So a ton of the searches I see coming up the last month or so one sticks out. “Is RIFT any good?” I see it come across my spider constantly. I came home from work last Thursday, saw that RIFT was open beta for the next few days and I wanted to see for myself… is RIFT any good….

Well before I get into what it’s about and what I liked and did not like, I will say this, YES it IS that good, I only hope it can CONTINUE to be that good for more then 3-5 months.

OK when I played what did I notice? Well the obvious first thing that sticks out is the rifts and invasions themselves. Take the public quests(PQs) from Warhammer and make them a bit more random occurring and also at a higher occurrence, that’s where you start. You reallly cannot miss them on the mini-map b/c they are brighter colored then the rest of it and if you mouse over it, it will tell you what type of elemental rift it is and what level. When you get within a certain range of the rift you can join a public group which will make it easier to heal and coordinate as well as make you eligible for rewards at end (you might be eligible if you aren’t in the group but just always group it makes it a ton easier). Also when they are completed the rewards are per person, based on how well you did in the rift. So don’t worry about any ninjas taking all your hard work. Sure there are still drops off of the mobs and they can be rolled on, and they don’t quite have who can need what done right yet, but the main rewards are personal (which I like a ton). The rewards that I saw were primarily some currency “planarite”, some occasional things that drop random items like crating mats, and then the usual random items. It takes a ton of planarite to get any of the rarer items but eh that’s ok we don’t want to get everything THAT easy do we? The rifts themselves are actually real fun and you find a ton of help from other players b/c once some major ones spawn you get everyone in a certain radius hauling ass over to the rift to close it up and get the rewards. The same is fairly easily said about the “invasions”. Every now and then,you get some random invasions and also some scripted ones. The scripted ones are pretty cool as well and you get some yelling in the air by a big bad and then also get messages broadcast throughout out the land to everyone. They are pretty tough and a bunch of elites scatter the land so while some minor rifts couldbe done solo, these elite invasions certainly cannot. Find a group and take them on and when its all over you get some rewards as well. The non scripted type of invasions are bands of npcs from the other factions which come running in from and to a location. You could prolly take them on a bit easier with a couple man crew. Again, these all show up nicely on the map when you pull it up so keep an eye on that, it offers a great break from regular questing and is fun.

What I liked about rifts—> I just couldn’t stop doing them, the large groups working together, the feeling of completion, the rewards. They all felt great. It’s a little better then when I tried WAR in beta and did the PQ’s. The problem with them was you didn’t always get loot. Sometimes you had to do them a few times and still get a lucky roll from a chest to get something. Here, everyone gets SOMETHING, and as gamers we just want loot, plain and simple.

What scares me about rifts—> Again I bring up WAR. One of the things that killed WAR (I know it’s not the only thing but to me, it was a huge reason I didn’t play past beta), is that once people leveled past the first dozen or so levels the PQ’s were EMPTY. You simply cannot finish PQ’s with no public to help. It’s entirely possible this can happen in RIFT. What happens in 1 month when everyone is 20+ and not in the lower level zones. What happens when no one is around to help you with a same level rift as you are? Well you won’t be able to complete it, you will die trying, and then the rift would end up over flowing and attacking the towns and such with invasions until the breaking point when the server decides the home area will rise up and defeat the rift. Boy I am hoping I am wrong. I hope that there are some fail safes in place to ensure these areas won’t suck in 5 months. Rifts are a great gimmick and they are 1/2 of the reason I am hooked. The second reason….

THE SOULS (Class system)

There are 4 main classes (Warrior,Mage,Cleric, and Rogue) which break up into 9 sub-classes each. Thats basically 36 specs!  In comparison, WoW has 10 classes which all have 3 spec’s each for a total of 30. However, your character at any one time will be able to choose 3 sub-class of your main class. You then can also have 4 slots for different spec’s makeups of these. So the possibilities are limitless. I found that just about every single class has one spec for pure damage and one class which can heal. Sure most of the healer specs are for survivability as solo or in conjunction with a main healer, but it seemed to me from playing and looking over them all that any of them could be spec’d to a main healer at any time at certain levels. What I found is I couldn’t get enough of playing around with these specs and souls. I must have made about 6 atls just to try out a multitude of specs and souls. I will say every single one of them had fun parts and I only tried out roughly 15% (at most) of the souls available.

Warrior

I will outline the Warrior class first since I got the least time with them. I figured I wouldn’t be playing all too much in the beta in groups so although I usually LOVE to be a tank in groups, I wouldn’t be doing any dungeons this weekend so I will leave most of that until launch. I ended up trying out Void Knight (specializing in killing magic using foes) and something else (see I told you I didn’t play it long, so I don’t even remember what I paired it with). It was ok but the survivability wasn’t great at lower levels, which I am fully aware would change with the right combo, but I ended up having so much fun with other classes I never got back to mess with the warrior again. A lot of people were talking about how fun the Paladin was, and people seemed to be shredding monsters as warriors so I am sure I will try it out at some point.

Mage

Mage was the one I played the 2nd least but I did end up having a blast once I respec’d. I started off with Warlock and Necromancer and then grabbed Chloromancer next and made it my 3rd soul. Initially it was ok, I had a pet and like WoW afliction warlocks I was DoTing my way to kills. However the Skeleton pet doesn’t keep aggro amazingly well and I ended up pulling aggro constantly. He did some good damage tho, but the addition of chloromancer def helped with the self healing and survivability. BUT, the kicker came when I decided to respec into Chloromancer being my MAIN of the 3 specs and I threw more points into it then the other 2. I figured this would be more of a healer heavy build to try and see what it would be like to have a primary healing role as a mage. Well it seemed that not only did I have the means to heal myself and others, but I also did some decent damage along the way and kill things as well. Sure, this might diminish a ton as I got higher but that feeling of killing paired with healing is a ton of fun. And since I solo 75% or more of the time any self healing on the go is a huge plus to me. This will also make it to my must play list once it launches.

Rogue

I normally don’t end up playing rogus much in MMO’s. They are slower moving in stealth, and those type people generally are the types who prefer PVP. But I wanted to try out every class in this beta so I did. Holy crap was it fun. The setup is rogue basic from every game (and WoW too). You use energy to make your special attacks and then each main attack builds up combo points which you drain all the combo points with a big “finisher”. The finisher as always can range from just plain big damage, to damage + DoT damage, to damage + adding dodge % to yuo for some time, and the list goes on. The spec’s I used were nightblade, bladedancer, and riftstalker. I found the nightblade fiery spike (throwing a flaming dagger at an enemy to do damage and get points) to be amazingly fun and possibly OP in rifts b/c of the high rate of fire and this helps with your contribution in rifts and thus better rewards. Just spam it at all of the monsters all over the battlefield and you will be doing damage everywhere. I figured I would just go straight DPS on this trial toon, and it ended up being a great damage dealer and a ton of fun. I did this b/c in every MMO the 1st thing most people go for are the ranger or Marksman types for the pets and the killing from afar. I did this like so many others in WoW with my main being a NE Hunter so I wanted to branch out some and I wasn’t disappointed. I even did one battleground PVP on him. While I am not sure I made a huge difference, being in the lower 1/3 of the levels in the BG but we ende dup rolling over the other faction easy which made for good amount of their version of honor points and a couple of quests done too, so hey it was all good! The fact that damage was good travel was also good and speed of play was great will make it for me to play at launch an easy choice. I enjoyed it equal to as much as the last class I tried….

Cleric

Most of the time when you see cleric you just thing of healing and that’s it. Here clerics can be healers dps and also tanks. This will undoubtedly be the most versatile of all the classes in RIFT and likely the one I start first. One of the funnest classes I ever played was something on the destruction side of Warhammer. I think it was one of the dark elven ones where when you did damage this charged up your “mana” and then you could use that to heal others in battle (obviously the warrior priest in WAR is prolly the same way). It was a ton of fun to be dealing a TON of damage and at the same time throwing heals to save someone else in the party as well. This was the most fun I had in an MMO class, and I have constantly been trying to replicate this feeling to no avail until I stumbled upon the Justicar in RIFT. From asking around this seemed like the best choice for what I wanted to do. I liked the damage output and once I got 6 points into the soul I unlocked a spell which was an AOE heal which came out from me to up to 10 nearby party members. Making that spell a great thing for using in rifts. I could get into the main fray and then throw out heals without targeting anyone. It doesn’t get much better then that! I only hope that skill levels some more and does better heals and then it opens up a ton of options like either main or off tank or just dps. I paired it with the shamen soul and it made for some more fun. Really I didn’t do much with the other souls I used b/c I just kept pumping points into justicar to see how high I could get in that tree in the short beta time and see how much fun it would be.

This was the character I used to do the most rifts with and I ended up getting a HUGE amount of rewards from the rifts. Like I said earlier the rifts when you are piling up the rewards and having people to seal them with you are just addicting and make you so excited when you see another one pop up.

Final initial thoughts

I really fell in love with this game. I got the collectors edition and plan on playing for at least 3 months for the cheaper monthly fee and I figure that by the end of it I will either love it more or be burned out. I figured that the parts of rift that I loved the most were the ones that could be damaged the most if I waited until a few months after launch (mainly worrying about lower level zones being empty and the rift experience potentially sucking) so I figured might as well get in when a TON of people would be online and go from there. So after the initial period I will either like or not like grouping or the dungeons (which I can’t wait to try out since I only maxed at around level 15 I never got into a dungeon at all) or be burnt out on it all. Other games turned me off in similar times (LotRO 3 months and I said everything it did WoW did better, Aion 1 month and I realized the grind-fest it was and quit) but I am hopeful I can come to love this game in 3 months and continue to play.  At the very least I love it now, (and I don’t think it’s only because it’s new and shiny) and definitely recommend it to anyone who loves MMO’s and/or WoW clones. Sure it’s a clone but hey if you love WoW , and I DO!, then take that as a good thing and try it out!

More info after the launch!

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