[Sunderfury]

Found it, blue exp bar was patched in 12/03/00. Apparently the message just said to read the supplemental file for details. Someone should add this to patch notes wiki:

December 3rd, 7:00pm
------------------------------

*Velious Preparation*

The files just pushed to your client are in preparation for the launch of
EverQuest: The Scars of Velious. *Please read EQManual_Supplement.doc (or
.txt) in your EverQuest directory for information on new features, some of
them Velious-specific, which will be included in tomorrow's patch.

- The EverQuest Team

Here is the supplemental text:

Experience Bar Enhancement

Players will notice a blue line in their experience bar in
addition to the bars. *The blue line is a "macroview" of each
bubble of experience. *The blue line will fill the entire experience
bar for each for each bubble of experience earned.

Same Resolution Looting, Trading, Inspection, and Inventory (Velious Only)

Previously, when looting, trading, or viewing inventory, the screen
would switch to a lower resolution mode (that small UI in the
center if you are at resolutions above 640x480). *Now, if you
are in resolutions above 640x480, nearly all functions take place
in the higher resolution mode. *Functions that currently do not take
place in the higher resolution mode will do so in the near future.

Sense and Disarm Traps

In addition to rogues, bards, who always had the ability to
disarm traps, have gained the ability to sense them as well.
Since we are aware that some may have not bothered
training sense or disarm traps due to them formerly being
unimplemented, bards and rogues will have the ability to
gain skill without training once they have reached the
appropriate level and have crossed a zone boundary.

These skills now have use within Velious. *There are traps,
and they range from annoying to deadly throughout Velious.
They are invisible and can only be detected and disarmed by
rogues and bard.

Use "Sense Traps" to see if there are any traps in the vicinity.
If so, you can then use "Disarm traps" to try and disarm the
trap. *Once disarmed, the trap will remain inactive for a short
period of time (about a minute) while your group passes
through the area.

If there are multiple traps within range, your attempt to disarm
will be directed towards the closest one.


Corpse Dragging in Velious

Due to the importance of faction within Velious, we wanted to
avoid a situation where a group could die in an area, and then
easily bring in someone with good faction to drag all of the
corpses out without consequence or risk. *As such, there are
some zones in Velious where dragging a corpse is considered
"assisting the enemy" by the inhabitants of the area. *They will
react accordingly.

LoadArmor17 through LoadArmor22 = TRUE or FALSE (Velious Only)

Defines whether or not you want to load the new armor implemented with
Velious into your video card's texture memory. *Players with older video
cards may choose to set one or more of these options to FALSE if you
experiencing slow framerate or excess swapping when viewing these armors
in areas with many textures.

By default, these are all set to "FALSE", as it is possible that those with
lower end systems will have problems when attempting to load all of the
new armor files. *At your option, you can switch all or part of them to
"TRUE" to see the new armor. *If you have problems with framerate or
disk swapping, turn all or part of them back to "FALSE".

As a note, though you may be able to obtain the files and make these
entries if you are not Velious-enabled, the new armor will not be displayed
unless you are.

New Disciplines

RESISTANT (Level 30 - Velious Only): +3 to all resistances. *This
discipline lasts for 1 minute, and has a base reuse time of 1 hour.
The reuse time for this discipline will decrease as you level.

FEARLESS (Level 40 - Velious Only): Immunity to "Fear" and all spells
*that cause "fear". *This discipline lasts for 11 seconds, and has a base
reuse time of 1 hour. *The reuse time for this discipline will decrease as
you level.

(other classes get these at various levels as well I didn't bother pasting them)