After a good 4 months...

[Y2Sky]

... I am curious about the current status of Horizons. I remember enjoying the game despite the bugs but wound up quitting early in the fall of last year, as I was awaiting the arrival of WoW. I'm sure I've missed several changes, including the new Istaria. Would anyone care to share their current opinions of the game? I'm mostly trying to find the answers to these questions?

Have there been improvements in availability and number of monsters/resources?

Is combat still relatively laggy when grouped and when fighting several mobs, or has the combat engine gotten better?

Are there more involved and meaningful quests in the new Istaria, or is it still "Kill X of this mob" and "Collect Y of this item/resource"?

Do the shards have a good population to promote grouping/guilds?

Have the schools changed, or are they pretty much the same as they were in the fall?

Thanks for all the input!

[imported_Ssilmath]

I'll answer as best I can, here is this fanbois view...

The spawn system will either make far too few mobs, or far too many, but with the latter you can pick them off one at a time...

With the exception of just a couple times, the resource spawns have been pretty good, I can't complain...

Combat isn't very laggy as far as I have seen, though I solo a lot and don't know how it gets in groups...

Quests are actually fewer now, and mainly kill quests, but that is changing in the near future...

The shards have a lower population than before, but a number of new players are joining, some getting powerleveled and some doing it the way they are supposed to...I would say that populations are slowly going up...

Schools have stayed the same, with a few tweaks here and there...

Hope that helps, I would recommend rejoining HZ, it is looking like the game will have a future now...

[gopher65]

Numerous people left when WoW and EQII were released (if you are playing on Unity then people WILL be leaving for WoW. Has euro-WoW been released yet?). Many guilds with less then 10 active members were forced to disband and merge, so Guilds are (on the whole) actually more active then they were before.

ARoP and Lairs are just being finished up. After they are complete tiered speciel quests will be added for each species, as well as new vault capacity quests. According to Manga, kill quests are going to be readded to trainers, but this time with lore around each quest (rather like the "Find Bolger" quest if you remember that one. You had to kill 5 mylocs to recover the skull of Bolger in order to prove he had been killed).

Tier V blighteditems (dropped from mobs)and Blight Anchors are ingame. Tier IV blighted anchors have also gone live now. Lower tiers to follow shortly.

Crystals are getting a revamp.

Combat lag is still there to some degree (group pulled 50 mobs and framerate dropped to 3 FPS. But I kinda think that is to be expected since most were casting AoE spells:P. This was with spell effects on). What is most annoying is the fricking mob spawn. Due to some hardware issues they have had to change the spawn so it doesn't work like we would want it to. Several devs have assured us that they are trying to fix this.....

What else? ummm... Resources seem fine, except that they blight pretty fast after a Blight Anchor appears near them. But AE has said that it is slowing the spawn of blight anchors and taking a look at how fast they infect nearby resources so... yeah.

That's about it I think. oh, lots of plots for everyone now;). And no one has any money LOL

[Frons Von Frik]

get the free trial and test it out for yourself.. you may like it or you may not..

[Sajid]

Have there been improvements in availability and number of monsters/resources?

If you mean alternatives to cursed wolves and marrows - yes, huge improvement

Is combat still relatively laggy when grouped and when fighting several mobs, or has the combat engine gotten better?

If you mean better than the first Satyr machine raids and Aug/Dali sieges - yes, huge improvement. Many groups of 8+ folks take out 50-60 MOBs at once now.

Are there more involved and meaningful quests in the new Istaria, or is it still "Kill X of this mob" and "Collect Y of this item/resource"?

All the quests are generally the same except the "Kill X" general adventure classes changed to collect trophies where a trophy is a possible loot. Trophies also sell for cash and are not "bind on aquire" so you can sell, trade and use ANY way you see fit.

Do the shards have a good population to promote grouping/guilds?

Assuming you know players have no precise metric I will tell you what I do know. The population is stabilizing and I see many low levels (20+) running around (not just dragon alts) and our guild has recruited a whole new generation (Order). Our guild membership ranges from 5 - 30 on at any one time and the bulk of us are 200+ days in the game.

Have the schools changed, or are they pretty much the same as they were in the fall?

With level 120 (tier 6) MOBs and T5 forms/techs it is possible to have a rating of 200. Personally I have 4X100 adventure levels and that combination is nothing I thought possible when 1X100 meant months of wolves/marrows.

MMOG opinion differs person to person, therefore, the answers to the questions does indicate youcould very wellenjoy coming back. However, I would suggest taking Frons' advice and try it for a week and decide for yourself.