Hello all,
Later today, we'll be pushing out an update for Tacvi to all live servers. Although this update will only affect a small portion of the audience for EverQuest, those that are affected have been waiting eagerly for it, so I wanted to run through the changes that you'll notice and talk briefly about what is coming in the near future for that zone.
First, I believe that I've located and corrected the problem that was sometimes causing a crash in the first event in Tacvi. I've run through the event for many hours now, both by myself and with the aid of a testing guild and the zone has remained stable throughout.
Second, some tuning changes have been made to the bosses of Tacvi, so some things may work slightly differently than before. Although the encounters themselves haven't changed in any major fashion, don't assume that tactics you've ruled out in the past still won't work.
Finally, I've laid the groundwork for a change to how the zone works. Although this is the least noticeable of the changes, it's also the biggest. Tacvi currently works like other dynamic raid zones. Players gain lockout times based on their accomplishments in the zone. I'm in the process of changing Tacvi so that it will remember which bosses you have killed recently. Then, the next time you start up the dynamic zone, the zone will only spawn those NPCs that would have respawned since you last killed them. This will negate the need for lockout timers in Tacvi. The code to support this change is brand new and doesn't exist on live servers yet, so this change must wait until the next full patch to EverQuest before it can go in. In the meantime, the most noticeable difference you'll see is that all of the bosses in Tacvi are now up as soon as the zone spawns.
Although I'd normally rather wait until all the changes are all done before pushing the zone out, I'm pushing out these first few now, because I know how eager people are for the changes to the initial encounters.
Thanks all,
Rashere