<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>So far I'm level 9 but I don't really forsee too much changes in the general combat model. I suppose things might get more interesting when enemies can cast spells, but seeing spell resistance is nearly nonexistent, maybe not.
This game plays more like Diablo 3 than a MMORPG at least from the perspective of a mage. The power available for the player is very high. Maybe too much. There doesn't seem to be much incentive to group up at the low levels and it apperas to be this way on high levels as well based on beta impressions from elsewhere. Hence that's why I said this game is more like Diablo 3 than a MMORPG. The world certainly feels small enough. Put 5 guys in a dungeon like area and all you will see is just a bunch of corpses, even with stuff respawning at some insanely fast rate (probably 1 minute at most) which also makes it really easy to die because you can be clearing one way and head back and the stuff you cleared would've already respawned. But since death is utterly pointless it's not like it matters, just run back to your corpse or take an xp penalty rez, it's not like it takes more than 5 minutes to recover the xp you lost.
I'm guessing this game is supposed to have a decent mix of enemy type (as opposed to say EQ, where 99% of everything is melee). In reality this just means certain classes will never bother with certain type of enemy types. For example Hunter enemy types can beat up a Mage easily because they're good HPs and can hit you as well (melee will die before they get into melee range). So what do you do? Just don't fight Hunter type enemies and stick with the melee that you can kill with ease. I didn't see many group versus more than one fights but it looks like you'd just beat down the easiest or the most dangerous enemy first and given there is almost no crowd control ability to speak of in this game, that actually limits on what you can do.
I also did some tradeskills, and I think Blizzard takes this tradeskill interdependency too far. Say I'm doing tailoring and I want to make some boots, I need light leather, which inexplicable isn't sold in stores, so I need to find someone with leatherworking. Of course given how easy skill points are to obtain you (or at least I) would just learn leatherworking and make my own leather rather than deal with others. It's not like WoW totally dumbed down tradeskill system actually takes time to skill up once you've the preliminery raw materials (i.e. cloth for tailoring which of course isn't sold in stores (but then what MMORPG does)).
The much vaunted Quest system I thought is pretty bland. If you poke around enough you'll find that out of the 50 wolves at say 50 XP each you've to kill to level someone will give you 600 XP for killing 8 of them, so you might as well take the wolf slaying quest. Heck sometimes you can just go from point A to point B and get way more XP than killing stuff for some fetch quest. Driven by this huge carrot to do quests some people even believe that the quests are immersive and well-written. That is not to say the quests are bad, but they're really just some freebies you get as you level up and I guess you shouldn't complain about free stuff. You also get some much needed gear from quests, seeing regular stuff drop pretty lousy loot and beta impression seems to be it's not worth the time to get loot from dungeons anyway (because you could level instead and get higher level lousy loot that's better than good, low level loot). Actually, it is awfully familiar to Diablo 2, where you just get a bunch of items and hope some of the stuff drops will be useful. But at least the quest rewards are fixed so you don't have to worry about completely missing certain items.
I think it's a mistake for this game to even have a raiding game. As Diablo 3, though, it's pretty darn fun, even if it has a monthly subscription fee, and the Gnomes are cute!</div>
This game plays more like Diablo 3 than a MMORPG at least from the perspective of a mage. The power available for the player is very high. Maybe too much. There doesn't seem to be much incentive to group up at the low levels and it apperas to be this way on high levels as well based on beta impressions from elsewhere. Hence that's why I said this game is more like Diablo 3 than a MMORPG. The world certainly feels small enough. Put 5 guys in a dungeon like area and all you will see is just a bunch of corpses, even with stuff respawning at some insanely fast rate (probably 1 minute at most) which also makes it really easy to die because you can be clearing one way and head back and the stuff you cleared would've already respawned. But since death is utterly pointless it's not like it matters, just run back to your corpse or take an xp penalty rez, it's not like it takes more than 5 minutes to recover the xp you lost.
I'm guessing this game is supposed to have a decent mix of enemy type (as opposed to say EQ, where 99% of everything is melee). In reality this just means certain classes will never bother with certain type of enemy types. For example Hunter enemy types can beat up a Mage easily because they're good HPs and can hit you as well (melee will die before they get into melee range). So what do you do? Just don't fight Hunter type enemies and stick with the melee that you can kill with ease. I didn't see many group versus more than one fights but it looks like you'd just beat down the easiest or the most dangerous enemy first and given there is almost no crowd control ability to speak of in this game, that actually limits on what you can do.
I also did some tradeskills, and I think Blizzard takes this tradeskill interdependency too far. Say I'm doing tailoring and I want to make some boots, I need light leather, which inexplicable isn't sold in stores, so I need to find someone with leatherworking. Of course given how easy skill points are to obtain you (or at least I) would just learn leatherworking and make my own leather rather than deal with others. It's not like WoW totally dumbed down tradeskill system actually takes time to skill up once you've the preliminery raw materials (i.e. cloth for tailoring which of course isn't sold in stores (but then what MMORPG does)).
The much vaunted Quest system I thought is pretty bland. If you poke around enough you'll find that out of the 50 wolves at say 50 XP each you've to kill to level someone will give you 600 XP for killing 8 of them, so you might as well take the wolf slaying quest. Heck sometimes you can just go from point A to point B and get way more XP than killing stuff for some fetch quest. Driven by this huge carrot to do quests some people even believe that the quests are immersive and well-written. That is not to say the quests are bad, but they're really just some freebies you get as you level up and I guess you shouldn't complain about free stuff. You also get some much needed gear from quests, seeing regular stuff drop pretty lousy loot and beta impression seems to be it's not worth the time to get loot from dungeons anyway (because you could level instead and get higher level lousy loot that's better than good, low level loot). Actually, it is awfully familiar to Diablo 2, where you just get a bunch of items and hope some of the stuff drops will be useful. But at least the quest rewards are fixed so you don't have to worry about completely missing certain items.
I think it's a mistake for this game to even have a raiding game. As Diablo 3, though, it's pretty darn fun, even if it has a monthly subscription fee, and the Gnomes are cute!</div>
