I’m impressed that such a small corner of the map is so complex. Hours into playing around there and I still discovered some new places, like an Eagle Griffin nest and a cliff populated by Veteran Tigers. I even found a way to fly out of the beta area into the rest of the map, had an invisible wall not thwarted me.
The map was extremely frustrating at first because it’s maze-like and the verticality means you can see where you want to go, but you can rarely just go there. You usually have to zig and zag and sometimes leave the area completely and re-enter from another angle to navigate to some locations. The glider really helps diminish that frustration, though not entirely. It still sucks to be down on the ground in the Ruins part of the beta and see a champion walking up on the top edge of it or see an event on the plateau above the ruins and not know how to easily get up there without fighting the same handful of mordrem as you retrace your steps over and over trying to find a way up.
As for things to do, that’s different. There really didn’t seem to be much to do. And I don’t know if that’s due to bugged out event chains or what but I spent far more time running around fighting random critters than doing events of any kind.
But there are a nice variety of things to fight. And stumbling onto something new like the Arrowhead enemy or the Tigers or the Veteran Smokescale or the Mushroom Kings was entertaining and I was impressed that I was still finding new enemies even after circling the map a few times.
I read some specific feedback desired was on the day and night cycle and so far I don’t have much to say on it. Visually there doesn’t appear to be much difference. I’d really like it to get much darker at night than it is during the day. I’m not sure if enemies change but that may be why I was running into new enemies if some things like the Arrowhead only appear at night or during the day.
There was one significant drawback to the day/night system for me: After a day of glitched events I finally got a coordinated group of people following a commander giving advice on how to easily clear each escort step on the Wyvern chain, and how to avoid some bugs. We got to the explosives on the door with the Tough Bark husks charging up the stairs and the day cycle ended and failed the event for us then and there. That sucked.
The event took forever, and really, shielding enemies suck all around, let alone tons of enemies with tons of shields, so I don’t look forward to doing those types of events repeatedly. I’ll avoid doing many events at all that involve shielder enemies that require coordinated CC to burst down, that also have rapid respawn timers, requiring them all to die at the same time. That’s just not doable with many pug groups or few players, which ruins replayability and sustained play on the content, which, according to the POI from yesterday, is a main goal in HoT. To make content that’s got a long shelf life and can be enjoyed over and over.
I’ll also add: The two or three enemy types that seemed unreasonable difficult were:
Smokescales, because of their smoke fields often making them immune right as you pop a big CD, and because of their teleport attack being largely unavoidable even if you dodge it out.
Mushroom enemies that occur in large groups. I got pulled from around a corner in a canyon into a Mushroom King flanked by 2 Bombers. The whole canyon was immediately filled with crippling damage fields and I couldn’t really do much to escape a swift death.
Mordrem Snipers. Even avoiding half of their Rapid Fire attack can see you lose half your hp. And they take evasive maneuvers when you close in one them to try to CC them. Anyone without reflects or longer-duration blocks and invulns is in for a bad time against them.
And finally: The challenges or Adventures or whatever they were called, the mini-events with leaderboards, were pretty meh. I hope you don’t have to do them to get all the mastery points you need because replaying the same minigame over and over trying to shave down your time isn’t my idea of fun.