Rift

[Lyonheart]

Anyone play the beta? http://www.riftgame.com/en/ seem like a good game, lots of good player reviews. due march 1st

[arsonwave]

I'm an alpha tester for it, can't say much other than the game is sweet. I'll definitely be playing it once it goes live.

[Lyonheart]

I spent some time reading various forums and such, seem like a ton of positive comments about the game.I will give it a try for sure. There were several threads asking if multiboxing was allowed and no official response, but it sounds like it has a good macro system and should be easy to box. Its a 5 player group system as well. I am in this weekends beta test, cant wait to try it!

[Sbrowne55]

Wow I like this game. I haven't seen any good prospects in mmos in so freaking long. All there is, is korean mmo crap all over the place.

California based company, so I'm looking forward.

A nice video to watch too :P

http://www.riftgame.com/en/index.php

[jinkobi]

Jesse Cox has some good playthrough videos-

http://www.youtube.com/user/OMFGcata

Looks pretty cool but I might be balls deep in DC Universe by then or SWTOR beta. Too many good things coming around to play them all =(

[Khatovar]

My husband just got me the CE preorder, so I'll get to give it a whirl soon. He's been gushing about it since he got his FilePlanet beta, so here's hoping.

[Lyonheart]

Just got my beta invite for this weekends event. 8) I was hoping to get two invites so i can test boxing it, no luck 8(

[Redbeard]

I played the beta at a friends house for an hour or two. I like their soul customization deal.. but its the rift mechanic that will make or break the game.

We'll see how it does, I think it looks pretty solid though.

[Slats]

I am in also. Let me just say that patching 10.6mb/s is win over Blizzard Patcher. :D

[Kedash00]

got my beta key today, going to dl it when i get home, what's everyone's in game names so we can hook up?

[Lyonheart]

been playing all day. Started with a mage type, felt too squishy, but i can see them being more fun if I were able to box a traditional group. I switched to a rog..made him a bard/ranger and played him until around lvl 11 or so. So far the game feel like a mix of Warhammer, the rifts have the feel of public quests in WAR. The rifts can spawn anywhere at any time. They can be small enough for a few people to handle to a few groups and even large scale, multi raid size. They have stages or 'wave" normally ending with a named, when you kill the final named/stage you get a little loot bag symbol that has random loots and various shards. You can see them on the map. It also has a feel of WOW. EQ1 and EQ2 in the mix. It looks good and plays well on a good PC, cant speak for how it feels or looks on lesser PCs.

I'm not sure it brings anything completely new to the genre, but it seems to take a little from here.. a tad from there, and it feels good, fun! I mean Rifts are not new. WoW had some minor rifts as well.. but these rifts serve a purpose and are random ( unlike public quests in WAR )

The macro system is very simple, and there is some way to chain spells but i could not get t working right, but you can macro the basic stuff like /follow..targeting /cast etc. I will play a few more classes over the weekend and report what i think about it later.

[ghonosyph]

i got a beta invite starter but haven't actually received the beta invitation to the game yet... dropped wow a few months ago due to lack of funding and i'm foamin at the mouth to get into rift lol it looks so pretty and i absolutely LOVE the way their skillsets work... nothing is very cookie cutter, you can super customize how you want to play which is a HUGE jump over wow imo :D i cant wait to play this game OMGOMG!!

[Lyonheart]

i got a beta invite starter but haven't actually received the beta invitation to the game yet... dropped wow a few months ago due to lack of funding and i'm foamin at the mouth to get into rift lol it looks so pretty and i absolutely LOVE the way their skillsets work... nothing is very cookie cutter, you can super customize how you want to play which is a HUGE jump over wow imo :D i cant wait to play this game OMGOMG!!

yea.. i like the class i picked, started out as a ranger, ended up being more bard than ranger, but i loved the bards ability to heal via dps. Waiting to get back on here soon.. maybe ill fraps it 8)

[Maxion]

Got my beta through curse, and have been playing in beta 1, 3 and now 4.
Started with a paladin, but didn't have enough self healing for my taste (just a LoH spell every 20 mins), so I've been playing a justicar since then and loving it even more.

Not sure how multiboxable it will be just yet, but it does have a macro system (although very undocumented as of yet), and /follow works, and there is a keybind to assist your target, and there is a focus target system as well.
Also an option to simply always cast on your target's target, which would be enough to have slaves going fine i guess. But if they add macroability to /assist and or cast on targetstarget or focustarget it will be very nice. (those may already exist but I do not know the formatting to get it in macros yet).

Really loving the game so far though, and have already preordered one copy of the CE.

[Lyonheart]

Got my beta through curse, and have been playing in beta 1, 3 and now 4.
Started with a paladin, but didn't have enough self healing for my taste (just a LoH spell every 20 mins), so I've been playing a justicar since then and loving it even more.

Not sure how multiboxable it will be just yet, but it does have a macro system (although very undocumented as of yet), and /follow works, and there is a keybind to assist your target, and there is a focus target system as well.
Also an option to simply always cast on your target's target, which would be enough to have slaves going fine i guess. But if they add macroability to /assist and or cast on targetstarget or focustarget it will be very nice. (those may already exist but I do not know the formatting to get it in macros yet).

Really loving the game so far though, and have already preordered one copy of the CE.

i know you can use somthing like cast @targetoftarget heres a link to some commands http://telarapedia.com/wiki/Macro

[Maxion]

i know you can use somthing like cast @targetoftarget heres a link to some commands http://telarapedia.com/wiki/Macro

Ah, thank you, I'll see how these and similar functions work in game. This game might be very boxer friendly yet.
Though the ability to add delays in the macros worries me that we'll see botting going rampant, but hopefully they'll fix that.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Looks like they allow timing in macros, like EQ1 and unlike WoW.

Whats the PvP situation?

[Sbrowne55]

FAntastic! If this is boxer friendly, im done wow and starting rift up!

Wish I had a beta invite!

[Slats]

So far the graphics are nice but noting amazing. I couldn't honestly say they are any better than WoW on HIgh or Ultra atm and no DX11 support that I could see only DX9.0c. So this means it should work just fine iwth ISBoxer.

I had alot of trouble running in Windowed Mode and Windowed Fullscreen Mode. Both seemed very buggy.

The whole concept and story line is pure cheese. Didn't grab me at all, but at the end of the day unless its REALLY stupid I dont care too much as long as the content is fun. The quests I did in both starting areas seemed polished and good fun. You can customize the interface but not sure if it has LUA support. If it has this it would be a HUGE advantage because for me that is one of WoW's hugest factors.

I have pre-ordered one copy which is how I got my beta key. I'm not sure if you can have multie accounts linked to the one e-mail address but it seems at the moment you need to have multiple e-mail addresses to have more than one account.

It comes out about March - so probably right as the raids are finishing up and we are all bored of T11 content and have all our Reps maxed out.

[Maxion]

Yeah, pre-ordering guarantees access to the rest of the betas.
Will probably need an email for each account yeah.
Fullscreen windowed mode is working fine for me.
Content is good fun so far, tried some pvp and that was fun too.
For 2500 favor (honor) you can buy a pvp soul for your class, which gives some pvp specific talents and cooldowns, which might be nice later on, at least when you get higher pvp rank, since each pvp rank unlocks another tier of the talent tree for the pvp soul.
Haven't tried dungeons yet, but i hear they are very complex and far from tank and spank already at the low level ones.

[Kromtor]

american mmo developers tend to make aoe CC and damage overpowered as hell when it comes to PvP - that's been my experience. i look at videos of this and get flashbacks of DAoC where my entire group gets messed by a single player for like a 40 second duration while he picks them off one by one with control and damage spells.

even wow was slow to bring down the effect of aoe and that was only due to pve abuse. i'll be shocked if the pvp is boxable in this game - and i'll also be playing. looks fun, but so did AoC, AC2, Aion, Vanguard, etc etc....

[Boylston]

AC2 had potential to be one of the best MMORPGs except for the fact that MS doomed its launch with the horrific chat server problems.

[Maxion]

Currently you seem to get full xp for kills and quest credit while in a raid, so boxing up to 20 (max raid size) should be possible even for leveling (yes I am looking at sam here). but how well it works in pvp or raids is yet to be seen.

The pvp battlegrounds that have been released so far are up to 10 and 15 players, but world pvp is of course the main option for massive multiboxers. And there are indeed pvp servers.

[Mercbeast]

AC2 had potential to be one of the best MMORPGs except for the fact that MS doomed its launch with the horrific chat server problems.

And they went away from AC1 design and playstyle. I played the hell out of AC1, had a lot of fun in beta and at retail on Darktide. Friend got me a AC2 beta, I logged in once and all I could see was the shift towards a more EQ style game and never logged in again :(

[Kromtor]

Currently you seem to get full xp for kills and quest credit while in a raid, so boxing up to 20 (max raid size) should be possible even for leveling (yes I am looking at sam here). but how well it works in pvp or raids is yet to be seen.

The pvp battlegrounds that have been released so far are up to 10 and 15 players, but world pvp is of course the main option for massive multiboxers. And there are indeed pvp servers.
lol - somebody get a crash cart. sam just hit the floor.

[Shadoghast]

I got in on the beta event this weekend and was pretty impressed. It's mostly WoW crossed with Warhammer (spontaneous world quests/shared quests) with a touch of Shadowbane. (the customizable talent specs.) It looked pretty, and a nice change from the semi-cartoonish graphics in WoW. The server was really stable and aside from a minor queue I had no performance or access issues.

Imagine WoW where you can choose your talent trees and each of those trees are deeper and appear to be more interesting than the cookie-cutter-ized Cataclysm trees. The game ran amazingly on my rig (I have 3 monitors in eyefinity an play wraparound at 6084x1020 when I'm not multiboxing.) Leveling seemed pretty painless, but I was so busy re-rolling to try new combos, I never got past lvl 15 with any of them.

I'm definitely going to be playing this and probably dual-boxing it...once ISBoxer supports it. :^)

[Mercbeast]

A friend of mine is on the dev team, I should track him down and get hooked up.

Highly customizable classes like this will be hilarious for multiboxers. We will be able to pick and choose the absolute best mechanics possible for MBing.

[Kromtor]

the cataclysm talent trees really are pathetically dumbed down. coming up with the best combination of talents for my 4 ret pallies used to be a long process that took a lot of strategy and planning, now it's a joke. bleh.

[confusedtx5]

My jaw dropped when I saw the talent trees for Rift. The amount of spec possibilities is enough for me to sign up for BETA - got a key from the ZAM giveaway.

[blbjtb]

If you want to see the Talent trees click Here (http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html).

The Talent trees are no joke!

Also turns out you can have a 1st 2nd and 3rd talent specs as well as a pvp spec.

[Krago]

I have two keys and will try some simple DB when the Beta goes live this afternoon.

Planning on using ISBoxer on two screens and simple key repeating.

I'll report back on how it went and what if any issues I encountered.

[Svpernova09]

I've got access to the beta, the game looks really neat. I've got so much going on this week I don't even know if I'm going to be able to play >.<

[Pallarfo]

Got 2 keys (me + gf) going to try it to night, just plain singleboxing :)

[Zappy]

I got 2 accounts set up as well for beta testing, and played around a bit with it last night checking out the multiboxing aspect.

The first thing I found out is that it doesn't look promising to launch this game directly without using their launcher, so no automated startup. If you look closely under task manager (under windows 7), the launcher passes a ton of command line arguments, however, one of them appears to be a temp file that's created by the launcher and is different every time, so I don't know if there will be any way around that. All the other parameters are straightforward.

Once launched however, you can fire up a second launcher, and log in with a new account and a second copy of Rift.exe launches just fine. I was able to use keyclone to automatically add them, and then apply regions to them. From there, I was able to do window swapping, and key passing appears to be working just fine.

If I can get 2 boxing to be successful, then I'll try and get some more keys to see how it performs with a few more copies running.

[Lyonheart]

I am able to launch 5 clients via ISboxer.. you need to have the dev build of IS to get it to work.. info here>> http://isboxer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=896

atm i get 49% loaded into teh server/char list screen and says im unable to connect..might just be a rush of people trying to play

[Pallarfo]

http://www.riftstatus.com/index.php
Europe is down. Was able to create a char and then got booted.

[Lyonheart]

i think when they sent out beta keys with 25 charges to everyone, they might have not been prepared for all the people trying to log in.

[Mosg2]

The question is, do they have some sort of IWT key or not.

[outdrsyguy1]

well i managed to get in and play for 30 mins before they brought the server down heh. I am surprised that this thing taxes my graphics card as much as it does to be honest. I also have 1 of my 4 cores nearly pegged and the other 3 at 50% or so. I wonder if they are handling multiple cores correctly. only got about 4 quests done but it is nice to see a new look feel. really look forward to seeing the public quests/pvp stuff.

[Nitro]

I dont know if anyone has figured this out yet but if you set your lead toon to your focus via the "Set Focus Target" keybinding then you can use this macro syntax on your alts to cast against your mains target:

cast @focustarget Bolt of Judgment


Macros are not documented at all it seems so if you guys have any useful macros please post them, no matter how simple they may be.

[Svpernova09]

What server(s) are you guys on?

[Lyonheart]

What server(s) are you guys on?

i had a hard time getting the same server, the list was going wacky. going to start over tomorrow with 5 accounts again. i was running two for about an hour and was on medium settings fine.

So yea..post your server/ plus any times you might have for us guy 8)

[Lyonheart]

i have 5 cabalist on Gnarlwood.

tips: To macro a group invite type /macro to bring up the macro interface>> type invite player name , one line per toon so like

/invite booby
/invite poopy
/invite peepee

also this game has instances of zones ( i know i hate that ) so when you log your toons in they might not be in the same instance.. just invite them all and when they join they get a pop box asking to go to the same instance as the leader..easy enough 8)

[Lyonheart]

I'm running 5 and getting some strange behavior. When all of my toons cast, my screens start swapping regions.. lol..not sure how to fix that. I have the game on lowest settings as well and its choppy, looks like its going to take a beefy rig to 5 box on one PC.. my PC is pretty good as well. i can run 10 wows on mine at good settings with zero lag

[Mosg2]

Looking at the specialization trees Chloromancer looks to be pretty awesome multiboxed. You get your heals plus your dps from the same spec.

[Lokked]

The 49% thing --> Connection Failure seems typical of people unable to connect.

I was able to get my 3 boxes launched, but later all dropped :p

To box this w/Macros:

Set all toons in Interface to Attack Target of Target (it's an option in there).

DPS Macro:
/targetexact [MainToon]
/cast @mouseover [SpellName]

Dunno why @mouseover makes it work, but otherwise it won't. You don't need to set focuses for this to work.

Melee does NOT break follow, but chars will not auto-face. Chars will also not auto-face while casting.

Background FPS is freakin horrible. Anyone have a fix for this? Background runs at around 9fps. I'm only using like 30% of my processor power and I'm positive my graphics cards aren't even near being capped.

Overall, I'm pretty excited. This game has good class building variety!

**EDIT** Apparently the servers are down for 30 mins for a patch **

[Nitro]

Seastone US PvP server
4 Cabalists
Main toons name is Harm
Guild is Knights of Sahdow

[MiRai]

I'm definitely sold on this game thus far... 'sold' enough that I went ahead and grabbed the actual boxed CE edition from
Amazon. If it ends up being a flop, oh well, I spent $30 extra on a game I would have bought anyway. Some of us are
actually on the Reclaimer US server that we had chosen yesterday. Since I've become a Reclaimer, every time I log into
the server I have, "And I would walk five hundred miles... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy4UP_dCjAk)" in my head. :)

[Lyonheart]

Nitro, i made cabalists as well, i read that they are the best AE class. I was having an issue where when i would cast with them all, my regions would swap. Going to try your macro and see if that helps. might just play 3 though. 5 was unbearable lag, 4 was better, I'm thinking 3 will be the magic number.

[Lyonheart]

ok so i have to turn off the instant swap and only use hotkeys to swap ( so when i cast they dont swap ) but i cant find ANY hotkeys that work for all regions.. no matter what I choose, i end up only being about to swap two of teh four regions..grrr!

[Lokked]

I will try all 5 tonight, Lyon. What are your comp specs? If the lag you are referring to is background windows, I believe Rift implements some serious Inactive Window throttling. Possibly turning on "Force Foreground" option in IS might help.

For now, I've played (up to lvl 8):

3x Stormcaller/Elementalist/Dominator
Lots of knockback, Stun and Snare. With 3 of these classes, I could lock down a group mob (Elite?) without it reaching me. Stun and knockback cooldowns for these classes is pretty low (maybe too low).

3x Chloromancer/Warlock/Necromancer
You get a pet that holds agro fairly well, and a shitload of DoTs. 1 DoT from Chloro that AE heals friendlies in melee range of the mob (keeps pets alive), another that Damages the mob and heals you, 2 more instant casts. Chloro includes a debuff which gives a 15% chance on damaging the mob to return 100% of the damage as health. These DoTs have no cooldown and cost very little mana. You can chain pull mobs to no end. 2 DoTs have cast times, 2 (+ Debuff) are instant.

All DoTs stack.

Kill Collections drop 1 for each player in party (YES!!!), at least for the collections I've had to do. The only annoyances are Ground Spawn quests. Quests involving interacting (but not looting) with an object will update for all in party.

There is an option in Interface for AE Looting, but I never got around to trying it out. If this works the way I hope, it would mean never having to mouse-over to alts screen to loot, just walk them near the mob and spam AE Loot Keybind!

There is Click-to-Move, but I haven't looked into Interact With Target.

Not sure how this will play out at higher levels, but at low levels, your level vs mob level makes quite a noticable difference. Level 6s were hitting my 5s pretty hard, compared to lvl 5 mobs.

The delays allowed in macros is not as automated as it sounds - You can only have a single /cast function work per macro. You can include multiple /cast lines, but only 1 will trigger. This is beneficial in this way:


/cast Cooldown 10 sec spell
/cast No Cooldown Spell

When spammed, this will use your cooldown ability on first press, then spam the No Cooldown Spell, until the 10 sec Cooldown Spell is available again.

I haven't found a use for delays, except when pulling to have an Instant cast on 1 char go off the same time as a cast-time spell on another char.

There are several abilities which are off the Global Cooldown, which can be smushed into these macros as well.

[Lyonheart]

my specs are

intel core i7 920
12gigs ddr3 ram
Nivdia 480gtx 1500ram
velocaraptor hard drive

[Krago]

Hey All,

I managed to get 2 clients up and running using hotkeynet as I couldn't get ISBoxer to start up the two clients. However, I noticed above the dev version should fix this, I'll try that tonight.

FPS were fine and I had two windows up on one LCD. I tried plpacing each client on it's own LCD but the one on the left side would minimize and I was unable to get it back. It was still running as i could here the sound from that client.

I took my script for playing Runes of Magic and converted it for RIFT and set up some action bars and it worked fairly well after that.

I have a Cleric Sentinel backing up a Rogue Rift Stalker and it was working pretty good.
Hopefully, I can get ISBoxer working tonight and get more time to play instead of debugging.

I am on Deepwood as the server selection screen was jumping all over the place.

My Specs:

Core2Quad 2.8GHz (not OC'd)
4 GB RAM (dual chan DDR3)
ATI 4890 (not OC'd)

[Khatovar]

I must totally suck because I am not terribly impressed with Rift. I mean, you guys are all excited, my husband is all excited, his friends are all excited. I just walk away feeling "meh". I can get it's not WoW, and that seems to be enough for some people, but it's not really anything. It feels kinda like a game after you've gotten the cheat codes. It's all fun to be overpowered and stuff for about half an hour, then it just ruins the game.

[Pallarfo]

I've tried to play it, but I just can't do it. Leveled a few Defiant guys to around level 5 or 6, not sure.
The Defiant races all share the same starting zone (factory). The gfx don't appeal to me, it's nice, but doesn't trigger something. Back to wow for me.

[crowdx]

Well I have been playing rift the last few evenings and I am on the fence about this game. It brings back memories of Guild Wars and then mixed in with Aion.
I LOVED Guild Wars until I hit the level 20 level cap and Aion was too much of a grind to level plus end game was too pvp IMHO.
I am really hoping Rift can shine at level cap but that is where no one really knows if the game will shine or fall into the mists of Aion and Guild Wars.
So far I have tried every "latest and greatest" MMO over the last few years but it is always an issue to drop Wow due to all the time invested.
My wife has been very bored with Wow and tried Rift and she also found it very boring too. Maybe Rift is too much like WoW?

[Meeo]

Rifts is extremely similar to WoW, i been playing it since Beta 1, and its been enjoyable to say the least. I like the graphics, which are similar to Aion, but not over the top. Im supremely bored of WoW, and MMOs in general, but at least Rifts to me, is something new "theme" wise that i can try and get immersed into. Me and the guys i play wow with are also all on the fence about Rifts and WoW in general.

But in general, does anyone really expect anything different? MMOs all follow the same basic concepts (Minus a few), Grind, Quest, Gear up, for most pve'ers, everything will eventually be compared to UO, EQ1, and WoW.

[Lyonheart]

I leveled a team of 4 cabalist to 12 yesterday. And i too ended up being bored a bit. For me. i am always looking for a game that can be boxed with the ease and precision that WoW offers. You can box rift, and i was able to do it ok, but it did not feel a smooth as WoW. Thats the same way I feel about every MMO i have boxed, EQ2 was the next best thing as far as ease of boxing.

Rift will provide some people something new, but for me its not "better" than WoW, so I will stay with WoW. Next up>. SWtOR. Thats a game that i might actually play solo, but if its boxable.. OMG! its looking really good. However, people who have tested it are saying its WoW in space+ a lot more voice acting from NPCs lol, so well see.

[Svpernova09]

I made it to level 9 solo. I really enjoyed it. I dunno if I enjoyed it enough to shell out $49.99 though.

[Negativ1337]

Not sure, heard that trion spend $100 million on the development of 3 games. If theres 30 million involved in this game it isnt that good imo. I like the specs, and cool that multiboxing works but it looks like a released version of runescape on pc.

Going back to leveling my DKs :)

[Zappy]

I played a bit more into last night (all solo) and got my warrior to 9 and a rogue to 18.

I don't even know where to start to list all the good and bad, but I'll put up my little mini-review.

Their graphics engine needs some work in their MSAA dept. If you enable that, it'll cripple your machine. I'm running an i7 975 extreme, 12gigs ram, 2 580GTXs in SLI, and running it off an SSD with a Dell 30" monitor. With everything cranked, I see about 20FPS until i turn MSAA down to edge smoothing, then I see between 40-60. Graphics overall are good. The animations can use some work as they don't seemed as polished.

A lot of the built in functions for configuring your UI, keybindings, etc are very nice as you don't need addons to make it work. From going straight from WOW to Rift is very easy in the sense that most of the default keybinds are the same.

Questing - from 1-11 seemed very quick (I was running with a friend), then last night I did 11-18 and it slowed down a lot. You get the same quest grind feeling that wow has rather quickly. Kill x of y quests all over the place. That gets old, but I think any and every MMO has that. What I found though, if you get bored questing, simply run off and do the rifts as they provide decent XP as well.

Battlegrounds - Once you hit 10, you can start doing BGs and queue from anywhere. I'm playing defiant and the queues seem to be quite long (like 15-20 minutes) and right now I'm only eligible for Black Gardens and at first we got destroyed so quick, I didn't enjoy it at all. The next BG, I learned a little more to what's going on - rather than a zergfest, the objective is to hold onto the flag as long as you can - There is one flag in the bg and whoever holds it gathers resources for the team rather quickly. I had a few games where it was very close and quite entertaining. I can't comment a ton on the PVP so far, but it seems to be solid. The few solo fights I had were not quite 3-4 second bouts, but tended to be more in the 10-15 second range, so I think learning the classes / combos will make this quicker, but should also provide you with resources to last longer as well.

I haven't tried any dungeons yet, but from what I understand, I should be ready for iron tombs, so I'm ready to try that one out and i'm really curious to see their PVE portion of the game. I've read a lot of good things so far, but until you experience it, who really knows.

I got to Meridian last night (the first major Defiant city) and I must say that it's well thought out and quite impressive. I spent a good hour last night just combing through it doing a bunch of quests and checking it out. It has auction houses, class trainers, soul trainers, banks, etc there.

What really seperates this game from WOW is their talent system (Soul Tree). If you haven't seen the calculators yet, you can go here: http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html The level cap at release is going to be 50 with 66 possible points to allocate. What this means is that you'll be able to get the top skill (31 point talent) on two different trees and have a few more points for a 3rd tree or any combination between them. At first, it was very confusing, then I started to get a better idea of what I wanted my character to be, and after playing with the calculator and respecing, it's fun to build your and do some nice theorycrafting. I started with a ranger/marksman/nightblade, but found nightblade to not go with it at all, and wanted to try either a bard or saboteur and to my surprise, found out how easy it is. When you first start, you should have all three of your souls picked by around level 6, and to add more souls, you pick up the quests in the Meridian to get a new soul. That involves going to an active rift and performing a few actions, then once you turn it in, you've now learned this new soul. When you respec from your trainer, you can now change any/all of your souls and respend those points however you feel. In addition, you can train up to 3 extra roles (think dual-spec here) along with a pvp role allowing you 4 different specs that you can change on the fly anywhere. What this means is that you can now roll a class and once you're level capped, you can try out just about any new flavor of the class without having to start over or create an alt for it. This is a huge plus IMO.

One piece here that makes it feel like a grind to me that I remember back when WOW was first out -- walking everywhere. And what a pain that is. I can't wait to hit 20 so I can actually mount up and have some faster travel, so I'll see if that takes away part of that grindy feeling.

At first, I found one of those things in wow that I grew to detest and hate -- groups of people all waiting around to tag-kill mobs making it very painful. I've found that almost everybody/anybody will group up for these making it a lot easier - I just hope they add something to where you can form a public group for these types of quests like they do for the rifts as that would make it smoother.

Another big plus - there are people everywhere. The world feels very much alive because of this. One of the things I hate with wow today is the LFD and what it did to the game. People now sit in cities either queued for bgs, arenas, or LFD rather than going out exploring the worlds. World PVP is extinct for the most part - I blame this to on how flyers were implemented. IMO, they should have made it so that you have to wait 10-20 seconds before you're able to use your flyer after engaging in pvp or rezzing from pvp action. Wows form of world pvp is either the daily quest hubs or the occasional flyer that picks the fight in his favor and swoops in for the quick gank. In Rift, I'm looking forward to some of those epic battles around the dungeon entrances that wow used to have, and those big open fights in contested zones like the ole TM/SS fights. I miss the days where horde would camp on the boats at menethil harbor.

Lastly, I'm almost level 20, and haven't made it out of the starter zone. I have a feeling that once I get out there, it'll bring back some of those memories.

I'm not sold entirely on this game yet, but have to admit is has some rather strong points and I believe could be the first real answer to WOW. I don't see it ever taking the kings spot, but I could see this one as putting a serious dent into the competition.

[Lokked]

**EDIT - Disregard the piece here about Chloromancers AE healing each other. It's either been fixed or I'm an idiot. Probably the latter. **

I must say, the starter quests and mobs are far too easy, at this time. I've heard it gets harder around lvl 20, when OP classes (Druid/Warden and Cabalist, basically all Cleric classes) level out in effectiveness. Lyon, because you are rolling 4 of the most OP class (according to some forum posts), you may be finding the early game too easy because of this.

As far as the Edge Smoothing setting, I sat back in my chair, where I normally sit, and compared a line (building edge) and didn't notice a difference between Edge Smoothing and No Smoothing, so I think this is a fail algorithm.

AE Looting is not something you can bind :( It just makes it so when you loot one mob that is near others, it auto-loots all the mobs in the area. Slightly useful, but not what I was hoping for :/

For anyone wanting to run WoW's 4xShaman equivalent, try 4x Chloromancer. At level 10, with 10 points spent, they get an ability called Veil of Lifegiving, which AE Heals the party (minus the Chloromancer) for up to 80% of the direct Life damage done by the Chloromancer. So you can nuke and heal at the same time! 1 is able to MH a tank in dungeons (as shown by some youtube vid), so I'd imagine 4 is overkill, but you can spec some for more damage.

This game is very similar to WoW, and the Rift experience is going to make or break it. If Rifts aren't a fun alternative to Questing, Grinding, Farming or PvP in the WoW sense, what point is there to play this game? Public Quests were a spectacular idea in WAR, and were fun for a little while, but their implementation turned them into a gear grind. Rifts can actually take over towns and areas, and spawn (in later areas) at mostly random spots. Occaisonally, Rifts (Minor Riftsspawns can open up to become Major Rifts, spawning harder mobs and dishing out more valuable items. You could think of this as the whole Placeholder/Named spawn EQ thing.

I have high hopes for this game, as long as they up the difficulty of the first 20 levels. Unfortunately, the early level range can put a veteren MMOer to sleep.

[Zappy]

As far as the Edge Smoothing setting, I sat back in my chair, where I normally sit, and compared a line (building edge) and didn't notice a difference between Edge Smoothing and No Smoothing, so I think this is a fail algorithm.

I can say for sure on my setup that I didn't see any FPS change whatsoever, however, if you can some buildings in the landscape where you can noticeably see the jagged edges and toggle the setting, it absolutely makes a difference.

[MiRai]

I'm just going to quote you and build from it. :)



Their graphics engine needs some work in their MSAA dept. If you enable that, it'll cripple your machine. I'm running an i7 975 extreme, 12gigs ram, 2 580GTXs in SLI, and running it off an SSD with a Dell 30" monitor. With everything cranked, I see about 20FPS until i turn MSAA down to edge smoothing, then I see between 40-60. Graphics overall are good. The animations can use some work as they don't seemed as polished.
RIFT used the Gamebryo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo) engine which is currently 10 years old. It's what DaoC used and it is what WAR used.
Apparently this engine does have issues with MSAA and what you're saying about it destroying your FPS is true. I can
turn on MSAA x2 with my 460 GTX and be at 20 FPS like you're 580's in SLI. This is actually quite disappointing, but I'm
not going to let it get me down as the game still looks much nicer and smoother than WAR did for me.


Questing - from 1-11 seemed very quick (I was running with a friend), then last night I did 11-18 and it slowed down a lot. You get the same quest grind feeling that wow has rather quickly. Kill x of y quests all over the place. That gets old, but I think any and every MMO has that. What I found though, if you get bored questing, simply run off and do the rifts as they provide decent XP as well.
Couldn't agree more. I felt it was more around 14-ish that I slowed down due to all the walking and with Freemarch
getting sucessfully invaded we had to take tons of stuff back. My Warrior is currently 18 as of last night and there is a good
bit of walking now that I've passed Meridian which has slowed me down a lot in leveling... can't wait for that mount.


Battlegrounds - Once you hit 10, you can start doing BGs and queue from anywhere. I'm playing defiant and the queues seem to be quite long (like 15-20 minutes) and right now I'm only eligible for Black Gardens and at first we got destroyed so quick, I didn't enjoy it at all. The next BG, I learned a little more to what's going on - rather than a zergfest, the objective is to hold onto the flag as long as you can - There is one flag in the bg and whoever holds it gathers resources for the team rather quickly. I had a few games where it was very close and quite entertaining. I can't comment a ton on the PVP so far, but it seems to be solid. The few solo fights I had were not quite 3-4 second bouts, but tended to be more in the 10-15 second range, so I think learning the classes / combos will make this quicker, but should also provide you with resources to last longer as well.
To be quite honest, PvP worries me a bit. It has the same issues I felt I had trouble with in WAR. In WoW I can easily tell a
healer from a Mage, which means I know who to focus on as DPS. Since gameplay in RIFT can be a little choppy I find trying to pick healers out of a group and what not can be a little tough. Now,
granted I don't know what heals necessarily look like and can't easily pick the animations out in a crowd. But even after
playing WAR a good amount, I still had trouble knowing 100% what was going on in PvP.

As for queue times, I had one long 20 minute queue for TBG and we got demolished. I tried a little later and was about 4 - 9
minutes to get in where we had won a few times. I did notice they already have implemented cross realm BGs because
a few times I had players with the Name@Server plate above their head. It's beta though, so I didn't expect to have quick
queue times at all seeing as there are really only a handful of people playing at the moment.


I haven't tried any dungeons yet, but from what I understand, I should be ready for iron tombs, so I'm ready to try that one out and i'm really curious to see their PVE portion of the game. I've read a lot of good things so far, but until you experience it, who really knows.
No dungeons here yet either, maybe tonight maybe not.


What really seperates this game from WOW is their talent system (Soul Tree).
Yeah these are so god damn sexy. They were they intimidating at first and I didn't know what was going on, but I quickly
picked it up because, again, it is similar to WoW in a sense... just a [I]lot more flexible. I do like the fact that you get the
abilities from the Souls depending on how many points you put into them. It's nice to just get the abilities on the
spot rather than having to visit the trainer when there aren't any flight paths [yet].


Another big plus - there are people everywhere. The world feels very much alive because of this. One of the things I hate with wow today is the LFD and what it did to the game. People now sit in cities either queued for bgs, arenas, or LFD rather than going out exploring the worlds. World PVP is extinct for the most part - I blame this to on how flyers were implemented. IMO, they should have made it so that you have to wait 10-20 seconds before you're able to use your flyer after engaging in pvp or rezzing from pvp action. Wows form of world pvp is either the daily quest hubs or the occasional flyer that picks the fight in his favor and swoops in for the quick gank. In Rift, I'm looking forward to some of those epic battles around the dungeon entrances that wow used to have, and those big open fights in contested zones like the ole TM/SS fights. I miss the days where horde would camp on the boats at menethil harbor.
Yes, the 'alive' feeling is really great. Chat is active, and not necessarily with Chuck Norris or 'Your Mother' jokes, but with
people actually talking about where rifts are and just the game in general. I mentioned earlier, when Freemarch actually
got successfully invaded, people banded together to get shit done, which was nice. I fear, if this game isn't as
successful as Trion would like it to be, these zones could become ghosts towns quickly. As I made my way south of
Meridian the playerbase dropped off and there were numerous rifts that were open for quite a long time before anyone
attempted to close them.


I'm not sold entirely on this game yet, but have to admit is has some rather strong points and I believe could be the first real answer to WOW. I don't see it ever taking the kings spot, but I could see this one as putting a serious dent into the competition.
I was completely sold before but I think I was just excited about something new. :) I'm still pretty sure I'm going to
purchase the game, but we have a few more beta events before I need to make a final decision.

[Zappy]

Well, good news is this beta is extended til at least Saturday morning now. :D

[Mosg2]

Could someone that has beta access confirm/deny for me how their interact-with-target ability functions with melee? Is it like WoW where it will run you to the target or not? Kind of a big deal :) Thanks in advance!

[MiRai]

Could someone that has beta access confirm/deny for me how their interact-with-target ability functions with melee? Is it like WoW where it will run you to the target or not? Kind of a big deal :) Thanks in advance!
Negative, no IWT even with CTM enabled. The only thing I noticed was if you right-click on your target, hostile or friendly, your
player automatically faces the target. Not exactly useful for boxing.

[Mosg2]

So x4 Chloromancer it is :)

[Lyonheart]

I two boxed today. A tank and warden. I got to level 11 in about the same time it took me to get 4 cabs to 11 yesterday. There are a few nice things about grouping. There are some quests where you click an item on some corpse, npc or object, if you target it with all your guys and put the clickable quest item on a hotkey and use it at the same time, you get credit for each toon that clicked. So for example, i had to Bless some guards at one point, it wanted me to bless 5 of them, with my 4 cabs i targeted the npc, hit the item on all of them and got 4 blessed guards in one shot. Also the only collection quest i did that only one quest item drops per mob, was at the start of the game, after that every kill mob+ loot and item type quest has the item drop for everyone in the group.. something WoW needs to do.

I still do not think it will replace WoW for most, but it might very well be a nice diversion for awhile.

[Mokoi]

You can not expect a game, which is still under development, in beta and not even released yet to captivate you with the tricks and pleasantries that a 6 year old game with many more years of development had.

RIFT seems (from the outside) to be MILES ahead of where WoW was when it released. There was just nothing better when WoW vanilla came out, so people flocked to it. RIFT needs a chance to be played, and be supported to have the freedom to actually spend more time and money on the polishing.

No game will ever be launched which enjoys the same level of intricacy and polish that WoW has, because wow has had a HUGE headstart, and hundreds of millions of dollars invested in its infrastructure, and community.

please give it a chance so we dont have to see a free-to-play RIFT anytime soon like so many other wow-clones.

[confusedtx5]

It's all fun to be overpowered and stuff for about half an hour, then it just ruins the game.
Can't really judge a game from half an hour of game play. Also, from all the souls I've looked at, they all seem to have something 'overpowered' about them. If that carries onto all the souls, then it isn't really overpowered is it?

One of my favourite things in WoW (beside progression raiding) was to create specs intended for a specific niche. Sadly the cata trees ruined this for me, whereas the RIFT trees (and roots) are awesome. Adding to that, my guild of a year and a half collapsed to 10mans, and the grind from 80 to 85 being soo saturated with questing, my interest in wow has declined dramatically.
Whether RIFT can fill the gap will depend on its end game experience. And being an Oceanic player, finding an oceanic guild, with times suitable to me might be a little difficult until the player base builds up.

I wonder how a team of elementalist/chloromancer/buffsoul would go for dungeons.

[Kromtor]

you gotta wonder about the competency of devs that would make an 80% of damage dealt heal to the entire group......

edit: apparently the person who has this buff can't be healed by others using it - so could be easily countered in pvp i supposed but still seems OP in PvE unless chloro damage is horrific.

[Mokoi]

anyone else with uses on their beta code who can send it to me in game for an account?

[confusedtx5]

66T6-LZZG-THGF-DKKL-TGT2
Ssee if that works.
It's a VIP key, I've only used it once.

edit: Also, check http://www.zam.com/giveaways/rift.html to see if there's any left there. (For me, the page just shows my own key)

[Ughmahedhurtz]

you gotta wonder about the competency of devs that would make an 80% of damage dealt heal to the entire group......

edit: apparently the person who has this buff can't be healed by others using it - so could be easily countered in pvp i supposed but still seems OP in PvE unless chloro damage is horrific.

Or they, ya know, balance things with that in mind? :p

[Khatovar]

Can't really judge a game from half an hour of game play. Also, from all the souls I've looked at, they all seem to have something 'overpowered' about them. If that carries onto all the souls, then it isn't really overpowered is it?


Where did I say I only played for half an hour? This is my second beta wave and my "main" is 20. What I said is this game feels like playing a console with cheats, and the fun of being OP and having all challenge removed wears off quickly.

"Not being WoW" isn't enough for me to say a game is awesome. I can't differentiate one quest from another. It's all the same thing, interrupted frequently by the quest location being overrun by a rift. I've yet to get "caught up" in anything, it already feels like the grind I saw in games like Aion and that's just not going to do it for me.

[Lokked]

Don't do 4x Chloromancers :(

I realize the description mentioned they can't receive this type of healing with the buff on, but I made this recommendation after testing it out on a mob.

I tested this out before the most recent patch and was seeing quite large heal amounts from my alt, but after last nights patch I am not receiving any (while all have the buff on), so either they fixed it, or I'm crazy.

Back to the drawing board.

Well, the good thing about Rift (from what I understand) is, you only need 1 of each Archetype, and you can spec into any of the sub-classes you want (eventually, once you unlock all the souls).
So Account 1 = Warrior Class
Account 2, 3 & 4 = DPS (Mage) Class
Account 5 could either be a Cleric Class, or another Mage

[Lyonheart]

The Cabalists ( its a cleric class btw ) might get nerfed a tad, but they seem t be built for AE dps, its like there specialty. There very first spell is a splash damaging bolt, which you can increase the amount it does to extra enemies on the 1st tier of talents ( soul points)

Anyone figure out what tank would be a good AE tank, i did not see a lot of ae attacks in any of the defensive roles.. might have to do a offensive+defensive combo. Some of them do get ae abilities WAY down the line though.

[Zappy]

I played a bit more last night and got my rogue up to 22. I did Iron Tomb and that was quite interesting. I was very confused trying to figure out who the healer and tank was. In this particular run, we had a mage tanking, and a mage healing, so um yah... that's very confusing as you can't tell by looking what spec someone is. I tried the 2nd bg that opens up at 20, and it's the same concept of AB. One thing was that I was looking closer at the opponents during the fight and you can see who is healing, so it's not that hard to pick them out of the crowd, however, there is almost no way to tell until you see them casting. I still haven't figured out how to enable enemy cast bars.

The instance was quite fun, but it really didn't feel different from wow in anything other than better graphics. In any case, it was very refreshing to be able to play some "new" content without that wow feeling.

The 2nd point from my earlier post was about the mount. I can say for sure, once you get a mount, it doesn't feel nearly as grindy and I finally figured out their fast travel system. Entering into the 2nd zone and the landscape has changed a ton. The rifts are different and the loot is better, which made me want to skip questing and go after the rifts.

The animation on the mounts are bizarre. They have 3 speeds - 60%, 90% and 110% mounts. While I haven't seen the 90% or 110%, I can only speculate that the 60% speed is a slow motion animation and doesn't look right at all - yes it works, and the gameplay is there, but the animation looks really corny as the mount moves a lot faster than the animation.

My rogue is a ranger / marksmanship / saboteur and I decided to pick up a second role using the same souls, but this one being primary marksmanship. Switching between specs is actually one step easier in wow in the sense that you can add spell icons to your bar for which role. I can see a lot of fun possibilities with this and I like not begin locked down to two specs. The fact that you can build just about any hybrid spec, truely adds a lot of depth to the game like the old wow days where picking talents used to be fun.

I haven't decided if I'm going to attempt to box this game, but I will say that after last nights experience, I'm 100% sold now. I got just enough of a taste of the new areas that I want to play and explore a lot more. In the second zone running around in a full raid group from rift to rift was actually quite fun.

[Mokoi]

I got a beta hey from a new friend =)

I was looking, and for boxers, it looks like either 1x cleric and 4x mage or 5x cleric would be amazing.

The cleric roles looks like they can range from some pretty good DPS to tanking roles.

and 5x some of them look REALLY OP.. as in a lot of apssive healing and aoe / party healing while you DPS.. ill update when i get in game and try some =)

[Cookiebo]

hey.. im having problem with multibox here.. i got 5 beta keys.. but i cant play on 2 or more screens.. if I try to move the rift window from main screen and to my .2 screen.. it just "close" while still being open.. hmm if that make sense^^

[Kromtor]

I played a bit more last night and got my rogue up to 22. I did Iron Tomb and that was quite interesting. I was very confused trying to figure out who the healer and tank was. In this particular run, we had a mage tanking, and a mage healing, so um yah... that's very confusing as you can't tell by looking what spec someone is. I tried the 2nd bg that opens up at 20, and it's the same concept of AB. One thing was that I was looking closer at the opponents during the fight and you can see who is healing, so it's not that hard to pick them out of the crowd, however, there is almost no way to tell until you see them casting. I still haven't figured out how to enable enemy cast bars.

The instance was quite fun, but it really didn't feel different from wow in anything other than better graphics. In any case, it was very refreshing to be able to play some "new" content without that wow feeling.

The 2nd point from my earlier post was about the mount. I can say for sure, once you get a mount, it doesn't feel nearly as grindy and I finally figured out their fast travel system. Entering into the 2nd zone and the landscape has changed a ton. The rifts are different and the loot is better, which made me want to skip questing and go after the rifts.

The animation on the mounts are bizarre. They have 3 speeds - 60%, 90% and 110% mounts. While I haven't seen the 90% or 110%, I can only speculate that the 60% speed is a slow motion animation and doesn't look right at all - yes it works, and the gameplay is there, but the animation looks really corny as the mount moves a lot faster than the animation.

My rogue is a ranger / marksmanship / saboteur and I decided to pick up a second role using the same souls, but this one being primary marksmanship. Switching between specs is actually one step easier in wow in the sense that you can add spell icons to your bar for which role. I can see a lot of fun possibilities with this and I like not begin locked down to two specs. The fact that you can build just about any hybrid spec, truely adds a lot of depth to the game like the old wow days where picking talents used to be fun.

I haven't decided if I'm going to attempt to box this game, but I will say that after last nights experience, I'm 100% sold now. I got just enough of a taste of the new areas that I want to play and explore a lot more. In the second zone running around in a full raid group from rift to rift was actually quite fun.

Great write-up. Hearing that it might actually be worthwhile to farm rifts rather than grind quests sounds awesome to me - rewarding to people who have good group combos and especially boxers. The game has a very DAoC feel to me which probably comes from the somewhat hoaky animations and sort of delayed feel to the actions but that's not a deal breaker for me.

Somebody mentioned that you could get full experience for raid groups - since group size is 5 in this game and I really wanted to do more than 5 chars so friends/wife could play with (and just to use more monitors) i was wondering what sorts of penalties there are for being in a raid group as opposed to being in a normal group? I would assume you couldnt enter instances with more than 5 but that you could still farm rifts in a raid... anyone know for sure?

[Velassra]

I'm pretty much sold on the game, at least for single boxing. I'm pretty fed up w/ WoW atm. Once I get a better idea on how to play Rift and a better idea of what can and cannot be done, I'll consider multiboxing it. Right now I'm trying out a necro/warlock/chloromancer. Seems pretty fun so far. Not really reading much on builds etc, just putting points in things that sound cool, so atm really just screwing around.

Someone said a mage was tanking an instance? I wouldn't mind attempting a full petter group like I did w/ EQOA way back when.

[Zappy]

i was wondering what sorts of penalties there are for being in a raid group as opposed to being in a normal group? I would assume you couldnt enter instances with more than 5 but that you could still farm rifts in a raid... anyone know for sure?

As far as penalties in a raid, there may be some, as I've noticed doing some quests I didn't seem to get as much XP by having a bigger raid, but the fact that you can have 20 people in a raid and complete quests and still get good XP is pretty solid stuff.

For rift farming, absolutely in a raid. If you are playing solo and run up to a rift, you'll have an option to join a public raid, and from what i've seen, I know they support multiple raids as well. You don't have to be in the raid to get XP either, but it does seem a little quicker.

Once this game gets close to live, we'll have to make sure we all choose a server for each faction so we can unite the boxers. :D

[Lyonheart]

I played again today ( two boxing ). It reminded me of when i first started boxing in EQ.. tank and cleric. whats weird is this game started out being good, but not feeling enough "newness" to me that i would quit WoW, but after learning more about the game and playing into my late teens ( almost 18 now ) i now know for sure i will buy it. I had fun! For questing, anything over two boxing is over kill imo. Depending on how rewarding instances are, I might just stick to two boxing for awhile. I like having the heal bot for sure.

After i learn more about the game down the road, i might try 5 boxing it, but i think it will take a few upgrades.. or maybe even split the load between a few PCs. Playing two on one pc, one at max and one at min detail, it ran great, would lag a tiny bit in the city or around big rift groups, but not enough to bother turning anything down. The game is growing on me for sure. 8)

as far as servers, im pretty sure ill go carebear ( PvE ) i cant stand PvP when im questing. So if any of you are carebears lol.. let me know.. I get my PvP fix in warfronts 8)

[Cookiebo]

how could u set up more then 1 screen in this game..? i cant drag a rift window over to my second screen..

[JackBurton]

are bards fun like they were in EQ?

[Mokoi]

Once this game gets close to live, we'll have to make sure we all choose a server for each faction so we can unite the boxers. :D


this.

[Lyonheart]

are bards fun like they were in EQ?

They do not have a super fast run speed spell, but they get a 15%-20% group run speed fairly early. I played one the first beta. Not sure if they changed since then. I remember them being fun. And i had no idea how to play the game at that time. I might role another one next beta. But I do know they can "twist" songs 8)

edit: /re run speed. I just logged him in and its 15% and you have a talent that increases all anthems by x% per point. I dont think it gets faster than 20%

[Shodokan]

Is this game slated to have competitive PVP?

[Lyonheart]

Is this game slated to have competitive PVP?

Trion has yet to make an official statement on the legality of boxing in their game, I wish they would respond to one of the many threads on the subject! They will have BGs, ( called Warfronts ) very similar to WoW, WAR. You can start doing Warfronts at lvl 10. They also have a reward system in place to spend PvP currency on loots. Right now there are a few methods of obtaining rare+quality loots, quests, drops from mobs or players you kill, PvP currency, Rift currency. So there are vendors that let you spend currency you get from PvPing and vendors for currency you get when you help close rifts.

This game has a lot more ways to gear up then WoW does, and I am looking forward to it now. I actually am sad beta ended, i would love to test some more classes/specs before it goes live. I am hoping one of the final beta stages is an extended one, I mean it comes out in March, and you would think they want to test the entire leveling experience all the way to end game, right?

[Zappy]

I ventured a round a bit more last night got to almost level 26, but made a point to check out the other zones for what I could. Definitely a big change of pace there as there is a lot of new eye candy out there. While farming rifts with a few other players in the second zone, I noticed one really cool thing that boxers will love -- the experience gain. Doing nothing but farming rifts in big groups will net you some nice experience. Most rifts can be done with 5 people or less, so by having our own group, that will be a quick way to level.

While rift fighting, I found myself being attacked by some guardians, and that spawned off a nice outdoor war that went on for a good hour or so. The pvp in the game is good right now. I won't say great as there is definitely some class imbalances out there, but even with the those, it's still solid. Clerics seem to be the overpowered class right now.

[outdrsyguy1]

There was a crazy invasion that me and about 80+ others defended outside of sanctum. couple of HUGE treebeard looking dudes and TONS of minions. I went from 16 to almost 18 in about 30 minutes, it was CRAZY XP and a total blast. As long as someone in your group hits (doesn't even have to tag it) the mob, you get full xp.

[confusedtx5]

Where did I say I only played for half an hour? This is my second beta wave and my "main" is 20. What I said is this game feels like playing a console with cheats, and the fun of being OP and having all challenge removed wears off quickly.

My Apologies, it just came across that way when you said "It's all fun to be overpowered and stuff for about half an hour"

[MiRai]

Multiboxers will ultimately shine in this game. When you're in a zone and you're solo, if you cannot find enough people to
help close the Rifts, that seem to spawn fairly quickly even without an invasion, your quest hubs will soon become overrun.
Even if you're dual-boxing a Tank/Healer combo you're going to be better off than a single, solo, player because you can still
seal these Rifts.

This is just an observation from playing WAR which had similar "zone-based" content like Rift. At launch, these zone
objectives are nice and fun when everyone is busy leveling up, but when the activity dies down these objectives become
much more difficult to accomplish. In WAR this wasn't necessarily an issue because you could just continue to quest, but in
Rift, the zone is invaded and you lose your quest hubs for awhile. For example, when I was in Stonefield, I barely got any
Rifts sealed because people were becoming much more spread out. Sure it's beta and there is less of a player-base at the
moment, but after the initial rush of people you may find that you have indeed rolled on, what ends up to be, a low
population server. There's no way to tell at launch, but if you're multiboxing you most likely will not be affected at all by this. :)

This isn't a groundbreaking thought, but something I figured I would mention since a lot of people are becoming interested
in this game and this might help someone decide whether they'd like to multibox it or not.

[Negativ1337]

Hey guys,

I've preordered the collectors edition yesterday via steam. I will be playing Rift as a warrior (paragon/beastmaster) since it will look awesome. If i quit WoW and decide to go crazy on rift and multibox that, we will see how that will go :)

I prefer to wait for some multiboxing addons. And read some experiences of other multiboxers. We should make one realm a multiboxer/community server. That would be fun :)

Kind regards,

Negativ1337

[MiRai]

I prefer to wait for some multiboxing addons. And read some experiences of other multiboxers. We should make one realm a multiboxer/community server. That would be fun :)

Trion isn't allowing 'addons' the way World of Warcraft allows them. Source (http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?38788-RIFT-and-Add-ons)

[Lokked]

I would be interested in playing with other boxers.

As I will primarily be playing DPS (3-4 Mages).....

Originally while writing this, I was looking for the Defiant Kelari Race bonus to link for you guys, but I came across this:
http://www.fohguild.org/forums/1927978-post5572.html

If they change the bonuses around so they are about equal, I don't care which faction.

[Mokoi]

im going for the bad guys, i played alliance in wow and i always wish i was horde. so im going dark in rift =)

[outdrsyguy1]

the dark side was like 4x more populated on the server i tried in beta so far. I actually re-started as a guardian because it was 20 minute que for the other side and guardian was 4 second que lol. not sure which side i'll be when it all starts :(

[Mokoi]

OOOh good point

ok, guardians it is =)

screw horde BG queues.. and the rift equivalent lol

[Mercurio]

Hey! I see you, Mokoi. You are officially a WoW traitor!



But seriously, we were running some arenas tonight and all lamented your absence. Ah well, I hope you enjoy Rift!

[Krago]

hey.. im having problem with multibox here.. i got 5 beta keys.. but i cant play on 2 or more screens.. if I try to move the rift window from main screen and to my .2 screen.. it just "close" while still being open.. hmm if that make sense^^

Yeah, I am having the same issues.

I have tried swapping video cards and also updating to the newest drivers, still no go.
I need to open a ticket with Trion.

For now I have been placing one on top of the other and trying to maximize the useful info on the
under' screen.

Does anyone have this working, one client on each screen?

I have also been using hotkeynet's switch window functionality.

I cannot seem to get ISBoxer to work. Won't swap windows, won't repeat keys, PIP works though. :)

I started a new duo this morning tank/cleric and it seems to be working out well so far.

[Mosg2]

I'm looking for someone who has multiple accounts to do a bit of testing for me--It should only take 5-10 minutes I promise :)

I want to know of the Radiant Spores spell for the Chloromancer stacks--IE, if I have 4 Chloromancers can I cast 4x Radiant Spores and each Chloromancer gets their own stack that can proc?

I'd also like to know, if you already have 2+ Mages at level 10 or higher, if each Chloromancer can maintain Lifegiving Veil and have the other Chloromancer get the healing from it.

If anyone with 2 or more accounts could check these things for me quickly I'd be much obliged :) Thanks in advance!

[Gorthu]

Yeah, I am having the same issues.

I have tried swapping video cards and also updating to the newest drivers, still no go.
I need to open a ticket with Trion.

For now I have been placing one on top of the other and trying to maximize the useful info on the
under' screen.

Does anyone have this working, one client on each screen?

I have also been using hotkeynet's switch window functionality.

I cannot seem to get ISBoxer to work. Won't swap windows, won't repeat keys, PIP works though. :)

I started a new duo this morning tank/cleric and it seems to be working out well so far.


I just tried boxing 2 accounts on one machine. I am having a similar problem and I am using keyclone. As soon as I move to the second window, one of them closes out. I even tried it without keyclone. It's a rift issue. It seems that they are not letting us do two accounts on one machine now.

[Lyonheart]

i have been playing on two accounts all day.. but i stared soloing after the last patch.. ill try again here in a few ( two full size screens)

edit: I just logged in and it had some odd behavior, i have two regions.. one full size region for each screen. last beta and earlier today i would launch the team and it would place them on each screen like it should. just now it placed them both in region 2 ( my right screen ) and i had to use my region swap keybinds to get it right. It ended up working out, but that was odd. Something in the patch changed it somehow.

[Krago]

I just tried boxing 2 accounts on one machine. I am having a similar problem and I am using keyclone. As soon as I move to the second window, one of them closes out. I even tried it without keyclone. It's a rift issue. It seems that they are not letting us do two accounts on one machine now.

I can play two accounts on one my machine, my issues is trying to put each client on it's LCD.

If I put them on one LCD everything is fine, just cannot see as much as I would like.

[Mokoi]

I'm looking for someone who has multiple accounts to do a bit of testing for me--It should only take 5-10 minutes I promise :)

I want to know of the Radiant Spores spell for the Chloromancer stacks--IE, if I have 4 Chloromancers can I cast 4x Radiant Spores and each Chloromancer gets their own stack that can proc?

I'd also like to know, if you already have 2+ Mages at level 10 or higher, if each Chloromancer can maintain Lifegiving Veil and have the other Chloromancer get the healing from it.

If anyone with 2 or more accounts could check these things for me quickly I'd be much obliged :) Thanks in advance!

I'll test this for you today, if I can, buddy =)

EDIT: looks like the passive healing of the chloromancer is only available to targets without the buff on them, so with 4-5 cloros, you would need to heal a party member who is not a chloromancer, so stacking them wont work unless you run with a warrior or another tank.

[Mosg2]

Sigh. Danke Dan. The graphics are seriously turning me off of all things.

[Littleburst]

I'm downloading the game atm and I figuring out for myself what calling and what class resembles what, compared to WoW. It might be a helpful thing to other players aswell:


Warrior: melee dps with energy & action points(combopoints, works similar to rogue I'm asuming)

- Champion: warrior. plays with 2H's. Melee dps.
- Reaver: Similar to DK. Plays with Diseases. a "dark" class.
- Paladin: protection paladin. Wears a shield.
- Warlord: Buffs allies around him. Vulnerable alone.
- Void Knight: Unholy DKlike. A defensive warrior who counters magic damage.
- Riftblade: Warriors who enhance their attacked by magic damage. Enhancement sham like?
- Paragon: warrior who does steady damage by dualwielding weapons.
- Beastmaster: Offensive warrior, strengthened (http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&client=firefox-a&hs=3EV&rls=org.mozilla:nl:official&&sa=X&ei=Ye5OTd7kI8PsOfDIpDc&ved=0CCAQvwUoAQ&q=strengthened&spell=1) by a spirit companion.
- Vindicator: "pvp soul"

Cleric: Caster focussed on prayer and faith etc, but also has melee classes. Can heal and cast damaging spells.

- Cabalist: Ranged dps, I'm asuming Warlocklike.
- Druid: Melee dps.In harmony with nature they're able to call forth spirits to help them heal allies or deal damage.
- Inquisitor: Ranged dps who mixes life and death magic to deal damage.
- Justicar: Tank. Heals himself and allies by dealing melee damage.
- Purifier: Healer. Strong healers who heal with fire.
- Sentinel: Healer. Exells at healing big groups of allies. Weak offensive damage.
- Shaman: Melee dps. Enhancement shaman like. Deal melee damage and are able to heal a bit.
- Warden: Healer. Resto druid. mana efficient Heal over time healer.
- Templar: "pvp soul"

Rogue: Asuming it's similar to WoW rogue. Rely on dealing quick damage. Wields dagger/swords and wear leather.

- Night Blade: Uses magic to his advantage as a stealthy killer.
- Riftstalker: A defensive specialists who bends the planes to shift out of the phyisical dimension.
- Ranger: Ranged archer who has an animal companion. hunter in wow.
- Assasin: Walks into the shadows to bypass defenses.
- Blade Dancer: Super natural agility to kill an enemy quickly. If they fail to they have few defenses left.
- Saboteur: A rogue who uses explosives.
- Marksman: Sniperlike hunter. Killing people before they get the chance to attack back.
- Bard: Support class. Reducing incoming damage and a constant stream of healing.
- Infiltrator: "pvp soul"

Mage: Control elements."A Mage must carefully manage the arcane energies they draw from the planes to power their spells. With each spell cast, excess planar energies seep into Telara, building a charge around the Mage, who can let this excess energy bleed off over time, or harness it for even greater power." Wears cloth.

- Elementalist: Summons an elemental to help them deal damage.
- Warlock: Warlocks embrace the grim forces of entropy and death with curses that eat away body and soul.
- Pyromancer: Pyromancers deal massive amounts of damage with Fire and keep enemies at bay with well placed fire spells.
- Stormcaller: They combine the power of Air and Water to do great damage. Because they need to combine 2 forces, they take a bit longer to warm up.
- Chloromancer: They heal themselfs through dealing damage, in a way that they can even tank. They do less damage then a damage focussed mage.
- Archon: Support class that steals their opponants's strenghts and rely on this to deal damage.
- Dominator: A support Mage who terrorizes opponents, leaving them unable or unwilling to act. Those who muster the courage to assault a Dominator will find themselves at the mercy of arcane shields that turn the fury of their own blows against them.
- Necromancer: Relies on his pet for damage. Can heal at the cost of their own health.
- Archmage: "pvp soul"

http://telarapedia.com/wiki/Class

And a link to a Chart about which Class to pick:
http://tweakimg.net/g/forum/templates/tweakers/html/showimage.html?http%3A//img402.imageshack.us/img402/6186/selectionflowchart.png
http://tweakimg.net/g/forum/templates/tweakers/html/showimage.html?http%3A//img402.imageshack.us/img402/6186/selectionflowchart.png

We should also group up on EU realms :D Not sure if I'm gonna box it, but a good conversation is always nice :)

[Jeremiah]

Perhaps this is one way that RIFT can express their dislike/disapproval of boxing w/o making a statement? By making is that you can't run more than one client per machine? Sneaky :P

I'm curious as to whether anyone who boxes on 5 PCs normally has given RIFT a go? I play on a 27inch iMac so can't use my beta key for this weekend but am looking to invest in a new PC soon. Perhaps I should instead buy 5 x mid range PCs and try boxing that way?

[Lyonheart]

Perhaps this is one way that RIFT can express their dislike/disapproval of boxing w/o making a statement? By making is that you can't run more than one client per machine? Sneaky :P

I'm curious as to whether anyone who boxes on 5 PCs normally has given RIFT a go? I play on a 27inch iMac so can't use my beta key for this weekend but am looking to invest in a new PC soon. Perhaps I should instead buy 5 x mid range PCs and try boxing that way?

Have you read all the posts on here,?I am two boxing on one PC using ISboxer with ZERO issues!

[Malgor]

I got in beta on Friday and got my Pyromancer to level 10 today (worked over the weekend so first day off today).

There are a lot of things to like about RIFT. Although some of it is confusing, there are many plus sides compared to WoW.

I love the talent trees so far. The quest line is hugely improved over WoW collection quests and they are easy to complete. I am a bit confused about all the RIFT stuff, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Crafting is different as well - you have to be at a piece of equipment to craft things (loom for tailors) so it's a lot like EQ2 in that respect, but crafting is easy to level, plus there are crafting quests.

So far I give it an four out of five stars!

[Duane]

Got into the beta this weekend as well and really liked what I saw. The graphics and game play are really polished and I love the ability to customize your characters with all the talent trees. So you have a lot of the freedom with your character that WoW took away.

I'm going to pre-order the collectors edition next week so I can have a mount when Rift goes live.

[Mokoi]

I am running 5 on one machine, who is having trouble with that... just open the launcher in ISboxer and let them open one at a time and input your UN:PW as they appear.

[Kaelika]

It's good to see other people who might be trying this in RIFT. Myself? I'm contemplating dual-boxing. I'm still on the fence at the moment, but I've really been wanting an MMO to play again.

[Kromtor]

looking at the dominator class it's apparent that my fears of aoe in pvp being overpowered were correct, unless there are a lot of ways to defend against it (which there aren't in WoW so probably wont be in this, i dont even know of a "Trinket" yet) your entire group will be unable to cast for 10 seconds by one dominator's single spell cast. and thats just one of their aoe CC abilities. bleh.

[Mosg2]

I played some more this evening and I'm modestly impressed. It seems really polished. I'm interested in boxing this.

Now the question is to run a traditional group that has a tank or just run 5 Warden/Inquisitors.

^^That combo BTW seems really powerful. Most of your heals are instant HoT's and/or short CD instant heals with some really good group heals. Plus you're in Chain. Most of your damage is via DoT's and insta-cast direct damage spells. It's like a melding of Druids and Warlocks without pets. Hmmm.

[Duane]

I believe they've said that they weren't going to balance PVE around PVP. This is one of my biggest gripes with WoW.

[Lokked]

I tried a Bard + 4x Chloromancer group over Beta 6.

The bard was able to hold agro against all targets, and I set up a hotkey for each Chloromancer to cancel the Veil of Lifegiving buff if they were getting focused, and it worked pretty well.

But....Chloromancer DPS is crap, and it was all just too much to manage. Most of my DPS was coming from the initial abilities of the other 2 souls I chose (Pyro + Dom).

Hopefully there will be another beta before release so I can try out the Tank + 4 Wardens/Inquisitors (someone mentioned 4-5 clerics being viable)

PvP was fun. Unless classes get drastically different looking gear at the higher levels, it will be impossible for an enemy player to tell which of your bunched up alts is healing, until they've manually tab'd over your team, and Tab-targetting is really unreliable at this time.

AE hurts. The Pyro's ground ignite ability along with a snared main ate me a couple times.

Rift is still fun :)

[Mosg2]

I really liked the combo of instant dots plus instant hots for healing and damage.

[Redbeard]

I guess theres an open beta that is 6 days long starting this Tuesday, I am going to give it a shot.

Im most interested in the rifts.. I played a bit at a friends house and the questing is the same as other EQ / WOW clones, so im neutral on that.

Im really hoping the rift play will be interesting. Instead of logging in to grind heroics, Id like to log in and check out the map and go "Oh shit, there are 3 huge rifts in this map, lets go fight!" etc.

Not sure if anybody has read anything or seen anything about how much rift play there will be when you hit max level.

[Lyonheart]

Just made one more post, in hopes to get an answer, They have not responded to any multiboxing threads yet, but I tried to structure it to get a response. IF you bump the thread. Try not to debate, just state that you are interested in Trions response as well. Even though I stated that It is not a multiboxing debate thread, I'm sure it will turn out to be another hate thread. But i hope Trion responds. We need to know their stance on boxing.

[Lyonheart]

So the post turned into a debate, i knew it would, I tried to stay out of it, but the hate is so extreme! Its hard not to respond to some of the hateful responses!

[Dopledin]

So the post turned into a debate, i knew it would, I tried to stay out of it, but the hate is so extreme! Its hard not to respond to some of the hateful responses!

I've jumped into a couple of the MB threads (including the one you recently posted) basically to state some factual stuff about boxing, and try not to confront the haters with emotional type statements. There are some fairly staunch anti-boxers in the forums (played all the betas and the beta forums were similar with attitudes, etc), but they are basically saying the same lines from years ago in the WoW forums.

The ToS/EULA isn't against boxing to date (looks pretty much the same as WoW's years ago), so at least until I hear differently from Trion (I've seen some boxers in most of the 6 betas testing things out) I'm going to box. We all, in WoW, took a chance early on that Blizzard might disallow boxing, and they didn't!

I'm going to roll the dice one more time... I'm feeling lucky just with the fact they have a /follow command in Rift!:D

Nice to see the forums still active after taking a break for a bit.

Peace!

[Herc130]

I am really not liking the community at Rift's forums. So many blind haters there, not just for multiboxers, but seemingly anything they don't agree with. It is depressing reading the general boards over there, anyone state anything and they are...cheaters, trolls, don't know how to keep their computers safe from hackers, "gold" buyers, elitist and more. I don't think they are little kids spouting off, probably just angry at the world old people.

[Wadis]

That's pretty much a huge chunk of the MMO community as a whole unfortunately.
It's a breeding ground for sad lonely forum trolls.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

That's pretty much a huge chunk of the MMO community as a whole unfortunately.
It's a breeding ground for sad lonely forum trolls.

This. It's not surprising that gaming companies rarely listen to the forum whiners on ANY game forum. The forum posters are a tiny minority of the game's population, with the active posters (e.g.: whiners, defenders, trolls and useful participants) a vanishingly small percentage.

Which is why I only frequent this forum and occasionally one other. We might have our slow days here but the signal-to-noise ratio here is orders of magnitude better than anywhere else I've been. Funny how we "cheaters," "hackers" and "no-lifer basement-dwellers" have more fruitful discussions on a regular basis than the purported rule-following "normals" on the other forums. ;)

[Lokked]

I post on official forums for purposes of my own, but Rift, Perpetuum, RoM, and WoW's official forums are hardly a place to obtain or submit any useful information.

I think of them as mainly a collection of cynical people at work with nothing better to do.