This review is aimed at current EQ playersBy far the worst expansion released so far. It came out to early praise by gamespy/IGN, but as time has gone on the expansion has shown it's many flaws.
Currently the top zones are not even finished and released (2.5 months after release) - it's just an empty hole with no clue as to do what next - like was done with the plane of time.
The content before then is tedious, 6 1-group trials for flags that you must have. The trials need good groups, 5 and 6 basically require the holy trinity warrior/cleric/enchanter, and many people want to take 2 clerics - very little space for anyone else, lots of repetition of trials for these classes.
The AAs are very lacklustre, expensive with little thought gone into them. Leader AAs are fun, a good source of drama. Tribute is kind of interesting, a large hassle to turn it on and off to save points though. The spells drops are very rare (until the raid zone you won't see many, they are no drop and will rot if the class is not present), and not even that great.
Given all that, the zones are quite pretty, and the tradeskill ship zone it introduces is a great home for tradeskillers - contains just about everything.
Unless your guild requires it, don't waste your money.
...but not necessarily better.For those new to the game Everquest you clearly need to be looking at earlier expansions, as this one is definitely aimed towards the people that have been playing for a long time primarily - although more recent converts will still get some bonuses from having this expansion, they wont be able to see most of this new world until they are already fairly powerful.
Of course some will buy it merely for the new playable class - Berserkers - however for now this new class still has little place in the world, as they havent got any new ability that no one else can do better, so they are likely to see more problems getting groups than most other classes. The developers have stated they will look into improving the class to make it more useful after it has been in the game for about 6 months or so, so you can probably wait a few months still from when I write this if this is your reason for buying it.
The actual extra zones that this expansion introduces have some interesting and challenging things to do in them however, but one detriment is that it very strongly themed - meaning that you see almost the same things in every place you go to within the expansion, whereas one of the strengths of most of Everquest has been that everywhere you go you tend to see something new.
Overall it has been an ok expansion, not as good as most that have come before, but its likely to keep some people playing for some time to come - and with yet another expansion due at the end of July continuing the storyline from this expansion who knows where it will all end?
