I just like to post on Diva, so I thought I'd give you a brief overview of whats happened in EQII with the new expansion.
Desert of Flames is out and its the new Expansion for EQII. Its basically the old ro zones, but you wouldn't recognize it except for the Oasis, the gaters/crocs and the Orc highway and some Spectres hanging around the zone in--reached my magic carpet.
It is a very well done expansion with rich content, from what I have seen. Will it be good enough to woo back the many folks who just ran out of content on their level 50's 2,3,6 months ago? I dunno, we'll see.
The kicker is they rewrote the entire melee process. Things work significantly differently with many classes. Most people were very worried, but I think, the end result is many are very happy, overall, with the new system (except for their nerfs, lol).
Just to give you a feel for what a 50 Dirge now can do in a full group against a heroic (hard) or named encounter.
I have haste, mana regen, stat buffs and either an aggro generator for the MT or additional parry buff...all of which require no maintenance unless debuffed.
The mob is pulled and I drop three debuffs on him (about a min duration, 1-3 sec cast time) incoming, maybe popping off a pretty good bow shot (significant damage and health tap). I then choose a 24 sec mob mitigation debuff/snare for physical/magic damage or disease damage.
If I chose magic/melee debuff, I do a backstab that procs a debuff, an ae damage, then a series of three more damage attacks...
If the encounter is still going, which it will be on an evenish con 'heroic', I'll do my disease/snare debuff and drop through my three disease based attacks...this is all whilst meleeing. At some point I'll either pop one of my own ho's (Heroic Opportunity--a triggered buff & or attack requiring a combination of timed keystrokes by one or more party member) or augment someone elses.
My point? I will have possibly cast (not including what I already had up) about 16 DIFFERENT (17 if I choose to fear one of he mobs) attacks in one encounter, all with a purpose and many repeated several times over.
I may alter the strategy (ie if there was a necro or warlock in the group) to concentrate on a specific type of debuff and damage.
In my opinion, they fixed the dirge, who was of arguable value in the level 50 game, and gave him a ton of things to do, and many choice.
Is it the EQI bard? No. I do significantly more damage (not considering an EQI pet) than the EQI bard, my group buffage is about the same, but pulling by non-MT's doesn't really exist in EQII (it probably should, but they won't give it up) and crowd control isn't really practiced, at least not in the EQI sense.
They opened up single group encounters where you can receive healing and damage help from out side the group (If you choose...you can lock your encounter as well).
All bards have group run speed buffs called Selo's now...not nearly on par with EQI Selo's but it lasts 25min or so. This is one of the things they really blew...it has a stringed graphic instead of a drum---how could they get that wrong?
If I see any interest in this thread, I'll post other changes and answer any questions as best I can.
Was the expansion buggy? Yeah, but very little, at least by Sony standards, but not near what we saw with say, Luclin in EQI. I would have lost money if someone had wanted to bet me it would go this smoothly (so far). Locking up whilst zoning is a major PITA tho.