Gripes, complaints and irritations.

[01101010]

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.

[Rasix]

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

[ezrast]

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.

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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.

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. 

[Hawkbit]

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.

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.

[ShenMolo]

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.

[snowwy]

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    So what obvious thing am i missing?

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.

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

[Draegan]

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.

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.

[Polysorbate80]

<-- 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)

[Draegan]

<-- 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.

[Polysorbate80]

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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!"

[Bzalthek]

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

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

[Ashamanchill]

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?

[Hawkbit]

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

[Lakov_Sanite]

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"

[01101010]

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.

[Polysorbate80]

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

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

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

[Bzalthek]

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.

[Hawkbit]

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.

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.

[Count Nerfedalot]

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.     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.

[squirrel]

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.

[Lakov_Sanite]

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

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

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.

[Bzalthek]

You're not even making sense anymore.

[01101010]

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.

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.

[ShenMolo]

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.

[Typhon]

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.

[Koyasha]

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.

[Typhon]

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.

[Ghambit]

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.

[Threash]

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.

[Ghambit]

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.

[lac]

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.

[Ashamanchill]

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!

[Nebu]

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.