Rift

[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?