Yesterday, Sony launched the new adventure pack, The Fallen Dynasty, with Live Update #24. This update made some major changes to the way control spells work for all classes. Stun durations seemed to be reduced across the board, along with some interesting changes that allow coercer spells to land on epic mobs. So we could be seeing some interesting changes in raid tactics soon. They also took in-home selling out of the game and made it more like WoW (big surprise). They also made it so when quest NPC’s are in range they show up on the map like WoW (another big surprise).

So how is the adventure pack? Pretty slick so far. I’ve completed the quests in the initial village, sat and listened to the monk teacher spin a dozen yarns about the history of the monks, and gained access to the third floor of the tower. I’m currently on the parts that involve The Forgotten City. More on that in a second.

The artwork is great, the pig races are hilarious, and the story seems deep so far. I found an instance with an epic crab in it, several guilds were massing force to try and take it down. It’s instanced, and it’s a single mob, so it sounds like the old T5 raid zones where you go in, fight, get prize. We’ll see how the loot fares once we take it down. Zone layout in the Village and Mystic Lake are very progressive, so players of all levels (well, 55+ anyway) should have a good time. There are a couple of quests that require both a kill and the drop, so that’s definitely a choke point in the new quest line – expect to get your pull ganked a couple of times.

The Forgotten City is an obvious copy of the real Forbidden City – at least in concept. There are terracotta warriors spread throughout the zone but that is where the reference ends (at least as far as I got into it). It reminds me a LOT of the crystal caverns in velius (eq1). Very vertical in design and highly recursive – I could easily see myself cruising through here with a rocket launcher fragging. The layout is fun, but on my own a big hard to get around without picking a fight that I would most certainly lose.

Some others in the guild made it into an instance from the Forgotten City. That instance seemed to drop some legendary items at least. Word in guild chat was that it is a pretty hard zone, but I haven’t been there to see it yet. Hopefully we’ll get some more folks on later this week and get some groups into there. So far, I’m impressed with the pack and no emergency patch or server crashes for a change last night!

Banzai!