[Rygar]

A lot of people liked the Alternate Abilities in Shadows of Luclin, but I am in the minority there. I feel AA's ruined the game experience for me.

As if investing in equipment for your high level toon wasn't enough work, Alternate Abilities made you commit to your main level character even more. It completely demoralized me from making any alts because the idea of getting all those points was overwhelming.

I also recall the abilities making classes SUPER powerful. If you think racing to a dragon is stressful now, there became small groups of wizards that would use their Manaburn ability to in instantly destroy mobs like Gorenaire. Planes of Power added more levels and more powerful items and spells, as a result other mobs and zones could be farmed easier.

AoE groups stepped it up big time to get lots of AA points, if you think Chardok is bad now you ain't seen nothing yet. Some guilds wouldn't let you in for reaching max level, you needed like 120+ points or something ridiculous.

I never raided any of this content, so can't comment there, but I hear it helped spread raid targets to more guilds. On my server I remember Veeshan's Peak not even being farmed, zone was near perma empty.

I would have liked AA's more if they just kept the first level of the abilities, such as increasing some of your base stats, tradeskills, and run speed.

On current live its crazy, High Level + tons of AA's can let a cleric solo the Avatar of War. To me, that is just a sad day, that was never meant to happen. I think the line needed to be drawn somewhere between 'classic' and 'the new day of Everquest'. Velious is that perfect line in my opinion.