EverQuest II Producer's Letter

EverQuest II senior producer Alan Crosby has posted another letter to the community, this time discussing the game's upcoming Will of a Tyrant content patch, planned class tweaks, and more.
One feature we have been receiving a lot of questions over, is the Item Ratings system. I know that since it was announced, there has been a great deal of confusion over the system and what it is intended to accomplish. After many internal discussions, and listening to feedback from you, we have decided not to move forward with this system. We are exploring alternatives that would allow us to continue to grow items and allow your gear to advance in meaningful ways, without giving the impression that you are going backward.

Another long announced and long awaited feature has been the rework on the (fighter revamp). This is another project that is going to fall by the wayside as we now focus on small changes, rather than sweeping revamps. Fighters are going to see some love here in the near future, thanks to Xelgad, who is taking on some of the class balance responsibilities. First and foremost, we have identified a problem with a couple of abilities for Crusaders; Holy Ground and Grave Sacrament. Those abilities, rather than generating an amount of hate toward the hate list, were in fact moving the crusader up by ranks; thereby practically guaranteeing that crusaders would dominate agro. We are modifying those abilities to generate raw hate, as well as a much more modest rank increase., so that they are still very viable for tanking, but not an automatic pass to the top of the hate list. Additionally both abilities will have other bonuses added to them. We want to make sure these are abilities that the Crusader classes will want to keep on their hotbars.