After two crazy weeks of work, I finally had a respite this past weekend — and some much-needed time to myself. When it came to gaming, I decided to have fun and throw all my chips into one basket to see what I could do.
In this case, it was a weekend of playing nothing but RIFT. As I’ve said in the past, I feel the pressure of the expansion growing, even though we don’t know when it’s coming. What I do know for sure is that it’s (a) in the fall and (b) Guild Wars 2 is launching at the end of August. That means that I need to get serious about getting this character ready for expansion content in the span of a month before a fourth title comes along to compete for my time.
If I’m making this sound dire and work-like, it’s not; I like a challenge, and it’s enjoyable to push my character out of a lackadaisical leveling pattern to something with a strong purpose. My current goals are:
- Hit 50
- Finish up the last five zones of quest content (Droughtlands, Shimmersands, Stillmoor, Iron Pines Peaks, and Ember Isle)
- Get cranking on Planar Attunement
- Gear up in a few dungeon runs — nothing serious, but enough to tackle Ember Isle
- Do the saga quests (like the Water Saga)
It’s a hefty to-do list, that’s for sure. So with my weekend, I wanted to cross off one, if not two items from that list. I decided that on Saturday, I would do ALL of Droughtlands in one go.
Considering that there’s over a 100 quests in this one zone, it was kind of crazy. My big advantage was that I was about four or five levels above the content, so I could breeze through mobs rather easily. I started the day by gobbling up all of the quests I could find, then began running them like a madman. It was crazy. It was fun. It felt like a shopping spree where you’re trying to grab all you can before a time limit ran out.
I didn’t quite accomplish an entire zone in a day — but I made serious progress and finished the rest on Sunday. A casual playstyle means that I rarely finish a whole zone — particularly in the elder game — this quickly, so it felt like a neat accomplishment. Big thanks goes out to two guildies who lent a hand for a few group quests that I couldn’t solo.
So Droughtlands is officially behind me.
During this experience, two significant experiences happened. The first is that I began to strongly fine-tune my Cleric’s Druid build so that it would be a lot more durable. That meant ditching my Sentinel soul, scaling back on my Shaman talents, and weaving in a very strong dose of Justicar. It’s created a really fun hybrid that is flexible on the spot. With a few button clicks, I can go from a tank with a pet healer to a DPS machine with a damage pet. The melee aspect of it is quite enjoyable as well, although I do still love my Inquisitor from time to time.
The other experience is that I jumped into high-level Instant Adventures for the first time and saw my XP bar practically shoot through the roof. Questing is steady, slow progress on the XP front; IAs seem almost criminally overcharged when it comes to the XP that’s raked in. Between a handful of IA sessions and finishing Droughtlands, I went from level 42 to 48 in a weekend. For me, that’s huge. With level 50 in sight, I’m going to be pushing even harder this week to hit that mark.
Plus, IAs are just a lot of fun as a whole. I like quests for what they are, but IAs are instant grouping with rapidly changing goals and activities that just chain together. It almost feels like a cheat mode for the game. Plus, I’m getting just huge chunks of planarite and other special currency to spend on much-needed gear.
So even while one juggles MMOs, it’s still cool to put all but one aside for a big marathon session from time to time. I love the feeling of accomplishment that came out of this weekend, and I feel like I’m actually getting there with my character’s progress.
Back when I was playing Rift regularly I pretty much stopped doing quests around Droughtlands. Not because the quests are bad. Rift’s quests are about par for MMOs. I stopped doing them because they aren’t sufficiently interesting to do for their own sake and as a way of gaining xp to level up they actually slow you down.
There weren’t any Instant Adventures back then but mostly I leveled up defending zone invasions and taking down rifts. Or I just killed stuff. XP per kill in Rift isn’t great, or it wasn’t then, but i could kill so much more in the time I saved not running about from quest giver to quest location and back ten thousand times that it was more efficient. Also more fun in my opinion. I’d generally rather kill something because I chose to kill it rather than because some NPC asked me to. And anyway I was farming tradeskill raws.
Even with two level 50s and a level 47 (if I remember correctly) I’ve barely done any of the quests in either Shimmersands or Stillmoor. I did eventually finish much of Iron Pike Peaks but more because I really like the zone than anything.
Druidicar, eh? I know there’ve been some changes, but I know when I played that I enjoyed that, but it was considered inferior to the Shamicar. I eventually tried out the Shamicar instead. I never looked back. . . .
And unlike the prior person, I’ve found that if you just kill everything as you run to and from the quest givers that that’s the fastest/most efficient way to level. The quest hubs always send you out to the same areas anyway, so then you can slaughter things and do 4 quests simultaneously. Turns into big xp chunks when you do that.
I’ve generally done Droughtlands, then Iron Pine Peak, then down to Shimmersand. I’ve never really done much in Stillmoor myself. I think I decided to work the quests there on my Cleric post-50 just to see them, but don’t think I’ve finished the zone either, as Ember Isle came out about then, so like everyone else I moved on over there for the post-50 content.