EQII Developers reveal upcoming Tradeskill and Housing additions.

Emily "Domino" Taylor, Greg "Rothgar" Spence, Nandy "Zoltaroth" Szots and Paul "Frizznik" Carrico presented Tradeskill and Housing changes to the EQ2 community at Fan Faire.

The Tradeskill and Housing panel opened up with a recap of prestige housing that has been introduced to the game. Everyone was informed that the multitude of prestige home portals currently in South Qeynos and South Freeport will be changed into a single house directory in those cities from which you can choose a housing destination. Two new prestige houses will be introduced to the Marketplace over the next few months: the Felwithe Mansion and the Tenebrous Island Refuge.

In Game Update 61, slated for late August 2011, a House Rating System will be introduced to the game. This feature will allow players to "publish" their home in a directory which other players can then browse and choose to visit homes from. Publishing your home will lock the items so that they cannot be moved and unlisting it will unlock the home, but also wipe out any current house ratings. Players visiting a published home will be able to rate it in various categories and those that top the leaderboards may win awards!

Later this year, Carpenters will get customizable house signs. Players will be able to right click and edit the sign with up to 250 characters. The text will be displayed upon mouseover like store signs and street signs.

There will be a new Frostfell-themed group crafting instance. While reminiscent of the Far Seas Missions, expect the completion rate to be much quicker than them. Players will be required to decorate Lady Vox's lair while she is out!

Crafters will soon be getting their own Alternate Advancement tree! Tradeskillers will have three rows of abilities; they can put 10 points in each row to unlock the next row and 25 points total into the Tradeskill AA's. The top row will modify progress, durability, and double harvest chance (removed from the Shadow's AA tab); row two will modify progress, durability, and success chance; finally, the bottom row increases the chance of harvesting a rare and the chance of not using materials during item creation.  Note that the Adventure and Tradeskill AA's will pull from the same pool. There is no way to earn AA through crafting at this time, although players initiated a fair bit of discussion on that during the panel.

Tradeskill Apprentices will be introduced in the future. We weren't given much information about these, but we're told we can level them up and they will be able to make best-in-slot (but not better than raid) Heirloom items.

One other final tidbit that came out of the Q&A part of this panel was that the dev team will be considering removing the rare component from the crafted mannequins.