Dauntless - Co-op Action RPG - Ex Bioware devs

Played since the Founder's Alpha, game has definitely come a long way. Just got to the last island (Maelstrom). Difficulty jumps up until you're able to upgrade your armor enough to tank more than a few hits at a time. Doesn't take a lot of time to hit the Maelstrom and the monsters there are mostly upgraded versions of the previous monsters. Think low rank to high rank for you MH players.

Great:

Art, animation, music
Armor/weapon designs - Fun, interesting, and you can transmog
Weapon depth - Mostly easy to learn, hard to master. Look up the mechanics of the hammer, so much going on with it.
Potential - Most of the monsters up to the Maelstrom have some unique abilities and a lot of re-hashed abilities, but if you don't care about spoilers you should check out Shrowd which is the current endgame boss I believe. Great potential IMO.

Needs work:

UI is shitty overall, especially the menus. I think they only have one person working on it so if that is the case I guess it isn't so bad in that context.
Optimization definitely needs work. Sometimes feels good and sometimes its just sluggish.
Social stuff is severely lacking. There is a guild in place which is essentially a friends list at this time. I have friends on my friends list but I can right click on them in guild and get the option to add them to friends still.
Cells (essentially armor skills from MH) depth: Most seem like trash or just boring. Medic is insanely good.

Undecided:

Store - Pay to progress faster? You can buy consumables which can help a ton in fights but they're not required. Or you can farm them yourself. There is some cosmetics as well that look fun. Lastly, there is a patron status that boosts your XP which leveling only seems to give you extra cores to open up which provide cells for your gear. As of right now the patron boost seems like waste which was a big selling point for Founders. Will be interesting to see if they compensate us or not.

Other than the first couple days being near impossible to play, the open beta is pretty dang good.

I"m really enjoying this game so far. I appreciate the difficulty ramp up, something that I felt was missing from MHW. Dauntless more or less requires you to level up your gear and have proper elemental resistance/damage, which again reminds me of older MH games.

I'm doing heroic patrols on Maelstrom now and having a blast. As Delly stated, the Shrowd fight is really friggen cool and shows the potential of what type of Behemoths this game can handle. Since the game is F2P, I see no reason for anyone to not try this out. It's nice and fast paced, no farming really required.

My IGN is Murked if anyone wants to add me, I usually am on after 5PM PST.

I bought a founders pack like a few months ago...

This game is pretty fun. They fixed a few things I couldn't stand, like gather speed.

Game runs fantastic on max settings @ 4K. I have a 1080ti and a 4.5 Intel 7700K. 32 gigs of ram.

Store is anemic. Some items might be PTW if your anal about that sort of thing, but NOTHING you can't get or do yourself in literally minutes.

Monster variety appears pretty decent at lvl 4, and are fun as hell to fight. Especially once you learn their patterns.

I've only played hammer...but I've still managed gold damage most of my fights. I was hoping they added a sword and shield class. No go.

Game is fun. Try it.

DL'd this yesterday and killed a couple dudes, seems kinda fun but feels like I should be playing with controller?

Is anything from Open Beta following through to release or will it be a full wipe?

There will be no wipes, everything is live from now on is my understanding. A lot of people play with a controller, I use kb/mouse and had a hard time trying to switch to controller so I'm just sticking with it....however you will still need to user you kb/mouse to navigate the UI as you can't do certain things with a controller atm.

They recently just fixed scaling for players, so yes it's viable now to solo/duo. Previously the monsters were not scaled so if you solo'd, you were soloing a monster scaled for 4 people and it would take forever. Now it appears people are solo/duo much easier than a 4 person party (with PUGs that is).

Installed this last night. EQ Landmark has come a long way. Glad they got rid of the stupid voxels and building.

This can be played solo or duo, but the mechanics of the game heavily favor 2, 3, and 4 party groups. The whole "danger" mechanic is designed around dying and being rezzed repeatedly. There is even a skill, possibly the best skill in the game unless you never get hit called Medic, that when at +6 will fully heal the person you rez and give you a 400 shield for 20 seconds. So yeah, you can solo, but the game doesn't really reward you for playing solo.

After playing the current "endgame" and beating both end monsters, I can say without a doubt the free to play has hurt this game. After 1500+ hours in MH I rarely ran into a leech/asshole, but this game it is definitely more common. Not saying that should deter you, but just be prepared if you join PUGs. Also, this is much grindier than MH, especially if the desire sensor fucks you hard.

Despite some assholes and the grind, its still fun and I'm still holding out hope for future content to be really good as well.

So as usual, I'm the Monster Hunter style game shill. If any of you were interested in Dauntless before, you may really be interested now.

Since June:

New weapon, new quests, weapon and behemoth balance, several new behemoths, up to 5 exotic items, multiple progression tracks through questing/killing, a Fortnite/Blops style progression that is free/paid for $10 in which if you complete it you get $10 back, bunch of UI changes, lots of bug and animation fixes.

Currently there is the winter festival and the first paid progression system in which you get a lot of stuff like potions/grenades/platinum(paid curreny)/etc. This is a pretty good time to return. In April, Dauntless will be going to PS4/Xbox as well, will have crossplay, and will be put onto the Epic launcher..

Get it while its hot!

The fact that they include game impacting items in the store was an immediate Nope from me. If your going to have Micro-transactions that impact gameplay, I refuse to play. It ultimately means encounters are tuned with that stuff in mind eventually.

The reputation gives you levels in the 4 reputation tracks. Basically you get semi decent rewards, mostly consisting of cells and potion crafting mats. Once you hit the max level of the reputation track it goes unlimited and will give you a silver core (gold is the best) everytime in levels. In the end, its p2faster. Its not game ending, but can definitely make the beginning stages easier.

I had a couple months of the bonus rep and now I'm overstocked with everything. It definitely made the beginning a little smoother getting better cells earlier.

Edit: The 4 tracks on the left, I've maxed them out so its in the unlimited mode. You can see it shows the reward track at the bottom right. The bottom 3 reps are up to level 10 and the slayer track is level 20.

I'm digging it, something to kill a quick monster or two. I've never played MH so a free monster hunter game is perfect for me.