During the course of the week I have had a number of little bits and baubles that I wanted to share, but didn’t really feel like fit with the thrust of a certain post.  In Rift, if you complete the objectives of a stage in a timely manner you get bonus stages.  I reserve the right to post a long rambling mess at any time the mood fits me, but I think for now I will try and relegate them to my “bonus stage” posts.

Foul Cascade Shortcut

I have been trying to find a good way to work this in for a week now but having zero luck.  Once you hit 50, one of the things you will inevitably do is run experts.  One of the easier and more rewarding of these tier 1 experts is Foul Cascade.  As a Defiant player, getting to this instance is a thorn in our side as it involves running north through guardian infested territory from the Scarwood Lift porticulum.

While making the run for what felt like the hundredth time I decided there had to be an easier way.  In other games, players would get banned for “wall hacking” their way across zone lines.  But in Rift, Trion actually rewards this behavior since when you get up to the top of mountains, there are always cool things to see.  At the very least there is usually a wealth of artifacts along the way.

Above is my recording, using the in game /record system, of the route I take between Chancel of Labors in Iron Pine Peaks and the Foul Cascade instance.  Of note, I got confused while running across the lake as to where the road met up, and got dismounted.  Also of note, when you get to the Gloamwood / Scarlet Gorge zoneline, I drop down off my fast mount to my slow mount for a significant reason. 

If you are moving at fast mount speeds it is way too easy to drop down too far at once, and end up killing yourself.  Luckily, if you happen to do this, there is a soul forge at the bottom of the hill, at the same level as Foul Cascade so the run back is extremely short.  Honestly you would do just as well to simply dismount and hop down by foot, than to even mess with a mount.

I know there are other paths, but this one is pretty quick and relatively simple.  Would be interested to know any other shortcuts to either Foul Cascade or other instances that my readers have.  I know Caspian, one of my guildmates has a path that he runs to Foul Cascade somehow from Moonshae Highlands, but I do not know the specifics of it.  However according to him, this path involves no mobs in between, so that would cut down on the getting dismounted factor.

Nerd 202

One of my blogger and twitter friends, Kadomi branched out on a new venture this week.  She is making the scary transition from blogging about WoW, to blogging about geek life in general.  Just like her wow blog, Tank Like A Girl, the posts are well written and always interesting.  Initially I thought this meant she would be leaving the other blog behind, but since then she has updated posts on the wow site as well.  If you do not have Tank Like a Girl and Live Like a Nerd in your RSS feed, you should add them.  Both are extremely good reads, and I hope that she continues to have great success as a blogger.

Week Without WYSBPR

I realize it has been a long time now since I have posted an episode in the “Why You Should Be Playing Rift” series.  I have a few things still in mind, but in general at this point, players are either hooked on the game or well stratified in their opinion that WoW is the only game on the planet.  It has come to the time where I trim back some of my evangelism and start just reporting MMO news, and my own brand of commentary.

I think before all is said and done I would like to have a nice even 10 episodes in the series, so expect to see more things.  However the post I have been working on in the background, is somewhat the reverse of “Why You Should Be Playing Rift”.  The idea is to create a post outlining all the questions players can ask themselves, to determine if Rift is wrong for them.

Since release we have had a handful of players return to wow, because the game just didn’t scratch whatever itch they needed scratched.  For some the game play in Rift was too difficult, for others they missed the 3D chat room that WoW had become for them, and as a result missed too many of their friends still playing WoW.  Rift is by no means the “one ring to rule them all”, it expects a lot more of its player base than wow has since the burning crusade era.  As a result, this game just is not the right game for certain personalities and player styles.

There should be some cool things in the weeks ahead.  I have been shocked at how quickly this blog has revived and regained readership.  All along I thought I was just burnt out with blogging, when I went on hiatus from the Aggronaut.  Turns out, the game I was playing just did not make me excited enough to write anymore.  Now that I have pushed that game aside, I feel like I have a world of ideas swimming in my head.  Hopefully I continue to have success, but I just wanted to thank the readers.  I am slowly beginning to believe that I actually do have an audience.

Just wanted to get these up really quick.  These have not rolled out on North American servers as of yet, but if they follow the pattern recently they will be up at 8 AM PDT.  As of this morning we had already received the launcher patch associated with these changes.

New Items Arrive

As promised by Trion, the rumored “hundreds of new items” have apparently arrived.  These are supposedly sprinkled throughout the Tier 1 and Tier 2 dungeon bosses beefing up their loot tables.  I have no word as to whether or not these will be limited time drops, of if these are permanent changes to the loot table.  Either way I plan on making it another weekend of grinding away at expert dungeons.

Nameplate Options

One of the big problems I have with the game is the current nameplate system.  I will expound on this later in a future post, but it looks like we are at least getting some options.  There are now apparently two sliders in the interface options that allow you to control the size of player and NPC nameplates separately.  I just hope this makes them easier to see, and pick out from the sea of mobs.

Full Patch Notes

you can find the official patch notes here.

 

Despite having a now dead account, I still try and keep touch with my friends who are playing World of Warcraft.  Yesterday evening the buzz was surrounding the new and improved dungeon finder tool.  If you have read any of my recent posts on wow, you know that I consider this tool the “idiot button”, but I figured I would read the details and see if they were addressing any of the problems I had with it.  Below is a snippet that sums up the feature.  Full announcement can be found over on wow insider.

Failing To Understand Motivation

The above description of the new ability sounds great in theory, but it verifies a long held belief of mine.  Blizzard simply does not understand the motivation behind certain classes.  The classes that we are generally missing from the PUG landscape are the ones that require the biggest social responsibility.  It takes a special breed to be willing to take responsibility for other players into your own hands on a regular basis.

In WoW the class that has always been in the shortest supply are the tanks.  The tank is controlling force in any party, sets the pull speed, determines the approach, and for the most part directs the success of a run.  A good tank knows he has to rely on solid healing, expert dps and utility to get through the instance.  However someone has to be the voice of the party and More often than not, in a successful group, that is the tank.

To be a good tank, you need an instinctively protective nature.  You need the desire to protect the other players from harm and press yourself against the onslaught of mobs attacking you.  Doing this means you tend to develop a special bond for your fellow players, and as a result these players tend to ask you into groups on a regular basis.

Sure there are good tanks that are very reward focused, and chase every shiny new bauble available.  However after playing a tank in one form or another for 10 years, I believe a far greater number do it for other reasons.  I personally tank, because I enjoy the feeling of protecting my friends from whatever comes our way.  I enjoy saving the day in an epic fashion, and when you take away the familiarity with your players, much of that enjoyment goes away.

Failing To Understand Their Game

Kadomi touches on this issue in her post, “Call to Fail”, but I will expand further.  As I wrote about in my “Is WoW The WoW-Killer” post, the community of gamers is a much different place than when the game was released.  Long gone are the good natured, easy going players that are willing to work through a problem.  They have been replaced by the “lolurbad”, “faster!” and “big pulls” wrath genre morons.  As a result the tank ends up bearing the brunt of this player abuse. 

Frankly, no amount of carrot is worth the stick that the abrasive players already provide.  Stepping into a pug as a tank, many times is like stepping into a warzone.  The instances themselves are usually relatively simple, dealing with the selfish and socially mal-adjusted are the difficult part.  As the tank, you somehow have to figure out a way to steer this bus of constant frustration across the finish line in a timely manner. 

The simple truth is, if you are a good tank, you don’t have a need to pug.  You have a pool of players that are always willing to run heroics with you.  You become a favorite tour guide, that everyone knows will get them home safely.  Most nights in wow, I logged in to a sea of purple tells, many of which were friends asking me to come tank something for them.  At the end of the day, no amount of loot is worth dealing with the frustrations when you have a stable of “known good” players asking you for help.

This ties back in to what I said earlier, most of your good tanks are not doing it for the “money” so to speak.  Most of us actually like to help our friends.  We like to be contributing members of the guild and server community, and as a result become keystones in whatever environment we are in.  When you have this network of goodwill built up around you, why on earth would you as a player abandon that for an experience you know will lead you to invent new forms of cursing.

Lost Touch

This has been a constant thread I have seen among the various disillusioned players leaving World of Warcraft.  We all feel like Blizzard has abandoned us, the players that helped build its empire.  My grandfather had a saying, and I hope it will make sense to you non-Oklahomans: “You dance with the one that brought you”.  Basically most of the players I know filing out of WoW at this point, are players who like me played from release or near release.

We were the players that brought Blizzard to the throne of gaming it has managed to obtain.  Problem is along the way it forgot why we started playing their games in the first place.  In this facebook era of games, it is too easy to think it is natural to have millions of users to spare.  In doing so however, you forget all the reasons why your game was great in the first place.

I’m thankful to Trion at the moment, because they seem to get it.  After years of playing under Blizzard, Sony Online Entertainment, and Mythic I had come to expect a certain amount of distance between the company and its player base.  I expect them to not really understand why we cared about the game, and why we were playing it.  With Trion, it simply feels different.

In my time since starting Rift, I have seen far more involvement from the company as a whole than ever in my gaming career.  There have been 13 hotfixes and 3 patches, with the game only being out about a month and a half.  In the past I would have judged a game harshly on those numbers, thinking they were having to bandaid the game to keep it going.  Instead Trion launched the most complete product I have ever played, and continues to simply improve the experience with each release.

Magic Dust is Gone

I am not sure it is really quantifiable, but something is gone from WoW.  It is like the lid to a box has been opened and whatever magic dust was inside floated away on the wind, and is forever gone.  I left quite obviously to play another game, but many of my friends who are now leaving are just doing so because the game no longer holds whatever special property it once did for them.  Either they got tired of the hamster wheel, or simply stopped caring about the game play entirely.

I still believe this has been a gradual process of bad decisions that have lead us to this point, and this latest change in an attempt to buy off the tanks only supports that.  However I do still feel bad that whatever locomotive is at the head of the train, is most definitely off course.  I have many friends still playing WoW, and many that either do not have the systems or desire to jump to another game if WoW fails.  I honestly do hope someone will step in to balance the listing ship, before it capsizes.

Today is a fairly auspicious day for no real reason other than the fact that my wow account is officially dead now.  I feel like I should tell my characters to rest in peace or something.  I am extremely happy in that it means I can finally rebind the stupid accounts to the physical dongles, file them away in a drawer, and upgrade my stupid iphone.  I have been putting off an operating system upgrade for ages because of the horror stories of getting locked out of the mobile authenticator.  Now I can do so in peace and see if it improves the glitchiness with my stock iOS 4.0.

Have Rift Will Close

Last night went nothing like I expected it to.  I had originally planned on being gone, I had originally planned on traveling to a nearby town to meet a seller from craigslist and buy a laptop.  However since the seller has seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth, and is no longer responding to text or phone call, those plans went out the window.  On a side note, I am honestly hoping that nothing serious has happened, considering the last I heard from the seller he was boarding a plane to come back to Oklahoma.

Since my evening did not follow its normal plan, I decided to hang out and work on daily quests and rifts.  Recently I just have not been in the mood to do anything serious, and by serious I mean instancing.  As a tank, you are responsible for a good bit of the success and failure of any group you are in.  I just have not felt like wearing the leader hat the last few nights, so as a result I have participated in whatever invasions that have come along.

In my search to “catch them all” for the event, I have managed to get the 3 companion pets, and the bauble that makes you look all shade touched.  I’ve gathered about 150 more otherworldly sourcestone towards trinket that makes you look like the necromancer rogue pet, which costs 500.  I figure a few more days of daily quests and closing rifts will let me get all the spiffy limited time doodads.  In all my rifting however I still have yet to see a mount or any of the shadetouched weapon caches.  Here is hoping for a pony before the event closes.

Wrath of Kain

With yesterdays hotfix the level of intensity of the event was increased, and with it seemingly the frequency of major zone invasions.  I had heard rumor these existed, as a few of my guild members were in the server first level 50 major zone invasion last week.  However until last night I had not actually seen one myself.  I was carefully picking my way through my Order of Mathos daily quests when it hit.  Alsbeth was attacking Stillmoor, and we were about to be caught in the balance.

Within a few moments, the zone was lit up like a plaque victim with purple spots, each one pouring out all manner of nastiness.  The Defiant player-base formed up a raid and began working our way through destroying the pillars.  Each pillar, used in the summoning ritual was guarded by a zone boss, of similar difficulty to the normal invasion bosses.  The fact that the invasion had 4 pillars, and therefore at least four bosses was in itself impressive until we started moving across the land.

In our travels closing rifts, we managed to encounter 4 bone dragons, 4 giant constructs, and 4 archlichs.  There might have been more of these world bosses, but these were the ones I managed to see myself.  So that in itself makes a minimum of 20 boss type mobs up in Stillmoor at one time.  Each one of these bosses seemed to be capable of rewarding players with the rare quality Ancient Sourceshards.  With teamwork we managed burn through the rifts, destroy the pillars and shift the event into the next phase.

At this time, the map blew up with footholds, moreso than I have ever seen in a zone before.  While we burned through the invasions that were pouring out of the footholds, a group of players dedicated themselves to holding vigil at Zareph’s Return.  In this event, that was the key location that we had to keep from falling.  After all the fighting we managed to push into phase three, and face the invasion boss Kain.  This went as quickly as all rift bosses seem to, as everyone in the zone dog piled his location.  The reward for completing this epic invasion, was the fabled epic Ancient Sourcestone.

Wrath of Crucia

The wild ride in Stillmoor was over in about thirty minutes and so shortly afterwards I was back to doing my daily quests.  After an hour of chatting with guild and picking through quests, I heard the call go out that a greater invasion was hitting Iron Pine Peaks.  Considering I needed more Ancient Sourcestones, I rode to the nearest porticulum and popped into Whitefall.  It was with some trepidation that I joined the battle in Iron Pine. 

Last week, as I said some of my guild had participated in a major invasion, that happened to be in this zone.  Problem is, that night the invasion took over four hours to finish.  I looked at the clock, knowing I had roughly two hours of playtime left, and jumped into the fray hoping for the best.  The main issue with the IPP invasion, is that for some reason when it reaches phase two, the number of air rifts that spawn in the zone are at a minimum.  In addition to this, there is one known rift location in the far north of the zone that never seems to count towards the quest completion totals.

Knowing ahead that we more than likely were in for the long haul, it changed the way we approached the event.  Myself, Caspian, and a healer that was in zone Aran, quickly organized the raid into three basic goals.  The idea was that to hold out as long as we could, we needed to stop invasions from spawning.  In order to do this we needed to kill all of the rifts as they spawned as well as destroy all of the footholds.

Caspian charged off with a group that focused on closing the rifts, Aran lead up the defense of the Chancel of Labors, and I broke off with a small team and began systematically destroying each of the footholds in a sweeping pattern.  Within an hour we had whittled down things to where the majority of spawn points were down.  Each time an air rift would spawn, coordinates would be linked to the raidchat and a party would barrel off in that direction, quickly dispatching it. It became a waiting game. 

Since we closed down most of the possible spawn points, it meant that the few remaining spawners were constantly streaming mobs out to attack us.  Caspian and I had both gathered force at Whitefall in an attempt to salvage the town, but we both noticed that a massive invasion wave was heading straight for the Chancel.  Over time the defenders that were there, had splintered off to attack other things in the zone, and our map was indicating that a fairly skeletal crew of “purple dots” remained.  Over mumble, in a last minute decision we broke for the porticulum, thinking it might be our only chance to help save the wardstone.

We sprang from the portal, rounded the Chancel and had just enough time to charge an onslaught of enemies that were streaming down the path.  Each of us in our tank specs, furiously tanked at the wall of death.  It felt exactly like one of those action films, when the reinforcements arrive just at the right moment to turn the tide of the battle.  Caspian and I were those reinforcements, we were getting to turn the tide.  This outrageous assault on the Chancel continued for another thirty minutes to an hour as we turned away wave after wave of attackers.

Epic Defense

The event in Iron Pine Peaks was over three hours of constant fighting.  During this time I gained over 6000 planarite, and countless other doodads in the process.  I have to say this is precisely why I love Rift so much.  What would have otherwise been a down night, was turned into an epic fight against good and evil.  We didn’t spend time in an instance, or get amazing loot.  Instead we the players fought back and defended our allies as the world raided us.

The biggest thing for me at the end of the night as far as gains however was the fact that I managed to secure two of the precious ancient sourcestones.  With these I purchased two of the epic greater essences from the rare planar vendors in Stillmoor and Shimmersand.  They both proc amazingly often, and I am extremely thrilled to have them.  More importantly I have an epic tale to tell you all, about the journey.  I have said it before, Rift feels like a game that is more about the journey than the destination. 

At the end of the night it only cost me twenty gold, and my sanity.