The new TS sig line might be a lot of things...

I enjoyed the crafting timeline. I completed it this weekend since I was off work for President's day. I died more times than I should have because of my impatience, but I had a good time. I thought that the story was good, and I am glad to see you-know-who back in the pantheon.

I think the familiar was a good reward. I already had a similar one from beta testing, but I don't believe that items that affect game-play should be unobtainable for people that missed a short event.

I'd prefer to see the dailies improved to offer a chance at orange rune recipes, even if added in as individual recipes of one rune per drop, it would make repeatable grinding on the dailies fun.

You have rocks and plants, rather than the furniture items you've become accustomed to as a carpenter, because The Team hadn't even decided on what items to add for carpenters by the time beta rolled around.

So they had players submit screenshots of the bits from zone they liked, recolored a few previous holiday (and assorted other) items and that's what got shoved in the last week of beta.

The plants and rocks would have been fantastic additions to Moonlight Enchantments... not so much as the bulk of the carpenter's new recipes.

Sound like the devs and their bosses should listen and only slightly alter the slogan. (change it to "expansion")

To be fair to the devs, I liked the 2nd quest and the part where you had to keep the shield up in Nek. The story was imaginative and interesting. That being said, way too much agro and dying. Also lag in the zone with the flaming sidewalks killed me several times as the screen would freeze and suddenly I fall off. Overall I did not think the timeline was fun. I really liked the KA TS timeline if you are curious, might give you some perspective on my idea of fun.

I've finished the first three quests so far.

Innovation has some good ideas; actually made me laugh out loud at the phoenix ashes too.

My perspective:

• Characters are all 110 Crafters. No exp incentive to be had.
• This is my first run through it, and I put on all that nifty harvesting gear I've accumulated. My HP went from 50mil to 500k.
• One shot kills in innovation - no time to train away even. Agro = instantly dead. Probably because of the HP pool in hindsight.
• I had to go back and harvest additional power nodes and go craft more EMDs after about halfway through. Used exactly 20 for the whole zone, I think.
• I was swearing at this point, when I had to go get more power nodes to craft more EMDs. I was swearing a lot. Not in a fun and frustrated way, either. I THINK I died about 25 times in Innovation....largely because of.....
• I COULD NOT SEE THE BUBBLES ON THE GROUND. My settings were too low. Please stop putting graphic settings checks in the game. Some of us prefer high fps and run in play doh mode - or have older systems where it's play doh or don't play.
• The long crafting combines = not fun, not challenging - just annoying and asinine. If you wanted to make it spice it up and make it more interesting, make it constant counters with a third of the crafting time. Miss one and it crashes hard but still recoverable from one. That or fail and die. Or fail and lose the combine. Something. I didn't have any super speedy potions of progress left after leveling the crafters via writs, so I had to go long way round.
• Gathering the imp.... stool... Why would that take so long?
• Disease was properly disgusting. Slopping the blood on my screen was a bit much though for me personally, but whatever. Annoying not every block had an update for no reason I noticed. Explosions were very gross.

I'm up to Shard of Hate instance - Quest 4, so will offer feedback once I complete the last quests.
So far, for me personally:
Innovation: 3/10. Bubbles not rendering and having to go back and make more EMDs tanked this experience for me by a lot.
Solusek: 8/10. Fishing nodes were weird to target, imp stool took a long time, but the phoenix bit saved it.
Disease: 7/10. Concept good. No reason for non-updating cubes bummer and made this zone longer than it needed to be.

I'm not a fan of infiltration games, and I do hate lengthy recipes. So, previous negative comments almost made me skip this timeline. Nevertheless, yesterday, i gave it a try. My two cents:

I liked:
-a well written story
-devs' sens of humor
-aggro range of mobs is really low. Even someone like me, usually as stealthy as en elephant in a porcelain shop only died two or three times (lack of attention)
-yes, the crafts are slower than "normal" ones, but they are definitely not as slow as ToV's weeklies. I never felt the need of progress potions.

I didn't like:
-a bit too many mobs for my taste in shard of hate
-being killed in one shot by mobs may be frustrating
-my main disappointment lies in the rewards department. The tome would have been a far more logical reward for the greater ascended achievement. The changes of pony and guild harvester puzzle me. And, mostly, I had a dream of ascencion, or dilution, or infusers recipes.... and nothing ! Moreover, the daily or weekly quests rewards sound like an insult toward crafters. Infusers or advanced recipes books, for a 20-30 mn effort, I mean, really ???

Despite those lackluster rewards, I have to admit I enjoyed that timeline. Nice job.

(and sorry, english is not my mother tongue)

I Find the PoP TS quest to be easy. I only die only as a result of being in a hurry. I only craft 10 ESD ( 1st time I did 20 but had a ton left over ) and only will use 6 and it is very easy to dodge the mobs in all the PoP tradeskill zones.. The Shard of hate part it is easy to either dodge those mobs or run them off. I have done this on a level 100 and 110 adventure level. With all of that being said I know I few people who find it very hard to avoid ago and dislike this quest. Me personally I rather spend a few hours doing this getting my crafters to 110 than grinding writs for hours at a time. The only real time sink is the combines and really that isn't a real big deal considering the time I spent doing writs in the past.

P.S. If I had one complaint it would be the molten throne part. Where you have to pick up the poo from the flying goblin things.
gathering their poop causes it to explode and it will take a great deal of your health with it. If your level 100 and not a healer or without any abilities to toss a heal it could cause a problem but again this too is manageable.

I agree with most of what Torquem wrote. Crafting isn't really that slow if you have some decent crafting gear. Doesn't anyone remember how crafting used to be before we got to the point where, with improved skills and abilities, you just went 4-5-6,4-5-6,4-5-6,4-5-6 and were done with the item? The combines in this questline are faster than experimenting an item.

I'm not that big a fan of sneaking, but there needs to be at least some mobs you have to avoid at least for the repeatables, or people would start botting the zojne with no risk. And tradeskill sneaking has been a part of the game even with Domino as TS Dev. It's the price we have to pay for them keeping the promise that you can be a top level crafter without adventuring. They could as well replace the sneaking parts with fighting...good luck as a Level 1 adventurer!

Overall I'm enjoying the questline.

I pretty much enjoyed the entire timeline up until Plane of Hate, though I did find Innovation to be a bit annoying as well, once I got down into the deeper part of the dungeon. I abhor Plane of Hate for the TS timeline. It was the most onerous and annoying quest I have ever had to do, and would have been made more enjoyable, had I been able to defend myself against the trash mobs. I wouldn't have a problem with not being able to defend against the imp and the dragon at the end, but the trash mobs...again, I reiterate, as someone who has leveled their adventuring and Ascension skills, I should be able to at least defend myself against them. As it is a tradeskill instance, I don't care if they don't drop any kind of loot, other than maybe an occasional tradeskill material would be nice, but having leveled my adventuring up, I should at least have a chance of surviving when I get agro'd by a trash mob in there. That would have made the instance more enjoyable.

I'm not asking for an ability to sneak by the mobs, although since we are all given sneak abilities only to have the ability to use them pretty much pointless since we can't use them when they most count.

I agree also that the tradeskill daily and weekly rewards are very lame. I find infusers to be pointless even as an adventurer due to the limited amount they add to an item, as well as the fact that most of them are percentage based as to whether they will even stick or not. To give them to tradeskillers, whom are not all adventurers, is basically saying "Here is your reward" and handing them a crumpled piece of paper.

When I completed my first tradeskill weekly quest, I received a Standard Stamina infuser for my daily and a Standard Ability infuser for my weekly. That's it, nothing else...well, with exception to the normal coin and the nearly pointless 15 gems. Lame...just lame. Give me house decor, give me tradeskill materials, give me recipes...but please...no more infusers.

Just wanted to finish my feedback of the tradeskill line, with new perspective. I completed the line on the first toon I was on in previous post, and have finished the line a second time so far.

Plot spoilers ahead.

Note, a guildie was running one of her toons through the line at the same time, so I had the benefit of having a live person to ask questions to on the fly. That definitely helped.

Shard of Hate: I must have gotten lucky on this one. I've heard several people in game complain on this one, but I didn't die even once. I chalk it up to luck.

Molten Throne: I ran the new version of this quest while friends in voice chat were doing the original (with bridges). One was getting the super fps lag others had complained about; I had no issues with lag in mine. This zone was not bad. A little annoying since easy to lose your place, but not bad.

Nektulous: This wasn't very clear. I was clicking on the smaller disc to fill with hate like 10 times before I realized I had to click on the shield. Even then, was hard to get the right spot because of the mobs. Know of some people who have done that instance and the giant blue forcefield did not render with fairly high settings, also.

I'm really disappointed in the development decision to show the hand about Innoruk via the PQ before the questline had time to be ran. There are some of us out here still who enjoy the story, and that was a pretty big spoiler.

Overall -

Shard of Hate: 7/10. Was ok, but having done the pq already, was a bit lackluster. Especially because the pq is now hot garbage.

Molten Throne: 9/10. Relatively quick, new version no fps issues (for me). Some dodging, but not a freaking ZONE FULL.

Disease (Revised): 10/10. Best of the zones, even despite the gross factor.



I plan on doing this quest line with my toons eventually, but it's not one I will want to barrel through over and over for sure.

Just my thoughts.

I've run the TS line 4 times now, and done the weekly 4 times.

Inno- offputting the first time you run it. Now that I understand it, easy enough. A little long on the solo. Maybe shorten the 3 required combines? Also- if you're stupid, you can screw this zone up terribly, because you can get the codes to unlock BEFORE you fix the bot (in the solo). Just a "no plan survives contact with the user" comment.
Torden- A little long (and boring) but not terrible. Again, an idiot might craft the items in the wrong order- and have to regather and recraft one of them. Not saying how I might know that.
Disease/Fire- both good as is, TS line and solo.
Hate- 4 combines, and gathering mats for all of them- bleah. A little long. Fine for TS line, but for a solo, it's a bit much.
Throne- Fine in TS line, I look forward to the solo. Haven't seen it yet.