The new models in hills of shadow valley look amazing. - The Shadowed Assassin - The rock golems that roll up to you the unfold to attack.
All of the zones have amazing design, especially the interior zones. I really like the raids. Spell names have a lot of flavour as well.
All of it mostly. Shadow Valley is good new zone, as is Basilica and Bloodfalls. Would of preferred some part of progression to have been a little harder.
I like the spores flying off the mushroom in Umbral Planes. Also in Umbral Planes, I had a chuckle when I saw a "sleeping" Tegi wake up to cast a buff then immediately fall straight on its back.
Missions are very well done. Basilica rooftop is a favorite zone spot. Difficulty seems well balanced, although i think we are once again missing some ultra challenge stuff for high end groups that have maxed out gear/lvl/aa at 120.
Two words: Rock Golems. They roll when they move to you, then they rip their arm off and beat you with it.
i like that its not hair pulling difficult, but i also sort of dislike that its not hair pulling difficult.....but im more happy that its not to difficult.
Don't encourage him. Spell naming taking up the majority of expansion spell development time for the last decade is so backwards. I'd rather be casting Skin like Wood 37 and get tuned and/or *gasp* new! spell lines rather than any time spent digging through a thesaurus each year for spell names.
Definitely better to be undertuned for mob difficulty, than overtuned. You can always pull an extra mob or find some other challenge, but it's more difficult to make things easier, for the non end game gear/lower aa people. I personally have always had WAY more fun, when my toon was OP, than when things were tough. That's why people want raid gear etc, no? What's the point of getting better gear? To make the game easier. That's really the point of it. I see people in raid gear, complain that zones are too easy. Well take off your gear and put on lower level gear lol, why do you have OP raid gear on and then complain about the lower difficulty of non raid content? I know, it would be nice to have one end game zone for raiders, and many expansions had that, but raid content is really the end game zones for raiders. Most people still exp in lower level zones, because it's easier.
Look, naming things is one of THE two hardest problems in computer science! The other being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. Be nice to the devs, they're solving an NP-hard problem.
1 or 2 really hard things to accomplish (like the epics of yore) in an expansion is perfect. One of the things that I really hate about EQ in general is that by the time you can get gear you dont typically need it anymore. I am kinda bummed they didnt add a new Rallos Zek earring type thing. Overall I have been very impressed with this expansion. Love the new Zones (even SV, thats the good old sadistic zone style i have been missing!).
NO locked zones! Hated when they were doing the zone flagging stuff. Just open it all up, like EQ was to start.
That if I cant find a group the mobs are tuned well enough that I as a Rogue only need a healer merc to do 90% of the progression outside of Missions. Time consuming, but doable.
I like how the expansion starts out sunny, spacious, and bright, and the deeper into the story you go the more dark and labyrinthine the zones become until culminating in a sea of darkness and blood. Fun for all types!
