NDA Lifted .. Beta tester thoughts / observations pls

I am curious if anyone can tell me about gear.
Its the T1 stuff tradeable?
what are the stats like, on par with VoA T2/T3 group?

Im more interested in weapons and non visible.

I plan to hold off on RoF for a few months but would like to pick some gear up in the bazaar.

One thing I would like to see is a way to pick up for copies and just get charged one time.

Good link. I enjoyed it.
Anecdotally though, players who rate high on cooperation and low on competition just give up if an expansion is too hard. Like we did with most of VoA. Re. investment, SOE should weight the opinions of those with most accounts, most time played, or highest number of max level toons as being the guide for where to aim the difficulty.

(Now Tarrin and some ROI will jump in and tell us how easy it was but they're not the majority.) Go, boys!

*.Lee of Povar

In short, no, you are not.

I'm not sure that I could have made it more clear, but I'll try.

HoT was too easy, everything shouldn't be soloable (including every mission).

VoA was too hard, I could barely duo (two real players + mercs - I do not box nor do I group with boxers) any named, in T2, with primarily T3 gear (cultural armor/weapons + chest items from t3/4 missions). The named, per round, are not substantially more difficult than Argath named, but the named have way too many hit points. There is nothing that could be done to overcome that from my standpoint while VoA was current, since my aa's and augs were maxed (less t2+ voa augs that don't drop in mission1 chests . . ., and I had no more gear options to work on pre-RoF). I couldn't move on to T3 nameds because I couldn't beat the T2 nameds.

As I said before, I don't want things to be too easy, but I shouldn't be able to solo darn near every quest yet near-zero nameds . . . the only thing that acts as a roadblock on most of them is the sheer amount of hit points. The named don't hit THAT much harder than trash, on a per round basis . . and those mobs are easy enough, because I can outlast their substantially lower hitpoint totals with my puny dps. More in line with what I would expect are the "fake" named in missions such as Resplendent Temple #1 or City of Bronze #1 - though the latter is way too easy compared to the former. Those don't have the overinflated hitpoints that real named do, but they still have similar dps and spell abilities and, as such, are killable.

To put a different spin on it: with enough time invested, and practice at countering what mobs threw at me in UF (which many people acknowledge was difficult), I was able to solo about half of the named in all zones when the expansion was current - the other half had overly punishing abilities for me (charm, multiple add spawns, silence, etc.). That is closer to the balance of what I would expect - nameds that are doable with practice and everything maxed out just below the level of gear they drop (level/aa/augs/gear, etc.).

Frankly, I have been wondering since Omens why all/most named don't get the capability of the dogs in RSS - Feratha and the other one I can't think of at the moment - that have more powerful melee/spell output the more entities on their hatelist. Everyone could be happy, perhaps.

Consider the game without boxes. Think about all of this wearing group gear and without any support from people in raid gear.

I think soloing 1/2 the nameds of an expansion makes it too easy.