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Rift - worth buying?
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Post by
seebs
How are dungeons? I hear they are the usual MMO instances, but I'd like to know whether you think they bosses are interesting.
I've only done like the first two -- I'm levelling something like 6 alts. :) I've liked them. There are some boss mechanics, but nothing horrible. More like WotLK heroics, maybe; you actually have to know a few things and do them, but they're pretty much called out for you. Strategy matters some, though. There's one room in Iron Tombs that they actually nerfed in standard mode because it was wiping people too much, and it wasn't even a boss. (Large room full of infinite-spawning mobs, you have to run to pedestals that AoE the mobs down for you.)
A friend of mine is doing expert mode dungeons, T1 right now, and they are apparently pretty awesome; she's been describing the fights to me and they sound a little more challenging than WotLK/TBC heroics, and at least partially due to interesting mechanics. Various stuff where you have to get in or out of line of sight, dangerous floors, and so on.
They seem to be aiming more for player checks than for gear checks. One of the expert mode bosses, if you don't know what you're doing it's pretty easy to wipe in under two seconds. (Big spikes in floor; sorta like safety dance from naxx, only not quite as horrible and happens for the entire fight.)
So for instance, last boss of the first instance I did, he does an incredible fire damage AoE, but right before it a ghost says he can protect you from the flames, so you all run to the ghost. I am told that if you outlevel the instance by 5-10 levels, you can maybe heal through it.
The other instance I've done, the last boss spawns crystals which you MUST kill right away. Not super hard to do, but you really do have to be paying attention to it, you can't just tank-and-spank and hope to DPS him down before it matters.
I like the scenery, and I like the various quests in the dungeons, most of which are repeatable (for smaller rewards). There's a non-boss event of "destroy these three things", they summon adds as you burn them down, and if you just burn them down fast, you are VERY likely to wipe even if you outlevel the instance by a few levels and have a good group. (But wait, how did a good group make that mistake?)
So... I dunno how typical they are, since my other recent MMO experience is WoW and CoH. They feel a lot like the WoW instances I have liked better; atmospheric, interesting scenery, fairly good mechanics, not a whole lot of getting lost in endless tunnels. Shorter than stuff like Mara or BRD, longer than stuff like Ramparts. I'd compare them to something like UK, I think, but there's usually More To Do. But similar in difficulty/length.
Generally... elites really are. In WoW, I got used to being able to 2-3 man instances close to at level during levelling. I think a friend of mine and I did a complete clear of RFK at 26 (might have been 27?) with just a prot pally and a sub rogue. RIFT is a little less forgiving than that. :) Open world elites, you can mostly do with 2-3 people, or with a particularly good soloing spec and maybe 5-6 levels on them.
But I've seen level 30 characters complaining about getting their various rear body parts handed to them by level 15 elites.
Oh, and I got together with a couple of other level 2 players and we took down a wandering elite in the newbie zone. It took like four minutes to kill it, and we got a green. :)
I dunno, I'm really, really, enjoying getting myself killed repeatedly when I don't pay attention. I'd enjoy it more if there were slightly fewer respawns happening on top of me, but it's been a learning experience.
Post by
424328
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Post by
Murrdurr
Anyone have an idea of what will happen when Rift ages in the low-level zones as they de-populate from people hitting max level and sub levels stabilizing
They will just sit there unpopulated, you really think they are going to revamp the low level zones a month after the game has been released?
Post by
seebs
Anyone have an idea of what will happen when Rift ages in the low-level zones as they de-populate from people hitting max level and sub levels stabilizing
Yes. First off, invasions scale to zone population, so they won't just be completely overrun at all times. Past that... I've been on a low-pop server, on the first day, when there were no higher-level people around because there weren't any higher-level people. It worked out, although people had to work for it to get their quest hubs back sometimes.
It helps that the lowest-level zone is, in each case, physically adjacent to the capital, so there'll be high level people nearby. If you're hanging around the capital you get some of the messages for the adjacent zone, and it's fun to go out and beat on rift mobs for a bit.
Post by
424328
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
seebs
I didn't know about the Invasions scaling to zone pop.
Yeah. Made the first few days pretty hectic!
My experience is that we "win" invasion events a bit over half the time. We win often enough to feel like it's worth trying, we lose often enough that you don't want to just coast and hope someone else picks it up.
I once managed to slow down something like 5 simultaneous invasions (5 elite mobs and about 20-25 non-elites) for long enough for reinforcements to arrive. I did this by dying repeatedly but doing a fair bit of damage to them in the process, and also healing up the wardstone they were trying to take out. :)
Post by
218246
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Post by
270504
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Post by
Lombax
Hmmmmm RAGEOFACHILLES is spamming alot....
Post by
270504
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Post by
seebs
Bumping the thread 'cuz Something Actually Happened.
You know how people who get their accounts compromised
always
blame the company, and it's
never
the company's fault?
This one was.
RIFT just patched a vulnerability that allowed a clever attacker to forge login credentials for accounts. The really awesome thing is, you didn't need the password
or
the login name; just a numeric user ID. This vulnerability showed up sometime in the last week or so (at least last Saturday, maybe a bit earlier), but wasn't nailed down precisely until Friday.
In the mean time, Trion implemented a feature called "Coin Lock" the intent of which is that if there is any doubt at all as to whether it's you that's logged in, you can't do anything that deletes characters, destroys items, or removes money from the account until you enter a code which has been emailed to you. (The theory is that if you can't make money from compromising an account, you won't bother.)
Once the exact bug was identified, it took them two hours and five minutes to get to "servers down to apply patch", and they were up again within half an hour. Note that they shut down
all
their servers during prime time on Friday night for this one. IMHO, that is the right thing to do for a major security flaw.
It has been a very interesting week in RIFT land. And yes, it really was that bad a security flaw. Interestingly, there
was
code to prevent the attack, it just had a subtle bug.
Post by
334295
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Post by
334295
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
173035
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
seebs
Can someone just answer two quick questions for me about rift?
1. Is the game enjoyable if you are a solo player and don't know anyone? Or do you have to pretty much join a guild?
2. Can you enjoy the game just logging on for an hour or two at a time, playing only a couple nights a week?
Yes to both. The public group content, you can join groups without needing to know anyone or even be invited -- by default, everyone is open to spontaneous grouping.
You won't be all caught up on endgame, but I've not seen any evidence that this is a problem, assuming you enjoy parts of the game other than raiding. I sometimes log in for an hour and just go artifact-hunting or mountain climbing.
Post by
chaosultimamage
I can definitely tell I'm a little burnt out on MMOs now. I still like Rift, at least as much as I ever liked WoW, I just can't bring myself to really sit down and play for a long period of time these last couple of weeks.
Hopefully as a few of my RL friends catch up to me, I'll have more reason to play. Solo'ing is soooo boring.
Post by
334295
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
seebs
I don't know about post-Cata WoW. I would describe original WoW as fairly soloable, but there's a pretty limited range of Things To Do. Basically, you can quest, do instances, or PvP. Crafting skills are marginal before endgame when you get some decent recipes from raids. I guess there's achievements, but most of those are just more PvP and instances and quests.
In WoW, you really did sorta hit a wall at level cap, unless you wanted to group a lot. LFD may have helped with that, but I'm not sure I'm happy with what it cost. You could go looking for rare stuff, but most of it just didn't matter except for the current endgame content.
The big differences, as I'm experiencing them:
* Second role being available extremely quickly, and all four available quickly if you have the platinum, means that you can have a build you mostly enjoy, and a specialized build for, say, killing elites. (Well, weak elites. Tough ones you're just gonna need a group or a few levels on them.)
* Public group functionality makes a lot of group-oriented content accessible to solo players with less time spent looking for people and more time spent pushing buttons and watching things die.
* Better crafting, complete with crafting dailies available pretty much immediately, means More To Do.
* Artifact-hunting is pretty fun and also pretty profitable, apparently.
I guess... Playing solo and in small bits in WoW was pretty fun, but there were a lot of things I couldn't do, and there wasn't all that much I could do. I had fewer interesting options, most of the time. If I wanted to group, I really had to be social and talk to people, and often that didn't help because no one wanted to group.
I guess that's the thing; the public group thing makes it a lot easier to quickly grab someone to go do a group(2) quest, because you just click on the first person you see in the area and the chances are good that they'll be there doing it. Heck, even non-group quests; less waiting for quest mobs, more forming parties for 30 seconds to kill the quest mobs even more easily.
Well, that, and the artifact-hunting thing really works for me. I love to climb mountains and go exploring. In WoW, that meant worrying that I'd made it into an area where the GMs would suspend me for going there. In RIFT, it means worrying that the loot bag for finding the hidden thing will be a blue item "of the Fortress" instead of something valuable.
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