Rift: Planes of Telara

[Xuri]

So, like.... I put up a gallery of images (<--link) from my adventures in RIFT throughout this beta-weekend.

WARNING: The 59 images all load in full 1920x1080 (no thumbnails) for a total of 138MB...

I've been playing three different characters up to level 13-15, and I'm having a hard time deciding on which I like the most - my mage (Warlock + Necromancer/Chloromancer?), my warrior (Warlord + Paladin/???) or my rogue (Assassin + Bladedancer/Riftstalker).

My thoughts about the game in general so far, randomly summed up in list-form:

PROs:
-Extremely polished WoW/DikuMUD style gameplay - at least at levels 1-15 in both factions. Slightly more "worldly" feeling than WoW.
-I love the art style of both the world and the character models, as well as their animations (for the most part, there are some funky ones like male human swimming or female elf walking).
-Nice out-of-combat music (reminds me of Morrowind from time to time).
-"Vincinity looting" is awesome. Loot one corpse, and all other corpses nearby that you've got the rights to loot are looted too.
-Collections. You can find artifacts and books on lore that you get to keep in your personal collection. They can be found pretty much anywhere, which caters to the explorer in me.
-Rifts/invasions can be a lot of fun (even though chaotic at times), and can also act as an alternate method of leveling to questing.
-Runs very smoothly on my computer (no stalls while running around, no crashes to desktop or elsewhere)

CONs:
-Though very polished, there is little new in the combat/questing side of things, if you look away from the Rifts (which would be kinda dumb seeing as the game is marketed around those). Autocombat + extra actions on top, kill 6 wolves and get their intestines, etc. Works the same as any other recent MMO that has been released - which I guess can be either a pro or a con depending on your point of view.
-Follows the ancient art of letting the player fill his/her backpack with random crafting resources without giving any indication what they are used for. Results in meaningless hoarding and/or throwing everything away.
-Low-res skydomes and low-res flora sometimes create too large a contrast to the high-res character models
-The lighting/environment varies from super awesome (Pro) to really flat and boring (Con).
-Invasions/Rifts sometimes go overboard with the amount of elites that spawn and rampage through the lowbie areas - though that might have been a stress-test thing on the Beta?
-Pointless to join Warfronts (pvp "battlegrounds") if you're at the lower end of the scale in particular pvp bracket (10-19, 20-29, etc). Due to how the combat system works it's damn hard for the lower-level players to even hit the higher-level ones, and as such they get steamrolled pretty fast and feel completely useless (at least that's how I felt).
-No LFG feature - though so far I haven't needed it since I have yet to actually go to a dungeon.
-No screenshot key ingame (that I've found)

[Falconeer]

-No screenshot key ingame (that I've found)

And no keybinds for additional action bars (that I've found)!

[Xuri]

Go into keybinding settings, hover mouse over action-bar slot and press key.

[Falconeer]

Oh cool.

And by the way, screenshots don't do this game's beautiful visuals any kind of justice. I didn't like the graphics that much and didn't get the praises until I saw it moving.

[Lantyssa]

I really like the art style and quality in Rift. The landscapes are well done and the character models, while not varied, are good. In a first, they've made realistic female bodies more or less the entire way round and have some of the very few MMO forests which don't look like shit. Spell effects are entirely too loud and garish, however.

I'm digging the realistic humans.  For once I prefer playing one over some fantasy race.  Though really, humans in most fantasy games are a race unto themselves with their physical distortions.

[Lantyssa]

-Follows the ancient art of letting the player fill his/her backpack with random crafting resources without giving any indication what they are used for. Results in meaningless hoarding and/or throwing everything away.

This is one innovation from WAR others need to copy:  separate bag space for crafting materials.  The game throws a ton of crafting items at you before you've got a lot space, are anywhere near a vault, or have really learned how their system works.  And bag space is already so limited as it is with all the junk that drops.  I like that it gives you stuff to sell, but maximum sized bags probably aren't enough even in the early levels of the game due to it.

[Modern Angel]

My number one complaint would be the sheer amount of shit which drops. Class balance, PvP maps, individual abilities... issues with those are fairly minor and I have a lot of confidence in the team. But the number of drops really needs to be tweaked. It's borderline overwhelming.

[Mrbloodworth]

So, like.... I put up a gallery of images (<--link) from my adventures in RIFT throughout this beta-weekend.

WARNING: The 59 images all load in full 1920x1080 (no thumbnails) for a total of 138MB...

Your settings seem to not be on full.

[Threash]

So, like.... I put up a gallery of images (<--link) from my adventures in RIFT throughout this beta-weekend.

WARNING: The 59 images all load in full 1920x1080 (no thumbnails) for a total of 138MB...

Your settings seem to not be on full.

Yeah, either that or screenshots just don't do it justice.  I was gonna send that link to friends as i am too lazy to do something like that myself but it kinda looks like crap in those.  Game looks much better.

[Falconeer]

I dare to say that I have much better screens, but then again.. screens don't do it any justice. Plus, AA is turned forcibly off, which always makes up for crappy screenshots no matter what.

[Malakili]

I dare to say that I have much better screens, but then again.. screens don't do it any justice. Plus, AA is turned forcibly off, which always makes up for crappy screenshots no matter what.

Yeah, I found that the game looked a lot better in action than in my screenshots most of the time.  Though I was able to get a few good ones where I was zoomed out far enough that the jaggies weren't too obvious.

[Xuri]

So, like.... I put up a gallery of images (<--link) from my adventures in RIFT throughout this beta-weekend.

WARNING: The 59 images all load in full 1920x1080 (no thumbnails) for a total of 138MB...

Your settings seem to not be on full.

What's missing? All the sliders in my client were put all the way up to 11 (possibly with the exception of the first couple), but it could be that the crappy program I use to grab the screenshots is doing some "optimizing" on it's own, I guess.

[waylander]

After checking out the Warfronts the big things that jumped out at me were....

1.
Population imblance.  Defiants regularly had 20-40 minute queue times, and Guardians were virtually instant pops.  If that carries on through release there will be a lot of upset Defiant players who can't ever find a fight.  Maybe Warfront should just be FFA and you should fight against anyone else who queues for a match (ala GW1 GvsG matching).

2.
Premades vs PUG's seemed to be what a lot of people griped about. However if they fix it so it is only premade against premade then queues will be even slower.  

3.
PVP XP was boosted and the reward was decent even for losing a match, but the monetary rewards seemed noticeably absent.  Also the daily PVP quest was a 1 time deal compared to say Warhammer where you got a monetary reward after each match.  PVP seems to be an ok way to make XP, but not money the way it is now.

4.
Percieved faction OP.  I saw lots of Guardians talking about how their faction sucked, and I ran on PUG teams across both factions.  I noticed on the Guardian side that a lot of teams had 0 healers, tons of rogues, people tried to max kills instead of completing objectives, and they queued a lot at extremely low levels.  On the Defiant side I saw more balanced teams that actually completed objectives, and few Defiants who were extremely low level in the matches.

On the PVE side..............

1.
Rift invasions full of elite mobs camped quest hubs way too often, and the result was that people stood around or got killed when the entire horde of mobs trained on 1-2 people. This slowed down character advancement too much in my opinion, and the over abundance of elite mobs along with their frequency of appearance is just overkill.

2.
More levels of kill X of this or collect Y of that, and it makes the leveling process feel extremely boring.

3.
The planar vendors are still too expensive, and the rare tokens you need to buy the advanced gear don't come frequently enough.  Oftentimes you just outlevel the gear before you have enough stuff to buy it.

4.
Too many players also collecting X or killing Y to complete quests in the same area is annoying, and slows down character advancement.


I guess my general verdict right now is that I am unimpressed with the state of PVP content, character advancement, and PVE content.  I can live with the PVE side of things I suppose, but the PVP is not inspiring enough to retain players who buy this game with the idea that there is going to be some good RVR, competitive instanced PVP (what's the point of it?), or good invasions of the opposing faction's areas.

[Segoris]

2.
Premades vs PUG's seemed to be what a lot of people griped about. However if they fix it so it is only premade against premade then queues will be even slower.  

4.
Percieved faction OP.  I saw lots of Guardians talking about how their faction sucked, and I ran on PUG teams across both factions.  I noticed on the Guardian side that a lot of teams had 0 healers, tons of rogues, people tried to max kills instead of completing objectives, and they queued a lot at extremely low levels.  On the Defiant side I saw more balanced teams that actually completed objectives, and few Defiants who were extremely low level in the matches.

The good news about premades if you're a pugger - people cannot queue as a raid, limiting the number of a premade to 5 (currently 1/2 or 1/3 of people on a team in scenario). Bad news if you have more than 5 people who like to play together, unless of course you're Guardian as two groups can queue at the same time and get in the same scenario

Just saying that I noticed the opposite with #4 though. I fully believe your experiences, but mine were the flipside as I was regularly going against Guardian teams consisting of about 30% healers to the Defiants having 10-20% or so. It's why I ended up playing my cleric a bit in scenarios just to make up the difference a bit.

Someone commented earlier how ranged are king here - I'm noticing the opposite. Clerics are kings currently, then I'd say it's actually really well done in group play. Even when pugging as a warrior I didn't find it to be unbalanced. Guild vs guild and pug vs pug usually came down to who had more clerics though.

On the PVE side..............
3.
The planar vendors are still too expensive, and the rare tokens you need to buy the advanced gear don't come frequently enough.  Oftentimes you just outlevel the gear before you have enough stuff to buy it.

Could not agree more with the vendor cost. It is still way too high and the gear is not even worth it by the time you get all the required currency. Rewarding level 20 items that are obsolete by level 23, even though you don't have the currency for it until about level 25 just isn't a good system. Also, rare and epic tier 1 emblems need to be able to be converted to tier 2 at an exchange rate of say 3:1 or 5:1 or so.

I will add that invasion events can be more fun than usual (for pvp people) when trying to stop the opposing faction from completing theirs. Last night I was in a raid of 19-20 people, fighting two raids while also having to be careful of the final invasion raid boss with a nasty AE. That was some good times, making me thankful for being in a game without that crapass dungeon finder.

Though, this does mean that if you truly do not like pvp, do not go on a pvp server in this game. I know that seems like some captain obvious logic, but people are already complaining about pvp on pvp servers

[Ard]

3.
The planar vendors are still too expensive, and the rare tokens you need to buy the advanced gear don't come frequently enough.  Oftentimes you just outlevel the gear before you have enough stuff to buy it.

I'm not going to disagree with the fact that the costs need to come down, however, the only piece of equipment I'm missing off of the freemarch vendor are the epic pants (and I do have one of the two epic orbs for that).  I got enough tokens to more or less buy everything else, but I think the majority of them came from doing the Battle for Freemarch event twice, and the Tidelord one once.  If I was trying to get the items just from rifting alone, I think I'd be frustrated, since I only had a few of the emblems drop from that.

[Shatter]

Healers seem like they are pretty strong in the game and watching 3 level 10-12 players trying to take down a level 19 healer was like watching a laurel and hardy skit. 

One notably interesting part of the game is stacking.  A good example of this is how bard heals stacks with any classes +healing self buffs.  So in effect if you played a bard/riftstalker(Riftstalker has a +30% increase to heals on self buff) all your bard heals on yourself would go up 30%(plus other heals) as well as on anyone else that has a similar kind of self heal increase buff.   

[kildorn]

It's also pretty easy to spam heals at the low level without mana issues, and there seem to be very few interrupts/silences around. Throw in the liberal application of absorbs and instant heals and the really well done raid frames (seriously, yay for a game having usable healing frames right out of the box) and you wind up with a well healed team being pretty much invulnerable. About the only way my nightblade could do anything in pvp was his 2s disorient/stun out of stealth to open a healer up to burst damage.

[Modern Angel]

I had a friend who was laughing in real life because his healer had no cooldowns on his heals and a WoW Shield Wall he could put on people... it had a one minute cooldown. They ARE overpowered because of that, caterwauling on the forums about PvP aside. They're arguing the wrong thing on the forums. They need to make healing a little more difficult and add some meaningful choices or that glee at the ease of it is going to fade into boredom by level 50.

[Kageru]

Seems to be people are identifying cleric as the "tankmage" soul. Can heal, tank, dps giving you full role coverage, and lots of healing when you solo, with not too many downsides.

[Threash]

Yeah i expect lots of healers, void knights destroy them though.

[kildorn]

Seems to be people are identifying cleric as the "tankmage" soul. Can heal, tank, dps giving you full role coverage, and lots of healing when you solo, with not too many downsides.

Defiant side, my cleric was among an 80% cleric playerbase. Oddly my guardian mage and rogue were.. in a 90% anything but clerics playerbase.

But yeah, pve wise? There's nothing a cleric can't bring to the table in some way besides CC that I've seen.

[Dark_MadMax]

Played it this weekend and .... well its WoW light. I dont get why everything says its better polished than wow. I played WoW in late betas and vanilla and it was back then al superior game

It has decent graphics ,decent amount of content from what I seen. It cloned most of the stuff straight from WoW  down to very small levels. I guess dont fix what is broken

Rifts are just a gimmick at best and annoyance at worst. Like many said -once u seen one u seen them all. I got bored of them just after 1 day.

Worst dissapointment was with PvP .On PvP server pvp was way worse than in early wow/betas. I mean no one world pvps ,warfronts are just battlegrounds ..

Class design is worse. While customization are awesome, the classes themselves are pretty similar to each other.  WoW had 8 classes (or 9? )  - and each one of them was unique in style. Rift doesnt have stuff like druids for example , it has gazillion types of  rogues (which all play like combo point rogue ), warriors ,cleric and mages.  But only 4 -5 distinct  playstyles.


Its worse WoW than wow. I mean if it was like vanilla wow I would play it in  a heartbeat. But its not . It has all the bad parts wow gathered over the years (battlegrounds , uninspired questing,) and missing some good  from vanilla  (more playstyle variety, world pvp)


I cant say I like post BG WoW. But vanilla was one of the finest games made steered in very wrong direction. I  was hoping for something similar at least ,alas RIFT aint it . Its bland clone without a soul

[Draegan]

I wonder what Grunk thinks.

[Rasix]

Jesus H.  Punctuation then space, moron.

Reading that hurt my liver.

[Hawkbit]

It was a hate-chatbot. 

Seriously though, if you don't like something, that's fine.  But put some reasons you don't like it in there.  Pick it apart.  Because frankly, most of us here could give fuckall if you (or anybody else) liked it.  Rather, we want to know what parts of it didn't work and how to remedy. 

As far as classes playing the same, not really.  The chloromancer plays very differently than the other mage souls, in my limited testing.  My main experience is with pally/warlord souls and both of those souls.... well, how do I put this?  The buttons are pressed similarly, but how skills rampup for damage/threat is totally different. 

At live I'll be pally/void for guaranteed, fyi.  Death to magic users. 

[trias_e]

A friend just convinced me to pre-order this catastrophe waiting to happen, without even playing it.  Over drinks at least.  

At least the character builder is so fun to play with!  There's a better one now:  http://riftbuilder.lotd.org/

[Zetor]

The way things are now, I don't see myself playing a warrior or mage (assuming I pick up the game at launch -- still on the fence). Clerics get all the fun mage toys except for maybe cc; they're also way better healers and can spec to tank if they want. Same with warrior: rogues can tank/heal/dps while warriors can only tank/dps...

or am I missing something?

[Margalis]

Seriously though, if you don't like something, that's fine.  But put some reasons you don't like it in there. 

You talking to MadMax?

He gave perfectly good reasons.

[Threash]

A friend just convinced me to pre-order this catastrophe waiting to happen, without even playing it.  Over drinks at least.  

At least the character builder is so fun to play with!  There's a better one now:  http://riftbuilder.lotd.org/

Oh, thanks for that!

[Modern Angel]

The way things are now, I don't see myself playing a warrior or mage (assuming I pick up the game at launch -- still on the fence). Clerics get all the fun mage toys except for maybe cc; they're also way better healers and can spec to tank if they want. Same with warrior: rogues can tank/heal/dps while warriors can only tank/dps...

or am I missing something?

Sort of. My understanding is that the cleric tanking tree is extremely limited in multi-mob situations. Rogue tank is really good but to call the Bard a main healer would probably be incorrect; they're there for buffs and off-healing.

[Hawkbit]

Seriously though, if you don't like something, that's fine.  But put some reasons you don't like it in there. 

You talking to MadMax?

He gave perfectly good reasons.

Yeah, in my reread, he did give some good reasons.  I think I missed them the first time around because of the format of the post. 

[Lantyssa]

A friend just convinced me to pre-order this catastrophe waiting to happen, without even playing it.  Over drinks at least.  

At least the character builder is so fun to play with!  There's a better one now:  http://riftbuilder.lotd.org/

It won't be a WoW killer, but it's not a catastrophe waiting to happen.  It's probably the best put together MMO since... uh... WoW came out.

Which is kind of sad in and of itself.  This is what most of the second generation MMOs should have been.  We're only six years late.

[Threash]

Yeah, the first step to a "wow killer", if such a thing was even possible would be "able to run on grandmas computer" .

[waylander]

The way things are now, I don't see myself playing a warrior or mage (assuming I pick up the game at launch -- still on the fence). Clerics get all the fun mage toys except for maybe cc; they're also way better healers and can spec to tank if they want. Same with warrior: rogues can tank/heal/dps while warriors can only tank/dps...

or am I missing something?

No you aren't missing anything, rogue/tanks are the best tanks in the game.  Warrior tanks are not optimal, and therefore people will overlook them in groups later down the road once the general population realizes warriors aren't the best tanks.  This has been pointed out to the Rift devs time and time again, and apparently they are ok with warriors not being the best tank.

Clerics/Tanks are pretty solid and their counter is the stunlock-rogues, and spike DPS on them.

Mages, because there is no collision detection, cannot effectively be protected in the backline of PVP.  They have limited CC options, they are easily interrupted, and a melee can just run through them (during their 1.5 cast time on most spells) to use Line of Sight (LoS) to screw up their offense. Again a good rogue will eat their lunch before they know what's happening.

Necro pets can simply be ignored, and the pet owner quickly burned down to kill 2 birds with 1 stone.  This has also been pointed out, but never addressed.

The PVE side of things is relatively ok, but the PVP side of this game is not balanced, the PVP content is not compelling, and PVP servers seem extremely limited with world PVP options since people have to voluntarily flag themselves.

[Ghambit]

I'm interested to see how Warrior will stack up against Rogues as Tanks in the endgame though.  It's common knowledge rogues chew through energy like no one's business.  Warriors tend to use less of it and have mana as a backup option, making them a viable battlemage also if built as such.  Assuming long, complex encounters will be the norm. in the big instances how is a Rogue going to mitigate their energy use, dps, and threat over time compared with a Warrior?

One could posit a well specced warrior in a long encounter will be much more useful tankwise.

p.s.
Are they serious with this WEEK headstart thing?