DropBear wrote on Mar 24
th, 2015 at 6:21am:
What were your thoughts?
Why was it underwhelming?
TL;DR: Similar to HH, but the early version on Lama has fewer finishing touches, and as a result, less atmosphere. To my mind, the loot is a different question entirely.
On EE solo with MOD gear + TF maul, non-completionist pure pally human in DC destinty, it could kill him if I wasn't paying attention. I didn't try out Blitz (I had hurried the build, and only had the pally cleaves). It probably would have been less interesting. Though without infinite resources, anything but invisi-zerging the quickest path would probably become more challenging, simply because it's so large, and there are fewer shrines than in HH. At ~120PRR, the normal mobs could bring you down quickly if you allowed them to surround you. Champions could sometimes one-shot you if you let yourself stay below 600hp.
With a 15pal/3monk/2ranger 66 Dex halfling star chucker, same, though when I switched to robes, every mob was within 1 or 2 shots of killing him. (1000hp). Much more exciting that way

(I hurried that build too. Both times I just wanted to check out how good, but non-optimal toons would fare.) The chucker was more challenged throughout, but that's probably because I tried him out in Fatesinger, and then in Shadowdancer

I didn't bother with Manyshot or 10k stars, either of which would have probably made the difference (in the right destiny) when I got to the end fight.
Without any way to burst damage, my non-optimal toon couldn't survive more than 10 seconds. It was better in robes, but I didn't bring anything to protect against the Air elemental knockdown. Which didn't matter, because I also didn't have anything to protect against the Earth elemental earthgrab. Either of those removed evasion = game over. Saves varied as I tried different gear configurations (kicking myself for not bringing the ring of unknown origins). Reflex was between 72 & 101 no-fail; Fort was at something between 65 & 77; Will was similar, between 64 & 74 no-fail. (My mistake; I should have twisted no-fail fort instead).
Similar to HH, ToEE is sprawling. But it is not as expansive as the old Atari version. Of course, having no Hommlet cuts into its size as well. Also, I didn't check out the second quest yet.