Well, I'm still mixed about the game. Some elements I like, some I don't, and some I find so infuriating bass-ackwards.
The Good:
One element about the game I love is the exploration and rewards for that. The game literally rewards you, and big time, for going off the beaten path. You find random one shot treasure chest that give out blues and purple items for your level based on your class. You receive achievements that grant at a minimum a title, or sometimes even more loot. There is a bunch to do all over the game and that is some of the fun I miss about MMO's of late.
Another thing I like, epic boss fights. With quirks you have to figure out or you are dead. I don't mind that at all. So long as there is a chance for a decently geared, equal level group to be able to take on a boss then I'm content. I don't damn near impossibilities where if you don't have X or Y class in your group or if the tank doesn't have X amount of armor, or if the DPS can do at least Z amount of damage then you have no chance. This is one hold back from WoW. Either bosses are ridiculously easy or retardedly hard. Very few in between fights with bosses I would can "fun" in WoW and most other MMO's right now.
Rift HAS great boss fights in the dungeons. I loved Iron Tombs, the Silverwood dungeon (forgot the name) and deepstrike mines. I was trying to get my guild together for one more run on Foul Cascades dungeon so I could try it out, but on the last day everyone had something else they wanted to try out. Oh well, I'll get to it next beta. The bosses are not impossible, but they are challenging and take planning. Chances are, the first time you face a new dungeon boss, you will die. Once you figure it out how to beat a boss doesn't make it a trivial thing to do however, but neither is it impossible which is what I like as I said before.
I like as others mentioned, the quick switching on the fly of up to 4 different roles for an archetype. This does allow groups to re-customize themselves to take on harder content. Found a magic based boss in the dungeon that just ripped the Paladin/Warlord/Reaver tank to absolute shreds? Switch things out! The tank pops on a Voidknight build. The rogues changes over to a bard for a massive MR buff. The mage and cleric also switch roles to help handle the situation. This is also great for rifting and pvp. Speaking of which.
PVP is pretty fun so far. So long as they take out that stupid unreal tournament style buff (which I'll get into later). Everyone has a chance of being useful in pvp. Queue times are fairly short (unless it's 2am....). Matches are reasonably well paced. Rewards are fantastic, but not overshadowing PVE. And while a level 20 is at a disadvantage against a 29 as mentioned before, it is not THAT bad. So long as the person isn't stupid, of which there are plenty of noobs.
Rifts are fun and a great distraction from usually questing for leveling. They can be challenging or easy depending on which ones you want to go after. Rewards are great in both experience and items. It has some faults though which I will point out later. The open public grouping is great too as they just put that in last beta and is the same thing that Warhammer Online had with Public Quests. Actually rifts really are the same thing as PQs from Warhammer, just more dynamic and random to an extent.
Lag is relatively light the majority of the time as well.
The graphics are a major step up from WoW at least, but nothing ground breaking. The engine is solid, and there are very few major show stopping bugs in terms of mechanics so far.
The Bad:
Starting where I left off from previously with graphics. While they are nice and run well on systems that literally meet the minimum specs (and in most cases lower), they have issues. One is problems with ATI cards and artifacting in cities and busy areas. Another is a lack of coding for SLI or Crossfire. So if you have multiple cards they are not used. Another is they just added in code for anti-aliasing and it's terrible right now. My framerats drop from 90 fps with 0x anti aliasing to 20 fps with only 2x AA. It's badly coded right now. Also, turning on forced AA through the drivers seriously messes up the graphics in the game so that option is a no go for now.
As I said with lag being relatively light, when it does get bad, it's BAD. Also even a medium amount of lag will cause some classes to be completely unplayable. Not all classes, just some. Pet classes can still get by, as well as tanks and buff based healers. Classes like the riftstalker are absolutely screwed though with lag.
The timers on rifts are a bit too short. Rifts are designed right now to disappear after a certain time frame. This is good. This is because rifts spawn invasion waves that attack nearby towns and take them over. If players don't or can't close a rift then there would be a real chance that all normal content is inaccessible until that happens. Which means players playing at 3am would be unable to do questing for example without those timers.
The problem with the timers though it they are too short sometimes. Which means, if you and a group of people are not on top of a rift as soon as it spawns to take it out, you may not get all the way to the last stage "boss" of the rift. Because it will close on its own once the timer has gone off. Also, if there just isn't enough people to clear everything fast enough, although the people fighting the rift are able to clear it without dying, then they lose out on the bigger rewards from fighting the end "boss" as well. The timers need to be fixed for rifts.
The unreal tournament mega damage buff in pvp needs to go. Basically in PVP there spawns little red orbs every so often on the pvp maps. These orbs give you a 1 hour buff (never lasts that long since you typically die in pvp) that buffs your damage by double while pvping. You get little red wings that appear on the back of your character which are not that easy to see to mark you as a big target since they are transparent somewhat. Which means you can wreak havok in pvp. Also, pvp right now is to dependent upon "bursty-ness" right now. It's all about burst damage or burst healing with some annoying CC. The CC isn't that bad as nothing lasts longer than 8 seconds which all four archetypes have access to talents that can reduce the effects of CC drastically. CC in world PVP is a bit more overpowering though in smaller group fights, or even 1 on 1 if they have it and you don't then you are screwed. Because of the focus on burst damage, classes like the saboteur shine in pvp. But compound that with the double damage buf, other buffs, and a good crit; you can literally 1 shot many players. I've done it. But on a side note, it's annoying as hell to pop someone with a Sab for 2K damage which almost kills them (once I had someone at exactly 1 hitpoint from a burst hit), to see them full health in less than a second later due to burst healing. I like the plethora options of healing, but it is almost too much right now in pvp. Especially in the low levels as only the warrior archetype has access to talents by level 16 that reduce the effectiveness of healing on their target. Everyone else has to wait until the 30's or 40's.
Animations are still horrid for this game. Yay, that my kelari defiant character has a /dance that just wiggles in place. The emotes are boring, the animations for those emotes that have them are usually terrible, and the lack of such is not immersive.
The Ugly:
Just outdated mechanics that add in frustration for the sake of frustration. These serve absolutely no purpose. Many of them are pure time sinks where none is needed. The game does well to remove some time sinks to a degree such as being able to soul walk after death once every hour to rez where you died instead of spending extra time running back to your corpse all the time. However, for every good thing, there is at least an equally bad if not worse mechanic. Take Motifs from bards for example. Bards get 15 second buffs (30 seconds with talent support) that may be instant cast, but require 1 seconds between casts because of the global cooldown. There are 6 of these buffs for the bard, which takes at a minimum of 6 seconds to get through them. Which means by the time you are done casting the last one, the first one only has about 24 seconds left. This leaves the bard enough time to do 2 cadence attacks and a finisher before having to redo all the motif buffs again. It serves no real purpose to leave those timers that short. Some have mentioned that maybe bards shouldn't have all motifs up, but there are too many talents and skills that make use of multiple motifs running such as resonance. So that theory doesn't hold water. 1 minute or less long buffs are an old, outdated, tired mechanic that has failed every time it has been tried. Get rid of them all if possible, but 1 or two can be used if that is the limit of them for any class.
Speaking of buff problems... too many of the overlap and overwrite each other. Nothing is more frustrating than being in a group and having my 36 point endurance buff constantly being overrode by the warrior's 10 point endurance buff because he doesn't see his buff icon. It's seriously a major pain in the ass.
Major zone wide invasions have some big issues to be solved. One is obviously too many people in the same spot. It is not so much a problem with crashing, as that is pretty good, it's a problem with drawable objects. If there are literally hundreds of people on a certain spot, the game only allows 50 or so to be drawn even with maxed sliders. So that means there is a real possibility the enemies aren't being drawn on your screen.
There is still a fairly bad memory leak if you constantly change zones. After enough time, the game stops drawing server objects like buildings, fences, and trees. You can literally walk through them. Which is a massive bug in world PVP. People that know an object is there (because you still can't cast through the object because of line of sight) can literally walk in and out of an object that is not drawn on their screen but their foes can't because the object is on their screen.
On PVE servers, the PVP auto toggle option is not disabled by default. Bad programmers, bad! So if you are a pet class and a pvp flagging NPC attacks you or the pet then BAM! You are now flagged for pvp if your pet wasn't on passive. Or, if you are channeling an AoE attack spell that targets the GROUND and a flagged player steps into it then BAM! you are flagged now as well. Not to mention accidentally healing, or auto healing flagged people that join your public group for whatever reason. All of that can be stopped by turning off auto flagging, but most people don't even know about that interface option and assume it is that way until they find out otherwise the hardway.
Inventory space and small stacks. Combined with WoW's crappy inventory interface and it's a royal pain in the ass. Get rid of it. Not needed at all. I don't need a damn 30 point pixel border around every "bag" I have. They did so well with already allowing a very moveable interface, something WoW still doesn't have without addons, but then they throw back OLD WoW interface rejects into the mix that seriously piss me off. It is not 2002 and even some of these retarded interface problems WoW got rid of already.
Also, why do I feel as if I'm running back in EQ1 speeds in this game? It's so slow, that my 60% run speed mount hardly feels any faster than regular walking at all. Sure the zones are nicely sized instead of being insanely huge for no reason with large amounts of empty places and no content, but moving at a snail's pace is old.
Well that's my take on some of what I like and don't. Unfortunately, too many of the major ugly problems are keeping me from fully enjoying the game. Unless these are all fixed before release (which I doubt since I have many friends in alpha which is way ahead of beta on releases), I will not be buying this game.