I predicted it for the expansion 3 years ago, but it finally came to pass. SOE is adding a 25th class to the game, the Beastlord.
There were some other high level items announced at the Fan Faire keynote.
The next expansion for EQ2 will be the Age of Discovery. It will have more AA points to be earned, new zones, a build your own dungeon feature, along with the new class. The release target is November 2011.
I am sure details about the new class will be forthcoming.
Personally, I hope they went with the idea of being able to tame your own pet. I hate to have people say SOE is copying WoW, but the whole pet taming really made the hunter class in WoW.
Addendum:
From the update over at EQ2Wire (subject to change):
Beastlords are Scouts
Leather wearers
Brawler weapons
Melee DPS class, on par with other top-tier DPS
Pet class on Steroids
Should always use a Warder to be effective
Can collect and use many different types of Warders
Beastlord Warders
Different Warders have different abilities, hotbars, AA lines
More utility, damage, combat
Use stances to affect what ailities become important
And from Massively:
As for details on the class, he stressed that things are still being worked out, and are subject to change. It will be available with the expansion pack, and is a scout class with leather armor who uses brawler weapons. But what sets the Beastlord apart is his warder pet, which has its own AA tree and special abilities. The Beastlord develops a rapport with his pet through the use of particular combat abilities, and as he builds up that power, he and his warder are able to use special, more powerful abilities. It’s a very active class, and it requires people to participate more in the battles than with some of the other classes.
Edit: Some more recent Beastlord Q&A over at EQ2Wire.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Interesting. Beastlord became my main class in EQ1 about a month after it was introduced with Luclin – not having it available was one of several reasons it took me a couple of years to try EQ2. Maybe I’ll resub and try it out when Age of Discovery launches.
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I completely forgot the Fan Faire was on so the first I heard of this was your post. What a total surprise. You may have predicted it but I actually believed them when they said “Never again” for Beastlords. SInce my highest EQ character is a Beastlord, I’m very pleased they changed their minds.
I just followed your link to EQ2Wire and read Feldon’s precis there and it looks extremely encouraging. I think mercenaries were the single best addition ever made to EQ1 so I’m absolutely delighted to see them come to EQ2. The rest of the Age of Discovery stuff looks great, too.
I just have no idea now how I’m going to keep up with all this stuff. I’m playing Rift now and nowhere near done with it, and I’m expecting to play GW2. Mrs Bhagpuss is very keen to play The Secret World, which I like the look of as well. I was kind of relying on EQ2 slipping into the background to make room, but now that looks less likely. Starting to be a bit concerned about how all this is going to fit together.
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The November 2011 release date also qualifies as a bombshell. What other MMO is charging for two expansion boxes in a single year (Velious launched in February, though it was technically slated for last November)? And the second one is – by the producer’s previous comments – light on content but still required for the new AA cap? I can’t speak for the free players, but to me this sounds a lot like triple dipping a sub fee and the most money for expansion boxes in the business and an increasingly aggressive cash store.
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@Green Armadillo
As someone that preferred SoE’s old two-expansions-a-year model, I can’t see this as a negative. I look forward to buying expansions for MMOs I like because I see them as treats I’m giving myself. I’d like them to be finished, but frankly there’s been no observable improvement in build quality on the 12-month schedule over what we were used to on the 6-month one, so I’d rather go back to getting two a year. I like spending money on things for myself that I enjoy and it’s something I get few opportunities to do, especially now there’s more good free MMO content than I can reasonably expect to consume.
That said, do we even know that the EQ2 “Age of Discovery” is an “expansion”? Seems to be some possibility that it’s just part of the regular update cycle.
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@Bhagpuss – Well, they used the word “expansion” so I have no reason to believe it is a GU. And they have a logo. Oooh.
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They also confirmed that AOD is “free for Fan Faire attendees” as with prior paid expansions, though they haven’t confirmed a price.
I like spending money on things I enjoy too, but there’s zero evidence that we’re getting twice as much content for purchasing twice as many expansions at the same high prices. It looks suspiciously like all this new content they’re “generously” giving us in Velious content patches is actually the content that would have been in the AOD box, which will now only have a city overhaul. If it does have the same price tag, I will be underwhelmed.
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Yep, it is an expansion, clearly. I didn’t read the news report carefully enough.
I like it a lot. A new class as excellent as the Beastlord and Mercenaries will give me far more content I can actually use than the last two expansions I bought (TSO and SF) put together, so it’s a great deal for me.
Mercenaries in EQ1 gave Mrs Bhagpuss and I over six months of play doing content completely new to us. As a duo we were able to add two mercs and visit literally dozens of zones we’d barely touched or had never even set foot in before. EQ2 isn’t quite that sprawling and there aren’t as many places we’ve never been, but mercs should still open up a lot of content we’ve never seen.
DoV is the first expansion for EQ2 we didn’t buy. We probably will buy it eventually, but after two expansions of which we used barely 10% of the content we’d pretty much lost interest. If they did this one the other way round, gave us the BL and Mercs in GUs and saved the Velious stuff they’re putting in the GUs for the expansion, we wouldn’t have bought this expansion on release, if at all.
Presumably the new Freeport will have to be in a GU, though. Can’t really have two Freeports running at the same time for those who did and didn’t buy the expansion.
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