Rift: Planes of Telara

Draegan_sl said:

Any content is boring as fuck if you do it enough times. The thing is, they had the tech to make it more than just the same thing over and over. They had the tech to spawn 4 different massive invasions at the same time that fought each other. Toss in some dragons and some other crazy shit, and that is fun.

The other problem is that they made the rewards from the rifts/invasions dogshit. During beta your bags started to fill up with goodies, then at release they become more and more rare. Yawn.

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Yeah but what is the player actually DOING during all of this? They never answered that.

Grim1_sl said:

They quickly gave up on faction pvp when all the Guardians left the pvp servers after free transfers became available. There is only one PvP server now and even if they open up new servers due to F2P, there wont be any new PvP servers.

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And then repeated the same mistake by making a major feature of the expansion a a 3-way zergfest shit zone where you get in big piles and try to tab-nuke people down before they explode / run oor. So once again they are stuck tuning abilities around PVP.

Kreugen_sl said:

And then repeated the same mistake by making a major feature of the expansion a a 3-way zergfest shit zone where you get in big piles and try to tab-nuke people down before they explode / run oor. So once again they are stuck tuning abilities around PVP.

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Oh, I agree with you on the tuning thing. But the faction PvP element was largely irrelevant very soon after release.

Grim1_sl said:

Oh, I agree with you on the tuning thing. But the faction PvP element was largely irrelevant very soon after release.

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I played when server transfers were opened up and our handful of people who were all raging hardcore about PVP kept making us move from hotspot pvp server to hotspot pvp server and each time it became a steaming pile of dogshit, with the same few hardcore pvp guilds forming up massive bands of losers to farm solo players out trying to do daily bullshit or make doing any rift raid impossible.

Which brings me back around to my point: that the world PVP made a lot of the crap they wanted to be a feature of Rift actually completely suck. Yay lets go raid a rift that has a fail timer when at any point a band of people can slap on PVP gear and PVP spec and easily disrupt it.

Draegan_sl said:

I played at release and I leveled 1-50 two weeks before the expansion. Quest NPCs were almost never cockblocked. Or if they were, it was simple little thing you could clear in two seconds. Trust me.

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I still remember the forums lighting up with threads like 'WTF Y CANT I TURN IN MY QUESTS PLZ HALP'. Clearly Trion caved in and appeased the retards who couldn't handle even a little bit of deviation from the hand-holding quest model. The question is why? They had something potentially interesting and squandered it in order to appease the lowest common denominator. But that didn't work out for them in the long run, did it?

And all the while I remember Trion execs like Lars Butler always bragging about how awesome and successful they were. Releasing trailers mocking WoW (while being a total WoW clone and becoming more WoW-like over the lifetime of the game). Talking trash about 38 Studios and SWTOR and bragging about how they'd never go F2P, etc. I don't think they ever took any real criticism very well.

Kreugen_sl said:

Yeah but what is the player actually DOING during all of this? They never answered that.

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During invasions? Killing stuff for rewards and experience. The problem is that the rewards were nerfed to shit so no one cared, and the experience was nerfed as well. If they made it more enticing you could use that content to fuel your AA system, except their AA system was retarded.

They could of built in some sort of reward scheme that awarded really amazingly good (or just good) gear depending on what happened. Lots of things could of been different.

edit: PVP in this game was never good. Ever. When I think of Rift, I strictly think of it in terms of PVE only.

And they tore down the rest of the game trying to make PVP good.

Free weekend for anyone who owns the game. I'll probably log in just to peak around before realizing I have no fucking clue what to do anymore (I'm sure my skills will have been reset) and lack the care factor to figure it out.

Kreugen_sl said:

And they tore down the rest of the game trying to make PVP good.

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I don't think the sole reason the game got bland was for PVP, but I will agree it had a lot to do with the retarded class nerfs. I think the game got bland because the developers lacked imagination.

It's a shame too because over time, the art team and the world designers were getting and better. The expansion zones looked and felt amazing from a design/art point of view. Gameplay was another matter.

The zone events were based on how many people were in the zone and also gave good rewards. They were pretty well populated, too.

Ambiturner_sl said:

The zone events were based on how many people were in the zone and also gave good rewards. They were pretty well populated, too.

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They might of changed, but they gave crap rewards. They gave you tokens to buy stuff for your planar engines. Otherwise they were useless, though there were some uber rare mounts and stuff. But the problem was that you would do one invasion, go back to town, wait 15 minutes or so, then do another one. They implemented so that there was only one zone event going on at any given time. That shit should of been constant.

Anyway they should of rewarded better gear and they should of made events that dropped raid-level stuff too. They should of ignored most of the PVP and raid development and just focused on making raid systems better.

The raid rifts were very cool too and there was a lot of fun with PVP and them. They made them so much of a pain in the ass to just open because you had to farm a lot for them. Meh.

Kreugen_sl said:

And then repeated the same mistake by making a major feature of the expansion a a 3-way zergfest shit zone where you get in big piles and try to tab-nuke people down before they explode / run oor. So once again they are stuck tuning abilities around PVP.

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If you're talking about Conquest, that existed before the expansion.

ixian_sl said:

If you're talking about Conquest, that existed before the expansion.

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He is and it did. Quite a while before Storm Legion.

The Beta invasions/zone events were awesome. Not only were they crazy with planar mobs taking over most of the zone, requiring groups/raids to take it back, but you would actually get good loot/gear from defeating them. By 2 weeks into release that had all been nerfed down into oblivion and invasions have never been more than an inconvenience since. It's really too bad. It was little Timmy and his buddies that complained about not being able to turn in their quests that got it nerfed, and the one awesome thing Rift brought to the table that was different disappeared. Other than that it's just a decent WoW clone.

A friend was getting back into this. I looked at a vid of his, and his toolbars. And then I looked at the current soul builder trees for mages. stormcaller specifically.
lol. Nope. ffs. how many skills is that? 4 fucking bars of skills.

I don't know exactly how it is now but up until I played 6-8 months ago if someone had 4 full hot bars and they're actually using them all they're doing it wrong. There is no way you need that many hot keys. Especially with macros.

Tred_sl said:

I don't know exactly how it is now but up until I played 6-8 months ago if someone had 4 full hot bars and they're actually using them all they're doing it wrong. There is no way you need that many hot keys. Especially with macros.

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Yeah I had three macros I used so essentially was hitting three keys, plus a few more oh fuck buttons for cooldowns etc.

Lol. Warriors were a spammable AP builder macro with a spammable finisher macro. Other than tank oh shit buttons it was like 2-3 buttons. Boring as fuck at times.

Depends on what build was nerfed that week. While mages could go ele and do well enough, pets could be problematic with some encounters and all of the other good builds were awkward and annoying because you had many abilities you couldn't macro. Chloro is a breeze to play though if healing is your thing. Most of the time you can just target a mob and smash one button to heal your tank and usually keep the whole group up too while outdamaging your pathetic pugs. A second button with hover-cast enabled to cast direct heals on your group without ever changing targets. One button to cure your group or your hover target.

Unfortunately, the sheer stupid of most groups in Rift will turn those 15 minute McDungeons into hour long affairs almost every time.

I enjoyed tanking with my warrior at 50 prior to the PVP nerfs gutting every possible dps spec, but I have no idea if any of the same builds apply where you could mix paladin/void knight/warlord and get uber mitigation, uber threat, a group dps buff and two death grips on 15s cooldowns. Tanking was a breeze - one single threat button, one aoe threat button, and a few hotkeys for grips/taunt etc. It was an incredibly simple setup and threat/mitigation was never an issue.

Now you probably have to carry 4 tank specs to cover what you could do with one before.

The funny thing about those 4 hotbar types - just like in eq2, they are the ones that refuse to use any macros because they "dumb down the game" and insist that their superior skill allows them to somehow play better this way. They are the ones doing less than half the dps they should be doing as they play whack-a-mole with their mouse and have to focus so much on little icons coming off cooldown that they have zero awareness of what is going on around them.