The Exiles are not all that good to be honest, did a quest where I had to torture local sentients with various devices, yuck.
Had the day off to play with friends and what a frustrating experience that was. This is yet ANOTHER MMO that does not give you any incentive to group up with friends. Questing suffers from the same issues as ESO in that regard. We finally did the level 20 dungeons, was an amazing amount of fun.... for the first time. There is almost no incentive to do it again, ever. The loot was crap, the crafted items we made before going in in preparation was only marginally outclassed by the loot that dropped AND loot for classes dropped that were not in our group and the loot is SOULBOUND, cant give it to alts etc.
The only reason to suffer through the advanced difficulty of the dungeons again is to get some renown and maybe a housing item, yeay.
Look, the mechanics are great, the encounters a large amount of fun, once. Don't get me wrong.
But there is just no reason to do it again. I was hoping for something like the way you could purely level doing dungeons in WoW, get cash, some loot etc. Here you quickly get poorer as you pay for repair costs. Each dungeon got us about 50% xp in a level at 20, so for 5 hours of doing dungeons we barely got a level. Yeah sure, once you know it, you can do it faster, but still, I can get 2 levels in an hour of questing.
We then moved on to adventures to see how that works. Much easier, much quicker, also more boring. Got more xp, more renown and spent less money on repairs since no one died. Downside? Well it is limited and even though you have different options, you are going to be doing the same thing again at some point. Adventures are a much better option for group play. Here is the big downside of adventures: if you are level 20 (4 people) and you go into an adventure with 1 PUG who is at level 15, you scale down to 15. Not a bad idea BUT the loot is level 15 as well....
So we all took the day off to do the dungeons once, do adventures and then realised... what now? How do we play 4 people together from here on out? Answer, we try and quest, if one person drops, we all stop and play another character.
I actually wonder why they don't design this kind of game with a button that says: Push here to be max level and play the "real game" and another that says: Push here if you want to play a solo game and quest to max level.
Such a pity. Still, we enjoy the game, just finding it really hard to play it as a group and not be frustrated which I find really ironic since it is labelled as an "MMO".
Wouldn't it be so very nice if you could just join friends who are questing, get their quests shared with you, even though you have done them already, help them out, get some xp/items/currency yourself while scaled down to them? Why can no other MMO get this right except City of Heroes and GW2?
Ergh, the genre is really frustrating me at the moment.
