Expansion Preview: Arlorian Twilight

[Serancha]

That expansion title, though.

Haha it made me think we were having a vampire expansion

[ilhanna]

Haha it made me think we were having a vampire expansion

The bling vampire reference aside, isn't the word twilight sometimes used to signify the waning, the decline, the last days of an age/civilization?

That aside, and bearing in mind that what we've gotten here is more generalized previews and a generous dose of shifty eyes, and that until the expansion actually rolls out we cannot judge how easy or hard it is to unlock stages and progress through the ranks, these are some of my questions and concerns regarding the expansion:

Is the stage unlocks individual, collective or simply determined by STS? I mean does every player have to reach a certain level in terms of content participation to get to the next stage and unless they do so they cannot enter even though others may already have unlocked the next stage for themselves? Kind of like when you enter event map at bronze tier you're doomed to low level bosses even though others on map are gold tier. A collective unveiling on the other hand opens the next stage after a progress bar is full, even though not every end game player participates in the content, allowing late starters to join players with higher scores/points/ranks? Of course these are all moot point if the stages unveil at STS preplanned schedule.

Another concern is that in the last expansion a huge chunk of end game players I know leveled up slowly (yes, I know its 10 levels vs 5 in the next) which means that it may take many many weeks to get a lot of people to the same rank or whatever to explore the harder dungeons together. So are these going to be soloable if we need to because we can't find party for it or noone else joins?

On a side note, it will be interesting to see if this week's update will pad out the endgame spectrum of the population compared to the tiny percentage shown in the chart posted some weeks ago.

I saw Vroom mentioning that there will be some mechanism to make it mandatory to have both Templar and Apostle on map to complete quests. Again, my concern is how restrictive this might be, especially for people who play for limited time every day, can't find people to play in their time zone, etc. I usually can PUG maps when I can't find anyone to run with, so I'm wondering how feasible this will be especially with the harder dungeons/quests that require both Templar and Apostle? Will faction switching be possible? My concern is based on how even with the introduction of tri-force pets I never see them in use for their combos when I run with random players. And that's with pets, which you can switch in site. However more difficult it may prove to be when this mandatory combo involves players.