Played it a lot at release and enjoyed it but eventually left due to the following reasons (which hopefully some are fixed)

1. No carrot on a stick at End-Game. The gear sets were itemized horribly. I understand now you can rank up in PvP or something and get gear that way? So I guess this is partially resolved. Did their itemization ever improve or does everything still have retarded stats on it that your class doesn't need?

2. No incentive to actually defend capture points/keeps causing everyone to just keep/BO swap all day b/c this gave everyone the most renown. Boring. Stupid.

3. Only 1 keep design that was horribly done. Any new keep layouts? Or can 10 people still hold off 50 by sitting in lord room and just mass AOEing that little staircase?

4. Did they ever add adequate diminishing returns or curb the amount of CC? The game played so well in tier 2 and tier 3 and then went to **** in tier 4, where i suddenly can do nothing with my character because I am knocked down, stunned, silenced, punted, etc. non-stop all the time. I like to actually control my character sometimes.

1. They reworked the items and are more useful, RvR sets are really powerful but don't have the set bonus on them like the 'gold bag' sets.

2. This still needs work as people still swap keeps, at least at the lower levels. They attempted to fix it by adding a 'domination' system where if you hold a guild claimed keep for long enough you get a domination point, you can lock down a zone by holding all keeps/bo's in an area like this.

3. Same crappy keep designs.

4. They made the CC timer longer. Tier 1/2 is still fun without all those CC's.

After playing for awhile before the patch, and up until a few days ago with a Choppa, I decided it just wasn't where it needs to be. I didn't feel like I wanted to play really. Probably just me phasing out of MMOs or something.

As far as itemization, all of the **** aside from bag rewards are pretty much the same. In other words, item drops are still garbage most of the time. Green renown armor is still terrible.

Capturing points, keeps, etc still holds no real value at all. They added influence rewards for the RvR lakes, but since the itemization on them tend to suck balls (As a warrior priest in T2, you get a choice of 2 gloves; melee stats with heal crit, and healing stats with melee crit), they aren't worth getting half the time. The weapons from them are good though.

Yeah, same keeps.

I never really had a hard time with CC myself. though if you are melee, or get to close to any melee (or hell, any class) then you are pretty much snared the entire time. Unless they don't know what they are doing.

Another terrible bug in the game now is the out of range bug for pretty much any melee class. As a Choppa I spend 80% of the time being told I am not in range of my target when I am right on top of them just about. Pretty much anyone that starts to run away from you can, and will, get away because of it. It's fantastic, and one of the reasons I quit my Choppa until a later time.

There is a lot to be done still. They need to start breaking molds here and stop trying to be like WoW, and more like DAoC.

They went from advanced keep sieges, decent PvE, pretty good PvE raid content, superior battleground (battlegrounds that have no player limit > scenarios with a limit), and lots of other things I could probably think of in DAoC, to what they have now. Watered down keeps, boring PvE, boring raid content, and ****ty scenarios that encourage people not to get out in the RvR lakes and fight there. DAoC at least had it right when they capped battlegrounds at 49, so level 50 people had to go out and get in the field. Even sub 50's did, because hey, it was actually fun.

I did the free reactivation thing a few days ago to try it out again. Unfortunately, the sluggish/laggy combat system is still in place and still hasn't been smoothed out. If you're going to copy WoW's flawless, fluid combat system, do it right or don't do it at all. I love how if you use a mod that shows the actual cast time, a 1.5s spell will take anywhere from 1.8-2s to actually cast (and that's when not suffering from any pushback, of course). Such a joke. That alone pretty much kills it for me. Would've much rather seen them do a system similar to DAoC with melee styles via autoattacks, etc even though that would've meant a slower overall feel. At least it maybe wouldn't feel like a laggy piece of ****. Sigh.

1. They did do a pass through on the sets and made them better for the most part. I'm a BW and my helm still has some +wep skill so it's not perfect, but there are some good sets/items to go for. Each tier and pairing has an RVR influence bar now that gives purple rewards. They can vary in their usefulness but some of the best +crit gear comes from there. Also the newest items they've added (purp rewards from forts/cities) are really nice, so it seems they're moving in the right direction.

2. I'd say the domination system helps this quite a bit. Not perfect, but there's a lot of RVR in the tier 4 lakes and keeps rarely go undefended during peak hours. I refuse to take empty BOs and keeps and don't have much trouble finding fights.

3. Same keeps. They've stated they plan to add an additional ramp up all keeps and forts to alleviate this, but as of now that has yet to happen. AOE is also too powerful atm and will likely be nerfed a bit in the near future.

4. Longer immunity timers that actually work (most of the time). I'm a ranged caster so I don't run into too much anyway except for the occasional tank knocking me over. They did take out disorients stacking (the longer build time effect) and they no longer affect instant attacks which made every order melee in the game pretty happy.


Not perfect but I'm still having fun