NDA Lifted .. Beta tester thoughts / observations pls

But small question is, can I recommend it, not really.
It lacks a lot.
Does it bring anything exciting news, not really.
There some slayer things, kill a lot of mobs, and get some minor thing.
Collection stuff, disappointment.
Zones, the zones lacks inhabitants and feels empty.
Spells/AA, already mentioned.
People been screaming a lot about off line selling. You get that, but result as I see it, will be that prices on stuff there is likely to go down a LOT.
If I were not a raider, I doubt I would buy it, If I was a none raider, I would buy new Halo or Hitman instead.

My own recommendation would have been to postpone the launchday to January 2013, so they could get spells/aa and such in order.

Yeah I don't care to hear "we ran out of time" or "we don't have the resources" anymore. It takes far too long for stuff to come down the list of "to do" and it's getting really old.

There will be continued lines of AAs and Spells, so your old nuke spell will get an upgrade, but you're not getting a new type of spell.

They claim there will be more content later. We'll see if that happens and if it was worth the wait, but I personally will probably wait until the new stuff is released before I consider buying the expansion.

We were told in beta that you may be able to set your trader up anywhere in the game which might include lag heavy zones such as the Guild Lobby, but they have the ability to turn off the ability in certain zones. We'll see whether or not they pay the slightest attention to players and keep it out of the GL or not. When we brought it up they told us to stop talking about it.

All the whining and crying lead to Headshot, Assassinate, Decapitate, and other swarming abilities to stop getting upgraded. Time to start looking at everyone else's abilities that need to get "fixed"!

OK then, some more questions...

It was mentioned earlier that there are two tiers of (group) gear, but that they were essentially tiers 3 & 4 and I'm assuming that means they are on par with the higher tiers of VoA in terms of difficulty to get. It was also mentioned that focus decay remains (ARGH!) which raises the issue of how easy it is going to be for casters to upgrade focuses early on. I suspect for most, it will take a lot less time to level than to regear, which puts casters yet again at a disadvantage because our ability to upgrade focuses will be rather back-loaded. At least when going from HoT to VoA, Rustic armor can be easily obtained for the better focuses even if you lose stats in the process. Hopefully that makes sense.

Are there any long quest arcs like the Skeletal Hand, Bone Mask, etc?

Zones are open...what if anything is actually locked behind progression/faction/language/etc?

Any fixes for Wizards? Yeah, yeah, I know...but I had to ask.

I do have RoF on preorder but very little posted thus far sounds encouraging.

Endaar

Are there any long quest arcs like the Skeletal Hand, Bone Mask, etc? no

Zones are open...what if anything is actually locked behind progression/faction/language/etc? nothing

Any fixes for Wizards? Yeah, yeah, I know...but I had to ask. Yes we go some love

Sort off, there have been a lot of changes in the last few days which still need to be tested fully, in theory we should be in better shape than we were.

Ethereals kick out extra damage on raid mobs.

In the beginning gear will be harder probably, but later on it will be easy, a bit of t2 group gear even is attunable, there is also Shard's Landing the beginning zone of RoF that is literally a Dragonscale Hills 2.0, you could prob handle t1 gear there rather easy

So for long quest arcs you don't have one's like those, but there are things like a progression aug that powers up the more quests/missions you do, a nice aug for completing all group missions, and I believe it was mentioned that Charms related to completing content now get a bonus if you complete it instead of being normal tier stats

No progression for groupers at all, nothing is locked, do what you want day 1

Did anyone find out what the gear with 4 aug slots and no other stats was for?
Was that just items which weren't complete ?

And didn't someone say that fearless abilities and AAs no longer work in this expansion as they have found ways around them? Oh look at the surprised look on my face...it's botox lifeless.

"Autonomous Brokering System" is a fancy way of saying you can LD your trader and it will remain in game selling stuff while you turn off your computer and go to bed for the night. Typing /bazaar from anywhere in game is just an add-on to that.

I think people will be pleased to know that the current 'end-zone' for groupers is actually pretty decent. Xorbb is a massive zone and far less annoying to get around in than sepulcher was. I think it will be the city of bronze for the expansion in terms of which end tier zone people use the most.

Also yeah some of the missions are annoying copy / pastes of the raids which is frustrating but oddly enough (and keep in mind i've only seen about half the missions in the expansion, and know a few people that did farrr more beta content than I did) but the hardest mission I saw was the first mission that takes place in King Xorbb, that mission seems like a more frustrating version of the fear itself mission from HoT.

The final final group mission in xorbbs though (the end game for groupers) was actually shockingly easy, which i suppose was kind of a pleasant surprise given how unpleasant the final sepulcher group mission was in alaris. The Xorbb mission is WAYYYY more accessible to typical players imo.

*side note* there are no 12 man missions in RoF - praise jebus.


Oh and the new Kael zone seems like a major pain, annoying faction changes all around, and some of the named camps in that zone have linked agro to super hard overpowered mobs. Assuming this doesn't get changed, the Idol of Rallos Zek named camp in the new kael zone will end up being one of the biggest pain in the *** camps in the expansion due to how his agro is linked to *non-related* super shield mobs that have mega damage shields and lot's of HP. I think most people will do a sweep of Kael one time and never go back.

Shard's landing will likely be the most popular zone (and I must admit it's probably the best starter zone everquest has had in years), Xorbb's is also probably going to go over pretty well for groupers as it's probably the best end zone we've had since crystallos (IMO) and has far more camp locations for lots of groups. Eastern Wastes (RoF) will likely be the new zone of choice for druids / charm kiters and soloers.

Never really said it was going to happen, just that it may happen at some point which is what you first seemed to imply when you initially responded, so that technically wasn't a misquote.

If you finished HoT in Tier 4 gear, when you started VoA, Tiers 1 and 2 were down grades (except for spell focii). Tier 3 VoA was pretty much a side grade and Tier 4 was where you got your real upgrades. In RoF, Tier 1 is the side grade tier and Tier 2 is the upgrade tier. Think of it as SOE eliminating Tiers 1 and 2 and just giving us Tiers 3 and 4. There has been no announcements pertaining to more tiers later (and no real need for them).

Spells and AA's are just being upgraded. Not all spell lines or AA lines are being upgraded. It varies from class to class as to how important the non-upgraded lines are. We have been told that there is more to come but have been given no timeline. Considering how previous expansion releases have gone, the earliest we could expect something (and this is unlikely) is two months after release. Personally, I am expecting somewhere between four and six months.

If by "NEW" content, you mean zones with geometry that we have never seen before, you are correct. RoF is a lot like SoD in that respect. No mention has been made of adding more "NEW" content in that sense.

Log onto the test server.

Focus degradation still exists. As usual unless you are a bleeding edge raider it makes little to no difference.

The normal effect of easing trade restrictions (i.e. making trader mode more available) is greater price normalization. Right now prices swing wildly depending on what is available. With Autonomous Brokering prices should normalize more over time. Whether this is up or down is less obvious.

And if you are a melee class in a bleeding edge raid guild it also still makes no difference *thumbs up*

I really have to agree with this one from a personal perspective. Shard's Landing is a darn good zone. The little touches here really make a huge difference in how the zone feels. Just don't fall down the pit.

Raiding Berserkers -

If you have the VoA CoB 2hnd Slash - you have the best ratio weapon (RoF does not improve it)
If you have the VoA Sep 5 2hnd Blunt - you have the best weapon for Riposte and AE rampage.

If it makes little to no difference why do we still have it?
Why have we got focus degrading was a question frequently asked in beta, and we never got an answer other than it wasn't happening at this time.