I really don't appreciate the "Where's Waldo" theme that Bungie did with Destiny to find the new gear, that is why I am here. Not only that, playing Parkour with a character that can't really jump on things to get to an NPC that has all this new shiny, pretty stuff is located in an area that most characters cannot get to is dumb. This is a good concept, but not Neverwinter. This is not Halo level 50 jump contest, this is not Parkour in Minecraft, this is not Xur in Destiny 1(2), this is Neverwinter.
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As to the Where's Waldo on new gear, not sure I understand the analogy fully. I think you lost me on the Bungie reference? If you press CTRL+J it brings up the various items available to you from each campaign. When starting out, under level 70, I never recommend getting new gear until it is given to you. This game has a lot more types of currency than it really needs. If you are doing an area such as Cloak Tower at level 10, you would find "bounty" items on the ground that can be sold to the bounty store for gear.
Once you get to level 70, most people take either Barovia (Ravenloft) or Undermountain and get handed free gear from those campaigns. When you get to level 80 better gear can be purchased in the AH or earned in the campaign grind.
Destiny 2 has completely done away with levelling and training up feats/powers. Basically, it would be like creating a brand new character in Neverwinter and them being a premade level 80 with fully trained powers and feats and a set of (say Undermountain) weapons/armour. Apparently, for Destiny 2 F2P, it got around issues of putting everyone on a level playing field and made for a smoother gear progression (or something along those lines). People often say Neverwinter is like two separate games, the levelling side and the post level 80 campaign grind side.
Personally, I prefer the levelling side. It gives me a sense that the character itself is improving, not just carrying a bigger sword than anyone else (hence I prefer levelling to end game grind). However, when you think about this game (in fact most mmo's), it tries to level you to cap asap and then when you do get to max level, you are pretty much useless again until you get better gear. On that front, it does actually make some sense just to get rid of the levelling side altogether.
The balance side of Destiny 2 seems much more, well, balanced. I'm talking more about players vs monsters here. In Neverwinter, you can become very OP at higher level/better gear which results in completely one shotting everything in lower areas with large amounts of damage to spare. This has lead to the dreaded scaling being introduced in joint content. I noticed in Destiny, even when you have much better gear (or are higher level in the first game), you aren't just an invincible god in lower level areas. Better gear does improve your character and you can fight in higher level areas, you just can't be arrogant going into lower levels. You can still die. It's like the improvement range is a narrower band.
I notice that character customisation in Destiny is very basic. I always thought it funny when Neverwinter introduced custom wigs into the Zen store. Currently, I think you have a pretty good range of character customisation in Neverwinter, what is the incentive to buy extra customisation in the Zen store?
eLoL, Spinward, some intro quests (to get the title), River district portal quests, short cut of various places, reaching certain purple ball things, ...
And some changes he's doing on the game are alike things in GW2. The Parkour thing is an example, theres a lot of it in GW2.
I also remember a Foundry author asked me to test his creation and it had a helix of rocks I had to jump up to reach a pirate ship. I told him it might be possible from his perspective, but it made me quit at that point. I know some people like the jump puzzles, I prefer the mental puzzles.
I will state this, he wants to reduce the big module releases over time and release more small content in the hope it won't damage the game. Guild Wars 2 does huge modules (which they sell to the players) and they have as much as 1 or 2 years between releases. They get new content every few weeks but it is small content. In that sense, I am for him making these changes. This should give them time to fix more bugs too.