Is the supposed to be a 6 month expansion cycle? I think TBS had 7 events/raids.. In one zone mind you. What do raiders think only so few raids? And only 1 tier of gear. Why was T1 gear removed? What the devil happened with the raid content? With the few raids these either are extremely hard or this will be very quickly completed. Curious whats on raiding folk mind about this expansion?
Don't worry - you'll have plenty to do. If the 8m HP trash mobs are any indication - the raid mobs will take hours to kill. -R
TDS is actually the last expansion of the failed "staggered release content" because of the shortend development time it was decided to release what was currently available and spend more time developing a fuller expansion for next year. obviously players are disappointed in the low number of raids and that each zone doesn't have raid events. tier 1 gear was removed since it seemed silly to have tier 1 items only in a couple of events. in general raid content will be a lot less then group oriented tasks / missions since that is directed to all players and only a small percentage of players raid. all players wish every expansion was like the great epic ones of TSS / PoP / etc. but we try to be understanding of the issues the developers are dealing with. and hope stuff gets better as we progress through the year.
Don't be fooled to much. There is only 1 Tier of Raids and Group. They just took the group gear and reduced it into 3 parts, with T3 being what T1 group gear should have been. This is the first expansion in a long time with 1 Tier (if you include before we started naming them tiers.) Don't get me wrong, I am going to buy this expansion because I want to be level 105, but it is a hack job at best when it comes to loot. In the SOE tradition of cutting costs, they again hit this game by making 1 tier then stretching it out and telling us everything is released at once. Though I'm "hoping" that last part was a lie.
tower of rot and arghin-hiz couldn't have taken that much developpement time... neither plane of shadow-chelsith-hearth of fear...
when beta started there were 3 distinct tiers of group gear and 2 tiers of raid gear. -- they did not just "reduce it into 3 parts " loot wont be much of an issue. there are some nice augs , clickies and some chase items. im also sure we will see some more stuff with "revamped zones " and hopefully something like a PoW ( we hope plane of mischief " the limited content isn't due so much to cost cutting , its due to the failure of the staggered release plan. players wanted a lot of content and the developers just cant do it in such a shorted time frame for it to be good. rather then making us wait 18 months , they release the smaller expansion now and focus more on the future content.
Who the hell would want another PoWar type zone? There's basically no xp gain in the "open" zone and the mechanics suck. The raid is extremely challenging which is both a positive and a negative depending upon where you are in the raid ladder. The DEFINITE plus about the raid, in MY opinion, is that you're able to get right into the boss fight(s) and, while you have to deal with adds during the event, it's over in 30 minutes whether you win or lose. It doesn't drag on for over an hour because of having to kill a bunch of annoying trash just to get to the main fight or because of stupid "resource management" mechanics. To answer the OP's questions, yes, there really are that few raids in TDS and no, it's not a 6 month expansion. Depressing, isn't it?
i for one am dissapointed with the lack of raids. i wasnt planning on working on TDS progression for a few weeks until everyone spread out over the whole expansion. im glad i decided to start last night because what lack of zones and raids there are i feel is more than made up for with what the artists did. the mobs ive seen so far look awesome and the zones ive seen so far look pretty sweet. so yes we did get crap for content. but try and enjoy the zones because they look pretty sweet this year
It's not a lack of Dev time, it's a lack of priorities. If all spells were called New CotF_Spell_Name and kept old cast messages until the December patch there would have been dozens of more Dev hours to work on other aspects of TDS. It was never a consideration to launch an expansion with working missions and spells names copied from CotF, the Devs and management know what is important to players and prioritized Dev time accordingly.
Frankly, they shouldn't have charged more than $19.99 for this expansion for all we didn't get out of it.
i think $40 is fair.. problem is that $40 of content wont last a full year. Though $40 for second, 3rd, 4th accounts + is not all that worth it.
They've been vague about saying if there will be more content to TDS or not... I doubt even they know what they're planning at this point.
development is pretty well locked for the year. they plan out content like 2 yrs in advance. it has been vaguely hinted that there may be a bonus zone - not a part of TDS , released, and of course possible new revamped zones and anniversary stuff to be worked on. I imagine right now the devs and coders will be pouring over the feedback and spreadsheets for TDS and fixing bugs / fine tuning for the next couple of months.
