Rift

So the new MMO Rift came out a couple days ago and I bought it and have been playing it. A lot of similarities to WoW but only the similarities that make an MMO good. Along with better graphics and a few things that make leveling amazingly fun, I think its better. I like it a lot. What do you guys think of it, if anyones played it? Also if anyone is thinking of getting it I can answer questions.

 

I've been playing it since Monday. I played a Defiant warrior on the shard (server) Reclaimer. It is a lot of fun. Definitely a WoW-clone but only in the good ways, like you said.

The game is a little unpolished but that's too be expected from a new MMO (my biggest complaint is that your character doesn't automatically move to an NPC or monster when you click on them from afar to speak to or attack them). The graphics aren't that great in my opinion. My 330M obviously isn't a powerhouse but I get better looking graphics in other MMOs such as WoW or Aion with better FPS as well. But Rift still looks good. Maybe it just doesn't scale well when you start to turn down the settings.

The whole rift mechanic seems a little gimicky to me and considering I enjoy questing a lot, I find it frequently gets in the way of me doing quest. However, I am only level 12 or 11 or 13 (I forget) so I'm sure the leveling and the rifting experience gets better at higher levels.

 

yeap ive also been playing since launch and have been loving it, im a warrior on the defiant side on the shard Deepwood, reached level 18 and the rifts are more fun the harder they are, played through my first dungeon raid just a wee while ago and loved it......

i came from FFXIV and the differences are like chalk and cheese...

 

yea xFrancis i got a 330M too. the thing that gets me is the ground clutter, for some reason it kills my FPS. but do a custom settings somewhere between low and med, i found a good balance haha.

the Rift system is definitely the stand out feature. every time i see one, i go for it. I have a level 12 or 13 champ/rift/paragon and i love it. I really think once we get farther in itll start to shine, if not its only a matter of time before they patch it up and make it great. but imo this is best for anyone coming off WoW, because youll have the MMO experience while also having something fresh.

 

@mtness

If you're coming from FFXIV then even a drop kick to face would be a better experience than playing through that monstrosity of a game. I still have collector's edition box for FFXIV, which I preordered, and I'm patiently awaiting to see if they ever fix that game.

Glad to see the experience of Rift starts to really grow on you and improved as you level up, I suspected as much.

@JT408

I'll try to fiddle around with the settings that you suggested then. I think right now I'm running on the default medium or default high and I'm getting slightly less than 30 fps which is playable but sometimes it spikes down when I'm in a crowded rift.

Yeah the game is very easy to get the hang of if you're coming from WoW. Like I said, WoW is definitely more polished but Rift is hardly a week old. And it's had one of the best MMO launches so far. Only minor patches are needed to really fix up some of the hiccups. Then after that they can just go for new content as time goes by.

 

Francis, idk if your running a 1920x1080 screen but i do and i get a much better framerate with 1600x900. try putting the resolution one step below your native and fiddle with the settings.

i just had my first big invasion today, and it was crazy. rifts opened up all over the zone and it was just a massive war. i love this game

 

Yea I've had two invasions so far and they were both a lot of fun. Specially when the people in your public raid are all sticking together and you guys just down rift after rift and invader after invader! =]

I play at 1680x1050. I did what you said and put the settings on the default low then increased some of my preferred settings slightly and now I keep around 45 fps so I'm satisfied. I still think WoW and Aion run more nicely than Rift but the graphics are still decent.

 

Been playing since beta 5, having a blast!

Currently level 29 mage on shatterbone, stormcaller/elementalist/dominator .....good build for solo so far. Thinking of rolling a healer again too, but may wait until I hit 50.

 

Played aion last ..

Not too hurry to jump in to a new mmo just to see everyone quitting after reaching the cap after 3 month ..

How good is rift .. will only see when majority of players are at lv50.

 

@sama98b

Technically, I played FFXIV last. But since I only played for about 3 hours total, then Aion is really the last MMO I played as well. Aion had a lot of design issues that chased away a lot of the players. So far I haven't seen any of these in Rift but I'm only level 19.

I did do my first dungeon today though. Iron Tombs (or IT) was a blast! I tanked it on a level 18 warrior (Paladin, Void Knight, Warlord). The tanking experience is a little bland but it should spice up once I get some more skills. The dungeon though was the best and most challenging low level instance I've played in any game yet. The pulls actually push the healer (assuming you run it with others who are around level 19) and the bosses aren't just the usual tank & spanks which plague every MMO's low level instances. There's also some pretty cool mechanics worked into the dungeon and some cool quest to do as well. Good loot too, both from bosses and quest.

 

I was checking out rift and the class system to me seems fragmented in a bad way. i like the idea of different classes but having like 10 types of rogue is unnecessary. they could have accomplished the same thing with a single class. maybe since i havent played it i dont understand it well. but overall it just seems fragmented like i said before. all together there has to be like 50 classes.

 

There are the 4 "callings", mage, warrior, rogue, and cleric.

Each calling has 7 souls (which I'll just call classes), and an 8th soul that has very few actual skills/talents but which give very useful pvp oriented bonuses.

It's not really as fragmented as it sounds, since everybody has 3 classes everybody has access to a large assortment of skills so everyone has access to like 40% of the abilities available to their calling. If you get 8 mages together you're not going to have 8 people with 8 completely different classes, just 8 people with different talent specs. And remember each class has only 1 talent tree and you have to put talent points into the class to get the abilities/spells of that class so just by having a limited number of talent points you are taking a way a lot of that "what the hell am I going to do with 100 different spells!" worry.

Another limiting factor is just the synergies between the classes, for example riftblades (a warrior class that chucks elemental spears with spell-like abilities) get a talent that increases non-physical damage by more and more the deeper they go into the riftblade class so you're not going to see a lot of riftblades that spend half their talent points on riftblade and half their talent points on a class based on dealing physical damage. But you will see a lot of riftblades that take reaver as their second class since reavers have a lot of non-physical DoT abilities.

You can also change between 4 different specs/roles on the fly whenever you're out of combat, so you really have access to every class/soul in your calling, just you can only use 3 at a time. So going back to the 8 mages example, if you said "hey, mages can heal using the chloromancer soul, I need a healer for my party" after 2 seconds of casting the role change ability you'd end up with 8 healers assuming they used one of their roles on a healing spec. And they ultimately wouldn't be all that different from each other unless one of them didn't know how to do a healer build, but they would still be very different from any cleric healers.

There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get past it, the class system is very rewarding to tinker with and very convenient.

 

.. aha .. so they just took a few things from guildwars where you set skills up in town ...

 

That's the beauty of Rift, it takes inspiration from so many of the things that make other MMOs great and works them into one.

 

I'm playing,
Tori - 27 Rogue (NB/Sab/RS, MM/RN/RS)
Wolfsbane PVE server..

At night time peak queues can get alittle bad still. Had to wait 2 hours last night. Turns out I picked the "unofficial" oceanic server... So not only do I have all the US east/west coast people but Aussies too.

 

love it, been playing since beta 2. Im playing a cleric (shaman/justicar/druid or cabalist). Waiting to see how things even out at 50 between classes otherwise I may switch to warrior. Im on seastone.

 

Sweet, I just ordered a MBP like your specs, i7 with hi-res AG 330m. Glad to see it can handle a recently released game decently at higher resolution.

Anyway, my buddy did an impulse buy with this game and after about 5 days he regrets it. He finds it boring, rifts to be zergs. Battle animations are weak, useless skills and quests he says are extremely lame. That's his opinion, I wasn't really interested in this game since I play WoW and enjoy that.

 

If anyone wants to add me I'm TheNoobKing on EmberLord

 

That's odd that he thinks that, I played wow all the way till the cataclysm raids and I find the quality of the game to be on par with blizzards work. The character animations are even different per race. For example one of the bulkier races wields a two handed sword with one hand and will even occasionally switch hands while auto attacking. The lore is eccentric but pretty dense even in the beginning levels.

Unfortunately Rifts can be zergs on a high population server, but as the people begin to spread out over the new servers you start to realize how difficult some of them are. Especially late at night with less people on. It takes some time and coordination to finish or it can fail.

 

x2
The quests seem like every other MMO levelling quests to me, go kill X number of X mobs, move to new area and rinse and repeat. Ive really enjoyed some of the zany lore and the diversity of the maps. Personally I hated WoW graphics, but I absolutely love Rift graphics.

 

I'm hoping ATI has some performance improvements on the way, I'm not really very pleased with my performance. I can't even turn shadows on without the framerate taking a real dive in some places.

 

I've been studying all classes/specs on YT in a great deal to see what's good/bad. Seems that the Elementalist is the most OP of them all. Root spams and can kill melee before roots breaks lol.

I'm going to give Rift a shot once my laptop is repaired ...cant wait Alot of my WoW guild converted and they're around level 30~ right now.

I was considering going healer, but casters seem to be facerolling everyone right now from the 40+ PVP videos I've watched. Hmm ...decisions Of course everyone is still leveling, so I'm positive things will get alot better at the level cap.

A good youtube channel I recommend you guys to check out is /TGNRift ...which contains alot of guides, PVE groups and some PVP. I learnt alot from that channel so far.

I believe this MMO to be the most prominent one yet since WoW's release and I've tried all of them (minus Conan).

 

ive hit level 32 as a melee DPS and im still loving the game, the quests as others have said are like most other rpg's what i love is the varying rift's, these are just so much fun.

from invasions, strongholds and everything in between, they are great, and in the higher levels even with a decent party spread can be challenging , and if there are fewer members in the party, it can be hugely challenging, often leading to a unsuccessful attempt...that is great in my opinion.....and the server wide invasions are just chaos and so much fun to be part of.

the areas are great and vary greatly, as well as that some of the quirky achievements make for some fun when you just want to ran around exploring......so far so good.......keep it up Trion

 

sab is the OP class in the game, I know a few people who normally play mage get annoyed at getting assraped in PVP. I play a melee and caster cleric which is fun but isnt as great in PVP 1v1, but awesome in group pvp. I did play a mage for a bit in Beta up to lvl 15 or so and it was a blast at low levels (i went pyro/ele/something) Im considering making a rogue or mage at some point in the near future. My cleric is lvl 39 already lol

ATI has known issues with quite a few games, I had huge issues with Aion and switched to Nvidia, which was the only way I could avoid it. That was 2.5 years ago and they still dont have a fix for it.

 

Just a quick question for those that own this game. I don't play this game nor WoW, but if you are willing to pay the money for monthly subscription MMORPG, why not play WoW? I heard WoW is more polished and funnier game. In other words, is there something special with this game?

 

I still like Wow, but i've been playing it for a long long time and it's gotten a little stale i guess. With each expansion that has come out they have made the game more and more noob friendly, and while that's great for masses, it makes it less appealing to the hardcore players since every noob that's been level 85 for a month has T11 gear. It's just nice to play something that's similar, but different.

 

If you're new and starting off, I have to say WoW has a LOT more content, well b/c it's been out for 6 years. But you can do a LOT of things and with cataclysm out a lot of "older" lower level zones were revamped and then you have a ton of dungeons all the way to level 85. It is more polished b/c it's had time to come out to. So yeah if you're wanting to start a new MMO and want more bang for the buck, I don't see how you can't pick WoW since these are fairly similar. Even vanilla which gets you to level 60 can be had for as little as $5-10 and give you ton of content. You even get the cataclysm reworked zones.

 

Why should someone new to the mmo scene pick rift rather then wow? WoW has been around for 6 years and though the expansions have offered new content none have been revolutionary in terms of gameplay, imo.

Rift is an homage to wow, no doubt. It draws on some of the best things wow developed over the years and combines them with newer concepts derived from newer mmo's. WoW has amassed a ton of baggage over the years, by comparison rift is like a breath of fresh, but familiar air.

No game is perfect and there are many valid reasons to prefer wow to rift and vice versa.

 

Heh, a friend just quit because he couldn't take Rogue-Demo's imbalance in PVP anymore. I'm sure they'll get nerfed. I usually have patience when something is OP in MMO's, but I can't say the same for the rest of the community.

As for WoW ...I find it stale too. Been playing it since launch and although I've had some of the funnest and memorable gaming experiences in Vanilla / BC (partially due to the difficulty), it's gotten to the point where everything is so easy now.

So yeah, for us veterans, too easy + stale is my answer. You can have some of the best gear in all slots within a week or two if you play hardcore.

 

idk dude ive been playing a Champion/Riftblade/Paragon and i feel OP as ...i literally destroy people one after another in Warfronts and they dont even have a chance lol. ability wise i use Fiery Burst which is a really good Riftblade DoT, and then my Punishing Blow (kinda like execute, available to use <30% hp) hits like 350 WITHOUT critting. so its crazy. I'm level 22

 

Why should people automatically play WoW? I played a trial of it years ago and didnt like it, plus I hate the graphics. All MMOs are similar in a lot of respects and different in others, I just happen to actually like Rift, but if I played for a few weeks and didnt I wouldnt have gotten the game. In all honesty though it's something to pass the time until GW2 is released, or Im in school (in which I will have no time whatsoever to play games).

 

@starrlamia I agree. GW2 is gonna be fantastic. im pretty sure their making no monthly fees again, just a one time buy

but, although WoW and Rift have many control and interface similarities, they are still different games with different worlds and different feels. i personally love both games

 

SOTIS (SC2 custom game) just took a crap with their new 4.0 update. it totally ruined the game for me, and my buddies, so we decided to try a new online game.

any of u guys playing/still playing rift? any impressions? tips for a first timer? i'm debating if the monthly fee thing will even be worth it.

 

im still really enjoying the game mate, heaps of fun, i wrote a overview review of the game here if your interested in taking a look.