Returning Player Whats Changed ?

[shifty48]

HI All,
Well I thought i would come back, and reactivate my account.
Been away from the game for over a year.
I was wondering whats changed since then, and if it's for the good or not ?.
It will be nice to see all my old characters again presuming they are still there now I've gone premium, as I did have some high level ones.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can share with me
along the way, as I think I'm gonna need it .

[Kurt2013]

Your chars should still be there. Apart from the usual up and down via patches "optimizing" and "fixing" things, not much has changed.

You got now Dragonspine, an area in Stygia populated by tough critting lvl85 mobs and so far one group instance (also new belt and shoulder merchants i think).

Thunder river lag has been improved (for the better!) significantly.

F2p now has a 10g limit, instead of 2g.

You got a new resource for sneaking and sprinting (energy) now.

These are the first changes coming to my mind, pretty sure, that there were more.

[Rathothis]

If you've only been away for a year, you'll feel at home again in no time (you may debate whether that's a good thing for an MMO, but well ). Essentially, here is what we got:

* The Jade Citadel T4 raid has been completed. There are quite a few guilds who farm T4 each week.

* We got a level 80 ("Unchained") version of Amphitheatre of Karutonia, which is rather straightforward and gives some nice loot.

* We also got a level 80 group (also "Unchained") version of The Breach in Gateway to Khitai, which is also rather straightforward, but hardly visited by players since it does not give nice loot.

* We got advanced level 80 (again "Unchained") versions of the Dead Man's Hand and Forgotten City solo dungeons. These versions are a bit harder than the regular level 80 versions, but still very straightforward. They give rare trophies.

* We also got the first part of the "Dragon Spine" series of updates (free to subscribers). This features an outdoors playfield with a nice solo storyline, as well as a group dungeon called "Sepulcher of the Wyrm". Sepulcher has three bosses and is aimed at well-geared and AAed level 80 toons. It is a lovely dungeon until the last boss, which is entirely broken, which means that sadly, noone goes there at the moment.

* Finally, there have been revamps to the healer classes (PoM, BS, ToS) as well as Conq. Following the revamps, Conq and PoM have become immortal in PvP. The ToS is still not immortal in PvP, but some folks complain that its already significant damage output in PvE has gone up even further.

* EDIT 1: As pointed out by Kurt, the sprinting system has been changed - all classes now have a dedicated resource called "energy" that is consumed by sprinting, i.e. melees now have separate resources for combos (stamina) and sprinting (energy), as has always been the case for casters.

* EDIT 2: As also pointed out by Kurt, there have been some changes to the FTP system - but I see that you have gone premium anyway

What we also got is a restructuring process at Funcom due to the fact that they lost a lot of money on TSW. This means that a lot of the content that was promised for the last year / beginning of this year (notably, two further group dungeons and a raid in the Dragon Spine area, a new pvp minigame map, and the much-anticipated crafting revamp) has been delayed. We don't know for certain if and when these updates will go ahead - hopefully, there'll be some news from Funcom soon.