Tales of the Aggronaut

How To Rift – Character Creation

June 27, 2013 by Belghast

Since the release of the Rift free to play conversion, I have had a large number of friends coming back to the game. Previously I did posted targeting the features that have been added into the game since release. This time around I will be targeting this series towards players just starting out in the game. I am going to try and assume as little prior games expertise as I can. Rift is a game full of extremely rich and complex systems, and this series of posts is an attempt to ease a new player into it.

Choosing a Faction

Rift at its core is a game about a world torn asunder by the violent planar tears opening across the continent and causing all manner of nasty things to spill into the world. You play the role of an ascended, essentially a being with a number of souls merged into one. The two primary factions of the game represent the struggle between religion and technology.

The Defiant chose to rely on themselves and their technology to contend with the planar upheaval. The Guardians on the other hand chose to rely on faith in the old pantheon of gods that have been long dormant. Once the decision of your faction dictated everything you did from that point on. However prior to the launch of Storm Legion Trion released a “Faction As Fiction” patch. This meant that both Guardian and Defiant players could group together freely, and be members of the same guilds.

This has made it so much easier for players to play whatever suits them the best, but still be able to play with their friends that chose the other faction. This also makes the first choice you have to make during character creation completely dependant on which ever race you want to play.

Choosing a Race

Essentially there are three Guardian Races and three Defiant. For the Guardians you have to choose from Dwarf, High Elf, and Mathosian. On the Defiant side you have the air elemental descended Bahmi, the Eth and the Kelari. Each has a very unique look to them, and dictates which character creation options you have. Also each has a unique set of racial abilities. Each has a racial elemental resistance, but it is such an insignificant amount that it is ultimately meaningless. However the active racial is extremely useful, however some of them sadly are far better than others. I will give you a quick rundown of each.

Dwarf Racial

Dwarven Breakfast – this is an extremely good health and mana heal. It causes the dwarf to regenerate 8% mana and health per second for 13 seconds. This has a 10 minute recast time, so while extremely useful it is a panic cooldown.

High Elf Racial

Angelic Flight – This ability essentially lets you target a spot on the ground and your character performs around dramatic flying lean with angel wings spread towards the target. If you are an explorer, this ability will allow you to get some places that will be much harder for others without the ability.

Mathosian Racial

Motivational Roar – This ability is one of the more interesting ones. Essentially it increases the run speed of the caster and his party by 30% for 10 seconds. It has a 2 minute cooldown and represents the only racial group ability.

Bahmi Racial

Mighty Leap – This is probably my favorite racial, and the reason why I have several Bahmi. It is a targeted flying leap that works essentially the same as the High Elf racial minus the wings animation. Excellent for getting to places that are hard to get to. I’ve used this so many times to explore new areas.

Eth Racial

Agility – This ability increases the casters movement speed by 50% for 15 seconds. The recast time is 2 minutes and essentially gives the player a burst sprint ability, or if your class already provides one a second sprint. This seems to be extremely popular among PVP types.

Kelari Racial

Camouflage – This is another one of those extremely unique abilities. When cast it turns the Kelari into a fox for 30 seconds. While in fox form it greatly lowers the Kelari’s aggro radius allowing them to slip past many mobs unnoticed. Recast time is 2 minutes, and it has the side effect of despawning your pets.

None of the racials are so overpowered that you will be forever harmed if you do not pick a specific one. My personal preference is for Mighty Leap or Angelic Flight… since it adds a lot of utility for getting to hard to reach places. If you are a serious raider type, I could see Dwarven Breakfast coming in extremely handy as it provides a fast health and mana regen that could be used mid fight. For PVP players it seems like Eth is the natural choice since being able to move quickly on demand… always seems to be the right answer. Unfortunately while the Mathosian racial is interesting, it seems horribly gimped when compared to the Eth one. Sure it is group wide, but the time is 5 seconds shorter and the total speed increase is 20% less.

Choosing a Calling

Calling represents what most other games all your Class, but I can see why they chose a new name. Rift as a whole has a much more flexible class system if you view it from a traditional standpoint. There are literally hundreds of combinations of classes all dependant on which set of souls you choose. However I will get into this later. The Calling is essentially choosing between playing a Warrior, Rogue, Mage and Cleric. Each has its own sets of souls and with them special combinations and benefits. I will give a quick rundown of each of the Callings.

The Warrior is your traditional plate wielding beat-em-up class. They specialize in melee combat and the class has the most melee damage and tanking configurations of any of the callings. If you want to be that big guy in even bigger armor this is likely the calling for you. Deviating from the traditional Warrior role, they have a soul called the Beast master that lets you be a plate wearing pet wielding melee class. If you pay for the Storm Legion souls, it also adds the ability to do significant range dps with the Tempest. It has just been leaked that in Rift 3.0 they will be adding a true healing class to the warrior with the Liberator soul.

The Cleric is a chain wearing warrior priest, and represents the class with the most healing options. Additionally they can be extremely potent tanks and both ranged and melee dps. It is a mana based class, and comes with all the constraints of having a limited pool of resources. However almost each soul gives you some way of regenerating this resource. As a Shaman you have the unique ability to giving splash healing to the allies around you while dealing significant amounts of damage. If you are the player that always plays a healer, and only really cares about playing a healer… then this is likely the class for you… as you will have the maximum number of potential healing configurations.

The rogue is your traditional leather armored scout class. They are a jack of all trades and probably support the most drastically varried playstyles. A Ranger/Marksman build can give you something very similar to a hunter or ranger pet class. The Riftstalker gives the class extremely potent tanking potential, and the Bard is the king of battlefield support. If you are the type of player that likes to do something different each time you play, then this calling might cure your altism. Additionally it has two of the most interesting classes I have played. Saboteur is essentially a mad bomber, in that you plant charges on your target and then with the use of a finish cause them to blow up. Often times a mob can go from full health to dead within seconds. If you choose to buy the Storm Legion souls it gives you the Tactician, which is an AOE support class that heals and damages enemies with its flamethrower.

The mage is your traditional cloth wearing glass canon with a few tweaks. They have the most options for pure casters of all the callings. However they have a few tricks up their sleeve. The chloromancer is an extremely potent main healer, and the Archon is an extremely powerful support soul. The Necromancer gives you amazing soloing power by adding in a series of typed pets covering all of the callings. With the addition of storm legion souls, you gain the Harbinger which is an unheard of Melee Mage… using powerful magic to conjure weapons and armor. It has been leaked that Rift 3.0 will add another role to the class allowing it to tank by using the Arbiter soul.

Choosing a Purpose

While the calling represents the general direction of your class, your purpose is essentially a template that represents what your class does. You are presented a screen with a number of preset purposes to choose from. Two things to remember… firstly the list shown on this screen is just a fragment of the total number of presets available and generally represent the easiest to play. Once you get into game, you can open your soul tree window and see other available purposes.

The second thing to remember.. this is just a suggestion… these are not fixed boundaries. You can literally mix any combination of three souls together. These combinations do not always work out, in fact certain souls work extremely poorly together. These purposes give you a few guaranteed to be good recipes you can work from. Each time you get points to spend, a blinking arrow will show you where to spend the points to keep following the purpose. At any point you can deviate from the plan if you so choose.

However if you are new to the game it is generally a good idea to follow one of the predetermined paths until you understand how the soul tree system works. The short list provided generally gives you a mixture of what has been determined are the most successful souls. For leveling I tend to stick to a purpose that gives me a pet like the Necromancer or Ranger… or a tanking purpose as these tend to give you the best survival. Melee DPS tends to be a bit squishy, and Ranged DPS generally involves a good deal of kiting around.

Choosing your Features

The last step before you are ready to get into the game is to choose your features and name your character. You can see above that Rift gives you a significant number of personalization choices. You can choose face shape, height, hair style and color, facial hair and markings. For the most part each race has mostly unique options for appearance so they end up looking distinct out on the battlefield. One thing to remember while you are picking your choices that they can almost all be changed inside of the game by going to the stylist.

In the past players have felt obligated to get everything 100% perfect the first time. This lead to spending an exorbitant amount of time on character creation, because you knew that once you hit create… you could never go back and tweak things. However with the addition of the free to play gem shop, you can even go so far as to change your race and gender in game with an extremely simple to use stylist interface. While I would not suggest changing your look on a whim, because it could get extremely expensive, extremely quickly… you are never completely chained to your original choices.

You’ve Created Your First Character!

There you go, now you have walked through all the decisions involved with creating your first character in Rift. Now the fun actually begins as you are teleported into the battle as either a Defiant or Guardian. I had initially intended to cover the user interface basics, but this post has ended up far larger than I thought it could possibly be. As a result I am going to cut things off here. In the coming days I will post a thorough rundown of the features of the user interface, including customization options. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed the run down, if you make it in game, look me up on Belghast@Deepwood.

Console Advantage

June 27, 2013 by Belghast

Getting to the pc to write my morning blog post a little late this morning. I have a fairly significant meeting at lunch, and as such had to do a bit more pruning of my beard this morning to make myself presentable. I normally wouldn’t care much, but all the big wigs will be in this one.. and quite honestly I am more than a little nervous. While I am not the focus of the meeting… the focus is something that I feel is overly misguided. Only time will tell how successful the meeting will go, but when you get a technical person talking to a bunch of non-technical people… cognitive dissonance arises.

Coming Soon

I have been desperately trying to get new folks to try Rift… namely some of my staunch WoW friends that have tunnel vision surrounding that game. As a result I started kicking around the idea of a series of posts taking things from a very basic level. Last night I began work on a Character Creation and Default Interface post, but did not get nearly as far as I had hoped before cutting into a scheduled event. My hope is that I can finish it up this evening and post it tomorrow. Essentially my idea is to go through some of the most basic concepts and thoroughly explain them. I am not 100% sure how success the series will be, but I seemed to get a lot of interest from twitter.

When Rift first launched, I did the “Why You Should Be Playing Rift” series, and likely this one will be similar in focus. I want to highlight all the cool things about the game, because as friends have started playing there have been a lot of these items that are not adequately messaged in the game but provide amazing functionality. I am sure there are many players that do not realize they can auto sort their bags, or search them.. because it is never really explained. Additionally one of my friends had no clue there was a “sell all greys” button, because again it is there… but not really singled out to the player.

Stalwarts

My work on the How To post was cut short when I noticed the time. I posted a few weeks back about trying to get some of my longtime Guildies into Rift and having Mon/Weds event nights. Since I announced the concept Monday… it was too soon to really do much of anything at all. However last night we had a handful of people online and in the Stalwart@Deepwood channel. We had a player that was afk and another that was PVPing so it took awhile to finally organize. Ultimately we decided we really did not have the makeup for a dungeon group, but luckily there are several options to do in those situations.

We ended up with a 22 bard, 51 necrolock, and me a 60 psuedo tanky warrior. The absolute best fit for a mixed group like that was Instant Adventures, so we end up random queuing for one. We all got mentored down to level 14 and got assigned to Freemarch, and we basically ran around there all evening. I had forgotten just how active Freemarch is, because during the time we played there were three zone wide invasions that we also participated in. It was essentially two hours of roaming around following whatever objective we were given.

I can’t speak for the others but I definitely enjoyed myself until it just got too late for me to be conscious. Honestly the concept was that it didn’t really matter what we did, so long as we did something as a group. The instant adventure thing seemed to work for that, and all of us were rewarded large amounts of whatever the currency is for our individual level ranges. I managed to get 2 planar advancement levels while we were out there, so the xp is definitely still valid for a capped player. Hopefully in coming weeks we can get a better mix of classes and actually delve into a few dungeons. I know Atonal had a quest in Iron Tombs that I would not mind running the place for.

Console Advantage

One of the things I have been thinking about over the last few months since we got the game loft set up, is what exactly made me fall out of love with console gaming. I think ultimately it is that console games at some point stopped providing me sufficient improvement over my PC to make playing the games worthwhile. Prepare for a nostalgic trip down memory lane. If you look at the above shots… this essentially represents the state of gaming in 1992.

I have a good friend that is completely fanatical about Commander Keen so I will try and do this without any disrespect to the game. However the image on the far left represents the closest we had to “console action” in the PC Gaming world with “Commander Keen in Goodbye, Galaxy!”. The color palette was extremely limited, the sprites were very flat feeling. The controls were a bit wonky, because the only thing we really had to play on was the Gravis Gamepad… which was not even close to the quality and responsiveness of the Super Nintendo game pad.

If you look at the middle picture, Super Mario World… it just looks and feels better. The game was extremely responsive filled with large colorful sprites and tons of them on screen at a time. At this time PC Gaming was really enjoyable, especially for the deep simulation and roleplaying games available for it… but it was not at all a direct replacement for the console experience. If you jump over to the far right image… you see the infamous Mortal Kombat. The game looked amazing for the time, and hopefully stacked up against all these images you can see that as well. Mortal Kombat had higher resolution than the console games, and featured really cool photorealistic digitized graphics. Essentially all I am trying to show is that while there was a huge gulf between PC and Console gaming… there was an equally huge gulf between console and the arcade.

Paradigm Shift

Catacombs and Wolfenstein were early games in the 3d Shooter genre, but it really was not until the release of Doom in 1993 that the world stood up and took notice of PC Gaming as being a serious force. What happened was really curious. Instead of trying to out do the console action experience, developers started building new kinds of action games that played to the strengths of the PC. Processing large volumes of information and building 3D maps was something that was really beyond the Super Nintendo or any of the 16 bit genre… their systems were simply not designed for something like that.

I continued to play console games, but I shifted more heavily into playing the new crop of “post doom” shooters, like the amazing Lucasarts Dark Forces. Once again the arcade was still offering a much better experience than the console gaming. It was around this time that I was regularly visiting my arcade to throw coins into Killer Instinct, Samurai Showdown, and Dungeons and Dragons Tower of Doom. The paradigm shifted yet again in college, when I played my very first OpenGL games… and bought a Voodoo 2 3D Graphics card to attach to my diamond stealth 2D graphics card.

While the gaming experience started to pull ahead on the PC, it still lacked the titles I wanted to be playing. So when the Nintendo 64 came out, I was completely amped to be playing Mario 64. It was still an experience that I could not get anywhere else. But within a year of this being released… the PC genre leapt forward again and by the time Quake 2 came out it completely demolished the graphical quality of the 64. The same thing happened when the PlayStation was released. Ultimately the graphical fidelity of consoles will always be trumped by PC gaming, as it is a fixed target set at the release of the console… whereas PC gaming is a moving target always evolving each time a new manufacturer releases a new graphics card chipset.

However still during the PlayStation era… they were providing a unique experience I could not have on my PC. In the last decade this concept is all but gone. The games coming out for the PC are the same games coming out for the console systems. They have essentially destroyed console gaming as this unique expeirence that you could not replicate elsewhere. When I look at the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Xbox One, and Playstation 4…. I simply see PC gaming with a controller. The experience overall is not really different than what I have had on my PC for awhile, and sadly in almost every case the PC game will look better.

The Realization

I don’t mean this to be some love song for PC gaming, but it took me awhile to realize why I have been so lackluster towards the console gaming market for so long. They have stopped giving me something unique that I can’t get anywhere else. Sure each console still has a handful of exclusive franchises that you can only play on their hardware… but those seem to be fewer and further between. As I have tried to get back into the console gaming world, I have noticed that most of the “blockbusters” were games I long considered “PC Games”. I cannot fathom people playing Fallout, Dragon Age, Skyrim, and Mass Effect series on consoles. Yet each of those is considered a major blockbuster for the console genre.

That if nothing else was my biggest take away from the E3 show… just how few games there were that I was interested in playing… that were not also coming out on the PC. I guess the tables have turned to some extent… in the beginning I played console games because they provided an experience that I just could not get anywhere else. Today it feels like PC gaming does a really good job of providing the exact same experience that is available through the consoles… all you really have to do is hook up a USB Xbox 360 controller. In addition to that however it also provides an experience that I cannot really get in the same way on consoles… those games that really are not joystick friendly. So today it feels like PC gaming provides me that unique experience.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap things up, because I am running out of time. Essentially I now realize why the console genre no longer excites me the way it used to. It stopped providing something I could not get elsewhere. For most players it will be a choice of buy a gaming machine or buy a console… but for me it never has been. I will always have a gaming PC, because it supports the MMO gaming that I don’t want to give up. The question will always be, weather or not consoles provide me enough of something that I cannot also get on the PC.

The Playstation 4 looks like it might, it has a few games that are exclusive and something I also care about. However in the case of the PS4 and Xbone… both machine are already out of date before they have even released. I give it less than a year before the PC is regularly producing a far better looking experience than either of those consoles. Anyways… like I said I need to head on in to work. I feel like todays post is extremely rambly and contorted. Hopefully it makes a bit of sense. I hope you all have a great day.

Recursion Loop

August 7, 2015June 26, 2013 by Belghast

I’m struggling a bit with the whole remaining vertical thing this morning. I really did not get a good nights sleep, woke up several times. However each time I managed to get back to sleep relatively easily since I had an army of cats trying to snuggle with me. I find it odd that while there is one whole person missing from the bed… they all decide that the best place to lay is on top of me. After all these years, cat logic still completely evades me sometimes… but then again so does most human logic.

Curious Bot

I spent most of last night hanging out on the couch, fishing in Rift while trying to clear off the TV shows I had recorded from the DVR. I had a rather large backlog and I was only 270 fishing so I knew I could do it for awhile. In the process I managed to push up survival to 375 and I got fishing up to 305 so that now I can at least do the daily fishing quests for the area. I spent roughly from 7pm until Midnight my time fishing away, the majority of which was off a bridge in the canal behind Tulan on Brevane. I managed to pull up several nifty housing items so that part is still somewhat exciting for me.

The funny thing is… throughout the night I kept seeing the same player coming by and picking up all the normally non-aggro snapper hatchlings in the canal. They would run a little path, spamming their AOE abilities… then finally stop and skin them all… pause and continue the route. I tried to interact with the player but received no response. When I logged out last night they were doing it… and now that I have logged in this morning from the above screenshot you can see they are still hard at work. At this point it is obviously a bot, but a fairly advanced one from the looks of it.

The problem is… for whatever reason the petition system is borked. I seem to have a completed ticket stuck in the queue from ages ago… that I cannot remove to replace it. I would have gladly reported that Lisxande@Deepwood is a bot but unfortunately the system refuses to work for me. What I have been doing in the meantime is reporting any issues like this as bug notes… since those will actually submit. I doubt they will actually end up in the right place, but it makes me feel like I make at least doing something. As a programmer… I have to give them some credit for scripting a rather complex process… but it doesn’t make me not want to destroy them.

Recursion Loop

Have you ever had one of those television shows that you are not really into anymore… but you have been watching for so long that you feel obligated to keep up? That is precisely how I feel about the Anime Bleach these days. I started watching it during the heady days of WoW raiding, and I was drawn to the interesting and massive cast of characters. Additionally I thought the whole concept of a soul reaper was extremely cool. However I realized something along the way somewhere, every single season of bleach is exactly the same.

Ultimately something strange will happen that puts someone or something in jeopardy. Ichigo then discovers some new and dangerous threat that uses some strange and magical new powers. He rushes into battle and gets his ass kicked by whatever this new threat is. Then he spends the rest of the season learning some new even more powerful power from a mentor figure. He finally confronts the baddest of the baddies using this new power… and barely manages to defeat them… all because of his unbridled spirit energy.

The current season I am watching feels so rehashed. There is a definite moment of “no wait… there is this one thing that is the most powerful thing in the world that we haven’t mentioned for seven seasons yet”. I think to some extent I keep watching it, because the characters that are NOT Ichigo are still interesting to me. The thing that kills me however is the first third of an episode ends up being essentially the last third of the previous one. So it feels like there is so much building with very little payoff.

It is like that those ghost and super natural shows where it sounds like they find something… but they will never actually find evidence of anything at all. I would love to have someone cut together an entire season of Bleach as one seamless show… and trim out all the repeated content at the beginning of the show. My fear is that after you cut out ALL the callbacks to other things… you would end up taking a 13 hour episode down to like 4 hours. The positive thing however is that I have officially watched down my queue of bleach, so I can comfortably let it stack up again.

Defiance

Additionally last night while on my fishing binge, I decided to try and catch up on Defiance. I really enjoyed the first few episodes of the show, but by the time I had watched episode three I started to lose interest. I am not sure what it is about the show but I have for whatever reason not significantly imprinted on the characters yet. As a whole the series reminds me of this odd mishmash of Firefly and Terra Nova… but with High Elves and Cathar. There are a handful of characters that I really like, mixed in with a bunch of other stuff I cannot bring myself to care about.

I keep thinking that if I watch it enough there will be this magical moment when all the sudden it becomes amazing and magical for me. I’ve made it through I think episode 6 as of last night, but I felt myself fading in and out of paying attention… so I am really not sure I caught enough of some of the episodes to fully understand what was going on. It was I think during episode five that someone popped into Rift that I started up a conversation with. I am going to try and chew through the rest of the episodes so that I can at least say I am caught up. I feel like maybe since I am not really playing the game, I am not as committed to the universe.

I also feel like there has been a paradigm shift in science fiction. There was a time, namely the 90s and some of the early 2000s that science fiction shows were a rarity on television. Since something other than Star Trek was almost unheard of… you ended up watching whatever it was because there was literally nothing better on at the time. So I feel like there are so many science fiction shows that we view through the rose colored lenses of nostalgia. Today however the market is absolutely flooded with science fiction shows, and we have a lot more to choose from. As a result I find myself being far more critical of a given show, because I know there are others out there that I could be watching instead.

I want to like Defiance as a brand… I want to like the video game and I want to like the television show. I feel like I am watching in part to help support one of my favorite companies… Trion. All of that said while both game and TV show sound like something I would like on paper… the result of experiencing either has been lacking something for me. I keep feeling like I just need to give both more time to grow on me, but I am wondering at what point I will decide that “nope, it is just not for me”. As a consolation gift… I am at least immensely happy about having my title, pet and mount over in Rift as a result of the show.

Wrapping Up

Well I have pissed away an hour of time writing this long diatribe, and need to finish getting ready for work. I hope you all have a great day ahead of you. Mine will be stressful and frustrating as always I am sure, but hopefully I can actually get things knocked off my list that need to. I am constantly thankful for the awesome team of people I have to work with, I just wish I had a bit more stability in “management direction”. I am on this vision quest to finish leveling fishing, but I am hoping to finish it up tonight.

Fish On

June 25, 2013 by Belghast

Here goes my attempt to write one of these posts quickly. I am certain I will fail at it, but this morning is trash day… and as a result I need to go around the house and gather the rest of it. I am doing a bit better than I was yesterday morning, or at least I am feeling slightly more awake. Today is the day my wife travels again, so not really looking forward to that one… but at least this time she will be back by Friday. Unfortunately however it seems like she is going to have shittier wifi, so that will be annoying. Why is it that a budget hotel can give you free wifi, but a ritzy hotel does not?

Fish On

The last tradeskills I have to level are fishing and survival, and mostly due to the hours of doing next to nothing… I have put off leveling them. I like the fishing system in Rift so much more than I did the one in WoW, but in either situation it is still a very passive activity. That said it was designed hand in hand with Survival, so if I wanted to be able to make nifty stat increasing foods… I figured I would have to level the two skills together. More or less that has been the case, except that the fishing always seems to lag behind the survival level.

The fishing system is much more enjoyable as a whole than the one from World of Warcraft. Namely they have introduced several new things into the genre. Firstly and the most important thing… you can target the water you want to fish in. The thing that drove me insane over in WoW was the recasting over and over hoping that you got your lure in a school of fish. Additionally there is a mechanic for telling you if you are fishing shallow or deep water, and different things can be caught in each. The real hook for me however is that you have a decent chance of fishing up random artifacts and housing items.

I set out last night to fish and level survival all night long. I literally spend roughly four hours fishing last night, and in that time I went from around 200 to around 270 in fishing. Additionally I managed to level survival from roughly the same place to 300. During the time I got a few dozen artifacts, and four housing items that were contained in chests that also rewarded crafting currency. There is something strangely peaceful about fishing, and I had my hotkeys set up that I could fish entirely with my g600 mouse. It really is the perfect activity to do while watching tv… I am still shocked no one has packaged this mini-game and created it as a mobile app that lets you fish up in game rewards.

Plane of Water

Last Friday Trion had another one of their live streams talking about the future of Rift. You should check it out over on twitch if you are interested, but be warned… it is roughly 2 1/2 hours long. Essentially they teased a bunch of features for Rift 3.0, the next expansion in which they showed the picture above hinting that it would take place in the elemental plane of water. Essentially at this point all of the dragons are now dead, and the Rifts still have not stopped… so it is time to investigate the planes themselves for the cause of the tears.

The coolest thing is, that they seem to have firmly adopted the D&D model of elemental planes with the quasi-planes intact. If you notice in the above drawing you have a glacier, ocean, giant overgrown coral forest, underwater areas, undersea caverns… a really rich environment rather than one giant non-descript ocean. I personally am pumped over this expansion… I think I am one of the few people that really enjoyed Vashjir in WoW and while it obviously seems like they won’t be fully underwater… I am sure there will be elements of it. They mentioned that they will likely begin releasing small bits of underwater content to test out the tech well before the expansion release.

The thing that really caught my attention however is that they mentioned they would be adding some more meat on the bones of the companion system. That you would be able to level them, and assign them certain tasks. This immediately got my mind spinning… and I thought to myself… man would it not be amazing if they found a way to merge the Pet Battle system from WoW with the Crew Crafting system from SWTOR. If I could send my companions off to go harvest ore, craft an item, or more importantly ferry crafting materials to my bank… I would be in heaven. I was surprised at how much I liked both systems, and I would love to see them create a new hybrid system.

Finally they announced that there would once again be four new souls. Essentially this one was expected… in each case there is one role that a given class lacks, and they are filling in these gaps. Warriors will be getting a pure healer, Rogues will be getting a pure healer, Clerics will be getting a pure support, and finally Mages will be getting a tank. The concept of a tanky mage is just intriguing. I figure they have two ways they can go with this one… they can either make the pet tank, or give the mage magical armor to absorb damage. As far as warriors, since they already have paladin souls… I am figuring their healer is going to end up being a lot like the WoW paladin with tons of single target heals and a combo point based healing finisher system.

In any case… I am now super pumped about the expansion. I honesty did not expect to be hearing news about it quite yet, but given that it is Trion and with their rapid development cycle… it makes sense. I am wondering about the time frame, knowing how Trion works it could be entirely possible that this is a November/December expansion release date. That would make for a very merry Christmas indeed… essentially they would be delivering on the promise that Blizzard has never been able to… an expansion per year. This is about the speed the EQ2 has managed to maintain, so it is entirely doable so long as they always have a team devoted to expansion.

Rift Nights

One of the things I miss the most by being a nomad is the constant camaraderie of the Stalwarts. I am trying a new experiment, and not sure how well it will work. Right now in Rift we are not in a guild of our own, but because of this it opens up a lot more doors to grouping and regular open raiding. It also makes it hard to organize the people who are used to playing together in other games. As a result I have decided to start a server channel that way folks connected to House Stalwart that are playing Rift again can join in and get into group activity regardless of what server they are on. Since everything is cross server it makes life easier for getting together.

Additionally I am going to try and set up Monday and Wednesday nights for group activities. Roughly 8pm EDT til bedtime I am going to be around and available for random grouping with anyone that happens to be in the channel. The idea will be to grab whoever is around, and pick an activity that suits our levels and numbers. Rift is amazing good at giving something to do with varied group sizes. Some of the many options.

20 Man Raids – Require 20 well geared players

10 Man Raids – Require 10 well geared players

Elite Dungeon – Require 5 Max Level fairly well geared players

Dungeons – Require 5 players gear level completely open

Chronciles – Require 2 players gear level varies – These are essentially 2 man raids, see all the storyline.

Crafting Rifts – Variable group size, special crafting rift lure awards high level crafting mats

Hunts/Greater Hunts – Variable group size, special hunt rift lure opens up a hunt leading up to a boss fight

Elite Rifts – Variable group size, special elite lure opens a dungeon like open world rift encounter

Raid Rifts – Variable group size, special raid lure opens a raid like open world rift encounter

Instant Adventures – Variable group size, over world objective based event, has cool mini bosses every so often

Rifts and Zone Events – Variable group size, essentially rifts and zone events form all over the world all the time.

Conquest – Variable group size… 3 faction pvp system, similar to DAoC frontiers and feels like Alterac Valley.

Scenarios – Variable group size… these are essentially like WoW Battlegrounds. Not big on PVP but willing to try.

Basically there are a ton of different activities and the excellent mentoring system in Rift allows us to tailor the activity so that everyone is getting benefit. I posted this note on our forums, and social media yesterday, but it is a bit too soon for it really to kick off. However off and on through the night we had four people joining the channel and it at least became a more friendly chatbox option. If you are a current or former member of House Stalwart, or just someone interested in this little endeavor check out our forums. I will be turning off forum account sign-up moderation for a few days in case folks want to check it out. We get an inordinate amount of spammers hitting our forum, so ultimately I will be turning it back on in the future.

Wrapping Up

I need to get up and around and finish gathering the trash. I hope you all have a great rest of the week, and you get whatever accomplished that you need to. I made some serious progress on one project yesterday, but as soon as I did four others popped up in need of attention. Right now we have thirty five active projects for three people… so I have become adept at juggling work. It leads however to an extremely unstable and frustrating environment for me. Thank god I have amazing people to work with on my team.