Well, after screwing up my third character, I might as well conclude my beta test and post my opinion on it.
The Good:
- the game is pretty to look at
- combat is entertaining, which makes grinding less tedious than other MMOs
- some interesting ideas as far a classes go
- very satisfying support classes (assuming you have a group to play with, otherwise it’s just tedious)
- very fast GM support, I was impressed
The Bad:
- I would have prefered more fleshed out classe which you stick with, instead of that mix&match approach
- many classes end up not being picked, because they are either not very good, or only useful in very specific setups
- this leads to many people running cookie cutter builds, which leads to more homogenity than most other MMOs (for example most people seem to go mainly for Barbarian as Swordsman, or Elementalist as Wizard)
- “samey” looking abilities, with description that make it difficult to chose between them, before trying them out (like Wagon Wheel and Cartar Strike, although this is one of the less significant dilemmas, since you’ll most likely pick both)
- trap options as abilities, which may sound good in theory, but are terrible in practice (for example Full Draw sounded interestin in theory, but is pretty much useless in PvE and I imagine it’s nearly impossible to land in PvP)
- broken “in game editing”-tool, there have been a lot of tooltips that were just gibberish or misleading, if we had access to that tool a lot of the mistakes would have been fixed by now
The Ugly:
- no way to respec during the beta; seriously, this would have allowed people to test a much wider array of classes and skills, as well as letting them progress further into the game, which would have been much in the interest of this beta
Even though I still plan to play it on release since I had a lot of fun.