Throughout the week, Merloc receives questions from various places and answers as many as he can. He wanted to start sharing some of his answers with everyone else so that he wouldn't have to repeat himself.

Here's the first edition of Q & A from Merloc's Tower.

Q: Apart from the 2 "normal" loots on event 2 in Solteris the phosephene reward was the same as on event 1. Is that intended like this? I always thought that the second event should give the equivalent of 2 gloves (and same then for the following events).

A: There are 4 tiers of rewards in Solteris.

    Tier 1: Raid 1 and 2 - 100 Phosephenes clusters
    Tier 2: Raid 3 and 4 - 200 Phosephenes clusters
    Tier 3: Raid 5 and 6 - 400 Phosephenes clusters
    Tier 3: Raid 7 - 1000 Phosephenes clusters

The items you buy scale up for each item, so they do not match the number of phosphenes you get exactly... however they are tradable, so you can save and pool them between raids.

Q: Looking around at TSS class item drop rates and I'm finding that things could be amiss. Was told that all of the class items were to be 15% drop rate per kill, which is reasonable, however for Magmaband, by a survey of several guilds, I found over 193 kills of Lethar1 a total of 15 rings. While it's not a massive sample it's fairly large and I wouldn't expect to see nearly half the intended drop rate over 193 kills.

A: The raid class items in TSS drop approximately 15% of the time (each), we've run tests of 1,000s of kills to validate item drop ratios for loot, and it's always been correct. The fact that there are two loot tables for most bosses in TSS endzones might be the cause of the confusion. Class items only drop on one of the two loot tables, and with about a 15% chance. Most other items are also dropping with a 15% chance, but are on both of the loot tables, so they are actually dropping more frequently.

Q: The Shadowknight only ring that drops off of Lethar 1 (Magmaband of Cestus Dei) has been too rare for my guild and other guilds as well if you have been keeping up with the message board(s). My guild has killed Lethar 1 16 times now and we haven't had a single Magmaband drop yet.

A: Magmaband of Cestus Dei is 1 of 6 items that can drop in one of the treasure slots from Lethar 1, it has a 16% drop rate. With 16 kills, there is still more than a 6% chance that particular item won't have dropped for you.

Q: Katta Amiable Rogue Piercer-24/21 Castrum Dagger. Katta Ally Rogue Piercer-26/23 Castrum Elite Rapier (Ratio Downgrade Backstab Upgrade). Now all must agree it's harder to be ally then amiable? Lower the delay please.

A: I'm getting code support to separate backstab damage on a weapon from normal damage, so I'm planning to increase the ratio of that dagger, but leave the backstab damage where it is.

Q: Item: Paza's Cursed Remains - Current Problem: The illusion clicky on the item has a 5 second cast timer. For an item that cannot be equipped in any way, this doesn't seem to really be functional in any way. I cannot see a reason why the cast time should be so high, and why the item shouldn't be equippable.

A: I've changed Paza's Cursed Remains to be equippable in the ammo slot, and reduced the cast time to 2 seconds.

Q: Is there any discussion about making group (katta) weapons take type 4 or 8 augs?

A: We can't currently make slots that take more than one type of augment, but I do have plans to make more powerful type 4 augments in the future.

Q: Bard TSS BP still focuses rank II song rather then rank III as described. Please fix this. This actually makes going from rank II to III song a downgrade, not to mention the focus in general.

A: Non-casters are only able to utilize focus effects that affect Combat Abilities, since bards are not casters, this focus effect is not functional. We are planning to change this into a worn effect with different functionality.

Keith "Merloc" Turkowski
EQ Designer - Items