One night into 1.2, here is the good, average, and bad.
The good:
The weekly crafting rift quest is well designed. The rifts themselves are new, look good, and are pretty damn easy (you can duo them at worst, most could probably solo them). The quest is also easy, just turn in some higher-end mats, and get your plaque and rift lure.
The smart design piece is that done solo, the cost-to-reward ratio is unfavorable; the cost of the mats to complete the quest is higher than the reward from the completed rift, even if you finish the final bonus stage. However, if you get 5+ people together, and everyone has the crafting rift lure, and you complete all five as a group, everyone will end up with more rewards than the cost of the single lure. Simple, but pretty brilliant. The quest is technically possible solo, but only really gets rewarding in a group. Very solid addition to the game.
Another solid addition is the map changes, which now show which zones have an event and the event status. Pretty handy.
The average:
The new search filters are incomplete. For instance, you can search runes by slot from the crafting window, but you can’t in the auction house. Most people looking to buy a rune don’t have runecrafting to search in the crafting window.
We also noticed some bugs, such as exquisite cloth still dropping for non-outfitters, something that was supposedly fixed according to the patch notes. It’s not a major issue, but in a game that trumpets polish so proudly, that’s pretty sloppy.
The bad:
We ran one tier two expert dungeon, and never came close to wiping on a boss (my pet was so bored he was speed pulling, and the baddies I was with could not handle it, so the only trouble we had was with 3+ group pulls). Pre-patch we would wipe a few times on some bosses, and overall had to focus a bit more to get the job done. Post-patch, I was mashing my two macro keys while chatting about whatever on vent. The whole run was also much quicker (even with the pet deaths) due to the massive trash nerf and the increase to character power across the board.
What this really means is that we will burn through this set of content much faster than we would have previously (and pre-1.2 it was already going somewhat fast), and we either have new stuff to do, or we move on from the game. So far Trion has kept up in terms of content additions, but short of a guild merger, the 20 man stuff is out of reach, leaving only the new 10 man raid and expert/raid rifts for us, neither of which I expect to really challenge us.
So one day into 1.2, I’m still in a wait-and-see mode with the game. I like some of the changes, I don’t like the general dumbing down of the content, and overall I’m not really sure there is enough to keep us going. Facerolling content gets boring, fast, and the notion that I’ll want to run said content even MORE is a bit crazy.
Hardcore Casual 
And the other stuff? The dungeon finder? Is it working at least?
As for the content of Rift , there’s a chance SW:TOR gets delayed into 2012….what will we be doing until then? If Trion can keep up the content, they very well might take this year for themselves.
Didn’t try the LFG tool as I don’t PUG, but I think a guild member used it before I logged on and finished a run. Patch today fixed a bug with people not getting the bonus reward or something. Not a major addition/concern for me tbh.
I think it should be a major addition/concern for you – because we all know that the LFG tool’s addition is what is driving the expert difficulty nerfs. Trion said that they were “happy with expert difficulty” but they must have thought (probably correctly) that once a random grouping tool is introduced the experts would have to be nerfed to accomodate the poor groups assembled by the tool. They could hardly afford to implement the tool, against the reservations of significant portion of their players and then have it fall flat because the random groups all start whining on the forums about how Trion hates casuals.
What really irritates me about the tool is that it takes a flexible and elegant soul system and shoe horns it into an inelegant group template. It feels to me like the tool itself kind of turns its back on what the game was supposed to be about.
Oh well, I signed up for 6 months and even if I drop it in the near future, I think I’ve enjoyed it enough to feel like I got my money’s worth. It is just too bad that everyone struggle’s to put out a really interesting, compelling PVE mmo in the wake of how WoW changed the industry.
Right clearly I’m not happy about the dungeon changes, but I don’t think they had to happen with the addition of the LFG tool. If we assume the previous state of the dungeons were too tough (something I’d argue, but whatever), than instead of killing what was there, why not just add a PUG-level tier to the instances? Something just a small step above normal AP/CC, available for all dungeons?
I’m really disappointed in the nerfs and dumbing down of the dungeons in order to accommodate the LFG tool. Sadly, peoples reactions haven’t helped alleviate that disappointment. I have a 6 month sub that I cancelled when the LFG tool was announced and now I know that I won’t be re-subbing.
I suppose I could pick up Lotro again and check out the new dungeons or maybe pick up Darkfall again and check out today’s new patch. Feels like a really bad time in MMO’s right now. Holding out hope that maybe Archeage can give this genre a much needed boost.
Well, Rift is a 80% WoW clone. It’s not like we didn’t know.
While Trion does like a few sandboxy details here and there, they mostly continue to copy WoW.
So, in the end, we are at the beginning: Rift was a nice game for in-between. But they copied too much from WoW to be able to make the outddor world interesting enough.
That’s the sad part, the outdoor stuff IS good enough to separate Rift from WoW, especially when you consider the quality of the more recent additions.
The problem is, it’s not enough on its own, and the instanced stuff was a nice compliment. That’s no longer the case, and if all I’m logging on for is the world stuff, I’m not logging on much.
I tried the 10-man raid content last night, and it was quite a step up in difficulty from pre-1.2 T2 experts and greenscale.
I don’t think a population base spoon-fed the new expert dungeon experience will do very well in there, at least, until the next content nerf.
So there’s hope on the horizon for some challenging content, but further down that horizon is the looming possibility of it again being catered to the masses. Vicious cycle…
I tried out the new 10 man content last night, and I can say it is definitely a step up in difficulty from Raid Rifts and T2 Experts (I come from a guild that clears GSB in about 2.5-3 hours and RoS in 2 nights, so we have some good progress going at this point).
I haven’t jumped into the revised T2s yet, as I don’t particularly need the gear from them anymore… although I heard you can now buy Corrupted Souls with plaques so I may have to dip my toe in again.
Is it harder than GSB/RoS, from a gear perspective? Do you think you need GSB/RoS gear to do the 10 man raid, or is it more that if you can clear T2, you can get into the 10 man and make some progress?
I would say that the new 10 man content is approximately Tier 2.5 in terms of both difficulty and rewards. I’m pretty sure you could jump into it with T2 quality gear and you would be fine (some of the people we had with us were T2 (or even slightly below) level, while others like myself were mixed T2 and 3). We didn’t run into any very hard DPS checks, but the tank being very well geared seemed fairly important (as usual) due to some of the heavy damage he was receiving. The first boss we encountered even required a tank switch due to a stacking mitigation debuff that would completely wreck him if it got too high.
On the rewards side, the gear seems to be better than the newly-buffed T2 gear, but not as good as the newly-buffed T3 gear. I’ve heard the final bosses can also drop relic weapons (we haven’t downed one yet), but I would guess those are also probably a bit below the relic weapons from GSB/RoS.
One additional note: these aren’t all tank and spank. You should expect Raid level coordination being required. Off tanking on add pulls, tank switches during boss fights, raid mechanics that must be followed or else wipe, etc.
As you probably know, some T1/T2 dungeons are pretty easy to the point of face rolling. Raid Rifts are similar (though the Death one in Stillmoor is pretty rough if you don’t bring a strong group). This new content is definitely pretty difficult, though of course not as much as the 20 man raids.
Good info.
Speaking of raid rifts, how hard are those, and are they designed for 10 or 20 people? If we were running T2s pre-1.2 without too much trouble, can we get 10ish players of around that level and do raid rifts?
I would say the difficulty varies a bit between the 4 raid rifts that existed pre 1.2 (Life/Death in Stillmoor, Air in Shimmer, Water in IPP).
The Life raid rift was fairly easy. The mechanics were pretty simple and the overall difficulty was not very high. We probably had 12 or so people the first time we did it a while back, so I’m sure 10 people would be fine.
The Death version is pretty difficult on the outset due to some very hard hitting mobs with somewhat unforgiving mechanics. At this point we still prefer to bring 15+ players to the death raid rift just hedge our bets a bit, though we could take it down with 10 just fine if we were tasked to… but it’s better to not wipe if possible.
The Water and Air RRs are somewhat in the middle. They are decently challenging but pretty well positioned for 10 players. The Water RR even has a mechanic/ability on the last boss that will probably insta wipe your raid the first time through if you didn’t already know about it… but you will learn fast haha.
I suppose the varying difficulty matches up with the varying T2 difficulty. On one hand you have Runic Descent which I consider to be a fairly easy dungeon to complete, and on the other you have Deepstrike Mines which (in addition to the sheer mountains of trash) is still pretty difficult for even a prepared group.
Gear wise it sits about on level with T2 dungeons. If your players have T1 gear and are now working on T2, the Raid Rifts should be right up your alley. These RRs drop some amazing lesser and greater essences so they are very much worth doing in my opinion. We did the Life raid rift multiple times a day while working on our GSB progression so that everyone could fill out some sexy life resist sigils. We did the same for RoS though it was a bit less necessary due to boss mechanics not requiring high resist nearly as much for the raid overall.
The expert rifts (5 mans) are honestly pretty easy with a well geared 5 person group.
Woops reply fail ;)
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