f13.net

Official Website (http://stormlegion.riftgame.com/en/)

    * Level cap raised to 60
    * 1 new soul per calling
    * 2 new continents that "triple" the size of the existing world.
    * New shared-faction capitol: Tempest Bay
    * 7 new dungeons, 3 raids, 1 new Chronicle
    * Some new gameplay mode called Hunt: "New rift gameplay propels you into battling increasingly-challenging planar bosses"
    * "Dimensions: Customizable spaces allow players and guilds to own a sliver of Telara" (guild housing?)
    * Capes

Trailer is up on the official website, looks like a pretty different art style from what is currently in the game. Much more sci-fi.

For the souls, I would like a healing soul for warrior and a tank soul for mage, perhaps a real healing soul for rogue. Those are the only real compelling gaps I see.

Not sure about the world size. That much room for the population might end up with a dead feeling world. As it is, I can be out in the world and not see anyone and that's with just 2 real high level zones and two upper level zones.

I wonder how PA will work then. I will most likely be nearly fully capped by then, three trees + PVP done already. I'm starting to think that PA will wind up bitting them in the ass as it is. We are starting to tell the difference between people who are and are not heavily invested in PAs.

Gamespot article says Fall 2012 release?  Wow.

Level 60 means 80 soul points, right? I bet Trion is warmly anticipating the balance issues this will enable. Although they are introducing a new soul for each calling, so that bridge is kinda crossed anyway.

If they give warriors access to some kind of useful self-heal, or other way to reduce downtime while doing solo PvE, I might start playing mine again.

I'm looking forward to capes. I'd like to see how they animate in-game.

2 new continents? Are they all for 50-60 play, or will there alternate paths/activity for lower levels as well? I didn't see where the article specified either way.

Nothing has been said with soul points, but who knows.  If I had to guess, I'd say no just because of balance issues, but who knows.

I would assume the new continents are 50-60 only, but I see no reason to think that they wouldn't have some low level stuff.  But that would completely kill the old content.  I would guess it's just 50-60,

Hay Draegan, how come you can post this, it travels through the RSS feed, a non-zero amount of time passes, I read it in my reader, and I still had time to link your content post this awesome map here before you do it.  :awesome_for_real:

W.I.P. Map of Telara in the RIFT expansion (http://www.riftjunkies.com/2012/06/08/storm-legion-world-map-compare-land-mass-size/)

They cleared up the soul points thing today. More points and more than 51 in a tree.

I try not to shill my website here if possible.  Thanks for posting!  :heart:

That's a lot of fucking space.

The explorer in me is drooling at those two new big islands.  Gotta get my Necro up to max level as well!

Have they announced the new souls yet?

Nope.

I just noticed the cross faction capital. I'm really hoping they eliminate the grouping restrictions on PVE servers. This was the stupidest thing they took from WoW--particularly when you're doing rifts or zone invasions and there are two groups fully cooperating but unable to officially group together, heal each other, etc.

In any case, very much looking forward to this. After a couple of beta events leaving me feeling a bit "meh", more so than GW2.

I'll be playing again.  I'm going to be rerolling out of my rogue but I'll wait until the souls are announced to pick.

Also, with the same faction capitol, I've been thinking that they should get rid of Guardian/Defiant stuff and then just overlay their three-faction team conquest stuff on top of everything.  Factions are meaningless in this game now anyway except for open world pvp and pvp rifts but you can easily put that into the faction team thing anyway.

I will purchase this and play the hell out of it if.... they balance warriors in pvp. 

I'm sick of warriors having high dps and tons of cc in pvp.  It caused me to leave the game the first time.  If they balance pvp for the classes, I'd come back in a heartbeat.  Rift is the MMO I wanted to love... but couldn't.

Released a trailer for the new housing that's coming:

GameSpot link to video (http://www.gamespot.com/rift/videos/rift-storm-legion-dimensions-trailer-6398075/).

From what I have heard from guild people in the beta, the personal slivers are really cool. It's a case of, here have a piece of the world and here are item placement tools. Have fun storming the castle boys. The only limit seems to be your imagination and your ability to manipulate existing world items (rocks, trees, boards, beds, chests, everything) to realize your imagination.

On a further note, per the WoW tradition of releasing core game play changes early, the current souls are available on the PTS in their lvl 60 incarnations. There be dragons in these waters. Some things are hilariously broken, namely that one of the warrior charges is their highest damaging ability. The new souls are being kept for the actual expansion release.

There are some really odd choices. Macro'ing as it has been known in the game is gone for the most part because they have removed the cooldowns that made the monster macros possible. Whether this is a good or bad thing remains to be seen. It's certainly different and is the source of some entertaining firestorms on the forums.

In the case of the bard, it turns out that if you can get someone important, like Scott Hartsman, to notice your complaint, things do get better. Because the new bard is great. While not fundamentally different, it is mechanically smooth and entertaining. Stats now mean something, all the green numbers are belong to me. I have choices with my builders, but no real options for bad choices, just less optimal ones. Same deal with the finishers. I am now encouraged to use my finishers instead of sitting on combo points with a stacking buff that I can then turn into direct healing or maintain for increased general healing. Plus, using any finisher refreshes my 30 second buffs. It's good to be a bard.

They are also doing weekly live streams from the beta. Some are hilariously bad like the new rogue soul reveal. Who knew that doing a publicity event on the same server near live players could be a bad idea.

Could you elaborate on this?

I'm not sure what I can elaborate on. While you can still technically macro, what people mostly used them for was to pile up abilities into a single button.

For example, there's the standard rogue grinding spec.

The standard combo point builder macro is:

#show Puncture
suppressmacrofailures
cast Puncture
cast Precision Strike
cast Quick Strike
cast Keen Strike
cast expose weakness
cast reprisal
cast poison malice

This one button works because all of those abilities either have cooldowns and/or conditionals. Puncture currently has a 10 second CD. Precision Strike has a conditional and a 10 second CD. Same deal with Quick Strike. Keen Strike has no cool down. The last three are Off GCD cool down abilities.

So, the way the system works is that it tries to fire off the first available ability. If it can't, it will fail on to the next and the next until something works. So, at the beginning of a fight. Puncture will go off. The next press will fail on puncture - it's on CD - it will fail on Precision and Quick strike because the condition has not been met and eventually fire off Keen Strike because there is no condition and it has no CD. The third press would fire off Precision because puncture is still on CD and Keen Strike is it's conditional. A 4th press would fail on puncture and precision as they are both on CD. Quick would fail because it's condition has not been met and Keen would fire off. A 5th press sees Quick finally go off because the other two are on CD and Keen is it's conditional. Somewhere in there you will have button mashed while the GCD is still cycling so Expose Weakness and Poison Malice would have gone off because they are off the GCD and can be hit while that is going. If you dodged, then Reprisal might have gone off as well because it is also off the GCD.

So, the way it works now is that none of those on GCD skills have cool downs now. The conditionals are still in though. So, repeated mashing of that macro would see repeated applications of puncture which is a DoT with no initial damage. Thus no damage ever because you could reapply it before it ever did any damage. It used to be that the CD was the length of the dot, so pretty much a fire and forget deal. Now you need to watch a DoT timer to have it work right. Quick and Precision strike still have Keen Strike as their conditional, but now they have no CD so you can't macro all three together. If you do, it will fire keen and which ever is at the top of the macro. Quick would be the natural choice as it now does the most damage, but it is more expensive from an energy point of view so you would energy starve yourself in short order spaming that.

Bladedancer, which is the soul most of this spec is built off of is actually a fairly easy rotation with the way it works now in that you really only have two builders, one aoe ability, 3 finishers and then a set of macroable self buffs. But it's damage is somewhat debateable at the moment. The specs that are higher potential have several more dots to manage. The thing is that this is a fairly significant change in the complexity of the game. Outside of a single mage spec, most DPS specs can be adequately played with three to four macros. Playing without macros is generally a modest net gain, but not enough to entice more than the most dedicated.

If you look at a soul by itself, most of them look to play with 6-7 buttons, but once you add in two companion souls with abilities that can be used, the button total can easily double, all to be managed with out much in the way of queues from the game. And that's where the firestorms come from. There's a very vocal minority supporting this change.

Any word on the pvp equalization thing? I remember a vocal minority bitching up a storm about that one too (don't take away my punching bags! qq!).

Some of those things do seem interesting, though I likely still won't play a bard. Not sure about the ubermacro removal thing -- ubermacros were a bandaid solution over a system that encourages buttonmashing at its core. They could just turn most 'regular' abilities (not cooldowns) from non-primary souls into passive effects enhancing the primary soul's abilities, though I imagine it'd be even worse of a balance nightmare. GW2 and TSW have taught me that less can be more as far as hotbar buttons are concerned (though Rift still is nowhere near as bad as loremasters in LOTRO, for instance).

e: I also mainly play tank/healer on my cleric and warrior, so I only really used ubermacros for my rarely-used dps offspecs. There are still macros with 2-3 abilities for my healer cleric (especially for an -icar spec), but it's definitely not "playing the game for me", as the main challenge in healing is the decision-making involved in pushing one of my many healing abilities or timing my 4-5 tank-saving / mana cooldowns. Ditto with tanking, though I admit warrior tanking feels like feral bear tanking back in WOTLK (-> spam a no-cooldown high-damage/threat AOE, sometimes use mitigation skills).

A couple of the other big changes.

They decoupled mage healing from damage done. Now it's some a calculation based on base cast time. This is good from a pvp perspective. But they seem to have done some under the hood changes to the tools mages use to do the healing, so spells are responding differently. They also capped healing from Radiant Spores at 5% of the mage's total health. Currently it is a 16% chance to heal for the damage done to the target. On heavy raid damage fights this single spell from one player can do 10-15% of total raid healing.

They have also put in new stat cap calculations, but instead of following the WoW traditon of phasing in the changes as you level, they are just in. On live I currently have a 50% self buffed crit chance. I have 22% on the PTS. To compensate, across the board damage numbers have gone up. On the PTS, my marskmen spec that I am bad at has me at 3.9k DPS solo, on live I can hit 2.3k in a group setting. So, a net positive, but the feel is certainly different.

They also killed off the major unexpected -icar healing specs. They removed the Mein of Honor buff that enabled all of those specs and moved Doctrine of Loyalty, the work horse healing spell deeper in the tree. They never were happy that 11 points in the tank soul provided some of the strongest synergy in he game.

PvP normalization got officially thrown under the bus after the first test.

However it appears that they might backdoor it in by just slapping flat, across the board reductions on skills in pvp with this small pair of notes:

I have tried to get into a WF on the PTS, but the queues have not popped at all. There was a focused test giving out titles last night, but I was at work. The forum responses are mixed, unlike the vocal hateon for the normalization.

Oh, Planar Attunement is account bound. Each character shares the same pool. You only have to gain a point once and then every character you have can spend it. I have not experimented to see if it is account bound or server bound. With an eye to the future, early points cost much less but increase in cost as you have more. Someone figured out that each extra point costs an additional 2200xp capping out at slightly more than 1.6 million for the last point currently. They did make things "feel" better in that each point is now an actual click. You don't need to bank several levels worth of points to get something the way it works on live.

The current PTS is getting compared to LOTRO with some regularity for some souls.

I haven't played much beyond mage healing and that is only in 5 mans. But from what I have read, healing has just been themed up a bit more. Warden is now the AoE healer, reminiscent of -icar healing. Purifier is now tank healing with lots of shields. Sentinel is now sort of a battle triage healer with lots of really fast heals.

Apparently the reaver seems to be the go to best tank spec now and it's  a wall of buttons with all of its dots.

Thanks. It sounds like macros will still be viable, but that you'll need to use a few more total. Not quite the evisceration I was hoping for as someone that thinks macro gameplay isn't much fun.

While I recognize they had a problem with the "one-button" gameplay, and a secondary problem with Marco management being a required part of the game... I read this and think that they have only made things worse. 

The NDA, it done fell down go boom.

Anyway, the NDA is gone so there's more information coming out. Here's some of the biggest PvP change.

So basically they're eliminating the advantage provided by raid gear in pvp [good, except it doesn't include trinkets/seals/crystals/essences... how powerful are the best ones compared to a random level 50 blue one?], but they're keeping the "play hundreds of warzones without being able to dent your geared enemies until you eventually build up enough gear yourself, at which point you can roflstomp the noobs and bask in your awesome gearskillz" mentality alive.

Meh.

Pre-expansion patch is live. I logged in with enough PA pioints to finish off Tier 1 and 2 of an entire tree which was nice. I also logged in to every one of my talent trees reset, which was less nice. Feeling completely overwhelmed by the changes as someone who hasn't touched the game in a few months. Re-specing a tree is one thing. Doing it for 5 trees is another.

I think I'm going to try to recreate my inquisicar spec and then just take pre-set souls for the rest until I figure out what has changed.

Taking raid weapons out of the hands of melee in PvP is a step in the right direction.  That and the new skill trees may get me to consider blowing $15 for a month. 

I might wait for the expansion. Solo capacity is either enhanced - mage - or flat out moved - clerics and rogues - to the new souls. For mages, pairing harbinger and chloro makes for a soloing grind monster. Rogues and clerics relied on tools from the tank tree for their super grinding specs that have been changed or moved to the new souls. Rogues lost Rift Scavanger - unused combo points on a mob converted to health - and clerics lost the heal synergy from the justicar tree. In tactician, rogues pick up a buff that heals them each time they are hit and clerics pick up several health siphon dots in the defiler tree.

Anyway, they are "upgrading" their server hardware and merging servers again to create one server group for all of the various queues, dungeons and pvp. I don't know if this is market speak or what. I play on one of the kept servers and it feels busy, lots of AFKs in Sanctum, but I had started and moved off of two of the servers to be converted.

It's probably a little marketspeak, but its probably also legit with all the new zones coming online.

It seems like the -icar specs are still intact, at least for soloing. The AoE group heal was moved up the tree and out of reach, but you can still pick up salvation and the self-heal with a few points in the justicar tree. Frankly the -icar specs always felt brokenly OP in group settings, so I can't say I'm surprised or all that disappointed. Outside of master mode dungeons, my inquisicar spec was usually enough to play as the groups healer *and* do very competitive damage.

Hm, I was using an inq/cab/sentinel spec for soloing/rifting, and my survivability came mostly from the '90% of Vex damage heals you' talent - and in tough spots I could use healing breath and/or fear the enemy to get a few piddly slow-cast heals off (this was VERY rare, even on ember isle with my blue gear). I assume those trees haven't changed much?

I believe inquisitor aoe damage got nerfed, but otherwise those trees seem pretty similar to how they were before.

For some reason, they decided to take AoE out of most trees and build dedicated AoE trees and these trees are at best suboptimal for ST and are often flat out terrible at ST. However, there are a number of fights that call for periods of AoE and periods of ST. For the most part, I would say that these are fights designed for the old paradigm, but I don't know that I'd really trust these developers, who really like their very tight DPS checks, or any developers really to design with fights that avoid mixing things.

Anyway, the first phase of the new World Event was fairly underwhelming, but the second phase is shaping up to be entertaining with Instant Adventures in the main cities. Granted, mobs have a tendency to explode upon spawn because of the people, but the concept is still cool.  They need to do something with the invasion adventures though. The mobs keep their invulnerable buff until they are nearly on top of the wardstone, so I have yet to see one of those succeed even with nearly everyone blowing their heal the wardstone thing.

Ya unless they can figure out a way to delete about 3/4 of the available skills it seems like a bad move to me. Probably financed by Logitech or Razer to sell more 17 button mice :)

Devs could introduce auto-cockstabbing to game and a small vocal minority would support it. Look at Rokal. He doesnt like macros so he doesn't want anyone to be able to use them.

I don't mind macros, but I think there is a big difference between Macros in most games and macros in Rift. Macros are great when they provide convenience or let you customize how you interact with the game. They aren't great when they play the game for you. I expect that for a lot of players in Rift, they would jump on the forums to copy a talent build and then copy the attached macros into the game. They didn't really need to learn what any of their abilities did because the macros would cast them in the most efficient order and they didn't need to understand what was in the talent trees to follow a template. That doesn't make for very interesting gameplay, or allow you to appreciate different classes and souls much.

Rift does have a serious problem with ability bloat, but I think it's not as bad as people make it out to be. The truth is that each soul gets 4-5 very similar 'basic' abilities that allow them to work, but you could remove these abilities from you bar unless it was the tree you were investing all your points in. Some of the more hybrid-y specs did get a little unwieldy, but most builds do not realistically need to hit more than 5 abilities regularly and some cooldowns. That seems manageable. SWTOR by comparison is much, much worse.

I don't like how macros work in Rift so I didn't really use anything outside of a few shift-cast macros to save space. It was unfortunate that a player with a 1-button macro might perform a little bit better than me, but it didn't impact me much as someone that only casually plays. If they decide to limit macros more, I think it will make for a better game but they will need to address some of the bloat. I do think macros are a box they can't un-open, however.

All they'd have to do to make me happy is disable macros in the battlegrounds.  Pushing 1 button to PWN pisses me off.

If they remove all cooldowns then the only macros that will still work are the conditional ones which are probably the ones you really hate. :)

Right now I just hate macro warriors with raid weapons.  When the raid weapons get removed from pvp, then half of the problem is fixed.

They did that a while ago. Now it's pve with pvp weapons until you get a pve weapon. They are generally better itemized for pvp, with vengence (pvp AP/SP) and valor and less of the item budget spent on hit. They've been good with bringing out an equivalent pvp set when a new pve set is released for the past two raids. As a matter of fact, for Storm Legion, the first three pvp sets referenced earlier are ready and waiting on the vendors. I have yet to see the pve stuff.

The complete derp that are these new soul reveals is just stunning. First, for some unknown reason they have done the last two, rogue and cleric, on live shards. The cleric one was only slightly less trolled due to the fact that it was not a pre-order beta weekend. But about 10 minutes in, players started showing up. So, we had the dev character sheeped and shambled frequently. At least this time he figured it out early on instead of running around like a derp. Oh, the live producer with the wino bag, classy touch. At least they didn't get trolled from their office this time.

So, the new cleric soul is a DPS/Heal support soul with some interesting damage transference mechanics where you link yourself to a target and x% of the damage comes to the cleric. They can then use shared heals and damage to heal themselves and their linked target back up. But, because the "numbers" are not set, two and a half weeks before the thing goes live, they turn off the scrolling combat text so the viewers can't see much of anything. Mind you, this new soul has really, really subtle spell effects. So, most of what we saw was a little dwarf running around throwing down some target dummy - actually a kind of cool thing like the Stoneclaw Totem from wow that is automagically linked to the cleric and all cleric aggro is transferred to the thing - the mobs running at the totem and then some cast bars going. I appreciated the not so subtle passive aggressive from both the moderator lady and the actual class developer because she passed along the question about why the text was off and the class dev kept saying he wanted it on. Wino guy passed along the numbers are in flux bit as an answer.

I appreciate that they are trying with these things, but they need to plan out what they are going to do better here. They have been wildly varied in quality as well. The warrior one was the best from a players point of view as they gave out tons of information and numbers.

For an expansion that's out in a week and is no longer under NDA, I haven't seen too much info on basic gameplay. There's a fair bit of info about the 4 new souls as well as the player housing (dimensions) on the storm legion site... but not much else. Is there an LFR tool now? How much time does it take to level from 50-60? How is questing (sort of a weak point in the original game IMO): is there still a guardian-defiant split, and how many quests are there for such a huge landmass (or are they depending on IAs instead)? Do all of the new dungeons have master modes? Is the scaling system going to keep old content relevant, or just a novelty at level cap? Are cross-server zones 'in' or planned to be 'in'? (I seem to remember some experimenting with it when IAs were first introduced)

Of course I wasn't looking too hard either, but hey - if they want me to buy the expansion instead of getting more MOP sub time / resubbing to SWTOR / spending $ in the GW2 shop, they'd best entice me first! As it is, I'll probably wait a week or two after release and gather feedback.

edit: for example, I read in a throwaway comment to a Massively post that mob tagging is gone, so it basically works like GW2 - as long as you hit the mob or heal someone who's hitting it, you'll get xp/kill credit/loot too! This is absolutely HUGE, and I have no idea why they haven't expanded on it (or the cooperative nature of IAs etc. for that matter)

Yeah, the tagging thing is one of the nicest features. You don't get actual dropped loot, but you do get coin and there's no group XP cut. For that matter, you even get a group bonus if there are enough people involved.

There's still technically the two faction split, but it only matters for flagged, open world pvp. There's a Dalaran for this expansion and as you are out and about you can group up with the other faction for quests, etc.

No word on and LFR tool either way. There are no master modes at the moment. They will most likely show up at the next raid tier.

I got to a whopping 52 in the beta, so I'm not sure how long the whole trip takes, but it didn't feel any longer than any other level. I did notice that coming out of the first zone after completing it and about 1/4 of the other first zone I was about 51.5. Things take a serious jump in power in the second zone, but I think that it was mostly lvl related rather than straight power. The second zone has lvl 53 mobs and I was 51.5 at the time. Completely ID geared, I was having trouble if I pulled 3 mobs at a time and I did get wtf'd once when I jumped an invasion pack. That was unexpected.

I think questing is better. It's sort of a cross between the on the rails thing from WotLK combined with the kill a mass of mobs from BC. The way quests work now is that each hub is part of the zone story quest. There are generally one or two story quests at each hub. The quest sends you out to an area and most of the mobs have this new little icon, this icon means they are the target of a "Carnage" quest. They are the new kill x quests. You automgaically accept the carnage when you kill the first mob of a type. There's usually two or three of those on the way to a quest or at the quest area. The carnage quests auto complete when you are done so you don't need to head back to turn them in. There are also quest starting things, ie pick up x bear asses, once you get to most of the story quest locations. It's all the standard stuff, but its presented in a slightly more dynamic method which punches some entertaining buttons.

Completing the carnage quests nets you the new currency just like zone events. You can take the currency to the new city to buy gear. The gear can then be upgraded at least once at lvl 54. It may be able to be upgraded again, but I didn't check. You buy the first level of the gear then you just buy tokens to upgrade the gear. All of the pve gear I saw works this way that I saw.

There are now gated rifts, the Hunt rifts. They have tiers to them which need to be unlocked. The first tier is available at 50. There are something like 18 in each tier. The next tiers open up at 60 and there are 5 or 6 total tiers.

IAs have been their own path for a while now. These are mostly kill x and y quests or collect x bear asses, but there are some others like defend the wardstone or kill big bad. Up until the expansion, they had worked fairly well. With the giant zones in the expansion though, I have been less excited by them. It's mostly a problem of travel time or a general how am I supposed to get where you want me to go. "Old world" IAs have a fairly aggressive porting system after a great deal of push from the players. The IA developer is fairly active in making these fun, so I imagine they will work much better in a fairly short period of time.

Mentoring is mostly a level cap thing. You mentor down to do something different while still getting XP and relevant currency.

The most exciting feature in the expansion is the sliver player housing. It's enough to get me to buy the expansion, though I'm not sold on content outside of that. I logged in for the world event leading up to the expansion which was pretty underwhelming, but when aren't they?

If you want to see what things are like, they are letting past subscribers play for free until the expansion.

Found out that the City Siege IAs can be done by anyone. While the mobs are all skull lvls at 50, they can be hit by anyone. Kind of neat. Not sure if their outgoing damage scales though, you might get one shot, alot.

Thinking about picking this up, although I haven't played it seriously in a while (and never made it to max level) so I don't even know what IA stands for. I always loved the soul system though, and I'm a sucker for player housing.

I'm still not sure what to think (thanks for all the answers btw, dd0029!). Rift is basically the best WOW that's not WOW, and yet despite all of the great improvements it has made, it still feels sort of bland (from the quest/lore to scenery to animations to spell effects to sound effects). Hopefully the new dungeons/zones are better.

IAs are instant adventures - basically it generates kill/collect/escort/gather/etc type quests for you, and groups you with other people doing IAs in the same zone. After you finish an IA, you'll get another close by, and after doing a few of them, there's usually a miniboss or event-like thing (such as 'protect wardstone') that ends the IA chain and starts a new one somewhere else in the zone (and offering to teleport everyone there). It's a really awesome system, sort of like doing dynamic events in GW2 24/7.

The story is actually kind of interesting through the whole game. Unfortunately, this isn't 6 years ago when the story can be told and be engaging through quest text. The story here is definitely in the EQ vein in that it's there if you hunt for it. I just recently completed the water quest line, the one they added with the second raid. It was a fairly standard thing, but there were some interesting quests and Rift lore tied in, however, it was all in the little tiny quest pane. Something like Warhammer's Tome thing might be handy for this game.

I'll give you on the scenery, it looks good, but it's bland for the most part. From what I've seen in the expansion, things are just way bigger.  One of the things they went on about in one of the non class live streams I watched was the idea of vistas. I did find myself occasionally stopping as I was touring the new zones and just admiring the way the elements tied together. Not all that often, but it did happen. I guess size does matter, because things do look a little better.

So, anyone jump on this? If so, got any impressions to share? I'm still sitting on the fence, but I admit the potential of this expansion is pretty promising.

(Well, except for all the stuff I hear about an Oculus-esque vehicle dungeon...  :why_so_serious:)

I spent about an hour "playing" last night.

First I tried the pre-made template for the new Cleric soul (Defiler). They've got a pretty nice system where it will automatically place abilities on your hotbar, if you want, in a manner that someone might actually want to use. After reading all the abilities and playing the rest of what was left on my bar, I opened up the talent tree and noticed that the game had picked talents I wouldn't have. They'd picked mostly healing talents where I wanted dps talents to level with. I reset the tree, starting over again, and then said fuck it and went back to the spec I had been using about 5 minutes later. Rift has essentially added 4 new classes with the expansion but asking you to jump into them at 50 is rough.

After that I checked out Dimensions (player housing) which was great. They give you a really good set of tools and it's clear people will be able to make some pretty cool stuff using them. My one complaint about it is that prices for extra dimension keys for different areas seem high, but it could have just been the ones I was looking at. It's also possible that platinum will be much easier to come by at 60.

Tonight I think I'm going to make a melee build for my cleric and head out to the new leveling content. Looking forward to it.

It's relatively interesting. I need to revise my comment about leveling speed. It's taken a nose dive compared to pre 50. The questing is still moderately interesting with the story quests breadcrumbing to new carnage quests and other random pickup quests.

I will say that things take a fairly severe jump up in mob power once you get past the first zone. I'm not sure that was a wise choice. I was fully end raid geared going into the expansion and once I got out of the first zone, I had to modify my play style fairly significantly, from big huge multi mob pulls to single, maybe duo pulls. These mobs are fairly serious HP bags. Unfortunately, they are just that. Its just standard play style. With the long fight duration, 20-30 seconds, things tend to get a bit dull.

The new hunt rifts are kind of neat, but tough with just pickup peoples. The two boss stages have a mechanic where they gain a massive shield if there are other rift mobs up around. This mechanic is not terribly clear.

For cleric leveling, check the Rift forum for something people are calling "Just Seer". That's what all the clerics in my guild are swearing by and picking up spam quantities of server firsts.

I have not done the new dungeons beyond the one that showed up with the preorder, but I am hearing that they are really not pug friendly. Lots of not terribly obvious mechanics.

Interesting, thanks for the info. Out of curiosity, are those levelling builds optimized for people with raid gear from 50, or would they work for us plebs too? (I'm asking this because this was a problem when I played earlier this year - all of the guides seemed to assume I was at least HK-geared with synergy crystals and all that jazz. I also read somewhere that ID gear would last until level 56-57ish)

I'm leveling up a cleric right now (lvl 23) and the game has an amazing amount of good in it.  My only suggestion would be to get the Gadgets addon.  It's incredible, better than any WOW unitframe addon I've seen.  The expansion itself is pretty amazing in itself.  With all there is you can do, and the different types of content, the only thing it's missing is a LFR similar to WOW.

The Just Seer spec and the Duracell spec in the guide section of the forums both work extremely well.

I'm also leveling just with IAs too so I'm always leveling with other people.

The just seer works fine with non top raid geared players, you just won't want to go buck wild with it. Find your limits. I've replaced ID relic weapons at 54, with blues from the PvP box, and am starting to see very compelling green left side gear from quests. A good tip I got today was to use a spare sigil/source thing to slot in new lesser essences.

IAs are definitely the way to go sub 50. Just remember to buy the planar gear for each level bracket. Doing some pvp is not a bad idea either. You will be in full blues and purples the whole way. Remember to buy/upgrade your sigil/source thingee. I see tons of people at 50 with the starter two slot thing. Why people leave those stats on the table is beyond me.

Some initial thoughts on the expansion now that I've gotten past deciding on a spec. For the record, I went with inquis/defiler/justicar (51/16/0) and it's been working fine so far, so the quest content doesn't seem to require excellent gear or min-maxed specs.

They weren't exaggerating about the size of the continents they added, they're massive. As far as I know each of the two continents comprises a different 50-60 leveling experience. I started in Cape Jule since it seemed a bit more colorful, but I took a peek at Pelladane which also seemed cool and had a more alien feel.

Cape Jule:
(http://i.imgur.com/DIOO1.jpg)


They've changed the quest flow quite a bit. The general "kill X" quests that are a staple of the genre have largely been removed as traditional quests. Instead of talking to 5 NPCs in each hub and having them give you BS reasons to kill enemies, you are automatically granted the kill quests (called Onslaught quests) by killing one of those enemies. Enemies that are part of an Onslaught quest you haven't started are marked by a special icon over their head. Because of this, most quest hubs only give you 1-2 quests. You'll sometimes see other quests along the way to those objectives or off the beaten path if you explore, and you'll also have the option of doing Onslaught quests for mobs in the area.

I have mixed feelings about Onslaught quests. On the one hand, they smartly cut back on the amount of filler quest text you have to read. With so many fewer quests to provide text for, they are able to put some actual story into the quests you are doing and in general the quests make a bit more sense for the main story of each zone. One of my big complaints about TERA is that you get 5 pages of boring quest text for every quest to kill 10 boars. It gets in the way of the fun part of the game (the combat). Rift's combat just isn't good enough for combat to be a reward in and of itself, so the Onslaught quests end up feeling like a shameless grind. And boy, there are a lot of them.

They are technically optional: each Onslaught quests gives significantly less EXP than a normal quest, and they never give items (just zone currency). Still, the temptation to finish a quest you started is always there and abandoning them is impractical because you are granted the quest again the next time you kill a mob of that type. So far I have finished every Onslaught quest I came across in Cape Jule but I can't say I enjoyed doing them after the first few.

I think they could easily fix this in two ways:

-Onslaught quests should not be tracked as regular quests. It's pretty annoying to have your quest tracker quickly fill up with kill quests just because you ran into a new type of mob on the road.  If they were tracked in a smaller area of the UI and did not compete with other quests for space on your tracker, they would feel less obnoxious.

-Onslaught quests should never have a kill requirement higher than 10 mobs or so. Anything past that is more mobs than you would likely have killed of that type while doing the quest you are actually in the area for, at which point you are just sticking around to finish the Onslaught quest. It feels grindy pretty fast.

Overall I'm enjoying the expansion and I'm glad to see that the developers seem to have found their footing. They've really embraced the techno-magic angle in the new zones and it makes the game feel like something unique rather than just another Fantasy MMO. I know a lot of people complained about how boring/soul-less the 1-50 content was in the original game, and I think it's the one area they've  improved most for Storm Legion.

Those are technically Carnage quests. The Onslaughts are the defeat the invasion waves things. Most of your points are spot on though. The carnage numbers in Cape Jule and Kingdom of Pelladane are all over the place, from 10 to 30. In the later zones, it seems to have standardized at 16 unless the mobs come in groups, then it's usually 10 groups. This happens most often with the bugs. They often come in groups of 2 to 3, so the Carnage is usually 20 or rarely 30, either way, it's almost always 10 fights.

Each continent defintely tells its own story, I'm not sure though that you can level to 60 solely on one continent. You will end up moving into fairly high level areas quickly. City Core and Seratos are 53-57 zones and I was 51 coming out of Pelladane. While I could handle the 53 stuff, I was only 52 by the time I was starting to run into 55 mobs. And this was doing every Carnage and random pickup quest as well as all of the story quests.

I'll have to say that the leveling curve seems a bit off. It felt fairly slow from 50 through 54, but once I got to 55 it seemed to accelerate and was much less of a slog.

About the dungeons, not so sure about them. They seem to have missed the Cataclysm lesson. These dungeons are hard in regular mode. Don't get me wrong, they are neat. There are lots of mechanics and the fights are varied, rarely a tank and spank to be found. However, these bosses often have soft enrage timers and my guild group was needing a second group healer instead of a support healer to get through, which made the enrage timer really tight.

Yeah, I've been reading about the dungeons being too hard (http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-general-discussions/dungeons-raids/340224-storm-legion-normal-dungeons-too-difficult-most-players.html) (with most of the hardcore raiding community predictably going 'lol scrubs l2p'). Is it just hyperbole, or are tanks really getting 2-shot unless they were in omg uber gear from old RIFT raids? If I was to play again, my blue-geared cleric would probably get laughed out of the dungeon even before I zoned in, even if I tried to pick up a few SL armor pieces from early quests - btw, how much time does it take to replace every slot with SL gear?

Not really sure. I will say that the guy who MT'd for us through Maelforge did get two shot on the first pull of one of the lvl 60 normal dungeons. Then it happened again on the second pull. Then it happened on the first pull of the second pack.

I think some of the problem might be that the tanks are going in with their old omg uber gear and the new scaling is pwn'ing them in the face. I picked up a blue shield yesterday and passed it on to our MT. He replaced his relic Maelforge shield with it. We checked and it had 40% more armor than his old one. I was reading this thread (http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-general-discussions/general-discussion/340418-new-realities-sl-normal-instances-what-you-need-know.html) and noticed the thing about scaling. I imagine that's what's holding alot of people back. Because when you are looking at the stats. The old goto stats are mostly the same when compared to orange ID gear. Additionally, the new gear often only has one bonus stat, AP, Crit or Crit Power instead of everything. Then there are the set bonuses. So lots of people are reluctant to give up old gear.

Additionally, they have made some odd choices with gearing options. With the original game, it was fairly easy to be geared for dungeons. You could get a couple of pieces crafted and get a couple of the normal dungeon rewards and you were ready to go. DPS could rune for hit. I don't have an armorsmith yet, but there aren't any easily acquireable crafted rogue tanking pieces. For DPS, there are no purchasable hit runes. The recipies may be dropped, but I haven't heard or seen yet. I have done both of the lvl 60 dungeons and only one of them had a quest and the reward there was a ranged weapon, so no easy toughness there.

About those lvl 60 dungeons, I would say that they are both oddly easier than the two leveling dungeons I have seen. The mechanics are well telegraphed and mostly self explanatory. Standard don't stand in things, spread out, clump up, etc. There's also very little trash. The Empyrean Core only maybe 12 trash pulls. I missed the run up to the first boss in the Tower dungeon, but it looks like each boss has a little RP trash clearing where the mobs are neutral and you get an ability that one shots them as long as you aren't in their frontal cone. There are two actual trash packs before the last or second to last boss and that's it. They are still hallways, but there's movement and some basic story to why things are there.

My suspicion is that they designed the leveling dungeons as experts first and then just toned them down for leveling purposes. The leveling dungeons I have done call for very quick reactions for mechanics as well as heavy group and tank heals. The mechanics aren't as well telegraphed or evident.

I would say that if you are SL blue, you are good to go for dungeons. If this is a blue lvl 50, you will probably be fine for DPS for the first dungeon. You will probably replace all or least most blue lvl 50 vanilla gear by the end of one of the first zones. In hindsight, I should have replaced most of my ID gear beyond trinkets - which are non existent as far as I can see - by 55 or 56 instead of holding onto most of it to 60. I did replace all of my ID weapons, including relic main hand, by lvl 54 with a PvP reward boxes which gave lvl 54 blues.

While I'm here, I want to comment again about leveling speed. It got faster once I hit 55. In the beta, I much preferred Pelladane as the opening zone, however I noticed that lvl 53 mobs at lvl 51 were a problem so I decided to do Cape Jule as well. I came out of that at 53. I went back to Seratos and did half of that. By then I was 54 and starting to hit lvl 57 mobs. So I went back and started City Core. I just followed the City Core quest line through the next three zones. I did three or four hours total grinding out the new Hunt rifts with the guild to open up the first lvl 60 set. They are very good XP and there are usually groups going for  them. Don't burn out on them or expect gear from them, but do some for the XP.

Do you still buy non 50 planar gear from random merchant throughout the world, or is there one in the city hub?  I can't recall.

Sub 50 it's at the port town in each Zone. The 50 zones break that a bit, but the only really confusing one is Stillmoor. I have never leveled a Defiant so I don't know where that guy is, but the Guardian guy is at the second quest hub in the zone. In IPP and Shimmersand the vendor is at the center, neutral, non special faction, port hub.

That's what I remember.  It's a shame since I'm leveling via IAs and I'm missing out on ports  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, on my last alt through, I would stop at 20, 30, etc and hit up the relevant town to get the port then get back on the IA train. The only other detours were som PvP randoms to get enough favor for that tier of blues.

So, I'm into the expert grind and yeah, this is not so good. Just prior to the expansion, they nerfed AoE healing across the board and seem to have forgotten that they designed with that healing in mind. There are also scads of tank one shots out there. There are lots of fights you need to two heal as a consequence, which frequently means you aren't going to hit the designed enrage targets if your DPS isn't top notch. This means that healers are only slightly less in demand than the tanks. I've yet to luck out with a random during prime time, instead I'm hoping I can get in on the two or three guild 5 mans going on. This stuff is doable, if you have a very solid group.

Speaking of DPS, there was an explicit comment in several places where they mentioned they were going to design fights to be melee friendly. So not the case. This is some full on BC level melee hate on stuff here.

Outside of the dungeons, I will say that the other lvl 60 stuff is interesting. There's lots of "just one more" with the carnage quests. The gear you can get from the zone currencies are equal to expert gear once it is upgraded and, unlike the vanilla edition, is relatively reasonably priced. If you ground it out, you could upgrade a piece in a day, but one a week is more likely. There are also lots of different ways to get that currency. There are easy daily quests for at least 20 of them. They drop from invasions and rifts. There are weekly quests to complete X invasions or close X number of upper level hunt rifts. There are the zone events as well. While not as involved as the Ember Isle events, they are generally more interesting than the original kill X invasions and close X rifts events. Though there are still a couple of those "simple" events.

For all I don't like that they made trade skills a fairly significant money sink, I think they will work better in the long run. Crafting augments are now player made instead of dropped and you have to make and break down significant quantities of raw materials to get them. The vendor portions are not insignificant costs and should pull money out. The new dimensions/player housing is not my thing, but some people are experimenting and making some neat stuff. Someone recreated the Pig and Whistle from Stormwind.

The dungeons are another case of designing for the audience they want, rather than the one they have. Designers really need to remember that most people who play these games play them like ARPGs and just accept that the bleeding edge is going to burn through everything in a week. They can't be stopped and even trying to contain them is detrimental to the rest of the game.

Do you think they are copying WoW and releasing for the hardcore and nerfing later for the casuals?

Is there some automagic way to set up Gadgets Unit Frames or do you just have to add each item and save it and adjust it?

Release hard and nerf has been the apparent operating principle for everything other than Drowned Halls so far. I'm not sure it's the plan though, if it is, it might not be a bad idea to telegraph it like WoW does now with the progressive buff thing. Even then, I'm fairly certain that it's a bad idea to release intro content with that in mind. How many people did that turn off in Cataclysm?

For gadgets, I don't use the unit frame bit, but from what I recall when I tried it, you do have to do each individual bit.

I think you have to do it separately.  It was a pain in the ass but it only takes 10min.

I got my cleric up to 48 last night.  Would of been 50 if the Giants weren't on.  I found an awesome grind spot that makes leveling amazingly fast.  I'll be hitting 50 in about 1.5 days played.

I play a Defiler with points in Cab so Bound Fate spreads Tyranny.  There is a place in Freemarch where there is a farm full of undead stuff, which is a focus of an IA.  The mobs are around level 13/14 or so.  Essentially what I do is drop my little tanking totem on a central mob target, then run around Marrowing (dot/heal) every mob around me.  I Dot/Bond the casters.  What this accomplishes is, the totem acts as a gathering place for every NPC that I target and I never get touched.  I then Tyranny/Bound Fate and everything dies. (5-10 mobs at once)

With a veteran experience pot, I get around 850xp per mob in the late 40s.  I join the local IA in Freemarch and if I'm not kicked I get a few extra xp every few minutes as other people clean them up.

This probably works with other AOE grinding builds, and I tried the other popular Cleric builds, but this one has the most survivability to it.  It's amazingly efficient to round up mobs too.  It's not a lot of work at all.  The only way I die is if my totem gets stuck on a wall and all the NPCs come after me.

This is much much faster than doing just IAs.  Also, since you're deleveled to 14, I couldn't find any other spots in the game where IAs were triggering that this worked so well and so fast.  Though, I might have to try the trolls in Stonefield, but I only have two more levels to go until I hit the expansion content.

I never tried just grinding while mentored. It's interesting that that works. Most of what I did mentored IA for were inscribed stones and PA crystals.

Note that, for unknown reasons, they decided to make XP pots mostly useless post 50. The bonus goes down to 10% for XP, but it does stay 100% for PA XP. Speaking of, that is another neat thing about the expansion. Everything you do gives both regular and PA XP. It's not split, it's just plain doubled. Kind of neat.

Some of the guild went into and 3/4'd the first 10 man. From what I heard, things were well designed, not easy, but not nut punchingly hard.

Went into the new 10 man last night, Triumph of the Dragon Queen. I'd say that it is easily on par with the difficulty level of Gilded Prophecy when it came out. Though I am going in this time with much better players and parts of it are still a real challenge. The last boss in particular is a testament to their commitment to killing everyone, immediately. He's got two raid one shot mechanics, one has to be dealt with and one has to be avoided and neither has much room for error. Bards are back to irrelevant buff bots again though.