Originally Posted by
Totemanic
Honestly, trying to get a balanced opinion on these forums is harder than trying to get blood from a stone.
Personally I like it, I'll try to give you a few things I've noticed;
The questing is great if you get into the story, if you skip all the dialogue like many do then it will not be for you. Agreed, questing is great. Unfortunately, after 40+ levels of not only class quest dialogue, but every quest dialogue, it gets old. they should have saved dialogue and decisions for class story, and got rid of it for regular quests. either that, or limit it to 1 or 2 choices per convo, instead of the sometimes 5-6 it currently is.
The crafting system is very 'hands off' in that you don't really need to do any of it yourself, personally I like it, but then I hate normal grindy mmo crafting systems. While this may be a nice feature, there are times where i just want to craft things myself (which you cant), instead of waiting up to 2.5 hours for my companion to finish a mission, or craft an item (yes, i said 2.5 hours, and thats at max companion affection). Would have been great to be able to actually go on these crafting missions yourself. Hands off by choice is cool, hands off by design is not.
The pvp is actually not bad imo, however there are only 3 warfronts so it may get a bit repetitive. Damage isn't too bursty unless you're really out geared (there is a current problem with 50s being put in the same games as low level characters but that is being fixed this week). PVP is atrocious. There's no denying it. The 2 main warzones are the exact same concept as ones im sure youre familiar with from other MMOs. The other one, huttball, is 100% about fighting the terrain, and 0% about PVP. PVP in general suffers from big class imbalances, and horrible (absolutely horrible) ability delay.
The flashpoints are generally a bit longer than in wow, with the shortest taking about 20 minutes and the long ones over an hour. The trash is extremely easy, however the bosses have nice mechanics and are a decent challenge. Done most of the flashpoints but 1 or 2, the mechanics are pretty similar to everything else. Also, you MUST sit through all the conversations each time you run each flashpoint (you can, however, rapid fire your spacebar through the choices, but you have to wait on the other group members).
Normal mode raiding is designed to be puggable and pretty much is, only the last boss in EV would cause any serious problems at the moment. On Nightmare it requires 8/16 people that know what they're doing, it's not as hard as wow hard modes but that's not surprising as it's the entry level raid. Agreed 100%
Most bosses have anything from fairly to extremely strict enrage timers, so dps cannot slack. Even with 2 raid geared dps we still hit the enrage on a few of the flashpoint HM bosses (probably some tuning needed there though).
That's about all I can think of at the moment, it's not super different from wow but it's a fun enough game in my opinion. I'm sure a free trial will appear soon enough if you're willing to wait.