I gave it a go when it hit open Beta. Overall I'd say its not terrible but it doesn't have much to recommend it either.
First and foremost the game is worse for being f2p.
Things you can buy with AD/gold are very inflated price wise... and the stuff you buy with Zen (real money) are expensive too. 16 bucks for a bag, 30 bucks for a mount. No powers respec except with real money (feats can be respec'd with in game currency and they are more like wow talent points, you get enough power options that you can afford a few suboptimal choices).
Crafting also suffers from f2p syndrome basically gated to be a huge time sink. Basically crafting is basically like swtor where you send dude on missions and it takes time to complete. the difference being missions taking multiple hours ( between 4-18) is not uncommon. There are shorter missions for grinding xp while you're actively playing, but they aren't significantly more efficient than some of the better long ones.
Some things I noticed. Class variety is bad, and class balance between those few classes is also bad. Rogue have huge DPS advantages. Great Weapon fighters are largely considered crap. Wizards have some use in AoE/pvp but in high end pve their single target dmg is weak and bosses are completely immune to their control effects.
Healer threat is quite ridiculous. Every boss summons adds mid fight, and those adds will always get on the healer. some of it is the tank's fault but even good tanks lose aggro to healers if the enemies aren't tightly clumped up to be immediately AOE'd down.
Tanking is pretty similar to say Tera where you actively block, but the way their mark (taunt+ double aggro generation vs target) fades if the enemy deals hp dmg to them is kinda frustrating and hard on beginners.
I found the foundry quests ok, but not amazing or anything. And the regular story/gameplay is basically a wow clone and again not anything special.
Honestly I'd probably like it okay if it wasn't a f2p cash grab. But basically what little I found enjoyable ( the relatively active combat and fancy dnd stylings) is simply overshadowed by the devs intentionally making the game fun in the interest of making money. You don't *need* to spend money to play the game fully which is good, but they definitely want to make you take forever to accomplish anything if you don't pay money.
I will mention that you can convert ingame currency to zen so you could in theory at high levels farm enough to buy the cash shop stuff you want with ingame currency. eventually. Anyway the good thing about f2p is that there is nothing stopping you from trying it out yourselves.
Last edited by Vurin on Sun May 05, 2013 5:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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