rift – Page 7 – AggroChat

The True Endgame

June 17, 2016 by Belghast

Wardrobe System

Last night I had a marvelously relaxing evening working on “endgame content” in Rift. By that I mean the true end game of any MMO… and that is wearing interesting outfits. There are so many different cosmetic systems out there, but I have to say that in my personal experience Rift has hands down the best one. How the system works is you have a tab on your character screen labelled Wardrobe, and at the bottom are a number of alternate outfits that you can save. By default you get one free wardrobe slot, and then up to four can be purchased using platinum, with the second tab costing 10, third costing 50 and fourth costing 100. If I remember correctly the loyalty system has a number of unlocks that come with various ranks in that, gained through either subscribing as a patron or spending money on the in game shop. Up to sixty total wardrobe slots can be unlocked however through the cash shop currency, and each of them costs 144 credits which if you base that on the conversion rate for the $19.99 and if my math is anywhere near correct that is roughly 90 cents a slot. What makes the system so special is that the game saves appearance and dye information at an account level, and simply looting an item into your inventory saves the appearance. You don’t even need to equip an item to save its appearance, which means if you get a sweet bind in equip item that you are not going to use… you can sell it and still have saved its appearance data. Dyes work a little strange in that they are mostly unlocked through cash shop currency… however I believe you have some of the basic colors unlocked for free. The individual unlocks are at tiers of pricing and are either 90, 270 or 450. As I am writing this I am realizing that all of my information may be slightly off given that I have the patron discount applied to pretty much everything. Essentially if you really want a color it isn’t terribly cost prohibitive to get it, however I wish their dyes worked like Wildstar in that they were drops out in the world and not something you simply purchased.

What makes the Wardrobe system so special to me is that for every single wardrobe tab you can save an appearance that you choose from all of the appearances you have collected, a primary and secondary dye color… and even toggle whether or not you want to display that particular slot. What I love the most however is that you can save an appearance for two one handed weapons, a two handed weapon, a ranged weapon and a shield with every single slot. That means when you are running around in this outfit and you switch specs to something that uses a sword and board, or something that dual wields… you don’t have jarring change in appearance, nor do you have the odd feeling of running around and fighting with a shield but it still shows your two handed weapon. When you pick up any item, or look at an item in the crafting or auction pane you see a little note that tells you if you have collected the appearance for it yet. What makes collecting gear so damned fun for me at least is that they have created this tab called “Appearance Sets” that tells which pieces you are missing from each set. For the completionists there are a number of achievements tied to the collection of various sets as well. I have lots of singlets and partial sets but you can see that as of last night I have completed 30 of 323 available item sets. The only thing that I wish it showed… was where you could actually get that specific appearance item be it crafting or drops. That said the Rift team gets amazing marks for me in the way this system works and feels to use. What makes everything better… is that you can use ANY gear type on ANY character…. so I can have my plate wearing warrior in robes, or my mage sitting in full plate.

Bolstering the Sets

So when I say last night that I spent the entire evening working on the true Endgame… what I mean is that I have been on this crafting kick. Another feature that I love about Rift is that I can pretty much make one character do every single crafting profession in the game. Granted this is cost prohibitive when it comes to credits, but when the free to play system launched they gave long time subscribers a pretty massive cash shop payout. This allowed me to add everything but Apothecary and Outfitter to my primary Bahmi Warrior main. At some point I would love to add those professions as well just so I can have a true omni-crafter in this game and to streamline the creation of items. I have a max level outfitter on my Rogue, so last night I had to spend a good deal of time swapping items back and forth for the creation of fabric bolts. Over the last week as I have been out in the world picking up max level crafting materials, I have been spending some time at the end of the evening pushing up my tradeskills and at this point I have several of them at the 450 max or pretty close to it. This is the point where my brain goes a little off the track here, and shifts goals on me. When they put in the Item Appearance system, I was a little disappointed because so many of the items left to collect were things that I had in my grubby little hands at one point. Now I saved the items that really mattered to me, but wound up scrapping the vast majority of the items I handled over the years. I always had it in the back of my mind that at some point I would start running old world dungeons and crafting old world items to help bolster my appearance collection.

So last night while watching The Expanse through the Syfy Roku app… I started in Freemarch and worked my way through the various zones of the Old World collecting ore, wood, leather and cloth and then taking it back to either Meridian or Tempest Keep and crafting item sets. By the point I had shut down for the evening I had made my way through to Titanium and had crafted the Plate and Chain armor sets for each… as well as the armor bundles that were available at various points. At some point I will follow up and do the same with weapons, but there are far more items to craft there… or at least it certainly feels that way. I suppose at some point I will go do the same with my Rogue and collect the various cloth and leather sets, but since I am a pretty plate and chain focused person those weren’t nearly as important to me. The truth is since this system went in during Storm Legion if I remember correctly, I have most of the post Old World craft-able sets already saved, so that leaves me with Carmintium left to craft of the easy sets. At some point I would like to purchase the rest of the alloy metal sets like Steel and the rest of the Orichalcum set… but those involve farming up a bunch of crafting marks to purchase the patterns. In the end I had a blast and knocked out a bunch of those things that I have always said I wanted to do. I love the crafting system in this game because it is just intricate enough to keep my focus… and not a maddening mini-game that requires me tending it as I craft things. I like systems that make the acquisition of raw materials the challenge, not the assembly of those things.

Racing Snail

June 16, 2016 by Belghast

Out of Advice

This month is of course the rescheduled Newbie Blogger Initiative… and I have been horrible at supporting it so far. Normally I have filled my blog with various sundry related information about blogging, and if you really want you can probably still take some of that as completely valid. I know this event works, but the problem is… at this point I just feel like I am out of advice to give without simply rehashing a bunch of old themes. The truth is I really don’t know what I am doing, and while sometimes I put on the front that I do… I spend the majority of my time winging it. Sure before I wrote a single line on Aggronaut, I had planned a lot of stuff like the domain name and hosting provider, but that is not to say I didn’t have a much earlier not fit for public consumption blog on blogger. Back then… I just started blogging, and it is I feel honestly good to just go make some mistakes on your own without the intervention of others. My original blog was a semi-private ordeal talking about my life, my family, and all sorts of random events in large part surrounded on our sudden and bizarre desire to start camping. I say camping… but what I really mean is hanging out at a lakeside resort in an RV. It was real and snarky and sometimes raw… but it had a very specific audience of folks who actually knew me in real life. Those people didn’t care about my gaming, and in most part would probably find it strange.

So when I created Aggronaut it was by purpose designed to be completely divorced from my real life. The idea was I would have the real world blog for people who knew me… and then the other blog to talk about my passions. That didn’t exactly work because I’ve found that while I can write in a mostly anonymous fashion talking about people and events from my real life setting… I can’t exactly keep them out of my topics. I’ve tried not to name names in my blog as a sort of “protect the innocent” fashion in part because my wife works in a very skittish profession. I never wanted anything I might say to reflect badly upon her. I would say that I probably filter myself a lot, but the truth is I really don’t have that many inflammatory opinions. What I personally consider ranting about subject… I’ve often been told is just polite but impassioned discussion. So as I sit down and try and thing of advice to give a budding blogger, I am really finding myself completely empty this year. Just because I have been doing something longer, doesn’t mean I have any better grasp on how things should work. I don’t know what I am doing… and it is perfectly okay to not know what you are doing. I’ve somehow made that work for over seven years now, and I suppose I will continue to make it work for the foreseeable future. I lack the ego however to tell you t hat my way is the correct way, because I know I don’t even know if it is right for me. Next week I might get new information that makes me question everything about what I have done for the better part of this decade, and that is also okay. Basically if you want to write… just go write.

A Good Note

Over the last few days I have become progressively more active in the Rift community. There is something comfortable about coming back to this game, and I find myself obsessing with all of these little details. The experience has been something akin to catching a movie on cable television that you have not seen at decades… and then having a sudden swell of feelings for how much you used to love that movie. Coming back to Rift this time feels very much like dusting off a favorite tome and reading it again with new eyes. There are some things I am coming to terms with, namely that unlike so many games… it is unlikely that I will find many of my closest friends interested in joining me. As I have learned time and time again… Rift is not really their game and especially the AggroChat crew can rattle off a list of reasons why. That said… it has always sorta been my game, and been something that I supported regardless if I was actually playing with it. I’ve said time and time again that Rift is essentially all of the features I ever wanted in a video game compiled in one game… and they just keep adding more features as time goes on. That said it is also a much harder game than I have grown accustomed to, and as a result for the last several years since the launch of Storm Legion I have struggled a bit to find my place in it. I was extremely slow getting to level 60, and I am just now getting to 65, so the speed and difficulty of leveling was something I had a difficult time reconciling now that I am extremely used to the fast pace and ease of leveling in the “modern” mmo. I’ve long said that my favorite time period in World of Warcraft was Wrath of the Lich King, and I’ve just realized that Rift is as though you stopped the clock in a time period before content started to get watered down to appeal to a wider audience. That is not to say that Rift does not have a lot of solo-able features… but if you intend to play at the highest levels of the game you are going to need a group and dedication to your character.

All of this aside I am in this position where I am really enjoying the depth of this game, and finding myself with this entire list of things that I want to accomplish. One of the best parts of the game for me personally is the way that they have changed the wardrobe system. Now when you pick up an item, you collect its appearance and can then assemble outfits out of these appearances without needing to fiddle with any of the actual loot. The fact that there are also zero negatives like a gold sink associated with it, means I am constantly changing my wardrobes around, and I guess at times this is a positive. Within the Rift forums and Discord there was a contest called “Planetouched Style”, the idea being that you assembled an outfit that represented a certain planar theme and then went out into the world and found a location that fit the theme to take a screenshot. The first image was my entry, going for a sort of “Papa Legba” feel for it… and then finding an area out in Seratos that really shows off the deathyness. Much to my shock… I apparently nabbed second place in the contest. So I am now the proud owner of the 5th Anniversary edition racing snail… completely with flames decorating the shell. This goes nicely with my 4th Anniversary mount that I already spent damned near all of my time riding. I am excited and humbled to somehow have managed to win, but it was a great note to end the day on yesterday.

High Center

June 14, 2016 by Belghast

Gear Barrier

For months I struggled to find meaning in MMORPGs and wrote about my feelings a little over a month ago. Then something changed, and I am not exactly sure how or when it did. Now I am suddenly finding myself caring an awful lot… and even more than that thinking about what I am going to be doing that evening. The only problem is… I have found myself struggling nonetheless. Life was going rather peachy in Final Fantasy XIV that is… until I started trying to catch up in the patch content. Last week they released 3.3 patch content and I happily quested my way through both the tail end of 3.2 and 3.3 until I hit a road block. That road block being that in order to do the first dungeon introduced by the new content… I have to be sitting at 200 item level. Now when I took a break several months ago I was sitting at 190 item level and that was just about as good as was humanly possible to get at the time, or more so as good as you could get without the really painful grind. Upon coming back I have been having a blast farming ponies with the guild and slowly working my way through the relic weapon quest. I’ve also attempted to keep running experts but failed miserably at doing them on a regular basis.

The end result is that I have managed to pull my item level up to 195 but 200 still feels like it is a very very long ways off. One of the problems is in the past when they have introduced a new item cap like this to continue the quest, the previous set of dungeons provided gear that was of sufficient level to breach it. However the last set of dungeons in this case only dropped 195 level gear, which were upgrades in a few slots but in no way good enough to bring me up to fighting levels. The answer of course is to run Void Ark over and over until my eyes bleed, however I find myself struggling to do that when I don’t have anyone else to run it with. Tuesday is the night we run group content as a free company, and on that night the guild is active as can be. The only problem is the rest of the week it is a ghost town. So I struggle to push myself to do activities with strangers, which is going to be a common theme in this post. My entire time in MMO gaming I have always had this wonderful social support structure, from the moment I set foot in Everquest to modern times. If I needed something done there was always a ready supply of friends that I could pester to come do it with me. When I am missing that I am finding that I don’t exactly know how to function.

Social Barrier

This brings us to game two that I am struggling with. Over the weekend in a fit of nostalgia and such I dove head first into Rift and am having a really great time. I’ve started participating in the Rift discord community, and picked the brains of several friends as to all of the things that I should be doing now that I am back. The item that kept getting mentioned is that I really should start working on the weekly quests out in the Planetouched Wilds area. So being a dutiful follower of instructions I wound my way through the quest content and hit a big stubborn wall. There was a quest on top of Lantern Hook that involved killing a bunch of mobs essentially before they killed me, and quite frankly I was overwhelmed. I tried it in a few different specs before eventually asking for some help. The only problem is by that time in the Discord community, everyone was busy doing their own thing and not watching chat… so I got nothing but crickets. The challenge with Rift is that it is not that I have minimal social structure in that game like the way I do in Final Fantasy XIV… it is that I suddenly have none at all. Over the years all of that structure has eroded to where I am left with just one single channel that once or twice a night has another person in it with me. The majority of the time when I say hello to said other person in the channel I get no response telling me… that it probably scrolled by so fast on their screen that they didn’t even notice it.

Rift does a great job of providing a ton of things that I could be doing solo, but unfortunately there are still times where I absolutely need other people to do content. What I ultimately did was start watching the level 65 channel until I saw someone that seemed nice enough and that was playing on the same server as me. I pushed myself so far out of my comfort zone and asked them for help… to which I was shot down. However I politely thanked them anyways, and about thirty minutes later while I was still sitting there struggling to figure out a way to do the quest by myself… I got a message from them again saying that they were finished with their raid and that they could come help me. So massive thanks to Domasca from Faeblight for assisting with the quest and pushing me past that obstacle. I continued on about my business and finished another set of quests only to return back to Lantern Hook to be handed yet another quest that I had no way of soloing. It was at this point I gave up for the night and went to bed, frustrated. Basically I am already standing on a precipice with this game and have a handful of choices in front of me. Either I can start rebuilding my social network within Rift a single player at a time, and in doing so force myself into anxiety ridden territory. I can research specs and try and find that one magical spec that lets me solo silly hard content like I have done in the past. Then of course there is always the option to just quit the game again… which is the one that I am trying to avoid as hard as I can. Rift is this wonderful throwback to an era in MMO gaming that I miss greatly… the only problem is that era is one when you needed lots and lots of active friends to support you through all the random things you needed to accomplish. So in truth… I need to figure out how to meet new people in this extremely well established and already stratified community.

Goal Accomplished

June 13, 2016 by Belghast

Memories of Other Times

This weekend saw me succumbing to nostalgia, but not in the method you might think. With all the talk of the Warcraft movie, one would assume that I spent my entire weekend playing that game. However instead I wound up spending nearly the entire weekend playing the game that ultimately first took me away from World of Warcraft in a significant way. There were some events that happened this past week, and I ended up finding out that a friend of mine had passed away suddenly. That friend is someone I first met during the launch of Rift when they were part of the community team, and from that point on we kept in contact through the other games we both moved to. Of note… I am never too far from Rift, and I am rarely more than a patch behind when I inevitably fire up Glyph to peek my head in. I’ve subscribed to the game more time than I have not since it launched back in 2011, and I’ve watched the game evolved through expansions and the shift to free to play and have remained one of the few of my friends that carries a heavy torch for the game. The problem being that in order to do a lot of the things I want to do with the game… I need a body of active players. While we have had several resurgences into playing Rift, the last of which seeing the forming of House Stalwart on Faeblight during July or 2013. The only problem being this lasted a few blissful months and then once again we were all fading away from the game to play other things… myself included.

Something shifted as well with the way content was structured in the old world versus content in both Storm Legion and Nightmare Tide. In the original game I managed to level three classes to 50 happily before finally running out of steam. In Storm Legion I managed to push my warrior up to 60, and a significant time later managed to barely push up my rogue up just before the release of Nightmare Tide. The latest expansion however… for whatever reason I just hit high center and never quite managed to near the level cap. When I logged in this weekend I was sitting at level 62 and had been there for quite awhile. There was something about the way the zones were designed, that firstly greatly increased my inborn tendency to wander off aimlessly. This exacerbated another problem that I have had in the newer content… and that is I seem to be able to completely lose the quest chains in the mix and fail to follow them ultimately finding out I am entire zones behind in trying to follow any semblance of a leveling path. So instead I would wander about and grind mobs, mostly doing carnage quests… which are these kill X quests that appear in the wild as you well… will mobs. This is an extremely slow way to level and after a few hours of doing this… and not really seeing the level bar move terribly much I would wander away like a bored child into some other game.

Instant Adventures

Now a little over a year after the launch of the game, the good folks at Trion introduced a system called Instant Adventures. This was single-handedly the best re-purposing of content I have experienced in a game. There are a number of things that happen while you quest your way through a zone, and instant adventures is essentially taking all of these tasks and placing them end to end… and aiding the flow by offering the occasional teleport to the next area and the next set of objectives. The result is this mindless train that you can hop on and just focus on the mission at hand, and in the process getting a bunch of planar currency and the occasional gear filled chest in the process. I’ve always found these an extremely fun way to level at low levels, because you can just literally hit a button and start getting fed small bite sized objectives to focus on, which is the perfect manner to grind alts. The only negative however is that the gear chests are nowhere near as plentiful as they come be… and you often times wind up significantly behind the curve in equip-able items. Over the weekend while recording the AggroChat podcast for example I started a character on the EU server Zaviel and started leveling through Instant Adventure. I shot up the twenty in no time flat… however I am still largely wearing sub level 10 gear other than a handful of really amazing items that I happened to went through the adventures. That said… this is a fun way to level a character and so long as you are riding the train the gear disparities are largely not that bit of an issue thanks to a bit of a bolstering system in place.

Last year they extended this Instant Adventure system to raids, and released Hammerknell as what they called an “Intrepid Adventure”. The result is something halfway between World of Warcraft LFR, and an Instant Adventure that involves going through the raid and its trash packs… that have been chopped up and fed back to you in neat bite sized chunks. The thing that I find interesting is just how many mechanics have managed to make it into the Intrepid adventures, and that the saving grace seems to be that you can simply zerg your way back to the boss after every death instead of needing to wait for a rez. Roughly a month ago they released the second raid as an intrepid adventure based on the Mind of Madness raid. While I had a blast doing Hammerknell on a whim a year ago, I never wound up sticking around for long. This time around however I had a mission in mind… figure out a way to level from 62 to 65. I’ve felt like a failure for quite a while that I never managed to hit the level cap this time around. So Friday night when I hopped into game I headed straight for the queue for Mind of Madness and found myself enjoying both the content I was participating in and the speed at which I found myself leveling. Both Saturday and Sunday mornings I wound up sitting in one spot for a couple of hours and finally convinced myself to use some of those patron boosts that I had been sitting on for ages. Sure enough when you add in a +160% experience boost to the already good experience of Intrepid Adventures… the levels quite literally fly by. Sunday morning about noon I found myself with a newly minted level 65 character…. wearing a mismash of gear I picked up through the weekly patron crates… but somehow managing to qualify for expert dungeons.

Expert Grind

Now at some point during the weekend I had installed a dps meter because I was curious if I was actually doing okay… or if I was somehow struggling. When it comes to Intrepid adventures I seemed to be doing just fine with my dps usually running around third place or at least within a contentious pack hanging around that spot. I leveled for the most part with a high survival dps build 44 warlord, 32 champion, 0 paragon. This worked great for uptime and the ability to never need to really heal myself, however apparently it is a less than amazing build when it comes to running “end game” content. Being dumb however I just hit the queue button and hoped everything would be just fine. The end result was myself lagging so far behind the rest of the dps that I got called out on it almost immediately. We wiped over and over because we lacked the dps to tackle the encounters the manner in which folks in experts apparently are used to running them… namely in an ignore all mechanics push the boss as fast as you can and always get the speed run bonus manner. I dropped from the party and wished them luck… and in truth in spite of calling me out on the dps they managed to do so in a far more polite manner than would have happened in other communities. From there I went back to the drawing board and found my way once again to the warrior guides section of the Rift forums. Here I cobbled together a 61 Paragon 10 Warlord build that seemed to work okay… out in the world I can burst down most things before they really have a chance to damage me, but if you put me in an extended fight or a multi target fight I struggle. So I will probably continue to swap between it and my “Solo” build just for my own sanity.

The result was immediate and evident that the bulk of my problems in experts were spec. Granted I still grossly under gear the tier 3 raiders that are regularly running experts these days, however this time around I was able to out dps the tanks and healers. Over the course of yesterday I ran five for six experts and managed to cobble together some upgrades. I am still wearing several pieces of otherwise crap gear… but my hope is through running a bunch of experts I will either be able to mitigate that through spending currency or through getting lucky drops. In my very first expert I managed to complete I ended up getting a really nice purple two-handed axe so it seems like the loot gods have been smiling on me. This is not at all how I intended to spend my weekend, but I enjoyed it greatly regardless. Coming back to Rift felt like going to lunch with an old friend that you had not seen in a long time. I am not sure how long I will be around, especially given that there are other things in other games that I also want to accomplish. However for the time being I am really enjoying myself in my renewed resurgence in the game. I’ve always had a soft spot for my Bahmi and it feels good to be flexing those muscles once more. With the multi-core support the game runs amazingly well on my laptop, but unfortunately still struggles quite a bit on my AMD based desktop. The guild in Faeblight is empty, and I was alone for almost the entire weekend so that alone makes me wonder if this is sustainable. However I have the Rift discord channel to keep me company, and if I wind up staying I might end up needing to move Belghast elsewhere to find the support of a more active guild. Regardless it was an enjoyable weekend and I managed to mark one goal that had been bugging me for quite some time off that list in the back of my head.