Blizzard have updated their Diablo 3 website with a skill planner and it really is a whole toy in itself. Thanks to Diablo3farming.com for the tip and to Marcko for the tip about Barbarian loot skills.
These are the characters I've made so far:
Lootmaster Barb
Runed Hammer of the Ancients gives enemies 55% chance to drop treasure or health globes when you crit them with the Hammer. This means crits are loot so we'll take the Ruthless passive for more crit chance. Runed Battle Rage gives you 20% chance when you crit them with anything and you only need to cast it once every 60 seconds with the Inspiring Presence passive. It also boosts all attacks. That passive also helps Threatening Shout which coats nearby baddies with a 22% improved treasure drop. That one not only helps you but helps your mates too. Treasure find Barbs are going to be a popular party member.
For gear we want high crit and fast weapons. Fast weapons take more swings to do the same job and more swings is more crits is more loot. That's why Frenzy is a good complementary skill it gives more swings. It can also be runed to move round the map faster.
Teleport Wizard
Let's face it teleporting around was what made the Sorceress in D2 the premier magic find class. The developers of D3 claimed they'd made the sort of teleport spam we saw in D2 not possible in the new game. I think they were wrong.
Firstly Teleport can be runed with Wormhole that puts a delay before the cooldown is applied. In other words as long as you keep teleporting Teleport doesn't have a cooldown. You Teleport, the clock ticks, one thousand and one, one thousand and two, and doink, Teleport has a cooldown. If you're quick enough to find a new destination and go you can spam it as long as you have enough Arcane Power.
So let's build in some Arcane power. Astral presence and Prodigy are two AP-improving passives and your signature spell can be runed to give arcane power every cast. Once runed a Magic Missile gives 19 AP as compared to Teleport's cost of 15 so if we run out we just need to stop and nuke something a couple of times.
OK so we have a build that can move about a lot, make it a bit tougher with an armour spell and add some damage. We're done.
The Butt-Kicking Monk
I built this Monk around the Seven Sided Strike skill. With rune and passive this is what the skill does:
Teleport between nearby enemies 7 times striking for 234% weapon damage every hit. Heals Monk for 3195 life. 75 spirit, no cooldown.
That gives a simple playstyle of building up spirit until we've got enough then destroying everything with our big uber skill.
The spirit generating attacks give 6 spirit per attack, 7.2 with our passive if we use a two-handed weapon. We'd want to use a two-handed weapon in any case because our big attack is based off weapon damage. Not dps, damage.
I picked Fists of Thunder and Way of the Hundred Fists for the spirit builders although to be honest they all seem pretty similar tactically. Runed one of them for faster spirit generation and the other for a short duration buff. So we'll hit things with Hundred Fists until we have 3 stacks and then use it once every 5 seconds to refresh the stack, using Fists of Thunder the rest of the time.
Mantra of Conviction pairs beautifully with Seven Sided Strike allowing us to set up a pack to take more damage before we unleash our big hit. Breath of heaven allows us to do a big group heal instead of a Seven Sided Strike which could be useful and certainly will be desired in parties. In hardcore especially it's good to be able to keep a disconnected player alive.
Rocketwoman
Rocketwoman is a Demon Hunter based on the passive that gives rockets 100% bonus damage. Rockets are gained by glyphing certain skills and generally the rocket version does about the same damage as the vanilla version before the bonus is applied.
She also incidentally has gold-sniffing ferrets. In England in rural areas we have a sport known as ferret-legging. Your friends put a ferret, which is an animal like a thin small cat, into the bottom of your trousers and tie the leg of the trousers closed at the ankle. The frantic animal then wriggles around and probably bites. They usually climb upwards. The main interest of the sport is watching to see if the animal will bite the participant in the bollocks (it's always men who play this sport for some reason). So perhaps D3 is making a nod to the sport here with the ferrets running up your enemies' trousers to bite their trouser pockets where they keep their purses and their secret codpiece gold stashes to cause them to drop more gold for you to find. Even if I were not designing these characters with a view to gold and magic find that's a pop culture reference too wonderful to pass up.
I was once offered a go by sniggering farmers while on holiday in Somerset. I declined.
Let's talk about rockets. Not only are rockets phallic and thus fit the comedy theme of the build but they also come in quite a variety of types and seem rather powerful.
Sentry gives us a passive rocket-firing turret, Strafe allows us to fire rockets on the move, Multishot is a massive volley of arrows and rockets. We'll take Impale too for a single target fight and Marked for Death for a damage buff.
Big Bad Zoo Zoo
This is an attempt to re-make one of D2's most popular builds, the Zookeeper Necro. Zookeepers were very good indeed in D2 because they were one of the most gear-neutral builds. They rolled over everything except Act Bosses (which were specially adjusted to do disproportionately high damage to summoned minions). That's less of a problem in D3 because it's much easier to group, you don't risk being PKed (player-killed - the end of the road for Hardcore characters) and we've no reason to believe that minions will be similarly gimped on Act bosses. The goal is to keep a big army of monsters up that passively kill the monsters for you while you run around picking up loot, breaking urns and opening chests.
Dramatis personae:
Enter 4 Zombie Dogs, stage left. 3 from the basic spells, 4 with the passive which also makes them tougher. From youtube footage it seems like these are always out and follow you around. The core unit of the army.
Enter one Gargantuan. A big zombie. It may have a limited duration as there's a rune that makes it last only 20 seconds (possibly implying that the vanilla form lasts more than 20 seconds but not indefinitely).
Enter one big fat spider. The mother spider births spiderlings and lasts for 22 seconds.
Enter one big fat toad that swallows enemies whole.
Enter one army of dagger-wielding fetishes. It lasts 20 seconds and can be cast every 38 seconds thanks to cooldown reductions from rune and passive.
Enter one ritual dancer who buffs all the others.
That's quite a cast. Basic tactic is move to somewhere near some monsters and while your dogs buy you time drop some creatures on them then ignore the fight and hoover up loot. Wearing Thorns gear causes the monsters to beat themselves to death on your pets which gets the job done even faster. But it's probably simpler to just wear magic find in every slot.
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Monday, 12 September 2011
What are they doing with OUR money?
Anyone who haunts MMO blogs and forums sees some variation of these words a lot. The devs are "neglecting" the game, they've stopped caring, they're developing (gasp) different games (which is an infidelity like cheating on a marriage).
I actually don't like the idea at all that MMOs are an investment and we are somehow buying ownership of them.
Imagine if you did it when you bought a beer. "Hey buddy, are you going to re-invest those $3 in new brewing technology? You better not be wasting my money or I'll stop drinking and make all my friends stop drinking too."
But Eve in particular is full of people who do precisely that, most notably of late The Mittani.
I think you should buy games like you'd buy a newspaper or an ice cream. Is the value of the item in excess of the value of the money you could save by not buying it?
Of course it's a means of exerting player power and as such it's even getting meta-gamed. However in the long run it's not healthy, players don't make sound holistic decisions that improve the game for everyone else and it generates an emotional knot that has people rage-quitting over the most irrational reasons. How many long standing Eve fans will never play Eve again after a monocle they would never have bought became available in a cash shop they would never look at?
It's just plain daft.
I actually don't like the idea at all that MMOs are an investment and we are somehow buying ownership of them.
Imagine if you did it when you bought a beer. "Hey buddy, are you going to re-invest those $3 in new brewing technology? You better not be wasting my money or I'll stop drinking and make all my friends stop drinking too."
But Eve in particular is full of people who do precisely that, most notably of late The Mittani.
I think you should buy games like you'd buy a newspaper or an ice cream. Is the value of the item in excess of the value of the money you could save by not buying it?
Of course it's a means of exerting player power and as such it's even getting meta-gamed. However in the long run it's not healthy, players don't make sound holistic decisions that improve the game for everyone else and it generates an emotional knot that has people rage-quitting over the most irrational reasons. How many long standing Eve fans will never play Eve again after a monocle they would never have bought became available in a cash shop they would never look at?
It's just plain daft.
Sunday, 11 September 2011
Diablo 3: latest in phishing
I just got this email. Apart from the instruction to reply to noreply@Blizzard.com it's really very clever.
--- On Sun, 11/9/11, diablo3 wrote:
From: diablo3
Subject: Diablo III beta test invitation!
To: me
Date: Sunday, 11 September, 2011, 0:41
Greetings from Blizzard Entertainment!
We’re gearing up for the forthcoming launch of Diablo III and would like to extend you an invitation to participate in the beta test. If you are interested in participating, you need to have a Battle.net account, which you can create on our Battle.net website.
We will flag you for access to the Diablo III beta test when we begin admitting press. You do not need to go through the opt-in process.
To secure your place among the first of Sanctuary’s heroes,Please use the following template below to verify your account and information via email.
* Name:
* Battle.account name:
* Password:
* Country:
* E-mail Address:
Thanks and see you all in the Burning Hells!
Yes, I'll see you in Hell too.
--- On Sun, 11/9/11, diablo3
From: diablo3
Subject: Diablo III beta test invitation!
To: me
Date: Sunday, 11 September, 2011, 0:41
Greetings from Blizzard Entertainment!
We’re gearing up for the forthcoming launch of Diablo III and would like to extend you an invitation to participate in the beta test. If you are interested in participating, you need to have a Battle.net account, which you can create on our Battle.net website.
We will flag you for access to the Diablo III beta test when we begin admitting press. You do not need to go through the opt-in process.
To secure your place among the first of Sanctuary’s heroes,Please use the following template below to verify your account and information via email.
* Name:
* Battle.account name:
* Password:
* Country:
* E-mail Address:
Thanks and see you all in the Burning Hells!
Yes, I'll see you in Hell too.
Saturday, 10 September 2011
Thursday, 8 September 2011
Understanding liquidity - how to play the markets in games
I want to talk about liquidity. Liquidity in the economics sense means converting one item into another item easily. For example gold (real gold) can be sold for dollars and dollars can be traded for just about anything.
In business, economics or investment, market liquidity is an asset's ability to be sold without causing a significant movement in the price and with minimum loss of value. Money, or cash in hand, is the most liquid asset, and can be used immediately to perform economic actions like buying, selling, or paying debt, meeting immediate wants and needs.
Source: wikipedia
When I started playing Eve I realised something that I still find utterly astonishing - almost everything in Eve is liquid in the financial sense. Your battleship = 100m isk = a Sovereignty Blockade Unit. Stuff isn't perfectly liquid, there are transaction fees, price fluctuations, issues of location and so forth. But pretty much everything is at least 90% liquid. If you have a spare battleship and need a SBU you can exchange them without significant loss of value. Of course in certain circumstances such as price gouging and other market manipulations you may lose value but these are exceptional.
In WoW most items are not liquid. Your bind on pickup epic may be worth 1000 gold but you can only vendor it for 20 gold or at best disenchant it for 50 gold's worth of mats.
Let's now have a look at Diablo 3 where we will see some astonishing factors of liquidity. Just about everything not only can be converted to gold but also to real money (unless you play hardcore). Understanding liquidity in the game could have a profound effect on the way you play it. I'll illustrate with examples.
Example 1: non-liquid inventory management.
Barb character - loot discovered = one Barb sword, one Wizard wand, 5000 gold, 20 junk blues and rares, 5 assorted gems.
Barb uses sword and the damage gem, stashes the Wand in case they want to roll a wizard one day, vendors the junk blues, saves the gold, stashes the spare gems.
Example 2: liquid inventory management.
Barb character - loot discovered = one Barb sword, one Wizard wand, 5000 gold, 20 junk blues and rares, 5 assorted gems.
Barb uses sword. Trades the unwanted gems for damage gems and cubes up to make a really strong damage gem. Sells the Wand and buys a second Barb sword for dual wielding. Spots that crafter mats are expensive on the RMAH, salvages the junk blues for crafter mats, buys extra crafter mats on the gold AH, sells all of these crafter mats for real money.
This Barb has an extra weapon, a better gem and has stored his surplus in a more mudflation-proof currency than the first player.
All because he sees that anything can become anything else. Alternatively he could have used his RMAH profits to outfit his Barb better without spending more real money than the guy who just casually slings it into his stash.
If you take this to the highest level you monitor values across a range of markets and play them. Gold is selling high? Vendor/auction everything you don't need and sell the gold. RMAH legendaries are cheap? Raise real money using other surplus stuff and buy an uber weapon to kick butt with.
In a game where everything is liquid there is huge advantage to be gained by trading, selling to expensive markets and buying from cheap markets. What you shouldn't do is sit on value. Let me give another example:
Example 3: Non-liquid Barb player discovers a Windforce, an uber elite legendary bow. It's the first Windforce in the game and will sell for £2000. However he decides he wants to make a Demon Hunter. He rolls a new character and spends the next 2 weeks leveling his Demon Hunter, finally reaching level 60 and equipping his magnificent bow.
Example 4: Liquid Barb player discovers a Windforce, an uber elite legendary bow. It's the first Windforce in the game and will sell for £2000. He decides he wants to make a Demon Hunter but knows he's best cashing in now. He sells the Windforce for £2000. He rolls a new character and spends the next 2 weeks leveling his Demon Hunter, finally reaching level 60 and buying a Windforce, (several of which have now been found) for £200 He equips his magnificent bow and ponders how to spend his £1800 remaining funds. Maybe he'll wallpaper his house in Blizzard T-shirts. (Warning: RL Blizzard T-shirts are probably not very liquid).
In business, economics or investment, market liquidity is an asset's ability to be sold without causing a significant movement in the price and with minimum loss of value. Money, or cash in hand, is the most liquid asset, and can be used immediately to perform economic actions like buying, selling, or paying debt, meeting immediate wants and needs.
Source: wikipedia
When I started playing Eve I realised something that I still find utterly astonishing - almost everything in Eve is liquid in the financial sense. Your battleship = 100m isk = a Sovereignty Blockade Unit. Stuff isn't perfectly liquid, there are transaction fees, price fluctuations, issues of location and so forth. But pretty much everything is at least 90% liquid. If you have a spare battleship and need a SBU you can exchange them without significant loss of value. Of course in certain circumstances such as price gouging and other market manipulations you may lose value but these are exceptional.
In WoW most items are not liquid. Your bind on pickup epic may be worth 1000 gold but you can only vendor it for 20 gold or at best disenchant it for 50 gold's worth of mats.
Let's now have a look at Diablo 3 where we will see some astonishing factors of liquidity. Just about everything not only can be converted to gold but also to real money (unless you play hardcore). Understanding liquidity in the game could have a profound effect on the way you play it. I'll illustrate with examples.
Example 1: non-liquid inventory management.
Barb character - loot discovered = one Barb sword, one Wizard wand, 5000 gold, 20 junk blues and rares, 5 assorted gems.
Barb uses sword and the damage gem, stashes the Wand in case they want to roll a wizard one day, vendors the junk blues, saves the gold, stashes the spare gems.
Example 2: liquid inventory management.
Barb character - loot discovered = one Barb sword, one Wizard wand, 5000 gold, 20 junk blues and rares, 5 assorted gems.
Barb uses sword. Trades the unwanted gems for damage gems and cubes up to make a really strong damage gem. Sells the Wand and buys a second Barb sword for dual wielding. Spots that crafter mats are expensive on the RMAH, salvages the junk blues for crafter mats, buys extra crafter mats on the gold AH, sells all of these crafter mats for real money.
This Barb has an extra weapon, a better gem and has stored his surplus in a more mudflation-proof currency than the first player.
All because he sees that anything can become anything else. Alternatively he could have used his RMAH profits to outfit his Barb better without spending more real money than the guy who just casually slings it into his stash.
If you take this to the highest level you monitor values across a range of markets and play them. Gold is selling high? Vendor/auction everything you don't need and sell the gold. RMAH legendaries are cheap? Raise real money using other surplus stuff and buy an uber weapon to kick butt with.
In a game where everything is liquid there is huge advantage to be gained by trading, selling to expensive markets and buying from cheap markets. What you shouldn't do is sit on value. Let me give another example:
Example 3: Non-liquid Barb player discovers a Windforce, an uber elite legendary bow. It's the first Windforce in the game and will sell for £2000. However he decides he wants to make a Demon Hunter. He rolls a new character and spends the next 2 weeks leveling his Demon Hunter, finally reaching level 60 and equipping his magnificent bow.
Example 4: Liquid Barb player discovers a Windforce, an uber elite legendary bow. It's the first Windforce in the game and will sell for £2000. He decides he wants to make a Demon Hunter but knows he's best cashing in now. He sells the Windforce for £2000. He rolls a new character and spends the next 2 weeks leveling his Demon Hunter, finally reaching level 60 and buying a Windforce, (several of which have now been found) for £200 He equips his magnificent bow and ponders how to spend his £1800 remaining funds. Maybe he'll wallpaper his house in Blizzard T-shirts. (Warning: RL Blizzard T-shirts are probably not very liquid).
Sunday, 4 September 2011
Eve Online: Player participation perverted
In which the head of the CSM, who also not so coincidentally is the head of the Goons in Eve, reveals that he has used the CSM to push through changes to the game that allow his alliance to beat their enemy alliances.
In his words:
"The fruits of our political efforts in March - winning the CSM and then establishing dominance there for the good of the game - are finally being revealed in public: not only is the focus of the next expansion on issues championed by us, the supercap nerf itself is almost word for word what we have advocated.
...
Our memories are long, our knives are jagged, and our hate is yet unsated."
In that article The Mittani gives a lot of credit to CCP employee Stoffer. Stoffer is an ex-Goon who got a job at CCP to work the system from the inside. Here's a forum post from a couple of months ago.
"Hey Stoffer,
We won man, its game over now. You got in and trolled from the inside and nothing can never top that. Goons won the game.
Quit your job, and we can dissolve Goonwaffe right now then duckwalk back out of this ***** being all smug.
Everyone else,
Remember when Goons gave a presentation and said we weren't out to ruin THE Game, [but] YOUR game?
We totally lied."
And on that note see how The Mittani ends his piece on Kugu?
"We will not stand idly by as an alliance while our subscription money goes to waste, watching the game we pay to play spiraling into entropy due to the folly and neglect of CCP's management. It is not yet time to start a fire, but get your gasoline ready."
So how did it all happen?
Well for one thing CCP has a policy to recruit from its player base where possible. There's a lot of sense to this as it assures a supply of knowledgeable committed staff. Notably they recently recruited former Goon CEO Darius Johnson to be in charge of their security. Here's an interview he gave EveNews24 about security in the game. So there are senior Goons in very powerful positions inside CCP.
The Goons have adopted the same policy of infiltration and subversion towards the actual real world games company and the player council as they famously adopted in-game towards their play opponents. (The in-game antics are documented in great detail by The Mittani himself at Ten Ton Hammer).
So what does all this mean for the game?
Well it seems that the conflict of interest that ex-Goons who are CCP staff members now may be damaging the good of the game. It's not worth playing if one can't be competitive and who wants to play a video game so hardcore that you have to infiltrate real life agents into a company in Iceland to keep up?
As for the CSM Goons dominated it partly by organising all of their members and allies to vote for their selected candidates (and they determined internally who everyone would vote for so as to have the greatest tactical impact). They also used a dirty tricks campaign against rivals like Trebor. His opinion:
"Over the past few days, I've been the target of a big smear campaign by The Mittani and his goons.
It's the usual bullshit. Quote mining out of context, character assassination, ad hominem attacks, the big lie -- all the classic techniques. They even started a campaign to have my wikipedia page deleted (currently failing horribly) and twice vandalized the page.
And that is exactly why The Mittani and his buddies are running for CSM. He's realized that it is actually very, very effective at influencing CCP, and he wants to try to use it as a vehicle to advance his own petty in-game interests, at the expense of the vast majority of the players of EVE."
So it seems that the CSM is broken. Kudos to the Goons for getting all of their members and friends to vote their candidates in but an advisory body, called a stakeholder in the game by CCP should not be a tool of an alliance used to beat opponents. After this no one will ever stand for election on a public service agenda, election will all be about metagaming.
One thing it does show is how extraordinarily dedicated Eve players can be. Internet spaceships is serious business!
In his words:
"The fruits of our political efforts in March - winning the CSM and then establishing dominance there for the good of the game - are finally being revealed in public: not only is the focus of the next expansion on issues championed by us, the supercap nerf itself is almost word for word what we have advocated.
...
Our memories are long, our knives are jagged, and our hate is yet unsated."
In that article The Mittani gives a lot of credit to CCP employee Stoffer. Stoffer is an ex-Goon who got a job at CCP to work the system from the inside. Here's a forum post from a couple of months ago.
"Hey Stoffer,
We won man, its game over now. You got in and trolled from the inside and nothing can never top that. Goons won the game.
Quit your job, and we can dissolve Goonwaffe right now then duckwalk back out of this ***** being all smug.
Everyone else,
Remember when Goons gave a presentation and said we weren't out to ruin THE Game, [but] YOUR game?
We totally lied."
And on that note see how The Mittani ends his piece on Kugu?
"We will not stand idly by as an alliance while our subscription money goes to waste, watching the game we pay to play spiraling into entropy due to the folly and neglect of CCP's management. It is not yet time to start a fire, but get your gasoline ready."
So how did it all happen?
Well for one thing CCP has a policy to recruit from its player base where possible. There's a lot of sense to this as it assures a supply of knowledgeable committed staff. Notably they recently recruited former Goon CEO Darius Johnson to be in charge of their security. Here's an interview he gave EveNews24 about security in the game. So there are senior Goons in very powerful positions inside CCP.
The Goons have adopted the same policy of infiltration and subversion towards the actual real world games company and the player council as they famously adopted in-game towards their play opponents. (The in-game antics are documented in great detail by The Mittani himself at Ten Ton Hammer).
So what does all this mean for the game?
Well it seems that the conflict of interest that ex-Goons who are CCP staff members now may be damaging the good of the game. It's not worth playing if one can't be competitive and who wants to play a video game so hardcore that you have to infiltrate real life agents into a company in Iceland to keep up?
As for the CSM Goons dominated it partly by organising all of their members and allies to vote for their selected candidates (and they determined internally who everyone would vote for so as to have the greatest tactical impact). They also used a dirty tricks campaign against rivals like Trebor. His opinion:
"Over the past few days, I've been the target of a big smear campaign by The Mittani and his goons.
It's the usual bullshit. Quote mining out of context, character assassination, ad hominem attacks, the big lie -- all the classic techniques. They even started a campaign to have my wikipedia page deleted (currently failing horribly) and twice vandalized the page.
And that is exactly why The Mittani and his buddies are running for CSM. He's realized that it is actually very, very effective at influencing CCP, and he wants to try to use it as a vehicle to advance his own petty in-game interests, at the expense of the vast majority of the players of EVE."
So it seems that the CSM is broken. Kudos to the Goons for getting all of their members and friends to vote their candidates in but an advisory body, called a stakeholder in the game by CCP should not be a tool of an alliance used to beat opponents. After this no one will ever stand for election on a public service agenda, election will all be about metagaming.
One thing it does show is how extraordinarily dedicated Eve players can be. Internet spaceships is serious business!
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Rift: back for 5 days
I spent 5 days back in Rift and it was educational for me.
I found out two main things.
1) Rift is a superb game of its type with a number of clever features that I remember and some new ones that I don't.
2) It's not my type.
I have a number of characters spread across different servers, the most advanced being a level 50 with raid/t2 gear. Which I barely touched. There seemed no progression because the character can only progress through loot, can only get usable loot from raids. I've advanced that one too far to be able to do anything with him on this type of casual visit. And I didn't really fancy progressionless play.
Server transfers have come in since I stopped playing. I am in a battlegroup which has all the busiest servers EU-side so after some investigation I decided not to move. I was pleasantly suprised that many very active servers were available for transfer. It's not at all like the rather desultory offering in WoW where you occasionally are invited to move to a server which is deader than a parrot. (For example Argent RP-PvE server was there).
I played my Rogue a little but the main thing I wanted to do was dungeons and they weren't popping. Rift has cross server LFD now but it's still possible to queue for 4 hours on a Friday night as dps in the busiest EU battlegroup and not see a group. (That might have been a one-off. I got much better results with my low level mage even when I queued as pure dps).
So I mainly played a mage, which started at level 28 and finished at level 33. I did a little questing but i'm not terribly interested in questing these days. I did quite a lot of warfronts and those are quite fun. Somewhat pale compared to Eve pvp though. There don't seem to be any stakes at all, or at least that's what I felt. Everyone progresses and the winner progresses a tad faster. I have no sense of who I played with or against. A lot of what makes team sports fun has been sacrificed for accessibility. I found myself seeing the battles pop and missing them or clicking Ignore because I couldn't be bothered.
I did like the LFD. I was limited to 2 possible dungeons and farmed them fairly heavily. (As I leveled precisely which 2 I had access to changed). I probably did around a dozen dungeons runs. The wait is much longer than it was in WoW if I queue as dps only. However the wait wasn't bad at all when I queued as Healer, Support and Dps. Better yet, it lets you alt tab and the Rift tab at the bottom of the screen will flash when your group is ready if you're doing something else in windowed mode. That's very convenient. (It also does this for warfronts).
Probably the most interesting part was respeccing the character. I tried all sorts of different builds and still have new ones to experiment with. As someone who likes creating characters in different ways Rift is one of the most entertaining games out there. It's also taught me that games where you have to spend a significant sum to respec are less fun for me. I want to tinker constantly with my builds.
Would I recommend Rift? Very much so. It remains as far as I'm concerned the pick of the diku-types. It's better than WoW, AoC and Lotro.
Would I play it? No. I have problems with the content and progression:
solo pve (quests, rifts, etc) - bores me quickly
world pvp - no one does it much. I murdered one guy in a level 30 area, he got me back and I got him back again which was fun. But I had to initiate it, I don't think he would have attacked if I hadn't. And no one builds groups to go off fighting.
group pve (dungeons) - excellent, waiting is a lot less excellent. I do like the alt tab feature but I'd rather play a game that kept me playing because I'm hooked, than a game that makes waiting around more bearable.
group pve (raids) - still too much investment for the fun returned. Having had two raid guilds collapsed I don't want to sub and try to get into another one. Plus starting at the bottom of someone's dkp system sucks. Plus I guess I'm too burned out still. I see raids as a close community and tend to feel committed. Having had two collapse 4 months ago when I played Rift is very offputting. If I were to raid at the moment I'd rather raid casually perhaps in WoW's cross server raid pugs. I cba to work hard for a raid guild unless I feel there's the prospect of longevity.
group pvp (warfronts) - ok but aimless. It can be fun dotting people, burning people and the heal by nuking rift mage gameplay. But it doesn't suit my need for a strategic sense to pvp. How does running around what is basically a football field playing sport lead to us conquering their capital, burning their villages, seizing their treasury? It's not player AGAINST player, it's player WITH player in an endless round of pat-a-cake.
I'd certainly play another Trion game, it's a beautifully crafted game of its type. But playing this made me realise how much I want Diablo 3 and Prime instead. In fact after a few days I found myself thinking don't play Rift, play Diablo 2 and had to make myself get the maximum out of the free time instead of playing a game that's always available to me.
I found out two main things.
1) Rift is a superb game of its type with a number of clever features that I remember and some new ones that I don't.
2) It's not my type.
I have a number of characters spread across different servers, the most advanced being a level 50 with raid/t2 gear. Which I barely touched. There seemed no progression because the character can only progress through loot, can only get usable loot from raids. I've advanced that one too far to be able to do anything with him on this type of casual visit. And I didn't really fancy progressionless play.
Server transfers have come in since I stopped playing. I am in a battlegroup which has all the busiest servers EU-side so after some investigation I decided not to move. I was pleasantly suprised that many very active servers were available for transfer. It's not at all like the rather desultory offering in WoW where you occasionally are invited to move to a server which is deader than a parrot. (For example Argent RP-PvE server was there).
I played my Rogue a little but the main thing I wanted to do was dungeons and they weren't popping. Rift has cross server LFD now but it's still possible to queue for 4 hours on a Friday night as dps in the busiest EU battlegroup and not see a group. (That might have been a one-off. I got much better results with my low level mage even when I queued as pure dps).
So I mainly played a mage, which started at level 28 and finished at level 33. I did a little questing but i'm not terribly interested in questing these days. I did quite a lot of warfronts and those are quite fun. Somewhat pale compared to Eve pvp though. There don't seem to be any stakes at all, or at least that's what I felt. Everyone progresses and the winner progresses a tad faster. I have no sense of who I played with or against. A lot of what makes team sports fun has been sacrificed for accessibility. I found myself seeing the battles pop and missing them or clicking Ignore because I couldn't be bothered.
I did like the LFD. I was limited to 2 possible dungeons and farmed them fairly heavily. (As I leveled precisely which 2 I had access to changed). I probably did around a dozen dungeons runs. The wait is much longer than it was in WoW if I queue as dps only. However the wait wasn't bad at all when I queued as Healer, Support and Dps. Better yet, it lets you alt tab and the Rift tab at the bottom of the screen will flash when your group is ready if you're doing something else in windowed mode. That's very convenient. (It also does this for warfronts).
Probably the most interesting part was respeccing the character. I tried all sorts of different builds and still have new ones to experiment with. As someone who likes creating characters in different ways Rift is one of the most entertaining games out there. It's also taught me that games where you have to spend a significant sum to respec are less fun for me. I want to tinker constantly with my builds.
Would I recommend Rift? Very much so. It remains as far as I'm concerned the pick of the diku-types. It's better than WoW, AoC and Lotro.
Would I play it? No. I have problems with the content and progression:
solo pve (quests, rifts, etc) - bores me quickly
world pvp - no one does it much. I murdered one guy in a level 30 area, he got me back and I got him back again which was fun. But I had to initiate it, I don't think he would have attacked if I hadn't. And no one builds groups to go off fighting.
group pve (dungeons) - excellent, waiting is a lot less excellent. I do like the alt tab feature but I'd rather play a game that kept me playing because I'm hooked, than a game that makes waiting around more bearable.
group pve (raids) - still too much investment for the fun returned. Having had two raid guilds collapsed I don't want to sub and try to get into another one. Plus starting at the bottom of someone's dkp system sucks. Plus I guess I'm too burned out still. I see raids as a close community and tend to feel committed. Having had two collapse 4 months ago when I played Rift is very offputting. If I were to raid at the moment I'd rather raid casually perhaps in WoW's cross server raid pugs. I cba to work hard for a raid guild unless I feel there's the prospect of longevity.
group pvp (warfronts) - ok but aimless. It can be fun dotting people, burning people and the heal by nuking rift mage gameplay. But it doesn't suit my need for a strategic sense to pvp. How does running around what is basically a football field playing sport lead to us conquering their capital, burning their villages, seizing their treasury? It's not player AGAINST player, it's player WITH player in an endless round of pat-a-cake.
I'd certainly play another Trion game, it's a beautifully crafted game of its type. But playing this made me realise how much I want Diablo 3 and Prime instead. In fact after a few days I found myself thinking don't play Rift, play Diablo 2 and had to make myself get the maximum out of the free time instead of playing a game that's always available to me.
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