Author: Brian

My Defiant Mage Kae reached level 50 in Rift yesterday. Actually, I could’ve done it on Saturday night but there were hardly no guildies on, and I though why waste the big level 50 achievement notice if no one’s around to see it.

Of course hitting the level cap in a game isn’t new for me, but I am very pleased to have done it so quickly. Even more surprising to me is I’m the first level 50 Mage in the guild.

I mentioned briefly why I thought I’d leveled so quickly, but I wanted to add to it a bit. First I want to mention that I don’t think this game is any shorter than the rest of the current crop of MMOs. As a comparison, my played time in STO at Vice Admiral 1 or level 51 was about three and a half days while my play time in Rift is 6 days, 2 hours, and 47 minutes.

Having an active guild has definitely played a role. I know there’s people to chat with every night when I pop in, and I’m more likely to stay online longer each night.

Game design is also important. I didn’t hit any dead spots. Most games have some flat areas on the leveling curve or gaps where all of the quests are suddenly too high. At that point I’m stuck grinding mobs, which I did in EQ and don’t enjoy. Rift didn’t have any dead spots that I noticed, at least on the Defiant side of the content and since I was leveling as a glass canon, I figure that’s a pretty representative example.

Lastly, having a completely new setting to explore really got my wanderer’s impulses firing. Even as fast as I leveled, I spent quite a bit of time wandering around zones. I will admit that part of that was because there are achievements for doing it, but only part. One of my favorite things to do in these games is see something interesting in the distance and then go to see it. Usually this involves climbing mountain peaks, but sometimes it’s just getting to the otherside of a forest or following a stream to see where it goes or exploring a cave to see how deep it is and if there’s a named mob hiding inside.

All of these factors combined to speed me through the leveling cycle on Rift much faster than I anticipated. Of course the big question is, “What now?”

I don’t know the answer to that. If history is any guide, I’ll roll an alt with the intention of going through the game a second time and lose interest after a week. But the game has surprised me once by dominating my attention for the first month, so maybe I’ll get a second character to the cap. I do have a lot to do with my mage still: crafting, world event, PvP instances, and dungeons. Oh, and there’s a few story quests I haven’t finished yet and I need to know what happens with Uriel and Kira.

I’m getting near the end of the leveling curve. Even into the 30s it was possible to get roughly a level a day, but around the  mid-40s it dropped to about half a level a day. Even with the slower pace, I’m not feeling any kind of grind though because of all of the different activities available. There’s crafting dailies, quests available in three different zones, the world event dailies, and Warfront PvP.

Kae reached level 48 tonight and if all goes he’ll be 50 before the weekend is over.

This will be the fastest I’ve ever gotten to the level cap in an MMO. It’s not been any easier than any other current MMOs to level, but I’ve just been playing more consistently and for longer periods. The game has been very well designed, I’ve not run into any dead spots in the PvE game. There are always quests available for my character’s level, and in the later levels there are more quests than I need and multiple zones to go to. Aside from the game design, being in Circle of Trust has also made a difference. Knowing that there are always people online to chat with and do dungeon or rift runs gives me incentive to login every night.

Dogs and cats.

I finished the Critter Tears collection and received the Spirit of Tears reward, which looks like a ghostly cat. I was pretty lucky in that it only took me four or five tries per animal to get tears, I’ve heard from some players that have had really bad luck and had to kills dozens.

I’m more of a dog person than a cat person though, so I was also happy to collect enough Otherworldly Sourcestone from the River of Souls event to get a Shade Touched Hound. It cost one hundred of the sourcestones, which didn’t take too long since the four dailies each yield ten (or they do now, it was increased in a recent patch). I’ve also picked up the odd sourcestone from closing death rifts as well, but I’ve only gotten a few at a time that way.

I missed the first couple of days of the event, so it’s only been since Friday that I started seriously running these quests, and so far they are still fun. The next stage starts in the 9th so I’m sure I’ll be ready for something different by then.

It’s a small server after all.

Telara usually feels like a pretty large place, but it’s started to get smaller. I say this because while I was in Shimmersand hunting for rifts and saw a Death Rift pop. As I rode up the trail to the rift and joined the public group, I found myself with none other than Mr. And Mrs. MMOGC. Pretty funny that I randomly run into guildies like that.

Loving Roles

Now that I’ve gotten the hang of it, I’m really enjoying being able to swap roles depending on the situation. Usually I run around in my Stormcaller/Elementalistl PvE solo build, which has been working out excellently.

Anytime I end up in a public group of more than two others, I swap over to my Chloromancer/Warlock and get a little more practice at healing. Switching mental gears from a DPS mindset to a support/healing mindset is tricky, especially without the helpful fiction if logging out to swap characters. It’s very fun though and very handy in situations where you suddenly find that a change in strategy or tactics are needed.

Rift has required me to think a bit differently about the characters I play.

In most games, I pick a class and roll a character. That combination combines in my head as I play and my character ends up developing a personality and backstory of which the class is an integral part. Even in Champions, which doesn’t have a class system, I usually have a build or theme in mind for a character which becomes a part of that character’s identity.

So coming to Rift, I had the same mindset where I identified my Mage character with his initial Soul, which was Stormcaller. This kept me from really getting the Soul/Role system.

What finally clued me in to it was watching a Cleric steamroll a mob camp that I’d been carefully working around the edges of with my Mage. I’m not sure what soul combination the player was using but they were at least using Druid since there was a Fae trailing along healing them. I watched the player run into the center of the camp and gather up five mobs and proceed to melee the whole group while their pet healed them. As a Mage, there was no way I could do that. Or at least not as a Stormcaller. I had been trying to pick off mobs from the edges of the camp so I could clear a path to a named mob I needed for a quest, so of course I was a little upset when this Cleric came charging in, but that turned to jealousy while I watched him clear the camp and survive.

Then the light bulb came on. I could do that to, even if not exactly the same way.

My original role has most of its points in Stormcaller, with a few points in Dominator for better crowd control duration and a few in Elementalist for the basic pet and a convert charge to mana ability. I still had two roles unlocked that I hadn’t done anything with, and it dawned on me that I had tons of other options I could try out to see if I could find a more survivable solo PvE build.

I just had to mentally separate my character from the build I had been using from levels 1 to 40-something.

As I mentioned during my first try at this, I initially put almost all of my points in Elementalist. That build was much more survivable (after I remembered to train up all the new abilities I’d unlocked), but depending so heavily on my pet was not as much fun as slinging lightning.

What I really needed to do was see if I could split my points between Stormcaller and Elementalist enough that I could get the Greater Earth Elemental tanking pet and still keep my beloved Lightning Storm from the Stormcaller soul. Turns out it was much easier to split that way than I expected. I ended up with a new build split 33/22 between Stormcaller and Elementalist (with 3 points in Dominator). I was able to get deep enough into both soul trees to get all of the abilities I wanted, largely because I found I’d put a lot of points into Stormcaller water spells which I don’t use much. Honestly, when I originally leveled, I got to the point where I was just putting points into Stormcaller out of habit and a fuzzy goal of trying to get to the 51 point spell.

This new build is a lot more fun. Now don’t have to drink after or use potions in every fight, I can handle multiple adds, and I’m no longer suffering from Cleric-envy.

The thing I just have to remember is my character is a Mage not a Stormcaller. I’ve got three builds I can setup for different purposes and there’s a four one I can unlock once I have the platinum.

By the way, learning a new build is something else that I’ve had to get used to doing. I put a healing build using Chloromancer and Warlock build together and realized I’d need groups to practice on. I decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to take it into a dungeon until I knew better what I was doing. Maybe a guild run would be okay, but jumping into open Rift groups seemed like a better route. There’s a lot more of those around, they’re mostly open groups, and there’s usually a lot going on, especially on the big invasion bosses, so that any screw ups would involve a minimum amount of hassle.