Rift

Fudge, it's PC only and I'm way too lazy to install Boot Camp on my mac.

Was told the final "Alpha" event is going on now. Not sure how people get into it, but 1 friend of mine got into it for pre-ordering (I think)....but his son who also pre-ordered the game didn't.

Looks like the jump-start of the game for those who pre-order starts Feb. 24th'ish (I think)?? and the game goes live on March 1st for everyone else.

Yeah the head start is Feb 24. Next beta is this Friday Feb 4-7, final beta is Feb 15-21.

I too wish they had a Mac port, but I imagine they won't do that until they achieve some critical mass on subscribers.

Which side on Belmont? Just made a "good" character, since it was the only side that had a short race.

We are on Defiant side Stosh. Zeyla, Allara and I are on right now if you want to come over.

Wow, there's a queue.

Ya, there is. They already need more servers..lol.

Hoss has been created on Belmont (hope it is ok with everyone that I did that). Zeyla, Allara, Sutlro (RL friend), Pethella (Sultro's son) and myself are in it right now. Everyone is Oiffcer or higher for learning the guild management stuff. Quite a bit of stuff you can do.

So if anyone gets online, send someone a tell in game and we will get you in Hoss ASAP.

And the server goes down...

Server goes up, server goes down. Never a miscommunication.

I've been playing it a little bit. On Belmont, lvl 5 Sasami cleric healer. I think the concept is really interesting, especially their soul(specs) system. Really allows a shitton of customization of your class. There is always cookie cutter builds, but with 8 different trees for your class and you can use 3 at a time. That allows lots of variety. Even so, the game is basically WoW 2.0 or EQ 50.0 or whatever. It takes from the best and makes something out of it. It's too similiar to WoW at this point that I'm still trying to justify playing the game when it comes out. It does look really pretty though and seems really interesting storywise.

I was talking with Zeyla about this today, but one of the things I like about it is the imminent danger. I'm used to basically being invincible in WoW. Rift requires me to be extremely careful with pulls and stuff. If I get 3 mobs, I'm gonna die, maybe repeatedly. Sorta takes me back to EQ a little bit, in a good way. Had some people over today so I couldn't play that much, hopefully hit it more tomorrow.

I made it to level 10 as some bard/ranger/riftseeker combo despite having the flu and feeling like shit. They stole some good ideas from Warhammer and improved them, aka the "public quests" which is good. There's a lot of EQ in there, since several of the devs were original EQ guys. I'm only level 10, but the multi-class thing is going to take some time to grow on me. I'm having a tough time embracing my class since I don't really feel like a particular class and there are so many soul and spec options you can almost be all things at the drop of a hat. I'm only level 10 and already I have a ridiculous amount of abilities. It's starting to feel like EQ2 where literally you have 40 different abilities on your bars. My dirge in EQ2 had nine buffs to recast each time I died, and something like 15 single target damage spells, 4 different AE spells plus a dozen various specialty spells.

I preordered, mainly to get into the beta, but I'm starting to wonder if I just donated another $60 to my failed collection of MMO games.

Totally agree about having too many abilities. I don't know if I'm "doing it wrong", but I just ignore most of the abilities and pick 4 of them for my rotation (couple openers, filler, finisher), and I only have one buff. I put as many points as possible into my main soul (ranger), and fill the rest in one other soul. The third soul gets 0 points and I only use the freebie skills it has (this is common in Rift). I definitely think this game is overkill for anyone new to MMOs, but the flexibility has me intrigued. I suspect once people get to max level and theorycraft the cookie cutters, things will shake out to be similar to every other MMO (only one right way to do things). But I don't intend to get into hardcore raiding anyway, so I don't particularly care I guess. I figure if it provides me with a few months of entertainment, it was worth the entrance fee. Kudos to you Stosh for surviving Aion as long as you did...

ive been screwing around with it off and on. The enviromental graphics look awesome on ultra and the game appears to have no lag at allso far. I like being able to combine the different souls within a class; it can lead to some pretty cool combos. The character animations, like jumping, the running, kind of look like crap though. I plan to mess around with their trades today.


Edit: o ya, i really how they have built in UI editing without using mods to do such things. Can customize pretty much everything.

I agree with Allara on the rotation issue. I use 3-4 abil's for one on one fighting then swap to using 2 different ones when i get into fights with 2+ mobs. Being a champion class I am able to hit multiple targets at once to build up combo points then use a finishing move to hit them all again.

Again, we have a guild up and running so if/when someone is on that is in it (do a /who Hoss just like in wow)....and we will get you in and promoted to officer or above so we can all play with guild management junk.

From what I could tell, yes you got all these abilities, but depending on what path you were going down, some were more powerful than others so the other spells you were getting along the way that you weren't speked into weren't as powerful. So I didn't see anything wrong with using 3 or 4 abilities.

The public fights for Rifts are really fun I find. Would be awesome if they did this for WoW. Like the elemental fights of the pre-cata events in Wrath. Except they are actually important instead of just for the achievement.

The World Dragons used to be huge pvp hate fests. It was crazy.

Defending the Rifts is kind of fun. Its cool that defending it has a greater purpose.

I'll wait until the next beta event to decide if I will buy the game and play it on the weekends. As of right now, it's really fun, but it's not to the point where I can justify spending 15 bucks a month on a game. I'm only lvl 13 before this round of the beta ended, but the world events were by far the best part of the game for me with the class customization a close second. How are the dungeons and some of the late game stuff? Anyone have any insight and oponions on it?