Rift: Planes of Telara

Hrmm, just got the "rift is now fully free to play" email which kind of surprised me. I thought they were doing okay?

Classes, factions, GODAWFUL leveling experience (go collect bear asses? fuck you), and the overly long dungeon fights at release made me move on and I was never able to come back. It really felt like they were so intent on copying wow that they missed any opportunity to truly innovate.

Oh well.

notafunhater_sl said:

To add to the actual discussion: I played Rift for about a year and a half total, with a 6 month break after HK. I like the game fine, and I believe it was the best available MMO for most of that time, but it is just missing . . .somthing. I ended up quitting when my guild when MIA for 3 weeks to play other games and I was the only one logging in. At this point I don't see myself going back. All my favorite souls were nerfed repeatedly until they were basically unusable. Repeated "balance" patches due to pvp imbalances that took all the flavor/fun out of pve as well.

The game also falls prey to the "powergamer" syndrome, which is that despite however many options you have, there is going to be a #1 top dps/tanking/healing build, and most people that have a clue will just run that, removing any advertised variety. Trion fed that with Storm Legion by making all the 61 point builds the best rather than allowing hybrid builds to continue to shine.

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It's missing animations. Literally all of them. Most of your abilities have the same or similar animations. Every fucking shot is a blue ball you throw at the enemy or a small lightning strike. You don't even move your goddamn feet when you charge. The sound doesn't sync up when you hit, charge, cast...any of it. The game is great from a design perspective but just doesn't have the good animations/sound that you'll find in WoW.

Beyond that, the soul system was a huge fucking mess. People min-max...it's what they do when you tune content tightly dummies. And aside from VK for magic and Paladin for melee, everything pretty much had a 'best' spec for what they needed to be doing. By the time you're level 30 you've got about 20 abilities, only about 15 which you need to use, and 10 of which can be put into two macros of 5 each. For new players its overwhelming and for older players it's just fucking boring.

I played into HK and jesus it gets boring. I'm an old EQ player so I'm not usually one to harp on graphics or animations but for the type of mmo it was trying to be, it failed terribly in making visceral combat.

That's a 100% spot on post.

Heallun_sl said:

It's missing animations. Literally all of them. Most of your abilities have the same or similar animations. Every fucking shot is a blue ball you throw at the enemy or a small lightning strike. You don't even move your goddamn feet when you charge. The sound doesn't sync up when you hit, charge, cast...any of it. The game is great from a design perspective but just doesn't have the good animations/sound that you'll find in WoW.

Beyond that, the soul system was a huge fucking mess. People min-max...it's what they do when you tune content tightly dummies. And aside from VK for magic and Paladin for melee, everything pretty much had a 'best' spec for what they needed to be doing. By the time you're level 30 you've got about 20 abilities, only about 15 which you need to use, and 10 of which can be put into two macros of 5 each. For new players its overwhelming and for older players it's just fucking boring.

I played into HK and jesus it gets boring. I'm an old EQ player so I'm not usually one to harp on graphics or animations but for the type of mmo it was trying to be, it failed terribly in making visceral combat.

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Excellent post you laid out very concisely a lot of my feelings on this matter.

Cheers.

Draegan_sl said:

That's a 100% spot on post.

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^ +

Unless im seeing shit, it seems there is brand new Pvp server as well as another for FTP.

http://forums.riftgame.com/general-d...-incoming.html

Hail Ascended!

What an awesome few days we've had in Telara - but we know we can do better getting you on the shards faster and enjoying the game. To that end we are rapidly preparing for the deployment of new North American servers, this will also mean a change to the way that all North American shards are configured. To our European players - please know we're also working on preparing similar solutions if needed, please see Daglar's post for details.

At 3:00PM all North American shards will be brought offline for this change, once the changes have been made this is how the new server structure will appear:

North American Server Cluster #1.Deepwood
.Greybriar
.Faeblight (Roleplay)
.Seastone (PvP)
.Hailol (NEW)

North American Server Cluster #2.Laethys (Oceanic)
.Shatterbone
.Threesprings
.Wolfsbane
.Necropolis (PvP!) (NEW)

You can see we've added two new shards, we'll also likely test to see if we're able to expand individual shard population caps without impacting performance.

With these changes we should have enough capacity to support our burgeoning community, but rest assured if more is required we'll be ready & waiting.

We want to thank all of you for your amazing patience & support through these first few crazy days. The success has been fantastic but it's most important to us that all of you have a comfortable & fun experience when you want to play!

It's an exciting time here at Trion - thanks for being a HUGE part of it!

What is funny is how they split them those 2 clusters cannot interact with each other at all anymore (LFG, Chat, Cross Realm zones, and most importantly LFD). I was thinking of giving this a go but an even longer dungeon queue for DPS doesn't sound appealing at all.

They were forced to add two new servers and split up the NA cluster though. All the servers had queues and a couple of them were over 3 hours. They couldn't add anymore servers to the original cluster, it was already maxed. Not a perfect solution but the best one available. And free transfers are available to the other cluster, or any server.

As for dps queues, that's on you. Play a healer or tank and queues are almost instant. True in every game. And it's not like tanking or healing is that tough in Rift. Ton of dummy guides with macros.

Got to 16 and ran the first instance. Sooner or later Trion is getting 20 bucks out of me. It's cutesy fun, but jesus, it's EQ2 button glut (and last 5 years of wow). I'm already at 2 macros. PvP is lol at lowbie levels. My poor tank explodes before he can close the distance to hit with his foam axe.

Juvarisx_sl said:

What is funny is how they split them those 2 clusters cannot interact with each other at all anymore (LFG, Chat, Cross Realm zones, and most importantly LFD). I was thinking of giving this a go but an even longer dungeon queue for DPS doesn't sound appealing at all.

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It should still be about the same. Ratios working how ratios working. Also--every calling has a heal or tank spec and those tend to queue fairly quickly. Chloro isn't fun like it used to be though--I've never cared for the mage calling at all.

Xeldar_sl said:

Got to 16 and ran the first instance. Sooner or later Trion is getting 20 bucks out of me. It's cutesy fun, but jesus, it's EQ2 button glut (and last 5 years of wow). I'm already at 2 macros. PvP is lol at lowbie levels. My poor tank explodes before he can close the distance to hit with his foam axe.

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PVP's pretty brutal without at least some range. You may wanna try 0 pointing either warlord or tempest. Being able to deathgrip on a 10 second cd works wonders for control and like WoW BGs, once you pull someone into your group cluster they're gonna get zerged down.

Grim1_sl said:

They were forced to add two new servers and split up the NA cluster though. All the servers had queues and a couple of them were over 3 hours. They couldn't add anymore servers to the original cluster, it was already maxed. Not a perfect solution but the best one available. And free transfers are available to the other cluster, or any server.

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I don't get it, how does a server cluster get maxed... isn't the whole point of a cluster that you can just keep adding to it if all your servers are full? Does Rift really not allow queues warzones etc between two different clusters? wtf

Well apparently their max cluster size is 8 servers. Why that is an issue I have no idea, but everyone who has dealt with computers should understand by now that these types of limits happen all the time, and usually a factor of 8 is involved in some way (8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, etc etc.).

I don't understand why people are whining about it. This is a positive for everyone except for those who had cross realm events going on, since that can only be done in the same cluster. But new cross realm stuff was set up even before the new servers went on line. Queues to get into the game have gone down and so have queues for qroups / warfronts.

But hey, if you like sitting in the queue for hours then tell Trion how much you love it. I'm sure they will listen and put your suggestion in the appropriate basket.

Grim1_sl said:

Well apparently their max cluster size is 8 servers. Why that is an issue I have no idea, but everyone who has dealt with computers should understand by now that these types of limits happen all the time, and usually a factor of 8 is involved in some way (8 bit, 16 bit, 32 bit, etc etc.).

I don't understand why people are whining about it. This is a positive for everyone except for those who had cross realm events going on, since that can only be done in the same cluster. But new cross realm stuff was set up even before the new servers went on line. Queues to get into the game have gone down and so have queues for qroups / warfronts.

But hey, if you like sitting in the queue for hours then tell Trion how much you love it. I'm sure they will listen and put your suggestion in the appropriate basket.

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Why is it with all these players I still queue into instant adventures that have one other guy who is totally not even doing the quest? It's worse than regular questing, lol.

Lol, can't help you there. IA's are supposed to be the fastest way to level though.

Grim1_sl said:

Lol, can't help you there. IA's are supposed to be the fastest way to level though.

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1-50 yeah, IAs seem to be just crazy.

51-60 IAs dropped in Xp/hr a ton. Purely anecdotal experience - 45% to go in 59 to hit 60. I popped a 40% increased xp potion (one of the new ones that works for 51+), and decided to do IAs for the 2 hours duration. I only got 15% of the xp needed. I got the remaining 30% in 3 hours with only 10% increased xp potions by just doing normal quests/carnages.

7.5% xp/hr w/40% gain potion doing IAs
10% xp/hr w/10% gain potion doing Quests.

Wish I'd used the 40% gain potion for doing the quests.

Overall I didn't find 50-60 to be all that horrible like people are saying. It felt nowhere near the grind of 50-60 EQ, or even 50+ in original WoW imo. I also did it 90% on Quests/Carnage, didn't do any dungeons or pvp. I read about the horror stories of trying to tank as a warrior in 50+ dungeons without having proper gear (there is no quest gear that has tanking stats on it up to 60, so yer effed).

Enjoying it again, particularly at that Free price point.

Grim1_sl said:

Lol, can't help you there. IA's are supposed to be the fastest way to level though.

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Fastest way to level was told is Hunt rifts in a raid no clue if that is accurate.

Cheers.

If you're not willing to play support in a game like rift you don't deserve a group, tbh. I played mage and 90% of the time I was chloro in groups and raids, because clerics in that game were complete shitheads.

Bard and Archon bitch were prized roles for us. Yeah they were easy in the sense that you didn't have to play DDR with your keyboard, but a good player in those roles made the entire night go so easy for everyone. And there was a noticable disparity between a good support and just some support. Like DPS was hard. All you needed was a macro-mouse and the situational awareness to not stand in fire. The rest was just math.

I understand not wanting to play support all the time. It can get dull even with good players, and it gets frustrating with bad ones. But the way you find good players is to be a good player yourself and to play support. Once you've made some e-buds you'll start to fight over who GETS to play support that night.

It's happened in every mmo i've played.

Great Hunt rifts, but it was nerfed in 2.3 since they put a min level on SL zones minus Tempest Bay. GHR are still pretty good if there is 2 raid groups doing them and they don't care if you are there, 50+ though.

Tried tanking, its not bad, but its a lot of macro's other then your longer cool-downs and a Riftstalker has no gaps so its very similar to a Brewmaster in WoW. Regardless of having to tank to get a decent queue time its too bad because I truly did really like playing an Assassin rogue. Melee in Storm Legion expert dungeons get bent over so hard by every single mechanic on every single boss so actually living and topping a meter felt like an accomplishment even if it was only a 5 man.

Iannis_sl said:

I understand not wanting to play support all the time. It can get dull even with good players, and it gets frustrating with bad ones. But the way you find good players is to be a good player yourself and to play support. Once you've made some e-buds you'll start to fight over who GETS to play support that night.

It's happened in every mmo i've played.

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Agreed with this, Bard is a lot of fun. No idea how the support queue's are may try to pick that up again