I really did enjoy my time in rift and hearing all this recent news and playthroughs by Herding Cats and Bio Break has really got my interest back, there just seems like so much that’s new. It’s funny but I found the whole thing rather great from questing, to rifting, dungeon diving and PvP. This is probably due to the fact I have never played WoW beyond a couple hours of a free trial years ago, although to give rift a little credit they did refine the mechanics quite well so that would have hooked me as well.
Shockingly Rift was actually my first serious mmo, I realise that may sound weird but it was only just circumstance in a way. I had finished my degree that Christmas and was out of work for about 6 months mostly due to Rift and being lazy. It was great as I was leveling above the curve with some nice people I met, dungeon running with them was great as it is a time you really get to know people. Mostly though I really enjoyed the PvP and got quite good at it. If you ever faced off against Erinthia the Defiant Cleric on Bro’cliff or Dayblind you knew me.
As the weeks turned into months and those months flittered bye I started becoming very frustrated in PvP because of the gear advantage. It was my job to heal and I was Damn good at it but when players were dying without even a chance of being healed I got angry… Not at those dying, lesser gear because of less time was no reason for that, I got angry at the mechanics. With time it got even sillier and with rank 8 and the expertise normalisation it all just felt retarded. Rank 1 people couldn’t even kill each other and the few that were rank 8 (like myself) with a few consumables were slaughtering whole groups with aoe. I came to the realisation, as did many that the developers really had no idea how to plan and implement PvP.
But now things seem to be slowly changing over in Telara, with many new PvP features being implemented. We had conquest enter the realm a little while ago although going by a review it still seems to need a little work. And now Rift may be getting a rework to the fundamental way these instanced battlegrounds work but a few things to take note (which were ripped from the comments at massively)
1. IT IS NOT COMING OUT IN PATCH 1.10. IF anything it will come out in Storm Legion. In other words, Rank 50 gear is NOT going to be trivialized come Patch 1.10.
2. This is NOT a concrete plan for them to normalize stats in PvP. They’re simply testing, gathering data, and figuring out what to do from there. They’ve said numerous times on the forums + on the PTS when it was being tested that this is just an experiment.
3. The testing will go on the live servers for a week when Trion’s ready to put it out. It will only go on for a week, and after that the normalization will go away and they’ll figure out what to do with PvP based on the data they gathered.
Also going from the press release the gear probably isn’t going to just get thrown away, my thought is that it will become cosmetic rewards, although they are mostly butt ugly anyway.
It is rather amusing as I was one of the biggest spokesgal on the forums chanting this fact to them, what really annoyed is that there were no announcements or even dev forum posts regarding pvp… Ever. It may be too late to draw back the PvP’ers now though as usually once you leave you pretty much leave for good. We even have GW2 ramping up now who would arguable do the whole no gear PvP far better than Trion ever could as that was their original design and focus.
In saying all this though I would probably go back to explore and PvP now and after the expansion, but it has all been too long and I sadly sold my account a long time ago thinking Trion would never wake up. The question is whether to give it a go and what will be on my plate then, maybe in a few months time or even after Christmas.
Take note Funcom, the future is now and it is totally gearless… remove the grind for better pants. We are a remarkably fickle bunch, us that pvp and Lose us once and you’ll likely not see us again
Healing the masses 