RIFT: Waving to madness
Right now RIFT is in the first of an eventual five-stage world event titled “Waves of Madness,” but so far it doesn’t feel “mad” so much as “oh hey, there’s a couple new dailies to do!”
Don’t get me wrong, I love me some dailies that have interesting mechanics (I’m particularly fond of the quest where you run around the city exposing spies and killing them) and let you save up for nice rewards, but I think Trion’s being a little too subtle while ramping up to these world events. The problem is that when people anticipate them, they want something great right off the bat — none of this “prologue” stuff. The result is that you get a lot of whiners who aren’t happy with the less-than-thrilling intro, and we all know how hard it is to coach patience to MMO players.
So it’d be much better if there was an actual event to kick off the world event, something noticeable and interactive that would serve to draw players in and have them begging for more versus doing their dailies while impatiently tapping a toe waiting for the circus to arrive.
That said, it looks like Waves of Madness will be a lot bigger than the faulty River of Souls, and I know there’s a lot of eyes on Trion to see if their course corrections from the first world event will result in a much-improved experience or not. The dailies so far are okay, and I like the fact that one of them is to bless a wardstone, which not only gets us familiar with the blessing skill (if we haven’t used it before) but gives us added incentive to do a rift in order to get a planar charge.
The rewards are attractive, I’ll admit. Some nice necklaces that have water-breathing on top of decent stats, a few pets (I’ve already got the crab… yes, I’ve got crabs), cosmetic armor, and other miscellaneous goodies. I do hope we plow into Phase 2 before too long here, because I’m eager to see what comes next.
As for my character, right now I’m mostly running a Bladedancer build on my Rogue and loving it even more than Saboteur (if that’s possible). It’s a really fun soul to use, since you’re firing off tons of instant attacks and dodging damage left and right. I love the charge ability and usually jump up in the air, hit it, and “fly” to hit my foe. There’s also a wicked awesome AoE barrage attack you can do which is almost always an “I win” button if your foes are at level or below.
That’s about it for RIFT right now. I’m only a few days away from our annual mission trip, which means that planning and preparation have taken over my life, so don’t expect TOO many articles on Bio Break this week. We do have an excellent roster of guest bloggers lined up for next week’s blogathon, so there’s a lot to look forward to!
- Posted in: RIFT
