Welcome to the Planes of Power. Of course, if you haven't purchased the expansion you can do so at our online store at www.everquest.com. If you have, prepare for adventure beyond Norrath and into the realm of the gods. We hope you have fun.
One of the new features included in the Planes of Power is a new way for NPCs deal with Player Characters. It allows NPCs to recognize certain actions taken by player characters. This may mean that an NPC will not be interested in talking to you until you've accomplished a certain task or until certain events have occurred. So some NPCs may not have much to say to you upon your first meeting, but might be more talkative later. This can also apply to events and locations that might react differently to a character that has accomplished a task than to one that has not.
With this patch any character with more than 30 unspent AA points will have those points deleted when they log in.
The Raid functionality has been added. Here is a brief overview of the Raid system.
In the past, experience on raids would generally go to a single group or a few groups. The group doing the most damage would get the experience on any given kill. But, that has been changed by a new Raid feature.
The Raid system is intended to aid in the formation and organizing raids and make looting on raids a little more manageable. It allows a certain amount of experience to be shared among all members of a raid. The basics of the system work very much like grouping has always worked. The Raid Leader is the leader of all the raid groups and the group leaders remain leaders of their individual groups.
Alt-R or /raidwindow will toggle the new Raid Window. This window works much like the group window. You can invite people to the raid (if you are the raid leader) and see a list of the folks in your raid, along with the status of those members (Raid Leader, Group Leader or raid member - which shows with no rank). It also shows you the group number of the individual members.
Only Raid Leaders and Raid Group Leaders can invite people to a raid. This is done with the Invite button on the raid window.
If a Raid Leader invites an individual (someone not in a group), that person joins the raid as a Raid Group Leader. If the Raid Leader invites a member of a group, the entire group joins the raid, and their group leader becomes a Raid Group Leader.
A Raid Group Leader can invite people to their group, thus inviting them to join the raid group as well.
Only a Raid Leader can remove someone from the raid. He or she does so simply by clicking on the character's name in the raid window and clicking the Disband button (also in the raid window).
Being removed from your group (using the normal grouping features) will not remove you from the raid.
You can remove yourself from the raid just by clicking the Disband button in the raid window.
Just like groups, raids have their own chat channel. /rsay works for the raid just as /gsay does for groups. Just like group chat, you can set this to be your default channel for a given chat window by choosing it from the right-click Default Channel context menu.
Experience for killing NPCs will be distributed to all members of the raid that are within range. However, the experience given will be smaller than the experience that would be earned by a single group. Generally, unless you are fighting NPCs that require a raid, you will still be better off earning experience with the old fashioned six-person group.
Raids will definitely allow for larger than traditional groups, however, much of EverQuest is designed with the six-person group in mind. Adding a small number of people to a given group will allow this "oversized" group to gain experience. However, we recommend that once a "raid" of ten or more people forms, a second, traditional group split off and adventure on their own.
The Raid Leader determines the looting permissions for any NPC killed by the raid. There are three types of looting that the leader can choose from (though the Raid Leader can always loot NPCs killed by the raid).
Please note that altering loot permissions only applies to NPCs that are killed after changing this setting. See the command list below for more information about setting raid loot permissions.
When an item is looted by a raid member, a loot message is sent to all members of the raid.
Summary of Raid Commands: