February Waypoints

My girlfriend wants to go someplace really expensive for Valentines Day. I'm taking her to the grocery store.

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Cure All

Darq Side member Lolase pointed out that the new Zimaran self-cure potions are not available as a choice yet in the Threat window, so that will be a slam-dunk to get added to the UI quickly. As an alternative you can always choose cureplayer in the dropdown, and the window will use whatever cures you have in your character's inventory (or your cure spell if you have one.) But caution: if you're using potions, don't keep any spares in your bank or shared bank. If you do the game will give you an error message and the cure buttons won't cure you!

(Speaking of which, here's a quick plug for a super-cool premium feature: Cure Next. Be sure to check it out!)

A Moving Target

It's gotten much easier to run the Harvesting Helper in the background since it can now be configured to suspend temporarily whenever you get aggro or start a tradeskill combine. [1] [2]  But chief noticed recently that while out and about harvesting, the helper is not very cooperative if you want to do a quick pet pull, talk to a vendor/quest NPC, or otherwise manually target something that the helper is not focused on.

We're currently finishing testing on a new option that stops harvesting whenever you manually use the mouse (or tab-target) to exit the node-gathering loop. So now you can target an enemy in preparation for combat, or interact with an NPC, and the helper will obediently stop looking for nodes until you begin harvesting again. Watch for this simple but smart update in February.

Pricing Peeve

We're all living with the game developers' decision to unlist our broker items periodically. Helpful controls were added to the Broker window to relist each item in your sales displays, as long as it has been priced previously. (You can still drop items into the displays and use them as extra storage; as long as you don't set a price they won't get swept up in the listing.)

Several times I've gone for days checking broker sales and collecting coin on my alts, but forgetting to relist. It's easy to overlook if you're not specifically checking for it. Long-time Darq Sider Lhaffinatu wanted a way to ensure that all his items get relisted whenever he checks his broker sales. So now there is a simple control (will appear in-game soon) to automatically relist your items each time you check the broker. You can opt in or out of the setting for each of your characters separately.

Need More Info

Two of our members, Inaasubi and Ironhorse, made requests recently regarding the Quick Setup grid. Since the utility is gathering information from the game files about our characters, would it be possible to show more of that data in Quick Setup? It would be nice to group and sort our characters by certain aspects like tradeskill level and class, race, guild, account, current zone, etc. Not only that, but for players with dozens of characters (you know who you are!) generating some kind of ordered display, like a spreadsheet, would be useful as a reference.

Here's what it looks like so far. Tradeskill level and class have been added to the default view, and you can click a link to display more data. From that listing you can create a formatted itemization with all the info suitable for framing (j/k) or dropping into an Excel spreadsheet. Nice!

GBMU

This one's a bit more tricky, and it involves a suggestion from mineeme for the Gear Buff Macros window. Since we're constantly getting gear upgrades, especially in the first part of an expansion, any Gear Buff Macros that swap out a current gear piece need to be edited to include the new item. Otherwise the macro will try to swap out the old item. No bueno until you can get into the utility and update the gear slot manually.

Can the utility do some of this work, possibly with a button that checks Census and gives us a report on gear slots that have been upgraded recently? Or better yet, can it update the macro buttons with the new pieces automatically? All the ingredients for something like this appear to be available, and we'll be digging into this extremely useful suggestion in February.

And while we're on the subject of utility improvements...

Darq Sider Phule likes to use the 16-slot Quick Camp list (dropdown on the left-hand side of the Camp window) but he noticed there's not a means to start over and clear the whole list at once. That was an easy fix, and Phule is already using it in a future version of the utility. There is also a way to quickly wipe out the list from inside the game, and we should be able to add a control for that in February.

More Helpful Help

It's always a balancing act to provide enough information in the UI without excessive tooltips, hints and other widgets cluttering up the place. Quite a while back bluja000 asked for links to the associated Patreon videos on Help pages, and more recently Derrik suggested adding default key combos for toggling UI components to the Help window as well.

The video links should be doable, and we still need to figure out whether we can discover and display each player's current key combos. To reduce confusion I'd much rather display your own shortcuts in case you've changed any of the defaults. So we'll investigate what can be done here.

Zoned Out

This is one of those seemingly permanent annoyances: How to reset specific instances on the Zone Timers window without going through each one individually or clearing the entire list all at once. This one drives us all crazy, including Kammelle who asked if we could take another look to see if anything can be done.

My response is always, "It would take the developers about five minutes to add some checkboxes to the list, or filters for solo/heroic/raid zones." The request has been made multiple times to me and on the official forums, and to be fair it may not be as easy as we think for the game designers to implement such a thing.

I have one more idea about having the player create a list of zones manually, and then compare that list to the zone names in the window. So we might be able to at least mark them with a different color, or find some other way to designate zones that you do or do not want to reset. There may not be a slick solution to this, but if we can come up with anything you'll be the first to know.

Thank You

Everything we do here at the Darq Side is possible because of you. I'd like to welcome quite a few new Darq Side members, and express my sincere appreciation to our established members for your continued patronage. An extra tip of the helm goes to those members who have mentioned the project to your guildmates and fellow players.

And just a reminder, you are always welcome to brainstorm, privately with me or Rosyposy, or in Discord. As it turns out, crowdsourcing feature ideas and improvements from smart, dedicated players makes EverQuest II a more informative, efficient and entertaining game for our members and for thousands of other players around the world.