During his visit to Trion Worlds' office for the third Gamer Day event, Staff Writer Paul "LockeColeMA" Cleveland stepped into the Abyssal Precipice instance and prepared for high-level Warfronts.

After the first boss we continued up the slope to find a quest objective, the First Test of Theodor. Clicking on the stone monument summoned a series of skeletons which we had to dispatch. Since the skeletons could be pulled in smaller packs of two or three at a time, we had no real difficulty in finishing the quest, which rewarded a blue item far inferior to the epics we had already. It's worth noting that the first boss also dropped a blue item when killed. Just after this I respecced to a second role primarily with Chloromancer points. While this helped greatly in clearing the trash up to the second boss, ultimately it may have led to problems in that fight.

The second boss was Majolic the Bloodwalker. His first phase goes down quickly, and then the real fight begins when he sheds his skin (ew) to become a living blood elemental. While the gimmick of the fight quickly became apparent, we were not able to overcome it; Majolic will turn random party members into blood crystals with a bit over 5,000 health. Players within the crystal are stunned and take heavy damage over time (I was taking around 700 damage every second or two, and my max health was only 4,500). Who is going to be turned is shown by a stream of red flowing toward the future victim; this should give a quick healer time to fully heal them before they become encased, and DPS enough time to switch their priority. It's good in theory, but two DPS with completely new classes and one DPS specced primarily to off-heal made it almost impossible. The one time we did manage to break a crystal, the boss was already starting to encase a second character. We decided to call it quits for lunch at that point.

After lunch we went back to get new characters and try out level 50 PvP in Whitefall Steppes. For those who haven't tried this Warfront yet, it is your basic capture the flag – get the flag and bring it back to your base, all the while slaughtering the enemies in your way. Judging by how well our instance performance went, I was sure we were in for even more fun with the closed alpha players on the server. Alas, it was not to be; the majority of us ran as Defiant, and technical problems made our queues not show up on the server for some reason. After making new characters, getting a boost to level 50, equipping all new tier 2 gear and choosing our new souls, 45 minutes had gone by and no one had stepped foot in Whitefall. The sheer number of options when it comes to level 50 stats kept us plenty occupied up until it was time for the roundtable discussion, however!

Overall I didn't get a great feel for the end-game just with the brief couple of hours I played at Gamer Day. We were wiping on normal mode, not expert... and in raid tier 2 gear (expert dungeon gear). The main issue was sorting through all spells and abilities, figuring out what most people have 50 levels to learn and tweak, in a couple of minutes. However, I can say that the instance (and the zone of Iron Pine Peak) look amazing and play smoothly. Crowd control and prioritizing attacks made a huge difference in the difficulty of the dungeon; and over the course of an hour we went from wiping continuously to slicing through cultist packs with ease. I don't think players will be disappointed in the high-level dungeons come the end of February!