A Rift Apart

Rift 1.3 hit not too long ago, in part the experience of searching for patch related information is what caused me to start this blog.

Belatris’s Rift incarnation is a Chloromancer, for those who don’t know that’s the mage healing ‘soul’.

I enjoyed the soul though 1.0 to 1.2, needless to say I was a bit on the ‘worried’ side when I saw the wall of text that was the test shard’s patch notes. While I fancy myself a math person, all those numbers honestly scared even me. I really didn’t have much in the way of an idea how my beloved mage, who was in the upper 30s would handle in 1.3.

In the end, it wasn’t so bad … a little bit scary when trying to keep a tank up at first. They put a hurting on the class for instance healing at early levels.

It seems like they are trying to ‘reward’ people for going deeper into a tree … Chloromancer for instance dramatically changes between 49 and 50. That 51st point you throw into the tree REALLY changes the whole class.

While I can certainly understand their intentions and motives, I’m not sure it translates well to … you know everyone below 50. Chloromancer wasn’t the only soul to get this treatment, Justicar also had a similar treatment.

As this is my first post, I don’t want to seem overly harsh. Rift is a very, very strong game. I think the term WoW Killer is thrown around too much, so I won’t use it. I will say that it’s the first game that I’ve seen push the MMO genra forward in a while.

Dynamic event based content (rifts) and the ability to adapt any ‘class’ to a given situation (mage healers, rogue tanks ZOMG!) is certainly a welcomed addition.

There’s also the fact that 3 months into the release, they are still going strong … and have put out 3 major patches.