The Shrine

So have you guys been doing the dungeons? I did King's Breach today in a group. It was easy except the 3rd boss Autoch who is impossible if you weren't behind a wall since he kills a guy each time he charges, and the group broke up since we were too tired for some silly gimmicks. I find the difficulty in the dungeons to be borderlining unreasonable for a pickup group, though due to the soul system you'll probably be able to find some kind of combo that eventually works by overloading on heal/dps/something. Overall they maintain the illusion of hard without actually being way too hard. The trash of this game seems to be really hard, but I guess it's to balance with the fact that bosses seem to be relatively easy. It's pretty ridiculous when some trash has better melee capability compared to the boss, though.

No I can't stand pick up groups and I'm doing more than well off of solo/2-3 people quests and rifts. Since the experience and quest rewards aren't super amazing I'm guessing the main draw is the loot? Maybe once I get higher in level. Spending hours to maybe get some good loot was one of the things that soured me from WoW.

The gear progression in this game isn't that big. It's not like if you had a full set of blue or even purple gear (if they even exist at this level) Autoch wouldn't be killing a person each time he charged. I just did it because it's something different. Since there are many classes that can rez it's really that big of a deal to wipe. I think my group wiped 5 times on the trash and 0 times on bosses minus Autoch which I was pretty sure we weren't beating since he's way overtuned. You got trash that is genuinely difficult since you got mobs that can kill you in 3 seconds when all their big moves are up. Like I said, it felt like it was borderlining impossible but eventually you won't get as bad a break when a mob tries to do a 3 hit combo of doom since it'll miss a hit or at least you'll block two and then you'll beat it. Of course if you've some kind of well-oiled machine of death you can heal through that too or dps through that but it's not needed. That said it's kind of humbling when you see a mob hits you for like 1500/1000/1000 in succession, and makes me wish I was a Paladin.

Even Autoch who is apparently the hardest boss in the game right now isn't really that bad. My group of 1 healer + 3 others got him to 20%, and when you consider that each time he charges, someone basically dies, that's not that bad of a result. The fight is way too gimmicky as it's utterly impossible to heal through his charge damage without 2 healers so you have to stand in a spot where he can't charge at all, and I don't like to bother with gimmick position fights unless there's no choice. After 3 wipes we figured that there was no way this guy is going to die unless we stand in some magic spot but then people were too tired to continue. I expect they'll fix that encounter up by lowering the charge damage so that it no longer instantly kills someone the moment he KBs the tank. I mean, 855 damage per tick dot is more DPS than his melee damage on the MT and he does that on one person every 10 seconds.

Believe it or not, I actually find well-oiled machine of death to be rather boring. I ran one when I was in EQ and it's cool to tell about your friends how your 3 guys can do what others need 30 to do it but it's actually a lot more boring than it sounds like. Then again maybe it's not entirely fair to call my group pickup since I did all the positioning/moving so that nobody ended up standing in a frontal cleave or a fire and that's the stuff that usually trips up pickup groups.

Messed around with the tank classes, Paladins is definitely way better for single target tanking if you ignore the fact that Void Knights are bugged/OP at the moment so they can keep up 10 pacts forever (which is like having 3 attack points/5 combo points permanently). They even have Captain America's shield charge move! Reaver is better for AE aggro and probably better for getting high contribution in rifts, and probably do a bit more damage. That said Paladin single target DPS is surprisingly high when you get shield slams that do like 300 damage, since that's 3 point finisher range DPS.

Yeah I got my paladin to level 20 before going back to my rogue from the first beta I played in. Given more time to think about the skills and the recent adjustments to rogue souls (got a 24 Eth and a 25 Mathosian riftstalkers/assassins with different thirds) in general I'm loving it. Under certain conditions I can survive forever with my riftstalker abilities where my combo points on a target just died go into healing me. Provided enemy damage doesn't outpace my killing speeds. So far the best I've done with that mechanic is 5 consecutive (each one agroing while I'm still being attacked) kills with me fighting no more than three at once and one of them dying really quickly in that scenario.

I've gone through and given a lot of thought to playing a warrior when the game releases but I don't see much for me other than the paladin. Gave reaver, paragon, and champion good ol' college tries, too, but had the most fun with the paladin. That 100% heal/10 minutes is a doozy, but I'd still rather have my riftstalker combo point heal (mixed with 30% increase to healing effects and my level 25 rogue can heal himself for ~700 hp at the end given five unused combo points. I did love my paladin, though. Ideally once I got shield charge I was going to get the greater primal pet from the beastmaster tree, but the disarming thing made me go for twenty points in instead of 18. That shield charge is nice but once again my riftstalker can basically do the same thing (no root, of course) three ways while giving me a massive buff.

Gave mage a try for an hourish but the mechanics didn't interest me at all. Never been a glass cannon type. Still need to try cleric.

I looked at the Riftstalker tree and I'll have to reserve judgment until I see how well they tank something that does a 1500/1000/1000 combo attack. For example Reaver is much better than a Paladin for a lot of random stuff if you're trying to optimize killing speed, but as soon as you run into a mob that can do 3500 damage in 3 seconds you're going to wish you have the Paladin cooldowns. The problem is that self heal abilities don't really matter if the mob can drop you 3 hits unless your self heal abilities are way overpowered. It's very nice for rifts and leveling, but presumably the harder content resembles more like dungeons than rifts. Of course you don't have to do the dungeons either, as the rifts are plenty fun themselves.

My impression of the Riftstalker is that you're probably supposed to be weaker as a tank but rely on combo activated abilities to have comparable mitigation via short term buffs. However if these abilities aren't overpowered then the first hard hitter will just eat through your combo defenses and then you'd hard a very hard time surviving. It's hard to say just looking at the tree, but generally speaking interesting mechanics are either underpowered or overpowered and there is no middle ground here.

For me it isn't about actually tanking, but taking some abilities that simply make survivability as a rogue easier and then reinforcing them with the damage from another tree. The short ~10ish second damage and crit boosts after rift teleporting to a target paired with other burst abilities from other trees tear things up. Add in the heals and the shields and I become a mediocre off tank. I'm not going to even bother entertaining the idea of tanking dungeons bosses or most elites. At best I could tank the 2-3 person quests with a mage and cleric and switch to guardian stance for increased threat generation. There's one thing about a lot of those riftstalker abilities is that they basically all generate extra threat. Because of this I ignore a lot of the tree when I'm soloing because threat generating skills generally deal less damage then, say, their assassin counterpart. My stalker stance actually adds a 10 second threat debuff, as well, which makes burst damage much less risky in groups.

Tried to do Iron Tombs with 3 people (level 20, 21, 15 healer) and it's a lot harder than people claim even though that's the 'training' dungeon. I noticed that most of this stuff would be utterly trivial if you have 2 healers, and since there are no real DPS test in the early dungeons this means if you wimped out or just happened to have a lot of people pick healers or even just have some points on the side for healing (bards, chloro) it's not going to be hard. It seems to me if you just take people primaily speced as a tank with heal on the side (both rogue and cleric can do) there's no way you can lose to this stuff but it'll also be pretty boring! I think there are more DPS test fights later on (Emberlord is supposed to be one of them) so this method won't always work.

Official Rift server list is out

US Servers

Belmont PvE
Briarcliff PvP
Byriel PvE
Deepstrike PvP
Faeblight RP
Gnarlwood PvE
Greybriar PvE
Keenblade PvE
Lotham PvP
Reclaimer PvP
Seastone PvP
Shadefallen RP
Shatterbone PvE
Snarebrush PvP
Spitescar PvP
Sunrest PVP-RP
Wolfsbane PvE

I guess they kept the names as far as I can tell after all. The server I spent the majority of my time on day...something one word is gone... Dayblind? Whatever I just played on it to get away from the population found in most other shards.

I decided to play on Belmont Defiant side, PvE server. It's the top of the alphabet so it'll definitely have a lot of people, hopefully not too many! Well if it turns out Belomnt has queue during prestart I'll probably pick a different one, but that's the current plan right now.

Yeah same here. Typically, even though I hate getting ganked, I prefer PvP servers but since I'm going to care more about my Guardian I guess I'll go play my PvE Defiant on Belmont if I get sick of playing my rogue or getting ganked. But, yeah, I'm not putting up with any queuing.

They're resetting it for live right?

High Pop PvP servers tend to keep it interesting.

Yeah they're resetting but Briarcliff is the top of the alphabet for PvP so most likely it'll have high numbers, same with Belmont. I think the bottom of alphabet is high too (Wolfbane was always high in beta).

High population can be interesting... 20 minute queues prompt me to find a new server and I hit one of those during beta on Belmont.

Pfft, 20 min queues, I remember 1 hour queues in WoW! Man up and wait it out!

Yeah and WoW blew back then. What I'm saying is that if the shard is full and there are plenty of less full ones (like in the beta even during the stress test) then I'm going for less population. I don't care how 'interesting' it gets. Fighting for PvE spawns and having 30 guys fighting in a standard minor rift is not any fun in this game.

I'll be on belmont as well, Defiant.

I saw an hour long queue on Briarcliff during beta.

Really? Your friends still planning on making Guardian characters there?

Not sure, those are a different set of friends. I only managed to log on Briarcliff like 3 times in the Open Beta so no way I was going to do that on retail.

I suspect you might see queues even in Headstart period since there's only like 15 servers for US (less than what they got in Open Beta), but I assume they did it that way because they'd rather have queues than having too many server with low population until they've a better gauge of what the population is.

That popped into my mind too but I'm just hoping they looked at pre-order numbers and thought that was all they really needed [/falsehope]

I think I'm gonna put my Guardian on the Reclaimer server.

The servers seems pretty hammered right now, but then that was true in the betas on the first day when you've all these guys taking time off to get on it, so who knows what happens when I get home.

http://ca.kotaku.com/5769470/rift-might ... y-for-rift

Hehe, too many people!

I think people severely underestimated the number of crazies that'd take a day off to be the first guy on.

Seraphina MM/Ranger/Sabo
Rinn is my Mage
Maelynn is my Cleric

Don wrote:I think people severely underestimated the number of crazies that'd take a day off to be the first guy on.

>_>

In my defense, I am actually very sick...good timing?

I just think it's funny all these people who clearly thought: "Who else would be crazy enough to take a day off for a game!" only to find that there's no shortage of people like them. If you manage to get in first, more power to you, but it's like camping out for a midnight launch and complain all the copies were sold out because you weren't as crazy as the guys ahead of you.

I'm Zol on Belmont Defiant side.

Yeah it was funny - I was actually around when the servers got opened they went from empty to high population in seconds and full within a couple minutes.

Okay, well tonight the Belmont server has a much, much shorter queue than Reclaimer so Defiant here I come. Making a warrior named Trias. Also my Reclaimer Guardian is named Yemeth and he's a rogue.

Edit: Hopefully when they reach some kind of equilibrium with the servers they'll allow us to move characters to servers without half hour waits.

Belmont here I come

I'm guessing you'll see another influx of people on March 1st so it's still too early to see how it'll turn out, but hopefully people will stay away from the full/high population ones.

I'm praying they're ready to open up a LOT of servers since I imagine people are still crazy enough to still want physical copies of an MMORPG even though you can download the entire game from them as long as the game is still being ran by the developers.

I'd think even in the digital age the guys who preordered must not be the majority, so I think the servers will get pretty hammered yeah.

Well jumped onto Belmont to level my cleric (named Yemeth, also made a rogue named Pierce) and two minutes later they took down the servers to add more for launch so at least they're adding more without that "on the fly" craziness from head start. Hopefully it'll be enough to make a difference. There's certainly already a bunch of them (status page: http://www.riftgame.com/en/status/index.php ). My biggest fear is that they don't add enough and further expect us to switch servers and effectively abandon characters.

Shrinweck wrote:Well jumped onto Belmont to level my cleric (named Yemeth, also made a rogue named Pierce) and two minutes later they took down the servers to add more for launch so at least they're adding more without that "on the fly" craziness from head start. Hopefully it'll be enough to make a difference. There's certainly already a bunch of them (status page: http://www.riftgame.com/en/status/index.php ). My biggest fear is that they don't add enough and further expect us to switch servers and effectively abandon characters.

It's actually more worrisome if they added too much since Rift depends on having a minimum number of people for the game to work (the zonewides can't possibly work with 5 people in the zone).

That I'm somewhat confident they're ready for. Can't be rocket science to merge two shards.

Shrinweck wrote:That I'm somewhat confident they're ready for. Can't be rocket science to merge two shards.

Nobody in their right mind merges servers unless it's absolutely unplayable otherwise. There is just way too much negative stigma attached to the action. I'm looking at WoW census and it shows some server have 2000 active CHARACTERS so that's got to be a ridiculously low population, but you don't hear WoW merging servers. Now of course WoW can probably function even if you're the only person on the server while soloing, but Rift can't work like that unless you want to never do major rifts (and even minors get tough later on).

Ah, well, I guess you're right. I'm not worried about it - it looks like they added a bunch of but not too many servers.

Well it's only bad if you have a crystal ball that tells you 3 months from now the game will flop horribly due to unforseen issues.

Of course if you have that kind of power you should use it for something else besides predicting the fate of MMORPGs. This isn't like most MMORPGs where you can clearly see why it will fail, so if it does fail it's not something I can forsee at this point so no point to worry about it.

Since we're all on the same server should we create a guild or at least all join the same one?

We were talking briefly about this in game, but I do have the means to do a site/vent for a guild for us if we decide to create one. But would if be a better idea to join an existing one? The problem is that there still isn't an established pecking order with guilds yet. We don't know who the good guilds are.

I'd like to have our own guild, but I won't be on as much as some other people, so I have no idea what we should do.

I have a friend from work that is on our server who also does not have a guild.

I joined the guild Heretic for now. Depending on how endgame stuff turns out it may or may not be necessary to raid super hardcore. Besides I doubt any of us have a playing time that'd fit with a real hardcore guild.

*Coughs*

To me hardcore is competing for world top 10, and I don't got the time to do that anymore.

Yeah, pass. I think Shellie and I are mostly just looking for a guild with sociable people that are just looking to play the game and have fun as opposed to hardcore raiding.

The jump to a PvE server is grating. I got to scarlet gorge on my first defiant character (got there twice as Guardian) and the middle of the zone which usually revolves around a certain amount of ganking and partying to counter the ganking was just a bunch of dudes questing. Still fun, it just takes a lot of the tension out of the game which I can't say I prefer or not.

I ended up joining Behemoth. Nice guy with a mediumish guild roster. Website, vent, etc. Seems casual but they are willing to help with quests, instances.

Sounds fine to me. I work the next two evenings/nights but I'll send you a tell next time I see you online.

Saw you were 35 on your warrior, Don. Just started giving reaver a chance on my warrior (recently 29) and it's pretty ridiculous. Slower damage than my old favorite the paladin, but I'll take DoTs, consistent heals, and energy conversation over quicker kills.

I'm not sure how the Reaver class is supposed to play because there just aren't that many mobs worth AE dotting in this game. The improved lifetap only works if you've a swarm of weak mobs and those aren't really a threat to any tank, and you won't find them in the open world a lot outside of phase 5s.

Paladins pretty much don't lose health once you've the two talents that heal on blocks against weak mobs, though it takes longer to get there compared to Reaver getting improved lifetap.

It works a lot better in practice than in theory. The heal DoT, the 9% heal a kill, and using a shield means I'm ending most fights with all my health. There's also the AoE attack that hits up to five enemies and heals you for 100% of the damage done. The ability that makes DoTs AoE is great even when you're talking two enemies since the cooldown's so low. My favorite initiator is throwing on three DoTs, using the skill that makes DoTs 'putrify' (DoTs remain on enemy, but it's direct damage based on how many are active), and then using a finisher. By the time the DoTs putrify I've got my next finisher ready and the fight is basically over. I also enjoy actually having energy and getting to use skills as they cooldown as opposed to waiting for a damn bar to fill up.

I'm concentrating on my defiant rogue right now. Trying to build an assassin/riftblade/nightstalker where I take the healing benefits of a riftstalker (30% enhanced healing, heal myself based on how many combo points are left on a target when it dies), the damage and abilities of the assassin, and the combo point and finisher bonuses of nightblade.