NDA Lifted .. Beta tester thoughts / observations pls

Most of the named mobs are noticably easier than Alaris named imo. I was actually able to kill a few named mobs in the end zone of RoF with 2 cleric mercs + boxing a 96 mage/ranger.

A few named mobs though have some very err.. painful mechanics to deal with though, but as a whole this expansion's non instanced content seems generally easier than alaris.

Dagarn didn't have a delay 17 bow last I read.

Customization with non-visible armor - All non-visible armor in Rain of Fear can be worn by all. You'll be able to customize your stats for every encounter.

I've not seen any discussion of this. Did it go the way of ship-to-ship combat?

aye the last part is possibly a bit misleading, but it basically means you could have say heroic int gear as a bard for an extra nuke or two and extra spell damage, or you could have heroic agility for more defense, or heroic str for higher melee damage.

None of it is to an extreme though like many seem to have read it to be, just able to wear any type of non vis so slight changes in heroics.

What are the stats(as/HME/focus) amount on the group/raid gear??

I think the issue is that spells (excepting rank 3) are relatively easy to obtain, and focus don't (substationaly) improve, if they did not degrade group casters would be a smidgen maximum with a handful of rank-2 spells. (The smidgen being a larger mana pool, and a small amount of mod3s.) The degrdation casters simply places the same requirement that melee have of picking up a couple items/tier for their primary DPS boost. Consider tanks who need every slot and augs.

An often ignored point is that casters reduce the fizzle rate on older spells as they level (increased specialization also?); a small improvement to dps undoubtly not as large as a melee class gets with increased caps & table changes.

My recollection from previous expansions is that (Focus + Old Rank 3) < (Degraded Focus + New Rank 2), particularly for spells from the first few levels; I presume (though admittedly I've never bothered to look) that it would be similar for an old rank-2 and a degraded focus with a new rank-1.

In short, lets see some numbers.

They deffinatly are harder thid bing s higher level expansion, most nameds have more HP and hit harder but witha solid group you'd be fine in the right places

If I remember right, druids had 2800-3100 HP, 3000-3300 M for T2 RoF Raid, for a total increase of 2600 HP/M over T4 VoA Raid. Rounded the numbers. I assume other classes are in similar ball park numbers.

awe falos is so cute, how are pets and the programming going?

In other words, they were either too lazy, or "ran out of time" to make class specific non-visible gear.

The whole "ran out of time" excuse is pretty weak. What a year is not enough time to get things done?

No, they had the gear class specific, with normal stat makeups you would find for the most part (this year Heroic Charisma didn't cost any classes heroic stat budget), every piece in every slot, they just made it all/all instead of being those classes only

I believe they are referring to the additional content promised post-release.

Interesting response. If there is no difference, why continue to do it?

No, but guess what your spells don't get worse as you level up either. They are exactly the same. It is only when you use NEW spells that they can potentially not be as efficient as your old spells were. Your spells however are NOT worse because you leveled up.

You'd never get any upgrade to it though. Just look at monks, we've had the exact same best dps disc since level 63; and they repeatedly state they will never upgrade it in any way shape or form.

Because there are differences, but you like many others are taking his statement to mean something other than intended. Piestro simply meant that unless you are a bleeding edge player and grind your way to 100 and just grab all your new rank 1 spells and use them; then yes you will find they are less effective with your old focii than your old rank 3 spells or about a wash with your rank 2 spells. But as you get rank 2 spells they will all be better; and once getting new rank 3 spells they will be still better; and generally in that period of time you will also pick up the new focii either group which might be a minimal upgrade over your old focii or a wash or T1 raid gear which will be a clear upgrade. For your average group player you are really not going to see a difference going from old Rk 2 and old focii to new rank 1 and old focii.

I believe the idea of "to make you hunt/raid for new gear" is the final response we're getting on the focus degradation topic.

Which is a horrible response.

I have no clue what you are referring to with that post, but your post about focus degradation was laughable, even a few of your caster guild members were like 'lol wut?"

Maybe stick to speaking on matters of warriors because your comments about focus degradation are very out of touch.

If they took away focus would that be better? Maybe its too late, i'm assuming at some point they added it as bonus to casters and before that it was just aa's and such? Doesn't the focus degrade over each level so by the time your 100 most of the slower levelers should be in Rof gear before maxing and i'm assuming the top end zoomers would also be gaining raid armor or named Rof drops. I know many of the high end though exclude casters from gaining raid gear until the tanks, is that where the disconnect comes in. Your not able to bid so you either drop a bit of dps,use group gear or use older spells?

I have to agree in a way though with the fact that if focus automatically upgraded on older gear what reason would most casters have to strive to upgrade. Other than mana your very less gear centric than the melee. It appears to me that the main problem is adding something like focus in the begining seemed like a great idea and they <dev's> have a constant struggle. To try to balance how to keep it in the game, and not remove a reason for a large portion of the game to need to upgrade gear quickly

They had a busy year with the same old team. I'm amazed they got done what they have. The decision to drive this incomplete expansion forward wasn't made in the Dev's meeting room.

Even with the time crunch, players should be happy with RoF. There was much give and take but over all there is positive.

• Classes being very well balanced trumps no new spell or AA lines. Typically new lines throw balance off.

• Adaptive reuse of old zones that people enjoyed immensely in the past trumps the fact that there is not much new "from scratch" content.
• Content being accessible by more players trumps a reduction in difficulty.
• Less audio triggers in raids trumps all of VoA raid content if you think ATs are garbage.
• Offline trading trumps what is in place now by far.
• VoA raid gear still trumps RoF group gear, so there is still incentive to explore those "old" raids.

Those are the big ones IMHO. Yes, it might have been nice to have had new AA/spell lines but there would have required pushing back the release which the devs probably would have found desirable but their short sighted bosses...probably not so much. The focii issue should also not be unfairly pegged as a negative towards this release. Some of you corned Piestro about it and he lashed out in a way that is going to taint this new expansion for some people but those same people were already disgruntled. Oh well. There is too much positive to let that negative over shadow everything else.