What's coming in RIFT →
Interview with Scott Hartsman about what’s coming in RIFT.
RIFT $9.99 on Steam! →
A stellar deal. I bought another copy YESTERDAY for $20! We’ll see if Steam gives me a refund.
This is kind of a mess but it’s basically correct. I made it for funsies.
RIFT Standard Specs
I’ve heard some talk recently regarding standard/cookie cutter specs in Rift. Honestly, I don’t give much merit to the discussion at this stage given such a small percentage of the playerbase has hit cap. I decided to crosspost some of the discussion happening on our guild forums.
rakeleer said:
The nice thing about Rift, though, is that there are a LOT of variables to be tested and theorycrafted, and tested again. It’s going to be a long while before the “cookie cutters” are known - and if Trion keeps these numbers a moving target, that will extend things.
Agree 100%. Most people haven’t REALLY realized what a huge undertaking theorycrafting is for a game like this. Even when the game is years in maturity, I believe the ‘standard’ specs will be very situational (possibly even unique to certain boss fights, given the number of options). Three different trees (times 4 classes times 9 souls) with all different abilities, buffs, cooldowns and talents make optimizing DPS for situation X an enormous task (not to mention PVP/Tanking/Healing).
Take DPS for example: If you were limited to one talent tree, it would still be a lot of work to select the appropriate talents, generate an optimal rotation given a particular gearset for a particular situation. Throwing two more talents into the mix (granted, all available options aren’t all strictly DPS) adds 3 times the number of skills, buffs and abilities you have to account for, in addition to how synergistic certain skillsets are/are not. You then have situational priorities like physical vs. magic damage, ranged vs. melee, armor mitigation vs. stun resistance vs. crowd crontrol, burst vs. bleed, etc. for a given fight or scenario which will determine which talents you select.
The number of variables involved are massive.
Iron Tomb
Ran IT last night with some guildies and a few other fun people. I was tanking as a Rogue (certainly something I haven’t done in any other game) which was a fun an interesting experience. The Riftstalker spec requires that you keep careful track of your cooldowns as you have a few damage mitigating and armor improvement spells based on combo points in addition to your mitigation that comes after your shifting abilities.
The instance itself was a blast. The entrance sets up the lore and strangely reminded me of a Disneyland ride of some sort. Really none of us in the group new what to experience so trying to figure everything out made it a unique challenge. I was expecting a basic tank and spank/work your way through the trash dungeon but there were a few tricks and encounters that provided an additional challenge that was quite refreshing for such a low-level instance. It should help people to get prepared for (what I expect) is a more challenging endgame. Learning simple boss mechanics, how to CC, etc. are skills that often times aren’t found in endgame players in some other games.
All in all, RIFT game continues to surprise me and I keep thinking, this is how an MMO is supposed to be done. I can’t really point to anything that is incredibly revolutionary about this game, but it just seems to get everything right.
Blog
I wanted to put all of my RIFT stuff in one spot. To find out more about me visit BANANATRON.com.
