Myself and some friends just 'finished' the Requiem zone. First impression is good. It reminded me a lot of old PoHate trips back on live but less trainey. Drops were solid for the intended tier minus some notes at the end. XP was super solid but will obv be less so once the holiday bonus ends.
After putting on my a mix of cmal, bounty gear, quest drops and some random stuff, I ran with guildies alts and others who could legit get upgrades from the zone. Once we figured out how the minis and regular bosses, and later the zone boss worked, we had good progress, a decent number of drops for our members and over two long trips were able to complete the zone in quest. The fights are interesting mechanicwise and work as an ok introduction to raiding (mostly the final fight mechanics, which took a few tries to figure out). I think this fills exactly the niche is it designed to as the gear starts at roughly cmal level and ends (when levelled) well below T3 bounty gear. All of the gear I have seen has focus effect 5's on it, which feels a bit low compared to the boes that have shown up as of late in bloodstorm and LOIO, however the other stats are solid. I'd really like those to be bumped up to a 6 so make the gear a bit more hardy since it will, in theory be with the players for a decent amount of time to level it. We had a few ancients drop which is really really nice for the toons we had with us as endlessly soloing t1 raid mobs for alts is both terrible for the powerful and unfair for the unguilded or no access to ringers or powerful toons.
A couple questions/ideas which can maybe or maybe not be answered by the staff:
-Plate legs seem to be missing a focus effect as the at least leather and chain legs we found had them.
-I believe we have only found bps/legs/hats and jewelry and cloak so far, no other slots (unsure if this is intended), but are there going to be full sets of gear? EDIT: There seems to be full sets of armor and most peripherals, just had weird drops initially.
-Stemming from the above, will the 12 man zone's gear (which I think is a safe assumption that gear will drop) be replacements to the 6 man or perhaps will it be required to upgrade into that? (assuming this can be revealed)
-The zone in quest seems to indicate that either the boss or the quest rewards scale to some extent, but the quest cannot be repeated as far as I can tell. Our group just finished the quest as a way to see the rewards. Could there be a way to repeat the quest? Or a way to upgrade to the scaled up version if there isn't already? Or is that scaling just for the loot the bosses drop, like the cyclops?
-Tied to the above comment about focus effect levels. I have never seen it on an item on this server but live I think had a mechanic for it. Could leveling items actually level to a better focus effect at some point? The items I recall from live they actually became a new item when levelled each time (I believe similarly to the cc aug I'd guess) so there was maybe more freedom to change the item stats more as it grew. I personally, LOVE levelling and or growing items for some reason, it seems to give a bit more permanence to one's gear. On eq2, you ended up turning your epic weapon into an epic augment that could be used once a couple expansions hit and the raw stats of the epic weapon were super subpar. Live had rolling epic quests. I'd think these zones might be a way to have a version of that. To be fair, both games suffered from a fair amount of power creep but I do think the concept of gear growing and being used to make other, better gear is really neat as it gives a larger sense of accomplishment to having the final item over having killed Mindful for the 900th time and got a spire.
-For the intended audience, is there a decent way to funnel players there other than reading the announcement of the zone itself or word of mouth? A quest, an npc, something? I feel like something pushing new players there or at least making sure they know it exists would help a lot in the future.
I think that's all I have but I may add ideas as they come to me.