It's been a while in-between posts again. Grim has been lazy. Bad Grim! I swear I have a couple sitting in the drafts folder, but they're mostly about the awesomeness of 1.6, and now that 1.6 is drawing to a close it feels a bit weird to toss them out there. Maybe I should, I'm sure there's people that have gone on to that other game with the glowsticks who might not know all the glories of the Ember Isle. Anyway, as I am wont to do, posting at 1:30am that is, here we go. 1.7 is on the horizon and we've got a load of notes from the Cleric dev lead.
Right, so if you're not a Cleric or have no interest in it, bugger off. Thanks. Otherwise you're just going to see me whine about a class that I really do enjoy playing profusely.
(pulled from the forums, comments denoted by -- )
Planned Changes for Clerics in 1.7 Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know the current list of proposed Cleric changes now that I'm done with most them and have a chance to post. Most of these will go up with the next PTS push. The rest will probably come in with the push after that.
Obviously remember that none of this stuff is final. Some of these changes may not even end up going Live, depending how things shake out in testing. Also remember that this is not an exhaustive list of every change we ever plan on making to Clerics or a representation of every issue that may concern us.
Clerics Updated the tooltips on pretty much everything. This is part of a larger effort to increase the readability of tooltips in general. You'll also notice that values for damage numbers and the like now include Spell Power, buffs, and whatnot. The goal is that when for example, Bolt of Judgment says it deals 100 damage, that's how much damage it actually does. Resists, buffs, and debuffs on the target may change that, but that's the amount of damage you will do. -- Obviously, this is something that probably should have been corrected a year ago in beta.
Cabalist Dark Passage: Now teleports 10 meters forward. -(prior: 10-15m random) -- A reasonable fix, although it comes with a 5m range nerf. The cabalist is the wannabe RDPS class, but it has too much utility stapled to it to be an elite class. The last big changes addressed playability, but nothing to address scalability into end-game content. There are no pure cabalists in raids, and the few classes that hybrid into it go 22 points at best.
Druid Trickster Spirit, Slothful Spirit, Spiteful Spirit: These have all been changed to spells that deal Earth damage and work from 30 meters. -(prior: melee range, physical damage) Eruption of Life: Now triggers off of any damage. -(prior: on melee hit) Faerie Healing: Increased the healing amount. Faerie's Favor: Now instacast. Increased the healing amount. Now affects up to 4 additional party or raid members within a 20 meter radius if cast by the Greater Faerie. -(prior: 2s cast, ST) Mead Rush: New ability usable by the Satyr. Charges at the enemy and deals damage. Has a 10 second cooldown. Fury of the Fae: The Satyr will now also autocast this when out of combat. "I do want to specify right now though that the Druid will not become a full support soul. There are currently no plans to add a full support soul to the Cleric in the foreseeable future." -- Adding 3 ranged abilities, with Bombard makes it 4, and a charge to the Satyr sure looks like this class is moving away from melee. On top of that you have a sleep and silence that can be cast at range, and an unbreakable 4s root to escape with. In fact, you can hit all 4 of your ranged abilities and rotate casting sleep, shield of the oak, and stone burst with little reason to get in melee range if your satyr is beating on things. That's assuming of course that the spirits are going to be doing more reasonable damage under an elemental type. Those 4 melee abilities? Toss em out, Druid looks like a half-assed RDPS/Support soul now. Druid is now totally ignoreable, you will not see them in raids or dungeons, possibly in PvP but as a prestige pinata pretending to heal debuff.
Inquisitor Corporal Punishment: Now lasts 12 seconds. -(prior: 5s duration) -- As if this buff weren't permanently up, in reality it's a token buff to the soul at best. Inq is the best DPS soul Clerics have. A single buff will not put them anywhere near the ranks of true dps warriors, rogues, and mages. Perhaps 1.8 will bring us a real Cleric DPS soul. They will need to try a lot harder to retain their position as a raid healer DPS, the Inquisicar is not dead, but will have tons of mana problems which will bite hard into it's DPS in raids.
Shaman Battle Charge: Reduced cooldown to 10 seconds. -(prior: 15s CD) Brutalize: Now deals 30-60% of Massive Blow's damage over 10 seconds. Reduced maximum stack size to 3. -(prior: 10-20% over 4s. stack size unknown, ticks perhaps?) Dauntless Courage: Now affects all melee damage. -(prior: physical damage) Vengeance of the Frozen Earth: Removed. -(prior: snare on hit) Ekkehard's Invocation: Now spell available in tier 3. Instacast, ranged, and deals Air damage. Favored of the Valnir: Now increases the duration of Lightning by 4-8 seconds, causing increased damage on each additional tick. -(prior: increased healing received 5-10%) -- The Shaman is getting buffed, but changing. Battle Charge is now your only snare with the removal of Frozen Earth (which was admittedly situational, and typically PvP only), on a shorter cooldown which helps with a handful of bosses in recovery from KB's. Dauntless Courage is a significant buff, but won't be noticed on the overall parse as more than 2%. Lightning Hammer will be at the bottom of the rotation unless it stacks with itself, Lightning Hammer is on a 6s CD, increasing the duration will remove it from any macro to increase it's total damage. This could be a non-factor depending on scalability of the tick, yet to be seen. For me, I'd place it a priority above Crushing Blow and be done with it. Chances are I'm wasting some of that additional harder hitting duration. Pending DPS tests, this ability may be passed up entirely. Replacing Frozen Earth with Ekkehard's Invocation will allow Shamans to close in on a target while dealing damage. Being Air damage, it's another reason to throw points in Stormborn. However, I'd rather not add a ranged ability to Shaman. Also, a comment states that it will do less damage than CB. If that's the case, why not cut it's damage in half and have it apply a snare, then turn Battle Charge into a stun or root. Shaman's ability to hold onto a target in PvP will be diminished, and it's usefulness as a spec as well.
Justicar Reprieve: Increased the effect of Spell Power. Healer's Creed: Now increases the healing you receive by 5-10%. -(prior: reduce mana cost of doctrines 15-30%) Light Makes Right: Now functions properly immediately after purchasing. -- Copy+paste the old Shaman ability into the Justicar and nerf the shit out of -icar healers in one fell swoop. The calling takes a hefty blow with this change, and not enough love to make up for it. Any resentment towards the Cleric Lead will be over the misuse of this nerf. By that I mean (/rant), if they were going to dick about with nerfing DoL, it should have been to remove it from easy access ranks to allow our DPS souls to actually DPS without having to -icar in order to be useful. None of our DPS souls compete with a Warrior, Mage, or Rogue that's attempting to make pretty red numbers. Not one. They're all supplemented by easy group healing and that's fucking annoying(/endrant). Reprieve is a token buff, but still not on par to a warrior tanks big self heal. No significant change however to the role they're intended to play. So as a tank, not much changes. As an offspec, you're reaching for a mana potion a bit more frequently in extended fights.
Purifier Surging Flames: The triggered heal now has a 20 meter radius. -(prior: 15m) Divine Cascade: Removed. -(prior: target deals damage to nearby enemies when healed) Gathering of the Ancestors: New spell available at 38. Puts an absorb shield on up to 10 party or raid members within 35 meters. Applies a blocker that prevents being affected by it again for 20 seconds (this is a different blocker from the one applied by Ward of the Ancestors and the two don't block each other, but they don't stack). 30 second cooldown. Asphodel's Purifier Crystal: 4 point bonus now reduces damage taken by 7% for 10 second. Now overwrites and cannot be overwritten by Protect the Flock. -(prior: no idea, however this buff overwrites the 5% damage reduction buff for a whopping net bonus of 2%) Rise of the Phoenix: New spell available at 44 points. Resurrects with 50% health and mana. Usable in combat. -- Finally the healing classes, apparently what Clerics have to do if they want to be in a raid for any reason. We don't get a buffing soul, we're not allowed to DPS on par with anyone, we can raid heal (warden or -icar) or main heal. Purifier is probably the best tank healer with the combination of absorbs and big heals. Stretching out Surging Flames probably isn't going to make much of a difference, it's nice to splash a bit extra during raid damage. Divine Cascade was a worthless ability, good riddance. The new Gathering spell however starts to point to a Purifier that needs to be taking on a group oriented role. I don't understand why one of the best ST healers is getting better AOE damage mitigation. Gathering way better than Cascade, but it doesn't really fit. This seems like something that would be better suited to Warden. Alas, usefulness in a raid solidifies Purifiers in their role as a main healer. No harm, just a confusing foul.
Sentinel Healing Communion -(prior: 15m), Healing Benediction -(prior: range not specified) : Both now have a 20 meter radius. Marked by the Light : Now has a 15 meter radius. -(prior: range not specified) Life's Return: Now has a 5 minute cooldown. -- Sentinel has a bit more in the way of AE healing, but is still a stronger ST healer. Instead of getting individual spells buffed, it has radii increased. Was this an issue somewhere that I'm not aware of? Are there fights that have pure healers scrambling to hit players that have wandered too far off? I've been through most of the raid fights in the game and I can only think of a couple. But still they would be covered by -icar specs over these increases. A disappointing pass for Sentinel.
Warden Waterjet: Reduced its benefit from Spell Power. Healing Showers -(prior: 7m) , Orbs of the Tide -(prior: 10m) : Both now have a 20 meter radius. Healing Cataract: Now has a 25 meter radius and affects 10 party or raid members. -(prior: 15m, 5 players) Ripple: Now has a 20 meter radius. -(prior: 15m) Cascade: No longer costs mana. River of Life: New spell available at 44 points. Resurrects with 50% health and mana. Usable in combat. -- Warden makes the most sense (of the three) to expand the AE raid heals. Giving Healing Cataract to 10 players will make the spell worth thinking about even though it's very deep in the tree at 44 points. The massive expansion for Healing Showers (31pt) will help quite a bit. Orbs of the Tide is generally on the tank, which is the center of the raid area which should help as well. What I don't like is seeing Waterjet getting nerfed out of the blue, regardless of the amount. Warden from 0-5pt is a great staple for DPS classes due to efficiency of Waterjet as a default ranged poke, the 4pt KB, and the bonus to instant cast damage. This is just flagrant, and flies in the face of the problems that DPS clerics have had for months now. The only justification that I can figure is the 11pt tree ability in Shaman may have been less powerful than Waterjet, even buffed, and the Lead didn't want to see Waterjet being used over his new ability. Which has it's own problems.
So there it is, I'm a jaded Cleric with expectations for that calling that simply aren't being met by the Cleric lead on pretty much any front.
We're consistently behind on DPS in all souls no matter how much we try to stack things. The only true function our DPS souls have at the moment is -icar and spamming heals during very obvious points in AE raid damage while barely cracking the DPS chart. Our Druid is beyond broken and the Lead still wants to repurpose it as DPS (or something) but there's just too much utility built into it to be anything BESIDES support. Not to mention, the changes in 1.7 do nothing for it's DPS and do more to REINFORCE it's position as a support role that it's not supposed to have.
Our Tanking soul is a third rate citizen, the only thing we really have going for us is the ability to hold aggro by spamming DoL, which when your OT is trying to hold a secondary mob, really isn't all the useful after all. Being able to direct our overheal aggro would do wonders, maybe tossing Righteous Mandate on an enemy would redirect overheal aggro to it. Also, why are we wearing bucklers? Warrior shields would give us a large chunk of armor, stats, and additional chances at loot, hell convert all the bucklers and let two callings share the pool of shields. It can all be Warrior stats, that's fine. We like Warrior stats for tanking because they actually help with mitigation.
Our healing souls are becoming more alike each other with each iteration because for some reason the Lead is finding it hard to pinpoint what specific abilities he wants to define each soul. It's really not that hard, and I don't know why it's getting treated like a complex equation. Purifier does absorbs, Sentinel does big ST heals, Warden does HoTs. The thing looming over the head of every healing cleric however is the competition from chloromances that can generally pump out just as much healing and still dps inbetween other support classes and our weak ass Cleric DPS.
Where the hell is the synergy between our souls? They're all built so sterile. Our DPS are bound the the -icar, but that's hardly any kind of synergy if it's a forced position and EVERY DPS soul is tied to it. In theory the Cabalist and Inquisitor should work together, but both of them have 36pt abilities that escalate their core abilities to the point of usefulness in other directions as they get closer to 51. The healers are drawing closer to parity with each other and suffer from much of the same thing. How is it with a class as varied as Cleric, we can't seem to figure out how to be as much fun to build and play as any of the other Callings? The Lead is focusing on a limited number of specific builds that work, and seems to be ignoring specs that COULD work instead.
What's really funny, despite all the problems I've gone over here, I still enjoy playing this Cleric more than any other game so far. I just think there's some obvious things that could be fixed and tweaked, as does the community, but we're getting the classic dev reaction of "Daddy knows best" while seemingly systematically ignoring input from the community for direction on what they find "fun" to play.
I'm a fan of the gritty, dirty, leans-towards-realistic art style when it comes to video games. If something looks like it's coated in plastic, or is just too clean for it's own good, I'll probably pass on it. Initially at least. I like to be deeply immersed in my gaming experience, and the visual art style of a game can break that immediately for me. I don't want to feel like an outsider pulling the strings of a muppet. I want to emulate and have it become an extension of my will. I like the sensation of having to be pulled out of the game when reality strikes.
It's not that drastic, but those are the things that grabs my gaming itch and scratches it with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Real life is dirty. Adventuring, doubly so. Some people scoff at the thought of having realistic item decay. How many times do you think you can bash on armor with a sword before it loses all of it's cutting power? There's fantastical extensions made to the logic of that to make a game playable, but I still prefer items that break down over time and need to be repaired. Magic to increase the longevity of an item (i.e. enchanted items never go dull), is a poor cop-out.
There's not a lot of good systems out there that embrace item decay. Bethesda tossed it out of Skyrim, although it had been present in the previous Elder Scrolls and Fallout, but apparently it was too much for the masses to comprehend. Minecraft (although not a gritty game) has item decay on pretty much everything and millions of people seem to be OK with it. When something breaks that can more or less readily create a new one. Strong materials last longer and are more effective. Crafting is your everything and the better stuff is harder to find. That's value built into the system. Why do people spaz out when they find diamonds? Because it lasts nearly forever and chews through pretty much anything.
I also enjoy a bit of skill in my games that adds to the dirty feel. It's one thing to lock onto a target and spam a few skill buttons with the limit to your test of skill being staying in range of your target. It's another thing wholly where you're aiming your shots, attempting to hit specific weak points, or nailing the timing perfectly to maximize an effect. When all I need to do is mash my keyboard because my target is guaranteed to be hit, my mind tends to wander. I've been know to tank in MMO's while playing Angry Birds, because really, standing in place spamming taunt just isn't that challenging. Hell, running around spamming AOE leaves me plenty of time to watch Hulu on the side. When focus and precision are brought into the mix, you become engaged on a whole other level. It ties into living out the character and being immersed in your role.
Am I talking about roleplaying? A bit. The problem is, I'm no fuzzy elf with a fancy dress and a french tickler. If I have to sit there and look at an invicible barbie doll that never takes a nick and cuts through enemies without a scratch on their blade, it ain't right. Will there be blood? Not always, not early often enough, but if the enemy (and myself for that matter) at least looks like they're getting their ass kicked, it'll do. It's hard to believe you're sitting on the brink of death when your character appears to be fresh off the factory line. It breaks the barrier of believeablity and in my mind just looks sloppy and poorly done.
When I see an explosion, I expect some debris. When I see body taking a hit, I want some blood spray. At the end of a hearty battle, I expect to see my armor scratched to hell, a few new scars, and the entrails of my enemy preferably hanging off of my person somewhere. When I drive my machine gun-laden dunebuggy into a wall, I expect to see it crumple and twist before flinging my body through the windshield. Some would say I expect too much, but I'm only asking for things that are perfect common sense. Maybe it's an additional animation here or there. Maybe they work a physics engine into the game. At the end of the day my character shouldn't look and act like a cartoon. He should look and act like a big badass goddamn hero.
It's another end of the week at the end of the year. I'm just sitting around watching the twitter stream scroll by while listening to some last.fm and thinking to myself. It's been a while since I've made a post. Well here you go, for your pleasure I'll ramble on about what's been going down in the past month or so for me and my gaming addiction. Working about 100 miles from home sure as hell doesn't do me any good when it comes to blogging. Usually I'll be able to practice my wordsmithery during downtime at work. Being on-site working directly with the CTO of the company that is outsourcing you for contract work, well, there's not a lot of downtime. This is cutting into my gaming time goddammit, so be happy.
Here Be Dragons I did intend at one point to do a follow-up on Skyrim. To be fair, I started one, but it sounded like we were in a sex crazed relationship at the time, so I let it go. It's been about a week or so since I fired up the game so I think the awesome shiny has worn off and it's been reduced to a slightly less pure form of awesome. Skyrim did win a bunch of awards at the VGA's, and they're certainly deserved. I think all I can really do is reaffirm that yes, after 100 hours, the game is still entertaining. The depth shallows out a bit due to the tediousness of always having someone finding work for you to do, but it's never the same work, which is what makes the game deceptively deep.
Being a Bethesda production it has a handful of weird bugs. Dragons flying backwards was an interesting trip. Some of the broken quests are more prominent. I would occasionally find late in the game that jobs you were sent on to places that were already cleared out would be broken. Killing a bandit chief that was already dead had to simply be resolved by using console commands to skip that chain in the quest. This happened more than once, so it seems like a systemic issue. Then there's the UI and menu system, ugh. Spit in the face of the PC gaming master race, it's a console wank job at best. If it weren't designed for controller from the outset, or if an entirely different UI was designed for the PC (seeing as how we have keyboard instead of buttons) that'd be great. Thankfully there's a handful of creative masterminds that have modded the piss out of the existing UI into something more useful. Thank you modding, you make all the pain stop hurting.
Magic is probably the most challenging aspect of the game to get powerful in, followed closely by melee combat. I recall starting out the game running around with a shitty iron sword and a handful of fire. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out which was more rewarding. However, once I started nailing people in the back of the head with arrows from 300' or so, the magic lost its luster. Yeah, it's funny to watch them burn, but they don't react to it quite how I would imagine being on fire would make me feel. Once I hit ~35 or so I decided that this would be a good time to put my 100 Sneak to good use and start flipping around a dagger with that sexy x15 multiplier damage on backstabbery. Let me tell you, if you want to develop any skill in combat and be useful, do it really early in the game. When I hit with the backstab it usually just pisses them off, causes all their buddies in a 3 mile radius to come running to assist, and has me on my heels backpedaling like a bitch. It's worse if I miss, because then I'm not taking a big satisfying chunk of their hp with me. The game is unforgiving at higher levels. You're good at what you're doing, and anything else will make you weep with regret.
You all know the high points of the game, and I didn't want to cover those again. Plenty of other people have. Let me just say that the downside to Skyrim is a drop in the bucket compared to the sheer awesomeness of its vast open world. Don't have it yet? Go buy it.
MMO of the Year Rift has come out with some new stuff with one of its latest patches. I don't know if you heard but they've added this big ass island to the east of the mainland. I consider this brave new land a sort of hardcore mode. Everything is higher than lv50 and most of them are elites as well. If you have friends and want to be challenged to a moderate degree, Ember Isle will accomodate. There's the standard zone events that get people flowing out of the woodwork that brings the difficulty level way down. Also with the new lands comes some interesting dynamic outposts that you can build up turrets and healing pods at. Building them up however invites the denizens of the island to wander over and crush the shit out of your face. Fancy trade-off I suppose.
There's a pile of new dungeons to be had as well, although I haven't yet made my way into Cadaceus Rise, I have done Rise of the Phoenix in Stonefield. Well, we attempted it. RotP is the new 10-man sliver with gear requirements/rewards on par with the first half of Hammerknell. That's the top end of the raiding game if you're not paying attention. The guild has been in there a few times unsuccessfully, but we've made some decent progress on the first boss. Lately the Iniquity crew has been crushing GSB and RoS at will while working on post-Murdantix bosses in HK. One might imagine Rift to have also lost it's luster, but the fellows at Trion Worlds are really keeping on the ball about content generation. I hope their subs stay at a high level for a long time to come and this little SWTOR business is a little bump in the road. From what I've seen so far, Trion is highly committed to building worlds, and EA, who has the ability to dump tons of money into the onset of games, is not. Maybe that'll change with Bioware pulling the strings. Who knows?
Oh yeah, and Instant Adventures are the new hotness that keeps you grinding without realizing you're grinding at all with people you might have never played with otherwise. I would be amiss to not mention this. Basically you can queue up for small zone quests. Kill 15 of these, free 16 of those, eat some mushrooms, whatever. It's busy work with reasonably decent rewards for the effort, and a boss every handful or so. If you need immeadiate action and don't want to wait you can queue for an IA (which has popped immediately whenever I've tried) and run around with handful of people cleaning up the wild lands of Rift. I think the IA's are the next logical progression from Public Quests, but need a bit more reward and risk to really polish them off. They scale well for the amount of people involved too. I've run IA's with full raids of people that had larger bosses and tiny 4-man groups with smaller and more manageable bosses. They also never end. You can get a quest at your capital city that will require you to do 7 IA's, but often you end up doing a handful more just because they're immediately engaging and never lack action.
Rift is still my MMO of choice. Until they stop doing things that define how I think MMO companies should act, they will continue to be my MMO of choice. Pretty simple.
New Addiction League of Legends! This is the latest game on the docket for me. One of my regular dudes has gotten me hooked and I've probably dumped about 20$ into buying up a handful of champions at full price before I realized that not only do they go on sale periodically. I'm about two weeks deep into the game, halfway to the level cap for my summoner, and I've barely scratched the surface. Most of my time has been spent in bot matches getting used to the flow of the game and practicing not-dying. This is a very valuable skill to have as the more deaths you incur causes you to gain less xp and gold, which in turn causes you to fall behind quickly, and unless your team can carry your ass, permanently. I like how unforgiving the combat is to the loser, it makes sense. I'm tired of the PvP games out there where everything needs to be perfectly balanced all the time. If you're getting your ass kicked and you can't adjust to the pace of the game, I see no reason why the game should mechancially adjust to your failures.
I get my ass kicked most of the time. Being an aggressive player in LoL is hard to do, most of my game consists of poking people from range and waiting until they do something stupid. Bot matches are great for this because of how uniformly programmed the AI is. They rarely push deep and get themselves into trouble which is great practice for learning when to run away and how often it's needed. LoL is a faster paced strategy game where you're hyper-focused on the immediate surroundings. Getting on voice chat makes things so much easier as communication is what will make or break games. There's a lot of terminology to learn about LoL, but once it clicks you step up to a new level. I might be giving the game a bit too much credit. From the outside it looks like a top-down isometric single-character RTS, which admittedly is crap compared to commanding armies of units in other RTS's. Coming from a background in WAR however, it serves a specific part of me that needs that fast paced high-risk battle that get's your blood flowing. Be it adrenaline or rage, LoL can get it going and it's something that's growing on me. Probably more posts to come in the new year. Don't worry you people following the blog, I'll announce when I'm ready to close up shop if you're trying to clean out blogrolls and whatnot. Also, don't feel shy about emailing me to get tossed onto mine. I haven't updated that thing in a while anyway. It's probably due for it. Cheers!
Because if anything, this game is very impressive.
When you hold it against other games from the past 5 years, there is really nothing revolutionary going on. Bethesda didn't re-invent the wheel with the graphics here, they just threw a bunch of paint on it. Nice thing is, they're goddamn artists at what they do, that really makes the difference. Skyrim is the smaller of the past three Elder Scrolls games, but is packed from border to border with detail. While it doesn't have the vast landmass that Morrowwind did, it's got sights that you would never have seen from Morrowwind. I particularly enjoy the night, and will likely enjoy it that much more when some darkness mods are available. Under a sky filled with stars, a pair of moons, or the aurora borealis from being on top of the world, the night time definitely has the advantage.
It has a very believable manner of telling you odd little stories as well. Things that really make the world feel at least synthetically alive. First time in a city? Chances are you can listen in on conversations or have events unfold right in front of you. Whole story lines start this way because you hear an argument, someone gets stabbed multiple times in front of you, or people walk right up to you admiring your shiny armor. Maybe you're a bit more on the anti-social side of things. Well, chances are you managed to wiggle your way through at least some of the starting story, but those people around you are persistent little buggers. More than once I've had a courier come running down the path at me to deliver a letter begging me for help on some random errand (that turns out to be large quest chains). If you're not interested in tracking down stories via conversation, Skyrim with offer them up to you on a platter. Ignoring people beckoning, nay begging you to assist them? Not a problem says Bethesda. While you're out exploring, we're going to send random crazy dude who hands you a magical shield amidst a bear attack. No, don't worry about the bear, once you're done with that, another flustered man will rush up to you asking if you've seen someone slightly resembling a random crazy guy who may have been carrying a magical shield. Problem? No buddy, never seen the dude. You want some bear meat? Even the dungeons aren't safe from some story interaction, more than once I've walked into a dungeon with half the place cleared out, or a fight in progress. Why don't you people go find your own damn dungeons? Skyrim will make you it's errand-boy-bitch one way or another. Unless you murder them all. Oh, right, Dark Brotherhood. Murdering murderers of murder for hire.
Daedric Princes! One of my favorite things about the past Elder Scrolls games was tracking down these shrines, activating them, and doing all the crazy god errands to win their favor and epic loot. Well Bethesda is no stranger to worshipping strange gods for favor, it's like a cult I'm told. Skyrim isn't quite as typical as the other games. Sometimes your interactions with the Daedra are a little bit out of left field. Like the woman who was eating corpses, apparently she wanted me to join their dinner party, oh, and bring a priest. They're quite tender. Maybe the haunted house where things start flying around and the voices grow more eerie by the moment, so creepy it drives the ghostbuster that dragged you along to the point of murder. Then you murder him. Then you murder another priest. The Daedra enjoy that sort of thing, murder you know. Oh fine, some of them are a little less bloodthirsty, like the one who's pup has gone missing. You return the poor creature who has been neglected and are gifted a fine axe. You are then commanded to cut off the pups head. Wait. That's just more murder. Curses! The Daedra are terrible gods! I like them a lot!
My female Breton favors sneaking around in heavy armor with a bow and a pair of flaming hands, though not simultaneously. She even carried around a shield for a little while until my precious Lydia the Meatshield showed up to take those hits like a big girl. There's nothing quite like the power a bow gives you. Once you get a nice one enchanted, most of your stealth shots are instant kills. If you're good enough to make long distance shots, you can take out two or three targets before anyone realizes where you're coming from. Lydia, my darling, loves to play the game where I'll take a high perch, and once I start firing, she'll rush into the poor smucks. I need to take a moment to thank Quicksave, because poor precious Lydia has taken quite a few arrows deep into the back of her head. It's uncanny how often I hit her in the head. Disturbing really. Maybe she's suicidal. After all I make her lug around all my dragon bones and scales. Oh, and stand in the dragon breath until she falls down. Did I mention my 6th primary skill is healing? On your feet Liddy! No slouching when there's a dragon to distract! I'm the Dovahkiin dammit!
There's a terrible lot of shouting, or perhaps a lot of terrible shouting? Shouting terrible things in a dragons language of death and pain. Lydia, why are you in the way again? Don't you know when I do my uber-knockback shout you shouldn't be standing at the edge of a cliff? Some of them she shrugs off. I Accidentally. The kill command shout, that lowers their armor and will to live. Spit that one right on her. She literally shrugged at me and brushed her shoulder. What is that?? Surely these designers knew that things like this would happen and coded in a little extra "oops" factor. Oh she's a saucy lass. With her cold dead stare and impatient tone. Lydia, when you're caught looking at her, will make you get off your ass and do something. I recall many a time digging around in dungeons for loot and gold, Lydia would clear her throat at me, I would look up, and her face... oh her face in the darkness. Well, let's say she started wearing a helm. She was shouting with her eyes is what she was doing.
I tried what I could to pay attention to what the fuck was going on throughout, but in the end wandering off to discover locations took hold of me. It's nice being able to talk to the carriage near stables at major towns to hitch a ride. Does wonders for getting to new areas quickly, but you lose so much flavor when walking around. I highly recommend running everywhere. Screw your horse. If you're not working on a specific goal, just point yourself in a direction and let er rip. Did I mention the Daedra that wanted me to cleanse her temple so badly that she flew me a couple thousand feet above the ground and threatened me with gravity if I didn't help? There's things out there in Skyrim that need to be experienced. Frequently. I haven't played Rift since the day before Skyrim released (save for tonight at which we downed Alsbeth cause we're cool kids).
Blaq (http://zewar.wordpress.com) was talking about the third realm in EA's latest Wrath of Heroes which kicked me in the head a little bit about the good ol' days. Right, well that's not really fair. WoH merely has three teams and no realms to speak of. Let's not get me started on kicking inbred puppies, I'm interested in what people mean by the third realm that manages to get badly interpreted on occasion. It's not as simple as putting a third team into a playground and expecting things to work themselves out. As Blaq mentioned, all this does is create two losers that fight each other over an objective while a third team becomes the winner by completing the other objectives uncontested. Who is this fun for? The winning team has no conflict or competition, and the teams engaged in conflict both end up losing as a result.
One would assume that Mythic was trying to harness the energy of DAoC on a faster paced small scale battle with WoH, but that's really moving in the opposite direction of why three realms in DAoC was important. Games really need to be designed from the ground up to reward groups of players for helping each other achieve greater things. That's where the whole pride aspect came from. When you went out and did something epic, it benefitted everyone. This sort of mindset goes away when the only reason you give players to log in for is a personal gain. It's one thing to give players a big ol' sandbox to roam around in and kick each other in the face over, but it's something else entirely when you start to highlight objectives that help out the strangers around you that look the same or wear your colors.
Maybe some of you out there never really played DAoC during the peak of it's lifespan. I certainly didn't, but I've heard enough about the game from close friends that were a part of it to understand why the multi-realm RvR worked so well. A DAoC article for review. There was a level of complexity in DAoC that really required guilds to form strong foundations and realms as a whole to have a leading class of players that could take in the battlefields and execute plans of attack. WAR was a much more simplified version of this closer to launch, but still required some realm coordination back when Forts existed. Today it's a zerg on zerg pile of bodies, that while entertaining for the people who remain, is hardly something a realm needs coordination to accomplish. One thing that I'll attribute to the dumbing down of MMO PvP is the attitude you get from PvP'ers in general. Not that I like making generalizations, but people today are bigger assholes than they were ten years ago. Much bigger. Or maybe they're just getting more efficient.
Because really everything is becoming more efficient. Today we have such wonderous technological advancements like MAPS in-game! Or Guild Rosters that don't require you to alt+tab to your internet browser and be logged into your guild site (upon which tabbing back may or may not crash the entire PC). Quest givers these days have annoying icons over their head, and pretty much a line pointing to your objective. I'm getting away from the point of RvR, but you get the idea. As the lowest common denominator slowly expands to encompass more and more people, you attract a lot of pond scum and destroy the intricate complexities that made the competition that much more valuable in terms of time invested.
I'm in it for the long game, the strategy, political positioning and alliances. I also like the high impact combat, but that's only a piece of any given game, and not a very large one most of the time. It's more of a culmination of different plans, preparation, strategic placement, and honed skills that all turn the tide of a battle. The real exciting battles come from having things planned out, the deck stacked in your favor, and something totally unexpected happens in the middle of execution. Being able to react on the fly is a huge source of adrenaline and overcoming both an expected and unexpected enemy simultaneously is one of my favorite outcomes. You rarely find this in two sided games because people have been trained to follow the person in front of them almost mindlessly.
The third realm is rarely a balanced affair due to this, however, it doesn't mean the third realm is ever a failed state. The dynamics of being the weakest realm, strongest realm, or one that has to temporarily ally with another realm to overtake a more powerful enemy is far more interesting than being on one side or the other of a wave of players bouncing back and for to the flavor of the month realm. I can find enjoyment in being any of the three realms because of the battles. I know if I'm the weakest I can play cleanup when the other two realms collide and destroy each other. If I'm the strongest I can push multiple fronts simultaneously and dominate the field. Alliances between realms are shaky at best and can cause some serious political intrigue when they break mid-combat causing chaos to break out as well.
Sadly, WoH, and probably some of the other games touting a third realm or three team combat, may be passing these factors up. MMO's, to a purist like me, are world building affairs. The Warfronts and Scenarios that have come into popularity over the years are NOT where we need a third realm. It's the big wide open world where it really makes a difference. The guilds, keeps, objectives, resource generation, political system, and all the other things that are involved with being a part of a realm are made dynamic provided they're all attainable by kicking someone else in the teeth. The 3-way battles are just the cream floating on the top. They reason behind the battle makes all the difference between whether it's a sweet whipping cream, or a mouthful of pond scum.
First off, if you follow me on Twitter you may occasionally see tweets from me hocking a Kickstarter project written by the leader of Iniquity. Let me just vomit forth a few links here in case you're not a-tweetin' (you fool!).
Ferrel on Twitter The Blog Kickstarter Project Some Creepy Youtube Video of a Dragon The Podcast Needless to say, they're a little excited that it's close to being finished. Now with that out of the way I was going to talk about one of my RL friends that I had a conversation with about Rift. He's one of the 11 million avid World of Warcraft players that have heard about Rift, but never really had a chance to play it. The word on the street is that, apparently, it's just another MMO stealing the spotlight for a moment before it fizzles out and everyone "goes back to WoW". I mentioned that I played Rift to him, and there was some genuine intrigue. When I mentioned I did a little bit of blogging his ears perked right up (you know, WoW invented the MMO blog of course). Once I started to delve into the things that made me <3 Rift all over the place, he began panting like a bitch in heat.
I 'll likely continue this in my next post, as I'm heading out to the bar for some recreational drinking and ass-grabbing. You get a short one, because as I've learned, once I toss a post in the Drafts folder, that shit never sees the light of day again.
Yeah that's right. You can double check your url at the top of the page (if you actually wander all the way to the site), it's a new post!
Let me say, part of the lack of posting has something to do with the lack of criticism I can throw at my current game of choice, but I'm working on it. Hopefully by the time I manage to put a whole post together Trion won't have the problem fixed or mechanic rejiggered. They've done this to me three times now, I barely finished a big post on crafting right before they made a ton of changes to crafting, basically expanding it to levels that make it desirable at end-game. They also caught me halfway through a Deep Look post at the Cabalist where I was going to tear into how annoying the class is to play (this was fixed with changes to Decay). Then the most recent one I think was when I very nearly lost my mind over the imbalanced PvP gear, before they changed the Valor stat to be attainable for a character as low as Prestige rank 2, something that requires a very small level of gameplay to achieve. Having the game constantly fixed and polished makes blogging hard for me, which is why the last post lasted as long as it did. I really fucking love this game.
Yeah, it's been hard over here for a gamer that's used to conquering content, dissecting it, and exposing it's flaws and weaknesses with sharp and constructive criticism. That's probably my charm and wit talking there, but I really do enjoy building upon or re-engineering broken content and mechanics. It's just not enough for me to lay it all out there for people, unless of course it's particularly complicated. Rift has been giving me these problems. As a guild we're just now finishing up the first tier of raid content. We've cleared Greenscale a few weeks ago (the bastards did it while I was on vacation), and we dropped the Herald in River of Souls this past week after two solid attempts. We have one more boss, Alsbeth, and we'll be packing up the party for a run on the water temple that is Hammerknell. Also, I'm still balls deep in different specs as a Cleric I haven't been able to really sink my teeth into the level 11 Rogue or level 13 Mage that I created months and months ago. One of the biggest things I can complain about right now is the lack of DPS that Cleric souls put out, but when I really try to DPS it's not like I'm sitting on the bottom of the charts either. Having such a flexible class to play has really put a damper on my ability and willingness to learn the intricacies of the other classes (which is traditionally a great source of blog posts).
Things are relatively balanced across the board, any complaints I would file as nit-picking though it might be legit. Content is constantly being added to the game at a pace that I almost can't keep up with on a single toon playing upwards of 40 hours per week. I briefly considered trying to wrap my head around the story of the game thus far and presenting it in a few part mini-series/summary/cliff notes bundle of posts, but that sounds like a lot of work. Ah, work. There's that too. Work has kept me pretty busy for the past couple of months which really killed the time I would normally blog about things. I suppose a fair amount of the reason I've been absent is something of a lack of passion for this game like I had for others in the past. Or at least, that's how I interpreted it at first.
You see, as much as I love Rift, it doesn't grab me by my higher literary functions and inspire me to vomit forth volumes of fictional work like WAR did. As a game it's great, everything I could hope for and more, most of the time. Also, this isn't to say that Rift is lacking any kind of storyline because it really has that in spades too, there's just... things about it that don't feel right in my version of high fantasy RPG's. WAR suited my style, gritty, angry, kick your teeth in and use your skull to defecate in, kind of deal. Warhammer Dwarves are far and away the best representation of the race out of any fantasy setting I've known. They're violent drunken greedy bastards that are content with a hammer in their hands on the forge, a pick over their shoulder in the mines, or a flagon of ale in a bar (with a fight brewing). The Dwarves in Rift are really quite soft and remind me more of gnomes or hobbits than anything else. Moonshade Highlands, for as beautiful as the zone is, has it's main encampment filled with foppy hat wearing dwarves living in grass shacks overlooking the ocean. That struck me as terribly wrong when coming from where I feel most comfortable. The Empire in WAR really hit dead on the sort of late dark ages reawakening of the european world. The equivalent humans in Rift is actually a split society of ultra-religious zealots and god-hating techno-wizards. There's no real good and evil struggle in Rift that pushes the conflict between players, but a moral/spiritual set of choices that annoy me to no end in the real world anyway.
Now we're onto something!
So I actually took a short break there to converse with my RL brother about the real life parallels of the factions in Rift. He wanted to compare the Guardians and Defiants to Christians and Muslims, which really isn't even close ideologically but for the sense that both factions knew one set of gods existed, it almost works. Basically he summed that Muslims and Christians have the same god they worship but they have different books that describe different holy men in very similar ways. Throughout the millenia these two sects of peoples have been killing each other in the name of their respective gods, even though that fundamentally they were the same people. Different morals and lifestyles, but fundamentally they worshipped the same god. My issue is where the conflict between Defiants and Guardians exists. They're essentially the same exact people but with scientists and zealots ripped apart and factions based around them. I find it hard to believe that these are two warring cultures in the face of the very planes of existence threatening to rip them apart. The Defiants openly acknowledge the power of the Guardian gods, it's not like they're making claims that they don't exist, just that they figured out how to hack together means to replicate their powers. The Defiants early on were blamed for tearing open the planes with their technology, even though it was all just a matter of time before the Dragons returned. As far as I can tell in the lore, the Defiants may have mucked something up, but it was an inevitability.
I wonder then, and this is where the disconnect with the story comes in, if the planes hadn't been ripped open and the Guardians still hated the Defiants to the point of war, when do you toss aside your differences and deal with the threat of these dragons? It would seem to me that in the real world Christians and Muslims would come together using their strengths to overcome an enemy that threatened to destroy everything in the known world, at least BEFORE they resumed killing each other. With Telara being raided by the planes, and both factions having the means and know how to deal with them accordingly, they REALLY still have time to fight with each other? I seriously doubt that, and it takes away from the game for me in a fairly significant way. Even on a full PvP server, there's some invasions that you really need the full cooperation of both sides to deal with. Not to mention figuring out how to get back there and keep things things from opening up over and over again, it just really seems like there's better things to be doing.
So hopefully that's enough poorly written religious garbage for you to understand one of the things that irritates me about the game. It's not to say that I think all 6 of the races need to hold hands and kumbiya their way through the invasions, just that I don't find their current source of conflict convincing enough and I'd like to see it expanded. I am actually a proponent of massive world PvP, but when the majority of the open world content is already filled with the psuedo-dynamic planar PvE, it doesn't leave a lot of room to fight. On another related note, I don't like two faction world PvP to begin with, and I'd LOVE to see the races/factions dissolve into a free-for-all (flag as aggressive), or guild based PvP system where race means little besides where you start out in the world and which factional cities you can enter. You know, old school stuff. Shadowbane style city building is probably WAY too much to hope for, but given the vast combinations of classes and on-the-fly hybrid-ability, at least it has the variety down. Lastly, I, as a person, don't give much credence to religious/scientific headbutting. Why can't I be part of the third faction that could really give a shit what those two sects of morons are doing? Being cornered into one side or the other of gods vs technology while the world burns due to their lack of attention span is frustrating to say the least.
I think it boils down to Rift not having enough reason to fight other players. Both on the lore-based reasons they have for conflict between each other, and on the basis of gameplay where there's so much PvE to be had that additional world PvP just isn't necessary to be satisfied.They would need to take a full patch cycle, or hell, a significant portion of the upcoming expansion, to create space where the planes take a backseat to the war between the natives of Telara in order to pull it off in a magnitude that feels right compared to the great PvP MMO's of the past. Having it as a bullet-point or battleground when there's obviously so much more going on feels cheap, and that's something that just doesn't seem right coming from Trion. Make the PvP relevant in the same manner you've made the world PvE, dungeons, raids, crafting, rifts, and everything else relevant in the world. It just feels out of place and doesn't really grab the margins of open world PvP'ers like it should be doing. If Ember Isle takes a step in the right direction with the Sourcewells as fortification points we might seem some action, but I need full on fortresses to really be satisfied. The greatest world PvP games that I've played in the past had lots of tools to kill each other with and lots of locales to do it in.
I have faith that eventually the game can accommodate the more bloodthirsty Warhammery side of me that really wants to crush in my opponents skulls in PvP, but right now the lame excuse for conflict and lack of meaningful world objectives are holding it back.
I wanted to make a post here about how incredibly bat shit insane the development pace has been at Trion regarding Rift. We're seeing content being pumped out in a matter of months where other companies would be looking at 6-8 months. In the past half year Rift has had no less than four major updates, a 20-man raid, and two 10-man raids introduced, multiple tiers of gear, a PvP ranking overhaul, hell, I don't really want to go into what they've done per se, but how they've managed to do it. I know this post is going to come off as a bunch of rabid fanboy wank, but that's fine. It should come off like that. They're doing something the rest of the industry really should take a step back and admire. That includes you.
Without further ado, I'll send a linkback to www.soulrift.com for their interview with the main man in charge Scott Hartsman. Take some time and listen to the podcast, because it's Scott doing what he does in being very candid and direct with answers. I'm pretty sure there's a line of questioning in there where the interviewer jokingly asked him to share some secrets, to which Scott replied quite excitedly that he could share some secrets, and then proceeded to do so. Iteration was the word of the day. However they managed to build out the world, they did it right. Each developer has a full instance of the game on their work machines, so when they're testing and building things out they don't need to wait until the end of a week to push an upload to a central store to see if things break. Because of this there's less reliance on teams to get things done and collaborate on single items at a time. Developers can take those items, and bang them out individually building against the full live version of the server (although not live) to see if things break and how, then go back and correct or iterate their code. Because they don't have to wait to push these things to a live build, and can iterate changes very quickly, it means from concept to test to live is a very short time.
Among other things he also shared how the game was designed to be modified on-the-fly in realtime on a live server as needed. Ever wonder about the tools GM's have at their disposal? Apparently the dudes on Rift can make anything, quite literally any object/npc in the game, to turn on or off at any time to correct an issue. There's also triggers built into the server code that detects cheating and odd outliers. Say a player somehow shows up with 10,000 plat on him? It can be removed, the player can be coin-locked, and the loophole can be closed all before a hotfix is even thought of. Trion really has a ton of control and power, and it all comes down to how they've planned out their development process. Removing all of the traditional barriers to kicking out content was one half of the battle, the other was building an atmosphere of development that didn't include firing their staff shortly after launch. Retaining your development team to continue live development has been invaluable, and it shows by the lack of bugs and blinding amount of polish.
Hartsman also confirmed that there would absolutely be a full on expansion that is already in the works. Adding new lands to the game is something they hoped they would be able to do at launch, and after the amazing amount of subscriptions, it was set in stone months ago. The full expansion started development a few months after the game launched. Considering how much they've been able to do with small content bursts, one can only imagine what kind of colossal expansion this could turn out to be. Rift 2.0 will likely be the version number to look for. Unfortunately, we've already had 1.6 confirmed, and 1.5 is right around the corner. Something he wouldn't/couldn't allude to was how far off the expansion was.
This is the kind of breakneck development speed that I can get behind, and if they keep it up, could ultimately de-throne the 900 pound gorilla sitting on the backs of all other MMO's to date. Something that we haven't seen done extensively in quite some time is the development of large new sprawling masses of land to explore. Double the size of Telara and we could be talking about a place that would start to be comfortably inhabitable by a large server population. If they build out some real capital cities as part of the expansion, or give us access to the 6 different planes, or so many other things my head might start spinning if I really start to consider what a serious expansion could look like in this day and age. The possibilities for Rift right now are endless. The promise of content on not just the next horizon, but the next dozen horizons is something I think much of the MMO community has been clamoring for. If they can pump out enough content in a short amount of time to really start to rival some of these big veteran MMO's, I could see them really start to pick up on subs in a time when F2P is the new hot keyword, totally breaking everyones minds over where the MMO landscape is going.
I want Rift to be the next WoW. I want them to do it bigger, better, faster, and to fly in the face of what everyone expects. I want them to pick up that subscription MMO banner and make a game that anyone would feel proud to throw down 15$ a month to play, not because we have money to burn, but because we feel that it's worth it. That's what gets me going every time I take a step back and look at what Rift has done so far. They made me feel like they're actually developing the game with my 15$ a month. There's some real value here, and I think with the leadership they have in place, the iterative development pace, and the raw talent behind them that can drive them far into the future. If they can keep their eyes on their work and away from their money to avoid the greedy pitfalls that these other companies are all to pleased to dive in headfirst, this could be a game that I enjoy for many years to come.
Something that I've seen over the years in a variety of forms and have even implemented myself is adding in roles to a guild where players are recognized for their exceptional effort or skill. In larger guilds there's a need to dole out responsiblity to an officer core so the leader and figurehead isn't constantly micromanaging on a day to day basis. During my days of being in a serious Warhammer guild there was a couple levels of our officer core. The top three positions were for the guild leader and the two immediate successors. All three had equal rights as far as management went and were all considered the guild leader. Underneath the three of them were the main officer core, long time trusted players that could be relied upon to manage full warbands of people and were generally competent in every role, or at least knew how every role worked within each other. There was a secondary officer role below that which acted as a squad leader and assistant to their direct superiors. Below that were various ranks of players based mostly on time in guild with the top non-officer rank being our most skilled players that consistently kicked ass and were recognized for it.
This was back in the very early glory days of WAR when having an active roster of a hundred or more people was not terribly uncommon. As far as organizing 100+ players it was more or less necessary if you we planning on doing anything strategic. We managed to run four full warbands for about two months before the game started to nosedive, and things did go rather smoothly until the GL at the time saw the end was nigh and disappeared beneath a pile of psychobabble. Like, quite literally. He took down everything of use on the guild forum at the time and plastered it with hundreds of lines of profanity. It was probably the most epic rage quit I'd ever seen a guild leader go through and none of it was provoked by the guild as far as anyone could tell. Due to the structure of the guild we soldiered on as the population of the game dwindled away. There's something to be said about structure and order that makes people feel like they belong. Being an integral part of the system or striving for a position of renown or influence is an intangible carrot that I see a lot of games not accommodating for. Enough reminiscing however, part of what I wanted to bring up was a new layer of guild importance in Rift. At the moment guilds aren't extremely useful, but do manage to wedge in a couple bits of handy utility. The ones we use most are the rally banner for chasing down raid rifts during times of high contention, and the SP/AP/End bonus banners. Also, the Cache Finder bonus helps pick up an occasional extra Mark or Plaque from raid and dungeon bosses. The guild bank, although I feel it's a bit small and the cost for a second slot a bit high, is a handy staple as well that I think people expected from the beginning. As Trion continues to grow Rift and the population realizes it might actually have something solid here to latch onto, I think it would be pertinent to expand on the functions that a guild holds.
Ideally right now you need at least 20 consistent players to get through some of the harder content and a handful of substitutes to sit the bench and make sure your raids are always filled out. There's also a case to be made for having 30 players plus subs as you can then rotate people between 10 and 20man content on guild designated raid nights. We're not quite there, but we could be as soon as summertime slows it's damn role and lets us get back to serious gaming. The utmost importance for having these different thresholds of players is to hold peoples interest in that they always have a chance of progression on raid nights. What about the other nights of the week? What about the players that aren't on at night and miss one or two raids consistently? For the off hours and frequent players more is needed than just raiding, and I'm not talking about the PvP.
I propose Guild Stewards, masters of their own profession or role in the guild. Initially these would be purchaseable guild ranks that you would use your perks on. The requirement for these positions would be based upon either their skill in game and/or achievements collected which would be directly related to the Steward position. Each steward position would grant a passive benefit to any guild members that are in a party with them, and would have a useable ability related to their area of expertise. While there are tangible benefits to becoming a Steward of the guild, they also serve as a recognition to your dedication and to highlight that player as one that is highly knowledgeable in their field.
An Armament Steward would craft masterwork weapons and require 300 Weaponsmithing and Artificing as well as the True Professional achievement. All weapons crafted while in a party with this steward would gain an additional 3DPS or 30AP/SP for jewelry. They would gain the Mastercraft prefix. This steward would also be able to enhance weapons, increasing damage dealt by 5% for 30m.
A Fortification Steward would craft masterwork armors and require 300 Armorsmithing and Outfitting as well as the True Professional achievement. All armors crafted while in a party with this steward would gain an additional 30END. They would gain the Mastercraft prefix. This steward would also be able to enhance armor, reducing damage taken by 5% for 30m
An Enhancement Steward would craft runes and potions and require 300 Runecrafting and Apothecary as well as the True Professional achievement. Runes when applied in the presence of the steward would be given a to return the crafted materials to the user. Potions being used would have their durations increased by 25% or potency increased by 10%. This steward would be able to enhance potions or runes to increase their potency if used within 30m.
A Materials Steward would harvest all manners of materials and require 300 Mining, Harvesting, and Butchering as well as the Supreme Harvester achievement. Raw materials when processed or harvested in the prescense of this steward would have a chance of producing an additional unit. This steward would also be able to add harvesting icons to your large map and a larger radius to them with a 30m duration.
An Exploration Steward would be well traveled in the lands of Telara and would require the Every Nook and Cranny achievement unlocked. This steward would be able to see NPC's on the main map, even ones that would normally not show up on a mini-map. They would be able to confer this ability to another guild member for 10m at a time for a specific zone.
An Invasion Steward would have experience defeating the planar forces invading Telara and would require the Colossal Victory achievement unlocked. They would confer a 20% damage bonus to all party members assaulting the invaders or objectives. When an invasion starts they would receive a one-time prompt to be sent directly to the zone where the invasion is occurring.
A Planar Steward would have knowledge of all the rifts across the lands of Telara and would require the Telaran Defender achievement unlocked. They would be able to see tears forming a few minutes before normal Telarans on their map. They would also be able to change a normal tear into a Raid or PvP tear once every 30m.
A Dungeon Steward would have conquered all of the 5-man dungeons and would require the Dungeon Expert achievement unlocked. Upon entering one of the expert dungeons, the group receives a 5% damage buff and the loot drop chance is increased. While inside the instance they are able to group resurrect their party once every 15m.
Of course you could continue adding more guild stewards ad infinitum. You could go so far as specific dungeon stewards, class or even soul stewards, a steward for each zone or even each major quest hub. Making them all purchaseable options for the guild to decide if they want that sort of particular dept. Adding recognition that comes with tangible rewards gives people additional goals to strive for. I like the achievement system, accumulating points, even if it's only for bragging rights among guildies (I'm ranked #6 overall in the guild). Giving further recognition to players in the form of a secondary title, or guild tabard, or something of the sort adds another meta layer to the game. More things to strive for, more reasons to level the guild, more reasons to play with yourself in front of others. Because really, what else is there?
Crafting in Rift is good in the sense that it does pretty much what you would expect for a AAA MMO crafting system. Up until you hit level 50 crafting is quite passable. Things scale well, new recipes unlock at a pleasant pace, and the ingredients have a proper drop rate for the pace you acquire new rare recipes.There is a major flaw in that it follows this style of crafting right into level 50 where the environment changes so dramatically from a questing/leveling progression, to an instanced gear drop progression. Someone missed where the crafting needs to continue on this path as well for some reason. Unless in the future there's a planned level cap raising expansion (which in turn would suggest the crafting level cap would raise past 300), crafting needs to progress in an alternate manner as well. To be fair, the recent 1.4 patch has addressed some of my concerns by adding in more crafting content, but most of it is in the form of the crafting currency purchasable recipes.
Among the various quests in the game, the small section of them dedicated to crafting are very simple. Metals for example. Upon harvesting a node you can occasionally run across a quest item similar to the resource you were after, shiny nuggets of varied colors usually. This gives a quest to head back to your main city and show it off to your crafting trainer. He in turn promptly wets his pants and gives you another leg of the quest to gather 10 of each resource nearest that level so you can create a hybrid resource of the two metals. Steel for example is created by combining Iron and Chromite. In turn, you can craft Steel items that are a blue rarity variant of the normal green items. The Steel recipes are on a vendor that can be purchased using the crafting currency which points you right back to grinding dailies. At lower levels this seems like a mistake, mostly in that I probably won't be in level range long enough to amass the amount I need for more than one or two recipes (at most!) before they're useless again.
This makes a lot of the inbetween materials wholly useless, hence expanding on the quests. At low levels you could take those recipes off the vendor and make them rewards for doing a quest chain that takes them around level appropriate zones. These should be mostly solo-able, meaning no more than one elite mob at a time, but essentially difficult enough to justify the time spent doing them. Another idea would be to make the lower level dailies have a longer chain of quests that take you around the zone crafting items at different locations instead of making them in bulk at the capital city and delivering them like a glorified pack mule. This would get people out and about using different crafting nodes and interacting with different characters as well. Making the world feel more worldly is a wonderful side effect. Another way of spurring different aspects of the game would be a quest that requires you to interact with fellow crafters to trade items back and forth, or needing to craft an item with someone elses materials before you can learn the recipe yourself as a sort of mentorship quest.
This is all for the entry levels of the game, things that would add to the meta that crafters enjoy anyway, and possibly if expanded far enough it could be a viable way to level. Later levels of crafting when you start getting up into the power scale of T1/T2/T3 gear (currently it appears that crafted gear has gotten a bit higher than T2 Expert drops and not quite up to GSB Raid drops). Once you get into these echelons the rest of the game moves toward a group mentality where anything meaningful requires a handful of like-minded individuals. Crafting Rifts exists as a reward for burning a lot of mats at a weekly quest giver, but the risk/reward is a bit imbalanced. The Rifts themselves are very easy to do solo, but you get the most out of it by inviting your entire guild who all have a chance at the more rare drops near equally. At least, I haven't noticed having too many people to be a detriment to loot distribution. Bring on the Expert and Raid crafting rifts stocked to the brim with interesting mechanics related to all of the things that crafters crave. Bars, slowly filling up. Or, maybe just like the other rifts with crafting loot. That'd work too. This actually feeds into the next piece that I was looking at to give a revamp, and that would be Augments. Right now augments are a vague and slight enhancement to gear that come with a whole smorgasbord of names to assign as prefixes. Improve the method that one can deal with these augments. Tie the ability to interpret what value they hold to the level and experience of the crafter. A more skilled/experienced crafter should be able to know nearly exactly what a particular augment would be able to do, and should also be able to implement them more efficiently than other crafters. The purple augments, I think, should be reimagined entirely as highly valuable rare drops from Expert and Raid rifts that add a very significant boost to stats on an item and can only be applied by the appropriate crafter to an item that doesn't have an augment already. This leads nicely into my last point for now on crafting
Attaching augments and enhancements post-partum, and for that matter, only allowing the original crafter to attach them. This would do wonders for that other aspect of crafting that pushed people to do it in the first place. Pride of the quality of our work. If augments could only be attached to items after they've been crafted by the original crafter it would do wonders for repeat business and developing a name for yourself as a crafter in the community you provide for. This could easily turn the stale "everyman" crafting caste into varying degrees of crafters at the endgame. Don't be afraid to dive in and make it worthwhile. With the amount of grind already tied into the crafting system you're really hitting a large percentage of players that would consider themselves hardcore crafters anyway.
Last night after the quite successful GSB run with the guild (cleared the first two bosses in a reasonable amount of time) we had a solid run with some of the guys in DD. Only a couple minutes off from the Rapid Assault which we could definitely get if we were more confident about running to the bottom of the starting room while enduring a hail of fireballs and the like. Most dungeons the trick is to avoid any unnecessary pulls and one-shot all the bosses, but I really think for DD you have to run that gauntlet which does add a bit to the challenge.We might have to give it a shot with two tanks just to keep all the trash pulled, two DPS, and a pretty monstrous healer. It's a possibility. Alternatively, I suppose if we didn't wait for potty breaks it could have shaved off that couple of minutes, but meh. If we do end up getting the Rapid Assault achievement I'll be sure to throw up a link to that video.
This run however, close as it may have been, didn't have much in the way of achievements of any renown. It was a good run, I don't think we died as a group at all, although some individual deaths occurred. There's a point where we started talking about books I think. You might want to skip up past the where we clear tie Wildmages at the top of the spiral, it'd dead silent until then. We talk about a couple things that I was ill-informed about with the upcoming 1.4 patch. We were all pretty tired, and pleasantly surprised that everything turned out as well as it did. I guess that tends to happen running T2's with a bunch of T3 geared dudes.
A couple weeks ago now I started to do some livestreaming of dungeon runs back when I started up Guardian characters on Byriel with the Iniquity guild. Well, I'm pleased that my crew of guys have all finally reached L50 and are reasonably geared out. That means I'm going to start running more of the Expert Dungeons and we'll probably be going for a couple of achievements at the same time. As usual, the chatter will be on Skype and mostly unfiltered, hell sometimes I don't even let my guildies know they're being recorded. Be prepared for foul language and conversation!
Mostly I don't want this blog going to waste. Sometimes I lose focus or get pulled into the day to day items that keep me from pushing these projects forward. Twitter and G+ are certainly distracting, but they don't keep me from playing games in the slightest. I do have quite a stable of these videos on my Livestream page if anyone is interested, but I'll be linking the better ones. I'm sure no one wants to watch a group wipe a dozen times on each boss because we're all either too drunk or tired to do it right.
(not my standard gaming fare, but since I have this bloggy thingy here, I should probably use it for something at least.)
Are you the sort of person that takes one sideways glance at Twitter and thinks to themselves, "Why would I be interested in someone brushing their teeth?" Please, kill that misconception in your mind. Let me help you.
You're doing it wrong (and you'll probably do G+ wrong as well, but that's another post). It's your own damn fault if you follow people on twitter that post about toothpaste, unless that's something that actually interests you. It's NOT Facebook where your "friends" are correlative to your social status and the ability to play Zynga-esque games. It's usually not about your everyday life either, unless, again, you make it that.
So there's a handful of different twitter users out there. First there's you, being the clueless "I don't get it" crowd that either think social media is useless, or are just ignorant to how it works. Spammers make up a huge chunk of it, and many of them are in the clueless bit as well. Spamming for followers is no way to get actual meaningful followers, you "people" are as good as spammers. There's legit marketing that goes on in the form of company accounts. They're the outlet for press releases and rarely come across as personable human accounts, but are valuable just the same.
Twitter really gets interesting when it comes down to the individuals. You have the content generators, the consumers, and the more casual people that just chat it up. Often these three are really one group of what I like to refer to as the active user base. I would assume this is the group that most people would strive to fit in.
So start off simple, be a consumer. You don't need to interact with ANYONE to have a successful Twitter account. All you need to do is have an interest in something. Maybe even a couple things. Start off with some of the companies that represent an interest of yours and get their official twitter account to follow. Then you can dig a bit deeper and find some of the employees that work for some of your favorite companies. Often times these guys will have more interesting or in-depth things to talk about. If you pay attention you'll notice that other people are talking to those employees which is a good sign that they'll be talking about things that share a common interest, so go ahead and follow them too. Do this for a couple companies that represent your interest and you'll have a healthy base of people you're following to give you a nice realtime feed on whatever interests you.
Maybe you want to say hi to some of these people. Careful, you're on the precipice of becoming a casual twitter user there. Once you start talking to people about common interests you might talk to them more and more as you see them respond. Twitter conversations are great because more often than not you'll get all kinds of viewpoints on things that really interest you and you'll probably meet other people in the meantime. You could end up spending a fair chunk of your day talking about things that you actually like with total strangers! This crazy internet thing...
Of course, once you get to this point it's only a matter of time before you bite the bullet and start creating things to share with your new friends who share your common interests and talk about them all the time at length in an intelligent, informed, and meaningful manner. You might start a blog, or get in good with an employee to leak information, or just become a regular aficionado with your interests. People might look to you as the veteran expert and ask you questions that they think you might have the best answers for. This is when you really start generating followers as people are looking to you as an actual source of good hard reliable information and content.
Now, lists. Do you want to go even further? So you have your main encompassing interest that makes up the majority of your feed, but maybe there's other things on the side that you kinda sorta wanna keep track of, but don't really want cluttering up your well constructed main feed. Lists are used to group together users so you can see that feed seperate from the main feed. This is handy for people that post less frequently, or to tie companies to their employees so you can see the hivemind at work. They're also used to follow things that have little to do with your normal stream, or to keep track of specific instances or hashtags more easily than the search function.
tl;dr bullet points! * follow what you like, not who you think you should * report spam, block spammers * one large interest, use lists for side interests * use people you follow to find new people to follow * don't over-do it. twitter is a creep, not a sprint
The breakneck pace that I've been hitting lately as far as leveling goes has mostly been in the form of questing. Now I'll admit I don't always pay attention to why I'm doing quests, or even the rewards that come from them, but when I stop to read a bit of the text it does occasionally give me pause. Basically I'm breaking it down in my head into three categories. The premier quests of the zone are almost always the story quests. These are the ones that have a bit of voice work done and have you completing epic tasks like wrecking named elite mobs, burning down villages, and kicking puppies in the face. I like these quests. When I see that orange-ish background on a quest dialogue I tend to resist my urge to click Accept and actually read the damn thing.
Now, everything can't be a story quest obviously, so the rest of the fluffy crapsicle quests are usually the Kill 10 foozles variety. I spam click accept on these in an attempt to get them off my screen faster. On the rare occasion that I stop to read one I'm left feeling disappointed as they probably don't have much more in them besides "OMG foozles are raping the children! Go pwn them!" and then you do that. Or collecting shit; "Holy poop! The foozles are pooping all over the place! Go pick up that poop!". Then you go out and do that too. Occasionally they'll get creative and you see something along the lines of "Quick grab some foozle poop from across this field, bring it back here to saturate it in yak piss, and then go throw it at the foozles!" but those are pretty rare. Singular task objectives are the majority of crapsicle quests in the game, and reading them will probably not make you feel like a Big Damn Hero type. I normally refer to these as Bitch Quests.
There is a third type of quest in the game that I do enjoy, but only because of how natural it feels. Any time you're running around slaughtering the landscape and you run across a dead body with sparkles coming off of it, it's usually a good thing. This means you're either rewarded immediately for discovering the rotting corpse, or you roll the body and steal some precious family heirloom that can be returned to some long lost uncaring relative that couldn't be arsed to give a proper quest in the first place. Also, lumped in this section are the ever elusive trophy quests from killing trash mobs. These are the ones that pretty much every zone gets people hung up on finishing the zone questing achievement at 3-5 shy every damn time. You kick a mob in the nuts, some teeth fall out, and you deliver them like an excited schoolchild to the nearest authority figure who then gives you some candy for being a violent sociopath (in the form of XP and $$). These I have lovingly dubbed, Corpse Quests.
So amidst the Story, Bitch, and Corpse questing I've had very little time to do any PvP. Cannot be arsed I believe Bootae would put it? PvP doesn't reward enough XP to justify it, and chances are unless you roll with a premade you're gonna get hosed on grouping that makes sense. Typically this will lead to losing, and getting very little, or no XP. CBA indeed. The open-world PvP-ish objectives in Scarlet Gorge and Scarwood Reach are worth doing. Fun times there, until the wandering L50 sees you flagged and forces you to swallow your own teeth via the business end of a pointy boot. Thems the breaks though, don't PvP flag if ya can't handle it.
Dungeons... oh dungeons... how I miss thee so. The 30-39 bracket is terribly devoid of players queuing for dungeons, and good tanks that pull at an insane speed are really hard to find (I know one other besides myself in the 30 bracket). They are by far the fastest way to level when you have a good group. On any given night I would crap my pants if I were able to do 6 runs at a reasonable pace, and I'm really missing my L50 toon that could queue up and get nearly immediate pops. Alas, the grinding continues. The sooner I hit 50, the sooner I can get back into the groove of things. Particularly another Deep Looks post since those seem to be well received...
I've tossed in my Defiant towel, for now at least. The Aussie guild that I bounced over to was just keeping me up way too late at night. Probably wasn't healthy for me in the long run to work 5 days a week on 4 hours of sleep each night. I suppose I could have bounced around there for a while, but instead I've heeded the call of Iniquity. It's headed by @FerrelES from EpicSlant.com and has been around for quite a long time. I'll withhold comments as I've literally just made my way into the guild. They're playing Guardians on Byriel which means re-rolling and starting with pretty much nothing at all. They did pass down some bags to the lot of us (thanks!). Runebreaking is a pain when you're dealing with 8-slot bags.
My regular crew of guys made the trip over to Byriel as well and actually had a couple days head start on me since I was up north* for the past weekend (*Michigan thing I think; most of the urban/suburban citizenry vacations up north and works in the southern end of the state). However, Friday before leaving I started a fresh Tree Monkey Cleric and burned my way to level 13. Normally I would be playing a Dwarf, but their racial ability is pretty blatantly insulting to me. Being able to fall twice as far insinuates they spend a lot of time being tossed. Definitely not a Dwarven trait, imo. I enjoyed the Bahmi leap ability as it gave me access to all kinds of exploratory places in the world, so continuing that with an Tree Monkey made sense. They're so damn skinny though...
Between Sunday and Monday I've blitzed my way to Lv28 and also have been smacking my Livestream account in the face. I think tonight we should have things set up properly for audio, though there's a few videos of normal dungeon runs on my page if anyone can stand the silence. We like to run them quick and haphazardly so there's more than a few wipes but it's a ton of fun. We try to warn people beforehand that we're crazy bastards when it comes to dungeons. Everything is a dps race, there's no stopping. If we're out of combat there's something wrong. Our tank is amazing, our healer is amazing, and our DPS loves to punch things in the face. 4 out of 5 of us are on Skype and are totally synced with how we run. The unlucky guildie or random is usually strung along for the ride. Unsure if that's a bad thing or not.
Ah, also for future reference, these videos will be highly NSFW because we swear like a bunch of pissed off sailors at a swearing convention. I try to warn these guys beforehand that they're being recorded, but usually that just instigates worse language, subject material, etc, so I figure it's better to leave them unaware. Be prepared for more of these!
Okay, that's my bi-weekly post. More when I have other things to talk about. Keep an eye on the livestream stuff for more frequent updates. :D
Last night was probably one of my most active nights of Rift yet. There’s a couple things I want to touch on, but almost all of it is over the 1.2 patch. The blog hasn’t been as active lately. Been busy drinking. Watching the Red Wings finish out an amazing series against San Jose. Getting ready for warmer weather finally. There was also some blips on the radar called Portal 2 and Brink that got in my way a for a couple days. I suppose I could have blogged about any of that, but they’re pretty static events. The progression of MMOs, the encounters, conversations, interactions with people. Those are all things I find more blog worthy really.
Something that’s had me stumped about Rift, and what I rather enjoyed in Warhammer, is the room for improvement. WAR had tons, and I could rant on that for days. Rift, not so much, or so I thought. It’s probably just the learning curve that I feel like I’m on the rising edge of now, but for a while there I was just as green as the guy next to me. Now I realize I can lead and tank all the T1 dungeons with an amount of proficiency that regularly has people sending me tells about how awesome I am. Most of the time I laugh about this because I really consider myself an average tank at best, but I guess knowing the pulls and moving briskly makes up for not being an un-killable rock out there.
Every run of the night was formed using the LFG tool. This is mostly because the dungeons lock out if you manually enter them with a static group, I find this retarded, but whatever. I knew it was going to be a good night when lo and behold I find Herc and his ragtag band of holy-shit-amazing. Herc tanks like me, keep pulling until everything stops moving, I love this tank. Herc on Faeblight, you’re the MF’ing man. Rock on you! We crushed the PISS out of FoLH and picked up the Rapid Assault unlock as well as the Kitty Conservation unlock on Rorf. There might have been a third one in there I don’t remember. The Achievements in this game for difficult tasks do make me quite happy. They were also pleased to have me along with my DPS Shaman, and I managed to keep up with the other top DPS, with the lead trading back and forth the entire time. I think he was 2% ahead of me by the end of it! Great run! Tasty!
I MUCH prefer being a top-of-the-line melee DPS player than a creative and quirky tank. One is a dime a dozen, while the other is much more memorable, so I concede when needed. My personal highlight of the night was entering an xKB run with the LFG tool that was stuck on the last boss Konstantin. This boss is tricky because the environment is just as hazardous as the boss. Spikes shoot out of the floor and walls, and there’s a solid 20s phase of him doing increasingly deadly cleaves that you have to kite around while avoiding the spikeage. I recall running up to the boss stating that it’s really not cool to enter a dungeon that only the last boss is standing, but we gave the tank a chance.
He didn’t survive past the first cleave.
I’m not sure what he was going for, but maybe having me melee next to him got him all confused. When the cleaves started he sorta stood there all stoically and died, well, not quite heroically. Once the boss took down the MT, I picked him the boss and started kiting. They tossed a battle rez on the tank, who taunted the cleaving Konstantin over to the pile of healers and casters, promptly wiping the group. I did a /sit and waited my turn to die, facepalming all the way to the respawn button.
Mr. Tankopolous began whining, the group was collectively facepalming as well I’m sure, but they were ready to give it another shot. Tank asked me to go RDPS with the rest of them so I wouldn’t be in the way when the cleaves started. -blank stare-. Uh, buddy, I didn’t get hit by the cleaves. Ergo, not in the way, but whatever. Switched to my caster spec and proceeded to be interrupted every time a spike rammed up my ass. Tank almost started kiting, but died shortly after LoS-ing the healers behind the pillar. Starting to see how this group lost two players which opened up the spot for me and the unfortunate rogue. Hey, Mr. Tank, mind if I give it a shot?
Be my guest.
Done. Pop over to my Justi-Druid spec, pull out my Satyr, flip on a buckler and dagger. Yeah, it looks weird, but they didn’t see much alternative. Why do you have a pet out Grim? Well, he puts out another 100DPS that I can’t do. Also, I think it’s funny to watch creatures die helplessly because you tell them to stand in the fire. Sick sick man. Of course, after I one-shotted Konstantin their jaws were on the floor (as in, didn’t die the first time through). I can’t imagine how many attempts they made at this boss that causes two players to drop from the group while on the last boss. Everyone said grats, two of them sent me the customary “you’re awesome” tells. The Tank gave me a courtesy tail-between-the-legs thanks for picking up that boss. The night continues...
Shortly thereafter one of my inner circle gaming buddies hit 50 (FINALLY YOU SONOFABITCH) on his Cleric and was immediately dumped on by a full load of L50 blue and purple gear. This was cause for celebration! We hopped in a group together, queued up for the remaining T1’s, and almost immediately picked up a DPS and Support toon. Every run thereafter for the night resulted in at least one achievement unlock as we were all hitting our stride perfectly. It started to feel like the old days when I would tank while walking backwards in many of the dungeons in WAR because the heals were that good and the DPS could kill mobs just in time to pick up the next set.
We managed to rock out everything except for RotF as I can’t stand the snow blindness on the third (?) boss. xIT we picked up the achievement for not killing the spider adds and the Big Heals achievement for the Ragnoth. I believe we got Gnarly Gnars AND Corrupted Queen in Foul Cascade. The only one we picked up for Kings Breach was on the first boss for killing him with 6 puppies on me Dogs of War . It was, all in all, the best night of Rift I’ve had in quite a while. Getting a solid core group of players together makes all the difference in any game, and being able to PuG two people without batting an eye makes these runs all the smoother. We just have to get lucky that one of them is semi-competent and these runs tend to be pretty cake so far. I suppose once I pick up another piece of toughness gear we can see how these T2’s are going to treat us as a whole.
Sometimes I think the Internet just hates me a little. I was well on my way to posting my experiences with the Shaman and the power goes out at my workplace on exactly 6 PCs near me. 4 of which were unused entirely, and the 5th was only powering a monitoring dashboard that automatically restarted anyway. I was well over halfway done with the content too. It’s annoying because I used to write blog posts in my browser but would end up doing some stupid keyboard shortcut and reloading the page. Now I apparently need to be worry about power going out in a corporate setting... Ready to buy a UPS or something to keep under my desk here, just in case. That's enough whining about how my productivity on the blog is persistently curbed by the damn Universe getting in my way, moving along. Fuck me, I had a cool title and now I've forgotten it... bah! Right, so, I've specced out a 51pt Shaman to run around and crush in faces with my big hammer of he-must-be-overcompensating-for-something. This is the closet that Clerics can get to a melee DPS role and it's missing a whole lot of goodies that other traditional (rogue/warrior) dps roles bring to the table. However, if you're a class masochist like me then you're probably used to smashing that square peg in the round hole. First off the bat, the biggest strength for a Shaman is their multiple non-global-cooldown abilities. These are abilities that fire as soon as you hit them with no delay between the next cast. These are meaningful for the shaman because the three main ones have a cooldown of 5s and should absolutely be fired off as often as possible.
Jolt - fair amount of Air damage with the buffs high in the Shaman tree, fires after crits Glory of the Chosen - the most potent Shaman heal, fires after being crit Fated Blow - undefendable attack that fires after being blocked or parried Rage of the North - 7s of 100% crit chance, long cooldown of 1m30s
The Shaman has very little, if any, issues with Mana due to Endless Winter constantly giving back after crits land, oh and you crit a LOT with a full Shaman spec. It’s because of this that you’re able to spam abilities nigh endlessly and I encourage you to use to non-GCD abilities as often as possible. The second part of running a Shaman is respecting the Massive Blow . This is your go-to ability of ass-kickery. I’ve had this critting on L52 elites for upwards of 1200 damage, on players it can be even higher. The reason Massive Blow is so awesome is really because of how high you’re specced into Shaman.
Long Memory - Resets the cooldown with Crushing Blow (which is your #2 ability) Frozen Embrace - Huge boost to crit with Massive Blow Brutalize - Peripheral bleed damage Lust For Blood - Making those crits hurt so good (in addition to Overwhelming )
So for a quick and painful burst in PvP as you’re running up on your target the first thing you do is pray you’re not terribly CC’d. Once that happens you should be in good territory to tear a clothy in half. Turn on your Glacial Shield which might not last very long then hit Vengeance of the Primal North as you’re closing the gap which sets you up for some very respectable AoE on hit for 25s or so. Pop Battle Charge once you’re in range to snare them and break any that you might have had on you. Rage of the North, (any xGCD abilities after RotN), Massive Blow, Crushing Blow until MB is up again, after the next MB and your 7s of crit is worn off you can work Lightning Hammer and Glacial Shield into the rotation. This makes for some very aggressive front-end burst capability that leaves you swinging a steady rotation of pain afterwards but far from impotent. The only issue is going to be getting CC’d right after popping your big cooldown abilities which is fairly common. If you have room somewhere on your bar, Bitter Wind is an xGCD interrupt. I haven’t had a lot of use out of it so far, but against a single target it might make the difference in a close fight.
I haven’t really talked about all of the buffs (moreso with Justicar tied in). Shamans get three sets of three, Heart, Courage, and Vengeance (which has a fourth, but it’s special). Heart of XX is your paired up as Life/Death, Air/Water, and Fire/Earth +30 resistances. I haven’t run any numbers to figure out what would be most prevalent, but in PvP I tend to stick with Life and Death resists, no particular reason. Courage of XX gives a meaty buff to Strength, Dexterity, or Wisdom. Since Shaman derive their attack power from spell power I’m almost always running Wisdom here as it gives the best returns. Vengeance of XX are your on-hit effects. There’s a Snare, increase Physical damage by 5%, and additional Water damage (even though Shaman are Air based). The fourth I already mentioned is on a 2m cooldown so you would need to reapply one of these three after it wears off. These are harder to recommend, the snare proc is really nice if you’re after a fast moving target that refuses to hold still. The 5% damage boost applies for anyone attacking that target but the extra elemental damage might be more useful on armored opponents. I haven’t had enough time bouncing between them to really recommend one or the other.
You’re not going to be topping any leaderboards as a Shaman in warfronts, but your enemies will give you a wider berth after you shred them to pieces almost effortlessly the first time. You MIGHT be able to take down two squishies if they’re right on top of each other during your 7s window, but I wouldn’t expect that to be anywhere near the norm. This has been my favored spec as of late, and my favorite moment so far was actually in The Codex when a rogue caught me running to the opposite side of the map, stunned me for 4s, and then I turned around and tore him in half. You might also be tempted to go with some AoE, but it’s a futile endeavor as a melee class. Save the AoE for dungeons and raids.
Speaking of dungeons and raids, I had the opportunity to run xFoLH a couple days ago and toward the end our off-healing was so good I busted out the Shaman spec to see how it’d fare against some bosses. Now, you may know from the past that I’m a bit of an addon junkie, so it isn’t going to be a suprise to reveal that I’m a fan of the RiftJunkies combat parser. I know, it’s flawed probably, doesn’t give off 100% accurate numbers and all that rot, but still it’s something. That being said, as a Shaman in a t1 dungeon I was rocking upwards of 800dps in single target mode with close to double that spamming AoE. This was on par with the Cabalist in the group, and not far behind the Assassin. On top of that, with my partial Justicar spec I was offhealing the tank enough (along with a bard and chloro) that we didn’t even need a pure healer. I actually had to hold off on some of my messy AoE because I was managing to pull aggro a little bit.
The Shaman can be a solid DPS class, but like the Justicar, it lacks the CC tools to really excel at it’s job. The xGCD abilities when used in a macro with your basic attacks make quite a difference and their ability to ignore mana management means you’re always mashing buttons to squeeze every last drop out of the class. Not the top of the pile for either PvP or PvE, but a rewarding class to play nonetheless.
Last night I had my first taste at tanking some Expert dungeons as a shieldless cleric. It's a bit disorienting going back to the lowbie dungeons on expert mode and not being able to pull half the dungeon at one time. One thing that bothers me, immensely, is when people point at 50 being some kind of magic number for Toughness. Toughness reduces the amount of damage you take from PvE crits. That's it. I don't know how much other people get crit but for me it seems like less than 20% of the time for any given mob, if that. Also, the biggest crit I saw last night was just under 3500, where the biggest heal was 4800. Maybe this is because of my Warhammer PvE experience, where praying was a commonly acceptable tactic, but that didn't strike me as all that dangerous.
What seems to be more... ah, challenging, is the regular trash pulls or adds on a boss that are hitting for 700-1500 on regular hits. I can survive and be healed through a big crit every 5-10s or however long inbetween. What caught up to me in Realm of the Fae last night was the trash pulls hitting for upwards of 1500 in quick succession. We ended up having a Sentinel(?) as a main healer with a Bard and Chloro at least partially healing just to make things easier. I'm also told that Realm of the Fae is one of the most difficult T1 dungeons as well, so I'm willing to leave it at that.
Anyway, our xIT run went smooth. Very smooth. As a Justicar running 24% parry, 8200hp, 850 atk power, and 130 hit tanking wasn't a problem. I wasn't missing on my attacks, nothing was omgrofl critting me. The bosses have little quirks to figure out but most of them we had down in two or three attempts at most. I think the Spider boss wiped the group once with her AoE aura and my ineptitude at understanding when the hell I was supposed to LoS her. Halfway through the second fight I said fuck it and stood in the middle of the room. Healers did their job and I soaked up all the damage like a sponge. Caor was a pansy, as usual, and presented no problems whatsoever. The Three Kings were immune to CC on expert mode so we had to burn down the Cleric while all three were beating on my face. I was LoS'ing the caster causing it to drop it's longer cast time heals since it couldn't be CC'd. That seemed to work fine. The skeleton adds at the end were nothing to worry about.
The ogre boss Bonelord Fetlorn in the dark room was interesting. He does a 2s cast ability that either summons an elite add or fears you. It was tricky finding a good spot where I could stand while not LoS'ing my caster, but still have both of us able to duck out of the way when the cast pops up. I've made this helpful diagram. When the guy says something, starts casting (look for the casting bar under his target window), or everyone panics and runs away, just move a little bit. Provided the tank and healer don't get feared you should do this fight pretty easy. Not sure how tough the adds are since we only had one spawn and got feared the next time around anyway.
Ragnoth has a snare now when he starts doing his super fire AoE and you're supposed to run to the other mob. However, there's an achievement if you're healed through the full duration of it, so it doesn't really hit as hard I suppose. Tanking him in the middle-ish part of the room so people have a chance to run to safety helped a bit. Combat rezzes helped for the people that were too slow, and I think we did lose our healer part of the way through the fight too, but he came back. Oh, and he's not the last boss anymore either. There's a passage that gets opened up after the fight that takes you down into a subterranean cavern with a whole bunch of trash that you have to clear before the last boss.
Totek is a big dumb looking thing. Fairly simple fight that you'll want everyone but the tank to stay at range for. His main annoyance is a persistant AoE knockback mode that will do some fair damage while bouncing you all over the room if you aren't tanking him against a wall. Totek is big. Chances are you'll be staring at a lot of crotch for this fight. Pretty sure he need to wash up in there. After a couple minutes of being pinned against the wall by his underbeard we took him down without any surprises. xIT is pretty cake so far.
I don't want to talk about Realm of the Fae aside from saying that we had a significantly less geared main healer that may or may not have made the difference in ease from xIT. We knocked out the first two bosses and wiped a lot on the trash. While the third boss owned our collective asses without even breaking a sweat. I don't plan on going back there without a flamethrower and some napalm. Fucking plants.
Shortly after my last post I finally nudged my Cleric into his level 50 spot. Since then I've pretty much done my crafting dailies, scoured Shimmersand for Carmintium, and dick else with that toon. I've rolled an alt instead, as I'm going to need someone to do my weapon crafting after all. So yes, he's a crafting alt, but I'm leveling him entirely different from my Cleric. The Cleric was primarily leveled via quests, and there's plenty of those to go around. I've done maybe 20 Warfronts across my 50 levels with him, and ran a grand total of 4/10 dungeons with him (Iron Tomb, Deepstrike Mines, Kings Breach, and Runic Descent). I managed to collect just enough Planarite to get the best focus, and really didn't get a whole lot else from Rifting. My biggest goal was hitting 50 with the Cleric, and quests were the most reliable route to get there for me.
So my crafting alt is going to be a Warrior, supplemented by crafted armor from my Cleric throughout the game he's also working on Weaponsmithing as he levels. I'm considering dropping Mining to pick up Runecrafting and leaning on the Cleric to provide materials as I level him upwards. Of course, that means I'll need to take some extra time during my gathering to collect lower level materials as well, but it'll probably help me finish off some of those Artifact collections and achievements while I'm at it. Oh, and dailies for rep grinding, as soon as I find a nice table that lists all the different rep merchants and what they peddle. I've seen a couple that are entirely uninteresting with their rewards, but hopefully they get fleshed out with more recipes as time goes on.
Right, so playing a Warrior. Probably would have been siginificantly more rewarding if I had rolled one before the 1.1 nerf, but the silver lining is that I have no idea how badly they were nerfed in the first place. From what I can tell the Warrior is can really be broken up into three roles, Tank, DPS, and Harass. For the majority of my leveling I'll be running a DPS build based around the Champion soul, and I'll keep a sword/shield for the occasional Tanking experience. I'll have to get some links to the Soul Builds later as pulling them together while sitting in this all-too-open environment is going to draw a bit more attention than I want. Perhaps on lunch via laptop. Basically from what I've seen the good Warrior builds lean on conditional abilities for burst damage, being able to pop off three or four non-GCD abilities all at once seems to be a very effective way at dropping hp bars.
I'll get into more specific builds in a later post, similar to the Justicar post that I wrote up. For leveling the Warrior I think I'll be sticking to running the dungeons at my level and chasing Rifts inbetween finding groups. I'm not sure yet how this is going to work out with being a crafting alt since I'll still need to collect materials (which don't seem to spawn in dungeons), but if I'm lucky with drops I might not even need the crafted gear anyway. The other reason I want to stick to dungeons for leveling is to get these damn Epic quests finished. I totally missed them with my Cleric, and I think he's still stuck on the Deepstrike Mines leg of the questing. I hear the rewards from this are quite literally the best gear in the game (at the moment anyway) which makes me quite happy.
It's nice to have big, massive even, quest chains that reward you with some seriously epic loot at the end. It's one thing to get lucky on a drop and find some amazing purple item, but the luck factor that catches me. I've dealt with the luck factor in other end-game situations before and while the rush of finally getting that roll on your drop is certainly desirable, it's a different sort of feeling to work your way to a solid reward. Perhaps it's a mindset, but when I run dungeons I try not to think about the potential drops, you can avoid a lot of anxiety this way. Having other long-term goals, guaranteed "welfare" gear, and crafted items which are on-par or above the standard greens for your level help out in this regard immensely.
One last thing for my second run through the world of Rift is the end of the free month for launch day subscribers. I wonder, will the game hold up? Is it going to continue to accrue players with the new content being actively developed? Freemarch thus far has been anything but devoid of players, although that 30-day mark has been passed. I wonder what Stonefield and Scarlet Gorge are going to look like in this post-launch era. Something to take away from this post would be looking at rolling an alt, and playing it as differently as possible if only to see a different side of the game as before. My first play through I missed a majority of the dungeons and focused mostly on leveling.This time I'm going to focus mostly on the more unique experiences and leave all those silly quest-givers alone.
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Grudges are Good
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I'm a fan of the gritty, dirty, leans-towards-realistic art style when it comes to video games. If something looks like it's coated in plastic, or is just too clean for it's own good, I'll probably pass on it. Initially at least. I like to be deeply immersed in my gaming experience, and the visual art style of a game can break that immediately for me. I don't want to feel like an outsider pulling the strings of a muppet. I want to emulate and have it become an extension of my will. I like the sensation of having to be pulled out of the game when reality strikes.
The breakneck pace that I've been hitting lately as far as leveling goes has mostly been in the form of questing. Now I'll admit I don't always pay attention to why I'm doing quests, or even the rewards that come from them, but when I stop to read a bit of the text it does occasionally give me pause. Basically I'm breaking it down in my head into three categories. The premier quests of the zone are almost always the story quests. These are the ones that have a bit of voice work done and have you completing epic tasks like wrecking named elite mobs, burning down villages, and kicking puppies in the face. I like these quests. When I see that orange-ish background on a quest dialogue I tend to resist my urge to click Accept and actually read the damn thing.
When the guy says something, starts casting (look for the casting bar under his target window), or everyone panics and runs away, just move a little bit. Provided the tank and healer don't get feared you should do this fight pretty easy. Not sure how tough the adds are since we only had one spawn and got feared the next time around anyway.
