RIFT

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iannis

Musty Nester
31,351
17,656
Did they ever break out of the retardely complex mage rotations trap they created for themselves?

I enjoyed rift when I played it, but they were honestly bad at balance. Reminded me of daoc era swinging nerfs and fotm builds. I looked at the upcoming patch notes one day and just lost interest.

Not all mmos are like that. I really liked their volcano island though. Parts of rift were a lot of fun.
 

Sinzar

Trakanon Raider
3,149
269
You can play mages (and most rift classes) at about 90% power by just throwing most of your spells into a single macro and spamming that during combat.

I still play Rift sometimes because it does a whole lot of things right. The endgame is where it kind of falls flat for me since it's all about grinding currencies for weeks at a time for super small upgrades. It's fun to make new class every six months or so and dink around leveling. Helps that the game's free now.
 

Reht

Molten Core Raider
1,115
317
You can play mages (and most rift classes) at about 90% power by just throwing most of your spells into a single macro and spamming that during combat.
Pretty much been my experience. The new(ish) Frostkeeper soul for mages is a pretty fun healing spec, was OP as fuck when it first came out, especially in PvP. Kind of reminded me of the WoW holy paladin since it's strong single target healing with mechanics similar to beacon of light. I still play it, but am on hiatus waiting for the new expansion.
 

Sinzar

Trakanon Raider
3,149
269
Sinzar Sinzar Just curious but what does it do right in your opinion? Haven't played since 3 months after launch.

There's a lot of small things I just really like in Rift, such as the flexibility in their class system. There's arguments that every class only has a single meta spec and others are all garbage, but that's generally the top 0.001% players blowing smoke. When I play my rogue for example, I can at the touch of a button (and without some annoying "gold sink") swap between like 6-8 viable builds, such as Assassin/NB for burst damage, Marksman for kiting, Ranger for ezmode afk questing, Riftstalker when I want to tank a dungeon with insta queue, Physician when I feel like healing, Bard for the big aoe zerg world boss fights, etc. All of these builds are saved and swapped to at one click out of combat, including full hotbar loadouts, etc. Other games have similiar features, but none do spec swapping and multiple roles in one character as good as rift.

Another thing that's great during the leveling process is your total freedom to level the way you want to, all of which are viable. You can do the classic quest hub to quest hub to level, and the worlds big enough that there's multiple paths you could take on different characters instead of there only being 1 hub for each level range, or you can level purely through pvp battlegrounds, or you can grind dungeons the whole way through (after like level 10? or something). They also have a feature called instant adventures which is basically a big roaming group that does quests together that you can queue for regardless of your level range (it scales you to the zone either up or down). All of these various leveling paths reward you with level appropriate gear along the way, so no matter your preferred flavor of leveling, it's all viable.

The dungeons are well made also. The normal mode dungeons are as expected designed for any old casual group to effortlessly clear, but the heroic stuff has to be taken seriously, with some light CC actualy being used, and most heroic bosses are like mini-raid fights with a bunch of mechanics. Now, like every other MMO, a few months into an expansion, players outgear everything and even heroics are faceroll aoe fests, but for example the first month of storm legion, and the first month of nightmare tide expansions, dungeons were a great experience with high challenge, high reward.

There's other things too that just come with a game being out for a while and still actively updated, such as the best wardrobe/transmog system around, a good UI system that's heavily customisable, player housing with decoration options for those who like that stuff. There's a raidfinder for some of the raids, which is similiar to WoW's raidfinder, which is to say it's incredibly nerfed and almost impossible to lose, but it gives the option for casual non-raiders to at least see the content and the lore. Speaking of lore, Rift has some interesting characters and storylines if you're into that stuff.

I've droned on for a while now talking up how great Rift is, and all of the points I made are valid, but it certainly has it's share of faults too. I won't go into a long lecture about the bads of rift, though someone else will probably chime in here, but for myself, as I said previously, the single worst problem it runs into is the extreme grindiness of the endgame. It's a shame because you can have a blast playing Rift from levels 1-65 and then for ~3 weeks at level 65 as you do the endgame dungeons. Then you hit a wall, and it's either join a very hardcore raiding guild (the raids in rift are HARD), or you grind out currency for super small gains. It's the grind that always leads me to stop playing any time I return and level a new character.

That reply certainly went on longer than I had planned!
 
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Convo

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
8,760
605
It's cool man. Appreciate the detailed reply. I really enjoyed leveling up in rift myself. The dungeons were pretty solid as well. game lost me at end game as well. Just really lacked the depth IMO
 

Zehnpai

Molten Core Raider
399
1,245
I knew the team working on it was absolutely passionate about the project. I remember we were testing raiding one night, one of the devs/programmers was with us. Darph and I wouldn't stop bitching about the lack of raid targeting. Next day the game had raid targeting (it was super crude but it worked) because the dev had gone back into work in the middle of the night and added it in. You don't do that sort of thing if you don't love what you're working on.

But a lot of what Sinzar just mentioned came later. Early on you could only bank what, 2 alt specs? And you couldn't do that until like level 40 or something and it cost a ton of in game currency to do it. It was horrible. The Quest hub design was bad, PvP was bad, the dungeons were stale WoW-trope "Hallway->mini boss->hallway->mini boss->hallway->boss" layouts and the xp was meh. I don't know if crafting has gotten any better but back then it was "make 10 bronze swords to make 10 iron swords to make 10 steel swords to make 10 mithril swords..." with no real useful items out of it. Instead of being a WoW-clone that was better at some things it was just worse in all categories.

Just goes to show how hard it is to make a feature rich game that Rift would have needed another 4+ years of development to not have fallen so flat on release.
 

Kreugen

Vyemm Raider
6,599
793
One of my favorite games to tank in, at least back at 50. One button macro for single target threat, one button macro for aoe threat, a 10sec cooldown death grip, and misc interrupts/taunts.
 

Grim1

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
4,854
6,812
How one MMO developer went from paid to free-to-play and back again

happy and kinda surprised to hear Rift is still around

Haven't logged in for quite a while. Too many games still on my list. But I have fond memories of Rift up until I started raiding.

And it wasn't like the raiding was bad compared to other games, I just don't care for raiding in modern mmos. Too much youtube video study, hoop jumping and everything else I hate since WoW defined the genre.
 

RobXIII

Urinal Cake Consumption King
<Gold Donor>
3,616
1,680
... I really liked their volcano island though. Parts of rift were a lot of fun.

I really liked that whole volcano thing too. Ton of content, and I actually got 100% of it done too. Later they added a secret deep underwater area with shineys :p

The pvp dailies I remember were annoying, pretty much nothing you could do against stealthers as most other classes. When I did finally find a shitty Beastmaster(lol) build so I could see stealth and wreck face, some rogue developer must have died, and they quickly nerfed stealth detection. QQ
 

Ancallagon

Silver Knight of the Realm
213
38
Just got an email from RIFT that they added the Nightmare Tide souls to my account and a few other things for free. Don't know if there's a limited time to accept the gift package, but just thought I'd mention it in case anyone else didn't see it. Good timing, I was getting bored of whatever I was doing and looking to start cycling through old MMOs, so I guess I'll start with RIFT.

Yay for free (even if old) stuff.
 

Byr

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
3,659
4,928
Giving away the xpac for free, guess going back to a buy to play model didnt work out for them.
 

Tauro

Bronze Knight of the Realm
371
26
Last Xpac was always free to play. You had to pay for some additional souls, earring-slots and some gear unlocks. They changed earrings&gear unlocks to also be available for ingame currency so you dont need to buy them with real money any more.

Anyway, new Xpac (Starfall Prophecy) is out now. Made a new rogue and boosted him to lvl65 (you get 1 free boost to lvl65 when you buy Starfall Prophecy). The free lvl65 gear they give the boosted char is good to start leveling. Got to lvl 66 over the last week, was playing very casually. Quests are standard MMO stuff but still nice and the new zones look great. Some mobs are quite hard to solo and rifts kill me real fast (same level!), thats quite a change from the previous 65 levels. I like it.

With 3 hotfixes since release the game runs quite smooth right now. Endgame stuff is missing for now (raids/planar assaults). I guess when i reach lvl70 around christmas everything will be available ;)
 

Reht

Molten Core Raider
1,115
317
Yeah the new zones looks good and it's not faceroll easy like it has been, i am enjoying it...for the moment.
 

Sinzar

Trakanon Raider
3,149
269
Giving away the xpac for free, guess going back to a buy to play model didnt work out for them.

Is the latest xpac free also? I haven't been keeping up with the game recently, and when I heard they were going to charge for the new xpac access, I kind of stopped following (I don't play this enough anymore to justify spending cash, but would have dinked around casually if it was free).
 

Reht

Molten Core Raider
1,115
317
Is the latest xpac free also? I haven't been keeping up with the game recently, and when I heard they were going to charge for the new xpac access, I kind of stopped following (I don't play this enough anymore to justify spending cash, but would have dinked around casually if it was free).
No, it's not free
 

Ambiturner

Ssraeszha Raider
16,040
19,498
Costs way too much to dink around in to see if you want to give it another shot
 
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