I'd recommend sticking with 3.5e and earlier, it's a lot more involved and interesting, 4e involves a lot of random stupid that isn't actually necessary to understanding Neverwinter.
4E lore in general is pretty terrible, watered down, and lazy (see my avatar :p), so can't blame Cryptic entirely. But in general I agree, if not for the name dropping, there's really nothing about the game that actually says 'Forgotten Realms'.
Well...that's kind of disappointing. I was coming back specifically to roll up a Sun Elf to check stuff out with...but nope, they somehow screwed up what should probably be one of the simplest aspects of the game.
Umm..you are aware that Neverwinter is not a standalone DnD setting right? It's a single part of the Forgotten Realms setting. And being Neverwinter based is fine, that doesn't mean they can't expand and flesh out the setting more. Neverwinter is a 2013 MMORPG, that feels like a prettied up 1993 railroad single player RPG.…
The loot is random due to the fact that it's open to all levels. It may be affected by your party makeup, at least from my limited testing it seemed like I got more level appropriate loot when there were more people closer to my level.
I'd kind of prefer to get the counterparts to the existing classes first, like we have GF/GWF. I'd rather see Battle Cleric, War Wizard, and Cutthroat Rogue before Ranger or Warlock.
I am actually curious, is there any point to doing dungeons before endgame or outside of a delve event? I'm new to the game, but from what I've seen so far dungeons give you less xp, less money, and less loot than you would get for spending the same amount of time just farming the zone, and there is fairly cheap equipment…