All U.S. servers will come down for a hotfix at 7am PDT on Tuesday, March 29, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The U.K. worlds will have their hotfix at 5am London Time on Wednesday, March 30, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours.

The full patch notes are available after the hop. There is also this thread by Smokejumper on the EQII forums explaining the Velious dungeon balance changes occurring today.

Tower of Frozen Shadow: Shadowed Corridors

• Creatures found within the zone should no longer critical hit players quite as hard.

Tower of Frozen Shadow: Umbral Halls

• Creatures found within the zone should no longer critical hit players quite as hard.

Tower of Frozen Shadow: Haunt of Syl’Tor

• Creatures found within the zone should no longer critical hit players quite as hard.

Hold of Rime: The Ascent

• Creatures found within the zone should no longer critical hit players quite as hard.

Hold of Rime: The Fortress Spire

• Creatures found within the zone should no longer critical hit players quite as hard.

Forgotten Pools

• Creatures found within the zone should no longer critical hit players quite as hard.

Kael Drakkel (Heroic Instances)

• Critical Mitigation requirements have come down by 10%. Temple of Rallos Zek Heroic Challenge is unchanged.
• Hit points have been slightly reduced on overall population. Temple of Rallos Zek Heroic Challenge is unchanged.

LIVE EVENTS

EQ Anniversary Event

• The Prodigious Glowing Black Stone now has a required equip level of 40.
• Chronoportal jewelry items are now Lore-Equip instead of Lore.
• The "Remnants of the Feerrott" painting from the chronoportal merchant was using an incorrect appearance, and has now been corrected.

QUESTS

Public Quests

• Improved server performance during public quests.

Kael Drakkel

• The Throne Room teleporter should now stay activated after completing stage 1, part 1 of the quest, "Triumph in the Temple".
• For the quest "A Path to Freedom" in Kael Drakkel, the part of the quest where you click to turn on the teleporter should now update the quest for all members in the group.
• For the quest "A Path to Freedom" in Kael Drakkel, if the player lagged out or zoned out before getting the quest update by witnessing all orc slaves escape through the portal, he or she can return to click on the teleporter again to re-initiate the event.

Tower of Frozen Shadow: Umbral Halls

• Fixing the mirror for the "Mirror, Mirror" quest now updates for the entire group.

ITEMS

• Contested Kael quest rewards have been rebalanced.
• Added double attack to a variety of fighter items. Overall, fighters should see an increase in the total double attack they can get from full sets of DoV items.
• Scout/Fighter weapon damage rating has been increased for TOFS x2 and above.
• Fixed an issue with two TOFS x2 fighter rings giving too much double attack.
• Fixed the riposte values on raid tank breastplates.
• Rebalanced mage raid gloves to be more appealing.
• Added crit bonus and potency to tank gloves.