I agree, constructive criticism is probably best. I'll put in my more detailed thoughts here.
1. Balance overall is very poor at all levels and tiers - and they keep pushing more content out instead of fixing what's already out and broken.
As Maze said, Mercs are ridiculously strong to the point of afking during content with a single Merc. They are so strong in fact that my appropriately geared/max as tank can't survive a round on most bosses where a pet or Merc won't even take damage. And Mercs are essentially free (19pp when you have millions). But without Mercs or Pets being ridiculously OP, you wont progress because mobs are balanced/scaled around them.
2. Mobs are based around Mercs so player characters are nearly instantly deleted when fighting things. Walking into T4 with full T3 geared tank using my 3.0 (which I shouldn't even have yet) has me dieing quickly on trash, or insta-gibbed on first boss if i accidently pull aggro from my Merc (who still doesn't take any damage even on a T4 boss). There is literally no progression here, it is "afk until you're Merc fetches your loot" kind of system.
3. Classes are a cluster fuck. Some have severely broken/op spells, others have only the base spells still (they claim these classes are unfinished, but are still pushing out new tiers of content at a good clip), and others that are "finished" have maybe 8 beefed up spells while the rest are useless. You have to fish through all spells from 1-80 to find the hidden op ones which is annoying AF. 99% of your spells are worthless when they hit for the live EQ DMG (couple hundred, maybe a thousand) on a server with multi-millions of HP. They should just nuke your spellbook and only keep in the spells they're beefing up - Otherwise there is literally no point to them.
Also, pets are broken.
4. There are 3 "hubs" for no real reason. 1-3 NPCs of use in some hubs, a couple more in others. No real reason for it, even from a "progression" point of view. It feels more like they couldn't decide which hub to use at what time, so it's super fragmented - there's even NPCs in the Nexus that appear to be from before the server had a plan (5 or 6 different 1-70 NPCs that sell junk gear worse than what drops in those respective zones - ie defiant gear). Merge your damn hubs!
5. No real cohesion to the server. Stuff is "hidden" for no reason other than to be a pita. As mentioned above - the melee and caster vendors in Pok make the server even more trivial... If you know to look for them and buy their wares. Put notifications at certain levels to seek out these NPCs if you're going to fragment the hubs!! The 30khp earring when you have 8khp as a fresh 70 is just bonkers. Not knowing to pick it up is just.. Why? Why does it exist at all? Why the sudden inflation of HP and damage values for no reason? Fresh 70 you are sub 10k. After 1 tier or so you're 150khp. Wtf?
TL;DR - You might have fun for the first bit. But going afk while your Mercs solo shit gets boring fast.
I hope this helps the dev's focus their server a bit better and really work to create a more polished, balanced and cohesive experience. I'm not posting to discourage them from development - Rather I hope they take some of our criticisms of this and fix it accordingly. I'm sure the server would be a long-term blast if so.
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