Stargrace

Goodbye Stonefield, Hello Scarlet Gorge #Rift

It’s surprising how fast the levels go when you actually sit down to play Rift – I spent most of my free time yesterday in game, something I haven’t really done since release. I found myself working my way through the quests of Stonefield without too much trouble and before I knew it I had hit level 30 and moved on to the next zone, Scarlet Gorge. No surprise here the zone is red desert like with tall mountains of rock pillars and mining excavations, it looks fantastic. The best part about being in this zone is that while I never once saw a major invasion in Stonefield (and hence never earned any of the shards or stones required for the rare planar gear) I saw a major invasion almost as soon as I entered Scarlet Gorge (granted it WAS prime time US hours, which I don’t typically play) and earned myself two of the blue-type shards. Random note, the icon for the blue shards looks FAR too similar to the purple ones, so when you’re browsing the rare planar merchant it’s difficult to tell which shards you need for which items without actually mousing over the items. I think the blue ones should be given a blue background, instead of the purple one they currently sport.

My crafting is above my adventure level, which is something I’m always happy to see. I can craft up to level 32 items – but I have yet to come across supplies for that tier quite yet, so for now I harvest materials for my daily crafting quests. I’m saving up those artisan tokens for recipes, but I’m not sure if I want to purchase any or just keep saving up until I hit the end levels. So far everything I’ve crafted is far better then my quested rewards – dungeons being the exception along with planar gear and pvp rewards.

The progression is still very linear with some randomness thrown in depending on how you like to play. If you’re in a populated zone you could easily join a raid and bounce around doing nothing but closing Rifts and footholds, and level that way. You could queue for dungeons at the same time, and complete a quest here and there. The problem for me is that if you’re only doing one of these things (or even all three I suppose) it becomes very redundant for alts. I know they’ll have to do the exact same quests that I just completed, and that has put me off playing them. On the other hand they’re also both crafters (I have a mage and scout along with my cleric) and their crafting is far above the levels that they’re adventuring in. It makes doing my crafting dailies quite an adventure as I have to walk from location to location. I try to stick to the roads because being level 7 coming across level 18+ mobs makes for a very painful trip.

When it comes down to it – am I having fun? Yes. I am. I’m excited to be in a new level range, excited that I’m slowly closing the gap between me and my friends, and excited to work on my characters some more. I’ve done a lot of tweaking to my soul specs (I have three now) but I’m going to save those details for another post because I’d like to get into a lot more detail.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

#RIFT 1.2 Hotfix 7 – 5/25/11

GENERAL
* Raid warning text for certain boss abilities should appear immediately rather than fading in, so you have more time to react.
* Fixed an issue with some quest items that had a use time and would give quest credit at the start of the usage instead of the end of a successful use.
* Iron Pine Peaks: The missing Defiant quest for this zone is now available – ‘Stay Frosty’, my friends!
* Runic Descent: Additional safeguards have been added to prevent rare crashes of this instance.
* Item: Adorned Shadeshard: Stacks of the Spell Power bonus from this item now get properly removed for each successful cast.

LOOKING FOR GROUP
* While waiting for a dungeon group, switching roles to one you did not select to play when queueing will no longer drop your party from the LFG queue.
* The LFG ready check window should no longer remain on-screen even after you’ve left the LFG queue.

PVP/WARFRONTS
* Diminishing returns immunity timers now end 15 seconds after the initial application of movement-impairing effects, down from 24 seconds.
* Port Scion: Fixed an issue where players would sometimes not respawn properly at the Bridge when their faction controlled it.
* Port Scion: Idol of the Planes, Idol of the Gods, Planar Capacitor, and Planar Flux icons can now be seen on the map from anywhere in The Battle of Port Scion.
* Port Scion: Slightly adjusted the hit points of bosses and objectives.
* You can once again remove members from a pre-made party while in a Warfront – and it won’t kick them out of the Warfront raid and leave them all on their own!

UI/SETTINGS
* Added a ‘Unit Starting Price’ field to the Auction tab of the Auction House. This lets you set a starting price per-item when listing a stack of items.
* NPC casting bars should better match the actual duration of the ability being cast, fixing some cases where they showed an incorrectly long casting time.
* Fixed a bug causing Artifacts with very long names to not show any Artifact Sets to add them to.

Public Quests and Other Goodies #EQ2

I managed to do a few more public quests yesterday but still feel like healers get the short end of the stick. I don’t believe that I’m the only one who feels this way either – out of three raids of 24 people there were only four healers (one per group) in any one of the raids. There were a LOT of crusaders, at least two or three for every group. They’ve been the flavour of the month for so long now due to their healing / dps / tanking capabilities that it no longer surprises me. Luck was with me for one PQ as I did manage to get the fabled weapon. The breast piece eludes me, but I healed my little heart out on all of the raids and after dropping my settings down to the lowest rank I at least had no issues with lag. I switched back to my regular settings as soon as the PQ was completed, and roamed around the area looking for shinies. A lot of people in the PQ were boxing – some were boxing full groups of players, I could see them all auto following one another. It was a little odd to watch. The rewards from PQ are not that great any more, having their critical mitigation nerfed into oblivion, but for those of us who are still getting their feet wet with DoV it’s quite a large improvement. Yesterday I picked up shoulders, shoes, forearms, and a fourth piece that I can’t remember. It wasn’t the head piece. Ah well, no matter.

I’ve got two or three more days of questing before I get my flying mount, and I’m looking forward to that. So far only my crafter has obtained hers, and since I don’t use the character for anything besides crafting she really hasn’t used it too often. I wish we could fly in the city zones, as that would make getting to and from my guild hall a lot easier when my guild port is down (I play mostly evil aligned characters and the guild hall is located in Qeynos).

I haven’t been doing much decorating in game lately, but I have added to my book collection and I’m some where near the 473 mark (ok, exactly near there, hehe). I had a generous contribution of 20 books yesterday and gladly added them to the collection. I do want to decorated the remaining homes that I own, Stargrace (my 90 defiler) owns a dojo for relaxation as well as a Freeport home on top of the museum that I’ve worked on. There are also a few more ‘artifacts’ I wish to collect, for example the tapestries that are representatives of the Courts of Maj’Dul from Sinking Sands. These are new quests that were added when Sinking Sands went through a revamp, and I haven’t had time (or the patience) to complete them yet.

On that same note, I went through my settings and decided to hide all of the rewards from my quests, so I don’t know ahead of time what I’m getting. You may think that’s an odd thing to have an option for, but I really like being surprised. I don’t know if I’m getting a piece of gear or a house item (unless I’ve done the quest so many times that I’ve memorized the rewards). It’s a neat little feature and allows me to customize my game play even further, which is something I appreciate. It’s all in the details after all!

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself. It’s a glorious Wednesday!

Why I’m Not Leveling #Rift

The title of this post is not completely true – I did hit level 26 today on my Defiant cleric. I’ve been playing off and on since release and this is my highest level character. Of course I’m playing Rift meshed between a handful of other games and real life, but there’s another reason why I’ve been neglectful in my leveling. Pictured above, the cleric in Stonefield. This zone is almost completely empty every single time I play. It’s me fighting minor rifts alone, me questing alone, and me in the small quest hubs alone. In fact the last few times I’ve played I haven’t seen a single other character around. It makes for some pretty lonely times. Of course, this is also mostly my fault. While everyone else was off leveling and exploring – I was playing other games and so I was left behind. It makes sense, I don’t expect anyone to hang back and wait for me and I state this every time I join a guild, that I tend to take things slower, and do my own thing. Sure, I could use the new LFG tool and get into a dungeon eventually, but I wanted to explore the massive outdoor world. I just wish this tier were not so desolate.

As if it were not bad enough that I never see anyone around me – I also never hear anyone in the public channels for my level or this zone. I enjoy doing my own thing and watching chat filter by, the illusion of being social without actually being social. Except for some reason that doesn’t work here, either. I’m not on Faeblight server which which is where most of my twitter friends ended up, I’m playing on Deepwood – and there ARE lots of players around. Meridian is full(ish) every time I head there. Because there is only one starter zone and progression is so linear and there is no mentoring in game there’s very little reason for folks to want to come back to the lower level zones unless they are working on achievements and collections. One of my major pet peeves has always been seeing huge empty zones – there should always be a reason for a player to go back to a zone within a game. When new zones are added (or levels) they tend to make older zones obsolete.

Needless to say, I haven’t been logging in nearly as much as I’ve wanted to. I do my crafting dailies, as well as the dailies in Meridian, and wander about completing a quest or two before logging out. Hopefully I’ll get inspired enough to work my way out of this tier and the next one will be better.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

From 0 to 135 #EQ2 #EverQuest2

This weekend found me (much to my surprise) in EQ2 when I wasn’t out enjoying the Tulip Festival and gallivanting around the city with the other half. After exploring a little DoV (I’ve barely set foot into this expansion) and doing enough quests to be on the daily portion of my flying mount, I decided that I wanted to play a lower level character. I really enjoying older content in EQ2 and I had a level 6 Freeblood character that I had created some time ago. Myself and Ibeogur teamed up (while chattering to Ultann in guild) and headed first to Wailing Caverns. Because this weekend was double experience the levels came incredibly quickly (not to mention I have 120% bonus due to max level characters, and I used a potion, and I had vitality). Before too long the ranger was level 35 – and I had gone from 0 aa to 135. I’ve spent what I can in the first two trees until level 70 (50 points in each), and made my way down the Shadows tree. I didn’t want to level too fast, because there are a lot of quests I enjoy doing. 35 is a comfortable level, and I’ve set myself to 100% aa for the next little while. I’ve played a few rangers before – one all the way to levle 90 but I ended up deleting her because she didn’t have the aa and I didn’t feel like grinding them at end game. Looking back I suppose it’s a little foolish of me to constantly delete my levle 90 characters, but I only get rid of those that I feel no emotional ties to – my main characters I try to keep around.

I actually had a lot of fun playing – a lot more then I thought I would. It’s been ages since I’ve played EQ2 on a serious level and having guild mates around made an enormous difference. Of course it also took some getting used to as well. I barely remember how to get from one place to another or what any of the acronyms mean in game. Channels were bustling (at least on the Antonia Bayle server) and I managed to pick up 10 (that’s right, TEN!) new player-written books to add to my museum. That brings my total up to around 433 player-written books. I’m pretty proud of that fact.

I hope everyone else had an amazing weekend no matter where you spent it. It’s a long weekend here in Ottawa (Victoria Day is today) so I’m going to spend it indoors gaming after spending most of my weekend outside in the sun (plus it’s cloudy and just gross outside today). As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!