Server Name: Winters Roar
URL: http://www.wintersroar.com
Version: 4.4
Before I start, I have to say BIG PROPS to Wiz and his hard working dev team. I've messed around with minilogin servers for a long long time now so I know how long it takes to get some of these things done. Not nessecarily hard, but time taking. But time = money. Props!
This is kind of my review for the server. So you'll see some ups and downs to it, but I really never experienced many bad parts to it. This is the first review of many reviews I plan to write. I have started the "Darkyth's EQEMu Server Reviews". You will see DESR: in front of all my reviews.
To Start:
The leveling is legit. It seems like its slow at first, but it's really not that bad. It's not slow like live, it'll take you a bit to reach the top, but it's never really a problem. The cool thing is you don't lose experience when you die, you just get in experience debt. You have to pay it off until you can gain experience again. It's basically the same thing as before, but you don't lose levels and stuff this way. A really big plus in my opinion.
The max level is 60. Few people have been wondering that.
The items are all custom. I think i've only seen a batch of items that i've seen from live. A lot of work had to go into all the reworking of the items. Custom spells too!
The history is setup really well with a whole bunch of lore placed through the game with quests, weekly events, and on the website. It's more adventerous and adds a lot of juice to the server.
The raiding is a lot like live. You need to keep your raid together and everyone counts. If your chain heals break, then your attempt breaks. Today with 17 other I raided Dragon Necropolis to kill a dragon and the heals were perfect. Later on we went to fight a Guardian dragon out in Western Wastelands and the melee died and then everyone started to drop like flies. So it is well put together and balanced instead of just a zerg rush.
The zones are pretty much all customed. If you can zone into the zone, it is populated, so never worry about empty zones. (Actually I think I ran into one empty zone which was Umbral Plains). A lot of the zones are reconnected to different areas, so a lot of zone paths are changed.
Quests, hooray. There are tons of quests out there, some resembled to live (velious faction quest armor), but they are all customized out with custom items. It's really fun to finally have new quests which aren't posted all over the internet so you don't really know what to expect.
Population? I think the average for today was around 20 players. Most of the time it was kept at peak for 33+ players. While we were raiding it was around 37. So don't worry about finding players your level. There is a huge variety of levels.
Screenshots!
Here was the buff prep. before battle.
This is the fight, I merged it with the text of it dying. Fight lasted about 5 minutes. It was a pretty quick battle.
This was an attempt at killing this dragon. We came back more organized and laid the smack down and showed her who's boss. :P
I know a lot of people can't play 4.4, but after 5.0 it will be moved over of course. So just letting you know of the hard work some people have been putting into servers and what to look forward to after a stable 5.0 is released.
I give this server:
Why so high? Well, a lot of people might say it's not worth this rating if you were going to be a real critic. I gave it this high, because it's achieved what many -COULD- do. Hint the keyword is could. After almost 3 years, this is the only real custom server. Not in a sense of guildwars, but totally custom.
DESR: Winters Roar
Linear Mode
