f13.net

~Getting dismounted so easily
~Mobs ten levels blow you aggroing you from stupid distances.
~A debuff, that when you run away from a mob it applies a 20% stacking damage buff on you.

Seriously, what. the. fuck?

Not even going to get into how few actual buildings there are, as in places you can enter. The population of this world sure loves sitting on porches.

Mm, I approve of this thread.  Let's see.  I think I agree with all of the above.  Also:

Transportation issues.  There's no mark/recall, no flight points or any kind of quick transportation within a zone, only the Porticulum for transit between zones.  This means that when I get a message that such-and-such place is under attack, I cannot possibly reach it in time to help, unless I am already near.  For a game with lots of time-sensitive, location-dependent stuff, this sucks.

Channels.  Yes, another game with fuckstupid lack of channel security/persistence - as soon as a channel is empty it ceases to exist and the password, oplist, and banlist go away, so you can never keep a channel name secure from channel griefers.

Densely packed, aggro mobs even on roads, particularly because of points one and two above. I barely even bother with my mount anymore, most times I just switch to my assassin spec and stealth whenever I don't want to clear shit for an hour just to turn in a quest. A good rule of thumb should be that a level appropriate character should be able to travel on a road without ever aggroing a mob (of course, invasions get a pass since that's sort of the point).

Edit: There is in fact recall, you can bind at any of the Porticulum locations and teleport there every hour.

Literally about 99% of my random loot has been "of the fortress" including the one blue and the one epic drops i've gotten. 

Just one gripe from me right now.

Yah, they need to make it easier to run away and just move around in general.   Are ports the only method of quick transport available?

I'm also of the opinion that you're a little too squishy early on.  This may be soul/build specific but anything other than 2 mobs at level 17 (champ) and I'm likely looking at a dirt nap.  Even with two, I take a huge beating.  Combined with the difficulty in running and you just eat a lot of deaths in this game.  I'd rather not be forced into a tank/FOTM build for questing, but at least this game offers that sort of flexibility with little hassle.

I do also think they need to work on their lore presentation, although it's pretty decent for a launch MMO.  I'm still a bit muddy on what the hell is all happening and I actually read the quest dialog (mostly).

Heh, yeah - some people were griping in the level-specific channels the other day about how the roads were more dangerous than taking a shortcut across the countryside.  I have to agree there, and it's quite annoying.

Soul recall should let you port to ANY portal once an hour. Click it, get the portal interface and away you go. There's no point in binding to any specific portal, since there's no transportation time between portals themselves (except loading screens.)

Maybe later there'll be binding points but no portals, but that's stupid in any case.

Portals and hearth are all I've seen Rasix. I agree with the "too squishy" sentiment. As a MM/Ranja rogue at 32, my pet can handle 2 mobs if I keep my HoT on him; if I get a third I have to pull it off him and tank it myself or he'll just die way too fast (and once he's down I follow shortly). Kiting isn't really a viable strat for me either, since taking two steps in any direction almost always results in more adds.

After playing WoW and its increasingly risk-free questing, I kinda like that there is more danger in the routine world questing experience. Though I must admit after dying so many times in alpha playing a mage, I opted for the more surviveable cleric for my main and it's been much less of an issue.

My main complaint right now is the lack of a runecrafting bag and the lack of tabbed bankspace.
I'm not one of those people who enjoys organizing bags/banks into some kind of spectacular folder system.

Also, the "sell all" tab doesnt just sell greyed vendor trash.  I tried it the other day and it sold a wand I intended to keep... so be careful.

If you're a runecrafter, half the "of the fortress" gear, mainly the cloth, is flagged to not be runebreakable. It was placeholder gear from when they switched from static drops to the modifier system that never got shaken out of the loot table.


Pet peeves though: broken quest chains (my rogue is missing an entire line in gloamwood, I cannot fathom how. But I've done the zone five times now and I know the exact chain that is never appearing), and the goddamned guardian Cult Saga. Defiant one was changed to "close 8 death rifts" guardian one is still "kill every invasion boss in silverwood, AND be in the correct group/raid to have have loot/tag rights"

I killed three without getting loot sparklies before saying fuck it and moving on.

Also: Cadence, while awesome, is a stupid mechanic (60 energy, channeled, and if you hit any button, like say trying to queue another cadence, it cancels early and tries to start the next one, and tells you it can't because you're short energy.)

Also: all mobs appear to have a HUGE melee range and a perma ~15% runspeed buff. This makes kiting a bit of a pain in the ass.

RE: Cadence, all channeled skills are like that. I've wasted the cooldown on Crossfire a lot because I hit it, it doesn't trigger immediately due to lag or something, so I hit it again; the server catches up, fires the first one, immediately interrupts it with the second one only to tell me that ability isn't ready yet.  :uhrr:

Gripes:

1) Quest items taking up bag space

2) Loot tables seem weak

3) Level 8 mobs aggroing my level 25

4) Gloamwood is FILLED with quests that run you back and forth across the zone

5) Would like some kind of aggro meter for healing Rift invasions.  I get aggro all the time by healing main tanks, particularly when the tank is a rogue. 

6) Respawn rates are too fast in some areas and too slow in others. 

7) Quests that generate a rift will attract other players causing you to not get credit for the final mob as someone else pulls it. 

I'll think of others.   

Oh yes - "merge public groups" seems to work sporadically at best.

Only irritations for me so far have been the occasional plat spam whisper and the Report command fixes that.

Many times in MMOs I've had to do what I call "threading the needle" -- i.e. picking out a careful route among mobs. It's such a natural reflex for me that I rarely get dismounted.

Ill second threading the needle. But I also agree lower level mobs will dismount you a little to easy, and the stacking runaway debuff is a bit overkill. Maybe if it ws 5%, but 20%? really?

Not exactly true.

Silverwood has two teleport/bind spots.
Iron Pine Peaks has three.
Stillmoor has two.
Shimmersand has two.

So 40% of the zones have multiple spots.

Edit:
IPP/Stillmoor/Shimmer are the three zones that you will spend the bulk of your time in.  The long 40-50 leveling process and all of the end game factions and Raid/Expert Rifts are here.

Edit2:
My gripe is that some dungeons are far away from faction specific portals.  For example, getting to Foul Cascade as a Defiant is a pain in the ass.  While getting to Kings Breach as a Guardian is equally painful.

I was saying this exact thing last night in guild chat actually. One the up side however, the mobs have a very short leash.

Travel will be streamlined, someday. They could easily use those stones in the camps as telepoints - and if need be, let it cost planarite which will make people partake in the object of the game.

Crafting - at least for apoth - was fucking stupid. The needed ingredients to run past the opening pots were so rare that I actually got more green armor drops than rotten teeth off the mobs that drop them. Big turn off for myself.

Crafting quests that give fewer rewards than you could get by salvaging the items you just turned in.

PvP daily and planar loot giving leather to my warrior (at least it's BoE).

Only way to earn money seems to be by questing. I'm leveling a character mostly through PvP, and if the time I invested in armorsmithing doesn't pay off I will never be able to afford a mount.

PvP is a very inefficient way to level.

You think crafting quests are shitty now? Wait til the higher level ones, where you might not even get useful rewards for your class. I'm an outfitter, and the last 3 dailies I've done have given me wood and stone.

I think the point of the crafting quests is less the bag of crap, and more the tokens used to buy crafting recipes.

No clear visible sound cues / animations for abilities; most spells and melee abilities have the same animation and spell visuals are very low-key. This is not a big deal in pve (other than noticing when a tank/healer uses their CDs or if a party member is casting a CC vs a nuke), but in pvp there's no way to tell what the enemies are casting and who is CC'd (other than squirrel, obviously).

Buff/debuff display is also pretty bad. Most classes have like 3 self-buffs and 4 bard songs running at any time, while I'm interested in whether they have a cooldown or proc active so I can dispel it / CC them. (the big CDs don't really have any visual or audio cues either, see above). Same with debuffs on me, the only one that's really distinct is the saboteur combo point thing.

Buff/Debuff display is fucking horrid.

This.

I don't mind all the extra running around , pissed off low level mods, and not having everything lined up for me on a plate.

One of the best things about it is randomly grouping with other folks, or grouping with guildies, just to do normal quests. The quests are harder than WoW - I die a lot and have to be careful.

I don't think I've been in a group outside an instance in WoW in 3 years.

It feels a little EQ like, with a thick layer of WoW polish on top.

I'm enjoying it much more than the last few fantasy MMO's to come out (AoC, Warhammer, etc).

Do you mean the icons or that it's hard to know someone's state just by looking at them? I moved my self buff icons above my hotkey row and that helped a lot with my awareness of temp timed buffs (esp. bard Motives).

Let's get a couple facts straight ok?

1.This is not a bad game.

2. Anyone saying this is as polished is wow doesn't know what they are talking about. Not to get into a long rant but stable and well made isnt the same as polished. Polished is being able to hover over someone and have the tooltip have their guild name, instead of having to squint or having their guild name come up in a /who which it does not either. In fact in rift the only way to know if someone is in a guild is to stand right next to them and look under their name. This and a lot of other 'little things' is what is the difference between well made and polished.

3 Tedious and repetitive tasks are not the same as hard or difficult ones. Having to run around mobs ten levels lower because of some bullshit mechanics tacked on does not make the game more difficult, challenging or engaging, all it does is add time to whatever travel you are doing as you stop to kill each rabid boar in your path.  This is not challenging, in fact the mobs are quite easy when you arent trying to run and getting 100% extra damage from them. This does not add a layer of complexity or difficulty, it's a bullshit cockblock timesink.

There are a lot of things rift gets right but this isn't a wow killer, it's not robot jesus. It'll do well, I expect better than warhammer or aoc but its not a step forward in mmo's, its a sidegrade to wow.  In some respects it's better, some worse.  Where I think rifts greatest success will be is that it will prove that mmo's besides wow CAN do well, if made to at least this standard.

Rift will be setting the minimum standard for success.

One of my main gripes - scant drops in killing rifts. I can go all out and burn through all my abilities, have my little nonsense suxxess meter well into the gold range and get planarite and stupid use treasure which gets me wisdom/int essences or health seeds. I have received 1 purple stone in the first area and 4 blue stones in 34 levels - and I RARELY pass up a rift unless its a major and I am the only one there.

Oh yeah, one other little gripe. The interface editor cant resize your open bags.  :uhrr:

Everything that is associated with buffs and debuffs, whether its the target UIs or the buff/debuff frames, is atrocious.  Your own buffs/debuffs aren't even put in order of time left, it's all fucking random.  You try playing a rogue where you juggle four 60s buffs.  You just end up using them randomly.

It's horridly frustrating.

But the rest of the game is tits.

---

Lol Lakov - You certainly play the WOW fanboy perfectly well.  Being a Rift fanboy, I salute you.

From:  http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?97217-The-quot-Things-I-wish-I-had-known-sooner-quot-thread... (http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?97217-The-quot-Things-I-wish-I-had-known-sooner-quot-thread...)

*Under Settings there is a greyed out Global UI size. This will scale the bags and Character box, which you can not do manually under Edit Layout*

Who said 'it's as polished as wow"? Not I. Of course it's not.

No it's not a WoW killer, or robot jesus.

And it is definitely harder than Wow at the levels we are in now. I have spent the last few months leveling up a variety of toons in WoW and it is easy mode in a box with a bow compared to this game at these levels. Outside of instances, who even dies in WoW any more? The fact that there is actual danger for your toons at these levels might be a cockblock to some, but I enjoy it.

No cloaks? wtf!

- why the fuck does EVERYTHING seem to have a DoT on you at all times? ffffuuuuuuuuu!

I like wow and I seem to always be in the position of defending it for the sole reason that a lot of idiots seem to think it's a bad game. I'm a big fan of "art is subjective" and all, maybe the sims is for brainless people, maybe farmville is lowest common demoninator but they are still good games. They are good at what they do, they offer things customers want and in that way wow is a very, very good game. It also doesn't hurt that it was programmed well.

That said I'm sick of wow and as evidenced in other posts, I feel the game is suffering from age "cracks starting to show" and all that. To call me a wow fanboy a couple years ago would have been more accurate but even then to me it was always just "the best out there" not the best.

I recognize rift for what it is, a good game that will sustain a healthy amount of subs for a long time but, it's not a great game. Hell I may even continue playing well past the free month but it's got its flaws.

I think the big question is "at what pace do the refine/improve things"?

I'm impressed with the level of polish and stability at launch.  There are certainly some annoyances but it seems like the core design and technology work well.  If they can start tidying up some of the issues upthread in various updates, they're going to make me very happy.

Copied from the "what went right" thread:



I agree with the quote, but the guy tanking the lvl 20 uber elites was a lvl 35.  In fact, there were a few upper level players hanging out, somewhat trivializing the invasion. 

If the rift mobs have gone grey con to you, then attacking them should spawn level appropriate mobs that attack only you and despawn if they kill you, or something. 

That sounds horrible. 

Here's a launch gripe... it appears that when they added the 20 +/- new servers for launch, they failed to offer a single new PvE RP server in that mix... now the 3 RP servers are completely full.

On to game Gripes:
1. Bag Management... wtf?  I hate this dinosaur design feature and this deserves sub-issues:
a. Limit size? Why?  Are we really in a bag-size arms race? against whom? You... the author of my fun?
b. Don't put quest shit I *must* have in order to play your game in my limited bag space.
c. If I have to manually find things in my bag, then make your icons OBVIOUS... colours, sparklies, anything for things like Artifacts, Quest initiators, etc.
i. The Fang of Epic Wolf quest starter should not look like the four other wolf teeth I have from trash or crafting materials.
d. Re: c above... don't make me manage my bags... Arkinventory from WoW is a good place to start.  Even WaR had shitty broken sorting for bags.

Kudos for the auto-sell trash feature... but aren't we beyond the animal organ harvesting feature?  If simple gold is too incongruous for wolves to drop... why not take a step forward and put all bloody bits in some sort of expandable hunters' game bag that I empty periodically at some macabre carbon recycler in town?  I would actually like this sort of "bonus" gold bounty hunter aspect - especially if I don't have to manage it in some sort of dusk-bat eye musical chair game with my inventory.

Similarly, if it is a quest item that I find, loot or surgically extract from a corpse... it has no business in my bags... it is a non-item, it is a digital counter - make it so.

Today's bagolomania rant brought to you by the letters R, F and T.  There are a couple of other small gripes I have, but I need to go sit in the corner for a little bit.

Invasions are some of the best way to farm planarite just because how fast it is and the quantity of invasions during those events.

You're going to have complaints either way.  It's either A) QQ not enough people in the low level zones to complete these events or B) The high level characters are helping me and now it's too easy!

Your inventory has a search function by the way. 

Yes, I was aware of that... still does not alter my opinion of the design.

The fact that there's only one leveling zone helps the newbie population.  I suspect that barring a full invasion, that a year from now there will be enough people rolling alts to support a thriving leveling community in each zone. 

Again, I do believe in a separation of levels - if a lvl 35 is finding faster planarite in a low level zone, then more of it needs to drop in his level appropriate zone.  There's better answers for this issue.  What about on PvP servers, having lvl 50s hanging out in the 20+ zones?  That seems to have potential for some extreme griefing. 

Personally, my runecrafter hangs out in level inappropriate zone invasions because I need that tier of greens to smash, and invasions give you shitloads (just stand around defending a wardstone)

For planarite, it's faster to do level appropriate invasions (while the 10-20 invasion gives you ~10-20 planarite a wave, the 20-25ish one gives 50ish/wave) but at some levels there aren't enough other people to defend against invasions. On the other server I outleveled people on, we had maybe 10 level 30s and the zone kept spawning invasions because the defiants had enough people around to deal with them. But the guardians were basically just playing a last stand game at their wardstone whenever they happened.


As for pvp servers: lol world pvp? Personally, I've always been of the opinion that if you attack a grey(not they attack you and you defend), you should lose whatever version of pvp points the game has. But nothing like that will ever happen because every time they put in lowbie protection on a pvp server, there's a fifty page bitching thread about how not only should you be able to hang out in Silver Landing as a 50 Assassin, there should also be full corpse looting and YOU CAREBEARS NEED TO GET OFF PVP SERVERS.

Just say you don't like the inventory management mini-game and be done with it. Seriously. Managing inventory is just one of the time sinks in many MMOs and it makes you feel like you're "doing something" when you touch all your "pixel loot". I am not kidding you -- there are people to whom this appeals (I reference the TV show Hoarders in case you're wondering about the illness/mentality I'm referring to). Getting trash loot also appeals to the whole "slot machine" effect -- awwww, I pulled the lever (or pressed the button) and got bupkus, or YAY I got cool drop! If you eliminate the trash drop, it removes that stupid human need to feel we got a "response" from the system -- that something we did (looting) yielded something tangible (even if it takes up room in our inventory).  And when your bags are full and you have to go back to town -- guess what? -- you just created your own dynamic content by creating your own personal quest! The reward is an emptier bag.

I, for one, would love to see a return to bags with very specific size limits, and also weigh limits on how much you can carry. Why is the weakling mage carrying around 600 pounds of looted armor in his burlap pouch? By eliminating the basic "realism" of loot space/weight, you also eliminate interesting game solutions (crafters create a "bag of holding" or mage has a floating disk spell or warrior hires 2 porters to lug around his stuff, or adds saddlebags to the mount, etc. etc.).

But since RIFT doesn't appear to be about such trivial stuff -- we've got planar invasions to fight after all -- then I agree that making all of the looting aspect of the game as streamlined as possible would be a very good thing. Planarite, for example, should just automatically go to your currency the way gold does. When my bags are full and I open my reward list, I have to click the Planarite icon to move it to my currency tab -- seems to be an artifact of the system prior to the currency tab, when Planarite occupied space in your bags.

Having the lower level mobs aggro is certainly irritating, but I can see a small benefit-  it makes it less likely that a high level will easily jet around and get all the crafting nodes, thereby allowing a lower level to grab some of the stuff.  The nodes in this game do respawn pretty quickly, but fighting with higher levels for low level nodes was always something that irritated me about WoW

Inventory search function is only useful if you know the actual name what you want.  It doesn't really work so well for 'that thingy I picked up from that named guy I killed a while back'.

I don't have much experience with ArkInventory, but I can say that the Baggins addon in WoW is exactly what I would like from a default inventory system.  Customizable virtual 'bags' that have a number of default categories such as 'weapons', 'armor', 'consumables', 'trash', and a category for each tradeskill, and then you can create entirely new categories of your choosing and include items by type and individually, as well as exclude them from other categories based on varying criteria, such that, for instance, anything you add to an equipment set doesn't appear in the default 'armor' category.

I really wish this game had some kind of UI customization available.  I admit I do not like the extent that some WoW addons can go, but there really needs to be a middle ground between how open WoW's addons are and 'no addons, ever!'

Speaking of which, one of my top gripes is the auction house.  It doesn't include even basic features of the most common and popular auction house addons for WoW, you'd think this would have been one of the main things they'd look at when designing this inventory - 'what AH addons are popular and what are the basic features we should add?'  A price history on items, as well as automatically searching for any item I try to sell and showing me current auctions and price history would be nice, like Auctionator and Auctioneer both do.  As it is I have to manually search each item I want to sell, then go over to the sell screen to sell it.

My gripe is armor.  My Heavy Leather brigantine is the exact same style as the one I crafted out of Soft Leather when I was level 12 or whatever.

Now, my first blue chest piece was a sexy little number, but once I outleveled it, it's back to looking like a schoolmarm.

The higher level armors could use some spiffing up, for rogues at least.

Hehe. Have you experimented with the dyes to maybe get a spiffier look?

That's a really good point, actually.  It didn't occur to me because I'm so used to the binding process from other MMOs, but you're right.  Once you couple the bind spots and fast transport spots... might as well just make the "recall" ability just a portable fast transport.

This. I haven't seen any leather armour that looks really cool. Admittedly I'm only level 17 but even the higher level characters I've seen don't sport really neat armour. More armour!

I like the trench coat looking leather armor, it feels like what an assassin should look like.

That's rather my point with the Hunter's Game Bag concept... I'm all for random loot and a *real* slot-machine effect -- a little ding and a cool gold icon of the rare spider pituitary prized by businessmen throughout Telara for its erectile disfunction benefits that I could sell for the price of a new mount -- would be awesome... It should just never go in my Inventory bags.

There's a low level Defiant questing set that I like the look of.  But with no appearance tab, it's wasted since you get the last piece around the time you're wanting to replace the rest of it.

I'm honestly surprised that the thread for this is that long.  I've found very little to complain about yet, and it has been by far the best MMO release I've experienced (did not play MMOs much until year 2 WoW).  So far Rift has been a raging success, in my opinion.

Unfortunately leather armor doesn't ever really look great.  Except for some of the models you can see for the raid gear from the vendors.

Plate and chain look amazing though.  A lot of the cloth does too.

 :angryfist: :heartbreak:

At this point in the development of MMO's, every game should have an appearance tab.  I want to be a special snowflake, damnit!

At least we get armor dyes, which are a decent compromise.

Not when every piece of leather armor looks like some kind of padded fire-proof trenchcoat!

For flashers who are pyrophobic?

I'm somewhat annoyed by the gear icons that look nothing like the gear models.  I got some shiny new pants that looked neat in the icon and the model is a thong.  Glorious.  What if I don't want my butt hanging out for the world to see? ^^

Really worried that in the end there's gonna be four looks (plate wearer)(chain wearer)(leather wearer)(cloth wearer)

This and the way people are working the rift participation mechanism are both very disappointing.  I guess we'll see what Trion is made of in the coming weeks as they begin to patch exploit holes and develop content.  I wonder how possible it will be to do both simultaneously. 

Well, look at what people are griping about. There's a lot of "I hate getting knocked off my horse by gray mobs" and "I wish the armor in this game looked cooler". If I worked for Trion, this is exactly what I'd want to see in a complaint thread, as opposed to "I ran out of things to do at level 15" or "half of my talent tree is unfinished/broken skills".

This. Just read the "Cracks starting to show" thread on the wow forums for comparison, nobody here is complaining that the game is going in the wrong direction or the devs have no idea what makes their game good.

Indeed -- most of the gripes are highly fixable and without requiring fundamental architectural changes.

Lack of guild bank

Yeah, the no guild bank is actually pretty irksome.  I have bags of artifacts I need to chuck I don't wanna AH them...

Late last night they turned off Runecrafting to correct an exploit, without having to restart the servers.  It doesn't necessarily mean they'll be as on the ball with fixing exploits, and so on, down the road, but I was actually impressed that they were able to do so without a restart, let alone 4+ hours of downtime, or worse.

I'd give my left nut for Trion to give at least one mage soul an invisibility spell.  Even if it took 20 points I'd save a role slot just to travel with it.  Mob density, aggro radius, and respawn rate is ridiculous in this game (for the non-rift stuff, I love the invasions and can't get enough of them).

As a mage you can't get anywhere in this game without a pet up.

Other than that I do enjoy the game.  But it sometimes feels too claustrophobic and I can't take a breath and enjoy the view.

How is that a complaint Cadaverine?

Well they did turn runecrafting off and i couldn't do my faily.

I will stand by my typo.

Yea, that sucks. I bitched about it in the crafting thread here, and there are a million posts on the official forums about it. Hope they fix it soon, I have like 50 greens chilling in my mailbox or on my low level alt (now mule) because of it.

I get this too, sometimes.  The fact that grey con mobs aggro doesn't help.  I'd even be okay if riftspawn grey cons had aggro, just so the world mobs don't.  I never get the feeling as if I can actually look around and explore without something attacking me. 

I installed the game and it told me my video driver was out of date. After a few hours playing I took a break, and when I came back to my computer I decided to install the latest Nvidia drivers.

Now the game will not load, and crashes out with a Direct3D error. So happy I followed their recommendation on that one. Guess it's a good thing I know how to roll back video drivers.


Edit: I am a fool. Fixed.


On to proper gripes about the game:

* Coming from Aion (well, not directly, but that was the last MMO I played), the character customization and general appearance of the characters is pretty damn awful. Straight up ugly, few options, washed-out colours, and how fucking hard is it to notice that your character model's head is too small for its body? Hearing that there is no in-game ability to manage gear appearance independently from gear stats just makes me cringe even more.
* Not really RIFT-specific but fuck inventory management. Just fuck it completely, I do not need bags and I do not need banks and I certainly do not need to run out of space, ever. A tedious idea that should have been kicked to the curb years ago.
* Barely scratched the surface admittedly but so far the Guardian writing and voice-acting for cutscenes, etc. is 97% terrible.

I'm still having a blast!  But goddammit I'm out of bagspace.  Where can I get some greater-than-eight-slot bags on the cheap?

It was meant as a response to Nebu's wondering how well Trion would deal with exploits, and such.  I just forgot the bit about quoting him, so that what I said made sense to anyone other than myself.  :oops:

A lot of bags are being sold for below materials cost, either from people who are all "durr, I farmed it so it's free!" or from people using bags to level up the tradeskill (stupidly, cause they take more materials than other things).  Check the prices of materials and the prices of the bags and see if the bags on sale are a good deal - they probably are.

This runebreaking being disabled is really starting to piss me off though.  I don't know what this "exploit" they turned it off for is about, but at the moment I am doubting it would have a larger negative effect on gameplay than turning off an entire profession for everyone.

The exploit was as follows from what I understand:

1) Start runebreak on an item
2) Sell item to vendor
3) Receive runecrafting materials
4) Buyback item
5) Repeat

Woolen bags were selling for 36-50 g buyout last night (it fluctuates quite a bit day to day).  It's only 10 slots.  I have 6 of them filled with artifacts in my bank...

I picked up a 12-slot bag for 50G which seemed a little spendy but not horrible.  That and 8-slot bags from the vendor are getting me by right now. 

ilyatha's got it right, it was essentially a duping bug that really had to be fixed; I do wish they would hurry it up, however.

I doesn't seem like something that would be difficult to fix.

Should be fixed once the servers come up, it's in the latest hotfix notes.

Because nothing could ever go wrong if players had unlimited inventories.

Agreed.  Gold pieces should stack, and you should have to take them to a special money-changer NPC to convert them into a higher tier of coin (while paying a % fee) to further optimize your bag space.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I say.

I maintain that inventory should be either effectively unlimited (put some kind of cap on it just in case of some technical problems, but make the cap higher than any player could be expected to reach, even if they decided to say, keep every piece of armor they ever wore and everything that seems like 'it might be useful someday') or entirely realistic in that you cannot carry more than a person could be expected to reasonably carry (see The Witcher for a good example). 

In between is retarded.  It adds no 'realism' to have bags that can carry fifty suits of platemail armor, or fifty slips of paper, but not 49 slips of paper and 6 suits of platemail, and I don't really think I know anyone who thinks it's fun to run out of inventory space and have to go back to town.  At least purely by weight (like UO) makes a little more sense, but the 'inventory slots' idea really should be ditched already.

The only upshots to a limited inventory that I can see is making it easier to organize (since you won't have huge amounts of stuff to go through) but a good organization method would be a better way to handle that than forcing people to throw things away.  Some people are hoarders and like keeping piles of stuff and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to.  The only other upshot I can see is if you're going to make it into a moneysink (like, pay rent on bank vault space in order to store more items) but most games aren't using it that way, so that's not much of an excuse.

Quests involving running across the zone multiple times + getting dismounted after 1 hit + spawn density is making me want to quit the game entirely.  Also mages seem to kind of blow early levels, and the only decent specs for PvE quest grinding are some combo of chloro, necro, lock, elementalist.

Another thing.  I really miss EQ's diversity of races and racial cities.  RIFT really takes the blandification of these things to the next level.

My gripes:

- Bland Guardian faction and races
- No multiple starting areas
- Clothing diversity/appearance lacking

The running thing doesn't change... ever. 

Play any of the other three archetypes.  After leveling a mage to 20, especially a non-pet mage, all other classes feel like super easy-mode.

Mages lack the power to just burn things before melee, and suffer horribly to archer typed mobs (shitty armor, low hp, few defensive spells to deal with it)

I find all that amusing considering a well specced marksman can burn most mobs without ever touching melee range, and don't suffer too much from archers or mages due to having even higher damage output if the target doesn't WANT to be in the tiny dead zone.

Solo cleric: handles 3 mobs trivially.

Solo warrior: handles 3 mobs with a little bit of tact.

Solo rogue: handles 3 mobs reasonably

Solo mage: hands the healer 6 gp. 

You forgot "solo pally/reaver: pulls 3 mobs, curses that the other 6 didn't add as well" ;)

Eh, while my mage is a elementalist/dominator, I don't have too much trouble with multiple pulls.   Squirrel one, optional root another, and burn.  Problem is that can't heal my pet until 16, which means that multiple pulls will result often in a dead pet.  Plus, I have a damage absorption shield which is pretty handy as well.

They need a lot more burst, but overall I just think that lower level mobs (not sure how this scales) need their HP reduced by at least a quarter.  It's just far too many casts until dead mob.

Mobs got a huge hp buff in beta.. 5? Maybe 6. Made the low level game a lot more lethal.

Necros also seem to get all their pet management tools early. Elementalists take forever to get pet heals and pet threat/damage increases.

Exposed debuff is retarded and has gotten me killed more times than I care to admit. Secondly stealth/stun/snare mobs in high level zones are just annoying when you're trying to do dailies or a rift.

Assassin typed stealthed mobs are indeed some crap. Nothing says "we hate mages" like mobs you can't engage at range to start, who stun right off the bat and deal high damage.

I loved that in beta you could see their stealth outline at range, but not click them. So at least you knew not to walk into that room unprepared.

Not in my experience through level 10 with Pyromancer/Elementalist/Warlock

Here's my build:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=1zIqv.fco.M.0M (http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=1zIqv.fco.M.0M)

Even if I don't get the Ground of Power up, I can do enough damage between the Soul Leech, Fireball, Flame Jet and Flame Bolt to finish them off. The key, of course, is using the pet to grab majority of the aggro -- I can do ok if one of the three get on me as long as the pet has the other 2. I drop soul leech on all three if possible, plus the instant Dark Touch DoT, then start laying down the fire. It's a tough battle, no question, but doable and even 'exciting'. I definitely have to think things through much more with my mage than my rogue.

Well, I found my biggest complaint, though time will eventually fix it.  I pre-ordered the CE from amazon, they sent it out yesterday.  I'm blocked out of the game until the box gets here.  I should have just gone digital.  Me and my neandertholic ways.

Gripe: Why aren't my skills tied to my level?

Don't you just hate it when you try a new soul combo, run out to adventure land...only to discover you forgot to buy the higher tiers of your new skills?

I did that on my Defiant Bard, when I made an Assassin/Riftstalker role.  Hopped into the warfront, and was wondering why I couldn't kill shit, until I realized I hadn't trained any of the assassin skills. 

I've found that the key to most of the mage souls is the neat little tricks each one has (or a combo of a few).  It never seems as simple as burst dmg.  Typically you'll need to debuff, drain, combo, mez, or cc to get max effect from your spells.  Not to mention the plethora of abilities that are situationally dependent... like 'do X more dmg. if target isnt moving' or 'do X dmg. if X amount of stacks and you use air attk,' etc.
For instance, my 'storm shackle' is near useless unless I pair it with a knockback abilitiy under the root time.

It's a lot of casting yah, but it can get quite entertaining.  As for big time burst though, it's there in the upper lvls.  And the dmg curves seem to get better and better over time as abilities and stats start working together later on.   I dont think lower lvl mobs need HP reduction, but I fear how they've scaled higher lvl mobs in relation to the dmg. curve.  If they curve the mob HP up just like dmg., than obviously having shitloads of burst dmg. isnt gonna matter much.  So far to me though things seem to be getting easier just by shear virtue of having more options.

I am open to suggestions as to what could go wrong that could not be trivially fixed in design or implementation of a system that nonetheless eliminates the stupidest message in MMOdom: 'your inventory is full.' If you suggest enough serious problems that the fixes result in something even remotely 1% as stupid as the inventory management on any MMO I have ever played I will be profoundly impressed.

What could possibly go wrong with giving your players an infinite data structure.

I was actually doing pretty well with Pyromancer main (with some points in StormCaller -- the slow/pushback specials were handy) up through lv13 or 14.  Adds were often deadly, but otherwise I got by fine.

Then I started doing the additional soul quests and have been doing Necromancer/Stormcaller through lv17 and have found myself surviving situations where I pick up 2-4 additional critters from time to time.  Every now and again I need to use a healing item to bridge a tricky moment in combat, but I find myself dying relatively infrequently if I maintain some situational awareness.

I could stand to lose the reds that aggro you while you're walking on the roads, but I actually like that combat is not entirely risk free.  WoW used to drive my crazy with how "easy mode" it always seemed.

What's running quests with groups like?  How does XP sharing in groups work?

I've been solo except for invasion stuff which I jump into all the time.

Also, the artifacts collection stuff is insanely addictive.

Gripe-  My female dwarf doesn't have any neutral casting animations (for crafting or summoning a mount).  Or idle animations (like stretching).  And when she feigns death she doesn't drop to the ground she just stands there completely still  :uhrr:.

The dwarves are known for their stoicism, especially the female dwarves.  Working As Intended.  Will Not Fix.

It's still limited by the total number of items that exist in the game.  No one will ever actually get all possible items, but all you have to do is make sure the inventory system can handle a player possessing every single item that exists in the game, and you're good.

You mean make sure it can handle every player possessing infinite quantities of every single item that exists.

This system doesn't have to be pushed to extremes either. Make it so that a toon can have, lets say, 500 unique slots, that is multiple pieces of the same item stack, and everything picked up after that get automatically sold for face value. If assholes are pushing that boundary and complaining, well come on now, that's a bit much.

Except that now all you're arguing for is bigger bags; having some weird auto-vendor after X slots is counter-intuitive. If you're going to go that route, remove trash loot and go back to wolves dropping gold.

Effectively infinite is probably entirely doable, but it's not really necessary.  I wouldn't say 500 is anywhere near enough, though.  But say, 5,000 or 10,000?  It is unlikely any reasonable player will ever hit a cap like that.  That's why I said in an earlier post that a cap on it might be put on in case of technical problems, but it should be made higher than any player is ever expected to reach.

Also, limited 'stacks' of materials should go away.  Anything should be stackable (it's just an additional number in the entry instead of an entirely separate entry) and anything that stacks should cap at some high number.  Hey, maybe 32000 works, since I know it's related to a certain size of data storage unit somehow and that's why EQ HP couldn't go above 32k until Velious when they changed the size of the data storage unit or whatever.

I'm not going to keep arguing, this is just a nonissue for me; but then, I don't even mind playing loot tetris in games like D2.

Oh damn, you got me. I guess we'll have to cap it at 24 bank slots after all, just to be safe. We'll let players buy 8 more though, so I guess 32 is okay. But that's definitely the maximum. It's either 32 or infinity.

In warfronts there is no way to kick or easily report afkers.  There is no role balancing in the warfront queues either, its not rare for me to join a black garden with no healers.

This is more of a player problem than a game problem.  3 out of 4 classes in this game are capable of healing.  I don't think I've ever seen the warfront queue give us all warriors.  So, there should never, ever be a time when someone doesn't look at the group and go 'hm, no healer' and hit their role switch button and switch over to something that can heal.

Also to report an afker in warfronts target and type /report. Not sure how much good it does but you it does report them.

Import settings only works within the specific shard...  :oh_i_see:

Warfront annoyance: when you port back to the game world after a match, it returns you to where you were when the queue accept appeared, NOT where you were when you hit accept/enter.

So if you think "huh, I should move out of the middle of this spawn I was clearing for a quest and then enter the match".. SURPRISE!

/exportui {name}
/importui {name}
/exportkeybindings {name}
/importkeybindings {name}
Someone posted this elsewhere, but it's worth repeating.

In the 40s I'm starting to have the WAR T3 problem where there aren't enough quests for any given level; I did most of the level 40-42 quests in IPP just to ding 41, and once I run out of 43s I'm probably going to have to move to another zone because I can't readily handle level 3+ mobs. I'm not sure if the quests are more sparse/worth less % XP, or if it's that I'm doing almost only questing because BGs and dungeons are less readily available.

Are you rifting?  I'm nowhere near those levels because I'm running a bunch of alts, but I find that if I don't participate in rifts I lag behind.  A lot. 

I do Rifts and Invasions when they occur on the path of my quests, but as I've said they don't pop very often in the higher zones (due to population) and they're almost always minor.

The XP curve seems to assume you're doing instances. I was way behind, did a random KB group, and it shot me up a level and put me where I was supposed to be again.

That sounds about right; I was doing OK when I could find dungeon groups but I haven't seen one that needs DPS in ~5 levels.

I try to do every dungeon at least once, the first time quest rewards are usually worth it.

I know i'm stupid, but i can't for the life of me get the Rift-meter to stay in the spot i choose. Edit layout- move around-save......and the next time it pops up it's back to where i moved it from
Starting to piss me right off. Scroll of Intelligence should apply IRL  :oh_i_see:  So what obvious thing am i missing?

Having played guardian now to 20 and defiant to 30 all I can say is anyone playing defiant got shafted when it comes to ease of questing, ravel and convenience. It seems like the people who designed the defiant side just said 'fuck it' at some point.

That's interesting, because I was just about to post the exact opposite. 

Guardian first zone layout is circular and interesting flow-wise, but it really seems all over the place with questing.  There's no obvious story going on, other than the Aelfwar stuff, but it's not like the Defiant story that smacked me in the face with big STORY listed quests.  To me, the defiant side ultimately seems more fleshed out. 

Fuck that grass over there being all green and shit.

We are talking about two diff things. Hell the quests themselves defiant side might be great works of literature but having to run all over the goddamned countryside to do things like turn in crafting quests is fucking weak. Guardian side? you just hop in the portal and you're there.

Don't worry, they change this starting at Gloamwood.  You have to run that twisty zone like it was the Barrens.

I had similar problems with pet/party windows saving layouts in the Beta. Only way I found to remedy it was to be in that state (with pet summoned or in a party) when I moved the state specific frames around as it did not seem to save the states properly when using placeholders.

I did not buy the game, or play in the later betas, so I do not know if they resolved that.

After playing for a week, I see what people are saying about mob density and spawn rates. HOLY FUCKING SHIT, making level 3 mobs agro you, do triple damage, stack roots and slows on you, WHEN YOU ARE FUCKING LEVEL 25, then four more SPAWN RIGHT ON TOP OF YOU, is retarded. It's a level of retarded that has surpassed every "feature" since the invention of vieo games. It's not realistic, it's not fun, it adds nothing to the game, and it solves nothing.

It's ONLY a case of developers being dicks.

Gloamwood seems to be much better about keeping aggressive critters back a reasonable distance from the roads, except for the damned forest of spiders area.  Silverwood is just obnoxious as far as having to dodge monsters while going to and from places.

I really don't understand the stacking damage penalty for fleeing.  That just makes no sense to me as a game mechanic.

That said, still having fun.

Wait until you get to higher levels like Scarwood or Moonshade where there are roaming aggro mobs on the FUCKING ROADS!  :mob:

Droughtlands the mobs actually patrol the roads... :oh_i_see:

At level 35, I'm doing mostly quests and no dungeons.  I hit rifts if they're in my path or if it's an invasion.  So far, I'm doing level 36-37 quests and haven't run out of content.




I ran through the level 40 snow zone (Iron something?) to turn in a crafting quest yesterday.  The mobs do patrol the roads.  It was fun trying to get to the portal town at level 35. 

At certain points you can get quests in your hometown that portal you to the new zone. Bu it's certainly possible to run through +20 mobs with some luck and skill and get there on your own.

Keep getting gold spam mail from the same guy.  Been reporting his mails for 3 days.

Really strange complain considering every calling can do one of the "useful" roles very well and 2nd role cost like 30 gold (3d one is not expensive either). Rogues can tank, mages can  main heal.  And  clerics can dps heal and tank

Why does it surprise you that people are stuck in the traditional MMO mindset?  I play a cleric.  No one (I repeat NO ONE) wants a cleric for a dungeon run to do anything but heal.  The only way you get to play a non-traditional role is to play with a) friends or b) people desperate for another body.  

I wish I had a dollar for every time in a rift invasion that I got tell spammed because someone in my group died.  They see cleric and think cleric = healer.  While my cleric can heal during a fight, it's nothing in comparison to the healing I can do when I purposely play my healing spec.

I'm hoping that people will realize that this isn't a typical cookie-cutter game when more hit or approach the level cap.

Or don't talk about class when you respond/create an LFG post on chat channels.  Someone looking for a tank?  Hey, that's me.  I don't say "I'm a rogue/cleric, want me to come?", I say "I'll tank that" and proceed to do so.

Although I think having the names of classes be so 'typical' was a mistake on Trion's part.  They shouldn't have had 'warrior, cleric, rogue, and mage' as their callings, they should have made up entirely new names that didn't have preconceptions tied to them.  "Cleric" doesn't even make sense Defiant side, since Defiant 'clerics' get their power from spirits and pacts with non-deity entities, and are wholly different from 'clerics'.

The raid frames support different colored names depending on if one is healer, tank, melee dps, ranged dps - they *should* differentiate between cleric roles, too. 

They do, but not in a particularly clear or obvious way... I can hardly distinguish between some of the colors they picked, and I can't remember if blue or pink is the healer color.  Another area where sensible modding would do wonders for their game.

Pink is bards, in my experience.  Blue is healers.  Yellow is DPS, and orange is tank.  I like how bards are special enough to get a color of their own.

I'm hesitant to tank a zone I've never done before, and as a Rogue that's my only other option. I'm also already using my second role to have a real DPS spec, since my main is that leveling build Draegan posted somewhere around here; it's bad DPS since it relies heavily on dodging attacks.

Heh, tanked RotF and I haven't tanked anything since early BC in WoW.  How I did was..  :awesome_for_real:

Wouldn't even a DPS grinding spec be good enough for DPS for a leveling dungeon?  I don't think anyone's going to pull out the meters and vote kick you.

does this game even allow for addons? I hate to compare to wow but to me having a moddable game is probably essential to long term player retention these days. I can't think of anyone who doesn't use at least one mod in their wow.

There's 3rd party log analyzers. But otherwise, nope.

It seems not such a big deal at first but something tells me this is a bigger mistake than most realize.

I could use a bag mod, that's for sure.

Yellow is ranged dps, brown is melee dps, but at that point the color differentiation doesn't matter.  I suspect archons and dominators would show up in pink also, but no one rolls full archon or dominator far as I can tell, whereas every rogue on the planet has a bard spec.  I could unlock my last role tonight and test it though I suppose.

Yeah, I really do think it's a big deal.  Long-term, the auction interface is going to be a major annoyance to me.  It's already somewhat irritating, but if I can never use features like seeing a price history/average price of an item over a long period and such things, I'm not going to want to participate because I certainly don't have the time or inclination to keep notes on this shit, which means one less thing to do in game.  Also means I likely won't make much money, so being 'poor' will be a source of frustration and another potential cause to quit.

speaking of the auction interface...it's got a lot of issues. My main complaint though is when searching for things like the collectibles, I can't sort ones I already learned from ones I still need. Probably doesn't help some artifacts are used in multiple collections.

Yeah, I just noticed there is not a <usable> check box filter.

On the other hand, I can confirm that you can <shift> right-click on an item in your inventory to get a list of all current auctions of that item... which is better than the default WoW interface, and mildly helpful - even if it won't help Koyasha build a mercantile empire.

edit:forgot the shift.

Mage Archons will be pink as well.  Possibly full Warlords, but I haven't been grouped with a heavy Warlord yet.

That's quite helpful, at least.  I was complaining that I don't get an automatic search when I want to sell something, and I have to manually search, so that'll take some of the annoyance away.  But a long-term price history is really important still.

Warlords are orange, I was playing a full one in beta.  They're a full tank class in their own right, despite also being a buffer/debuffer.

•Red = tank
•Purple = support (typically Bard)
•Blue = Healer
•Yellow = Ranged DPS
•Brown = Melee DPS

The reason why you almost only see pink as bards as very few people play archons as primary spec or the warrior support varient.

The color coding falls apart in some places like my char is a reaver > riftblade dps and gets flagged as tank even though i do ridiculous dps and have taken no tanking talents.

To be fair I am also annoyed when people do not switch specs when needed. I ran a few dungeon runs with me tanking (rogue), chloro(mage) main healed and cleric doing melee dps (shaman)- i have no problem with this. Problem is when I ask mage or warrior to rez and they tell me they dont have it specced. Seriously? Out of 4 frigging roles you couldn't find spot for one role to do that before joining instance group?

Or in WF, clerics doings dps. I get it  you have dps role. But it also looks like  we dont have any damn heals ,so please be nice switch roles. Because I frigging do- if I need tank or off heal(bard) or run flag(rs/bard) , I go and switch roles . Dont be #$% and dont dps as a cleric when there is shortage of heals

Well, it depends on the level as it pertains to how many roles you can feasibly have. 2 at the first dungeon level should be standard... but almost 4p for the third role will have to just wait.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm playing a lvl 20 Justicar/Shaman/Druid, because I like tanky-type holy characters.  I don't WANT another role at the moment.  If I do decide to make one, it'll be DPS.

The cleric is not your healing bitch.

Which is why their system really does require every archetype to be able to perform every role... that way you can have 100% circular slap-fights... you heal, no you, no you, no him, no you.

Want to be 100% certain that you get heals when you need them?  Roll a healing cleric.  Just because someone is playing a healing capable class does not make them your healing bitch.

Seems like it would be easy to allow players to set their raid frame text color for each role they choose, so if someone wants to play dps in a tank spec (as the system allows) then they could be properly listed as such. 

It actually shows this way (healers are blue whether mage or cleric, dps is yellow) . My main main gripe is in  WFs you get for example a team with 4 clerics which total do whopping 10k heals combined. Meanwhile enemy team has clerics doing over 80k heals. Guess which team wins? I cant exactly balance it with bard either as it can not work as primary healer no  matter the spec.

Roll a healer; the problem is you.

The problem is the healer spec being used, and the team's approach to healers.

I have plenty of fights where I am the healer, and I'm being focused by three riftblades the second I cast anything. While when watching the fight, I'm the only person even as much as lobbing a silence at their healer.

One of the reasons bards are so popular as a pvp healer is that they don't have the stress of "who do I heal" or "oh crap, do I cast this heal or that heal and what's the status of my regen cooldowns!"

They're just AE heal everything, and the only cooldown to give a shit about is Virtuoso (which is the overpowered button of the century <3 <3)

Nope. problem it puts people like you or nebu  in same WF as me. WTB rated WF

Not a gripe, but the more I seem to explore the roles, the more I get overwhelmed with them. There are almost too many per class, and way too many configurations. Though I guess that could be a "what went right" thing too.

Just because the system has a lot of flexibility, doesn't mean people have to play roles they don't want to. It's a game.  It's their leisure time. Also, they're not always going to have their specs up-to-date (including ability rank purchases) or even have the correct gear for them. 

That being said, I started tanking out of necessity. I figured since I could, I would.  Not everyone wants to do that.  The rogue didn't pipe up and offer to tank.  The mage didn't offer to switch to cloromancer when we needed a healer.  Their choice. 

/big_shrug

Then why aren't you rerolling cleric? You're seeing a shortage of healing clerics, so that's your duty, no?

Because he doesn't WANT to play a healing cleric.  :awesome_for_real:

I get overwhelmed with this system as well.  To manage - I pick two roles that are different, and I play them as two separate toons.  It really works pretty well, though I am not going to spend more of my time reading about the game than I actually play it.

Once you take 2 or 3 classes to level 20 or so you will start to see a lot of similarities between the souls in different trees and get a feel for it. They are all variations on the same themes. An assassin in the rogue tree is similar to a champion in the warrior tree. It's a mix of building attack points(or conviction, or pacts, or combo points), using reactives skills, AoE skills etc. Different names, same skills. The first couple of skills in each tree are usually the same. A mitigation skill and a + damage skill, etc. I haven't played a Mage yet but I bet it's the same there too.

My warrior, cleric and rogue all have basically the same hotbar setups. Most used skills in one area, oh shit buttons in another, AOE in another, buffs in another. Theres a loty of similarity in the skills when I look at them, and it makes it easier to figure them out.

Yeah, that actually fixed it........ i hope

Make sure you don't do any dungeons then.  Everyone but a Rogue has access to a ress spell.  That means in a group with no rogues, you have 5 free easy wipe-recovery chances per hour.  Essentially people should be taking turns soul walking, switching into a soul with a ress, ress everyone, and switch back to what they were doing.

<-- fails to see your point.  Seriously, wtf?

I reiterate my feelings with a visual aid I was forced to make (using artwork gratuitously stolen from somewheres on the internet) for a member of my D&D group a couple years back, when he kept insisting my cleric hurry over and heal his ass after he'd gotten himself in trouble (again.  For the millionth time.) 

(Spoilered due to horrible nerdiness)

ok.

You said you were Justicar/Shaman/Druid.  I said you should have a role that has a ress in it to help out groups when they wipe.  Then go back to your dps spec.

I don't see where the issue is.

A) I don't have a DPS spec.

B) I get a battle rez, although I need a few more levels

C) If we're all wiping that often, we've got other issues to sort out

Seriously FUCK whoever thought of the running away debuff. I have never so wanted to quit in disgust over a single mechanic before in my life.  You thought this was a good idea? Really? REALLY?!

Lets just forget for a moment that this game is literally crowded with mob spawns. Let us also forget how easily you are knocked off your mount and...AND even if you want to have those things, you would still get people taking a hefty chunk of damage from trying to run away.

Now, adding on top of that the dmg debugg which is frankly atrocious considering how many god damned times I need to run back and forth through mobs I already killed thirty times over.... Even if...IF I do stop and try to fight I'm 40% down on health with that fucking debuff for another 6 seconds. God help you if you aggroed more than one thing.

I really don't know how things like this get put into games. Are they sitting around going "yeah our game is fun but you know what? Let's periodically stab them in the dick" "Great idea!"

You do know you can have up to four roles that you can swap in and out of out of combat willy nilly right?

What Lakov said times a million. It is especially stupid in this game given how rifts work. I see a rift on my map, I'm gonna want to drop killing 10 foozles and get there. Problem being, this system makes that a bitch. This design feature is one of the more head scratching ones. Fortunately, I can't see them keeping this. It's just too bad.

Also: Why can't I talk to guards in sanctum to find out what I'm looking for? They stole everything else from WoW, why not this too?

Maybe they'll put in an icon on the mini-map that transports players directly to a level relevant rift for their convenience. 

No one wants this game to be dumbed down to such a level but a rift or the boss of an invasion that's on the other side of the zone? Might as well be on another planet, you're never going to see it. Rifts/invasions/bosses right now are not "to arms, let us ride off to the rift in the planes over yonder and vanquish the werewolf king"  it's "shit, its halfway across the zone, back to farming bear asses"

Amen. Rift bosses seem to be a matter of luck to be in the right place at the right time. Now if upon an invasion, all mobs were to go yellow... then maybe we'd have something a little less stupid. But I have to agree... I get excited when I see the invasion prompts only to find major rifts and bosses a good 5 minute ride away which means I might see 5-10 planarite IF i get a shot off or a heal or whatever. Maybe they could put in my earlier suggestion of allowing wardstones to teleport you to any of the zone wardstones with a reagent - meh, hell with this brainstorming. I have to be up in a few hours.

You do know his comments were nonsensical given what I'd already said about my character right? 

(Hint: Tank-mode clerics get a rez.)

The only time I can't make it to a rift boss before it dies is if I log in or zone in with it already half dead and on the other side of the zone.  If it spawns anywhere in the zone and you notice it, there should be no reason you can't make it.  There has got to be some reason you can't bypass most of the mobs if you're paying attention.

I could back this - and rather than a reagent, maybe one or two planar charges.  Beating a rift nets one, make it cost one to port to the next wardstone.  That seems fairly balanced.

OK, wife and I did about half a dozen each of rifts and those roving invader group thingies tonight in Scarlett Gorge or whatever it's called.  We were level 27-28. Every single one of the rifts took 10-15 minutes for us to complete, duoing half of them and having a couple other people help on the other half.  And not once did either of us get more than 12-15 planarite plus a minor consumable.  Not once, even when we duoed the entire rift and were in the gold the whole time.  The invader group thingies on the other hand took just a couple minutes each to kill the 3 - 6 mobs in them, and the rewards were 20-30 planarite plus a consumable or two AND half the time (3 out of 6) one of those container reward thingies AND once even a blue currency reward thingy.

That is just wrong.  By evening's end we were actively avoiding the stupid rifts (would make an exception for a zone-wide invasion, but that didn't happen this evening).  This is NOT the risk/time/reward formula they need if they want us to care enough about the rifts to keep playing the game - them being the main thing differentiating RIft from prior games.

Other major design decision gripes:

Grey mob aggro + debuff when running is 1999-era Verant-style stupidity.  I'll bet money that whole mechanic is there for one reason: to slow down artifact collecting by high levels in low level zones.  Screw the people who belong in that zone, let's don't let the high levels get the stuff they missed without hassling the heck out of them.

Total lack of group-oriented get-out-of-jail-free options.  No evacs, group feign-deaths, aoe crowd controls or anything, and you certainly can't run away.  If you encounter it, or it runs into you while you fight something else, or it just spawns on you, you are screwed. Period.

Inventory crunch, as others mentioned before.  No, it doesn't have to be infinite, but it definitely needs to be far more than it is now.  Any game that interrupts my fun to harass me for inventory management every 20 minutes or less has failed on a basic level.

Bank access.  So far, the only places I've found with banks are the two main faction cities.  Is that it?  Bull fucking shit to that noise. Especially when you combine having to go back to the city for the bank access to craft with the absurd places you have to take your full-because-of-the-stupid-inventory-limits crafted items for the daily crafting quests.  Oh, you want to *charge* me to travel back and forth from Sanctum to East Bumfuck for the crafting quests and pat yourselves on the back for another stupid money sink? Screw you.

The rift group/raid mechanism is both awesome and annoyingly braindead stupid at the same time.  They need to separate the rift grouping mechanics from the party group mechanics, such that anyone in a rift area is in the rift raid, like it or not with no interaction required to make it happen, and without affecting or altering the makeup of their existing adventure party. And folks on the other side of the zone should not be taking up slots in the local rift raid.  The system has got great potential, and is better than nothing, but the whole thing seems to be only half thought-through and needs a lot more work to make it flow smoothly and effortlessly from adventuring to rifting and back again.

Given Scot's pedigree and that of some of his designers, why the hell they chose to slavishly imitate some of the worst features of WoW (basically all the "fluff" stuff outside of combat and questing) rather than pick and choose the best ideas from other games in the few areas where Wow is obviously weak is baffling to me.  Is it some stupid superstition/fear that changing ANYTHING from the one "successful" game out there may ruin the magic and cause the whole thing to fail?  One example is the auction house;  EQ2's broker is FAR less demanding of player time and far less punishing of people just trying to figure it out/learn how to use it.  So why on earth would they choose to imitate WoW's instead, which punishes you for even thinking about playing right off the start, then screws you if you overlook some detail when setting up each individual auction by hand, and finally robs you if you do manage to make a sale, all while denying you any hope of ever being able to use any of the addons that make WoW's AH monstrostity barely tolerable? Was the player economy such a low priority that they couldn't even be bothered to examine whether slavish imitation of WoW was really the best approach?  The whole realm of player economy seems like not even an afterthought in Rift so much as copy and pasted from WoW for the sake of copying WoW without any thought put in to whether that was the best they could do in Rift.  OK, some hyperbole there as they did at least make it possible to craft stuff that is useful to your character rather than stuff 10 levels below you, but still, lame and disappointing overall.

Minor bug gripes:

My crafting window has recently started refreshing itself every 30 seconds or every time an item is made (you can queue up as many of a single item to do in a row as you have the mats for).  Kudos to them for letting you browse your recipies while you crunch through converting 75 hides into 75 leathers, but raspberries and rotten tomatoes to them for resetting the scroll position after every combine, and every 30 secs even if you aren't making anything.  There is NO reason to refresh that damn window at all if I haven't learned a new recipe, crafted something, or had an item added to or taken away from my inventory.  DON"T be moving it around on me!  And adding insult to injury, they didn't implement any paging on the stupid scroll bar, you have to thumb wheel or click-click-click the little arrows to single step up or down, or grab the little scroll bar to slide it.  clicking in the empty space above or below the slider does nothing.  wtf?  did they get some retard ex-apple UI designer who is still living in the 80's?

Otherwise, I really do like the game so far.   :grin:  I guess it's just that they did so much so (unexpectedly) well that the areas where they didn't do so well stick out like a sore thumb.

Grey mob aggro and inventory are the ones I dislike most with inventory being the worst. Quest items should not take bag space and I'm getting sick of artifacts. They're cool but damn there's a lot of them. Yes I can just leave them, but they pile up just from kills. After artifacts, quest items and consumables there's rarely any space for new items and $ collecting. It's by far my biggest sore point.

I'm not sure what kind of magical rainbow shitting pony your character has that allows them to roam willy-nilly through one of the biggest traveling cockblocks in an mmo but I'm calling bullshit here.

You're not even making sense anymore.

Pretty sure if you are doing minor rifts, your chances of seeing a blue, even soloing it through the double bonus stage boss is less than if it was a major rift. I do minor rifts for the planarite and majors I look to grabbing blue shards - invasion bosses, purple shard, though those are few and far between - which is how it should be. I agree with ya, it's rough to solo a whole minor rift yourself and get 16 planarite and a green essence that you can't even use.

Yep. Minor Rifts (lots of regular mobs with an occasional elite - check your map it will say Minor or Major) almost never drop blue shards, if ever. I have soloed them with a Justicar in tank mode. They can be small group or solo fun, but don't have the drops the Major Rifts do.

I don't think he's confused about why the RIFT was giving the rewards it did, his point is that a rift was taking 10-15 mins and an invasion group was taking 2-3 and the rewards for the invasion force were much, much better.  Less effort + more reward = not making sense.  Players should not be avoiding rifts.  From a 'makes sense' perspective - defenders should be wanting to take out supply/staging points rather then prioritizing invasion forces, the reward system does not currently reflect this.

I also agree with his point about wanting a rift/invasion-group separate from player-specified groups and the rift/invasion-group being auto-enrolling based upon proximity points.

Those are odd experiences, cause personally I can take out invasion groups and get somewhere between 3 and 15 planarite on average.  I rarely get anything more than that from taking out an invasion, to the point where sometimes if I just don't feel like it I avoid them on the roads, only bothering to fight if I'm at a wardstone they're attacking.  I wonder exactly what sort of calculations go into the rewards to make our experiences seem so different in this.

I think what maybe is slanting it is that there are 'normal' mobs (picture is not different) in an invasion force which are actually elite.  Where as the minor Rift will just have normal mobs if you solo them - so the game decides that stuff you can solo doesn't warrant more reward than stuff that requires a group.

Thought experiment:
Imagine that the minor Rifts were quick solo jaunts of phat lootz happiness.  Wtf do you think would happen to their entire dynamic system in regards to Rift growth, invasions, footholds, etc. if minor Rifts were easy farmage?  EVERYONE would be out there raping the land (with repeatable rift quests btw) before anything gained any kind of momentum.  No, the way it is now is perfectly fine.  Let the system grow on its own.

Now, if the GMs interfered more, perhaps we could see more easily farmed and rewarded minor rifts... this way they could more manually control how the gamespace fleshes out.  But they've already said they were going for a more automated system.  So for now the minors really are only there for some planarite, repeatable quests, to grow into majors/invasions, and roadblocks you remove so you can quest.

This.  Minor rifts are like global warming, easily ignored and most people don't want to deal with them, then one day your quest hub gets raped by fire men and al gore is nowhere in sight.

Which seems to routinely happen in Gloam.  No one hits the minors, then before you know it the portal is overrun by an invasion force.  You port into an all-out war, participate, then hay guy!!  phat lootz in bag.

I think it was somewhere in this thread I read that you can only use your starter three soul trees in additional roles. As many of you probably know, that's not true, once you do the appropriate quests you can add the other three to your builds.

I neglected my foraging a bit while leveling and had to go back to lower level zones to get my skills up. Getting demounted by everything is annoying as hell but I'm sure it's one of those things they'll patch in later on.

I can see the quests for unlocking new souls being a negative sticking point for some people. I wanted to replace one of my souls last night, and I ended up running over hell's half acre trying to get a rift that would give me that planar shard. I was slightly annoying to me, but I had the patience to stick it out. I can see a lot of people just saying fuck it, instead of doing those, especially since you can't grab multiple quests at once. I mean, that's what this game is about, right? Why not just dole out the souls and say go nuts johnny!

As soon as I found out that this was the mechanic, I always made sure that I had a soul quest.  That way I could grab a shard while finishing other quests that brought me near an active Rift.  Granted, I learned of this mechanic in beta so I was ready for it when the game released.  They don't do a very good job of making it a clear mechanic in game.

Okay now I have a new gripe, but it's just a weird one. Every time I log on my pally to mail something to my justicar the cooldown on my lay on hands has just popped. Everytime. It's like the motherfucker is using it offline just to bug me  :awesome_for_real:

New peeve: broken quests. The phasing of the Whitefall dominated villagers exorcism quest was shifting randomly for me (had to rezone twice to switch into the phase with the dominated villagers), and the quest to kill Podovaxus in Droughtlands cannot be completed unless you have a spec that can burst ~1k damage (the quest mob goes immune to all damage at 800ish hp and blows up, but doesn't give quest credit). That quest is also a story quest, so you're locked out of the last half of Droughtlands. I could probably pick up an inquisitor spec and nuke him down now, but I don't feel like wading through the 5000 mobs surrounding him. Oh wells.

edit: related peeve - tons of spelling errors all over the place. I'm an ESL and I notice them all the time... use a spellchecker, c'mon!  :awesome_for_real:

TIP: DoTs work on Podo. Hit him with every DoT you have before he reaches 800hp and then just watch him die. Quest completes after that.

Yeah, I read the thread and that's where I got the inquisitor idea from (my two specs are healer and justicar tank, but I have a 3rd spec slot.. may as well put it to use). Maybe I'll do it one of those days, but I cleared the place about 4 times so far (including the time you go there on a quest from whitefall to get the item from the dude on the top of the hill), so not feeling it atm.

Ash's post about mailing stuff to his alt made me think of another gripe- mailing stuff is EXPENSIVE. Especially at low levels, when you are less likely to have enough bag room to be able to stash stuff like crafted items. I went to send some crafted greens to a guildie to RB- didn't ask for compensation, but then it cost me several gold to send on top of eating the mat cost. I am gonna just list stuff for cheap on the AH to clear my bags out now, or hand it to people in person.

Man, I thought I was seeing things, but my pally LOH does the same fucking thing.  I'm bugging it next time I log in.  For someone who plays for 3-4 20min periods a day, its awfully inconvenient. 

You're saying Paladins use lay on hands when no one is watching? :oh_i_see:

Do you not understand the value of having a spec that can ress someone after a wipe? Then go back to whatever spec you were using before?  I'm just going to go ahead and say you don't and leave this alone.

Dirty birdy's.

It's better then using it while everybody is looking. Besides, my paladin hasn't picked up any of that flasher trenchcoat leather yet.

On a topical gripe note: any the hell are their patch notes vague as all hell?

"we changed X in some way" Yeah, great. Tell me what you actually did, damnit.

My character has no torso.


Also that is with helmet turned off.

This is of course all my fault, there was a mis-itemized PvP reward available at Kain's Landing, where for some reason what should have been a plate hat was instead a plate chestpiece. I could hardly pass up the opportunity, and I have been rewarded for my keen eye for bargains with a ghostly torso and remarkably exposed underwear. Plus a unicorn hat that I am actually wearing on my chest, which I guess explains why I cannot toggle off the graphic.

Sadly, turning off hide helmet does not give me double-hat-models.


Actual gripe, while I'm here: items in this game, at least so far, are dead boring. I am getting pretty tired of replacing one green piece of armour with another green piece of armour with identical stat bonuses and slightly higher numbers. Or a blue piece of armour that has one 'special bonus' (+physical crit or +attack power) and is otherwise completely uninteresting except that it will need to be replaced a few levels later. Only the proc-based planar essences seem to add the slightest dimension to a character, and you only get one and even there it's usually just 'a bit more of the same.'

I remain somewhat baffled that with all the Diablo-clone games out there ably demonstrating how much more fun loot can be, most MMOs (that I have played) can't seem to get past this ultra-conservative approach to items. Especially for sub-cap items, where balance is hardly going to be as big an issue because even a really snazzy item is going to get replaced pretty soon -- and getting to level 20% faster for a few levels due to some killer item synergy is pretty much a win all around.

I wish it didn't let you pick up artifacts you already have. Getting so many duplicates has been a bit annoying.

Running debuff still in the game, seriously ...fuck that debuff.

I wish there was a guild bank so that you could give me all your duplicate artifacts.   :grin:

That's what the mail is for. I have an elaborate alt-artifact-mailing chain set up.

Though to be honest I wish stuff like artifacts/collections was account- or at least server-wide. It gets really tedious when your alt is picking up an artifact and you have to guess whether or not your main needs it or not.

I'm close to completing all the Freemarch artifacts, so I've been making a killing on the AH selling spare artifacts.  However, a guild bank would be really nice, if I were in a guild.  A shared bank, or even just a few slots a la EQ2, would also be nice, given the cost of mailing things.

From a business perspective, I can clearly see why a guild bank would be something I'd avoid as a developer.  They create CSR nightmares.  When an account gets hacked, the first thing compromised is the guild bank.  Without it, you isolate losses to a single account which must be easier to track and remedy.  Having to pour over the in/out log on a guild bank would suck. 

Good point.  Maybe an intra-guild mail system where you can mail things to guildmates for free, then.

I guess these flying, out of your reach, mobs might count as slight irritations.


edit: also, while trying to run away from superman mob here, I managed to fall down into a higher level zone. Great preview, rather fast ending.

Apparently the whole any class can do anything! Mantra being bantered about is pretty but not wholly accurate. It seems cleric tanks are not end-game tanks and rogue tanks are too glitchy to even know if they are good or not.

So you have

~Warrior= tank/dps  no heals

~Rogue dps/tank?/Buff class,cannot main heal

~Cleric dps/heals/pre-50 tank

~Mage dps/heals


Seems like 2/4 are healers and 2/4 are tanks with all 4 being dps.

Apparently you are talking out your ass again.

Share with the class then.

Even if your numbers are right, that's still a better percent of classes that can tank/heal than WoW so what's your problem?

Wasted potential, when I first started the game the thought of any base 'class' being any role in a group was awesome, incredible versatility and all that. However that's not what you get, you get four choices choices. Heal/dps, dps/heal, tank/dps, dps/tank in comparison to wow you can actually do all three roles with druids or paladins.

Think about this for a second, how many defensive souls does the warrior have? 4 tanking souls, four dps ones. Is that totally necessary? Couldn't they have given void knight to mages? Would have made a ton of sense and varied things up a bit. Maybe make paladin a viable healing soul for warriors.

Again, they are playing it safe, not deviating too much and I'm forced to ask, why?

Rogues and clerics tank just fine, clerics might actually be the best tanks atm and rogues just got their teleports patched yesterday or the day before to not fall through the world so much.

Is this endgame 5mans? Raiding? All reports I get on my server say no to clerics as main tanks and I dont know about rogues still not being glitchy, havent seen em yet.

We have cleric and rogue tanks in our guild, i'm not 50 yet but they are running expert dungeons every night.  Also nobody EVER said every class could do every role, that is just your own retardation.

I never said that Trion said that every class could do everything but don't try and bullshit me and say that wasn't the general sentiment of players at the start.  Why can't they? with such a robust soul system they are still shoehorning people into tighter class roles, why CANT bards be good enough to main heal?

Ok that aside,  expert(heroic) dungeons are nice but they aren't raids and in the end that's all that most people care about. Can clerics and rogues tank raids? maybe? I dont know but i hear the answer is no. It sounds like clerics can tank like vanilla wow bear druids could tank IE, good enough but still rather have a warrior.

Greenscale, the dragon of life and end boss of the first raid instance, was tanked by a Rogue riftstalker tank when he was first killed. Because they are better tanks on that fight. They take less damage than warriors.

I think that should end the discussion surely?

Anyone know how to turn down the annoying wind background sound shit without muting the rest of the game? It's most present in Meridian and Freemarch; none of the sliders except Master Volume seem to do anything about it.

Actually, because this game doesn't have an auto join LFD, unfortunately preconceived ideas about tanks and healers, become de facto reality. If I am a Cleric tank, and I am spamming chat but no one will take me, because they think Cleric tanks suck, then I essentially can't tank.

That being said, I'm not freaking out yet until most of the population gets to 50, and tries shit out (myself included). I have hope that any class with the option can tank (or heal) right now, but if it turns out to me a mirage, then ya /uninstall.

UI volume.  I messed with everything until I could get rid of that damn wind.

Rogues and clerics can tank in the end game.  Roguea were never meant to main heal.

Gripe: Scrolling combat text scrolls at the monster, which often renders it off-screen... would prefer it scroll at character so I can get a feel for what abilities are doing/proccing.  Again, sensible modding would remove this from a busy developer plate.

Comment: I rather wish they had done a better job thinking through the 3rd role for all the archetypes (plus a better job overall of thinking through all the Roles across all the archetypes)... I'm not agreeing with Lakov that I experience this as some sort of lie/deception on the part of Trion - on the whole I find the scheme liberating, especially when compared directly to WoW.  Rather, when I try to build Bards and Chloromancers I am struck by the lack of options to really excel at the runt-Role they've given us.  More of an opportunity missed than a positive failure.  Perhaps it will be remedied over time.

Chloromancers are not a runt role at all. They're awesome and much needed.

Bards are fantastic buffers and off healers.  Unfortunately they're so easy to play and don't really require a brain.  Very disappointed with them.

I'm not saying trion ever lied but the whole soul system really gives this big illusion of variety when there isn't one. Really wish they had just allowed every role to do everything, with 8souls a piece there's really no reason not to have every class be able to tank/heal/dps as effectively as anyone else.  Again, doesn't make it a bad game, just wasted potential.

I agree with you there.  That and if you want to add a 4th role called support... there should be a good idea of what support does and how/why you need it.  I'm not yet convinced that there *are* 4 roles yet... just Tank, Heal and DPS.  The game will be more interesting if they can flesh out the 4th role and, yes, round out the runt roles in each tree with better cross soul synergy.

The fourth role of support is very undefined, definitely agree there. Only bard and archons count as support apparently in the raid UI, and warriors don't appear to have a support class at all - instead they get 4 tanking souls, which seems overkill to me. And bards and archons both bring a lot of different stuff to a group.

In the long run I think we will see more spread, but for now challenging even the basic assumption that cleric = healer, warrior = tank, and rogue / mage = dps seems hard enough. I think asking folks to accept mages tanking might have been a step too far, but well have to see. I hope in the long run that's the plan with the souls.

A mage tank could simply be a reliable tanking pet, that wouldn't be too hard to swallow. There have been a few times in WoW where Voidwalkers tanked raid bosses, even one (OS+3) where it was the ideal tanking strategy.

As I said before void knight would make perfect sense as a mage soul for tanking. Give warriors a pure buff/heal class instead and things get a lot more balanced. I think a lot of the class stereotypes exist because people aren't sure who can be what still. They could have avoided this completely by letting everyone do everything and really...why not?  Again they are trying not to deviate too far from the cash cow that is wow and to me that really shows a lack of insight.

I find as I'm doing expert dungeons, that mystical fourth 'support dps' role is really useful, at least as a healer.

A chloromancer or bard that is providing passive AOE healing while DPSing gives me more time to focus on the tank (which can take ridiculous spike damage if they don't have enough toughness) with the healing.

Warriors desperately need a tree to fill that role, like the Warlord tree.

If you want to do T2 experts, a Chloromancer or a 2nd cleric is a must.  Chloro is better because they're dps while healing very well is pretty good.

Not to pick nits, but you said Chloro was an awesome main healer.  I believe you.  That means you all are saying you need 2 main healers for T2 content.  That's not a call for support.

Edit: Pre-emptive retraction... that's not precisely what you said.  But then I go back to my original point that the runt roles are not sufficiently fleshed out as they should be.

Chloro can be a main healer, or can be a great support healer in the same fashion as a bard by speccing differently. Clerics don't have the option of speccing into a massive, passive AoE healing spec like chloro's so they can't fill that role and so usually take up the main healer role.

The only issue with this is that a lot of people think this is the *only* role a chloro can fill. In the 40's people are asking for a cleric healer to join groups with a chloro off-spec healer, and they don't realise the chloro coul main heal just as well. Chloro's ability to off-heal, along with bards filling that role, has convinced many people that's *all* they can do.

This is a bit of theory craft on my part, but it seems like with just 13 points in chloro a mage could be a pretty beastly support healer.  Upgraded radiant spores is pretty rad.

How about a Justicar tank being the passive AoE healer? In the lower dungeons while tanking as Justicar I noticed my passive AoE heals kept people topped up pretty well. Think it works in the late game?

When we first started doing experts our cleric was some kind of druid/justicar support healing role and it worked OK. He just switched to Inq later though. The T2s we've done I just solo heal stuff (I'm a chloro) and if we need to (for stuff like Scarn/Caelia/Calyx/Atrophinus in RD) our cleric swaps to his Warden spec. I haven't really found any situation where it would be healable with one healer and a support but not healable by one healer. If it's needed swap in a 2nd healer. If you're going to bring support the only soul that really pulls it off well is Bard, at least in my opinion.

Level 26 now. I've only got 8 points in chloro atm (rest is full necro). Radiant spores, withering vine and bloom from chloro, combined with life shift and blood binding from necro, you have a lot of emergency healing capability. And that's just for others. For yourself, the Soul Purge (channeled dps plus heal you and your pet) means the healer does not have to spend time worrying about healing the mage.

Another bonus: a lot of mobs run around with self buffs that give them 10% damage bump for a 10% health decrease. I knock off that buff with necro's greater consumption, which also regains a small chunk of mana, in the middle of a fight.

I have a full chloro spec in my other role, especially nice for rezzing or if group needs more/stronger healing than the necro/chloro build gives.

Odd gripe, but the game sadly has little replay-ability. Outside a few twists to the same quests, its the exact same crawl through the exact same trails. Hence, if you want to reroll a rogue from your current warrior, you'll be in the same places with the same faces. Not long before the back of your mind is poking you telling you that you did this already. Guess this is an example of how multi-starting areas helps keeps the steam rolling out. There is just so much of Silverwood one can take..

You can have a Chloro Main heal and have a Justicar off heal.  You can have a Cleric main heal and a non-full chloro off heal.  A non-full chloro is essentially a Mage with 20-30 points in Chloro and more points else where for damage.

You can get away with one healer on some boss fights in T2.  Some boss fights you need 2.  Depends on skill and gear.  There's a lot of movement and awareness involved in T2 fights.

edit:
Justicar tanks, properly geared, are sick group healers.  I saw one rip through eIT.  I should of rolled one.

Bards are pretty useless in group oriented PVE prior to raiding where you only need 1.  You're better off having that rogue go spec Ranger for dps and just cast Rain of Arrows on trash.

I disagree.  I'm halfway through 48 and i have not touched Moonglade Highlands, Shimmersand OR Stillmoor.  That is plenty of content for me to explore my second time through, silverwood will definitely suck but i did that about 30 times during beta.

Just to clarify one of the two souls that allow rogues to be anything but dps is useless except for in raids where only one is ever needed?

Depends what you mean by Bard.  If it's a 51 pt bard, then yeah, you only need one in raids.  In Experts, they can be used and work quite well, but if care about min/maxing everything, use a cleric/mage.

If you use a pseudo bard/dps build they can add a lot.

Bards or some combination of them are fantastic for leveling.

Some form of Bard is amazing for solo farming/playing at level 50.

I'm only discussing PVE.  Bards are pretty awesome in PVP.

So.... yeah if you want an optimal group setup in 20 man content, bring 1 Bard.  Were you expecting more?

People have a funny way of liking classes and not just classes but specs when they are different enough. Wow is still learning this lesson when it comes to moonkin/shadow priests and to a lesser extent things like beastmaster hunters.

A shadow priest or a bard do not identify with priest/rogue they identify with the spec and concept and what they want to play. As soon as you start saying things like "just respec ranger for most fghts" you are gonna turn a lot of people off, they don't want to play rangers, they want to be bards.

 Trion will need to recognize this soon and not just in the case of bards, they have made so many of their souls distinct, which is a good thing but it seems like they want you to always be switching depending on what situations call for and a lot of people just want to play X type of character and will get upset when that type is useless.

In a game that has 28 souls, needing only one of something for a 20m raid is not a balance problem.

Well, as you note, it seems like part of the design of this game is for people to switch as appropriate to the situation.  We get 4 roles, 3 of which are unlockable with minimal to no financial hardship by level 30, the 4th will probably have no problems being unlocked by 50, and it's possible to swap active roles very smoothly as soon as you're not 'in combat'.  And you don't wind up with an empty mana bar either, so you can immediately be useful in your new role.  In pvp, role-swapping mid-combat is even quite possible, as long as you avoid getting hit long enough to be counted as out of combat.  This all says to me that the design is not intending for people to be 'a bard' or whatever, but that they are intended to be a rogue and switch as often as is useful. 

This is different from WoW's design where you were only allowed to switch specs recently, there's only 2 possible specs, the cast time for switching specs is way longer, and after the switch you're drained and need to drink to be prepared to act.  And before switching specs was allowed, you were essentially married to your spec - not to mention, the cost of tinkering and switching your points around was high, at least for the average player that was not making considerable amounts of money through their financial empire.  In WoW, you were clearly intended to be 'a shadow priest' and not just 'a priest'.

I grok what you're saying but the only reason people get upset in the first place, IMHO, is not because of over-identification with a class but because once they made the class choice, they were pretty much locked into it and, therefore, if the class was underpowered/sucked/broken/etc they were literally stuck with it unless they wanted to reroll.

Here, they can keep elements of the class they like so much -- or even just a piece of it -- but they have so many options for ways to add to that main choice that it will be hard for them to feel stuck or useless.

e.g. Let's say I've got OCD when it comes to Rangers and I can't play the game without having a Ranger Soul. And let's say I want to get all the way as far as I can go in Ranger. You know the drill:  I drop 51 points in it. Now I have 15 points leftover for bringing in some spice from 2 other souls -- like 5 points in MM to increase the distance of my ranged attacks. And 10 points in Bard for the Cadence healing. Am I still "useless"? Am I still not enough of a Ranger? I think you'd have a hard time arguing that a 51 point build in any soul is useless.

You might argue that I would have to switch around a bit at various stages -- Hartsmann has said as much (see recent interview from Pax East on Zam) and admitted some souls will feel underpowered at some leveling stages but the goal is for all to be solid at end. This seems to be the reality of the game -- I can't say for sure since I haven't played any character to 50 yet, but it looks that way.

edit: and I forgot about Roles! So I keep my 51 point in Ranger across all 4 roles because I'm so OCD. I have 4 different ways to arrange the extra points/souls just as Koyasha says. I'd like to think that is another nail in the "useless" coffin.

You do know this game is based off of soul builds right?  And you get four of them?  And there is a reason.  So you can use the best one for any given situation.  You are not a Bard, you are a Rogue.  You are not a tank, you are a Warrior.  Thats how the system works.

In all fairness he's not saying anything about that being how the system work, but how most players work. They totally identify with one spec and if they think that spec sucks, they're not going to change it, but complain. That's what's so great about this system, having the ability to recognize a spec sucks and another one is just plain superior, makes us relative gods compared to those that pigeon hole themselves in.

I still see constant spams of LFM Tank, or Healer, and show up in the group finding that there's already a warrior in there, or a cleric, or a mage. People find something they like, and don't want to change, even as painlessly as this system makes it.

What I'm saying is that even if some switching specs was instant...some people in wow still wouldnt want to switch their dps spec to be the healing bitch. Sometimes it's the other way around. People want to go into games with specific roles, giving them more or easier flexibility will not change the player in the least.

You do know most people can play any spec and win for every single portion of this game except some of the more difficult raid encounters right?

Some people don't give a shit about numbers, they just want to play a certain class or style. What about that do you not get?

If they don't give a shit about numbers what is the problem? they can play whatever they want, just don't play with the people who do care about numbers.

Which is fine.  Because they can play that and complete every single piece of content in the game.  Except when group composition comes into play during some raid encounters and some T2 expert dungeons.

This is assuming people are playing this content at the assumed gear levels.

Oh right, of course raiders won't be affected by this. Utter bullshit, when needed classes aren't favored by the general populace raiding guilds have trouble recruiting or forming raids.

"Hey bill, we're raiding king assface tonight, need you to switch to your healing spec"
"what the hell, i signed up to raid as dps"

People may be flexible now but the idea of re-speccing has been in wow since it started and people still hate doing it, even as easy as it is and yes this is at the raiding level too.

Also, let's not kid ourselves here, this game doesn't have four classes with 28 souls, it's got 28 classes. You don't say "im a warrior with points in riftblade/champion and beastmaster" you say "im a riftblade" 

So when people start identifying with certain playstyles they dont like having to switch cause "sorry dude, we already got one" I've raided for way too long to not see this happen. Some raiders are flexible but many aren't.

People shouldn't play with those with differing play styles, expectations, etc. If you're Johnny Casual who refuses to spec into a useful role for your guild/raid, don't expect to clear raiding content.  :oh_i_see:

Have you raided? Ever? I'm not talking about johnny casual. As I just said, when people sign up for raiding guild they sign up with a certain class/spec. Now of course guilds say they want you to be flexible but if someone's been X spec for months and you ask them to change cause we are short on healers? Good fucking luck. It's human nature, don't try to play it off like raiders are some magical species immune to the same foibles as mortal men.

YES, by and large more raiders are willing to be flexible but at best it's 50%  You try telling your main tank you need him to dps or heal from now on cause his chosen class just isnt good for this tier of raiding etc.

I run a raiding guild in WoW; never once have I made (or even asked) someone switch to a spec they don't want to play. Please continue to make stupid assumptions though.

So if you never asked, how do you know they would?

I mean, you just proved my point if people in your raiding guild arent willing to play certain specs.

Note, I said spec they don't want to play. If someone is DPS with a healing offspec, that's different then "Hey mr DK DPS, plz go respec tank b/c ur dps sux kthx". We have enough people who ARE flexible that those who only want to DPS are free to do that.

The other issue with forcing people to play something they don't want to is that they're probably not very good at it. Some classes have gear overlap (in WoW) with other specs, but many don't; as a result when you make someone switch spec you get subpar gear and subpar performance. At that point you're better off just taking someone else. This is only an issue where you have absurd edge-cases like 10 friends who all only play melee dps.

I'm pretty sure you're not disagreeing with me at all. My point is that people identify with their specs and won't want to switch on the fly. DPS mages won't want to go chorolol and bards won't want to switch to assassin or whatever the flavor of the month dps is. Hell even among wow warlocks some people just like affliction, some people like destro and it doesnt matter which is better they will play that spec and both are dps.

if you have 10 bards in your guild and you only need one, some of those bards may switch and some may just find another raiding guild that wants bards.

That's my point and that's the problem trion is going to have because now they are going to have to balance 28 different classes

Fair point. The real question would be why you recruited 10 bards in the first place.

This is not Trion's problem.  This is an extreme, hypothetical case that you are clinging to just to bitch.  It's been heard before in other games "no one in my guild wants to play a healer!  How am I supposed to get through Dungeon X!"  If your guild all wants to be spec X and no one is willing to branch into other roles, even when they have 4 builds they can switch to on the fly, then you are guilded with a bunch of self-absorbed cunts and it is still not Trion's problem. 

I don't think Lakov is arguing a hypothetical case at all.  I like storm/lightning classes.  First thing I rolled in RIFT was a storm mage.  I noticed that the spells were trying to have synergies, but really didn't suceed at it.  I remembered two years of waiting for the Thane to become competitive in DAOC and quickly rolled a warrior (Rfitblade).  But the point stands, I'm kinda bummed that the stormcaller is largely useless.

If this was my first game, I'd be much more reluctant to swap "my main soul" out of stormcalling - even though this game is clearly designed for folks to swap specs.  Why?  I don't know, I just like the whole stormcalling thing.

Quick question - how many people not getting Lakov's point have ever used the term "fotm bitch"?

What makes it so impressive that you can't change? It takes all of 3 seconds, and you can still USE your Stormcaller abilities, just not as the primary focus. My Nightblade PvE is my primary role, but I switch to Bard when in raids and Assassin when otherwise, BUT the Nightblade still works pretty well in PvP, I just need to add some Assassin abilities and I use some low level Bard Songs at the same time too.

If you cannot understand the concept of liking the idea of being a character that can control lightning and storms (here lightning and storms is just an example), and how playing a game might satisfy that desire to some extent, my yammering via text isn't going to help you - but I'll try anyway because I'm broken.

My mage now has three souls - Stormcaller/Ele/Dom, War/Necro/Dom, Necro/War/Dom.  I'm so stubborn I didn't just remove the Storm soul.  But stormcalling is so underperforming and clunky that I never use it.  That is unsatisfying.  I CAN switch.  I DO switch (ok, I used to switch).  I would prefer to primarily use the stormcalling abilities, but the only area where storm seems like it can get the job done is in situations where I need AE damage and have someone else tanking (so, Rifts and invasions).

No I understand your point.  Perhaps it's my unfamiliarity with the mage calling that is the problem.  However I have the niggling feeling that your issues revolve around the stormcaller not being as useful as you'd like in more areas of the game.  I can feel that to some extent on my cleric.  I vastly prefer playing the druid/sham.  It's a melee dps spec with a warden third soul for some healing on the side.  But it's not useful in many group situations.  If I find that no one is healing, I'll have to swap in my warden/sent to get the job done.  If for some reason we don't have a MT I'll swap in the Justicar build.  I'd much rather not have to use those souls, but if it's necessary to accomplish the goal, I'll do it.  If, however, I was unwilling to do so, rather than see it as Trion's problem to fix for me, I'd not participate in events that require me to switch.

I can understand liking being a lightning throwing bad ass.  It just seems to me that you require that soul to be viable in every situation for some reason.  I see plenty of lightning flying around in public rifts, so there has to be some utility to the soul at any rate.

People don't like switching gears. If they roll a healer, they want to heal. If they roll a dps they want to dps ad if they roll a lightning mage, they want to play a lightning mage.  I think it's really offtrack to make this a casual vs raider argument because it's not. Raiders don't suddenly enjoy playing paladins just because that might be what the guild needs, they may tolerate it but they won't have as much fun as say playing their disease throwing reaver.

The bottom line is this is a fun issue and as blizzard is finding out with cataclysm and all the "learn2play we nerfed your classes" style heroics, fun actually goes a LONG way

I disagree.  The whole point of the souls and the ability to switch between them any time out of combat is to be able to switch gears.  Also, switching to a Paladin in Rift is much different than switching to another class in WoW.  In WoW, playing your Paladin only increases the strength of the Paladin.  In WoW, if you level up with your Paladin you will also have another point to spend in your Reaver set of souls.

Bolded the items that hit close to home (but the second bold is stated too harshly).  I'd phrase it like this, "I'd just like the Stormcaller to be useful in more areas, currently it seems like it's only useful in public rifts when I can focus on AEing".  That said, I don't expect it to be as good as any other spec in all situations - I expect that it will not be as good as other (or maybe even any other) souls in the same class for certain activities.  I would like it if it was at least fun to use in "bread and butter" activities - like single or multi-target blasting.  Currently it's just tedious.  There are a number of spells that don't fit in any rotation, and the charge mechanism (and what expends charges and/or hypothermia) needs work.  (example - there is a spell that expends charges but ends up not doing significantly more damage then the build-up abilities).    And occasionally you are better served by using the base-level blast from Dom, which seems weird.

All that said I understand that as a RIFT player I need to be using all of my roles pretty frequently or I will suck with those I'm not using enough.  Rotations are significantly different between each soul and combination of souls such that they take a pit of practice to get a hang of what you should be hitting and when.  I'm fine with that, I think it adds a bunch to the fun of the game.

I don't know if I disagree or not with the "people don't like switching gears" statement either.  I think "some people don't like switching gears" is accurate.  If a person is strongly in the "I don't like/can't switch gears" variety, then Rift probably isn't the game they should be playing.  I'm in the, "I like switching gears, I just wish my primary choice was less specialized" variety.

Some of my guildies (who are playing RIFT currently) don't like switching gears at all, since they think it dilutes the character. For example, a guildie has a bard character concept, and her chara *is* a bard (with appropriate 2nd and 3rd soul of course). No 2nd or 3rd spec. To me, this is an understandable playstyle, even if I don't agree with it. It also makes sense if you RP...

FWIW I have 4 specs on my cleric: pve healing, dps, tanking, pvp healing.

Yes, some people don't like switching gears.  It's the generalization I was disagreeing with.  I don't know what to say to those people, but if there's one soul they absolutely must play, then there probably needs to be some experimentation on the other two souls which would synergize with it the most depending on an individual's playstyle.  Of course, then you get into the more tedious portion of people who must play THIS particular combination of souls, or must focus on this soul PRIMARILY.  But, meh, you can't make everyone happy all the time.

Because Trion intended for people to switch specs on the fly does not invalidate my argument nor does it make it a good decision. What I'm saying is by and large people will not want to do this and be left wondering why their "class" sucks, or is never taken on raids.  Reverse it even and say I love playing a bard but they are only viable in the end game, I don't want to play a ranger for 50 levels and THEN get to play the class I want.

Just look at any fighting game. Yes you have the hardcore that will always play the strongest possible character but even among hardcore fighters there are usually a top 3-4 to choose from and everyone has their favorite playstyle. There are very few games that make you radiaclly change your playstle (heal to dps/tank etc)

Also you are missing the point Bzalthek, I'm not saying people will say "Man, if I can't play a warlord effectively screw this" it's man like "Man, I wish I could paly a warlord, those are really fun but eh, ll stuck with champion for now" this is a game, games are 'about' fun, in fact you DO want to make everyone happy all the time, that's the point. Of course you can't but more people than not like playing 'their' class, whatever class that might be.

Again, wow tried this, it failed. They tried saying "well if you can't get into a group as X sec, just respec and go Y!" people don't like doing that.

So ... some people like sticking with a certain class. Sometimes that class does not fill its role in raid situations as well as others. So those people either - switch specs to play with serious folks who want maximum efficiency in raids, or play with more casual people who may still raid, but are not as serious business about it.  Is this not any raiding mmo ever?

Part of the reason I never got far into the demo was because I felt bombarded with entirely too many abilities and choices with all the specs. It could have just been the early game, but I didn't feel like spreading across 3 things that quickly was a good thing.

It isn't in most cases.  You spread yourself thin and you miss out on a lot of options that greatly strengthen your character.  Your third soul early on should likely only be used for a nice free zero point ability.

Luckily it's trivial to respec and try out different soul and build options.

Not that I want to interrupt this wonderful argument but...


Fuck Scarlet Gorge. Particularly the Ironroot Draw area, which is the road between the Defiant portal and the northern quest hubs, that is camped by TONS of roaming, aggro mobs. Even after today's changes I'm still getting dismounted in 2 hits, and there's no way clearing 15 useless mobs just to travel between quest hubs is intended to be fun.

Everything you typed here is wrong.

Edit to add:

This game is all about 4 callings.  Souls are tools.  If you want to play the game to it's fullest potential you should use all the tools given to you.  If you want to only use a bard and be stubborn about it, then it's saying that you're only going to build a house with a hammer.

Now with that being said, you can do a very high percentage of the content in this game with any spec you want.  It might be harder and slower than the most optimal way.  Some of the stuff you won't be able to do is high end T2 and Raid dungeons because some of those fights require an appropriate combination of players.

For example: The last boss in Expert Abyssal Precipice.  You need two healers for the fight and you need good/decent AOE dps.  The best setup would probably be a Warrior Tank (aoe dps/threat), Champ/BM Warrior, Ranger, Chloro and a Healing Cleric.  However you can do it with a Rogue or Cleric Tank.  But there is no room in this fight for a Bard.  The Bard just doesn't have the DPS or the Healing output to work for this fight.

This is why you have four roles. 

However, if later on down the road when new content is put in, you can probably do this encounter with any setup once gear catches up.  But with current levels of gear you need a bit more controlled group setup.  Also one thing to note, you can do the whole dungeon up to this point with some sub-optimal group setups with just about any setup.  Some of the bosses will wipe you a lot though.  Some bosses are a bit more lenient.

People can play whatever they want.  You can get into normal dungeons and almost all of the T1 Expert dungeons with any spec you want and play it.  But you shouldn't be butthurt when someone asks you to switch to try a different strategy if you get stuck on something.

But if you want to play your bard and complete a dungeon in 2 hours when switching to a dps role would cut that time in half, then be my guest.

I dont even play my bard and you are completely missing the fucking point, again.

I'm NOT saying trion didn't build this game with the intent of switching through your four roles on the fly, I'm not saying in Rift that ever of the 28 souls was intended to do everything. What I AM saying, is that people don't want to switch between four different classes on the fly, they want what they pick to be able to do most everything and that down the line, the forums are going to be infested with "buff X soul, nerf Y soul" because people want whatever they choose to be good at this game.

Also, don't fucking use the term butthurt, you know who uses that? raiders. Raiding is the only time I hear that and all it is, is another way of saying QQmoar with less leet speak.

 If you think this doesn't affect you, you're dead wrong pal because Rift is going to be a balance nightmare for the foreseeable future for all the reasons I've been giving. You don't mind switching your souls? great, expect to do it with every single patch. However I promise you a majority of players, hardcore or not will end up getting pissy about changing playstyles so often.

Yeah I gotta say, Lakov has been pretty abrasive and occasionally out to lunch on RIFT stuff overall, but it is just astonishing how much everyone is talking past each other here. It's like two completely parallel conversations.

Lakov sounds butthurt.  :awesome_for_real:

 :facepalm:

It's a pet peeve, I hate clique-ish terminology.

Fascinating, tell us more.

Considering the ease of doing it, the cheapness of respecing (unlike WoW, I have no fear of doing it and wasting money), you need to stop calling yourself a Stormcaller and start calling yourself a Mage who can choose to specialize IN Stormcalling but know that in some situations there will be another role you need to play.


I'm sure there are elite builds that if you aren't using you'll be looked down upon (and some like Saboteur "drop charges on target and detonate at your leisure" need to be nurfed with an ability to block them some of the time, or a Bard's awesomeness or the high stun times I see people talking about at level 50 ), but the amount of souls and builds able to be swapped at a moments notice means there's a very good chance there is a good counter to that elite build that just needs to be swapped to when needed.  It's not like you're playing WW2OL and if you haven't got a joystick can't really jump into a Fighter plane to shoot down that annoying Stuka that keeps bombing your tank.

I don't know of any RPG or MMO that does NOT have people bitching about how the other side/class/server/player has better stuff and my stuff sucks and ohgod devs fix it it's not fair.  

You mean some people want to do that.  In reality what they are doing is just playing a soul and not their calling.  That's perfectly fine and a valid way of playing the game, who am I to tell people how to play games.  However that's not how the game is designed and they can't complain if they can't complete content because they refuse to play the game how it was intended.

Exactly and even in wow with dual speccing and recpeccing costing a ridiculously low amount compared to what you get at max level, people still don't like doing it.  The argument seems to be "well if you don't like it just play something else" but that argument will not placate people and trion is going to be tasked with balancing 28 different souls.


You must be new to MMO's, not only will they complain they will do so loudly and in enough numbers that trion will have to get to work balancing classes or people will start getting fed up with the game.  Hell go all the way back to diablo. Javazon, bowazon sound familier? People identify with the playstyles of their character. It really doesn't matter what their "base" class is or whatever name you want to give it.

Some people like pet classes, some people like dots, some love aoe an some love shooting lightning bolts from their arse. You can't just tell people to switch what they like on the fly and expect them to like something else and yes, they need to like it...because liking it means trion pays their bills.

Rift according to Lakov. Who is absolutely not butthurt.

Psycho.

 :why_so_serious:

Just pointing out you might want to back away slowly there buddy. That's your last 30 posts in a nutshell.

I have been getting a lot of downtime at work.

Yeah, this was a really, really stupid decision on their part imho.  I have to assume it was driven by a last-minute panic to distinguish themselves from WoW in the first few minutes of the game.  If you consider the game in and of itself it's almost impossible to argue that it's a good thing to force someone to select a second soul literally three quests after selecting their first, and the third a few levels later.  There's absolutely nothing so interesting about having multiple souls active at once that justifies thrusting that kind of complexity on a new user so early.  It wasn't really until level 20-ish that I really started getting much value out of my second soul, and I still, at level 43, haven't really done anything too interesting with my third.

Those aren't the levels I'm recommending for when they should have unlocked them, btw.  It's entirely possible that if I hadn't had access to my third soul until level 20, I would have gained an appreciation for it and cared about what I put there.  As it is, my brain pretty much decided to not care too much about the other two souls and to drag any abilities from them off my hotbar.  Later I started adding a few, and now my shaman/justicar actually uses some justicar stuff with some real effect, but there is absolutely NO WAY that it would have mattered early enough to warrant that stupidity at level 2.

Mind you, I'm not saying they shouldn't let you have access to lots of souls to respec into as early as they did.  That should be more fun than it is (it's boring as hell currently), but it happens at a good time and it's great having those options available to play around with.  It's the unlocking the second and third active soul trees that is stupid.  I'm a pretty open-minded dude and generally don't like to say I'm certain of anything, but in this case I am certain the game would be improved in an absolute sense if your second tree was unlocked at level 5 or 10 or something, and the third at 15/20.  And not only confused, but led to believe the game is full of redundant, flavorless abilities, since the current system basically gives you three nigh-identical attacks by level 6, giving you a horrible impression of the very system they are trying to impress you with right off the bat.  They clearly made this decision based on beta testing feedback, somehow failing to realize that beta testers are a) the type of people who play every MMO, and b) had already acclimated to the soul system by the time they were giving the feedback.

I love this game in general, but this is seriously one of the dumbest things I have seen done.  Where dumb is defined not by the severity of the problem it creates, but by how obviously inferior a decision it is.

I mean, for the love of christ, there is a goddamn quest in the defiant starting zone that details you getting your second soul (at around level 5, a reasonably appropriate time), except by that time you're actually getting your third soul because of this bizarre hacked-in change.  So fucking strange.

It was actually a change made early in the betas after massive requests and feedback about opening up the main draw of their game up sooner.  Used to be you got to pick between three souls to start, opened up the second on what is now the third soul quest and didn't get the third until level 20 or so.  It blew, this is much better.

Yeah, I, uh, don't believe you.  I mean, I believe you that this what was changed, I do not believe that this was a good change though, or that anyone's experience was enriched by having three souls active at level 6 rather than 20 (I could see pushing it to 15 or so though).

I know that they used to make it a lot harder to get new souls (I think they were metered out over all 50 levels or something, right?)  Changing that totally makes sense.  I think it's really cool that you can get all 8 PvE souls at level 15 or whatever.  That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about having three active at once by level 6.  And two active at once by level 2.

You do not have to throw complexity in a user's face.  Especially when it serves no interesting purpose.  There is no interesting gameplay brought about by having two active souls at level 2.

From what I can tell, the change to allow you to collect all 8 souls more rapidly was made at the same time as the change that allows you to have two soul trees active at level 2, and three by level 6.  I assume this is true because people always assume there is some connection between these two ideas.  The response to what I said above is always to say that it sucked having to wait until level 50 to have all your souls.  I'm all for having all your souls quickly so you can play multiple roles and try out different shit.  What I'm saying is that nothing interesting happens at level 2 when you have two active souls to justify the added complexity.  Consider the added complexity in this case means that new users are being forced to realize that they should be dragging an ability off of their hotbar at level 2 or 3.  Consider that in some cases this is like the third ability they have gotten so far in the whole game.  That's fucking nuts in a game that otherwise does such a good job of being approachable and pleasant to play.

I mean, I can say for sure that my play experience would not have been significantly altered if I STILL didn't have a third active soul unlocked at level 43 (though it would be hugely negatively impacted if I couldn't have gained all 8 to swap between by level 16 or whatever).  Hell, to be honest you could probably argue that it wasn't even necessary to EVER have more than two actives.  (And it's easy to be like, "OMG LESS OPTIONS," but then why not four actives?)  Mind you, I'm not making that argument.  I'm making the argument you don't need three actives at level 6.

Edit:  I should also say that I already knew it had been like this in beta, and that I would have known so even if I had never read about the beta at all.  Any observant person can tell it used to be this way, because of the fact that, like I said earlier, the quest text still talks as though you are getting your second soul at level 6.  Somehow, insanely, they thought it was so important that you have three active souls by level 6 that it was worth invalidating the quest progression of the defiant newbie zone.

Well i tried it both ways and the way it is now is much better.  Yes, it was that important, the other way sucked horribly.

I can't see how getting a third soul at 20 would suck horribly. Hell I can't see how a third soul is all that useful period, but whatever. All I was saying was that getting it after playing for an hour was very confusing. It's not like I couldn't handle it, but I had no idea what all this shit was for and if it all did the same crap. Also, there's the ever-present fear of a new player that YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG OH NOES!

The other way was like removing rifts from low level zones.  There is two things this game has going for it and they, along with most of their playerbase during beta, figured it was better to expose players to it as early as possible.

Yeah and I got that at like level 3 or something when I got the second soul. I was like cool!

Then in 20 minutes I got another one and I went, woah hey, slow the fuck down, I haven't figured out my bars yet!

I think maybe level 10 I would have been more comfortable with it. Maybe that's where it is now? I have no idea.

New Gripe:  Having all the planar consumables on the same timer makes them essentially useless.  You gotta save your highest level ones for oh shit moments meaning you rarely use them, and you can toss off a lower level one for extra giggles in fights where it doesn't matter anyway.  So they end up largely useless wastes of inventory and hotkey space.

And having the planar drops on the same cooldown as the stock mana/health potions is doubly annoying, for the above reasons all over again PLUS duplicated effects.

It was an interesting attempt to copy the ? mechanic (i forget what them clicky disk thingies were called, effects?) from CoH, but as of yet it's far more of an annoyance than a plus for the game.


Old Gripes renewed: They STILL haven't gotten rid of the goddamned debuff mobs give you when you get hit from behind while moving, and they STILL haven't made it possible to run from more than two or three mobs, today's aggro range tweak notwithstanding.  The first also seriously impedes tactics like running to the healer to get the mob off him or gathering up three or four mobs to fight at once.  The second means you are screwed with no chance ever of surviving if you get adds during a close fight or round a corner and run into one of those elite invasion forces.  Unless you stick to "safe" (ie boring) areas you are overpowered for.  Punishing risk taking and rewarding un-fun overcautious play is not the path to increasing retention.

Hell my gripe is getting those stupid consumables in the first place, ive never not sold them straight to the vendor.  For oh shit moments i use a health potion, the minor buffs those things give in no way justify giving up the precious bag space.

Yeah, I just vendor them.  I may save a few if they weren't on potion timers, but as it is it's just a little extra cash.

Yeah, frankly I just don't believe it.  Sorry, I know that's a dick thing to say, but one of the things you can count on players to do is always want more stuff faster.  It may even make them like the game less, but they still won't say they don't want it.  So the fact that seemingly everyone claims that it's so much more awesome having three active souls at level 6 doesn't mean much to me.  You don't really need to hear opinions on this one.  You just think, "Hey, what does it add to the game to have that much complexity at level 6?  Very little.  You don't have enough points to do anything interesting with the three trees by then.  How much does it slow down the learning process?  A lot.  To the point that you are forcing people to cull abilities at level 2 or 3.  Thumbs down."

And it isn't a binary choice anyway.  If 20 was too late for the third soul (again, I am skeptical, since I still do not need my third soul in any of the four specs I currently use at level 43), then make it 15.  Do not adjust the second soul down from 5 to 2, and then put the third at 5.  Just flat out dumb.  Sorry, I know I'm just asserting an opinion at you, and that's sort of a dick move, but things like this are just so fundamental to one's understanding of games it's impossible to debate it, really.  I'm not trying to convince you so much as saying this because frankly I think they need to be called out for it.

And, once again, I feel the need to reassert that I have no issue with gaining 8 souls at the rate you do now.  Just with three active at once happening so early.   I reassert this only because nobody ever comes back with, "No, it wasn't that it sucked having to wait so long to try out all 8 souls.  It was fine not getting 8 souls until level 50.  What sucked is not having three active souls at once until level 20, specifically."  Because frankly I agree that it would suck not being able to play with the souls earlier on, and I think people are assuming those two changes are necessarily connected.  They aren't.

That said, this is totally one of those complaints that actually indicates my profound love for the game in most every other way.  I only get angry about this mistake because I want to know that people trying out the game aren't turned off for some retarded reason.  I don't care about it personally while playing.

I agree with Threash. It sucked waiting until 20 to get the third soul. I much prefer it this way.

Ok so let's delve into that a little. What do you use your third soul for up to 20 now? Do you see a lot more utility in the early levels? How did you spec it out?

I'm curious given I only made it to level 10 on a warrior.

My armor randomly goes black sometimes, my gripe is that i wish it stayed that way.

It was asked for universally in alpha and beta.  It's better the way it is.  Who wants to play 5-6 hours before you get your second soul at level 15?

Abelian, I disagree with what you said.

For almost all of my classes the third soul has been a 0p pet soul, that makes early survivability much greater because I now have some form of add control. I leveled my rogue as MM/Bard/0p Ranger to 30 or so; that experience would have been fundamentally different (read: unplayable) if I had to wait until 20 or 15 or whenever-the-fuck to get my pet. I would have had to spec MM/Ranger, dumping points into a tree I had no intent of using (since you get an extra point every third level) only to respec them into what I want to be my second soul when I unlocked it as a third. It's fucking stupid, it was bad design.

Yah, my warrior looks pretty rad when that color palette weirdness happens.


On my tanky warrior, that third soul can provide some pretty powerful stock buffs from minute I get it. I can either opt for more magic damage mitigation or being 5% harder to hit in melee. 

While you never sink any significant points in it early on, the third soul provides for some nice flavor and utility.  It's also a nice "well crud, this second soul doesn't work so well with _____ " for ultra noobs.  No need to wait until 13 to decide that perhaps you should get that 0 pt pet.

As a rogue 0pt that helps:
Assassin - Free poison
Riftstalker - Free blink
Ranger - Free pet
Sab - Free AOE Snare
Blade Dancer - Free Dodge buff

As a cleric 0pt that helps:
DOT, Instant Heal, Shield, Healing Pet

Warrior - I forget
Mage - Necro pet, chloro spores, instant damage, instant dots

I think what the people against getting the soul(s) early don't understand is that most Rift players have played WoW or some other MMO; as a WoW mage (for example) you get several skills early that you will not use all of: Fireball, Arcane Missiles and Frost Bolt. Of those three, you will use whichever one you spec into primarily, and this is not difficult to grasp.

BM - pet
RB - 100% weapon dmg as dot on crits weapon buff
VK - 5% less magic dmg taken
Warlord -  -5% hit chance on enemies around you
pali - 10% block chance melee ability

Paragon, champion and reaver don't really give anything other than their standard melee abilities at 0 points.

15 is too late.  5-6 is fine for the second active soul.  15 would probably be good for the third active soul, but even 10 would make a world of difference (in a good way).

And again, I'm speaking not of soul acquisition rate (which is fine) but active souls simultaneously.

And I play tons of MMOs, and I still responded to the preposterous second soul choice at level 3 by just tearing off the abilities from my bars, because I spotted the redundant abilities and realized what was going on.  My friend who I tried to get into the game, who I played WoW with for years, was intimidated as fuck by the fact that he was having to choose a second tree within a few minutes of starting the game.  It's just preposterous, I'm sorry.  Talking about how it sucked to wait until level 20 to get a second soul is strawmanning the hell out of things.  I'm not saying anything like that, I'm just saying that choosing a second soul should not happen after you have killed perhaps 15 mobs in the entire game.  I mean, come on.

And yeah, I use the third soul for a pet (typically a druid) while leveling too.  What I'm saying is the game wouldn't be significantly different if I had to wait until level 15 to do that, and the cost right now is probably the most unapproachable game system I have seen thus far in an MMO.  I mean, it's really crazy dudes.  Christ, WoW waited until level 10 to even show you the trees (and that was good, btw).  Here you have to be analyzing them for synergy at fucking level two.

I think this feels sort of like the point Lakov was trying to make in a different area (not to say he cares one way or the other about this particular change).  I really don't think the majority of MMO players love analyzing game systems.  They just want to pick a cool sounding class and play it.  Now, you may very well be able to argue that supporting those types isn't that important when it comes to raiding, but I can't imagine why you can't just tell the analysis-crazy types to just wait until goddamn level 10 or so for their soul loadout fun so that the other peeps can have a relatively pleasant early game experience.

Edit:  Once again I feel the need to assert that I do actually love this game in general.  Ahem.

I'm going to chime in here and say the old way of getting souls later on wasn't better imo either.

Now the point of getting more sooner isn't really you want more than 1 or 2 active souls at a lower level, and in fact I see why that can even be a downside.

The main problem as I saw it was that some souls just don't have the power to stand alone (or even in pair) at low levels, it was simply very, very easy to gimp your toon: this is not a good early experience for new customers.
Example: bard sounds neato! let's try that -> you were screwed for the first 10 levels.

People don't want to hear: "just wait 10 levels, it'll get better" or "you'll get a better soul for solo'ing in 2 hours of play", they want to gripe on forums screaming bloody murder about how unbalanced this game is after 15 minutes of play (This is what they did btw, I was silly enough to read the Trion beta forums from time to time).

Couple that with the fact there really wasn't a clear way to show people what a soul was all about short of actually letting them experience it and they just dumped the lot on you and said: "figure it out for yourself!"  :awesome_for_real:

Not the most elegant solution perhaps, but I am certain it's better than the old system which would simply scare of newer/less tenacious MMO players.

tl;dr: If they hadn't, you would have about 10 times as many posts by now about how unbalanced the game is (from arguably misinformed people, but has that ever stopped anyone from posting their opinion?  :why_so_serious:)

I appreciate that this is already happening, but since I am absolutely on the 'three souls at 6, what were you thinking?' side -- for the reasons already exhaustively and cogently explained by Abelian -- I am also really curious what the people who are in favour see as the advantage here. The most interesting idea (to me) put forth so far is that this offers an 'oh shit' backup plan in case the second soul you chose turned out to be completely non-useful with the first. That seems like a legitimate case where the average user might get some genuine benefit and/or avoid frustration, though again this seems like something that would be just fine at level 10. 1, 2, 6 is crazy.

So far most of the responses in favour have just been 'the old way sucked' or 'there are some useful 0 point abilities!', but that doesn't really seem like much of a perk compared to the concerns brought up in terms of the basic user's experience of starting the game and being overloaded with choices for which they have absolutely zero context other than the 'suggested combination' tooltips. I mean you can't even preview the souls to see what their abilities look like, even if you were some kind of crazy MMO-veteran optimizer who is salivating to get his teeth into the ideal level 2 -> 6 synergistic levelling curve.

To bring in my own anecdotal experience, I picked my second and third souls completely blindly, and what do you know -- I only now (at level 46!) have started respeccing my primary role to start trying to find more legitimate synergies with the playstyle I was pursuing. Meanwhile I just had 90% of my points in my first soul, the whole way to level 45+. I am not an unsophisticated game player by any means, and while I never felt actively overwhelmed I think this is pretty good evidence that on some level I just decided to shut off the 'cope with this stuff' operation very, very early on in the game. I thought about respeccing many times, and probably if I had a really crappy primary soul (instead I had Champion) I would have done so earlier -- but the way I avoided respeccing and secondary roles even after I 'wanted' to try them out suggests that even with a gimped build I probably would have spent many, many hours just trying to push through it before considering respeccing. After all, the new player has no context for what is or isn't effective, short of constant death -- and the levelling PvE just isn't that hard.

I think the argument that having 3 active souls by level 6 is getting more of the 'good stuff' up front is extremely tenuous, given the possibility of this sort of reaction. If you overwhelm people with options they will just make arbitrary decisions -- and because those decisions are arbitrary they will be less likely to reevaluate them later on, compared to an informed decision. It seems just as likely to me that the current system causes people to avoid the 'good stuff' in order to preserve their feeling of mastery/control over the game, when a more sensible time frame -- and a few free respecs, and a tutorial on Role Switching while you're at it -- would actually result in more people taking earlier advantage of a major perk of the game.

It sucked.  Verily.

Souls are the strength of the game.  Without the ability to pick them up quickly and easily you just felt like a weak member of any of 28 classes.  Though it might be a little overwhelming for someone to be gaining them so quickly, it allows the player to start playing around with the system right away.  None of this needing to be half-way through the game to play it philosophy.

I cannot remember a single voice at the time saying it was a bad change.

It is also so cheap and easy to switch things around... that even people like me, who consistently choose horrible talent mixes (like my first Justi/druid/shaman spec) can easily "fix" their "Oh No I did it wrong"! in this game.

If nothing else, the three souls helps you screw it up faster... and then realize just how easy it is to "fix", so you don't fee so pressured to do it perfectly and have confidence that you can experiment how you want and come back and change things as you see fit.  I now have a couple of soul mixes that my guild wants (DPS/Healing) and one that is purely mine to play around with...

This.

The system isn't very difficult unless you have no or very little experience with Diku MMOGs.  The game tosses the system at you and you have to learn on the fly.  The great thing is that it's impossible to gimp yourself early on.  And if you end up picking a pretty bad build, you'll learn long before it matters.

Trust me, you would see a lot more complaining about how boring and annoying the game is if it was the old way.

Why would you want to limit your players the core gameplay of your game.  It's the whole reason why they went from having a total of 51 points to now 66?  That was boring as shit too.

Free respecs before 10 is a nice feature. My initial chloro heavy build was a mana hog that couldn't kill shit and lacked any of the chloro healing that makes it good (an untalented spores was pretty much it, and the silly dot), but a respec later and my mageling was off murdering things with void bolt until Chloro becomes a good choice again.

That said: second souls are usually not confusing. The only confusion occurs when you play the minmax "what stacks" and "does this modifier improve Y?" games. Shared cooldowns are usually not very well displayed between souls.

It's not the variety of souls in the beginning that is the problem so much as dozens of abilities even at low levels, most of which are redundant. I'm not saying every soul shouldn't have distinct abilities but the way they implemented them is pretty  :uhrr:

This could easily have been solved by only getting the base abilities from a primary soul and moving a lot of the crossover skills to the upper tree so that you actually choose them. For instance: My warrior does three near identical weapon strikes but the spear in his secondary soul is something unique so put the spear in the upper tree and all the crossover stuff in the bottom tree, make me never need the bottom tree and don't give me access to it.

Rift has some great choices but nearly any spec you pick you are going to have a glut of abilities you simply will not use and that's poor design and very confusing to new player.

You can easily afford your second role at the very first class trainer and respecs are free at low levels.  Maybe the third soul doesnt add much to your original spec but it sure as hell opens up a lot more options and variety.  My first three souls were riftblade paladin and void knight, i had three completely different playstyles to choose from by lvl 6.  That is exactly what this game is about and cockblocking players from things like that is one of the most common complaints in F13 about every single game and changing it was one of the biggest "this guys DO get it" things Trion has done.

That's not true from what I see - you get a choice of 1 to 3 trees in the sole. IE- Nightblade you can choose to go heavy ranged, heavy melee or heavy extra damage. It's not obvious from the tree itself what helps what (the vertical lines don't quite match up) but it's designed so you generally WON'T put all your points into 1 sole.

OK, calling waiting until level 6 to select a second talent tree for your character "cockblocking" is being pretty disingenuous.  Someone commented earlier about how it would have sucked in a similar way if they had not had rifts right at the start of the game.  Oh, wait, they DON'T.  You wait until level 6 to be trained on your first rift, and after you leave the newbie zone there are rifts about for you to play with.  That is fine pacing.

In the guardian starting area, your first quest has you choose a soul.  The next quest has you kill six dudes.  Then you get two quests, one of them being to collect four swords, the other being to kill another six dudes.  Upon completing these quests, you get your second soul, with no supporting quest text explaining why you are choosing a second soul (because it was just hacked in at the last minute).  Saying it is silly to be choosing something like that after killing a grand total of 12 mobs in the game is not asking for a "cockblock."

Ranger/marksman and any melee rogue is exactly what I'm talking about. All those base ranged abilities are great but they they dont mesh well at ALL with the melee rogue types, especially when they require stealth. What of you go saboteur/marksman? Well your primary attacks are already ranged so you'll end up using one-two of the marksman skills beyond your main sab skills because most of your attacks are redundant or won't mesh together(sab charges)

So even focusing on one tree with extra points in a second end up giving you a ton of near worthless abilities, situational abilities at best. God help you if you try for some strange 50/50 build.

Rift may be a min/maxers dream but I really think that is more accidental than intentional on the part of trion, shit just feels way too slapped together in parts.

And it's not like we are speaking in hypotheticals here, what you guys suggest was tried and it was universally panned.  So far nobody who played both ways has supported the second soul at 6 third at 20 system.  There's a good reason for that.

Who are these gamers that are "intimidated" by making a choice in a fucking videogame? They must really shit themselves in the cereal aisle at the local grocery. I don't get that at all. More choice is a good thing, period, and the sooner I can make those choices for my character the better.

I think overwhelmed is much better than intimidated. I was certainly overwhelmed at first by all the stuff. I can't believe that experience was isolated. You push through it if you want to and you bought the game. I was playing a demo, saw lots about the game I also saw in WAR or WoW, and decided to wait on a purchase until the game was more defined.

While I concur that choice in general is a good idea, it is not always better. Sometimes you can bombard your players with lots of meaningless choices that serve to hinder their experiences rather than enhance them. I'm not saying they do that here, but I don't like the blanket statement that choice always = greatness.

Yeah, that's just absolutely something I disagree with.  The "choice is always good" mantra gets repeated a lot but never questioned.  It's obviously not true in general.  Just think of any good game, and add choices to it.  Add three times as many classes to WoW.  Make it so there are five active soul trees in Rift rather than three.  It's just obviously not true.  A choice is good when it is an interesting choice.  Soul choices are interesting when you have the knowledge to understand the choice you are making.  You don't have that knowledge five minutes into the game.  So you now have an uninteresting, flow-breaking choice five minutes into the game, and you also lose what would have been an interesting choice slightly later.  (And I emphasize "slightly."  I am not advocating a second soul at 20 or anything.  I think the second at six is probably ideal.)

And by "intimidated" I don't mean that they are literally afraid of the game.  Overwhelmed may indeed be a better word.  Someone affected by this problem won't know that it was this issue that bothered them.  They'll just say the game was boring, it sucked, it was shallow, etc.

And yeah, I was overwhelmed by it as well, but I don't shy away easily and don't play solely for my enjoyment as a player.  I also just like to keep up to speed on MMOs.  So yeah, I kept playing, and I'm really glad I did.  But right off the bat I assumed that their skills had no real design behind them, because the presentation makes it feel like there is no thought behind it (it doesn't even tell you why you are selecting a second soul).  Granted, when I later discovered the keybinding system, the fact that the map fades when you move, the incremental search on your inventory, etc., I realized that there is in fact a ton of love and thought that went into the game, and that I was wrong about that first assumption.

All of this talk about being overwhelmed by the soul trees and roles - is this before or after reading the help panel that was added? I don't know if it's new or not and I didn't read it, but I did notice there was some info about souls, branch abilities, and root abilities in an effort to help make the system a lot more new-user friendly.

As for what is better - the current system of having options to all souls, and gaining more souls earlier is miles ahead of where it used to be. Especially since before you only earned one talent point per level, without the extra point every third level. The changes made were very good.

Fair enough, but the difference is you can ignore much of the choice 'till later on like someone already pointed out.
It may not be ideal, but consider the way it was: people that wanted more choice sooner (and there certainly were many of them) simply had no way of achieving that.

The system as it is now simply caters to a wider player-experience; it infringes (slightly) on people that would prefer a slow trickle instead of a waterfall, instead of completely ignoring the ones that do want as much as possible as fast as possible (which is what the the 21st century is all about: "I want moar and I want it nao!!" get with the times!  :why_so_serious:)

But again, there aren't just two options.  I totally agree that having all 8 souls by level 16 or 17 (I got them somewhere around there personally) kicked ass.  That is awesome and it is way, way better than the way it was before (from what I understand, you didn't get all 8 until level 50).

However, you don't need to jump all the way to having three quests between your first and second soul choices.  There is an enormous, enormous gap between those two options.  You also don't need to make it so that one of the defiant starting area quests has you go out and acquire a second soul to become a "true" ascended, even though you actually randomly got a second soul five minutes into the game as an entirely unexplained quest reward.

I can get that, and honestly wouldn't mind not grabbing that 3rd soul about level 10-12 as part of a quest which leads into talking to the trainer in Meridian to find out that you should talk with the souls representatives to learn how to earn more souls from that point onwards. I wouldn't mind that at all, but I don't feel the need to change the current system is really that important and am happy with it. Yeah it was tacked on, but sometimes that's okay.

It's only confusing to people who don't get it.

In any case, there were some souls that used to not get basic attacks.  Some souls were designed for groups only so they weren't sufficient for soloing.  They moved away from this giving each soul basic attacks.  That's why you have overlap.

Could of it been designed better? Of course.  But the way the system evolved over time is why you have what you have now.

 :awesome_for_real:

Bullrush Goddmanit! Bullrush!!!  WoW warriors wish they got a closer like bullrush.

At zero points it cant be used in combat, it doesnt stun or root either though.  I guess its decent enough to start combat with.

Honestly.

So far we have three people in this thread suggesting that they felt their own play experience was negatively impacted by this. These 'where are these people who hate choice?' or 'those are just some [other people] who don't understand MMOs' comments are either veiled insults or a sign that the issue is simply not being processed.

Everyone who has said they think the 1-2-6 progression is good has framed it entirely as 'the old way was worse!' and all those people also appear to have played in the beta. The original comment was not about the old system, and the old system being worse does not make the new system ideal. Playing in beta hardly invalidates someone's opinions but I do have to suggest that maybe you guys had internalized a mastery (or at least knowledge) of the soul system by the point that this new progression was introduced, and that this makes understanding a new player's experience somewhat more difficult -- in this case three new players have provided their actual experience, and it still has not penetrated that their experience might be valid or even representative.

For an alt or someone who has played around with the soul system in advance, the progression is obviously just fine, because they already know what is going on -- these are choices they already understand based on previous experience. They can even take advantage of those 0-pt powers and gain some immediate mechanical benefit from the third soul (though most of my alts just took a third soul that would be useful as a primary soul in a secondary role, instead.) But those are only the people who made it that far.

Champion gets Bull Rush, very very handy, plus I think maybe they also get the highest damage single target finishing move a warrior gets?

On souls coming too soon, I was frustrated as hell at having to wait till 14 to get more than three!  Given that is supposedly one of the strengths of this game, I wanted to try them all out before I settled on a build or two that I liked.  As it was I ended up swapping over to a completely different set than I started with by 15.  While I'm one that can get paralyzed by too many choices, the fact that i knew going in that I would not be locked in to some of those choices for hardly any time at all made it a LOT easier to just pick something and try it out rather than feel like I needed to go researching every possible repercussion pending from a choice prior to making it.

And wtf is it with you people that want to restrict others from making choices you don't want to make?  You don't HAVE to slot a third soul, do you?  You certainly don't have to use it!  Isn't it enough for you that pretty much EVERYONE who tried it the way you say you want it didn't like it and prefers it this way???  If you don't want to deal with the information, IGNORE IT.  Don't go trying to deny everyone else that info just because you can't handle it.

It really isnt that you get SO MANY CHOICES, it's that most of the choices are stupid and overlap so much.

Imagine this.

2 talents points each level, 100 points total at level 50.
You only get the bottom tree abilities from your main soul, freeing up the rest of the points to use between secondary and tertiary souls.
Some bottom tree abilities are made into soul tree abilities to compensate.

The illusions of choice isn't choice.

I know I've seen level 1 spam bots at the mail box in Freemarch, so you can skip the quests to get the 2nd, or 3rd, soul if you really, really, really want to not have it, and just go to the rift event at the end.  Since Guardians need to click on the corpse w/ the hammer to leave, they would have kowtow to the cruel overlords of Trion, and take the 2nd, and 3rd souls.

I don't know what impact skipping the tutorial quests, and heading straight for Freemarch would have, but it probably wouldn't hinder you too much.

Good grief. This is a discussion about general user experience, not about how I personally am all upset at getting too many choices. Nor is it some personal attack on your freedom of choice. It's a discussion about when and how the additional active souls should be introduced, and the impact of having them come so quickly. You can say 'it wasn't a problem for me' without throwing in 'and therefore you are wrong wrong wrong and also stop taking my pie'.

If you agree that this issue impacts people -- suggesting that these same people are going to intuit that they can harmlessly skip a quest that gives them a second or third class, or have any tools with which to evaluate whether or not this is going to be overwhelming or not prior to making that decision... I mean that just sounds like a total unwillingness to even engage with what this could be like for people who are not you. And not even the past you, who played the game for the first time, but the current you who has all this extra information that includes knowing you can skip these quests and come back to the souls later.

I've never honestly said this in earnest before, but people who are truly confused by the system to the point where they can complain about it, really need to learn how to play video games better.

Regarding, already being familiar as they changed it, it was almost unanimous even with new players, that the old way was less fun.

I've said this many times in earnest before, but god damn do I hope you have nothing to do with the development of any software, ever, anywhere. I work in user experience and this sort of attitude -- and the bizarre understanding of reality, pedagogy, and psychology that it implies -- makes my brain bleed.

As a guardian, you can leave with only 2 souls - I missed one of them somehow and didn't get my 3rd until 15 or so.

Didn't really bother me, it was a 0pt anyways, but the insta DD from domi would've been useful.

So I guess people were gearing out too fast, or something, and now T2 expert dungeons reward 4 plaques upon completion rather than 15. It's 2 per boss and there's an average of 6 bosses in a T2. It's gone from 25/27/29 plaques to 14/16/18. If you don't get any epic drops from the T2s and you have to buy every single piece of T2 plaque gear, it's 1000 plaques.

I've been having a lot of fun with Rift and it was a no-brainer that I was going to at least give it another month but now I'm really not sure.

It's not the people who complain about it that you need to worry about, really.  In some sense it's impossible to really "complain" about it, as understanding the issue enough to bring it up sort of implies that you are able to look past it and look at the game as a whole.  The problem is the people that just aren't grabbed by the game in the first few minutes of play.

And as has been said, it isn't a binary choice, etc, etc.  The old way may have been less fun than the new way, but it's also possible that both versions were terrible.

I think the difference here is really the perspective you're looking at the game from.  Like Emperor said, I'm not really talking about how it affects me, or any of us.  I'm talking about the effect on the game in general, for all possible people.

And yeah, you can miss the second soul, because it's the third/fourth quest in the game on the guardian side.  When you complete the second quest in the game, the dude standing next to the person you turned your quest into pops up an !, along with the person you are talking to.  If you manage to miss that, you don't get your second soul (which really isn't a big deal, being that it's totally fine to have two souls until level 15).

Well, I will say that the 1-2-6 progression is good and I never experienced the old one because I only started playing this game when they did that last open beta week.  I feel like it would be a terrible thing to wait until after 10 to unlock that third soul, especially since the third soul can give a very useful ability even with 0 points in it.  Now, if they shifted the second one back a few quests, so it doesn't come in like 3 quests after you start, sure, that'd be fine.  Give you a little more time to get used to it before giving your second soul.  But you should certainly get all three before leaving the starting area and going back/forward in time.

The one improvement I would like to see is a way to switch your selected souls before leaving the starting area.  You don't get much info on what these souls will do before taking them, although you can preview them in these games nothing really compares to personal experience, so having say, the Faceless Man who gives you the third soul now, or whoever it is on guardian side, allow you to switch which souls you have before leaving would be nice.  Although not really necessary, considering you can easily just get to 13 and unlock all of them.  Although I'm not quite sure why you're required to get to 13 to unlock them anyways - would be nice if you could do that at any level, as long as you have reached the capital.  If you're a newbie and you're just following breadcrumbs, you're going to be that level or higher by the time you get there, and if you know enough to make a beeline for the capital then you're not a newbie and you can get exactly what you want.

So you're response to a player who might be overwhelmed or find it annoying to have to choose so many things at once in their first hour of gameplay is L2P?

Dude, the whole point of the starting area is to handhold the user to the point of absurdity. I don't think anyone is suggesting they hold off the choice of your character to your second or third day of play. All I was suggesting is maybe I'd like to learn what the hell one of these things does for more than 10 minutes before I'm automatically getting another, and then another.

As I'm spending another evening finding myself irritated by the rifts and invasions while running back to the same area I just left for the third round of uninspired quests, it occurs to me that this game just has not sunk its hooks into me.

Unsubbed and uninstalled.

I'm sick of WoW, and I really want to like this more, but I'm going to have to find something else to satisfy the gaming urges for a while.

On the topic of Rift, Draegan and I often disagree. We don't disagree about this.

Is there a better way? Possibly. Trion hasn't figured it out yet. The current way is the best of many ideas. Hell, I'd expand it to disagreeing with Trion about a bunch of design decisions...but still being the best of the implementations I've seen tested.

Draegan is pretty much right about l2p. You're only a newbie once, but restrictions on newbies last for every alt you ever roll. Ok, it's overwhelming the very first time you play. I don't see that as a bad thing, it's not exactly 300-page manual wargame neck-beardy. Ye gods, mmo is already being boiled down to the most simplistic elements possible, even Doug Benson could figure out how to play a modern mmo. C'mon.

Ya I'm more or less done with this game as well. I don't know, it didn't gel. The thing is, I feel like the old George Costanza bit; "It's not you, it's me." It's a really well done game, it's just, I've been here before. I don't want to grind another toon to max level before I really start the game, I just don't.

The rifts are cool, but by my third toon no one was doing them anymore. And the class system, well that thing just rocks.

Why? Honestly, why do they have to? No reason you can make alts start right after the newbie area and with all class souls, provided you hit level X on another char.

Let newbie experiences be newbie experiences, there is nothing at all wrong with hand holding in the first couple hours of a game and thats ALL we're talking about. you are out of the rift starting zones in a couple hours, jesus people get some god damned perspective....and patience.


completely different topic, I am reaaaaaally getting pissed with these quests the higher level i get. at 40 i have had to go back to the same area at LEAST twice, to kill mobs i was already killing for the first set of quests and i have to kill 16. that's it, nothing interesting about the quest at all just....hey while you're there, kill 16 dwarves.  really....really? fuck you quest giver.

If you guys want to experience the old way make a new character and only use one soul until 15.  Then at level 30 equip a third.

I mean honestly, the extra hour or two of game play isn't gong to do anything to help a player figure out which attacks to use. 

Now you're just trolling, not a single person here said they ought to go back to whatever this "old way" was.

Conversely, you're talking about waiting maybe 4 hours of gameplay longer to get a third soul, out of hundreds if not thousands of hours of play for the game over time. The lack of a third active soul until level 13 is barely a meaningful restriction in comparison with the life of a character, particularly to an experienced player who knows exactly how to blitz through those first levels.

The new player -- the one who will either quit your game or subscribe for the next several years -- is more important than the player who already knows the game, and knows they like it, and who is really unlikely to abandon your game because making an alt results in a slightly slower power curve than it could otherwise.

QFT, CO does this and it's one of the few things I would applaud them for.

Also, I think it's fair to say the entire start of the game (not just how and when you acquire souls) doesn't reflect the quality of what follows.
I'd almost say they did a reversed AoC (Tortage how I miss thee  :heartbreak:), which is probably far better than the other way around.

LoTRO is another game that had a fairly good starter experience imo, I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes to player experience as a whole though.
All things considered, probably not that much.

Lol, bs.  What people have been suggesting was exactly what the old way was.

The old way was getting a third soul at level 10 instead of level 5? I thought it was 20.

In any case I think it's irrelevent because it's not that complicated to figure out when you're already bought the box. You're not going to give up after that sunk cost. However, if they offered it as a demo for free at some point, I could see some new users tossing it in with their own reasons of not to bother. It certainly was in mine in the open beta. After tanking for years in WoW I don't think it was a matter of L2P as much as simple annoyance.

Additionally, it also involved (unless I'm mistaken) giving out souls gradually throughout the leveling process.  So no, the suggestion of 1-5-10 soul acquisition (and then all remaining souls available at 15) is not particularly close to the old way.  Of course, I could be wrong, since nobody seems willing to actually detail how it used to work, instead preferring to just kind of refer to it as this demonic game system and hand wave at it whenever it is convenient to accuse someone of embracing it.

Edit: 


I don't think this is really true in general, because your first introduction to a system will color your interpretation of it for a long while.  It's not that people are going to hit this brick wall at level 2 and not play anymore, but rather that at level 15 they just won't feel connected to the game systems because they weren't introduced to them in such a way that they got particular internalized.

Now, I do need to reassert that I think this game generally has a really good user experience in a number of ways, at least compared to plenty of other MMOs.  It generally just feels like it loves you and wants you to be happy.  That's a great thing, and I'm really rooting for them overall because I want stuff like this to matter.  I just think their handling of their class system is this weird blip of painful unfriendliness to a new user, amongst a sea of general awesomesauce.  So yeah, I'm definitely not saying people will overall find it an unapproachable and unfriendly game, just that this one system risks giving that impression.  Overall, way better than the shitty average.

The issue I have with most of your argument is that you talk about the "new player" like he's never touched a computer before, but the reality is that you need the game to cater to the ex-WoW-player (or other MMO vet) because that's 99% of your population. Anyone who's played another MMO should have no problem wrapping their head around "I'm speccing for these abilities, so I should use them, while these other abilities are only situationally useful unless I spec for them."

Played 3 of the 4 class archetypes to 30+ and I'm feeling this as well.  The only reason to run quests is money and some gear.  Seems the best way to level is to have a set group to run rifts/dungeons with repeatedly.  I really got slapped in the face by this after I had completed nearly 10 quests at a hub and received about 2/3 a bubble when I turned them all in.  Fight your way into an area, kill mob x, fight your way out, turn in quest, and get sent to the EXACT same fucking place you just cleared twice.  It gets really annoying after a while.

See, I think you're not really right about this.  I know like three people who played WoW (one of them being my wife) who couldn't tell you a damn thing about how the game systems work, never really thought about "speccing" in a system-y sense of the word, etc.  My wife played a hunter because on the class selection screen it said, "You should play a hunter if you like to solo with pets."  She read that, said out loud, "I like to solo with pets," and clicked the play button.  She specced beast mastery because she loved that goddamn cat, and would not be able to really tell you what exactly the talents did for her in any real detail.

To be sure, she's an extreme, no question.  But she did play for like a year.  Loved farming some motherfucking herbs and shit.  She watched me playing Rift and found the artifact hunting rather appealing.  You might be thinking, "Yeah, but this game isn't for those people," but my point is that it isn't that far from being very much for those people as well.

More importantly perhaps, like I said, even when you DO understand what is going on (as I did), your feeling about the stuff in the game is colored by how pleasant your first interaction with it was.  If you find yourself thinking, "Man, I wish I had a pet" and then you suddenly are given a choice of a soul that gives you a pet, you're like, "Whoa, sweet!"  A perfect opportunity for this would be to make only four rogue souls available at the start, one of them being marksman (but not ranger).  At level 5, you can choose another soul, ranger being one option.  As a marksman, you've probably already wished you had a pet to tank shit for you.  Then you see, "Holy shit, even with 0 points I can get a pet!" and it's awesome.

You can still do that, of course, but it doesn't flow as well.  When a game hits that perfect point that you find yourself wanting more just before it becomes available to you, that's good shit, even IF you would have understood it if you'd had it all from the start.

Also, please don't read too much into the comment about only four souls being available at the start.  (I know they used to do it this way, or at least I assume, since you can only be told about four souls at the start of the game via the NPCs, even though you can choose all 8.  I assume this is another relic of the hasty change.)  The marksman/ranger example  works perfectly, but I recognize that it'd be hard to really nail this in all cases and I can totally see reversing that decision, but if you could pull it off it would be an improvement imho.  It would do a lot to shift the perception of apparent redundancy into a perception of awesome enhancement.  Just by changing the pacing of the presentation.

It is possible they tried several different methods.  It's also possible that it was in a portion of beta that is still covered by an NDA.  I am unwilling to elaborate myself for that reason.

While they could perhaps tweak it a little, the amount of confusion compared to the amount of fun is within a sweet spot, and at this point also risk upsetting existing players making alts in pursuit of new players.  This is a tough balancing act and one that has hurt other games to their detriment.  A better solution, at this point, would be to expand the help available regarding mixing souls and acquisition, and present it in an entertaining way.  Focus more on that in the tutorial while mixing in some more of the lore behind ascendancy.

You're making just as many assumptions about this 'new player' as I am, and imputing a lot of things to my 'new player' that just aren't necessary for them to have these problems. This whole idea that only some sort of completely ignorant or incompetent person could ever be affected by the current process is wrong -- this is not some kind of either/or proposition where either Clueless Guy Can't Handle It or Sophisticated Dude Loves it or some bullshit like that.

I haven't played WoW so I'm obviously missing some context there, but I have played a lot of MMOs and a lot of other RPGs with equally complicated mechanics -- and I've already described how I feel like my own experience was probably impacted by this, as have a few other people who also seem to have at least as much experience as your version of the 'new player.'

That's pretty much my approach to gaming, even after playing computer games since 1975. I look at what I think would be the most fun, and if it doesn't work out I either try something else that looks fun and hope it's not nerfy (if I like the game itself) or just move on (if I don't).

Ah, fair enough.  I had not considered that tbh. :)

I've done something like this in past games, i.e. level several alts in sequence through the same section of the leveling content. I've done this in WoW and in LotRO. I would frankly be surprised to hear from anyone who pulls the same stunt in Rift and doesn't get bored/burnt out.

Apparently you can't dye pvp armor, weak.  Specially since it's a retarded light blue color.

Crafting seems particularly useless in that I can make tons of weapons I will never need while levelling it up and you will never see them because with weaponbreaking to regain needed materials it would be stupid to try and sell them.

Really? i used a lot of armorsmith pieces while leveling up, i had someone make me some weapons too for levels were there weren't any quest rewards.  I only did every dungeon once though, maybe i missed out on drops.

I mean I'll use the weapons I make but...rarely at best. Often I'll either get a better quest or dungeon reward but it's still rare and the crafted goods are well...meh.  Maybe top end crafting is fine but jesus it feels like I'm crafting for no reason BUT to hit max crafting, 9-% of the things I make get broken to make other useless things.

I agree with you here.  The crafting seems largely useless for me personally, and I break my outfitter shit to get mats back until I can no longer usefully use those mats to gain skill, then I just finish using all those mats for shit to place on the AH. 

I pretty regularly wore pieces of armour I had made for myself as I levelled up, but I still agree that crafting barely qualifies as useful because those pieces were generally -- like all other upgrades in the game -- at most 5% better (and absolutely no different) than what I would have had otherwise. I got more use out of crafted weapons, though, as finding decent two-handers via quest drops was fairly infrequent. But it doesn't change the fact that the basic recipes are 100% boring, like all the other items in the game I've seen so far.

The costs for buying better recipes and the method for acquiring them both seem like total cockblocks (I have done approximately 50-60% of all the dailies available to me since starting the game and I think I can afford one high level blue recipe? Or I can grind reputation yay!)

It just strikes me as weird that there are all these crafting components that you have to buy!

FFXI crafting was broken in a billion ways, but I always liked that if I wanted to, I could craft everything from first principles (or at least from gatherables) without having certain materials that could only be bought.

I had no problem with the crafting, given that it's very basic. You can generally make level-appropriate upgrades more frequently here than in WoW, which means it's at least useful while leveling up. Rift never claimed their crafting was some awesome revolutionary new feature (and if it had I'd be more critical), but it scratches the make-my-own-stuff itch well enough for me.

I am finding at 44 (with very little dungeon running) that I have plenty of green quests to do.  I didn't complete Scarlet Gorge, either, skipped a bunch of quests there.  I didn't receive any breadcrumbs for Droughtlands, though, although I went down and did that after Moonshade.  So now, at 44, I have White Peak, Shimmerstrand and Stillmoor to do - plus Scarlet Gorge quests that I didn't complete. 

If anything, there are too many quests - maybe you missed some breadcrumbs?

I did most of the 40's in IPP, you do not run out of quests.

I went to IPP at 39; doing all the quests I could got me to 41, with all quests remaining 44+ and impossible to solo.

There is no way to run out of soloable quests.  You have to ping-pong between ICC. Shimmer, and stillmoor from 40-50.  My cleric hit 50 with plenty of quests remaining in ICC and Stillmoor and I never did a dungeon and mostly did zone events for rifts.  Moonglade also have some areas where you leave to do draughtlands about 38 and come back at 40-42 to finish.  Draughtlands also has some low-40's content and almost all of the 3-person quests are doable with a good duo.

I said I ran out of soloable quests in IPP.

I did zero quests in shimmer, about 20% of stillmoor maybe.  I hit 50 mainly from ipp, droughtlands before that.  You might have started too early.

I was about 1 level too low for most of the quests post lvl 37. I'd get a quest for mobs 3 levels above and not be able to attempt it due to many cases of death. I'd tool around and try rifting... though no majors would pop considering I was catassing at first and didn't have the pop to spawn invasions regularly. Now I didn't step foot in a dungeon at all so I figured that had something to do with it. I also know I miss a breadcrumb here or there...since there were titles on people my level I had not attained. meh...

I am confilcted regarding Rift crafting.  On the one hand, you CAN indeed make stuff good enough for you to use when you make it.  This is such a simple prerequisite for a good crafting system, yet one which the developers of game after game have deliberately gone out of their way to ensure is not possible.  Also to Rift's credit is that crafting is neither a click-fest nor a drag-and-drop micro-management nightmare, but is instead relatively straightforward and easy to do, with the added bonus of being able to afk at least some of the more extreme grindy parts (although you have to be careful not to get logged off for inactivity 3/4 of the way through converting your 300 hides into 300 leathers!  :uhrr: )

On the other hand, well, unfortunately that other hand has a lot of fingers, all with warts and blemishes and ugly putrid sores.  One problem is the simplicity of crafting itself.  The activity is bland and unexciting while the rewards are tame and just mildly stimulating.  No, it isn't painful to craft, but neither is it particularly fun.  And yes, you can actually get some use out of stuff you craft, but it is not much if any better than what you'd have if you stuck with only gear you got as loot or rewards.  You'd think Alchemy would be an exception to that, but alchemy is pretty seriously hosed right now (all potions on the same timer) and basically useless (nothing that is more than a very minor increment to what you already get from looted and reward items).  There doesn't seem to be any loot or reward equivalent to Runecrafting at all, so you'd think that would make a difference.  Not that I can tell so far, and I'm currently a level 37 warrior who has spent the last 20 levels with the best possible rune on every single piece of equipment I've used, and I honestly can't tell the difference.  (Heroic mobs two levels below me beat me to a pulp in a minute or two, and I churn through waves of normal mobs up to two levels higher than me like a supertanker through a canal - slow but unstoppable.)

So, not much fun doing it, and not much to gain by doing it, so why craft? To play the economy game?  The player economy sucks.  Big hairy rancid ones.  The auction house is a royal PITA, requiring you to spend lots of time and money reposting ALL of your goods every 12, 24 or 48 hours (with rapidly diminishing financial returns for each step up in auction length due to the large number of people crafting).  And for what?  More plat?  What good is that?  Once you've bought yourself a horse and traded up to wool or silk bags for every slot, what else is there to spend it on?  I'm sitting on a pile of plat already and nothing interesting to do with it, and I gave up selling crafting goods completely except for the occasional ginding byproduct.  Sure, I could sell lots more, if I wanted to micromanage my auctions every few hours and (manually!) track the going rate for every single item I could make to find the places where the profits are best.  But I'm fairly confident that I'd find that the best profit would be to just sell the crafting mats rather than the end products, and again, for what?  Lots of annoying, tedious work for plat I have no use for.

Finally, crafting in Rift really just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  It's like the developers didn't really have a reason to put it in the game except to tick off another bullet point from WoW's feature list, and as they were putting it in they figured hey, we might as well get something useful out of it so they turned it into a big money sink, and that's as far as their imagination took them. They don't seem to have any passion for or understanding of the desires of players who want to craft.  Sure, they successfully deployed a bunch of complicated systems that were implemented cleanly and competently (mostly), but without any soul and without having any reason for the players to actually use it.  It became a tool for good of the devs, that incidentally annoyed players (every time I pay a stupid little money sink fee that's obviously there for no other reason than as a money sink *I* get annoyed at least) but gave no real reward to the players for getting any good at it.

Yay, but Bleh.  :oh_i_see:

I'm willing to believe that you can hit a hump at various points, but post 40 I felt like I was drowning in quests. Every time I would dare explore or wander off The Pre-Ordained Quest Route I would invariably run into yet another quest hub with yet another set of identical quests. Which would be fine except if you actually take the quests, intending to get around to them later, you eventually notice that your inventory is like one third quest items, and suddenly you have no space for useful things like rift consumables, thirty-seven differently-labelled identical grey items, and Greens of the Fortress.

Edit: and well said regarding crafting. It satisfies the most basic animal urges (must collect objects, must collate objects, must click the button!) but it brings no real joy to the table.

Oh the auction house.  So very bleah.

Here's another place where FFXI was superior -- auction history.  Not quite EVE levels of several months of charts, but at least you could get a feel for what stuff was selling for (as opposed to what it was listed for -- if it's listed at all).  I know WoW had addons or mods for this, but it really strikes me as a basic tool that should be included.

Another thing that was interesting (and sometimes broken) about FFXI auction houses is that there were 4 different ones, in the 4 main hub cities and if you enjoyed playing the market you could often have fun buying from one and selling on another, taking advantage of market inefficiencies and actually making some decent money.

Also, *everybody* needed consumables and there was pretty brisk trade in them, which made skilling up Alchemy at least a break-even sort of proposition.  It's always advantageous to be higher level crafting in FFXI due to reduced breakage (breakage SUCKS) and higher chances of Hiqh Quality (often higher quantity) results.  But the economy worked -- characters across all levels sold drops on the AH for cash, crafters across all levels bought those drops to make things to skill up or sell or both, and characters across all levels bought goods from the auction house.

The only thing I've seen much advantage to buying at the AH in RIFT is bags because I'm always out of space and it's a way to get larger bags before they become available via NPC vendor.  I use consumables incredibly rarely and they're cheap, so I have little motivation to go bargain hunting.  In FFXI you *could* buy consumables from NPCs but they cost an arm and a leg.  You'd get a better deal from the AH most times.  In fact, the NPCs effectively set low and high price caps in FFXI, with the player based market filling the gap.  Though sometimes prices would drop below NPC buy or rise above NPC sell and again one could exploit market inefficiencies for some gain (typically short-lived, as people would start realizing they could get a better deal elsewhere).

I keep crafting, but I keep wondering *why* I keep crafting.  As far as I can tell it doesn't really do much for me and I suspect I'd have more cash at-hand to buy things if I just sold gathered goods to NPCs or crafters (whoever's paying more).

I do like that I can make level-appropriate gear as I level up (which is superior to a number of crafting systems I've experienced), but as noted above that gear is not particularly better than the gear I already get from quests.

FFXI's auction house was great, it was the first MMO in which I participated in the economy regularly - in EQ, I could never be arsed to use the bazaar or stand around using trade in east commons.  In WoW I participated because of Auctioneer and other addons.  In any game where I don't have readily available auction information I typically do not participate in the economy, neither buying nor selling things from/to other players.

FFXI's system had the problem of 10 auctions being too short a history though.  It was easily manipulated to whatever price people wanted by one to three people, as long as the item wasn't something so commonly bought and sold that you couldn't fill up the history in a matter of minutes.

So generally speaking, lack of some basic auction house features such as price history - preferably a price history that shows the last 2-4 weeks, as well as doing the math for you and averaging it out, like Auctioneer does - prevents me from taking part in the economy, at all.  I suspect there's a lot of other people for whom this also applies.  This significantly affects many facets of gameplay, since being able to take part in the economy improves many other parts of the game.

Oddly you just described how I've felt while crafting in every MMO I've ever played.

I think there's a fine line for balancing the economy -- you need good enough tools that average players can make reasonably informed decisions without a lot of pain, but you also need some amount of imperfection in information flow otherwise there's no "game" to the economy.  Go too far in either direction and you lose the fun.

Also, the auction fees in RIFT seem absurd to me, especially for stacks of items.  For common craft materials or goods I'm seeing the listing cost for a long auction to often be 20-50% of the typical buyout price for those items.  That's crazy.

Further, I much much prefer FFXI's reverse auction to the WoW-style auction house.  For those that haven't played FFXI it works like this:
- FFXI only allows full stacks or single items to be auctioned, simplifying things a bit in that regard
- sellers set a price for their item or stack of items and hand the items over to the AH
- ah listings show the last 10 sales for an item, the date of sale, price, buyer, and seller
- buyers bid what they want to pay for an item or stack
- buyers either win (instantly getting the item for what they bid) or lose (get no item, keep their money)
- the lowest-listed-price item which satisfies the buyer's bid wins (I believe if multiple items are listed at the exact same price time is the tie-breaker)
- if the buyer over-bids the seller who wins keeps the difference

The only things I would change:
- ability to list more than 7 auctions per character
- more extensive price history (maybe daily/weekly average/min/max prices shown as well as most recent sales)

The only auction house I've ever actually liked was EQ2, where you could just post an auction and it would stay up until the end of time. None of this short ass auction expiration bullshit.

COH has my favorite auction house implementation. It is completely merged (across servers and factions), has histories of the last 5 sales (like the ff11 example mentioned above), posted auctions or bids never time out, and it also works on the list-bid system (list for X, buyer bids Y, buyer pays Y and wins the auction closest to Y, if available).

edited to add: Crafted stuff is indeed mostly useless (I got some use out of artificer at low levels when there are no ring/necklace quest rewards and caster weapons are scarce). I have a 300 artificer main and a 300 runecrafter alt (getting 300 RC was easy by level 20 with my main supplying the alt with a ton of stuff to runebreak). Neither of them can make stuff that's even slightly on par with what you can get as quest rewards in the AP/CC dungeons or entry-level pvp gear you can get without any renown rank.

CoH's 'last 5 sales' history is even more useless than FFXI's 'last 10' except for items that basically never fluctuate in price.  Anything that fluctuates you either have to memorize the price (which is therefore almost no advantage over not being able to see the history at all, really) because it can vary by a lot.  Still, it is just useful enough that I did participate in the economy the last time I played, but still annoying that I had to keep track of highs and lows manually rather than having the computer do it for me.

Other than that, I agree that CoH does have an excellent AH functionality, because I do indeed prefer the FFXI/CoH 'blind bids' system, especially since the person who lists the item at the lowest cost sells it first.  CoH also has the good point that you can put in a bid and leave it up there if no one is selling cheap enough for you, and if someone eventually does list something cheap enough, you immediately buy it.

Not really a gripe, but I'd kinda like a 'set price on this item' thing.  Like I want to sell this for a certain price, and then it autofills the money ranges every time I put that item up.  That would make my life a little easier.

My memory is murky since I haven't played in a couple weeks but I'm sure it was automatically setting the price when I was selling stacks of cloth. I could even split it up the stacks and it would adjust it for the size of the stack. Maybe it clears the memory when you close the auction window?

Yeah, when you close the auction window it does reset.

That just doesn't make sense then. It's like someone was adding that feature and then sustained a head injury mid-implementation.

It resets when you log off, not when you close the window.

Weird I always noticed it whenever closing the AH, I may very well be wrong though

They did change that at some point to limit it to active accounts, I think you had to have logged in in the last week or something. I know it was pretty awesome before that. Before I'd cancel for the summer, I'd throw up a ton of stuff and pretty much everything would be sold when I re-upped in the autumn and I'd have a bunch of pp to get started with.

I remembered specifically because one time i logged in, set a buncha things on the ah for sale, went exping for several hours then when i went to sell more things before logging off it auto set the prices again.

Threash is correct.  This has happened to me several times.

Crowd control. Fuck it's like Warhammer T4 at release all over again.

Speaking of which - PVP at 50 is pretty terrible.

Leveled a bard first so never noticed it, but the lack of dropped food and/or bandaids is really annoying. The lack of bandaids really makes no sense, it would give you something to use all the cloth you get.

Probably been mentioned, but the completely random stuff that can't be runebroken or salvaged, while mostly getting fixed is still annoying.

It's also annoying repeatedly getting quest starting items that can't be used due to faction or lack of a crafting profession.

Raid windows appearing where ever they damn well please each time i join a warfront are getting annoying.

Try anchoring them to something.

Hate those common tailoring drops that cannot be sold. HATE.

Even if you complete the quest they keep dropping.

This is a gripe of mine.  I delete about 5 of these per day at a minimum.   

Semi-gripe: how is a Justicar expected to gear up for T1 tanking? I've been looking through my options, and toughness for cleric tanks seems to be obtainable only in 5 ways outside of the dungeons themselves:
- quest in shimmersand giving a level 43ish green chain vest with +12 toughness ( :awesome_for_real: )
- level 50 crafted chestpiece that takes a ton of rare mats and the recipe costs ultra-rare plaques to purchase (I'm guessing 100 plat, if it's on the AH at all - nobody on my server seems to have it)
- toughness chest armor rune (this is +15, +10 if used on the green vest above due to low level)
- two rare-ish drops (shoulder/boots) in CC/AP that give +13 toughness each
- going in T1 groups as a healer and soaking the (rare) chain tanking drops... assuming no justicar tank of course

Everyone seems to say that 50 toughness is an absolute minimum for tanking T1, so I don't think I can skimp out on it. Last option is the most realistic, but tbh I'm not too keen on jumping into healing T1s straight away as a new 50. Ah well!

Is the term "T1" some kind of WoW-speak?  I'm guessing it refers to the first tier of dungeons.  Do you mean the non-expert dungeons? 

There are "heroic" dungeons in Rift called Experts.  These are larger versions of the normal dungeons that you find while leveling with more bosses.  There are two Tiers.  Tier 1 is for people who hit 50 and have mostly level 50 dungeon gear or quest gear (or are good players that do them in quest greens).  Then there are Tier 2 dungeons which expect players to have mostly T1 gear.

There are 5 in each Tier.

As for Justicar tanking gear, you're stuck with a shield and plaque gear.  Next week or so they are promising more items to drop from experts so fill the gaps (one big giant gap).

You can also get away with not having 50 toughness for T1.  It might hurt, and it might be a bit harder, but you can do it.  When my guild was hitting T1 the tanks didn't have 50 toughness.

T2 is a different story.

Thanks Draegan.  I apologize for my ignorance.  I've leveled to death but still have yet to step foot in an instance.  Seems like I'm missing a good part of the game.

There are some amazing fun boss fights int he dungeons.  There are also some dungeons with an amazing amount of annoying snooze-worthy trash.

This is the weakest sauce. When did this become standard in MMOs?

"Well the only way to make this fight challenging is to just scale up all the numbers and then introduce a special stat just for the purpose of allowing tanks to scale those numbers back down to a reasonable amount."

I am just extrapolating on guesswork based on what 'you need 50 Toughness' suggests about the mechanics, here, but feh. Tiered gear with only one set of gear in each tier per role and only obtainable by doing a single content set?

Welcome to video games.  Content gets harder as you move on.

I'm raiding with a mishmash of T1, T2, and Plaque purchased gear.  You don't need to be decked out in T1 to do T2 etc.  Just above a certain threshold and it's not a hard line.

The T2 dungeons really only require the tank to be geared, anyone else can just wing it.  The fights are about knowing the mechanics.

I have a new gripe, complaint AND irritation all rolled into one.

http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?134394-Harvester-Keep-Eyes-open-for-Hackers!&s=30f6e5ec97ef90c4292abe3442cbc967 (http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?134394-Harvester-Keep-Eyes-open-for-Hackers!&s=30f6e5ec97ef90c4292abe3442cbc967)

Short version is, some folks seem to be using a z-axis hack to get under the terrain and harvest ore nodes with impunity.  Like a level 7 mining in the highest level zones with stacks and stacks of ore up on the auction house.  And Trion is not talking about it and has not taken any action against the cheaters.

This is a game-breaker for me.  This does not appear to be happening on my server, yet.  First time I see it though, I'll be canceling.  This is roughly the equivalent of playing a shooter with folks using an aim-bot.  I will not pay money for that privilege.

My gripe. Trions brillant event is flooding the low level areas with high level players. There are level 50 characters fighting level 10 mobs.

That's tons of fun for the level 10 characters.

Nothing new there, as a Defiant on Sunrest.  Always a bunch of 35+ players running around Freemarch, soloing rifts, which makes the already weak rewards weaker,  or farming crafting mats, etc.

You don't compete with other people for rewards anymore.

It's not about the rewards to me. It's about just playing the game.

In a DIKU mmo, Trion set up an event that pits level 50 characters against level 10 mobs in the newbie area. I just do not understand that.

And as a level 15 player, I can't even get a shot off. If I make it to the rift in time, which is a big if.  It's just not fun.

Depends on how they implement it.  The problem isn't so much my dsp vs a lvl 50's dps, as it is that the level 50 can round up all the mobs, and aoe them down in one, or two shots, and still have time to get in some on the one mob I am fighting.

If the new system is simply show up, get reward, then, yeah, it's not going to matter.

The patch notes make it sound like you're competing with yourself, however you have to contribute and if everything is dead you can't do that.

They need to make it so you can't get rewards for grey rifts as well.

Is there world event stuff for high levels that they're just ignoring in favor the noob stuff, or is it all level 10 shit? I've got work today so I'm not going to get to check things out until tonight or tomorrow.

Count Nerfedalot, I wouldn't hold your breath on that getting fixed; it's been a big issue in WoW since, well, forever. I'm not sure if they managed to fix it in Cata (I don't harvest anymore) but I know it was still prevalent in WotLK.

The invasions are all over the world in every zone.

You can do all of the same quests in the level 40-50 zones, but it requires you to port there and port back to turn things in.  I tend to wait for an invasion in Stillmoor because the planarite is much better.  For people that raced to the endgame and have no need for planarite, they may just find it faster to blow through a few rifts in the newbie zones.  

I don't have a character over level  18, so i can't confirm anything. But I was being told last night by high levels in Freemarch that death rifts were only opening in the low level zones. 

Death rifts open in stillmoor and gloamwood, i've seen them in both zones.

I did my death rifts in Scarwood Reach (level 30-35) on my warr (lvl 39) and Stonefield on my mage (lvl 29), so they are mistaken.

Yeah you can do them elsewhere, but at least for Guardians you get the quests about 30 yards away from Silverwood -- and when you click on the 'Map' option for the quests, it shows you the map of Silverwood.

Wow, Trion broke iron mining (http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?148248-Trion-please-address-empty-iron-nodes). I experienced this myself in game, before checking out their forums. You mine an Iron node, and you get no iron. You get skillups, and a geode if one would have dropped, but no iron.

Guess what I need to advance my Weaponsmithing!

I've experienced some things that irritated me in this game before, but this is the first thing that's made me want to quit until they fix it.

Sounds exactly like the bug that made kingswood unharvestable until 1.1. I've also heard rumors about infinite-use nodes... :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, friend of mine ran across one of the infinite nodes yesterday. He got to about six taps and then thought better of it.

You'll be happy to know that they're going to fix it so that you only complete the event dailies from level appropriate rifts. Which really is an illustration of why I like Trion and this game: it's not the fuckups, it's how quickly and competently you approach the fixes. MMOs are huge, massive beasts and I expect fuckups. I expect fuckups every patch, in fact. And while there are some borderline inexcusable fuckups here and there, Mythic level shit that just isn't as readily apparent as some other games, they're communicative, quick and generally competent with the fixes.

I agree with the above. There's a lot of stuff to fix but generally I see there's almost always a dev post saying "we're working on it" which is something.

What's the deal with the dye vendor? every other patch she gets disabled, how many dye exploits can there be?

I will preface this by saying I am playing rift, enjoying it still as a tank but jesus fuck experts need a lot less trash. 3hr dungeons no thank you.

Agree... the boss fights are much more interesting than the normal versions, but I still like a 45-60 minute dungeon run...

Finished a DSM x run last night: the run was about 1hr 50min and we wiped once on trash, once on Dichrom, and once on Plutonus. The dungeon is just stupidly long. I think the boss fights in there are the most fun out of any five man though.

If you weren't one of the lucky ones to win the plaque lottery early on you are basically just throwing plat away doing crafting dailies at this point.  Let me see, should i blow 2 plat a day on a 5% chance at a plaque or just tip someone 5 plat once for the 4 plaque item i need.

Darkening Deeps cannot be completed solo due to the boss that cocoons players - even a ranger with a pet cannot complete it because the pet will not attack the cocoon.

Annoying.

Quote comes from another thread. My reply fits better here:

In retrospect, this is a big part of what killed my enjoyment of Rift. I went through the following phases -

• Holy Shit there's so many talents and specs! The possibilities are endless!
• Ok, some of these combos have very little synergy, but that's to be expected. Not every spec will be viable. That's just not possible.
• Ugh. This one spec is amazing and everything else I've tried sucks ass because I just die all the time. I don't really have much choice in this at all.
• None of these alternate specs I've spent hours coming up with and testing are better than this other one. Fuck it, I'm going to play something else.

Rift offers the illusion of choice, and unfortunately it was that illusion that drew me to the game. It took me about 3 weeks to look past the new/shiny and see that I'd been "tricked". I don't regret spending $40 on it because I did get a few weeks of fun. If I wasn't already so tired of WoW then the rest of the game might have held more interest for me and I'd probably have stuck around longer. 

Meh, i disagree on everything other than dps.  For dps there is a best spec, for everything else there is best for a specific situation.  I have at least 5 different effective pvp specs that i use and enjoy and are equally effective in very different ways.  I know our tanks keep different tanking specs for different bosses and for trash, healing specs are all over the place too.

I should probably clarify that my experience was primarily focused on Mages because that's the class I enjoyed the most.

For Rogue DPS there are two or three very very competitive specs.  Blade Dancer heavy, Melee Ranger, and Night Blade heavy.  Then there are three different AOE DPS specs to choose from.  Ranger, 51NB and Sabo. Then there are two different tank specs, and a bard spec.

For Clerics there is one great melee spec, one decent caster spec, then support/healing/tanking specs.

For Warriors... one or two dps specs and like 4 different tank specs if not more.

I'm not super familiar with mages but I know there are 2-3 varied raiding/expert/dungeon DPS specs and then you have an Archon and a Chloro.

I don't know much about PVP, so there are more specs there.

This isn't even counting all the different solo/farm/leveling specs.

This game really wants you to die a lot. I could list a lot of different things that will get you killed that don’t really exist in other games but will just describe one experience I had yesterday.

A zone event boss was up in Droughtlands. I was on my level 43 rogue that is a riftstalker and bard. I ride up to the area the boss is being fought and click the join group button and I am placed in nearly a full raid. The boss level is 42. I was in guardian phase that gives 30% increased endurance, have 15% increased endurance from Great Fortitude, have 10% increased health from Good Health so I have a lot of health compared to most level 43s. Character has somewhere between 5000 and 6000 HP. I see that health is low on a lot of the raid so the first thing I do is move into max Cadence range to do some healing. In the 2 seconds it casts I get hit for 3500 magic damage. I use the 3 points generated to apply Rift Guard which gives me a 25.5% absorb. I then start another Cadence. Get hit for another 3500 damage. 25% is absorb but that is not enough so die. I use soul walk to move away from the boss. I rebuff but have no way to heal so at less than half health. I then decide to stay at max targeting range which is about 3 times the distance and player class would be able to hit the boss just so I could just watch what it is casting and see if I could learn anyway to avoid the damage being put out. Half my defiant raid id dead and would guess the same was true of the Guardian raid plus any others not in the raid. While watching at this max targeting range I get hit again for 3500 damage and die. This time I have to return from graveyard. On rezzing I immediately mount up and ride away. I am several hundred more yards away. Not only is boss not visible but not a single person from the two raids is visible. I get hit again for 3500 damage and die.

Can you share this melee ranger spec? i don't even play a rogue but that sounds awfully interesting.  Looking through their tree there is like no melee stuff there, odd.

LMAO... good times. I constantly soul walker, or run back only to pop up and get destroyed. Burned through many a soul walk. THe death bosses and that AoE shadow bolt shit does that a lot. died 3 time in a row yesterday in shimmer doing just that. In fact, I ported into the Wyrm port and the boss was right there annihilating the NPCs and I took one to the face that dropped me to half health. I laff'd twice for each of my tears. 

I've played for about 30 hours now, have a character at 18 (and alts at 15 and 9), and so far, I have only one major complaint. That's with the basepop. For a game that shows careful consideration in other places, it's remarkable how little thought seems to have been placed into something so basic.

1) INACTIVITY:  Basepop mostly consists of mobs standing around in a field, occasionally shuffling a few feet in a random direction.

2) DENSITY: There are many areas where it is literally impossible to find a path through without aggroing something.

3) SPEED: Mobs are able to run faster than me. I'd rather see them slower, but with a speed self-buff (countered by stuns/root) or a counter-able ability to root/slow the player. Without CC abilities, I can never escape them. In fact, even with CC I often can't - which is my next point.

4) LEASHING: Sometimes they just don't. I've been chased by a pair of Endless from Todrin's Estate to King's Retreat. Only after they killed me did they go home. That's just unacceptable.

In my opinion, running away should always be a valid tactical option. My experience in Rift has thus far been "If you don't win, you must die." You can't escape your pursuers, and once you start running the mob desnity just means you start kiting more and more mobs behind you. Rift basepop parties like it's 1999.

Ahhh the sweet smell of goblins in the Jungles, scorps and crawlers in the Nest, and undead/bats in Garlaige. Fuck I miss that god damn game sometimes... must be my masochistic streak shining back through.

I feel I should mention that zone event bosses, almost all of them have a few abilities that are based on %max HP.. you can die to silverwood bosses at level 50 for example. I think I know which boss you are talking about- it was a smooth kill when I did it because I was level 50 and chloro healing everybody for massive heals (since they're all lower level).

Oh yes. The exposed debuff (which was changed from a damage multiplier to a frickin' snare) makes me wonder if the win-or-die mechanic was actually deliberate. Very frustrating, not at all fun. Also still get dismounted by mobs 30+ levels below me occasionally while I'm wading through the spawn soup.

I really can't imagine how it couldn't be deliberate. Trion aren't that oblivious, that I can tell.

That doesn't make it any less bizarre a decision -- as mentioned, running away should always be an option, though I also feel like sometimes it shouldn't be a very good one. But as it is it's just barbaric, and worse at low levels -- which seems backwards to me.

The mob density thing bugged me during beta, but I came to like how you have to be more careful and that there is risk during questing out in the world, just makes things more interesting. I think it's more noticeable at lower levels, I don't know if I've just grown to be more careful or the character's powers have increased to the point where they are just more survivable, but even so I can't remember the last time any of my characters died out questing, other than the elite walking tree that snuck up on me yesterday.

It becomes extremely painful when you are trying to stop an invasion, considering it's zone wide and the boss is always where the players are not. To highlight this, was in shimmer last night and an air invasion starts. Shimmer sucks major ass to get around in by itself, but then you have all the mobs between you and that little ramp up the hill which is being flooded with invasion spawned mobs. Knocks down contribution to almost nothing when you are stuck riding 80% of the time and 10% of that is being knocked off your ride and/or killed from the debuff and train of mobs hitting you. Hell, most mobs don't even seem to need to knock you off as they have some sorta light speed pursuit thing going on. Being careful is one thing, having it impact your contribution score on invasions which means you get denied a shard is another.

Are you actually getting denied a shard because of it?  Every invasion I've done since they removed the meter, if I kill a single invasion mob during the course of the entire event, I get a shard.  It's always fun to be off doing something else and bam, you get a shiny blue shard because you killed 1 invasion 20 minutes ago.

Just enough points in ranger to get feral instincts and instant summon, more points into night blade for a standard build, then enough points into assassin to get the standard attack increases and backstab.

Keep Head Shot up (can use at 3m range), use backstab as your damager, blazing strike as your finisher.  That's about it.  Keep Fiery spike up at all times.

I hate being 40 and curbstomped by a 33 elite.  Fuck you Kain and your stupid hunt!

So it's EQ all over again? Thanks for that. RIFT will never get my money.

Every MMO is EQ with less suck and more rails.   If you like fantasy MMO's, you'd enjoy Rift for a month.  Just don't expect anything novel or Earth-shattering. 

I just meant that something that should be green and easily beatable is going to eat my face. Fuck that. Why even have levels if the mobs don't conform. That was my biggest gripe with EQ. As for RIFT, frankly I didn't even enjoy it for 15 minutes during open beta. I was thinking about joining up until I read the bit above. That sealed the deal.

I killed 2 of those 33 elites solo at 32.  It is not EQ.

We're talking about elite mobs.  EQ had no differentiators, you just had to know that something was tough or not.  If you were the first to find that mob, you had to do it via experimentation.  And doing that experimentation would make you lose experience.

It's not EQ.

Sorry for the presumption. I guess I'm also comparing the above account to WoW. A lower level elite should be beatable by a normal level that is at least 7-10 levels above. But apparently some of you have beaten elites at an even closer range. So maybe it was more class or encounter specific. Sorry for the vitriol. It's Wednesday and as usual I'm hungover and surly. Don't take anything I post on Wednesdays seriously. Or weekends. Or any day that ends in 'y'.

Just fought a rift boss named Corrupted Graniteborn Champion that's 16 while my cleric is 18 with mien of leadership on - 1.7k hp plus with 37% physical reduction. He uses an ability called earthen shock that one shots me repeatedly from full to zero - rez, buff, go in and get one shotted again.

Not quite sure what's the mechanic of earthen shock given searches on Google came up with precious little information so far.... but I think that one shot mechanics to tank-like classes at below level 20 is not quite excellent design....

That seems to be that guy's schtick. I tried to tank that rift boss yesterday on my 41 paladin with 6k hp. He double tapped me for 3900. I believe it's a problem with AoE abilities. I have noticed on my paladin, that if I am only attacking one mob and use my aoe ability Sweeping Strike which hits 3 mobs it will double tap a single mob if there's nothing else for it to hit. I was the only thing in melee and I guess the same thing happened.

Something else seems wrong with that ability as well. The first time, he will do the AoE snare and then cast his death touch. You have the time to run out of range of whatever it is, but the second time, he will start to cast the AoE and then nearly immediately death touch.

Earthen shock makes him counterattack for 80% of your max hp while it's up. Seems the only way to avoid it is to turn off autoattack and run away before he casts it and wait until the buff disappears from him.

http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?160943-Lowbie-death-rift-boss-Golem

The more you know.

I wonder if my necro can eat that buff.

Yeah, he sticks his chin out and says, "go ahead and hit me, see what happens".  Then you hit him, and you likely die.

I have yet to actually not hit him in a scenario where he activates that ability because it seems like he sticks his chin out after it's already active.  If there is some other tell to alert you (besides the casting bar) to not attack him, I don't know what it is.

Fake Edit: After reading that thread is seems like just the casting bar, knowing the mob, and knowing the spell that gets you killed are your tools to not dying.  I agree with original poster in that thread that having this boss in the 1-20 zones is not warranted.

Hrm, when my character died, I scroll up the combat text and am pretty sure it was a one shot with overkill damage. Considering my hardest hit on mobs being around 150 crit, I don't see see how 80% of that translate into 4 digit damage.

Modify - ok 80 % of your hp and not your damage. Still seems excessively punitive for a boss found in 1-20 zone.

Why oh why do we still have limits on the amount of quests you can have active? The limit in Rift is 25 quests.. I have 5 dungeon dailies, 3 raid rift dailies, 5 expert rift dailies, and 2 epic quests (which are both telling me to kill raid bosses).. I cannot solo any of these and I don't want to drop them, I have room for 10 other quests which gets filled quick with event dailies+pvp daily+stillmoor/shimmer/IPP dailies. It's so annoying having to play the "which quest should I drop.." game every day.

The 25 quest limit is pretty silly.  I do like that I can track 10 at a time though.

On a similar rant: I hate that the stupid event quest pops up every time I log on.  I TURNED IT OFF YESTERDAY!

EDIT: Added Second rant: Apparently there is a 30k planarite limit that noone tells us about? (http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?163496-30-000-planarite-limit-NO-warning-or-info-that-it-exists!)

Yes, I ran into that yesterday.  But don't forget, there's a 15000 planarite ascended ability to buy, so go buy it when you get close to cap.

Once you've bought that, go to the Augments dealer in the main city (next to the Loom in Sanctum, don't know where in Meridian), and buy augments.  Then sell them on the AH or give them to guildies or use them to stay under cap.

Ascended ability? Is it good for what? And where do you get it?

It's a medic.  It works like a healer (to restore your soul and those of your raid mates) for 2 minutes.  It takes 3 charges to summon.

On another note, it's surprising to me how infrequently people use their "Bless Wardstone" ascended power (assuming they even know to buy it).  Considering how little planarite it costs and that it's available in Freemarch/Silverwood.  That one and the open rift from tear I use frequently - the others, hardly at all.

I don't know where Defiants pick it up - somewhere in Meridian.  Guardians buy it from the merchant just below the artifacts dealer in Sanctum.

Aah, I see. Perfect for instances and raids I guess. Not really my thing. Hope they will put some new cool ascended powers with time.

I got another 4+2slot sigil and some essences for my tank spec after hitting the cap the first time. After I hit the cap again, I bought the rescue medic and (more importantly) the elemental squirrels. 5k a pop and there's one for each element... that's one way to 'dump' excess planarite. :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, I've bought 30000 planarite worth of squirrels, 22500 planarite worth of sigils, and 15000 on the medic power. Any more planarite I get is just going straight to master augment boxes. Not sure if they drop epic augments but the blue ones usually sell for at least a plat and the boxes are only 500 planarite.

ignore the edited complaint!

trying to farm any kind of crafting materials is a kick in the balls though.

What do you mean, any kind of crafting materials?

I'm on a popular pvp server and thus far have had no problem farming cloth or hides, and often end up with a stack of each if I do dailies in Stillmoor and Shimmersand.  As for farming the new cores or rare mats, well, that's why they're rare.  I buy them from the AH when the price is reasonable.

Trying to do the crafting apothecary dailies which require mats from iron peak and constantly getting dismounted and mobbed by things 10 levels lower, such that it takes an hour or more just to get the plants I need.  Even without other players around, it's a needless time sink.

Reading all these crafting dailies-related posts it really seems like I got off lucky picking Armorsmith and Outfitter as my main professions. Armorsmith dailies only require metal and Outfitters almost always only require leather, which made me wonder what people were going on about how dailies cost '2 plat' to finish. 16 carmintium sure don't cost 2 platinum, and soulbound hide practically falls from the sky.
 

Depends on your server. On mine, 40-50g per carmintium isn't uncommon. So 2 plat isn't exactly an unheard of figure.

I'm with Lakov on this though. The alch (as well as the artificer one) daily sucks balls. I can farm a stack of carmintium in the time it takes to get about 15 sagebrush

Yeah that's been a common complaint. Other areas aren't as dense, but then they get super-dense again. In some places you can pull a whole sub-zone with a single mob pull.

I think it's just a case of devs thinking they know their game better than the players. Of course they're going to want you to experience and see everything they did, and how dare you try to cheat around the lovely monsters, etc etc blah blah 1999 again.

Ahhh, yes.  From what I gather, apothecary dailies are practically impossible to do daily.  Trion has promised to fix that next patch.

I'm a butcher, outfitter, and runecrafter -- probably the easiest crafting dailies there are, I can get them done and delivered within 15 minutes.  I do the zone dailies most days, and don't sell my hides or cloth (I make boots to runebreak for mats which I then sell) so I always have good stock of what I need for dailies.  My mage alt is 29 now, and artificer, forager, and miner - so I have all the gathering covered (at least to level 29).

I'm surprised that Apothecary made it into the game in the state it's in - it's pretty fucked up.

Heh at that price is more like 8 plat.  2 plat is actually when they are selling cheap.

Beginning to see why the mobs are so densely packed now that I'm leveling a rogue assassin...

When I played my mage, I had no choice but to kill my way through everything. The quests came smoothly, and I had no noticeable content gaps. Now as a stealther, I tend to kill what I need rather than every single critter - and I'm having to grind WFs to make up the XP gap to catch my levels up with the quest chains (finished all Scarwood having just dinged 33).

:oh_i_see:

Good thing I enjoy warfronts!

Exactly why I was finding xp gaps between quest hubs. They mask that grind quite well... >.<

Yeah, puts that 2 plat figure right into perspective of not being so bad. Though it did drop quite a bit over the last two days, so that is nice.

Fuck trying to get Pristine Distillate.

Gah.  I need that quest.

x100

Yup, I did this too and hit big gaps where I was out of quests and had to grind.

How do you get it?  Is it a drop from foraging, or do you get it when you do dailies, or when you make apothecary items or what?

I keep getting cloth and hide recipes that I don't need, since I've already gotten them.  They drop off mobs or from butchering. 

Did they have different development teams on different professions?  The inconsistency is glaring.

I don't get it.  I've leveled 3 toons to 50 now and have never had to grind mobs because of quest gaps.  Never.  I always have quests left over in Shimmer, IPP, and Stilmoor when I finish.  All I can guess is that you're missing some quest hubs by not exploring the zones a little.  Not every quest hub leads you to it.  Some you have to look a little to find.  I love this.  It helps the game feel less on rails.

Was one of them a stealther?

I see your point now that I scrolled up and read the post again.  I may have to try leveling one just to see. 

My question back to you would be: Do you have all of the quest completion achievements for each zone? 

I believe so, yes - I certainly do for Scarwood. I'm pretty anal about picking up every quest I can find, and finishing story-lines (and as this is my second run-through, I know where to look for quests now). I was surprised at the amount of XP I'm obviously not getting when I don't have to kill everything.

I suspect the problem is mainly going to be around the Scarwood to Moonshade/Droughtlands transition as the content definitely picks up again in the 40s, but it was an irritation nonetheless.

I agree completely.  There seems to be a content gap from 34 to 40 or so.  I imagine that stealthing to avoid trash really exacerbates the issue.

It's a rare "drop" that you get from picking Twilight Bloom.  It gives you an item that starts a quest that bring you to the forager in Meridian who in turn gives you a quest to craft some shit.  Then you get a recipe for it as a reward.  The problem is it's fucking rare.  I have three fulls stacks of 50 Twilight Bloom.  Nothing yet.

Yeah there is a big problem, and always has been in that level range.

Also mob experience is a very large portion of over all experience.  Essentially you don't want to stealth to quest objectives, just kill kill kill.  And do Rifts.  Lots of them.

Yeah, the practical rarity of these sort of recipes tend to be way out of wack. Even if you assume that each quest drop has an equal chance of spawning per opportunity, the fact that cloth drops off all humanoid monsters without the need for a gathering skill or action makes the cloth quest recipes hundreds if not thousands of times more common. I gather methodically with a wide variety of alts and I have never seen any of the leather quest drops -- I'm also missing several metal ore recipes in the middle level range. Etc. etc. I didn't even know there were foraging equivalents, but then again I don't make a lot of potions.

Is it an apothecary recipe or a forager recipe?

Foraging.

Ailion the Rogue Dev or Adam Gershowitz have zero idea on how to balance classes or at least rogues.  They're nerfing Bards again.

I need the biggest facepalm graphic ever.

Jesus fucking christ.

I know.  I love bards so much I solo with one.  I don't understand, what, are we still useful?  I guess every rogue should have a pig and a gun. 

Fuck bards... no one like hippies, no matter how bad ass you try and make them.  :why_so_serious:

That statement is awesome to someone who has no idea what you're talking about (like me).  :drill:

Well I think I'm done with the game. Got to 50, did a bunch of T1 experts and realized I was just grinding away for no reason. The dungeons are kinda fun but so long that they feel tedious and even 2hr is just more time than I want to spend. Maxxing apothecary wasn't terribly hard and my warr has a shiny full set of t1 plaque gear which incidentally makes grinding dailies pointless now since the gear is on par with even the epic mathosian stuff.

So now my warr just putzes around when I log on, sometimes doing dailies but mostly spamming the channels looking for a T2 group which there arent many people doing on my server. I'd level another character but I'd be doing the same exact quests all over again and that just rubs me the wrong way.

Fun game just not nearly enough happening for max levels.

I'm running into a similar problem with polished mahogany.  I have almost 3 full stacks of mahogany.  I did, however, get the first distillate recipe pretty quick.  Meanwhile, I've thrown away 3 cloth recipes (since I'm not an outfitter on my mage).

Nerfing bards?  Why?  It doesn't take long enough yet to kill shit?  Mediocre dps and mediocre healing and mediocre buffing needs to be nerfed?

They made a mistake with the patch notes. They weren't nerfed.

Bards are still very usefull, they're just incredibly boring to play mechanics wise.  The more people you're grouped with the more tedius and boring it becomes.

For example in raids, an Archon has better debuffs than you.  So a Bard is responsible for Combat Run Speed aura.  Refreshing 5 motifs every 30 seconds. and spamming Cadence->Coda of Restoration.

That's it.  The healing isn't that great either unless you have a handful of different trinkets (that never drop, fuck you random number generator) and a collection of healing greater essences.

I think my biggest critique is that at least for DPS its most effective to chain everything in a macro to one or two buttons and mash them. Feels like going back to EQ.

I'm under the impression that people using macros are playing a different game than I am.  Macro users are playing the "maximize dps/healing spreadsheet game" for their fun.  Sadly, they put enough peer pressure on others that macro use is almost expected by people running dungeons regularly. 

I blame the developers.  If a macro makes your play much more successful than the human decision process, then your implementation of combat mechanics fails. 

I went to using macros on my BM/Champ build for two main reasons.
1) Much more frequent use of reactive/cooldown abilities, thereby increasing my damage output.
2) Cleared up a ton of space on my hotbars, reducing my need to remember where everything is.

Seriously, I have compressed roughly 12 abilities down into four macros. (Two for single-target, two for cleave/aoe abilities.) There was no way to keep track of everything when they were on their own buttons, even with the big power-aura-like icons that pop up when your reactives become available.

I did the same thing with my warrior btw. Using macros is obviously superior. But in terms of DPS roles, it's completely snoozeworthy.

I understand Hutch.  Playing the Shaman was an eye opener.  I'm going to grab a parser to check this out.  I'm going to monitor my shaman dps for 5 mins with and without macros.  I'll bet that macros give a 20-30% increase in damage output.  

If you're going to give players this big an advantage using a macro, then you should probably just reduce the number of buttons for all users.  It just creates a society of haves and have-nots otherwise.  

Why is that? everyone can use macros, there is no have nots.

Do you really think an 11 year old, or hell a 50 year old for that matter, is going to make elegant ordered macros for their character?  I'll bet that 80% of the playerbase doesn't know how to properly order and/or script a solid combat macro.  It's like saying everyone has a hammer.  Why can't they all build houses?

If macro use is a necessary part of the game, then making a good macro should be part of the leveling process. 

I don't know how to make an elegant organized macro, i still have them.  Cause i can read.

I am a university professor.  Let me assure you that the fact that you can read and comprehend puts you into a minority in the US.  

A friend is playing with Vu.  They reached the 40s recently, and it wasn't until yesterday that Vu walked her through making her first macro.

Some people don't even think about the idea of making macros.  Each ability has a button.  The game is about pressing buttons.  It doesn't occur to them to combine button presses.

It doesn't really matter until you get into t1/t2 content, and moreso t2 content.  Normal dungeons, leveling up, etc, you can more or less just button mash and everything will work out OK.  It's when things start turning into a DPS race while ALSO forcing you to do the hokey-pokey during all the boss fights or wipe instantly that you need to streamline it.

I'll post some parses from GSB/ROS later when I get home and you guys can see some of the disparity between players, even running the same build with relatively the same gear.

So, it's all but expected that you macro in order to be successful at the late game content.  That's hilarious in terms of game design.  "We've given you dozens of unique abilities so that you can cram them into 4 macros.  You're welcome!"

Depends on the class.  For stormcaller, your current highest-dps rotation cannot use any macros at all*, where for chloromancer it just makes your life a whole lot easier.

Greenscale, for example, requires you to be ready to move *all the time*.  Think the boss in RD that spawns mushrooms, but 20x as many, 3 different types, and they'll murder your ass in a heartbeat.

Only needing to rely on 1 button for your main healing rotation, and the other buttons for situational ohshits makes it a lot less stressful when dodging that shit and constantly moving.  You could probably be 95% as effective without the macro, but you'd need drugs stronger than Excedrin to not /wrists after 4 hours of it.

*All Instants/no cd/situational spells.

Raging storm->ice shear->LFx5->thunderbolt->ice shear->LFx5->........
Static flux+intensify elements+static discharge (in that order) on cooldown
Once they fix the lightning strike bug in 1.2, it'll end up getting worked into the macro unless it's a high movement fight.

Here's a SS of the breakdown of the 4 stormcallers during plutonus last night.  This is an aggregate of 5 attempts.  DPS is damage/players duration, EXT dps is damange/encounter duration.
Extdps is what we use for comparison metrics for the most part.
(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/86041/Rift/nirissa%20plutonus%20parse.jpg)

I much prefer it to the alternative of having dozens of unique abilities i have to keep different hot keys for.

Nerf's post, while I applaud the dedication and attention devoted, just makes me want to stop playing the game because I will never be involved enough to care enough to do any of that.

And I was told before this game has nothing to do with spreadsheets...  :oh_i_see:

Uhh it doesn't?  Unless you want to squeeze out that last 2% dps. 

I assume with the attitude you have towards this game, you'll never be involved in the sort of thing where you really need to worry about spreadsheets. 

I mean any game with numbers will have spreadsheets.

I think it's funny that, at least in this brief moment of your post, the opposite of 'use macros' became 'button mashing' -- when of course the only conceivable advantage to not using macros is to increase control over what abilities you use.

Personally I tend to use one or two macros, with my reactive abilities separated out, etc.

I like macros because almost by definition the thing they are replacing is not interesting -- it's the basic activity, the baseline of DPS or healing or whatever that has an obvious, optimal solution 90%+ of the time. If you can make a macro that is as good or almost as good as the thoughtful application of the same abilities, then it might as well be one button, so that you can focus your attention and your fingers on whatever's left over.

Of course if nothing is left over (hello bards), that's kind of a problem. But as Nerf says, at least you can run around dodging the spikes/flaming orbs/giant mushrooms while pressing your button.

And on the other side you have the specs where what's 'left over' is basically the entirety of your abilities. Tanking vs. melee dps is a huge gulf in terms of attentiveness required, just in terms of 'where is the button I want to be pressing now' -- let alone the part where you have to pay attention to the actual fight.

It's Nerf.  He comes from a combination of EVE and insanity.  He could spreadsheet a vasectomy.

But yah, any game with statistics will have a tool to analyze those statistics.  This is not new.

Or a renter's dispute.

You're not the only one, I never play these games that seriously - but there will always be those on the bleeding edge calculating percentages. I also have an initial tendency to be put off by that kinda thing - but I have to remind myself that there are a lot of ways to have fun in these games, and to each their own. I'm happy enough running through a forest hitting creeps with a stick and getting new pants once in a while.

I would like to see that.

See, Nerf is why I play these games (finals are almost over, stop bitching).  I don't have to do spreadsheets to assist my dmg or e-meter or whatever it's called these days, I just have to wait for him or others like him.  People like Nerf make my gaming life easier.

Artifacts.

Should be tracked at the account level, not at the character level; rewards (such as they are) should be BoA.

I kinda like finding artifacts, but completely lose all interest owing to the complete mishmash of collections across 4 characters.

Minor: while the sparkle egg is in keeping with the whole easter egg thing... I suspect I would prefer a sparkle object for two reasons 1) I think it would look cooler, 2) I could avoid grabbing the same old mushroom for the nth time.

You could just send them all to one char.

I have spent probably 10 platinum (at least) compulsively mailing artifacts between my 4 alts. More importantly, I have spent hours managing the aforementioned mailbox madness. This is simply a failure of game design. If artifacts are tradeable, then obviously they expect people with alts to do what I am doing -- and what I am doing is stupid and frustrating and makes me want to stop collecting artifacts. If artifacts were bind on pickup then this would merely be a weird design choice (compared to having them be account-wide collections) -- but when they are tradeable, there is no excuse. The designers have specifically chosen to encourage players to perform incredibly tedious micromanagement in order to maximize the feeling of reward from what should be a fun, breezy, as-you-go-along activity.

Half of this problem would have been solved before it existed had they not gone with "the Vision" (or lack thereof) that ruled out shared bank slots and opted instead for money-sinks-till-it-hurts everywhere (inventory space and mailing costs in this case). That would have completely avoided the frustration and annoyance of trying to share artifacts between alts all while dealing with inadequate inventory space.  But they chose Vision over Fun. 

The other half of the problem is that collecting itself has become frustrating and boring.  And I usually love collecting.  I'm not entirely sure why, but I suspect it has something to do with there being too many collections (for the number of sparklies) per zone, such that if you quest your way through each zone at anything close to a steady rate you will probably not complete ANY collections in the entire game!  Even putting in some serious time exploring and gathering/collecting plus buying the occasional cheap filler from the auction house has left me with a grand total of 16 completed collections at level 46.  Having to wade through hundreds of gray aggro mobs (another Vision-induced blind spot) to find stuff you missed at the lower levels definitely doesn't contribute any fun to the process either.

Oh, another gripe: why is auto-follow so damn fragile?  You basically can't do ANYTHING that involves a mouse-click while on autofollow or you risk breaking it. I've had it break while managing the quest log, moving stuff around in inventory, talking to NPC's, accepting or turning in a quest, and various other innocuous wtf did it do that for occasions.  Combine that with having to basically have your horse's nose in the next horse's butt to start following makes it a serious and frequent irritation. I think they may have some issues with mouse clicks bleeding through whatever UI component you were clicking on and the game then treating it as a movement command.  I don't use click-to-move, so that shouldn't be happening, but it seems like a click often breaks autofollow THEN gets checked to see if it actually meant anything that should break it.

Does this mean that you're playing again?  That would make me happy!

EQ2 had some bank slots that were accessible to all characters on an account. It has been done before and sounds like it should be replicated.

MMOs need to get rid of group only quests for leveling content.  If you want to stick a big bad killer mob out there, do so.  But don't have it gate my quests.  Give us an achievement or something for killing it.

I'm not against having hard quests.  I think MMO leveling could have a bit more difficulty, but elite mob nonsense is just bullshit.

I think both types of content have it's place.  Just shouldn't be mandatory.

Hell, it was in Aion of all games..

Because its unintuitive. The last few games that have "too many buttons" for "too few fingers" to be pressed in any sort of order quickly were "old school pc rpg's", "pre-starcraft rts's" , and now most mmo's since Ultima Online. Now of the three genres I listed which of them are "main stream" to an audience that regularly switches between playing consoles and farmville?

My two cents, if your game can be "macro'ed down" to 2 buttons, someone wasted a lot of time developing "skills".

You use too many quotation marks.

Some abilities are fine to be able to macro.  An ability that does more damage but is available every X seconds, and is in all other respects identical to your baseline ability, is one that you pretty much always want to hit when it's up.  This is something that needs to be macroable - hit the cooldown ability if it's off cooldown, otherwise hit baseline ability.  On very rare, very specific occasions - primarily involving highly coordinated pvp - you might want to save the cooldown ability so you can do a little more damage on a burst, but under normal circumstances, you want to hit it every time it's up.  Theoretically, you could ignore that very rare case and simply adjust the baseline ability to always do a little more damage, or to have a chance to proc additional damage, or simply to build up X number of charges, then the next time it's used, blow the charges for additional damage.  All of it serves the same purpose as having another ability that does the same thing with a longer cooldown, in the end.

Still, saying the game can be macroed down to two buttons is often an exaggeration.  There may be a couple classes for which that's true, but most of them have different abilities that aren't a simple priority list, with A always being better than B, which is always better than C, and so on.  If I have 4-6 distinct buttons I want to press in an average combat situation, that's excellent.  If I have another 6 buttons that are situational, that's fine.  If I start having more than that it might be a problem.  The 'priority list' setup is, I think, the worst way to do it because it brings combat down to a matter of watching cooldowns and pressing whichever is the optimal button that's not on cooldown.  But at least if it can be macroed, it's not a major gameplay hindrance.

I think the devs kind of went overboard with the CC nerf in the latest patch, especially putting every single CC on the same DR. It was pretty stupid to get chain-CC'd before with zero effort on the enemy's part, but now you / your team can make an entire opposing team CC-immune in seconds by just using some passive abilities (or abilities that have a 2-second "cc" as a side effect, like warrior charge, dusk to dawn, ...). Unless everyone avoids using those abilities AND there's some coordination over voice chat (ie premades), have fun being unable to peel enemy DPSers or setting up burst windows. Just do pve dps rotations on the enemy and win/lose!

Combine this with the built-in short cooldown CC breakers in some souls and the 2-min cc breaker in the pvp soul that also gives a 5-second immunity to all CC now... good times. It also makes me feel hilariously overpowered when playing my healer cleric.  :awesome_for_real:

It makes riftstalker flag runners unstoppable.

I'm still pissed the badass one weapon pointing up one weapon pointing down combat pose is female only.

There has to be a better difficulty between "fucking easy" and "squashed me into paste".  They could make the hunting targets in Scarwood Reach just a bit easier without making them as trivial as most regular "kill this target" quests.  This kind of content is just maddening in underpopulated leveling zones (especially late in the evening).

Seven out of twelve fucking iron nodes returning A Worn Pickaxe instead of ore after completing the associated quest. I want iron, not an item that has absolutely no use to me anymore.

Why is the goddamn thing still in my loot table? For that matter, why do I have to keep clearing some quest-starting cloth item out of my inventory every 5 minutes when I clearly don't care enough about linen to be an Outfitter in the first place?

A dodgy work around to that is to save all those crafting quest drops (the ones that do not pertain to you) and throw them in your bank. That is the only way to flag it in your loot as "already have one, stop fucking bothering me with any more of this."

All around the female animations, etc. are better.  I lvl'ed one to around 9 with a separate male one when I did the free trial and noticed the difference right away.

I love my male bahmi idle animations.

The more I play the more annoyed I get with the the UI and particularly the map.

Mousing over buffs and things shows tooltips occasionally, but then they disappear and you need to remouse over them. The tooltip anchor is frequently only a suggestion. Clickable UI elements are not always clickable. This one is most noticeable in WFs. If someone in the raid is stealthed, they aren't clickable from the raid UI. Somethings are not editable from the Layout menu. Namely floating tooltips and the quest box. I'm getting older and my eyes are getting worse. I would really like to resize the font in those things. Instead I am stuck with this teeny tiny font. The waiting for resurection box in WFs blocks everything and is unmoveable.

On to the map. Why are there lines to peoples way points? In WFs why do people not always show up? In Whitefall, why does the FC not always show up on the map? Why to base markers block names near them? For that matter, why are base markers the only things in the whole game that does not require precision mousing? Those things throw up a tooltip from comparatively miles away?

Back to fonts, why is there no reason to modify the floating combat text? It's way too small, on big things it's anchored above their head so you frequently have no feedback about what's going on.

They are all little things, but so much is so right that these sorts of problems get really annoying.

The quests can give you quest credit for watching an elite mob be killed by someone else and then I like your idea for achievements for making the actual kill.

Why are the freaking servers still down!

Should be unlocking now.

http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?211878-**-Incoming-Downtime-for-NA-Shards-1.3-Update-8-00am-PDT-6-22-11-**/page3

I see someone was already bitching about the lack of a shared bank and the high cost (in time and money) of using the mail system between characters. It fucking blows, I want to get my craftard on, but the obnoxious lack of sharing inventory between characters is really getting to me. This dev team seems to really hate EQ2, ironically.

I'm also about to puke from leveling up lowbies on the exact same quests EVERY DAMNED TIME. No amount of zone/world events can remove that suck.

Try explaining dailies to a non-gamer some time. Or why you're running the exact same leveling quests with a different character. It provides an interesting insight imo.

I just got my second character to 50, the only way I could stomach the repeat content was to avoid most of the last 15 levels worth of quests. I just stuck to dungeons only after my rest exp had recharged.

It's not that they hate EQ2, it's that they ignored it. The decision was handed down from on high on tablets of stone that they would make a game exactly like WoW except for a few key new parts (rifts, souls).  I assume this was to reduce development costs since copying shit verbatim is a hell of a lot easier than choosing the best aspects from all  pre-existing works then putting in the considerable effort required to integrate them properly into a seamless and self-consistent whole.  Of course, that is exactly what WoW did and why it succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.  Rift settled for mimicing 80% of WoW, even on systems where there are far better examples than WoW's implementation and that is probably the single biggest reason its success is much more limited.

Which is sad for many reasons, not the least of which being that they left a lot of money on the table in the form of past and current WoW players who left WoW for very specific shortcomings, but found those exact same shortcomings cloned into Rift.

Of the EQ2/WoW differences, the five person group and not grouping between sides stands out as the worst decisions.

I would like the option to group with Defiants.  I think the impending death of the world might make that something we could work out.

Now that I'm on a higher pop server, some of my gripes with the game are becoming less prevalent.  Scarwood Reach is still a bucket of ass and you stay in the zone forever.

The wardrobe keeps me out of some pretty hilarious and scandalous clown suits.  This game really punishes you for going mangina.  The latest chain "leggings" I got were nothing more than a bikini bottom.

Something I haven't figured out yet...how does a zone-wide event work on a PvP server?  Assuming at least 50% of the people that show up to the boss will AoE spam crap, how does an event ever get done?

By punish....you mean reward, right? Because my elfy rogue looooves her some bikini bottoms.

I do concede Phred's point about available grouping. I've found tons of groups for current content (the world event, rifts) but could only dig up one guy last night for the regular run of IT, and even he bailed after five minutes. The LFG tool sucks, imo. Another thing done much better by others.

The Count is 100% correct imo, they wanted, literally, WoW + rifts and souls. And as someone who doesn't like WoW, but does like a couple other mmos, it's painfully obvious. My "favorite" dev quote was 'Why re-invent the wheel?" Because the racing tire has been invented and you can stop using the wagon wheel, dammit.

Very carefully.   :awesome_for_real: Reminds me that I need to set up a DPS macro sans AE.  Even on a PVE server, you get Defiants and Guardians tip-toeing around each other.  Certain players just see it as time to get some easy kills.   I'll admit to stomping a Defiant or two if they initiate the action.


I'm a very modest MMO-woman.  :awesome_for_real:  My elf (YETCH, should have gone Matho again) cleric is currently wearing a full length chainmail dress with a high neckline.  The "I can't see with the blast shield down" costume helm (yay event drop) works rather well with the outfit.  Matronly, yet deadly.

I'm not sure Rift should have gone more towards EQ2, because I really could never get into the game.  It's currently working for me (no surprise, I'd be playing WoW right now if Cata wasn't such a fuckup) as I've got 6.5 days of playtime sunk in and 3 characters 30 or higher.  Still wish they would have taken more chances and done a few more things differently. There's a feeling I get when playing that this game was really close to being something fantastic merely than just "good".

Melee are usually AoEd a ton, you have to learn to back off when low.  As soon as the boss drops it turns into one giant free for all.  Quite fun actually.

I always felt clerics got the best helmets. Didn't see the top-tier raid stuff, obviously.

Clerics have the best gear visuals hands down.

I 50% agree with the LFD complaint, in that I think we all agree on ultimate solution.  The system works beautifully in getting players together, when there's actually players playing and using the system.  If this server transfer thing doesn't pan out as well as they hope (and we expect), we need server merges.

My giant goon of an elf cleric is wearing a giant chainmail dress and I love it. I hate 90% of the lady armor I have come across though, but the wardrobe function makes it so it's not as big a deal.

My cleric had a very brief shirt and no pants for a bit in the late 40s. It was not a happy time.

There are a lot of things EQ2 did better than WoW that Rift ignored.

Mentoring, Broker vs Auction House, shared storage, guild storage, crafting, appearance gear, global chat channels, unrestricted interaction between factions, gray mobs aren't aggro, a little more ability to wander off the tracks, inventory constraints, and most everything about the UI are examples off the top of my head.  I think there were a few more really annoying things in Rift but I haven't played in months now and some of the annoying shit is thankfully starting to fade from memory.

As I said, I and many others left WoW for very specific reasons.  Finding those exact same reasons deliberately cloned back into Rift with no improvement whatsoever combined with the prohibition against third-party UI's which ameliorated some of WoW's defects was a rude shock.  Given Hartsman's record at EQ2 I expected better from him, but perhaps his hands were tied by the need to sell "WoW clone = money hats" to the investors.  I suppose being CEO and ultimately responsible for many employees and millions of dollars makes you more conservative, but overall I liked his work when he was a rebel at SOE better than his results as The Man with Rift.  Or maybe I'm giving him too much credit for the improvements made in EQ2 during his tenure there.

As a male rogue I want to kill their designer.  The PvP sets all look like ass and Ive looked at every piece of gear on Auction to try and put together a better looking set and it all sucks.  Helmets, chest, shoulders...all of it.  Most of the helmets and shoulder pieces I would be embarrassed to wear, Id rather not and get stabbed in the neck... at least my corpse wouldnt look like a total newb. 

I don't like the increase in cost they made to the planar essences in the capital cities, and the increase in cost for the T2 plaque gear.  I also don't think Raid Rifts drop near enough loot considering they are a gear bridge to T3 content, and I think they should drop as much gear as the average T2 dungeon run.

I actually like the 10 man content, but I think we waste entirely too much time on trash clearing for the 20 man raids.

I also agree that the level by questing system is horribly boring, and I cannot stand to level alt characters due to having to repeat all the Kill/Collect tasks level after level.

From today's hotfix:


How long'd that take?

I think you're giving him a good amount of credit for eq2 but I think you're not giving him enough credit for Rift, especially when a number of the things you're complaining about were communicated to be being worked on so the customer knew what was upcoming a while before being put in game (guild banks and appearance tab are in game already and were mentioned they were going to be put in, customizable UI is on the test shard).  A no-restrictions inter-faction chat system isn't really necessary imo, but it wouldn't be a bad thing either.

I absolutely agree about the non-aggro gray mobs and would also love to see mentoring. I think both of these are something that should be standard features in current and upcoming MMOs and I think that eq2 did them really well. But, as for crafting, I can agree that Rift's crafting isn't great (though the crafting rifts are nice) but I cannot call eq2's crafting good.

I didn't like the increase to essence costs on the vendors either until I put it all in perspective and realized it only takes about 5 more minutes to get an essence now compared to previously. Tthe planar essence cost increase is canceled out by doing 1 expert daily as you get roughly 2.5-3k planarite (by selling the blue currency) to cover that cost, and the daily plaques for raid rifts was doubled along with getting a bonus plaque per raid rift. I do think raid rifts should always drop 2 epics and 2 essences, but not as much gear as a t2 dungeon. T2 gear increases I didn't mind until the changes to lfd went in. Seriously, fuck the re-queue timer and deserter buffs as they aren't needed with improvements to finding a replacement member.

As for time invested clearing trash on 20man, are you guys new to raids in rift and not that many people geared out? I can understand at that point, especially since the nerf to the epic item drop rates on trash but otherwise I just don't agree as a full clear of all raid content is normally done in a single night.




Too long

Don't bitch too much, it was a 5s stun at one point!  :grin:

One thing about Rift's team. I give them a lot of shit about design choices, but they do tend to come around eventually. I just wish they'd listen to me in the first place and save a lot of time and aggravation!  :drill:

I don't see a way around the linear levelup process that makes alts a chore, really. By the time they release an expansion, most people will have their characters ground up to 50, is it worth putting in an alternate leveling path at that point? It's nice that they can always put in more low and mid level dungeons thanks to the expert system, but I'm now going on three days of trying to find a group for plainjane IT.

Insert another gripe about the LFG tool. Am I missing something here? I can't see who is in the queue? I really miss...wait for it....EQ2's solution:

(http://rift-wire.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/EQ2_LFG_Window.jpg)

And strangely enough, that image is pulled from a Rift fan site (http://rift-wire.com/2011/02/16/lfd-vs-lfg-winner-takes-all/)  :oh_i_see: Which quotes Scott saying "MMO != WoW"  :why_so_serious: But to be serious, I really wish they'd start implementing the more advanced features of EQ2 rather than constantly going back to the primitive WoW well. Just because that's how WoW does it doesn't mean it's the way it should be done, ffs. Irritating.  Take that EQ2 tool and then merge it with the current Rift dungeon/quest tabs so you could have several LFG queues at once...no, that would actually be awesome so I don't expect to see it. I expect exactly what Blizzard has.

Edit to add: When I was wanting to get into IT, I wanted something like the "Group looking for more" tab, where I could offer people in a general LFG queue at the proper level range a chance to run through IT, even if that's not what they were planning. Instead, I'm sitting in a useless LFD queue nobody is using and stuck having to spam chat channels to try to put a group together. As Lionel Ritchie said, the shoes of a clown.

I love slutty clothes on my toons.  It's nice to have a choice of what to wear, regardless.  The wardrobe function is  :Love_Letters:

Actually, that was a big part of me playing retail, finally. Playing dress-up is an important part of these games. Slutty, slutty dress-up.

Also, I just want to point out that I find it amusing that I'm rallying for a grouping tool  :cthulu:

I agree with you on how the LFG tools of EQ2, DAoC, LotRO and that generation of MMOs were great for people to cherry-pick groups/members that were actively looking and such.  I miss those days.

However, in the grande scheme of things, I think the devs of both WoW and Rift see the matchmaking LFD tool as more 'fair' to it's players, as it both rewards players for at least using the tool successfully for the random part, and ensuring that the player(s) that have been waiting for a group the longest get into a fully-formed group first.  The key, as you mentioned, is getting people to use the damn tool :P.

I think WoW does take it a baby step ahead of Rift in showing you the progress being made to form your group.  You can at least see what role the server's currently got you best getting a role at and what other player roles it also has ready.  You'd be surprised how quickly I got a group going in WoW when I'd call out in Trade that the LFD needed a healer to queue up, and behold!  Group formed.

Really, that's how I advertise myself in Rift...I'm a Support/DPS/Tank in the LFD for random and random-T1.  You want me?  Use the damn system so I get my loots.

I hate the automated tool and would far rather have a real LFG system. Having said that and having loved EQ2s, I have to say that nobody ever used it. Every group I found was from the chat channels. It was easy and worked. Oddly, in my experience, the tool that got the most use was WoW's pre-LFD group finder. It plus the chat it put you in seemed to really work well.

Unfortunately, people seem to view auto-grouping as a right and increasingly not just autogrouping, but autogrouping so that the dungeons are trivial and fast. There's already a lot of screaming that the requirements in the tool are too low.

I understand that the interactive crafting workstations that can hurt you if you don't pay attention is something some people will like and others wont.  The best part about EQ2 crafting though isn't the mechanics of crafting an item itself, it's about the entire system and how it integrates with the rest of the game.  (Some) crafted stuff is useful at all levels (with some exceptions at post-Max level).  Across the board at every level in every craft there are items that are useful to players, but not necessary to players.  Or you can vend items that you ground out for at least the cost of the fuel.  The simple fact that raw resources have no vendor value helps feed the player economy.  Add in rare resources which have great value in the player economy and resource collection is rewarded handsomely, while at the same time ensuring relatively low prices for the common materials needed for grinding so you can easily craft without ever harvesting a single node if that is your preference.  Rare recipes as loot drops further stimulated the player economy. The consignment system allows you to easily craft even no-drop items and no-drop materials for others using any mix of yours and their components and with their payment visible as part of the transaction.  Player housing adds all sorts of additional interesting things for you to craft and ways for you to display your crafted wares.  And the single biggest key to the whole experience is the Broker.  You can access Brokers at cities all over the world.  There is no charge for putting things on the broker, no time limit for how long it stays there, no need to micro-manage every single lot every single day, the broker fee is added to the top of the sale price as a fixed percentage and can be bypassed completely if you've put the right containers in your house and the customer is willing to go to your house to buy the item.

In Rift, I found crafting to be tedious, expensive, and time consuming, and the Auction House to be downright annoying frustrating drudgery.  In EQ2 the crafting was sometimes downright fun, still tedious, not very expensive and often even quite lucrative at all levels, and the Broker was easy, low maintenance, low cost and readily available no matter where in the world my adventures had taken me.  Honestly, the Auction House is probably the single biggest reason why I quit Rift.  It was so NOT fun, and so integral to anything I might do outside of combat, that it became an insurmountable barrier to my enjoying the game.  I literally dreaded logging in and feeling like I needed to deal with the AH, if only to empty my bags so I had room to loot something again.  And at that point, I quit.

Broker is DEFINITELY superior to the stupid AH. But it's not how Blizzard does it.

I am of complete different opinion and experience than you it seems, in both games. I found the interactive crafting a bit tedious and redundant since it could be narrowed down to two or three buttons out of the six. As a new player, the materials needed were anything but affordable for the better crafted items where as the regular items weren't worth crafting compared to items obtained via hunting and questing (admittedly, that is probably more of a server economy issue more than anything but the drop rate didn't help when you needed a lot of the rare resources for a full suit of armor). The items I could craft were obsolete by the time I was able to gather the materials and reach the right level to craft them where just earning quest items proved to be more efficient and beneficial. The writs were nice though, I'm on the fence about the crafting levels though as I wasn't too big of a fan of that but can see why some people would be. Rare recipes are in both games

The broker wasn't anything special for me since I don't mind the fees to auction items in other games being up front with a limited duration of the sale, especially since in a lot of cases the fees won't be what, 15-30% was it? I do remember trying to look up items (not knowing names of items) was rougher in the broker than the normal AH though. Being able to sell from your house is nice, but I am someone who doesn't believe housing should be standard issue in mmos. I think it fits certain mmos better than others.

Rift's crafting is the definition of redundant and tedious though. The biggest advantage, imo, is it can be done and you can craft items that are good for your level when you need them. I have yet to ever find it expensive unless attempting to create an epic item with an epic aug as a lot of the epic aug costs on the AH are expensive and they don't drop all that often (which is one of the items I think should be more common on raid rifts, but when you do 4-5 raid rifts and not a single person gets an epic augment or there was only a single junk epic aug, that sucks).

The puzzle in Moonshade is highly annoying.

1.  The area to click the buttons is far, far too small.  Very easy to think you clicked it when you didn't.  You pretty much have to spam click and that starts moving your camera around bit by bit making it harder to complete.
2.  It's too unforgiving for a game that's going to have some built in latency.  You lag a tiny bit and you're done.
3.  It's too unforgiving even without that.  A puzzle shouldn't take two people just because requires you to click like a 15 yr old on a Mountain Dew bender.
4.  Anyone can click on the globe to finish the puzzle?  Are you fucking kidding me? We finished the puzzle and some random jackass came up and clicked on the globe and took the prize.  This was after telling them to stop trying to help because they were screwing us up. Their replay was that they didn't even know it was a puzzle and they were just running around clicking like a tard.  OK, terrific.
5.  It's very griefable and good samaritans are actually a hinderance to getting it done.  Some random idiot running around clicking shit will throw you off.
6.  The big fucking zone event text from people viewing the crap at Hammerknell is a really annoyance when trying to view green and red buttons under a mass of yellow and red text.

The puzzle isn't hard mentally at all. It's easy to figure out and it's easy to figure out the optimal way to do it.  The interface and the ability for random jackholes to screw you over make it a giant pain.  Did it twice, the second time someone stole his reward and then people showing up made it impossible to complete.   Most of the other puzzles encourage others to back off and wait and at least don't suffer from the need of precision clicks and a lag/person free environment to finish.  

/nerd_rage.

Up until this one, I had really enjoyed all of the puzzles and did them all. Then I got to this piece of crap and quit doing puzzles after 45 minutes trying to do it solo. There's a spot your can stand in just a bit forward and to the right where you can click all of them without moving. I never got any power to flow all the way through. I was always just a bit too slow.

The only other puzzle I've tried is the Stillmoore bat one. No where near as annoying, but still frustrating. Again nothing like the earlier puzzles. Playing against the interface is never a good idea.

I don't bother with puzzles anymore.

Moonshade and Stillmoor cured me of ever wanting to do puzzles again.  Fighting lag and the interface isn't my idea of fun.  Challenge my mind, please.

Yah, I found that spot.  I had it nearly done solo and then I misclicked one (as my arm started to cramp from all of the damn clicking) and my entire progress was shot in less than a second.

Best way was to trace the flow back from the exit with about a 3 count in between each click. Then just keep spam clicking in a cycle.  It's doable, but you have to be perfect.  You can't misclick and you can't lag at all.

Huge disappointment resulting from a rather minor point of the game.

I remember in the pre-launch hype Scott at one point said he wanted gathering (mining, etc) to be non-competitive. In that you didn't need to worry about someone 'stealing' your node because you were fighting the monster next to it. The whole spirit of rift was to be of cooperation (except pvp obviously), where more players = better experience.

Not only did that not happen at all with gathering (my first day in retail someone nabbed the ore node while I was fighting the mob next to it), but this world event is obnoxious with everyone in Meridian chasing after the same npc and static item spawns and trying to beat everyone to them. So in practice you either sit or run around looking for the npc/item to spawn and then you race to it and hope you beat everyone else to it. Waiting and hoping to not be screwed are not my idea of fun.

I messed with one puzzle once and didn't bother looking for any of the others.

Ran across my first completely fail healer in an expert this weekend. I'm actually rather surprised at how well my groups have gone to this point. I have to admit to some misgivings when I noticed the healer was sporting a greater faerie. But, even on my own cleric I've not paid any attention to the druid tree so I figured it was some sort of unique snowflake build that most likely worked. Then we wiped on the first pull in T1 Iron Tomb. But we had a fresh rogue tank who admitted to their newbness and took the fail. We struggled up to the spider boss. I was barding my ass off with hammering out the Coda of Restorations. Two of us survived the Spider boss by some uknown fluke. Then we get to whiny guy, easiest guy in the whole place. The first missed dodge/parry on the rogue's part created a deficit that the healer could never recover from. So, the warrior in the group offers to tank. He switches gear and spec and turns out a very respectable 9900 hp. Even that poor bastard couldn't survive the whole fight. We did manage it when I virtuoso'd out 15 seconds of Coda of Restoration on the rogue. I left the dungeon and then left the group.

My main problem as a MH was that I was always running full warden and never got used to any of the other healing souls. So spike damage in the expert dungeons on bosses was a problem. In each dungeon there was usually one guy that would give me a lot of trouble.

Gripe the first: Riding over an entire Zone to do Zone events... with attending aggro and just un-fun riding hither and yon.

Fix: Ascended power: aggro-free speed boost to mount.  If you are Rifting, then you'll replenish the ascended power token with each closed rift.

If you are just traveling and want faster/easier a-to-b, then hey... Ascended <-- file under perqs.

---

Gripe the second, if there is a zone event, suggest showing the friendly (public) raid groups on the map so one can head to the right spot (if desired); oh, and see Gripe the first.

That's especially fun in Freemarch before you get a mount. Figure a raid boss level mob might live long enough to...nope.

I'd almost add a gripe about level 50 players sweeping through Freemarch cleaning out all the collection shinies, but I figure that's normal for mmo. Though I didn't care to sit slogging through mobs in the scarred mire where I could see four different shinies in the graveyard but got zero as some dude just rolled through grabbing them. Being an mmo peon is fucking great. The Culture needs to develop an mmo.

A guest gripe from the fiancee: Why ar the cats purple and white and dead looking? How about some tigers and panthers ffs.

I'm /played nearly 24 hrs into the game, about to ding 20.  Having Fun.

But WTF is up with PvP?  I've done maybe 2 dozen+ Garden BG's (lvl 10-19) and without exaggeration maybe only 25% of those were wins.  There seems to be a consistent (?) superiority by Defiants.

So my question is about twinking: I don't assume there is some design inbalance, but these folks besides being maybe more skilled (every time?) must be alts.  Is twinking a big deal in PvP here?  I'm not really complaining, I just can't understand how else the other side can always win -- and win badly like ~20:500 so many, many times.  I have to believe there are buying high end PvE gear to equip these alts for advantage.  Is this real?

Not much twinking going on.  The superiority comes from three things:

a) PvP enthusiasts tend to roll defiant.

b) Spec (Soul build) is VERY important in pvp. 

c) Luck of the draw with servers and the bracket that you're in.  Most players you'll meet in the under 50 brackets are players working on alts that know pvp well.

Playing on Keenblade at endgame seems to be the exception.  On Dimroot, defiants won 80%.  On Keenblade, defiants lose 80%.