The System menu has been expanded and reorganized for easier navigation.

 

Friend Manager

The Friend List interface has been revamped and renamed the Friend Manager, because it is much more than a list of your friends. Many new functions have been added to help you make friends, keep track of contacts, invite people to your clan, chat with friends, form parties with friends, and more.

The Friend Manager gives you faster access to social actions to perform with your friends:

• Keep a friend list and block list.
• Invite friends to your party.
• Invite friends to your clan and invite clan mates to be friends.
• Whisper friends or open one-on-one chat windows with them.
• Send friends mail.
• Know a friend's level, class, clan, alliance, creation day, and when your friend last logged in.
• Write a memo about a friend.
• See a record of all the characters with whom you played in an instance zone in the past week and invite them to be your friends.

The Friend Manager can be found in the System menu. With this change, the Friends tab in the Community window has been removed from the game.

 

Changes to Options

The Options window has been expanded and reorganized, and some technical terms have been replaced with simpler terms. The Basic Setting button has been added, which restores all settings to default. The Window Location Reset button has been added, which moves interface windows to their default locations.

Video tab

• A new tab, Damage, has been added.
• Gamma is now referred to as Brightness.
• The Effect option has been added, which allows you to adjust the level of detail of visual effects such as skill animations and atmospheric effects.
• The Texture Filter detail setting, which toggled between smoother or messier detail, has been removed because the smoother setting has been made permanent.

System/Audio tab

• The Language setting has been removed.
• The Tracking setting that is found in the Map window can also be found here.
• The Close Help Window option has been removed.
• The Hardware Cursor option has been added. This toggles your mouse cursor's appearance between <em>Lineage II</em> style and the default operating system style.
• New sound volume controls have been added: Total Sound, Environmental, and NPC Voice.
• The Tutorial Voice volume setting has been removed; it is now an on/off setting.

Game tab

• The 3D Arrow setting has been renamed Tracking.
• The Decline Trades and Refuse Friend Requests options have been added.
• Settings for new screen status information have been added.
• The option to view a target’s casting bar and debuff information has been added.

 

Screen Status Information

Various new settings have been added to the game in order to allow a player to receive game data in a more visual manner than before. Health gauges, casting gauges, and damage text are now available for display.

Players can now see health gauges above the heads of their own characters, enemies, servitors, and other players as a thin red line. This helps you see the health status of others without having to target them or be in a party with them.

There is also the option to display a casting gauge on screen when a character or a target is casting a skill. This helps with strategic timing in casting skills and in seeing what skills an enemy is casting on you. Settings for the gauges you wish to see displayed can be found in the Options window’s Game tab.

Damage text can now be displayed on-screen as a character fights. Numbers appear according to how much damage was done, heal or MP restored, XP gained, and so on. Font color indicates whether the number is related to a positive or negative effect. Some descriptions, such as Evaded or Critical, also appear. The placement of the text indicates what the description is and who it is affecting.

For your character, notifications and positive data are shown on your left: Evade, Parry, HP and MP recovery, XP and SP gain, and Critical hits you receive. Negative data is displayed on your right: damage and Critical Damage, and damage over time that you receive. Data on other characters is generally displayed above each character's avatar.

Damage text can be displayed for your character, your servitors or pets, and enemies. Settings for what and whose damage text you want displayed can be found in the Damage Text tab of the Options window.

 

Shortcut Key Reassignment

With the addition of various new interface panels, the list of default shortcut commands has been changed. Some changes of note are:

• The ESC key now closes interface windows and cancels targets in order of the most recent action.
• Alt + Y now opens the Friend Manager window instead of the MSN Messenger window.

In addition, the Shortcut window has been expanded for easier navigation through shortcut commands.

 

Video Recording

The Replay feature still exists, but a new video recording feature has been added to the game. Recorded videos are saved as .avi files and are stored in the Screenshots folder of the game installation on your hard drive. To begin recording, click the Start/End Recording button in the Actions window. You can choose what resolution you want your videos filmed in. The resolution you choose will determine the size of the .avi file. Available resolutions are Current, Half, 640x480, and 480x320. You can start and stop recording by using the appropriate button in the interface window. The recording window also has a folder button that takes you directly to your Screenshots folder without exiting the game, but will cause you to switch to windowed mode if you are in fullscreen mode.