I have to disagree greatly with this review. Many things in this game are annoying at best and quite a few are just broken.
The pvp is basically unplayable. It's one of five ways to earn rough astral diamonds, but actually playing isn't a requirement, so there is almost always an afk person. In all the games I played, I never saw a 5vs5 match. Also the pvp is a capture the base type deal, but for some reason mounts are allowed. This means that people that have paid money for the faster mounts have a large advantage over the people playing for free.
The queues "work" but make no sense. A player can wait 30 minutes in queue to get into to a dungeon, only for the game to match 5 trickster rogues together.
The End Game is just the early game re-skinned. Once you finish the last quest zone you expect to be able to go to Castle Never for what I assume is some sort of conclusion to the story, but the dungeon is locked by a gear score. This forces you to play through the other "Epic" dungeons in order to get a good enough purple in each slot. The other dungeons though, are just the same dungeons you have already done at a higher level. All the secrets, enemies, and number of mobs are the same. Oh and I hope you are playing during dungeon delve! You see, every dungeon drops a certain slot of gear and there is no guarantee that anything of value will drop because the chest at the end of the dungeon is locked. It's only unlocked during an event called dungeons delves, which lasts for an hour and happens randomly.
The epic dungeons come in tiers, so once you get your first set of good gear you'll be able to do the next tier of dungeons...for a set of gear to enter the next set of dungeons >.>
Augmenting gear is a great concept but the way they implemented it feels like a boot up the bum. Runes can be placed in armor for free, but take astral diamonds to remove. The more powerful the rune, the more astral diamonds it takes to remove it. Runes, like the dungeons, come in tiers(10 in this case.) Crafting a new tier of rune takes four of the previous. So 4 tier 1 runes can become 1 tier 2, 4 tier 2s can become 1 tier 3 and so on. Combining runes doesn't always work though, there is always a chance that the crafting will fail. This percent of failure raises as the runes become higher tier and failure results in the loss of 1 of the base runes. Tier 1 runes have a 95% chance of succeeding, but tier 7 is only 30%. I've never attempted to make a tier 10 rune so I can only imagine what % it would be. There are also epic runes, which have an even worse rate of success. These losses can be prevented by, you guessed it, real money. Certain wards can prevent loss of runes in the case of failure or even force the synth to succeed. They can be purchased for Zen or there is a very small chance to receive one from your deity every seven real life days.
The crafting >.> Leveling one craft to max level can either take forever or an hour, just depends on how much real money you'd like to spend. Hiring an asset takes 18 real life hours, and they come in tiers... Four tier ones make one tier 2, does this sound familiar? You can buy assets for real money of course. You can also trade them, which helps a lot if you are working on a second craft. Each synth takes anywhere from 5 to 50 minutes normally to complete. Unless you buy the Zen craft materials, which in that case the synth is finished in 10 seconds and gives vastly more experience.
That's really the problem, everything is saturated in Zen. Inventory, bank slots, companions, mounts, gear, respecs, crafting materials, and assets can all be bought with Zen and in most cases are best bought with Zen. A player can farm for days for a bag to increase their inventory that is only half as good as the one in the Zen market.
The foundry and to a lesser extent, the combat are this game's saving grace. The foundry has some great player made content that I was happy to play through at first. But the game doesn't mark which one's you've done, so I hope you are keeping track. Some of the stories are really interesting, but as with all player made content, they are a mixed bag. I once started a quest that led me to an inn bursting with bad guys and I do mean that literally. The creator had placed so many hostile mobs in the rooms that they were glitching through the doors.
The combat is varied and interesting between the classes, everyone feels different. Guardians block, the two handed fighters sprint, rogues dodge roll, wizards teleport and clerics electric slide out of the way of attacks. The problem is that it can become a mess very fast. Enemy aoe attacks appear as red circles on the ground. Clerics use several aoe buffs and heals that appear as a different color on the ground. Control wizards have spells that can throw enemies around or lift them up into the air. Rogues can leave shadow images of themselves strewn about the battlefield. Several daily abilities cause the color scheme to be filtered to for example just red and black. Boss mobs can spawn tons of adds, destroy terrain and fling players about like rag dolls. Now imagine all of those things happening at once...because that's almost every boss battle past level 35.
When a player falls in battle, they can be revived by a party member for a short period of time. If a party member doesn't get to you in time or you've fallen too many times you'll die and be forced to respawn at your last campfire, with an injury. In the case of bosses, this means you're out of the fight til your party succeeds or they wipe. Don't worry though! When you die, for 30 seconds, the game gives you the option to buy a raise for yourself or your entire party for real life money! No game, I don't want want to pay $3 to get back up. I'll take my $3 and buy something useful, like an ice cream cone or a set of dice so I can play more D&D.