[RIFT] Post your BETA 6 review

[:aproxy]

The good:

So far, I'm still impressed with the stability of this game for BETA. So that is good.

The soul system has depth, which is a boon for when you are short a class, you can generally switch to the needed class in a pinch. I even got to try out a PvP soul, which is a soul specifically made for PvP combat that you can choose as 1 of your 3. It had some useful abilities, like a "cleanse".

I made it to level 32. You get a lot of abilities in this game, there is a lot of overlap in some cases, but its nice to learn which are the better skills to pick and which from each tree works together.

PvP, I didn't get a lot of time with. It was fun, but I am not a battleground fan. I like open world with the homies.

I like collections.

Zone-wide invasions: There is good and bad. The good is I like the zone wide quests when they happen. Collect this many blank. Defeat this many blanks. Kill big dude.

I like that forces that roam out of rifts can take a city and interrupt the humdrum questing by killing your quest givers and taking over.

The bad

Well, leveling is fast. If you're used to wow, this won't be on your bad list. But it is on mine. I like meaningful progression.

Every 10 levels there is a single dungeon which can be done multiple times with repeatable quests, but needs only be done once.

Availability of crafting mats does not scale with level well.

Same with faction rewards. Seems like before I had enough faction to buy something from their merchants, I was in the next zone.

Invasions, rifts, footholds: I don't think they should despawn. The should stay and get bigger and badder. Maybe merge together. Why not had a dungeon pop out of a rift once they get big? Right now, you can just wait it out. The name of the game is based off this entire mechanic, yet they seem secondary and unimportant.

So what now?

I preordered. It has a lot of good ideas, polish and promise. The devs seems responsive and a bit more agile than those left at blizzard. Need something to do until the fall where the big dogs come out.

What did you guys think?

[Geldan]

This was a very busy weekend for me. As such I didn't get to play much.

I did manage to run deepstrike mines once and immediately noticed how they buffed the mobs. I really like this change. The instance was still doable, but we didn't roll through it. In fact, the last boss actually took coordination and turned out to be a rather epic battle that wiped us once.

Tanking posed a welcome challenge due to a very limited number of AoE threat abilities. Unfortunately this changes at 32 points in any of the tanking trees.

Given the "difficulty" of this leveling instance, I am really excited to see how the endgame dungeons pan out. I have a feeling the "heroic" (I can't remember what they actually call them) versions will be quite fun and difficult.

On another note, Rift allows you to enter the dungeon in a raid, and the built in raid frames are great. I haven't examined them enough to notice if they have HoT timers or all of the bells and whistles that healers rely on, but they are very readable and have the most important tanking tool: Aggro highlighting.

[Eadwyn]

This was my first beta as a Defiant (and playing for more than a couple hours) and thoroughly enjoyed the experience so far.

Even the first group instance (Iron Tombs) was refreshingly challenging, although some of the trash mobs are much more difficult than the bosses. After the second boss, there are some groups of 2 big Egyptian-looking trash mobs that either need a high-level tank + high-level healer or need good use of cc (which I love when mmos require the use of cc to run the instance smoothly). Also there were a few stones that needed to be destroyed and if the party went too quick destroying them, your group would be overwhelmed by mobs who stun+steal life. Most of this difficulty is most likely due to the fact that no one in the group knew the dungeons, but none-the-less it was still very enjoyable and took quite a while to finish (1.5-2 hours).

I haven't had too much time to play with different roles besides my main one so far (Pally main + warlord as 2nd + void knight as 3rd), but before I logged off I bought 2 new roles and started creating alt-tank specs for different situations such as aoe tanking and tanking casters versus the normal 2-3 mob tanking. This should definitely cut down on classism during group/raid creation since any tank (or other class for that matter) can have up to 4 different builds that can be freely switched through during an instance.

As for the rifts, it's a fun little feature in game, but at this low-level I am with Aproxy and don't feel like it is made important enough where people will stop questing unless their quest hub has been overrun (and then they might just go to the next hub anyways). I kind of like the idea of them if being left alone long enough end up as a dungeon that either needs a party or raid to complete before it goes away (except there would definitely be a need to balance it so prime time is more susceptible to this than late-night-low-population times). The best feature of the rifts are the join public group button that appears, which makes gathering a raid group extremely easy.

Leveling so far is extremely fluid if you enjoy questing. Each hub has about 3-4 rounds of quests that send you out to a general area, finish objectives and return to quest hub, followed by a quest to go to the next hub. I haven't had to grind mobs once to get new quests to appear. The leveling is a bit slower than WoW, but not by much so people should be top level in a few weeks to a month (of course the very hardcore will be there most likely in 1 week, maybe 2).