Rift 1-50

[Don]

Bunch of random thoughts in no particular order...

Having 6 enemy factions in the game keeps the enemy consistent without seeing the same guys over and over. Well, you see the Death guys a lot, but obviously those guys are the powerhouse faction too so it makes sense.

Titans are my favorite model so far (Stonefield) though there are only two of them in the game (Centius and Occarim).

Of the zones I liked Stonefield, Moonshade Highlands, and Stillmoore. I really disliked Shimmersand, and I recommend skipping quests (at least some of them) in that zone unless you like wasting a lot of time. One of the quest requires you use an item to AE random spots on cloaked things you can't see in a very large area, and the item you need might not even be there and that's on par with the Scarwood Reach quest where you need 5 Bloodweavers when there are only 2 of them in the game, and even that really isn't too bad if you do the quest in offhours (about 5 minutes if you get all the spawns, but can obviously be a lot longer).

Dungeon-wise, I think Gatekeeper Kaleida is easily the best one out of the non expert zones, just because the fight is so long. Longer fights don't necessarily make the fight better, but so far I don't have any fight that's short & tough, which probably make sense since this is not supposed to be the hard stuff. Quite a few boss I ended up soloing after rest of my group wiped at 10%, including the last guy in Abyssal Precipice.

There is a Richter in the town of Belmont, but I found no references to What is a Man or a dark priest named Shaft. Stillmoore feels like the logical endzone to the game, while Shimersand is just sort of thrown in there to make sure you've enough quests to hit 50.

Void Knight is not a viable PvE spec, not in the sense that if you pick this you die but it's not the powerhouse people think it is. It's a great spec to make a screenshot showing you how awesome your stats would be if the mob actually hit you in the rare moment you had a 10 stack RD/RS up but no one is good enough to do that on a reliable basis unless you got multiple healers on your back (in that case your survival isn't really in question in the first place unless it's a raid). VK almost feels like a class dual wielding shields. If you want to get these impressive looking stats you'd have no offense whatsoever, and you'd also have practically no threat, so you're not really doing anything useful unless aggro is totally trivial on the fight.

Order of Mathos appear to be the hardest faction to get since the mobs that give high faction are all raid mobs. Start grinding that early!

As an aside I have the recipes most of the earlier factions for Weapon/Armorsmith, and I'm working toward the recipes on Order of Mathos/Icewatch/Dragonslayer. I haven't bought any of the recipes requiring Artisan Marks, but I have 350 of them so I'm about halfway to all the Orichalum recipes I need (don't even have the skills to make it yet but right now I'm not doing that'd require it as my friends are catching up in levels). If you see something on an earlier faction vendor that's tradeskill based, I can probably make it and I have all the materials somewhere in the bank.

[Don]

More high end stuff, haven't raided because I realized no one actually cares if you're number 7, 17, or 7777 in the world so no reason to get mess up your life for that.

The tanking talents for Justicar/Riftstalker is designed assuming that if you want to tank as one of those you must be a moron so they better make it foolproof. This is also true with all the Warrior DPS trees. These trees are 100% self-contained and require no tradeoff whatsoever, so it's kind of like having equivalent of about 100 points if you're one of those talents because you don't have to give up anything to get your core abilities. Some people say Justicar/Riftstalker are better end game but this remains to be seen (obviously those guys say they're better but what else is new) but what is obvious is that these classes have it easier on most stuff. For example the Riftstalker AE taunt is on 45 second cooldown, whereas all the Warrior AE taunts are on 1 minute. The Riftstalker group 'get over here' attack pretty much trivializes the hardest pulls in expert T1s that involve 4 mobs, 3 of them ranged spread out in a large area. It's not that you can't do these pulls as a Warrior but you'll have a hard time moving the last caster mob to where you need to AE them and this may cause someone to die or even wipe.

Charmer's Caldera and Abyssal Precipice is almost never done, probably because people think when they hit 50 they're now ready for Experts. This is kind of stupid since you got to grind Icewatch/Dragonslayer faction anyway, and while you get like 5 visible pieces of L48 blue gear from just the quests, Experts really do want a full set of L48 blues. While it's most noticeable in tanks you'll definitely feel the lack of DPS too.

I've done 4 out of the 5 experts now (though only beaten 2 of them). If you're a tank just lie about how much toughness you have if it's below 50 (especially if they want something greater than 50, just say over 9000) and blame the healer if you wipe. It's better than getting thrown out of the group immediately because you don't have a full set of T1 plaque gear before ever setting foot in T1 content. Realistically just say you'll go as DPS and watch some other poor guy die since almost always if a healer asks for that he actually sucks at healing so let someone else die instead, even if you're sure you could've tanked better.

That said there are some bosses that'd be absolutely insane without ~40 Toughness and probably places unreasonable burden on your healer. Ragnoth in IT and Battlemaster Atrophinus in Realm of the Fae comes in mind.

Here's my detailed thoughts on the dungeon themselves:

Iron Tombs

People tend to think Iron Tombs is the first dungeon so the expert version must be easiest too. This is not true. It's about average out of first 5 (FC definitely easiest before Queen fixed). The 3 Kings is the first hard fight, because you can no longer CC them on Experts and killing the cleric gets you healing debuffed, so you need to be able to interrupt the healer through at least 2 out of 3 kings (killing him first is too dangerous). Bonelord basically requires your party to never fail an emote and he's trivial if you do that. Ragnoth does a ton of damage by spell and by melee. The final guy is actually pretty easy assuming you avoid his PBAE.

Foul Cascade

This was the easiest dungeon in experts before Queen was fixed, and is still the easiest dungeon to get to the end though Queen may give you problem. Every fight is pretty much same as their normal version (the Countess drops bombs while teleporting now but it's easily avoided) and the extra fights are basically straight up tank fight (range DPS Sparkwing if you don't want to deal with his AEs). Queen spawns a 15K HP add every 16 seconds or so. You probably want to pull them to the tank and AE them down unless you've super DPS and can burn her down before they become a problem.

Fall of Lantern Hook

Didn't tank this one, so can't offer much on the tanking end. The first guy seems like he'd hit hard (has 3 dogs now) though it gets easier as you kill the dogs. The second guy is still all spell-based damage. Note that you can use charge effects through lava/fire/whatever as long as you don't end up in them. If you don't interrupt his Cinder Burst someone is probably going to die, but you got 6 seconds to do that. The third guy is all about spreading out after he does his gravity pull. Emberlord is still a DPS race. There's some guy after that, but my group wasn't able to kill him on time.

Realm of the Fae

For the guy with the hives, you want to pull the boss to the hive and AE the hive, but if that's too hard for your tank to figure out (as was in my case) you can just AE the adds at where he spawns. We actually killed him before we could kill the hive so it actually didn't matter where you tank him, though I suspect that's because people had no idea what they're doing (Hive is 35K HP, boss is 150K HP, but somehow boss died before 35K of AE damage even though you should be using only AEs). Battlemaster Atrophinus hits ridiculously hard (5K on special moves). The water elemental is annoying because you have to move around so much and it's easy to:

1. Run out of room.
2. Fall off a cliff.
3. Leash him because you went too far.

We didn't beat the last guy because it was too late and people had to log, but didn't look like it was that hard.

[Shrinweck]

My highest character is my rogue (44) and I'm getting through the levels a little more slowly. I've started to let my characters sit and maximize rest xp before getting back to them. Still grinding through outfitter (225) and just started runecrafter today (80-90) nearly bankrupting myself in the process. Need more artisan marks. Should have been more diligent with the daily quests and taken up a second trade skill sooner.

My idea of a riftstalker assassin that I dreamt in beta has basically been thrown out of the picture. While all of my roles still include riftstalker, it's up to the 13 points needed to get the combo point remainder health refund talent. I've settled on four roles for my soloing needs so far - assassin, saboteur, nightblade, and bladedancer. Interchange assassin and nightblade on my whims for sneaking about and being careful about agro range. Saboteur against hard single targets and AoE weaklings. Bladedancer just to kick major ass. Probably going to trade in nightblade for bard since I've found I can contribute the most with bard to invasions and whatnot. My bladedancer build is close, though. Playing around with actually putting in the full 51 points into that tree.

[Shrinweck]

I hit level 50.. Echoing your love for Stillmoor although the quests I did on Shimmersand didn't seem incredibly terrible so I guess I missed the ones you hated, luckily. Shifted my expectations and basically all of my builds so far have included 51 points in the one soul per role. Also I'm having no luck raising the hundredish platinum for the level fifty mount. I did a little Order of Mathos grinding and that wasn't incredibly mind numbing with an audiobook/podcast going in the background even with the mobs going down before I could get hardly any hits in at all.

Not sure there's much of anything else for me to do at 50 without joining a guild which I've been looking into with a bit more interest lately. Until then I'm actually having a little fun playing an hourish or two with my mage (gadzooks! since I hate mages) and my warrior is level forty. I must say I'm kind of jealous at Guardian mounts. Those things are so much cooler than robot horses.

On another note I maxed out my outfitter but I'm having no luck with getting those plaque things through master outfitter quests. Not that I'd really have the materials to make any of it any way, I suppose.

Also so far this global event is boring as shit. None of the unique death rifts are any fun at all. Which is made disappointing because the unique way they typically change rifts is typically pretty awesome. I'm hoping it's just a blip before the rest of the event slowly unfolds this month.

[Don]

What's your character's name on Belmont? I may have gotten the wrong name?

Some of the new global events would make sense only if you've done the expert dungeons, like Plutonus is the last boss of DSM on expert, so if you don't know that it'd not be clear what the heck he was doing there. I thought the Rising Kain zonewide in Stillmoore is pretty good even though I'm not sure who he is either. He has a pretty cool model.

I think Eliam and Atrophinus have interesting stories that spans multiple dungeons. Plutonus also looks cool, though I haven't gotten to him yet (Gatekeeper Kaleida is pretty insane on expert). Scarn pretty much is like a raid that you do with 5 in terms of the scope. Okay he's not as big as a full group dragon but he has the standard model and does everything that you'd expect a dragon do.

[Shrinweck]

My rogue (50) is Pierce, my warrior (40) is Trias, and my mage (18) is Bhaal.

[Shrinweck]

Arrrrgh queues for the first time since launch? I can cook and eat a meal before I can get in to play. I have enough time to GO OUT AND EAT.. Ugh.

[Don]

There's a world event on Saturday so the queues are pretty bad from everyone trying to log on. The server seems to be crashing a lot since there are way too many people right now.

[Shrinweck]

Yeah Belmont and a few others are going to shit and my guardian PvE server is full, too. Was hoping to participate in the event. Didn't think it was a one time thing. Apparently I'll get something for being in a queue, though. Whoop-de-fucking-do. The only positive thing about missing it is I heard it was about as underwhelming as it gets. I just loved waiting two hours and then the server going down right before I got in. Brilliant stuff.