I've played pretty much everything. I'm on a really gimmicky Barbarian build using some of the new enhancement trees (for reference, I self-heal for more HP than I have, use crossbows and attack and do damage with Wisdom, though this required sacrificing literally all of my Barbarian specializations). Gonna be TR-ing into a Sorcerer (probably a Warforged, maybe an Aasimar so I can self-heal), because I'm really close to completion.

I'm not a huge fan of epic, to be honest. I'm doing it right now to get a past life feat for it, but I'm not in love with it. A lot of the newer dungeons are weird in their design (e.g. giant HP monsters), though they've gotten better with the transition from Turbine to Standing Stone Games.

I think the real thing with DDO is that it offers a very tight instance-based experience with d20 mechanics, which are far more satisfying than any other MMORPG I've seen in terms of how well you can customize your character and how smooth the connection between complex mechanics and play are. If you play on Ghallanda, hit me up and I can send you a guild invite (you're on the Archdruid discord, right?).

The balance is definitely really janky, but since it's a PvE experience I don't mind. My brother and I pretty much just play solo or with each other (though he will pub some stuff), so we capitalize on that power creep so that we don't get murdered running on Elite. He's got so many TR feats it's not even funny.

I'm kind of excited about the new upcoming stuff. There's going to be the Alchemist class, who promises to be an interesting and novel caster sort of like monks but focused on throwing stuff. Keep on the Borderlands for a low-level experience sounds interesting as well, though I don't have any familiarity with it. They've been adding a lot of classic D&D modules; I'm not sure how faithful they are because I never really played modules in D&D, but they're fun as they stand even without the nod to nostalgia.

Honestly, my least favorite change in the last few years is when they got rid of the ability to spam Lars Heyton shouting "Oh no, the sahuagin found me!"