Underfoot Early Access Game Update Notes - Tuesday, December 8, 2009

December 8, 2009
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*** Underfoot – Early Access Launch ***

Welcome to EverQuest Underfoot, the 16th expansion for EverQuest!

The Underfoot centers around the Heart of the World. This is the vast magma ball that floats in the center of a hollow sphere that stretches across a great distance. Standing on any open interior portion of the sphere, adventurers can look up to see the massive, blazing ball of living lava. The sphere is large enough that while individual areas may have a "bowl" shape it is very minor. Lava flows into and out of the Heart of the World from volcanoes, lava tubes and crevasses all around the hollow sphere, like blood into and out of a heart.

The Plane of Underfoot is ruled by a curious being known as Brell Serilis, the Duke of Below. It consists of an elaborate system of caves and tunnels and is inhabited by all sorts of creatures, both good and evil, that normally dwell underground.

In his temple at the top of the tallest volcano, Brell spends his days making new races. Most he destroys, returning them to their primal clay. Some he makes into his servants. Recently things have changed. Conflict exists in the Underfoot. There are those who continue to worship Brell Serilis and those who feel abandoned by him. Brell's presence is no longer felt in the plane, and in his absence much of the machinery that serves Norrath and other worlds is breaking down.

It is into this troubled realm that adventurers can now travel.

- New Content: New areas for adventurers to explore including Brell's Rest, Pellucid Grotto, The Underquarry, Brell's Arena, The Foundation, The Cooling Chamber, Arthicrex, Lichen Creep, Kernagir the Shining City, Fungal Forest, Volska's Husk, and Brell's Temple. Travel to the Underfoot solo, with a group, or in raids to complete new quests, tasks, and events to acquire new items, spells, tradeskill recipes, and abilities.

- Extended Target Window: Track friends and foes with greater accuracy. The target window now lets you assign people or group roles to specific locations on the window for easy re-targeting. You can track main tank, raid tanks, main target, main assist, puller, etc., or just put a specific player or NPC in the window.

- New Achievement System: Display and manage your progress through the world of Norrath. The achievement system allows players to track various categories of their advancement such as levels, Alternate Advancements, quest completions, and other progression tracking events. At the launch of Underfoot, players can track their General, Tradeskill and Underfoot progression Achievements.
- Open displays achievements you haven't completed yet.
- Complete lets you toggle the display of achievements you have already completed.
- Locked toggles the achievements you aren't quite ready to work on just yet. As an example, if you are level 30, you should be focusing on obtaining level 40 instead of level 50. In some cases, like quest lines, you may be able to complete locked achievements. This helps direct the players to content they should be focused on for their level and progression stage.

- Master Tradeskilling: Create powerful new weapons, armor, food and drink items, poisons and more.


*** Items ***

- Made changes to the Type 3 "Irae" augments that affect DoT spells. They should now be giving approximately the same total effect they did before the change to allow the focus "spell damage amount" to spread its damage over DoT spells. There may be further changes to these shards.

*** Tradeskills ***

- Aded an Ink of Pain to the Iceflame Guard research recipe. This is to include the Absorb Hit part of the Prism Skin that is a recourse on the Iceflame Strike part of Iceflame Guard.
- Added an Ink of Zek to the Last Rites research recipe. This is to include the chance spell part of the spell that casts the Last Rites Trigger spell.


*** Spells ***

- The Dominating Aura will now behave as an Aura instead of a Trap.
- Boon of the Cetacean and Boon of the Avian should now last 4 hours as described.


*** AA ***

- Calling forth a Servant of Ro now summons a slightly smaller servant.


*** UI ***
- Split the AA display into assigned and spent points.

- Changed -
EQUI_AAWindow.xml
EQUI_Animations.xml


*** Miscellaneous ***

- Reduced the prices for many guild hall portal attuning stones.
- Removed weapon base damage caps for all classes of characters above level 70.
- Fixed some issues where invulnerability type spells interacted badly with auras.

*** Known Issues ***

We are aware of some issues with the achievements listed below. These issues will be fixed in subsequent update.

- Conquest: "Gem Collector" is displaying the wrong gem names in the achievement window.
- The Time Trial and the Challenge of Toughness for Search to Saunk are currently not obtainable.
- Conquest: "Burn the Heretics" cannot currently be completed.
- The Achievements for epic 1.5s are not currently backfilling if you've completed the 2.0 quests.
- Conquest: "Alphabet Goop" is currently using the secondary names of the NPCs instead of their "title" names. Defeating them in the order of their secondary names will complete the achievement.


- The EverQuest Team



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