D&D Online pre-order pack News

First!

Can I use the ring of haggling to get a discount off the full game?

i kind of want to play this, but i feel like i'd be letting myself down after managing to resist playing wow for all this time.
i lost at least a year of actual play time to AO.. don't really want to do that again :p

a "Ring of Haggling", which gives your permanent discounts when buying items

Get discounts in game if you buy now, now thats a new and original selling point.

So... When's the review for this?

I may or may not be playing the beta to this (depending on NDAs i may or may not have read :P). If i was however then i would have to say currently it's a lot of fun doing the dungeon mash, thankfully treasure is divided up fairly not just fastest finger first, graphically its very pretty with all your modern bloom effects present and accounted for :)

However for all that the game does well it does the most important thing about mmo's in my opinion, forming teams and missions, quite badly. There is no way of highlighting contacts to teammates, u cant check the rest of the teams quest list, active missions are not highlighted on the map, the chat functions are pretty rudimentary and bugged with little or no context sensitive menus (yeah i realise it's still a beta so bugs are to be expected :P), and the search window doesn't reveal the location of players which is actually very important to building a team. Also the pace of levelling is significantly slower than other game, i've been playing for days now and i'm only halfway to lvl 3. Not sure what the lvl cap is but it will be a hell of a long time reaching it even without alting :P

I dunno how it comapres to WoW never having played it but comparing it to CoH/CoV it's disorganised and slow but looks nicer (a lot like GW) and the DM describing bits of the mish is a nice touch and i have been a lifelong fan of DnD :) Doesn't mean i'll hang up my cape tho!

Well I'm probably going to finish my WoW sub... After a year it's getting very 'same old same old'. Might be a refreshing change.

Smoison, I hope if you was beta testing, you did plug all those niggles into the feedback, and they get corrected in time for the release... Some of them seem so... Simple...

The level cap is 10 but it's not quite that simple as they're broken up into ranks.

Yeah each level is broken into 5 ranks iirc and each rank gives u an action point to spend on changing certain enhancements. My issue with this is the very finite nature of enhancements - basically after my first change at lvl 2 i cant see any need to change again til lvl 3 which seems a waste. I understand that they are trying to give the impression of progession but in reality it feels a little false. However it does mean they can have a ridiculously large amount of content especially as they raise the lvl cap over the life of the game.

Oh yeah and the complete inability to solo beyond the opening area is pretty crappy imho. Sometimes you aint got the time or inclination to put a good team together and just want a quick hack and slash. But with no open hazard zones that i've seen so far and no quick and easy teaming method it appears that soloists are all but screwed.

Unfortunately my beta forum account aint working properly so i cant vent my spleen anywhere official yet :/