Nife will join the deities who have returned to Norrath.
• Some people may have been wondering about that lovely lady on the box art from yesterday's presentation [Friday's annual address]. She'll be the other, but will behave in a non-traditional fashion. Players will have to unlock the ability to worship her on a per-server basis.

Slide 7: Heritage quests? We've got those!

• At least five new heritage quests spanning the various dungeons and moors.

When asked about the "at least", Ilucide said, "We're hoping for more, but we promise five."

Slide 8: Missions

• Every dungeon theme will have rotating missions.
• These will award shards that can be used to purchase powerful new items and equipment.
• They give everyone a great reason to play with other folks even beyond normal dungeon drops.

Slide 9:  New tradeskill missions

• These adventures work much the same way in which our previous Griffon Tower & Spire Building events worked, but on a smaller scale, allowing groups of tradeskillers to work together for a greater goal.
• And, of course, that means new recipes, tradeskill equipment, and such for doing what you love to do!

Aeralik then gave us a glance at some of the dungeon themes, including a live look at Nu'roga, which has four floors and a lot of goblins around level 72. In Befallen there was a room that sent waves of EQ1 nostalgia through the audience. While we were looking at pickures of Lower Guk Ilucide commented, "Live... not so much." Najena's Forge has a lava wall that you'll have to puzzle through.

Ilucide said there are some "pretty decent puzzle elements" in these zones; there will definitely be a learning curve.

Aeralik gave us a peek at the new AA screen. They've moved away from having to buy a lot of AA you really didn't want just to get the one you did. There are 60 points to spend in this tree, bringing your total AA to 200. 10 AA per branch will open the special skill and the next branch. here is a general row, which includes a tradeskill and harvesting AA, things for everybody, then three trees which each lead to a special skill. The first is an archetype branch, the second a class branch, the third a subclass branch. Every time you complete a branch you get a special skill for that branch, and the end of the subclass branch are "two little special skills which are very nice."

    

While he teased us mercilessly not quite mousing over the new AA's, he said that this AA tree should address some of the pet peeves of some classes. They build on the role of the archetype and get more specific as you go down. Aeralik said that the tank class AA's "focus a lot on the issues that you guys have been discussing in the forums." And there's a bard runspped AA. The harvesting AA "is really nice, it builds on something we use a lot. You'll like it. I think someone asked yesterday about increasing the number of things you can get off a node? It's kind of along those lines." (Further discussion on that AA was put off until the Tradeskill Panel.)

--QA--

The Q&A session is rendered as faithfully as possible from a recording.

Q : Will the new AA be usable with the AA mirror?

A: (Autenil) The AA mirror will automatically pick up the new AA tree.

Q: Itemization has been a serious issue, will that be corrected this expansion? In terms of raid items and Legendary items.

A: (Fyreflyte) We definitely do have a plan for itemization. Assuming you're referring to the fact that a lot of raiders are using Legendary items over some of the Fableds, and yes, we've spend a lot of time going over how the difficulty of the different dungeons are going to progress and we will make sure there are upgrades for you with Fabled items so you don't see a bunch of raiders wearing Legendary single group content type items.

Q: Contested: will there be any this expansion besides the Avatars?

A: (Ilucide) We'll have a new Avatar, Rodcet Nife, that will go into the rotation. But we don't currently have plans for another contested right now.

Q: Will there be spending restrictions on the new AA similar to the level restrictions right away? Or day one can I just respec right away and take some of my 140 points.

A: There are going to be restrictions on it but we haven't set all the specifics yet.

Q: Missions: Are they going to be anything like LDoN's EQI, and will they be limited, like if you only have four people you can choose easy, hard, medium, or is the mission based group-wise, for six?

A: (Paul) It's based group-wise for six. Basically you can get one a day, it's going to be one mission per dungeon that is available to everyone that they can do that day. So basically you'll be able to go through it, you'll complete it, and then you'll get a reward you'll be able to spend like LDoN, like a token system.

Q: Solo content, is there going to be an increase in solo content, and reward items, or better reward items for solo players?

A: (doomcookie) Yes, Moors of Ykesha is pretty much going to be all solo content. There's going to be bucketfuls of quests there. We have a few competing factions in that area, so you will be able to infiltrate some other factions or choose to join with one rather than the other, I hear there's a lot of troll pirates, and that's going to be a lot of fun. There's a lot there and there's going to be some good rewards. We definitely have a commitment to having a whole scale of rewards; the longer quest lines are going to have the better rewards, the shorter questlines will have your basic throw-away stuff.

Q: About contested mobs, a lot of top raiders complain about the lack of contesteds, so this is a suggestion more than a question, like currently there's 12 avatars, and you're going to add two more, right?

A: (Ilucide) One, one does not behave as the other.

Q: Okay, my suggestion was why not make like all the evil avatars share a spawn, all the neutral ones and all the good ones, then there will be more contested.

A: We've thought about that before, and we'll keep thinking about it.

Q: And about The Tangrin? Currently he's the only contested mob out right now but he doesn't drop items for every archetype, is there anybody looking into that?

A: (Fyreflyte) Yes, I'm currently very busy, as you might imagine, with all the new stuff that's coming out, but we have talked about adding some more items to The Tangrin because he does have a pretty small loot table. At some point I would really like to get to that, I can't make promised on when that will be but it is on my list.

Q: Guild Halls: In some instances you'll have good and evil in the same guild. Will a call be provided?

A: (Jindrack) The first initial time you go to your guild hall you'll need to get there on foot, but there's an Amenity to buy, the Guild Translocation Beacon that when you activate it and click it you'll get your Call to Guild Hall, and that will be your main way of getting back. If your guild hall is inside the city you might need help the first time.

Q: Is there going to be a new epic quest and if so will it upgrade our old epics from this expansion?

A: (Ilucide) My answer ot this would somewhere along the lines of the Beastlords. Epic quests are a huge amount of work. It literally took most of our design department 3+ months to do all of those. So right now we have no plans to do more epic quests. (doomcookie) There will be a signature quest which will be long, full of lore, and hopefully wont have the steps where you have to do a lot of redundant things just to make it long. There will be distinctly good and evil versions of that quest so you don't feel you have the same goals as someone with a complete opposite world view as you.

Q: Guild Halls: There were two Amenities shown, a Status Executor hireling, and a Commodities Exporter hireling, can you describe what those do?

A: (Jindrack) Those two are both vendor trash loot merchants that you can have in there so you don't have to go to the city to sell your stuff. The Status Executor buys your status drop items and the loot vendor just takes your trash like your Petrified Seeds that you would regularly put on the merchant there.

Q: Missions: The shards, the items that you purchase, would they be equivalent to Treasures, Legendary, or would more shards equate to even getting items as high as Fabled.

A: (Fyreflyte) We're probably going to do several power classes of items, they will range in expense and they will start off pretty high-end Legendary, there will be some that will be roughly low-end raid Fabled.

Q: Since the new overland zone is formerly known as the Innothule Swamp, are we going to be learning more about Ogres and Oggok?

A: Not Oggok, specifically. There is a group of ogres there called the Bulosi (sp) ogres that have to do with the Greenmist, but that's as much ogre love as will be there. The Moors of Ykesha were mainly the home of trolls and frogloks, ogres were in Feerrott, so we're focusing on the southeastern half of that. So you'll be getting Grobb and Gutka. Q: Missions: You said there was one per day, I hope that's one per dungeon per day? A: (Paul) It's one per dungeon per day, so you'll be able to do all of them.

Q: If I start a mission, and my group breaks up in the middle of it, will I be able to group with other people to complete it?

A: It works like a regular group, it's not tagging your group, it's tagging your characters. So if you go through and break up you can hook up with somebody else.

Q: You said 20 new instances. Do they all scale to 80?

A: (Ilucide) Some of them scale from various levels, Najena and Miragul's will scale from 50 to 80. They all scale based on the level of the outside zone. The Mistmoore one will scale from 70 to 80. They all go to 80.

Q: Do any of the AA's upcoming allow abilities to span across a raid as opposed to just a group?

A: (Autenil) There is some of that, yes.

Q: Would the armor you can get with the shards, are they going to be just specifically archetype or will they be by class?

A: (Fyreflyte) It takes a lot of time to design whole sets for each class, so I do tend to stick to some of the archetypes for the majority of the gear. But I've definitely been focusing a lot more on on splitting that up from just having four. I've been doing a lot of like specially bard items, and crusader items, and then priests will hopefully be happy. I've separated out all of their armor types and put them on smartloot tables. So templars won't be running around in leather and yelling at me on the forums. So I will be doing some specific stuff, I can't tell you how much just yet. The majority of it will be archetype based.

Q: Avatars and the Avatar loot table, is there a way to go away from a global loot table to give a better chance to get a certain item. Also, with bringing epics into the game, the primaries are less desirable now, would it be possible to make all the primaries secondaries?

A: (Autenil) For the Avatar loot for the next expansion we're basically going to wipe the slate clean and start with some new stuff. And then we're going to work the loot tables with what we create from there. So if there's something you'd really really like get it now.

Q: KoS leveling was mostly group, by Kunark it was mostly solo content. Will that balance out, or will we once again have the choice to solo or group heroics?

A: (Ilucide) Looking at leveling is something we've been doing a lot recently. It's not necessarily connected to the expansion because we're not raising the level cap but we definitely want to make sure that both playstyles are totally supported. So we'd like to swing the XP back so they're more in line, about equal.

Q: In RoK We saw the mob AI get improved, casters would actually stop and do their spells fro a distance, will we see any more mob improvement or enhancements or just general environment changes such as combat music or anything else that would change the play in general?

A: (Ilucide) It was mentioned that the dungeons are a little more puzzle-oriented, and that is not necessarily in the way that you progress through them, but also to the mobs inside them. So you'll see a lot more unique boss fights that are like what you would see in Maiden's.

Q: It was previously mentioned there were going to be changes in PvP could you go more into that?

A: Please come to the Gameplay forum.

Q: Missions: When you complete a mission will you be able to get guild status like you do with other instances?

A: We hadn't talked about that. But with the system in place there's a possiblity we could do lots of different stuff. We've actually discussed moving the writ system more over to this so we'll be able to award an appropriate amount of faction and status that's independent from running a single write repeatedly.

Q: Is there any possibility of them adding more X2 content? Because there hasn't really been any since Village of Shin, and the previous ones generally were not worth the effort involved. I'd like to have like a whole dungeon X2 with some decent rewards.

A: (Ilucide) Funny you should mention that. So, not for the expansion launch, but we are looking at that possibility for a unique dungeon coming out after the expansion. But don't hold my feet tot he fire on that.

Q: Could you give us the strat for Rodget Nife, and will ther ebe any new adornments to fill the gap and help our high-end weapons better?

A: (Ilucide) As to the first question, I'd say make the green bar go all the way to the left. (Domino) As for tradeskill itemization, that's still something we are working on, so it's not finalized.

Q: with the new AA, I guess you guys are going to put in more spells and tactics, more abilities in general?

A: (Jindrack) We're not doing any new special spells for classes at this time. Those skills that were on the right hand side of the Achievement window, when you buy those those are your new skills for the expansion.

Q: And with those new skills, regarding the PvP server, is the PvP gear going to change at all, like to benefit those new AA items?

A: (Fyreflyte) I have to do a whole range of new PvP gear, that's a good idea. We'll take that into account.

Q: Will the Ykesha zone be on the same scale as the Kunark zones, maybe a ginormous one like the overland or will it go back to being a smaller zone like the older ones.

A: (doomcookie) It's... huge. And whenever I think I'm done they add a new cave system. It's as big as anything in Kunark. IT may even be bigger, actually. It's very very large.

Q: And will there be NPC who lead us into the Ykesha zone or will we just have to guess, I'm the right level so I'll head there now.

A: There will be indications. once you get there it will be much in the way of other zones, there will be people, there will be logical reason to go some place next and ti will kind of lead you there. (Gninja) The live event for GU 49 will be rather big. It will lead you into Innothule. By the time you can actually go to Innothule you and everyone in the game should know how to get there.

Q: With some of the that were released with Rise of Kunark we saw puzzles within a given instance that you had to do in a certain sequence in order to get to the last mob and that's not so different from raid instances or anything else, but going back to the Estate of Unrest, what we saw there was an instanced zone with a story from beginning to end that had real lore behind it, and as one write up said "There is no quest in this zone, the zone is the quest." Are we going to see more content with that kind of back story?

A: (Paul) So basically all of the themes, there's one story that basically pervades the whole thing, so it's like you'll go through the first section of Guk and you'll be told a little of the story and you'll move on to the next section of Guk and you're told a little of the story, until the final part. And those quests you all do once, it's not actually part of the mission system. The missions are defendant on that but the missions contribute to the story. We tried to make sure everything fit into the theme. So it wasn't just like, "Oh go kill me 10 frogloks" and no one cares why. You're being told a story as it goes and it's not just the quests, it's the population. To answer your questions, yeah, I think you'll see not only do the quests tell the story, the population tells, the story, the zone tells the story. Hopefully you'll get a lot of lore as you go through these and they're all like that.

Q: Any more puns like the "broken stalagknights" [a mob we saw on the zone demo earlier].

A: (Paul) We like puns.

Q: My question is about the zone, you said they'd scale and the loot would scale. Would that be the loot items themselves that scale or will there be separate look tables for the various tiers?

A: (Fyreflyte) So what I've been doing so far, I'm designing all the items initially just for the level 80 version of the dungeon to make sure that those all fit into the progression scheme that we have worked out for loot. And then I'm going to be going back over them and basically just scaling everything down. So you'll see basically lesser versions of the same items in each of the level tiers for the dungeon. I'll probably be using a system similar to what I used for the item revamp. It's all balanced around the level 80 versions.

Q: I have a question about older instances and scaling. I was wondering if you'd be scaling those so that we actually have reasons to go back and do those again.

A: (Ilucide) Scaling for us is a little bit more than just flipping a switch. It does come down to that but there's a lot of other things that are involved. We don't currently have any plans to upscale dungeons.

Q: I was wondering the location of the various place like Befallen in EQI was off of Commonlands, is it going to be off Commonlands again, I'd guess that some of the other places would be located in areas that were similar to where they were in EQI?

A: (Ilucide) Yes, absolutely. All the dungeons are where you would expect them to be. Befallen is in Commonlands, Miragul's is in Everfrost.

Q: In Kunark the soloable stuff isn't really soloable for many classes. And I'm wondering if the stuff that's supposed to be soloable will actually be soloable for somebody to fight at an appropriate level, not waiting until it's green so you can kill them.

A: We definitely do want to make sure that every class can solo well, and so we do have key members that play all classes. Class balance is definitely something that we're continually looking over.

Q: So you plan of giving druids and sorcerers more ports, and what's the means of travel going to be like?

A: It's... awesome. (Gninja) With the live event that's coming up the actual way that you're going to get to the new lands is by airship. The airship is actually going to be built much like the spire event. And that's part, only part of what the giant event is in [GU]49. Not only will you have to build the airship but you'll also have to build the platform it launches from, along with research maybe an older airship and find out how to build it. (doomcookie) Gnomes were the first people to reach Innothule, and so they have a few very fun ways of getting around that zone.