1.Shrouded Isles - by far the best expansion for the overall direction and theme of the game. New zones, a few new classes, and new items.


2.Foundations - a much needed expansion adding the ability to sell and store drops through a market system.


3.Darkness Rising - I like the idea of champ weapons which could be thought of as an extension of epic gear. I also liked the story line for champions quest.


4.Catacombs - New dungeons that could be conquered with a solid full group - some new gear based on auralite. This expansion is my breaking point. From here it goes down hill fast.


5.Labyrinth of the Minotaur - The best things about the lab is OTD's and Mythirians. The Lab is bad for RvR because if further segregates RvR play. RvR focus should be conquering the frontiers. If you want a dungeon style RvR zone go to DF.


6.New Frontiers - I am a big fan of OF and loved roaming fights in emain and soloing around the mile gates. NF segregates RvR. From NF I like the towers and keeps, I just wish they were in OF. Additional siege was nice too.


7.Trials of Atlantis - I really feel Mythic lost focus and direction of DAOC with TOA. This expansion was too big of a leap for the overall direction of game balance. With all the added TOA bonuses, characters that adorned good TOA templates made a quantum leap into god mode over characters that were not TOA templated. Many casual players that did not have the time to put into TOA, felt they had been cheated. Many quite.


If Mythic were to learn anything - Expansions should come in baby steps - not quantum leaps. Marginally improve gear with new expansions and focus on adding new areas, lore, and MOBS (PVE) to explore. Don't include expansions that segregate and spread out RvR. I also feel Mythic got it right with content like "Dragons Revenge" This campaign made many players interested in re-visiting old zones with re-itemized gear. "Dragon's Revenge" also had a cool story line. This is what I would expect from a quality MMO.


Thoughts ??? Opinions??

 

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SI

Darkness Rising

Foundations

Catabombs

NF

LotM

ToA


I rly enjoyed catacombs and what it brought to the game. The classes are so unique and fun to play. Their RvR application though and the imbalance they brought though is what moved that one down my list.


SI was just solid. It added more epic content and enhance the player-run economy/crafting system. Just an all around amazing expansion.


DR felt like a smaller version of SI so it was good in my book.


I like how foundations kept the economy in the players hands.


NF was interesting but really took a lot of the surprise and tactics/strategies out of RvR for me.


LotM was just boring and add a class that offers nothing.


ToA...no need to say why that is at the bottom of the list.

 

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/agree fatality

1. Labyrinth. Fun. Optional. Not a new grind. A new place to RvR. The only expansion class Mythic has ever made that has (to date) never been op. Too bad the game went into maintenance mode after it was released and they never bothered to try to make the minotaur relics have more of a purpose.
2. Darkness Rising. Horses. Champion levels. Champion weapon. Small increases in character power without a big grind.

All the other retail expansions either had massive new required PvE (TOA) or introduced stupidly op new classes (SI, Catacombs). I like how everyone proclaims SI the best expansion totally ignoring how stupid and game changing classes like necros, bonedancers, and animists were.

 

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1-Shrouded Isles. Everything we needed and at the perfect time for the game.

2-Darkness Rising. Single best expansion (of any game) in terms of toon evolution. Champion Levels added great variety without creating huge disparities from toon to toon. Champion Weapons were fantastic additions with unique abilities without being too arduous to obtain.

3-Everything else. Sucked.

 

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Umm greater Health/Power mythirians?

They are still 0-fer.

 

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1. SI -perfect timing, perfect (and not too much) content increase.
2. DR - same as with SI
3. housing: complicated. lacks most of the most urgent things to be adresseed (ingame letter writing, realm blackboard, a server-based noteblock for your char, a good, simple and working market explorer). Mainly just additional vault slots
4. LOTM useless class, even more zones to split RvR.. and having that great opportunity for a rvr-dungeon it's stuffed with lots of mobs, so it's just agora-cycling...
Mythic is just dumb as cow sh.. imagine the possibilities having the first stage of laby completely mob-free.. great rvr inside.. but.. counting to three is more than difficult for some.
5. Catacombs close to Toa, way too much Zones no one ever uses. close to no relevant content.
6. Toa - Well nice idea though, but too big, and massive problems with farmers, blocking artifacts.. simple instances on encounters would have done well.

last: NF - Destroyed good RvR, now it's just zergs camping one keep and porting into another keep to camp this. Fits in nicely with that retarded event this week. instead of trying to get the zergs on the move so you can have epic battles in the open, they concentrate them at a keep, where it's stand off lag fighting.. great..

1.SI - This is the only expansion that truly broadened each realm individually. It had content only accessible to individual realms. Each realm had its own unique new story, theme and large zones, and classes. Catacombs and DR were the only other expansion to partially attempt this, but they did it to a much weaker extent. Although some of the classes were not balanced correctly (BD and animist), the zones were done beautifully and I really liked the ambient music it added as well as nice PvE dungeons without influencing PvP/RvR. This was also around the same time as spellcrafting and alchemy as well as some good patches, so I would call this the renaissance period of the dark ages.

2.Darkness Rising - Instancing is lame, but the champion weapons, levels, and story were well done and allowed for character progression without screwing up PvP further. Sub specs were kind of pointless, but giving disease to any class is just stupid as its such a powerful spell.

3.Foundations - Far from perfect, but only added useful features rather than ones that hurt the game. The art updates were nice too.

4.LotM - Minotaurs were a lazy race and class design. Also, negative points for hurting realm uniqueness. It just looks stupid seeing giant anthropomorphic cows running around everywhere. This expansion and darkness rising both show that Mythic had acknowledged the errors of ToA and NF and they were much more careful to not damage the game when they designed these expansions.

5.Catabombs - Instancing was bad because it hurt population perception and realm cooperation, classes were OP and imbalanced, zones were ok but all too similar to each other without any real uniqueness for realms. This was also around the time of daoc's huge shift to mimicking WoW and it shows in this expansion with the quest features and instancing. Overall it was not challenging or interesting in PvE and I only went there for the big xp quests. This expansion also broke the threshold of spreading the players out too much and ruining grouping incentive for PvE in my opinion.

6.NF - Nice idea to make siege more important and complex, but it was just too drastic of a change from what people liked and the implementation was poor. Porting from keep to keep is probably the most stupid part of this expansion, and it really eliminates a lot of strategical possibilities that were available in OF. The dynamics are horrible, and combined with ToA this just made RvRing stupid enough to quit (luckily I had mordred). Since NF, I have rarely played on the blue servers, and I usually stick to battlegrounds.


7.ToA - My initial impressions when I first bought it were mixed. Happy there was new content, but very disappointed in the direction they took with the theme and lore of the game. Vikings in Egypt just does not feel good and really ruined the atmosphere of the game along with loss of realm pride and other things. Some of the zones were cool, but the theme was dumb. Underwater was a novelty at first, and just became tedious soon after.

Once I realized that most of the content would not be available to me because I did not have the guild, resources, or time to make any real progress, I kind of wrote off the expansion and went back to PvPing. Unfortunately for lots of us, a few months later we started to come across players with all kinds of out-of-whack abilities and casters nuking us down in 2 hits in less than a second and all other sorts of fu@#ed up mechanics that we never expected Mythic to make. This expansion really pulled the rug out from under a lot of us. It made even trying to compete even more pointless and gave more advantage to gank squads and zergs who already rolled everyone else and could now get through the PvE more easily.

Buffbots already were a big enough unfair win/lose factor, and the ToA abilities and items were just as influential. It forced people to grind out new parts of the game they did not like just so they could do something that they already had available to them before the expansion, RvRing. Just a horribly thought out expansion, although clearly one that Mythic put the most effort into. It was so involved that they never tested it appropriately and Mythic really was out of touch with their game and their customers. It took years for them to address a lot of the bugs in this expansion as well.

Combine the nightmare of ToA with the alienation and boring game play of NF, which happened over about only a year, and you get the huge decline in population, never to recover.

1) NF - vast improvement of the game
2) TOA - even though a bunch of whiners continue to cry about it, it added a lot to the game, and was overall pretty enjoyable
3) SI - also added a lot of new stuff to the game
4) DR
5) Cat - classes were very poorly balanced at release, which pretty much killed DAOC for me.

LotM I never truly experienced so I won't judge, and Foundations IMO was never a "real" expansion.

 

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1. Shrouded Isles - of the expansions, this one is my favorite although it started us down some wrong roads. The classes were mostly overpowered and game changing. Necros in general, while craptastic in RvR back in the day destroyed PvE in Albion. This is when I first started noticing "power leveling" begin, and ultimately I believe that the tendancy to PL is what led us to a lack of fresh blood coming in. I liked most of the art, which has just gone down hill since imo (lame, gaudy looking weapons etc)

2. Foundations - Listed second because even with SI's warts, I prefer it. I've just never been excited about housing. I was pretty much "Whatever" when it came out. Only expansion that they didn't make you face palm over something and say God, wtf were they thinking?

3. Catacombs - More or less a crappy expansion. I'm putting it here because it added aurulite which would have been a boon to people leveling. Sadly, SI ruined that and by the time Catacombs came in very few people were still leveling the old way. Hate the new character models and font too. Fortunately I only have to look at them if I watch other people's vids.

4. Darkness Rising - Not a hateful expansion, but not terribly interesting either. Champ weapons get a + because it opened up access to excellent weapons aquireable for casual players. Art for champ weapons gets a - for being fugly.

5. New Frontiers - Horrid. I've not hardly participated in level 50 RvR since NF went in. I prefered OF. The major thing OF could have used was mile gate removal, however you could argue that removing the milegates really allowed 8 manning to take off and I believe this elitism in the playerbase caused a lot of resentment in the non 8man community.

6. Labryinth of the Minotaur - Horrid. I hate using that word twice in a row, but I'm saving "Utterly Abysmal" for ToA. Retarded looking weapons, laggy play, teleporting everywhere (mostly broken for groups) mythrians...just yuck. I'll save off adding Greek Mythology to Arthurian legend for TOA since that steaming pile of dung started it.

7. Trials of Atlantis - Utterly Abysmal. WTF was Mythic thinking? Greek Mythology to Arthurian legend? Really? WTF. It just doesn't fit. Added water fights (came out before NF) and boats. MLs have been just horrible ever since they went in, especially for something not supposed to have a significant impact on RVR. Artifacts were lame, with HORRIBLE art. actually DOING the MLs was awful, and farming scrolls was for the freaking birds. Added the TOA bonuses and + stat caps which imo, were game breakers. You take away all those bonuses and today's game is MUCH different. Block rates are likely not as out of control, templating is easier, casters aren't casting at warp speed for massive damage, etc. There's not a single thing about TOA that I can say I liked. Lore was bad, content was bad, implementation was worse. This is probably the worst expansion I've seen for any game.

 

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