1) A much more beautiful game than I was expecting. Especially on the Kurzick side (but then, I go for the goth thing.
2) Ritualist ashes and aggro: I'm sure this lends to a risk of a flood of W/Rts using ashes to farm, unless it's changed before game launch. Meanwhile, I'd been looking forward to trying a Ritualist primary since the PvP Beta, and was disappointed by the fact that the ashes turn you into a primary target, sort of like a sole monk in 12x12 PvP.
3) There is a bit of a glitch that I first started noticing when pre-event data was streaming in (up to a week before the Beta), in which you'll select an enemy (it's also happened with an NPC) and their health bar looks empty. Their health functions as normal, and if they use Healing Signet, it displays the amount of health gained, rather than their full level. This was most common with Warriors, but I can't say for sure was confined to them.
4) Little things I noticed: "Befriending Luxons" is listed in the quest log as a Primary quest, while "Befriending Kurzicks" is logged as a Petrified Forest one. There is a spelling mistake in Moleneaux' intro dialogue for Envoy of the Dredge. For those of us who sometimes use C to quick-target, spirits are a real pain in the butt (is there a way to make it ignore them or use shift+C to include?). "Wardens on the March" had a classic case of the NPCs being dead long before you go there. And in the Mega Quest towns, where you can't take henchies into the missions, sometimes there were moments where I wanted to take henchies out into the explorable areas and couldn't.
5) The "Attack the Kurzicks" quest seemed to create some difficulty with the spawn frequency of the mobs. A lot of people said that the last 1 or 2 groups didn't spawn, while I had an experience in which 5 spawned in the space of about a minute and was overwhelmed. Later tries went smoother, and this may have been fixed.
6) Assassin pathing seems to not be as good as other character pathing. I noticed this most in House zu Heltzer. With any other character, I could click on an NPC in the other room and the avatar would navigate its way around fairly well (with the exception of one spot on one side of the stairs which tended to catch anyone venturing near). With an assassin, she'd walk directly toward the NPC, run into a wall and then stop. "Well now what do I do?" I'd already changed from Ritualist by the time I'd noticed this, so don't know if it affects the other new profession also.
7) I am trying to decide if Churning Earth is overpowered. Certainly, I haven't met many people who were able to complete "Wardens on the March," and I wasn't able to do so myself, because of the number of Earth Wardens (I'd step out of the AoE only to get hit with it again). It has about as much punch as Maelstrom, so it might just be the overprevalence in that mission, but I do suspect that upon launch, we'll see a spike in the number of Earth Eles.
8) I'm assuming that our Kurzick and Luxon faction will be wiped. Does that mean I should wait before doing quests like "Establish the Luxon Settlement" from L.A.?
All in all, very nice. Thank you for having the Beta open to everyone, and I'm looking forward to release day.
