Spells: Wizards still able to translocate themselves

[Vianna]

Whoever said this didn't go live is completely wrong. On Tallon Zek they used to post these changes on Angelfire and I remember the specific discussion was these changes were made just because of the advantage it caused in PVP. It was changed when the deleveling mechanics were changed. These changes all happened when they started making changes to remove griefing and other things from their PVP servers.

This was the first announcement.

First wave of PvP changes:
When we patch next, the following changes will be implemented on the PvP servers: Consider: /Consider will only have three results when used to consider a Player Character. The character will show as 'green' if he is below the range that allows you to attack him. The character will show as 'white/black' if he is within your ability to attack. And the character will show as 'red' if he is above your range. Sanctuary Levels: Characters below level six will not be able to engage in PvP combat, unless they take part in a Guild War, duel or use the Arena.

De-Leveling: Characters that lose levels will only retain the skills of a character two levels higher. This means that if a character of level 10 somehow loses 5 levels, that character will only have skills that would be available to a 7th level character. This change will apply to all servers (it has to, code-wise). So the two level buffer is there to make certain that people that lose levels during normal gameplay will be minimally affected (hopefully not affected at all), while those that purposefully lose levels with the intent of causing other players grief will find themselves at no great advantage.

There may very well be other changes in the patch, so read the patch message carefully. And this is only the first of the things that we plan to change, so don't worry that this is all that we plan to do. We are taking a careful, step-by-step approach to changes whenever we can.
- Alan












Then the Patch notes were posted a day later...

** PvP changes **

We have made the first of our upcoming changes to the PvP aspects of EverQuest:

- Consider: /Consider will only have three results when used to consider a Player Character. The character will show as 'green' if he is below the range that allows you to attack him. The character will show as 'white/black' if he is within your ability to attack. And the character will show as 'red' if he is above your range. This will only take effect on PvP servers.

- Sanctuary Levels: Characters below level six will not be able to engage in PvP combat, unless they take part in a Guild War, duel or use the Arena. This will, obviously, only take place on PvP servers.

- De-Leveling: Characters that lose levels will only retain the combat skills of a character two levels higher. This means that if a character of level 10 somehow loses 5 levels, that character will only have skills that would be available to a 7th level character. This change will apply to all servers (it has to, code-wise). So the two level buffer is there to make certain that people that lose levels during normal gameplay will be minimally affected (hopefully not affected at all), while those that purposefully lose levels with the intent of causing other players grief will find themselves at no great advantage.

These are the first of the things that we plan to. We are taking a careful, step-by-step approach to changes whenever we can, and we have other changes planned for upcoming patches.

** Quest Changes **

- We've made a change to the Velious armor quests. The folks in Kael and in Skyshrine that give out rewards for these quests are now being stricter about who they will reward quest items to. You will have to be considered an 'ally' (see Features section below) by these NPCs in order to be able to complete these quests. If you are doing quests for the Coldain, however, they are somewhat less picky, and they only require that they consider you 'kindly' to reward you for your labors. - The Black Silk Cape will now drop more frequently.

** Bug Fixes **

- Attacking with a two-handed piercing weapon will now 'gray-out' the attack button as it should.

- Text that once read: "You cannot remove this affect." now reads "You cannot remove this effect." Changed by popular demand...

- Food Emotes: Forcing your character to eat by right clicking food will now properly display the appropriate emote to those in the area.

- Fixed a problem that often made it difficult to loot really large NPCs.

** Item Changes **

- The Shield of Tsunami can now be equipped in the secondary slot. - Quivers now reduce the delay time on bows, the better the quiver the faster your bow. We will not be listing the speed increase a quiver will give your bow, but you can tell the good quivers by their ability to reduce the weight of your arrows (better-made or magical quivers have this property).

- The Ivory Handled Falchion should now 'proc' without telling you that it is out of charges. You may need to contact your GM to replace the item with a new version if it is still acting strangely.

- The Opal Bracelet is now a wrist item, not a finger item. Be aware, once you remove it from your finger, it will not go back onto that finger, it will only fit on your wrists, as it should.

- The Large Dragonbone Shard will no longer appear to be a Staff of the Gathering.

- The Ring of Levitation will now poof when all the charges are used up, and should display the correct number of charges.

- The Priceless Velium Reinforced Bow now has a range of 200 instead of a range of 0. - The Refined Mithril Blade should now be equipable in both primary and secondary slots.

- The Unicorn Horn should now have a graphic.

- The Hammer of Flattening has been changed from tiny to large. This might cause you a little reorganization in your inventory.

- Runebranded Stone Buckler is now labeled as a shield and can be used to bash.

- The Ring of Pureblood is now a finger item, not a waist item.

** Spell Changes and Additions **

- Translocation spells:
Five new Wizard 'push' spells have been added (Translocate: Fay, Tox, North, Combine and Group). Translocate spells send the group to the location, while the Wizard remains behind. Translocate Group sends everyone in the group (except the Wizard) to their own bind points. Translocate Group can be found on NPCs in Velious (and they won't give them up easily). The others are available on an exclusive vendor. All Translocate spells (even the original Translocate) have confirmation boxes that must be accepted before the target will be sent. And Wizards can no longer Translocate themselves.

- Some lower 39th and 44th level Velious spells have had their drop rates increased.

- GM Resurrection has had it's name changed from ResurrectionGM to Customer Service Resurrection so that players will be able to better tell when they are getting a resurrection from the GM staff. GM resurrection will no longer have Res effects, and will leave the newly Ressed with full Hit Points and Mana.

- Divine Aura and spells of that type (Divine Aura - cleric, Divine Barrier - cleric, Kazumi's Note of Preservation - bard, Harmshield - necromancer, Quivering Veil of Xarn - necromancer) will now prevent the caster from being stunned when hit for their duration.

- The Eye of Zomm series of spells will no longer work in Kedge Keep. This change was made to prevent an exploit.

** Feature Additions and Changes **

- Looting text has been changed. You will now see a -- before and after any loot messages. This has been changed primarily to help prevent any fake looting messages from being thought of as real.

- When you loot an item, you will receive a text message telling you what you have just looted.

- Expanded Friends List: The Friends List will now hold 30 character names. And each character has its own friends list. You can find and edit this list with a text editor, if you need to, outside the game. You can locate the text files in your EverQuest directory. The files will look like this: _<#>.ini. The default Friends List for existing and new characters will be your old Friends List.

- The destroy or drop item confirmation box will now close if you accidentally pick up another item while they are open. This should prevent accidentally deleting or dropping the wrong item.

- When selling to a merchant, you can no longer sell items that are inside a container by having the container selected and clicking the sell button. The merchant will tell you that you need to empty the container before the merchant will buy it. This should prevent folks from accidentally selling items that they did not know were in those containers.

- You can now move items around inside containers that are in the bank. - There is a new /consider message: "regards you as an ally". This is the highest level of friendliness that an NPC will register using the /consider command. The faction required to reach this rating is significantly higher than 'warmly'.

- The EverQuest Team

You can find it here on the old Angelfire Page: http://www.angelfire.com/rpg/tztimes/index2.html

[Doctor Jeff]

Let's move this to resolved.