Anyone still playing Rift?

Just recently got back to it, I left shortly after it went free to play but had been active since Beta3. The new souls are alot of fun and the Warrior's Liberator soul is exactly what was missing from my meatshield questing build. FINALLY, a Warrior soul that has sufficient healing in it to let me jump (literally) from fight to fight with no downtime.

I'm hoping to get my Mage and Warrior up to 60 by the time 3.0 comes out but alot of that is going to depend on work and weather.

Due to the disaster of a launch that ArcheAge has experienced (ok, maybe it's improved but I don't plan on checking for the next couple months), I decided to give Rift a try. I hit level 26 last night and having a blast with it! Despite it being f2p, I really haven't found any restrictions that have caused me to need to spend any money. After looking through the online store, I do feel that what is offered is very fair.

I did play the game a looooooooong time ago and found it has changed a lot for the better. Being able to sell items from anywhere and not just at vendors is huge. I'm in no rush to get to top level although I have heard at 50 the game really opens up due to expansions and new and cool stuff.

Interesting timing on this thread getting posted, since I finally uninstalled the game last night doing some maintenance on my PC.

Dethroned - If you haven't tried the "new" mage soul from Storm Legion, Harbinger, it's a blast to play. Both it and the warrior soul Tempest are game changers in their classes' playstyles. The Harbinger introduces mages to melee and has this awesome 4pt buff called Eldritch Armor that gives you a 40% chance per slash attack to insta-cast any spell=/<2sec cast time. The Tempest is a ranged-AOE soul that works beautifully with Riftblade (and Warlord IMO). Don't get me started on the newer warrior soul Liberator, it's finally given the warrior class the heals needed to grind through the questing and farming that they've been missing.

Farscry - Why uninstall? Just curious. I'm only recently coming back to it after a bit more than a year off and have found alot of changes but just as much has remained... along with the chat trolls :/

I heard the Harbinger was all the rage but I wish I could just buy 1 soul. I don't want to spend $20 right now on it (I think that's what it will cost me to get the souls). I have an easy-button elementalist right now. He walks through most anything but I would like to try something new. Maybe I'll pick up the new souls tonight. It doesn't look like any new souls are coming with 3.0 so don't think it's worth waiting. Do the souls ever go on sale though?

0megawolf wrote:

Farscry - Why uninstall? Just curious.

I've been running out of drive space, so went through my installed games to figure out where I could free up space, uninstalling games I haven't played in ages and don't have any real interest in firing up again in the near future. Rift is a decent mmo, but I don't really have any enthusiasm for playing it in the near-term; I can always reinstall it later.

The souls for 3.0 came out in 2.7's "Dream Pack" I think is what they're called. As far as I know, the souls never go on sale and likely will never be sold individually. From the looks of things, the souls and REX are Trion's money makers on their ingame store. Trion isn't charging people to access the new zones but they DO have to pull in cash somehow. Being free to play, I understand you only have two character slots? So selling the souls in a package would likely tempt you that much more to buy a third slot perhaps? I'm sure they studied their options and chose what best made sense...to them

Elementalist/Chloromancer/Dominator was my old spec from beta->SL expansion. I could just let my tank-pet take the damage, target through him and DPS/heal w/ Vile Spores while his Charged Shield kept damaging every creature that hit him. No more Charged Shield... LOVED that buff

I ended up dropping $50. I got the 30 day patron pass which made the pack with the harbinger soul down to 3150 credits. I had some loyalty from past subscriptions and buying items (9k roughly). Doing all I did tonight got me through the first tier of loyalty awards which included the 110% speed horse.

All-in-all a great night and I still have enough credits to buy another month of patron access if I want.

How come you got credits from the patron pass? Or was it the expansion you purchased?

The $50 got me 8,500 credits. 2,400 credits for the patron pass brings me down to 6,100. The soul pack is normally 3,500 credits but was 3150 (10% discount of 350 credits). That brings me down to 2950. Next month's patron access will be discounted to 2160 (2400 - 240 credit discount). That would still leave me 790 credits.

Or I can go buy something silly with the 3k I have available. Who knows

I've purchased a few items from the store but am an admitted cheapskate. A few bags for my characters, a mount that caught my eye and a 4/1 source engine for each character is really all. There's a point where the bags jump from ~45cred to 200+ and, with the ability to merch/mail anything anywhere, I bought the 45cred bags. Same applies to the source engines, the 4 minor essences will provide me with steady stats throughout the game. IMO, no need to splurge on the 4/2 engine when there MIGHT be a better one coming in 3.0

EDIT: Almost forgot, bought my friend her SL soul pack and my Dream soul pack.

I haven't played rift for about 1.5 years now. Wasn't too happy about the expansion, but the real killer for me was the horrible graphic performance for the large
scale zone events (slide show at best). And since I was no longer raiding to personal life schedule, not being able to do zone events was the final straw.

I loved it when I played it and was in a fun guild.

Not playing, but not because it's a bad game. It's very good. But there's just too many other games out there, and Rift is one of those MMOs that does not reward the long-term sporadic casual MMO player like myself. I can return to WoW and TOR any time, and the game doesn't feel like every zone is barren at the lower levels.

Instant adventure is the key for the casual gamer. But that gets a little old since it seems the only areas that are active are the 2 sides newb areas. It will automatically scale down your level or they have a system where you can scale down manually. (and at higher levels you have to run the newb area IA quests 20-30 times to get 1 level)

IA is better when you can find a group doing it in an area that is level appropriate because you can then double dip on the open rifts and dynamic kill quests in the area. (they trigger when you kill the right monster and don't require an npc to turn in) I really wish those quests were dailies. That would help casual players a ton.

But Rift's population is heavily weighted in the level 50+ players and the under 25 players. The 50+ players are all in guilds and doing raids and end game rifts. So when you are in the 30's things start to get lonely and by the time you are in your 40's the leveling slows down so much and you are so bored of the guardian newb area Instant Adventure (the one that pops the most even if you are defiant) that you move on to other games.

Man do we really need to get rid of this myth of stretching out of the higher levels to ungodly amounts of time commitment. There is an in between of the 150+ hour commitment and the 10 hour commitment. Games like Black Gold and War of the Immortals where levels come every 2-3 minutes really cheapens the experience and Rift is among those that approach 3-5 hours per level and kills the momentum of enthusiasm or near stagnates growth.

I think the Diablo games have the best blend and Guild Wars 2 is on target too. Sure Diablo 3 has paragon levels that stretch the character progression curve out past maximum level but those are completely optional, you are already incredibly powerful and able to handle chaotic insanity at that point and you are finding new loot to tweak your character incrementally during the longer paragon level stretches. Guild Wars 2 is another terrific example. It only breaks down because it starts to get unnecessarily obtuse finding connecting zones to new leveling areas in your 30's, 40's and higher.

I didn't like GW2, the "special events" that they lauded in their promotions occurred so often they were annoying and the change that you were supposed to affect never happened. As to Diablo 3... I quit buying Blizzard's games when they declared the "always online" policy. I can understand why they did what they did but it shouldn't prevent me from playing my game when on a plane, train or boat (which is ~5-6 days each month). There are also some hotels I've stayed in that I just wouldn't trust my info going through their network. Choosing not to go online shouldn't keep me from playing my single player games

I've had no issues leveling and the options to swap out specs on the fly is great. It's actually the main reason I love Rift, for the playstyle flexibility. It's similar to GW1 where you could mix/match your classes but with 10x more synergy. The questing is alright, not great but a decent choice of zone/story quests to choose from once you hit mid-20s. Rifting is always alot of fun, there's rarely a shortage of tears in any zone and the daily planar quests in each zone help to incentivize you if that's your thing

Just an FYI, maybe it wasn't clear but I was pointing to Diablo and GW2 as examples of successful games that do not employ the 150 hour minimum slogging commitment to level cap that seems to be a "you now do not suck" rite of passage in every mmo.

The one thing that thwarts the leveling experience in GW2 is the wandering around trying to find the zone connections for the mid and high level zones. I do like exploration. I do like aimless wandering, just not for extended periods of time when I do have a clear objective in mind.

I think it revolves around the old Diablo 2 Act 3 debate. You can have nested mazes and you can have lengthy dead ends. Pick one. Additionally, one of the things you absolutely don't want to encourage is running along the the entire perimeter until you find the exit.

I played Rift at launch and just the public grouping alone made me love it.
I may have to give it a try in Nov or Dec when I have more free time again.

I played Rift at launch for about 6 months. I rejoined the game shortly before F2P started and I've been enjoying it quite a bit since. There is definitely a lot to do in the game to keep people occupied.

Things are a bit slow right now while everyone is waiting for the expansion. I log on to do a bit of hunting for unstable artifacts and to work on completing some of the zones that I haven't finished. But, since I tend to stick to one main and not level alts very far, I'm also kind of biding my time and waiting for the expansion to release on October 22.

I play on the Faeblight server and late last night there was a crash. The new expansion came out on Wednesday and I spent all day Thursday (18 hours or so ) playing. Today I find out they had a hardware failure and they are doing a 24 hour rollback on Faeblight. To say I am angry is an understatement. It takes some serious incompetence in 2014 for something like this to happen.

While I can understand being upset, I've never seem a system that required backups more than once daily. That kind of hardware failure is pretty rare, assuming they took the normal precautions.

Hit 65 last night. I won't argue the F2P/P2W thing as it's been done already but holy cow can this game suck money right out of your wallet! I am 130 hours in at least so don't mind spending money. There's still a laundry list of things to do that I still have to complete. If you click the link below you can see a video I took of a dungeon tunnel. The tunnel kind of pulses, my computer took it into super overdrive! I can't embed the video since I'm at work and it was uploaded using Raptr.

Tunnels Gone Wild!

OK casting a rez on this sucker.....

So I played Rift at launch and then stopped, can't quite remember why. Dipped my toe back in and man is this game fun! So flexible with the souls now and every class can fit every role. Leveling is slow but I'm still really enjoying it and pleasantly surprised how many people are still playing.

Anyone else still playing this? I'm on Faeblight.

I go back to it frequently. The big push for me to play is when they add new souls. I wasn't wholely enthused about the last bunch of souls but the recent changes to instant adventure have piqued my interest.

There is supposedly one thing on the horizon that was mentioned and never talked about again: a new calling. I will jump on that when it comes or is even in testing or more of the planning is discussed. It is possible that the new calling will be one that has access to souls from every other calling

If the rumor is true, it will be a very long time before it is released I'd wager.

I was a huge fan from pre-launch and will probably go back at some point, but too many other things to play right now.
That said, I hope every future MMO steals some of the awesome things Rift came out with. I know WOW and other have done some.

I mighth join up soon.

I'm looking at MMOs as we speak.

Trying out again Tera, and Rift is in the radar.

Haha, I did the exact same thing when I got the MMO itch and just couldn't take ESO any longer. Played Tera for a while but just don't like the vibe of that game and it's just a little too pervy (felt awkward if the wife or kids walked by the way some of the women are "dressed" in that game). Am really liking the world and feel of Rift and the community (especially on Faeblight) seems much better (although I think quite a few kids home from summer playing).

Give me a shout if you join, I'm in a guild Pax Illuminatus which seems like good people and they are really active. Other good thing is system requirements are easy for this game, I can run it no problem on my Surface tablet.

One of the things I didn't like in Rift ( and I'm sure I'm in the minority ) is the fact they have events all the time! Yes, I know I'm not obligated to do them, though it does remove the immersion when you head back to the main city and everyone is running around trying to catch butterflies ( or whatever the quest dujour happens to be ). I do like events once in a while, but Rift seems to have them every other week.

I'm currently taking a break from Rift, but I still enjoy the game - just wish they would tone down those events.

Yup, it is one constant invasion which does take away the epic feel. And the actual mechanic of closing your run of the mill rift gets pretty old. The new nightmare rifts are pretty fun though, I like the race against the clock and the bosses do have some mechanics beyond just nuke like crazy. I also really like the instant adventure mode that they've added.

But I'm only level 25 so we'll see if it keeps my attention as I level up.

Does factions matter ?

Or they merge together at some point ?

Unless somethings changed they matter.

Well...
Instant adventures can be cross faction. You used to be able to join an instant adventure in an opposing factions zone.
But I think they have changed IA such that it is one collection of zones tied to the expansion for all players, no matter which faction or what level. Then they scale you up or down depending on who you are grouped with.

I am not positive about group finder either. I believe I have run dungeons with cross faction group mates a few times. (That I recall I have always played defiant but I think I have run dungeons with a handful of dwarves which are guardian faction. Dwarves are pretty much the only race that stands out as obviously different during the chaos of dungeons as a healer)

So factions matter and they don't...