OneofOne
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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Whoa drama queen cut it out with that hyperbole.
This was a review I thought worth reading and sharing:
Call of the Forsaken Review
By this time, you've heard the bad news: nerfs to caster DPS + berserkers, mediocre/poor AAs, merc AAs and gear being a wash, lack of creativity in the heroic missions content, inflated mob hps, two tiers of gear instead of four, staggered releases forcing you to pay $40 for four zones, nodrop across the board, etc...
Zones
Now for a bit of positive news: the new zones are beautiful. The artists did a great job dressing up the decades old EQ engine. The geography of the new Ethermere Tainted West Krana is of splendid complexity. The use of colors other than drab is great. You've not seen zones of this sort in EQ before, though the best analogy to it was the sweeping landscapes of Velious.
Two of the other three zones are up to the same standard, though at first you won't see it simply because two of them - Dead Hills and Bixie Warfront - are the equivalent of static hubs for Heroic Missions, in which the bulk of the content is contained. Of these two, Dead Hills is below standard in visual appeal, but hey, there's got to be one stinker, and it fits the lore. The final zone, Neriak 4th Gate, is a visual splendor that captures the old feeling of Neriak well.
The excellence of the terrain is supplemented by a decent amount of new mob and item graphics, given that this is four zones we're talking about. There's a lot of hit and miss in these. One of the successes is the ursarachnid - a new breed of spiders crossed with bears - which looks sufficiently menacing and bulky to match its alias. One of the less successful examples is the new beholder, which at first glance looks similar to a marble ball.
Besides the graphical design, the zones themselves are also of decent quality when it comes to content variety and rare distribution. You won't find the one-zone-broken-into-three Heart of Fear design in COTF Tier 1. Each zone has its own style and its own tricks - for example the underground tunnels running beneath West Karana 2.0, which at first you won't even know existed. The style of loot drops, where you have both the option of purchasing them with currency / getting them from rares spawned in zones/instances, is flexible and this especially applies to augs, which are a lot less ridiculous to get now that you're able to buy them with currency. The item system is unfortunately marred by the nodrop tag that's slapped across the entire expansion - minus spells - which discourages auction house activity.
For the rares themselves, there's a lot of tuning still left to be done. My personal assessment of them at the current stage is that they're rather easy mode when it comes to mechanics - ie there's very few mechanics - but have tons of hps, which coupled with the DPS nerfs, is capable of being an issue when the devs do decide to up their mechanics.
Heroic Missions
One of the sells of COTF is the Heroic Missions - the instanced content that had people buzzing about COTF being LDON 2.0. Well, COTF is not LDON 2.0, but is rather TBS 2.0. That is to say, this is an expansion with a few static zones and a few instanced zones, and where the instanced missions are standard fare group tasks, rather than the randomly generated LDoN dungeons where you had a choice of difficulty.
A lot of the Heroic Missions are linear, and a lot of them involve straight up killing. This is where COTF differs greatly from the previous set of expansions, where raid tasks and group tasks were two sides of the same coin. A lot of you complained about that, and the result ought to be satisfactory: the missions are rather friendly towards boxers and small groups, and you won't be dealing with complex raid mechanics / scripts rehashed for groups.
While this is great for accessibility - and believe me when I say that I'm a fan of accessibility - it is also a bit boring in that the missions are a bit too linear / simplistic. Several of them are just grindy kill 40 mob fares. I laughed out loud on one of the Dead Hills missions, which was a straight up parody of MMO kill tasks. Imagine this sequence of task updates:
Kill the undead that ambushed you 0/8
Now kill the bugs in the next area 0/10
Now kill the ogres in the area after that 0/12
Hell, kill the wild life for lulz 0/12
You get the picture.
Equipment
For those of you who complained ceaselessly about gear inflation: rejoice. Tier 1 CoTF is a minor upgrade on top of RoF T4 - around 150 HME / gear - and the best news for you is that you won't be replacing all your RoF T4 for 4-5 months, because rather than four tiers of gear, this time around you're only going to be getting two tiers of gear. Thus, on release you're going to have about 3/5ths of your COTF Tier 1 items, and 3-4 months later you're going to get the other 2/5ths. People who are worried that they're not going to be able to enjoy their gear before the next tier comes out need worry no longer - Chandrok has made sure that you're going to be wearing the same tier of gear for 5-6 months at a time.
Of course, this is bad news for those of us who thought that staggered content releases solved one of the biggest issues with having four tiers - people skipping tiers - and that, given this new schema, replacing all your gear every tier ought to be encouraged instead of discouraged, given that players are guaranteed to have to spend 3-4 months in every tier. But hey, we were not loud enough, so c'est la vie.
Another addition to COTF was merc gear. This is going to be a disappointment to a lot of people who thought they were going to be able to gear up their mercs in standard 2500 HME group gear. But no, merc gear is separate from group gear and is its own grind. From the looks of it, the stats on the gear aren't great enough to make a huge difference, but it does give you another carrot to chase after and hopefully, by the end of CoTF, the tank mercs won't be such crap.
AAs, Spells, Skills, and Merc AAs
One of the biggest downsides of COTF for a lot of you are going to be the AAs, Spells, and Skills. Simply put, for a lot of classes, COTF offers nothing new, and for several, COTF is a downgrade due to the patch day nerfs you're going to receive. The devs went out of their way to stagnate caster classes and this is going to be obvious come expansion release when you look at the new spells, AAs, and focus upgrades. Berserkers also took a hit.
Given that the changes are different for each class, however, I won't endeavor to review them. Now that NDA is lifted, the class forums are filled with posts of what changes are happening, so just go there and revel in the rants.
The final feature when it comes to AAs is merc AAs, and this is simply another grind. The only difference is that merc AA comes a lot slower than player AAs, but at the same time the AA abilities also cost less. I imagine people are going to be complaining about just how slow it is come expansion release, but when you think of it in terms of a time sink to tide you over when the gear upgrades dry up, it becomes easier to comprehend the design decision behind making merc AAs take this long to get.
Conclusion
I didn't do the raids so I'm not going to comment on them, and the added bank slots are exactly what they advertised, and so require no review. The rest of COTF is a mixed bag of quality and poverty. You won't be getting a lot out of this expansion when it comes to upgrades, whether via skills/AAs/spells/gear, and this is the simple result of the no-mudflation crowd winning out, on one hand, and the lack of dev attention to AAs/spells, on the other. I imagine they're going to save the new AAs for a later update the same way they saved it for the first content release of RoF. That's become a standard in this era of staggered releases.
Content wise, what's there is not that bad. The static zones are well designed graphically and have a casual feel to them. The instanced zones address the issue of rehashing raid content for group content, and also have a casual feel to them. A hardcore player is going to run out of content pretty fast, I imagine, but an average player who spends 2-3 nights a week playing EQ ought to be satisfied till the next content release. When it comes to the carrot in COTF, I feel SoE stands to benefit greatly from having a few chase items, because what's there currently is not enough of an incentive for chasers, especially after the quality of items ie the ACoF during HH.
Ultimately, what's there at the start of the expansion is, though marred by a few problems, not altogether bad. Yet, it is not enough, and it is only the hope for future content that makes the $40 tag at all valid. Without knowing what is coming, however, it is difficult to recommend on faith, and that is the biggest problem of them all.
To a greater degree than any other expansion, CoTF is a test of faith: in staggered releases, in the dev team, and in the future of EQ.
This was a review I thought worth reading and sharing:
Call of the Forsaken Review
By this time, you've heard the bad news: nerfs to caster DPS + berserkers, mediocre/poor AAs, merc AAs and gear being a wash, lack of creativity in the heroic missions content, inflated mob hps, two tiers of gear instead of four, staggered releases forcing you to pay $40 for four zones, nodrop across the board, etc...
Zones
Now for a bit of positive news: the new zones are beautiful. The artists did a great job dressing up the decades old EQ engine. The geography of the new Ethermere Tainted West Krana is of splendid complexity. The use of colors other than drab is great. You've not seen zones of this sort in EQ before, though the best analogy to it was the sweeping landscapes of Velious.
Two of the other three zones are up to the same standard, though at first you won't see it simply because two of them - Dead Hills and Bixie Warfront - are the equivalent of static hubs for Heroic Missions, in which the bulk of the content is contained. Of these two, Dead Hills is below standard in visual appeal, but hey, there's got to be one stinker, and it fits the lore. The final zone, Neriak 4th Gate, is a visual splendor that captures the old feeling of Neriak well.
The excellence of the terrain is supplemented by a decent amount of new mob and item graphics, given that this is four zones we're talking about. There's a lot of hit and miss in these. One of the successes is the ursarachnid - a new breed of spiders crossed with bears - which looks sufficiently menacing and bulky to match its alias. One of the less successful examples is the new beholder, which at first glance looks similar to a marble ball.
Besides the graphical design, the zones themselves are also of decent quality when it comes to content variety and rare distribution. You won't find the one-zone-broken-into-three Heart of Fear design in COTF Tier 1. Each zone has its own style and its own tricks - for example the underground tunnels running beneath West Karana 2.0, which at first you won't even know existed. The style of loot drops, where you have both the option of purchasing them with currency / getting them from rares spawned in zones/instances, is flexible and this especially applies to augs, which are a lot less ridiculous to get now that you're able to buy them with currency. The item system is unfortunately marred by the nodrop tag that's slapped across the entire expansion - minus spells - which discourages auction house activity.
For the rares themselves, there's a lot of tuning still left to be done. My personal assessment of them at the current stage is that they're rather easy mode when it comes to mechanics - ie there's very few mechanics - but have tons of hps, which coupled with the DPS nerfs, is capable of being an issue when the devs do decide to up their mechanics.
Heroic Missions
One of the sells of COTF is the Heroic Missions - the instanced content that had people buzzing about COTF being LDON 2.0. Well, COTF is not LDON 2.0, but is rather TBS 2.0. That is to say, this is an expansion with a few static zones and a few instanced zones, and where the instanced missions are standard fare group tasks, rather than the randomly generated LDoN dungeons where you had a choice of difficulty.
A lot of the Heroic Missions are linear, and a lot of them involve straight up killing. This is where COTF differs greatly from the previous set of expansions, where raid tasks and group tasks were two sides of the same coin. A lot of you complained about that, and the result ought to be satisfactory: the missions are rather friendly towards boxers and small groups, and you won't be dealing with complex raid mechanics / scripts rehashed for groups.
While this is great for accessibility - and believe me when I say that I'm a fan of accessibility - it is also a bit boring in that the missions are a bit too linear / simplistic. Several of them are just grindy kill 40 mob fares. I laughed out loud on one of the Dead Hills missions, which was a straight up parody of MMO kill tasks. Imagine this sequence of task updates:
Kill the undead that ambushed you 0/8
Now kill the bugs in the next area 0/10
Now kill the ogres in the area after that 0/12
Hell, kill the wild life for lulz 0/12
You get the picture.
Equipment
For those of you who complained ceaselessly about gear inflation: rejoice. Tier 1 CoTF is a minor upgrade on top of RoF T4 - around 150 HME / gear - and the best news for you is that you won't be replacing all your RoF T4 for 4-5 months, because rather than four tiers of gear, this time around you're only going to be getting two tiers of gear. Thus, on release you're going to have about 3/5ths of your COTF Tier 1 items, and 3-4 months later you're going to get the other 2/5ths. People who are worried that they're not going to be able to enjoy their gear before the next tier comes out need worry no longer - Chandrok has made sure that you're going to be wearing the same tier of gear for 5-6 months at a time.
Of course, this is bad news for those of us who thought that staggered content releases solved one of the biggest issues with having four tiers - people skipping tiers - and that, given this new schema, replacing all your gear every tier ought to be encouraged instead of discouraged, given that players are guaranteed to have to spend 3-4 months in every tier. But hey, we were not loud enough, so c'est la vie.
Another addition to COTF was merc gear. This is going to be a disappointment to a lot of people who thought they were going to be able to gear up their mercs in standard 2500 HME group gear. But no, merc gear is separate from group gear and is its own grind. From the looks of it, the stats on the gear aren't great enough to make a huge difference, but it does give you another carrot to chase after and hopefully, by the end of CoTF, the tank mercs won't be such crap.
AAs, Spells, Skills, and Merc AAs
One of the biggest downsides of COTF for a lot of you are going to be the AAs, Spells, and Skills. Simply put, for a lot of classes, COTF offers nothing new, and for several, COTF is a downgrade due to the patch day nerfs you're going to receive. The devs went out of their way to stagnate caster classes and this is going to be obvious come expansion release when you look at the new spells, AAs, and focus upgrades. Berserkers also took a hit.
Given that the changes are different for each class, however, I won't endeavor to review them. Now that NDA is lifted, the class forums are filled with posts of what changes are happening, so just go there and revel in the rants.
The final feature when it comes to AAs is merc AAs, and this is simply another grind. The only difference is that merc AA comes a lot slower than player AAs, but at the same time the AA abilities also cost less. I imagine people are going to be complaining about just how slow it is come expansion release, but when you think of it in terms of a time sink to tide you over when the gear upgrades dry up, it becomes easier to comprehend the design decision behind making merc AAs take this long to get.
Conclusion
I didn't do the raids so I'm not going to comment on them, and the added bank slots are exactly what they advertised, and so require no review. The rest of COTF is a mixed bag of quality and poverty. You won't be getting a lot out of this expansion when it comes to upgrades, whether via skills/AAs/spells/gear, and this is the simple result of the no-mudflation crowd winning out, on one hand, and the lack of dev attention to AAs/spells, on the other. I imagine they're going to save the new AAs for a later update the same way they saved it for the first content release of RoF. That's become a standard in this era of staggered releases.
Content wise, what's there is not that bad. The static zones are well designed graphically and have a casual feel to them. The instanced zones address the issue of rehashing raid content for group content, and also have a casual feel to them. A hardcore player is going to run out of content pretty fast, I imagine, but an average player who spends 2-3 nights a week playing EQ ought to be satisfied till the next content release. When it comes to the carrot in COTF, I feel SoE stands to benefit greatly from having a few chase items, because what's there currently is not enough of an incentive for chasers, especially after the quality of items ie the ACoF during HH.
Ultimately, what's there at the start of the expansion is, though marred by a few problems, not altogether bad. Yet, it is not enough, and it is only the hope for future content that makes the $40 tag at all valid. Without knowing what is coming, however, it is difficult to recommend on faith, and that is the biggest problem of them all.
To a greater degree than any other expansion, CoTF is a test of faith: in staggered releases, in the dev team, and in the future of EQ.
