Alright, I agreed with myself to give this game 1 month of my time.. I'm a former beta tester who never bought the retail due to the way beta ended.
so far im not all too happy.
first off.. WHERE ARE ALL THE MOBS! seriously, you can wander around for hours and not find a damned thing to kill.
when you do find something that you can kill, that actaully gives you SOME resemblence of decent XP, they put it next to other mobs that are twice the level. making it virtually impossible to attack the mob you can kill, without setting off the one next to it that will squish you into paste in a matter of seconds.
on the subject of fighting mobs, lets discuss the timers for the abilities. well, jsut the dragon ones actaully since thats what im playing. some of them are absurdly long. 2 or 3 minutes for an ability that really isn't all that great, but something you despretly need in order to kill something your own lvl.. dragon ravage, and bite seem way too long. tail whip isn't TOO bad, but should definatly be reduced a bit. Right now im killing sandstone golems. #1 because they are close to my lvl, and #2, i happened to run across them!. now they use 2 abilites, crush and hurl boulder. both definatly do more dmg. Comparing it to similar abilites i have, like ravage and galewind, im feeling a bit.. under powered. In the course of the battle the gloem will use crush aprox 3 times, and hurl boulder 2-3 times. in the course of a battle i can only use gale wind and ravage ONCE, and they both do about the same dmg increase as hurl and crush do for the golem. i should be able to use both at least twice in a battle IMO. #1. i'm a dragon, not exactly a species known for thier fragility, if it was a dryad or a gnome i could see it. and #2 im a supposed " gifted warrior", I should have little problem killing something my own lvl. and theres very, VERY little hope of me killing something even +1 my lvl.. the only way i could is if i got lucky and hit with everything and the mob missed me with all its abilitys
speaking of dragons lets talk about the dragon quests shall we? today i went to dralk and got a quest from the breath accuracy trainer. He told me to go to mahgra and kill 20 winter wolves. (Im lvl 12 BTW) so i figure, this quest is made advailable when a dragon hits lvl 10.. so winter wolves should only be around lvl 10-15 i figure. well i port my way to mahgra and look around.. took my about 10 minutes to actauly FIND a mob first off, and what i found was a winter mountain wolf.. lvl 51!.. ok, this was a mountain wolf.. obviously not what im looking for. so another 20 minutes of wandering around looking for winter wolves.. found ice beetles, and some more mountain wolves.. no winter wolves. so becoming fed up i hop on the dragon channel and ask where in mahgra the winter wolves are... the response... there ARE NO winter wolves in mahgra.... well great, turns out they are on some little mountain in the middle of darvus. so off to darvus i go, hike up the mountain and find the winter wolves.. GREAT ... right??... wrong, turns out the winter wolves are not lvl 10-15 like i expected, and like they SHOULD be, but are lvl 20-25!! so why the heck is this dragon trainer giving me a quest at lvl 10 that i can't possibly do till im either lvl 22ish OR bring 3 or 4 other lvl 10-15 dragons with me?! sorry, but i can't quite figure out the logic in this. first the trainer tells me the wrong location of the wolves, and second, theres not a snowballs chance in hell that im ever going to be able to finish this quest anytime soon.
Now lets look at dragons and crafting.. first off, why should a dragon be REQUIRED to craft at all? bi-peds don't have to craft, it may be a good idea for them too, but they arn't REQUIRED to. As long as they make money they can jsut buy the stuff off people who DO like to craft., why is it that just because im a dragon i HAVE to craft stuff? And you may ask, well why DO dragons have to craft? well simple, because we need to have hoarde values of a certain amount to actaully get anywhere. and guess what, mobs don't drop anything near worthwhile to add to the horde. so you have to go craft dragon scales and add em to your horde jsut to gain some horde value. now if mobs droped some stuff that you could put in your horde from time to time, that was worth something this wouldn't be as bad. course you still need to be lvl 30ish in craft in order to complete the ROP for a dragon.. which i supose is mildly understandable, but I see no reason for it. a set adventure lvl, and hoarde value should be enough, I see no need to tack on a craft lvl as well. its hard enough jsut to build up a decent sized HV
and what does a dragon crafter get to even do anyway? spells, scales and gems.. thats about it. most spells dragons can't use. so all those are good for is to sell, or add to your horde... scales are good, but every dragon is required to craft anyway so all can pretty much craft thier own scales for thier lvl.. gems, not a whole lot of good those are, can't add em to your horde (whic to me is rather absurd.. you can't add GEMS to a dragons HORDE!) so bascialy the're only good when cetain techniques call for em. theres no dragon lairs to be built, so me don't ahve much to work towards in the way of construction (BTW lairs were said to be ready to be implemented before beta even ended...)
theres about 100 more things I could bring up, but im tired of typing.. and my head hurts thinking about all thats wrong. All I know is that yet again I was lied to by DB. his email said they had fixed all the major bugs, balanced everything out, etc, etc.. bascially saying that everythigng we asked for in beta, is now done and in the game... yet, theres no dragon lairs, broken quests, or at least misapropriated quests, lack of stuff to kill, forced crafting for dragons ( we are NOT slave labor damnit!!).. list goes on.. This is NOT what I call all fixed up and ready to go.
I'll still stay in for a month, maybe my views will change. but right now it feeels like im still in beta, playing a broken game and paying for it, in more ways then one...