Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 15

 

 

[I Wanna Wear A] Mirrored Hat Like Slade 

 Swansea Sound

Wombling Merry Christmas - The Very Most

Matt Brown, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I Wasn't In That Much Of A Hurry Anyway - Time-Gating In EQII's Rage of Cthurath Tradeskill Timeline

Rage of Cthurath is shaping up very nicely. Then again, almost all EverQuest II expansions do. I think I usually come here in December, singing their praises in the first few days and weeks, before wandering off to play with some shiny new toy in the New Year.

The whole way I play MMORPGs has completely changed over the last five years or so, though. Before, even including most of my time in Guild Wars 2 (Which was hardly overburdened with the expansions while I was there, let's be honest.), a new expansion for my current game generally meant I'd be doing little or nothing else until I'd at least finished the storyline and quite possibly for several months after.

Now, I don't even seem to be able to stick at it until the end of the main story quest. I do finish in the end but sometimes it takes two or three goes, separated by weeks or even months, usually when I'm off playing other games. Last year, if I'm remembering correctly, it was Spring by the time I wrapped things up on the first character. 

Or maybe I'm imagining that. It's a bit fuzzy when you take multiple characters through the same content. Perhaps I did finish the Signature Timeline on my Berserker before I moved on to something else. I'm pretty sure I would at least have finished the Tradeskill line, if only because those always take a fraction of the time the Adventure ones need. 

[Hi! I'm the Inventory Full Fact Checker. I'd just like to jump in here and say that, actually, that's not quite correct. More to the point, it's totally wrong. As this post confirms, the Berserker (Whose name is Conkers so why not call him that?) didn't get around to completing the Tradeskill Signature Questline for last year's expansion, Scars of Destruction, until nearly the end of January. January 24th to be precise. And let's face it, precision is what I'm here for...)

Okay. Fine! Thank you for your service. Now bugger off. 

But that post is very helpful in making the point I was about to make, namely that this year, in keeping with the loophole-closing I was talking about only on Friday, someone at Darkpaw obviously cottoned on to the way people like to race through the crafting timeline just so they can get flying in all the new zones, before going back and doing the Adventure timeline on the same character. Being able to fly for that makes it so much faster and easier. It totally makes sense to do it that way round.

Only two problems with that plan this year. For one, I forgot to do it that way around. I was so eager to see how my necromancer would handle promotion to Expansion Lead, I never even gave a thought to the Tradeskill quests. I just slammed her into the first zone and started killing stuff to see how it went. 

And since it went really well, I kept on doing it. Right up until she dinged Level 131 yesterday, at which point I thought to myself, you know what? It would be really handy if my Sage, Barnabus, was high enough level to make Mordita's new spells for her as she was ready for them.

With that in mind, I swapped over yesterday and had him start on the Tradeskill line. It was exactly as expected. Some chatting, some sneaking, a lot of gathering and loads of crafting. All very entertaining and enjoyable. I was having a great time.

XP was rattling in, too. I thought about using an xp potion to speed things up even more but it hardly seemed worth it. It looked as though it might take about as long to do the whole tradeskill line as it had taken to do just the first zone as an Adventurer. I hadn't made my mind up whether to keep swapping between the two or to blitz through the crafting quests and get that finished first, when this happened: Problem #2.

That's the final part of Quest Four (Of Eight.) Halfway through the full questline. On paper, anyway. 

It took me about ninety minutes to get there. Maybe a couple of hours. I wasn't timing it. At that rate I'd have had it finished this evening. 

I will not have it finished this evening. I might not have it finished this week.

The final part of the fourth quest is very heavily time-gated. You have to "prove your worth" to the goat-folk of Yon Gorroth before you can get any further and boy, are they hard to impress. In the old days, you'd probably just have had to grind out some crafted item they wanted until your fingers bled, taking the same repeatable quests over and over again. Not any more.

Well, yes, still that, sort of... You still have to make them stuff they're too lazy/snotty to make for themselves, just so they can do you the favor of treating you like a hired hand rather than a potential criminal but now they're being a lot more controlling about it. And exploitative, too.

First, they want to charge you a fortune just for giving you the opportunity to work for them. Five hundred platinum pieces and a rare before they'll even consider giving you the work. Then they tell you it's going to take a full week, real time, before they're going to hand you the merit badge that lets everyone else know you're fit to be trusted with even more menial labor.

At this point you could just sit the week out, if you had the patience. The timer will tick down with no help from you. Feel free to log out and go play someone - or something - else for  few days. 

Is it just me or is that a bit of a risky mechanic for a genre that generally likes to keep people logging in every day? 

There is something you can do about it, assuming you'd quite like to play your character before this time next week. You can take a repeatable quest from the same guy and do that for an eight-hour reduction in waiting time. 

It's not obvious. If I hadn't had the walkthorugh on the wiki open, I would never have known. You have to Hail the goat to get him tell you there even is a repeatable quest. Who hails NPCs these days? Is it 2005 all over again? It's like they don't want you to know. 

Once you find out it's there, though, the quest only takes a few minutes. That's not so bad, is it? You could probably get the whole thing done in a couple of hours and be on your way to the next level and the end of the questline in no time. 

Yeah... nope. You can only take the repeatable quest once every three hours.  

Even if you were insane enough to stay up all day and all night, grabbing each opportunity as it came, it would take you a couple of days. Any normal person is only going to manage three or four of those time-cutting quests a day, if that. Maybe you'd get it finished in three or four days, assuming you played every day or at least remembered to log in every time the damn quest was up. 

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread complaining about it on the forums, hyperbolically entitled  The Tradeskill Timeline Sucks In This Expansion Like Never Before. Having played through every one of those Timelines I would  categorically deny that. There have been plenty of worse ones. 

Then again, I am a Crafter and an Adventurer. This doesn't critically affect my enjoyment. My immediate response was to make my mind up to carry on with the Adventure timeline and just do the repeatables as and when I think of it. I don't really care if it takes all week.

I might be a little more irritated if I only played a Crafter but I can guarantee that almost every player who does also has a whole stable of them, so it's not like they haven't got something else to do while they wait. Plus there's all that gathering to do if you want to have enough Rares to make anything worthwhile.

I really don't see what the rush is, anyway. The expansion is with us for a year. Does everyone really want to be done with it by Christmas? There are people in the thread speculating that someone might have "taken time off from work just do the TS signature quest" and now they're screwed, to which I'd say if they did then the problem probably lies more with that person's life choices than any flaws in quest design.

The upshot for me is that I'll get back to adventuring for now and shelve the plan to make spell upgrades as I go. So far there's no sign Mordita needs them and anyway. The way spell upgrades work in EQII now means even the Expert versions of the new tier that Barnabus could make for her probably won't be better than the researched versions she has of older ones. It's a very unintuitive process in some ways. Experts used to be the gold standard for casual soloing but now you mainly need them as a stage in a much longer upgrade path.

As for progress in the Adventure questline, Mordita can now fly in the opening zone and she's just arrived at the first solo instance in the second. I need a clear couple of hours when I can count on not being interrupted for that one, which isn't guaranteed to happen... ever.

If it's time gating your worried about, you should try living with a dog... 

(Oh, and in case you're wondering what the weird pictures of a fiery, disembodied hand are all about, that's the device you craft that allows high level crafters who don't have an equivalently elevated Adventure level to wander about the map in complete safety. It's slow but it gets the job done. Eventually. 

It's also a great way to take close-ups of mobs, something I hadn't realized until today. I may make more use of it for that.)

Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 14

 

Christmas Is - RUN-DMC

A Christmas Fucking Miracle

Run The Jewels 

Attribution 

Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 13

Christmas In Riverdale - The Archies

Attribution

Into The Unknown -or- Blimey, These Bags Are Heavy! What Have You Got In There?

That post title would work better if you were, in fact, looking into The Unknown in the screenshot above. You're not. That's the Oogothl Sprawl. Only, "Into The Oogothl Sprawl" doesn't have the same ring about it, does it?

And anyway, I haven't really been "Into" either of them, not in the sense of having gone somewhere and done something. What I have done is finish the first stage of the Signature Questline (MSQ if you prefer.) thereby gaining the Account flag that lets all my characters use the Spire to teleport you from the opening zone, Yon Gorroth, to the other two explorable zones, Oogothl Sprawl and The Unknown.

Getting that far has taken me around six hours although maybe an hour of that was spent giving my Necromancer's bags a serious clear-out, including swapping the bank boxes she was using for proper backpacks. 

That was something I wasn't expecting to need to do. Ever. I've been using the two kinds of containers indiscriminately for as long as I can remember. The only difference was what the icon looked like and which crafters made them. Tailors make bags, Carpenters make boxes.

Only very recently, in July this year, Darkpaw decided to get serious about the supposed weight difference between wooden boxes intended for vault storage and leather backpacks used to carry stuff on your character. I'm not about to do a full research project on it but as I vaguely remember it was that way when the game began but fairly quickly got changed so both sorts were effectively weightless. I think maybe weight itself was was removed from the game and boxes and bags just went along for the ride.

Then in July this happened:

Strong Boxes in inventory will now slow characters unless the character is in The City of Freeport, the Qeynos Capitol District, the Qeynos Province District, Neriak, City of Hate, or any house or guildhall.

It's an interesting change in a couple of ways. Firstly, there's still no weight to the boxes as such. Instead, there's a debuff to movement speed. Secondly, only some starting cities are exempt. In Halas, Kelethin and the Sarnak starting town, the name of which I can never remember (It's Gorowyn. Had to look it up.) new players will need to make sure they only use bags right from the get-go.

There is a reason for that, as pointed out by someone in the eight-page complaint thread on the forums this apparently minor change generated. The exempted areas are all discrete instances, whereas the other cities are areas in much larger, open zones. The "slow walking" code is obviously being applied zone-wide and there was presumably no easy or quick way to limit it to certain spots.

As many commenters also pointed out, no-one appeared to be asking for this change. EQII doesn't have exactly the split World of Warcraft does between "Retail" and "Classic" but it does have "Live" servers running the most recent iteration of the game and a whole bunch of Time Limited Expansion and Special Ruleset servers, on which different rules apply, including an "Origins" server that's probably the closest to the "Classic" concept.

With that amount of choice, it seems reasonable to assume that anyone who hankers after the good old days of 2005, when dwarves were dwarves and anyone seen walking the streets carrying half a dozen wooden boxes would rightly be pinned to the ground by the sheer weight of public disapproval, could jolly well pack their artisan-crafted traditional bear-skin backpacks and bugger off to Origins.

Even Origins, it seems, had to have a think about it first. The change was introduced there only after a period of anarchy, when sprightly Elves could be seen tripping merrily across the high walkways of Kelethin with half a dozen bank boxes bound around their waists as if they were made of thistledown. Although, given they were Elves, I guess they very well could have been.

Conspiracy theories were raised in the thread about the move being forced on Live by the need to service Origins or its having something to do with boosting sales of large bags in the Cash Shop. Unfortunately for the conspiracists, Origins has a completely separate code base that doesn't rely on compliance with the Live game and at the time of the change there didn't happen to be any large bags for sale in the Cash Shop at all.

A much more cogent complaint was that "no-one asked for this". It certainly wasn't a hot topic of conversation on the forums before the change was made. There is an in-game Feedback system that's invisible to all but the sender and whoever at Darkpaw has the unenviable task of reading it but it stretches credulity a little too far to believe there could have been a flurry of private requests for really heavy bank boxes.

Apparently the given reason for the change was so that larger vault boxes could be offered in the future. We used to get bigger boxes with every expansion that also came with a level cap raise. New recipes were added to Tailors and Carpenters books and everyone changed out their old boxes and bags for the more generous sizes. That stopped a long time ago for the very sound reason that the servers just couldn't handle the increase in the number of items they had to track as players moved around the world with the equivalent of a pick-up truck full of miscellaneous goods trailing behind them.

I suppose the idea is that boxes in banks won't need to be tracked in real-time to anything like the same extent, bank vaults tending by tradition to stay in one place most of the time, so it might be possible to make them larger. So far we haven't, as far as I know, seen any recipes for bigger boxes but then I haven't started leveling my Carpenter to 135 yet. Maybe she'll get a pleasant surprise. 

I doubt it. It might be in the long-term plans but what seems much more likely to me in the short term is that there's a faction within the development team at Darkpaw that just doesn't like seeing players "getting away" with things. They're always tightening up on imagined infractions for what often looks, from the outside, like loopholes being closed for the sake of it. 

For example, the recent changes to utilities. The patch that came along with the launch of the current expansion had a few unpleasant surprises for slackers who weren't keeping up to date with the latest nutritional advice:

Expendable item effects such as food that grant Crit Bonus, DPS, Fervor, Flurry, Flurry Multiplier, Haste, Melee Multiplier, Multi Attack, or Weapon Damage will no longer grant that stat bonus in expansion zones released after their intended expansion. For example food from Ballads of Zimara will not grant these stats in Scars of Destruction or later expansion zones.

Non-expendable item effects such as food that grant Crit Bonus, DPS, Fervor, Flurry, Flurry Multiplier, Haste, Melee Multiplier, Multi Attack, or Weapon Damage will no longer grant that stat bonus in the second expansion released after their intended expansion. For example triggered or passive permanent effects from Ballads of Zimara will grant these stats in Scars of Destruction zones, but will not grant these stats in Rage of Cthurath or later expansion zones.

I guess Provisioners will be happy about that. Personally, I rarely even remember to use food or drink at at all so its a bit of a moot point. Given that older food will inevitably provide lower benefits, though, it's hard to see this as a necessary change to maintain some kind of even playing field or to ensure the game runs more smoothly. 

And then there was this:

Many triggered item effects from equippable gear must now be worn to maintain the effect.

That, at least, could be argued to have some relevance to gameplay, if fights have to be tuned with every possible unequipped clicky in mind. There was a time when I would drag the icon of an equippable item in my bags to a hotbar so I could trigger it without having to either open the bags or, Tunare forfend, actually put it on! But that was a long time ago. I'm not going to miss it now.

I did expect a lot of complaints on the forum about both changes but I just had a look and I couldn't find any so either no-one cares or no-one's noticed yet. Which is possible. I only noticed the box thing because a bloody great red warning notice popped up when I ported my Necromancer out of her home into Antonica on the first day of the expansion. 

Even then, I ignored it because she was riding her broomstick and the speed debuff is either mitigated or completely annulled when you're on a  mount. It was only when she had to get off the broom for some reason and I saw she was hobbling along like a cartoon witch that I thought to take a look at her inventory.

She was using three bank boxes and had a couple more in her bags. The weight restriction counts for unequipped boxes as well. Carpenters, who have to make and move the things, aren't happy about that.

Once I'd decided to replace the three boxes she was using with bags, my first thought was to grab some off the Broker. I was only saying the other day how it's usually faster and nearly as cheap to buy crafted items as it is to make them yourself. 

I'd be grateful if you'd forget I said anything so dumb. It's nonsense. Some things are very cheap and very widely available but many are not. Big bags, for one. Unless you want pay half a million plat for a 48-slot bag, I suggest that, if you have a Tailor on staff, you get them to make it instead.

Which is what I did. Eventually. First I had to figure out why Mordita didn't have the recipe. That was easy enough. She doesn't have most recipes. I boosted her to 130 Tailoring with a Cash Shop token and crafting boosts don't come with a fully up-to-date set of recipe books. The only recipes she had were ones she'd picked up from holidays and quests. 

Luckily, most of the books are on the NPC vendors in the craft halls these days, where they cost silver and gold, which isn't even pocket lint. I bought the lot. Over two hundred books and scrolls. Every one of which I had to purchase separately. 

And then I scribed them all. One. At. A. Time.  

That took a while. It also filled all the available slots in my bags when I was only half-way through so I had to do it in two goes and then my mouse finger got cramp from all the clicking. I got it done in the end. Then it was time to swap everything over. 

Fortunately, I remembered that there's an easy way. Couldn't remember what it was, of course. I had to google it. It's simple when you know how. Just drag the icon of the bag you want to empty into an open slot of the bag you want to fill and the contents transfer themselves automagically. Leftovers stay in the original bag so just keep decanting into another new bag until you're done.

It was weirdly satisfying. I was almost sorry I didn't have more bags to swap. I might do it on a  few more characters now I know the trick.

All that took an hour or so out of my steady progress through the Signature Quest and now writing about it has taken up almost all of this post. Funny how these things keep happening, isn't it?

Maybe next time I'll actually get to post something about the Unknown. Or Oogothl Sprawl. 

I bet you can't wait. 

Inventory Full Advent Calendar 2025 - Day 12

 

Merry Christmas O! - Yemi Alade

EverQuest II : Rage Of Cthurath - Very First Impressions

After I finished yesterday's post, I felt sure the next thing I'd write would be a follow-up in which I recounted my difficulties - or lack thereof - in setting up my account to play Ashes of Creation (Early Access.) on Steam. With luck, I thought, I might even manage enough time in the game itself to put together some kind of First Impressions piece.

That plan lasted exactly as long as it took me to publish the post and then try to log into EverQuest II for a bit of house-building, only to find those servers also down, not for maintenance this time but for an update. I thought it was a bit odd. EQII almost always patches on Tuesdays. There was a link to the patch notes, so I clicked through to see what was going on. 

Which was when I realized there was something I'd forgotten. Something quite important.

Yesterday, December 10th, was the scheduled release date for this year's EQII expansion, Rage of Cthurath.  

That tells you a great deal about how some things have changed. Time was, when the imminent release of a new expansion for an MMORPG I was playing would have been enough to drive almost everything else from my mind. I would have been looking forward to it for weeks. 

On the day it was going to go live, I'd have been sitting at my desk, staring at the screen, waiting for the servers to open. I'd have been checking the forums, listening to people chatter excitedly about what was coming.

If the servers were due to come up when I'd be asleep, I might well have set my alarm clock to wake me up early so I could get online as soon as possible. I might even have taken a day or two off work so as to not to miss all the excitement.

That was then. Now, even though I've already paid for it, I couldn't even remember the day the expansion was slated to arrive. And it wasn't a momentary lapse of memory. The exact date just hadn't made that much of an impact. If you'd asked me, last week, when the new EQII expansion was coming, I'd have said "Sometime in December. I think it might be the 11th?"

Well, it wasn't the 11th. It was the 10th. And, at least once I'd been reminded, I did feel interested enough to want to take a look right away. The servers came up mid-evening my time. I was able to get in a couple of hours which, as anyone who's seen me moaning about it here lately will know, is quite a long session for me, these days. 

Today, I've already put in another three hours or so. If I didn't have this nagging voice in my head telling me I really ought to get on with writing a post about it, I'd be playing now. As soon as I finish, I'll be happt to get back to playing again.

Which certainly suggests I must be having a good time. And I am. I'm enjoying that oddly comforting, reassuring sense of commitment that comes with finding yourself wrapped up in a new expansion for a game you know well. You're aware there's plenty ahead of you. You're not going to run out of things to do for quite a while. 

You also have a pretty good idea what it is that you're going to be doing. Basically the same as you did the last time and the time before that. Only with different scenery.

That pretty much sums up an EQII expansion, twenty years after they began: same content, different scenery. (Really very lovely scenery, too. The screenshots never do it justice.) 

There's a very annoying cliche marketing departments, particularly those attached to publishing houses, love to use. There are variations but it always follows the form of "If you liked X, you'll love Y". The theory seems to be that what people want next is whatever they had last, only more so. It's as if the sheer repetitiveness of the experience intensifies it rather than watering it down.

And you know what? It's mostly true. It certainly works for books, anyway. As a bookseller, one of the first and most important questions you have to learn how to answer is "Have you got anything similar?". Readers read books a lot faster than writers can write them. A series that took the author a few years to write might take a new fan a few months to finish. Or even a few weeks. 

When they find there aren't any more and there won't be for at least another year, always assuming the author is still interested enough to keep the series going (Hi, George! Hi, Patrick!), they start casting around for something that's as close to what they just read as possible. Anything to keep the jag going. 

Gamers are much the same and MMORPG expansions ignore it at their peril. The "different" ones are rarely the successful ones. 

EQII expansions are even more attuned to the expectations of the audience than most, I suspect. I won't say they're formulaic or predictable but only because that sounds unnecessarily pejorative. They do all follow a pattern, all the same.

I wouldn't describe them as crowd-pleasing or fan service, either. Not really. Somehow, a section of the playerbase always seems to find itself baffled or upset about something. Many EQII expansions end up being surprisingly controversial, usually for relatively minor changes to systems or mechanics.

I think what EQII expansions have become in recent years could best be described as "a known quantity".  They aren't by any means all the same in detail. They all add new features and make changes to gameplay, some of which can be disruptive. It's also not unusual for the whole tone and feel of the game to shift perceptibly for the duration of a particular expansion cycle.

And yet, no matter how radical the new elements might be, the underlying structure is always almost identical. Compare the lists of content, year on year, and about all you need to change are the zone names.

There are always two or three open world zones across which you travel as the storyline unfolds. Each zone has a number of instances that have to be unlocked at specific points in the Signature questline. The questline always has you on foot at the stat, with flying being enabled at the end of each stage but only for the zone you just finished.

Everything always begins in a village or a camp on the edge of the first zone, to which you arrive by ship or portal from the Old World. Even though you clearly know nothing at all about the place you've just reached, everyone there immediately starts treating you like an old friend or a trusted servant, someone who can be relied on to take any job, no matter how  tedious or dangerous, and get it done with minimal guidance or instruction. No footling errand is too trivial; no affair of state too grand. Despite no-one knowing whop the hell you are, everyone just assumes you're trustworthy, capable and willing.

And, of course, you are. Before you leave the village for the first time, though, be sure to strip down to your underwear right there in the middle of the town square and swap every item you have for whatever you find in that box on the floor. Better yet, have a chat with the fellow standing next to it first. Let him tell you how to dress yourself. Better listen carefully, too. Miss even one step and you're going to find everything a lot harder going than you expected.

From then on, it's a long and convoluted tale of gods and monsters as you save the universe or the world or some specific subset thereof yet again, either by hitting things and setting them on fire, picking them up and making things out of them or quite possibly both. 

Along the way, you'll change everything you're wearing at least twice more, collect a whole bunch of random, useless items off the floor and hand them off to some obsessive, who will happily trade them for something different that you probably don't want either. You'll get a new pet and a new bodyguard and a new ride and you'll spend time and money you can scarcely afford on all of them to make sure they can keep up with you because you might think you're doing all this alone but in EQII "solo" means there really has to be at least four of you working together at all times.

That's what I was expecting and so far that seems to be what I've got. And I'm very happy with it, so far.

There is one big change from my perspective, something that really has freshened the whole thing up for me: I'm finally playing as a Necromancer. 

It's been my plan for several expansions but until now the disparity between my regularly-played Berserker and all my other sometimes-played characters has always left an insurmountable gap in preparedness, so even if I've started with someone else, I've always ended up back with him in the end.

This time, I spent much of this year setting up for it. Not the gear, which all gets replaced in the opening seconds, but the skills. In the past it's been little things like not having the obscure languages or taking three times as long to gather anything that's made playing anyone but the 'Zerker feel like a chore. My Necro is still lacking in a few specialist areas but mostly she's on par and for the first time I can enjoy playing her without the niggling details dragging the experience down.

So far, she feels much more powerful than the Berserker. Her Time-to-Kill is much better and she has far more versatility. Of course, to be sure the difference really is in the innate superior soloing ability of her  class, rather than Rage of Cthulath itself being a significantly easier expansion than the last few, I'd have to play it to the end of the Signature questline and then do it all again with the Berserker. I probably will, in time.

For now, though, I can say that from the first pull, every regular mob has been dying in two casts or three casts. And it only takes that long because they're all DoTs and I keep stacking them when I probably don't need to. 

The pet can solo them with no help from me and almost as fast. I have the new mercenary but he hasn't had to heal anyone on a regular mob yet. It makes exploring very enjoyable, even without being able to fly. Anything that gets in the way is dead before it even gets to us. 

Even more satisfying is the way the Necro has been able to handle the open-world solo bosses in the opening zone. As usual, they're all about seven levels above the starting level for the zone and flagged as tough for solo mobs. 

A few expansions back these kinds of mobs were always easy but then something changed and they became almost impossible. In one expansion, my Berserker still couldn't kill the named solo mobs in the first zone even after he'd finished the whole Signature quest. Things improved with the last expansion, in which they were kind of in-between those extremes. He still couldn't do them when he was working their zones but he could a little later, when he came back for another try. 

This time the Necro killed three of named mobs in the second session before she'd barely got going on the questline. It wasn't a total walkover. They all took some concentration. Her Mercenary died in one fight but it was near the end and the outcome was never in doubt.

I never felt she was in any great danger, even when she had to do all her own healing. Given that last night I watched someone in plate armor having a much harder time with one of the same targets, it seems fair to put it down to the superior DPS and survivability of the Necromancer rather than a major nerf to the mobs.

My overall first impressions, then, are very positive. The first zone is gorgeous. Any worries about the dark nature of the storyline delivering an ugly hellscape can at least be put off until I get to the next one. Gameplay is exactly as expected, which suits me perfectly. The story is also highly familiar and very much what I signed up for. And the class swap is shaping up just as I hoped it might.

All in all, a very good start. We'll see how it goes on.