Sinzar
Just curious but what does it do right in your opinion? Haven't played since 3 months after launch.
There's a lot of small things I just really like in Rift, such as the flexibility in their class system. There's arguments that every class only has a single meta spec and others are all garbage, but that's generally the top 0.001% players blowing smoke. When I play my rogue for example, I can at the touch of a button (and without some annoying "gold sink") swap between like 6-8 viable builds, such as Assassin/NB for burst damage, Marksman for kiting, Ranger for ezmode afk questing, Riftstalker when I want to tank a dungeon with insta queue, Physician when I feel like healing, Bard for the big aoe zerg world boss fights, etc. All of these builds are saved and swapped to at one click out of combat, including full hotbar loadouts, etc. Other games have similiar features, but none do spec swapping and multiple roles in one character as good as rift.
Another thing that's great during the leveling process is your total freedom to level the way you want to, all of which are viable. You can do the classic quest hub to quest hub to level, and the worlds big enough that there's multiple paths you could take on different characters instead of there only being 1 hub for each level range, or you can level purely through pvp battlegrounds, or you can grind dungeons the whole way through (after like level 10? or something). They also have a feature called instant adventures which is basically a big roaming group that does quests together that you can queue for regardless of your level range (it scales you to the zone either up or down). All of these various leveling paths reward you with level appropriate gear along the way, so no matter your preferred flavor of leveling, it's all viable.
The dungeons are well made also. The normal mode dungeons are as expected designed for any old casual group to effortlessly clear, but the heroic stuff has to be taken seriously, with some light CC actualy being used, and most heroic bosses are like mini-raid fights with a bunch of mechanics. Now, like every other MMO, a few months into an expansion, players outgear everything and even heroics are faceroll aoe fests, but for example the first month of storm legion, and the first month of nightmare tide expansions, dungeons were a great experience with high challenge, high reward.
There's other things too that just come with a game being out for a while and still actively updated, such as the best wardrobe/transmog system around, a good UI system that's heavily customisable, player housing with decoration options for those who like that stuff. There's a raidfinder for some of the raids, which is similiar to WoW's raidfinder, which is to say it's incredibly nerfed and almost impossible to lose, but it gives the option for casual non-raiders to at least see the content and the lore. Speaking of lore, Rift has some interesting characters and storylines if you're into that stuff.
I've droned on for a while now talking up how great Rift is, and all of the points I made are valid, but it certainly has it's share of faults too. I won't go into a long lecture about the bads of rift, though someone else will probably chime in here, but for myself, as I said previously, the single worst problem it runs into is the extreme grindiness of the endgame. It's a shame because you can have a blast playing Rift from levels 1-65 and then for ~3 weeks at level 65 as you do the endgame dungeons. Then you hit a wall, and it's either join a very hardcore raiding guild (the raids in rift are HARD), or you grind out currency for super small gains. It's the grind that always leads me to stop playing any time I return and level a new character.
That reply certainly went on longer than I had planned!
