13 out of 13 people found this review helpful.
ToA: The expansion of abilities, items and quests
Date of Review: May 20, 2004
The Bottom Line: If you play Dark Age of Camelot, pick ToA up. It makes most classes more complete and fun for RvR.
For most people, Dark Age of Camelot's Character development ends when they are at 50 and have a spellcrafted set of armor/weapons they can use in RvR (Realm vs Realm). At that point, they can worry about RvRing full time. ToA takes your character development time and doubles it, but gives you more abilities and better items in return. While Mythic has said that you don't need ToA MLs, Artifacts, or better drops to compete in RvR, you will find that your less effective than people who have put in the time to develop their characters farther.
ToA induces 3 new things for character development:
Master Levels: These are a series of steps (tasks) that must be completed to gain new abilities, spells, and combat styles.
Artifacts: Items that you must level in various ways to unlock their abilities, usually with 2 abilities on timers and have good stats.
Better Item Stats: Better drops from mobs and Better Items from ToA Quests, including bonuses to max stats, damage output, healing bonuses, casting speed increases, etc, etc
While ToA is most definitely a time sink, it does make most characters more interesting and useful in RvR.
When first released, ToA's Master Levels were horrible. Plagued with bugs and many too difficult for the server populations to handle; However, these bugs and tweaks have been worked out so that people coming thru them now should have a smoother ride thru them. Also, the lack of documentation is no longer a problem with many good sources of detailed information for newcomers and many experienced Raid leaders on most servers.