The clockwork armies of the evil gnomish necromancer Meldrath the Malignant gather in the Steamfont Mountains, awaiting his order to invade the kingdom of Ak'Anon. The launch of his great air fortress Mechanotus has torn open the earth, exposing new paths into unexplored regions of the ancient continent of Faydwer.

Rediscover Faydwer as you adventure in the nearby Loping Plains, home to the soul eating wereorcs of Bloodmoon Keep. Strive to end the torment of humans and elves cursed for centuries in the Hills of Shade. All the while, an ancient menace stirs east of the Dragonscale Hills, where the prismatic dragon Kerafyrm the Awakened plans his revenge.

Level Cap Increase: Players can now achieve level 80. New high level item sets, new Alternate Advancement ability lines, and new spells will come with this increase, including a new AA that grants a new spell slot.

Heroic Items: One aspect of player power is based on the seven physical and mental attributes of their characters: Agility, Charisma, Dexterity, Intelligence, Stamina, Strength, and Wisdom.  For player characters that have reached the maximums for these attributes, equipping normal items with increased attributes offers no benefit.  Heroic Items feature particular stats that allow players to go beyond those maximums.  For each point in a heroic stat, the player gains one point in the statistic and the maximum on that statistic is increased by one point.  In addition, heroic stats offer benefits beyond the normal statistics.

- Heroic Intelligence: For intelligence-based casters, increases mana pool, mana regen, and the maximum amount of mana regen a character can have.

- Heroic Wisdom: For wisdom-based casters, increases mana pool, mana regen, and the maximum amount of mana regen a character can have.

- Heroic Strength: Increases endurance pool, endurance regen, and the maximum amount of endurance regen a character can have.  Also increases damage done by melee attacks and improves the bonus granted to armor class while using a shield.

- Heroic Stamina: Increases hit point pool, hit point regen, and the maximum amount of hit point regen a character can have.  Also increases endurance pool, endurance regen, and the maximum amount of endurance regen a character can have.

- Heroic Agility: Increases endurance pool, endurance regen, and the maximum amount of endurance regen a character can have.  Also increases the chance to dodge an attack, grants a bonus to defense skill, and reduces falling damage.

- Heroic Dexterity: Increases endurance pool, endurance regen, and the maximum amount of endurance regen a character can have.  Also increases damage done by ranged attacks, improves chance to successfully assassinate or headshot, and improves the chance to riposte, block, and parry incoming attacks.

- Heroic Charisma: Improves reaction rolls with some NPCs and increases the amount of faction you gain or lose when faction is adjusted.

New Content: There are 15 new realms for adventurers to explore including Meldrath's maniacal Fortress Mechanotus, the Dragonscale Hills, the Loping Plains, and Kerafyrm's Lair: Crystallos. Travel through Faydwer solo or with groups to complete new quests, tasks, events, and raids and to acquire new items, spells, tradeskill recipes, abilities, and more.

*** Live Highlights ***

Book of Legends: The Book of Legends, a tome that holds the record of those who have come together to celebrate EverQuest at the SOE Fan Faires, now lives in the library within Plane of Knowledge.

New Loot All Options: "Loot All" functionality has been added to corpses. This includes a "Loot All" button on the loot window and the ability to shift-right-click loot a corpse.

AC Mitigation Improvements: We modified the AC Caps and over-cap returns for mitigation for all classes to bring them more in line with their intended ability to mitigate damage. Warriors, Paladins, Shadowknights, Clerics, and Monks received a minor increase in their mitigation ability. Rangers, Bards, Rogues, Shaman, Beastlords, and Berserkers received a moderate increase in their mitigation ability. Druids, Necromancers, Wizards, Enchanters, and Magicians received a considerable increase in their mitigation ability.

Fog Rendering System Enhancements: An entirely new fog rendering system has been implemented in the EverQuest graphics engine. This new system is used in all zones that currently have fog.

Multi-core CPU Support: If you have a Multi-core CPU you no longer have to manually set their processor affinity! EverQuest will automatically assign itself to an available core. If you run multiple copies of the client, each new copy running will assign itself to the next available core. Those interested in customizing which core or cores EverQuest clients run on, check the forums.

*** Recently Reported Issues ***

While some of the other issues that were resolved in this update were reported via bug reports, here are a few we'd like to highlight.

Issue: West Display Bug
Summary: When you face west the video geometry disappears except the UI and the Sky. When you face another direction the issue goes away. Normally this is only fixed by doing a reboot of your PC or reloading EQ.
Status:  We have made a change that should reduce the chances of the "west bug" occurring; unfortunately the change requires us to turn off some optimizations. If you want to disable this workaround, please add the following line to your eqclient.ini: DisableWestBugFix=1 (The EQ team would like to thank Community Member Strommmm for his feedback on helping us with this issue.)

Issue: Solteris Instability
Summary: Some people have reported that the Solteris raid zone continuously crashes during raids.
Status: Optimizations have been put in place to improve stability. We will continue to monitor the status of this zone and other instanced zones.

*** Items ***

- Prestidigitase, Staurolite, Harmonagate and Taaffeite have been modified to work in the new jewelcraft system. They will also continue to work in their original fashion if you prefer the jewelry made that way.
- Improved damage on some high end hand-to-hand weapons
- Improved damage on several 2 handed weapons
- New item modifiers are available in Secrets of Faydwer zones:
 - Damage Shield Mitigation: Reduces the amount of damage taken from damage shields on your opponent.
 - Heal Amount: Increases healing spells by the total amount of the modifier.  This is a base value that is scaled to the casting time of the spell so quick casting spells get less and longer casting spells get more.
 - Spell Damage:  Increases damaging spells by the total amount of the modifier.  This is a base value that is scaled to the casting time of the spell so quick casting spells get less and longer casting spells get more.
 - Clairvoyance: Gives a chance to gain mana equal to the total amount of the modifier when casting spells.

*** Spells ***

- Lesser Summon Corpse, Summon Corpse, Conjure Corpse, and Exhumer's Call have had their scribe-levels lowered for shadowknights.
- The Bewilderment line now has an improved resistance modifier.
- Player animations when using various AE spells and combat abilities now display properly.
- The protection granted from Shielding Thunder now stacks with Weapon Shield Discipline.
- The Consecrate Ground line now has a chance to root undead NPCs that enter the aura's area of effect.
- Recast timers on many mage summon item spells such as the Phantom Armor line, Aenda's Trinkets line, and Armaments line were removed.
- Necromancer pet haste now bestows strength and a damage mod.  Upgrades to the line should be improvements under all situations.
- NPC casters will no longer auto-learn Dispel-type player spells. 
- The Decrepit Skin, Ward of Tunare, and Skin of the Reptile lines are now limited by the number of heals / runes bestowed to the buffed player instead of number of hits scored against the buffed player.  The number of "procs" should be relatively the same, but no longer random.  These spells will scale down in effectiveness against lower level NPCs.
- Beam of Solteris and Hail of Arrows now have a hit limit of 8 targets.
- The cleric group complete healing spell "Word of Redemption" now mimics Complete Heal in that it heals for 7500 and cannot be focused.
- Single-target fire, ice, and magic instant cast spells from TSS and SoF now share the same recast timer.  The recast delay on Cloudburst has been decreased so it can be chained.  The Cloudburst line is now more damaging but less efficient than the - Flashfires and Cold Snap lines.  Recourses from these instant cast spells now bestow a short-duration buff that applies a damage increase to the next spell with a 3 second cast time or more.  Most other wizard direct damage spells have had their cast times nearly halved and had this time applied to the reuse delay, allowing the use of 2-3 direct damage spells in the time that would previously be required to cast one.

*** Tradeskills ***

- There is a new level 80 cultural armor set for all races and level 75 and 80 cultural symbol sets. New quests can be found for level 75 and level 80 quests.  Additionally there are new cultural raid augments to go with the cultural armor for the Serpent's Spine, the Buried Sea, and Secrets of Faydwer.
- Jewelry Making has evolved to a new method. Now jewelry makers will make base pieces of jewelry and gems that can be put in this jewelry for different effects.  This will allow people to get jewelry customized for their needs.
- Practitioners of spell research will no longer need to use runes, words and pages.  Instead, they can use the systematic spell research system to make all spells previously made with these materials.
- Within one of the newly discovered areas of Faydwer you will be able to find a gnome who wants a measure of revenge.
- A discovery has been made and now Gem Studded Chains are less difficult to make.

*** AA ***

- Harm Touch and Lay on Hands have been reworked. Changes to how these abilities work will enable us to more easily adjust and tune these abilities. The primary change you will notice is that both of these abilities have been changed from innate skills to the AA system. For the first 10 ranks of these new AAs you will automatically gain the next rank as you level up - you won't need to purchase the AAs. Starting at level 51 you can continue to increase the power of your ability by purchasing new ranks of AAs. These roughly correspond to some of the previous AAs that existed for either ability.

All previous functionality for these abilities has been turned off. All AAs based on focusing these abilities have either been refunded and replaced with new AAs or have been modified to work with the new abilities.

- Refunded the Harm Touch AAs as part of the changes to how Harm Touch operates.
- Refunded the AA "Improved Lay on Hands" as part of the changes to how Lay on Hands functions.
- Corrected an issue with the Flurry line of AA's that was causing them to trigger up to 94 percent of the time on a successful triple-attack, instead of up to the intended 30 percent.

*** Zones ***

- Fixed an issue with Halls of Honor where NPCs were dropping the incorrect item for the Hot Zone quests.

*** UI ***

- Corrected a few typos and errors with a few of the UI windows.
- Added "Claims" option to the EQ menu button which toggles the Claim Window.
- Made a few minor adjustments to the claims window.
- Added a slider/ctrl to loot slots with stacks. Shift-/Ctrl- semantics work with this functionality.

- Changed -

EQUI.xml
EQUI_LayoutCopyWnd.xml
EQUI_ClaimWnd.xml
EQUI_OptionsWindow.xml
EQUI_MailWindow.xml
EQUI_LootWnd.xml
EQUI_LeadershipWnd.xml
EQUI_GuildManagementWnd.xml
EQUI_TributeBenefitWnd.xml
EQUI_Animations.xml
EQUI_VideoModesWnd.xml

*** Miscellaneous ***

- Zoning to Toxxulia no longer puts player in Antonica chat channel.
- Changed the way offensive and defensive procs work so they will no longer interrupt melee swings for non-hybrid characters.  Hybrids already worked that way previously.

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