GU61 - Success or Failure?

GU 61 is in place. Yup, you guessed it, there’s been some hiccups. Firstly, the unadorning / unattuning didn’t quite go to plan. There’s been many reports and this includes myself, where items were unattuned and then after switching between toons, or logging in then out, the items became attuned again. This didn’t affect me too much as all of my kit that became free again were placed in to my shared bank straight away and those items remained unnattuned.

I had an additional problem. One of my pieces of equipment (my SF tier 2 raid helm – Rune Scraped Turban) had its red adornment pop off, then it wouldn’t let me reapply it. I even went and bought a new one just in case, but alas that didn’t work either. So I petitioned that problem. I didn’t hear of anyone else having any re-adorn issues.

There have also been reports of AAs resetting again after folks had painstakingly gone through the new trees and reset to their new spec. That hasn’t happened to me, but I ended up spending about an hour looking at the AA revamp and to be honest I wouldn’t relish doing it again. Stupidly, I didn’t save my new setup in my AA mirror.

So why’s that? Why would not saving be stupid? Well, because of all the issues, parts of GU61 will be run again today to try and hotfix the issues. The update time will be the same as yesterday which won’t be too bad. What will be a pain is that all of your equipment will become unattuned again with adorns popping off if you are wearing the armour. I haven’t read that they are going to reset AAs again, but I wouldn’t bet against it happening. So, if you are reading this in time before 3pm GMT today, then you still have a chance to go and unequip everything again and save your AA trees. If not you may have some more work to do to get things set up again when you log in later.

Overall, aside from the issues, I’m very pleased with how the re-itemisation went, and especially pleased that they included SF gear in the project. I have basically replaced the three remaining PQ rare armour pieces I have with old SF raid gear. After the revamp the stats are extremely good and probably place tier 2 SF raid gear somewhere between Ry’Gorr stuff and fabled instance drop stuff. I’m extremely happy I’m a hoarder in EQ2. My bank slots all have 44 slot bags in them and there are only a few free places as I always keep the previous few sets of armour / equipment I wore. Being able to go back and review their stats was very useful and I used a few pieces of armour and some jewellery. My crit mit has gone up from 109% to 142%, my crit bonus / crit chance / potency / resists have all rocketed. The only thing I have seen a detrimental difference to is my multi attack. I have lost about 20%.

The best way to see how all this shapes up is of course to run a few instances, but it took so long to reset everything I didn’t have time last night, so I headed to the training dummies to see what difference the changes had made. For my ‘control’ aspect of the test, I always use the group dummies (which creates about 10 level matched heroic dummies), and then kill three of them before ending the combat, to see how my DPS fared. The reason I do it that way is to simulate being in a group. Yes, I won’t have group buffs, but I reckon the time it takes to do those three is akin to a normal group encounter when you have a full group backing you up. My previous DPS high on this test was 42k. I did it twice last night and got 86k and 91k. So if that equates to a similar improvement in instances, then I’m happy with the game update. Yes there are a few teething problems, but then again there always is. They will sort them all eventually I’m sure. I’m not sure however, how long ‘eventually’ will be.

One of the things to consider, even though they have had the update improvements on test, is how it will affect the rest of the game play. Use Voltaan as an example. If from the re-itemisation like me many have been able to utilise previously won gear that is of a high standard and they generally see almost a 100% increase in their performance, then will this not trivialise many of the existing instances (aside from the already mega tough ones)? I ran through a couple of instances the night before the revamp and to be honest that was kinda easy as it stood. I’m thinking it will be cake now.

You see that’s one of the problems with such big revamps to a system. The knock on effects will come to light over the coming months, and as usual, hotfixes will follow to sort them. This isn’t a moan, it’s just the accepted way of how things work in EQ2 development. And let’s be honest, despite the hiccups, despite the unknown long term affects of the GU, the game is still an amazing one with so much detailed and fantastic content that even if they messed it up big style, I’d probably still log in to experience Norrath.

Sometimes we expect miracles from SoE because we pay them every month. Reality is somewhat far away from that though. Look at the actual stats. 54,000 items to re-itemise, and that was just a part of the GU. Now I pretty sure the dev team probably only has about 30 - 40 employees, if that, and there is a huge amount of work there for such a small number. Yes, there is the argument that they should employ more staff with our subs to speed things up and to make for better content. But my stance against that is a simple one. Too many cooks spoil the broth. What I mean by this, is quantity does not necessarily equate to quality. SoE have a good team. Yes it takes a little time for them to get it right, but they usually do, and usually with style (eventually). It’s always easy to focus on the bad stuff. But look a little more carefully past the surface and it becomes apparent that ‘there is more to heaven and earth my dear Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy’. Yup, I’m in an optimistic mood today.

Right, now I have to ring Ema and get her to unequip all my stuff again!

Be well.