RIFT: Celebrate good times c’mon!
RIFT is currently in its fifth and final stage of the lengthy Waves of Madness world event. And when I say “lengthy,” we’re talking about well over a month going on now. I think Trion’s overreacted just a teensy weensy bit to the complaints of shortness from the last world event, but really, it’s not as if a long world event is a bad thing. We’ve seen a nice cycle of daily quests, a few fun story scenes, and been given plenty of time to gather up the world event currency for the vendor before he waves bye-bye. So I am not complaining.
The fifth phase, oddly enough, is a celebratory one: “We’ve won, let’s party!” It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a holiday event in the game so far, and it’s actually kind of entertaining. Nothing too elaborate, but it does encourage you to dance, set off fireworks, and (my personal favorite) engage in a water balloon minigame. There’s even some strategy with the latter, because you can’t hit certain targets, and there are different point values assigned.
I’ve noticed that the dailies in phase five are awarding significantly higher amounts of currency, probably to let people wrap up their reward goals before it goes away. Each one of these world events has been a treasure trove of loot, and this time around I’ve scored a couple pets, a water-breathing trinket, an awesome planar focus (2 greater, 4 lesser), and a cosmetic skull helm. Really, the only other thing I’m interested in are some spiky cosmetic shoulders, but no loss if I don’t get them.
Apart from the world event, I’ve latched on to a terrific guild — The Watch on Deepwood — and they’ve been great at incorporating me into their social circle and activities. The other night we did a set of crafting and raid rift runs in Shimmersands that were substantially more interesting than rifts I’ve done in the past, and the rewards were much improved as well.
My rogue is trucking through the 40s at level 43 so far, mostly doing a mix of dungeons and questing. I really do love the five-man instances in this game, as they’re just long enough to be challenging but not too long as to be tiring. I’m also haphazardly crafting my way up through the tiers, but it’s not my passion so much as just something I can do with these cheap mats I keep picking up.
I’m pretty psyched about the Water Saga epic quest chain that’s coming with patch 1.4, especially since I should be nearing 50 by the time it comes out. For all the bellyaching that some commenters do about there being nothing to do at 50 other than raid, I’m finding that the game has a surprising amount of diversity if you’re willing to look. Having this quest chain to do (with a cool croc mount at the end) is a nice indication that Trion hasn’t forgotten about us soloers.
- Posted in: RIFT
I’ve enjoyed the event but it’s lasted about twice as long as it needed to. I missed the entire first week because I was away on holiday and since I’ve been back I’ve been playing half a dozen MMOs as well as Rift and I’ve still managed to collect well over 12,000 Seals.
I was hoping to take a break from Rift until the promised AAs and solo/duo instances arrive. I have stuff to do in all those other MMOs! Somehow, though, I just can’t stop logging into Rift. My third character dinged 50 last night and despite having two more in the 30s as well, my immediate response was to make a new cleric on the Defiant side.
All the things I liked best about Rift are still working for me. The pick-up-and-play grouping and raiding, the exploring, the tearing across the countryside in a huge mob on two-tailed cats and robot horses. I was expecting it to be getting old by now but somehow it just isn’t.
Are you saying that “Epic Quest” is a solo deal, by the way? I read that item on Massively as saying it was for a 10-man raid but maybe I misunderstood.
I have over 6000 of those tokens and won’t be able to find stuff to buy with all of them. As before, I’ll probably stockpile planar essences for various builds.
I enjoyed the event until Phase 5. It was a major anti-climax, celebrating victory should come after the event is completed. It rather broke my immersion to have the dwarves partying hard in Meridian when there was a super massive death invasion of Freemarch with so many invasion groups that even high levels where being overwhelmed..
The new dailies are silly in a modern WoW style as well which is a worrying development. I’m happy to have humour in Rift but I generally prefer subtler jokes than water fights and dance-till-you-drop emote contests.