How much does RIFT actually cost?

Free to play (F2P) games are all the rage, but the F2P MMO, RIFT is unusual in that it's basically still a subscription game masquerading as a F2P game. So... how much does it cost? About the same as WoW is the short answer.

The long answer is that you pay nothing to get started, but access to much of the new content for higher levels requires some degree of purchase. Fortunately (and craftily) there's the equivalent of a boxed set that gets you all of the important bits up to, but not including the most recent expansion: RIFT Essentials Edition. For  $50, this gets you everything that you really can't play on the same level without (additional skill trees, an extra calling (class) and two  additional gear slots among other goodies). Once you have that, you should probably play the game for a while and see how you feel. Becoming a subscribing "patron" gets you some nifties, but nothing that's essential. Then there's the most recent expansion ($40) which usually buys you the extra features, levels and content of the expansion.

So, for the complete functionality of the game, once the new expansion, Starfall Prophesy comes out, you would pay a total of $90. The ongoing patron subscription really doesn't add much to that,  but if you wanted to do that, it would be an additional $11/mo. if you buy the annual version.

It's cheap entertainment at that price (especially when compared to going out to movies or dinner) but it's certainly not the free game that they might tease in their ads.

RIFT: Free to Play first impressions

RIFT Free-to-Play launch page

I tried out RIFT on my far-too-old living-room entertainment center laptop last night in order to see how free-to-play was. I was kind of blown away, but there were negatives too, so let's get into it!

First off, in case you haven't followed it: RIFT, a popular second-tier MMO with a peak of an order of 1-2m users has gone free-to-play. I think that this is largely a result of their having lost user-base after the first rush of new users during their first expansion, Storm Legion... I'll cover why that was in another post. Free-to-play isn't the end of RIFT, though, if last night is any measure!

RIFT plays a lot like early WoW, before it got all of its sharp corners filed off. This is both good and bad. The game is far more dynamic than WoW, and presents the player with many more choices in terms of character development and play style. However, it also leaves casual players at the bottom of a deeper chasm of learning curve than the modern "just make it simple" MMO. As such, RIFT is much more of an MMO fan's MMO, and if you haven't played MMOs before, you might check out one of the simpler ones first (like Guild Wars or Star Wars... WoW is an option, but it's high-end grind is a bit too daunting in terms of time commitment for most new players right now).

Anyway, so RIFT is free-to-play; what does that mean? It means that you can log in (sort of... paying customers or "patrons" get priority if the server population is too high during peak hours), create a character, and do just about anything in the game, just like a paying customer. Paying customers get some bonuses like extra goodies, resurrection is a bit more convenient, etc.

Rift: Ways to level, 1-60

Leveling in an MMO is always a challenge. Often,  it's more of a challenge just to stay awake than it is to actually succeed, but more often than not I find myself poking around to see if there's any cool ways to level. In EverQuest, grinding was all there was. Quests weren't really a way to level and instanced dungeons didn't really exist (they were added late in that game's evolution).

In WoW, your options were: dungeons or quests. If you had some friends with lots of spare time to help you, there was also a grinding method that worked well, but it required a tolerance for boredom that was nearly superhuman. Later on, PvP also became a lesser, but viable option.

In classic Rift, the options exploded. You had rifts, quests, PvP, dungeons, zone events and the usual grinding strategies. Then Storm Legion landed.

Rift raiding video collection

As you may know if you've been reading this blog, I'm in the Rift guild, Ascended of Corthana, on the Faeblight server. For a while, now, I've  been doing a series of videos for them. Some of them are funny. Some are semi-serious. I've collected four of them into the above playlist for your viewing pleasure. I'll add more to the playlist as I create them, so feel free to subscribe for updates.

The music is all free, mostly from Jamendo and a few indie netlabels. If you're interested, you can check out my free music blog for more.

Has Blizzard given up on WoW?

Perhaps I'm spoiled by a shockingly productive development and design team on Rift, but I was stunned today when I read the patch notes for the upcoming 5.0 patch that's going to land for WoW. This is the first patch since 4.3 which introduced a bunch of new features including a new raid, 3 new 5-man dungeons and the Raid Finder feature. That was a good, solid content patch. Then, eight months later, you would think that they'd have something new to throw to the players while they wait for the September patch, no? Yep... a world event involving Theramore.

Rift Mage: Having fun with uitily

In Rift, I play in a guild called Ascended of Corthana on the Faeblight shard. We're a casual raiding guild that had some pretty severe numbers problems right around the time that Infernal Dawn came out. We've fixed that, and after we merged in another, similar guild we're now back on track and raiding ID while still clearing the last few bosses of HK for farm loot.

But our raiding Mage count is still very low, and as Mage class lead, I've had to bring the heavy utility to raids so that we don't end up with none. Obviously, I have to have a support (Archon) spec so that I can buff the raid if need be, but fights like every ID boss thus far in our progression along with HK bosses that I still farm from time to time like Prime and Prince require pretty specialized Mages for specific utility roles.

I've long had multiple specs to handle all of these, but now that utility is starting to become the primary thing that I bring to raids, I've been trying to consolidate. To that end, I now have two basic utility builds:

Rift: And now an expansion

Storm Legion logo
(c) Trion Worlds

Just a quick note on Rift: it seems like yesterday that I posted an article talking about how Rift was blowing the doors off content expectations, producing more new content than anyone else had in just one short year. Well, they continue to set the bar high for patches, but have raised it for the upcoming expansion. The expansion, which is now known to be called Storm Legion, is set to come out this fall. This is a smart move. Trion is counting on some people being a bit disappointed by the other offerings like Mists of Pandaria and Guild Wars 2, and they want to be the one to scoop the refugees as they did with Star Wars.

Rift: More content? Seriously?!

MMO Report visits Trion, makers of Rift

Rift is blowing my mind. I just went back over what we've gotten for new content since June. It's... well, it's a bit daunting, really. And now they're coming out with a new 20-man raid with 2 of the major lore characters (the dragons Maelforge and Laethys) for guilds to wipe on... er, do battle with!

So, just to recap, here's what we've seen since June of 2011:

• Twisted artifacts (ground spawn goodies visible with a specially purchased ability)
• The Hammerknell 20-man raid with 11 bosses introduces tier-2 raiding
• PvP rifts
• Instant adventures: a queue for ongoing world event quests
• Drowned Halls 10-man raid
• Variant warfronts introduced
• Ember Isle zone introduced with ongoing invasions to fight and its own periodic zone events with improved rewards

What the hell is wrong with MMO armor artists?!

Two of the most popular MMOs in the world, Rift and World of Warcraft. I've played them both. I like both games, though I play Rift exclusively now. Still, they have one thing in common: the raid gear seems to have been designed by blind fabric hoarders. Really, have you seen this stuff? The just-announced "challenge mode" gear from the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft, for example, and then there's the highest-end raiding gear sets from Rift (in Hammerknell). This stuff is a patchwork of multiple color schemes, patterns, fabrics, and materials. Why?

Let's go back and look at an old game. Here's EverQuest. Now, I'll admit that the graphics are very dated, and extremely low-res by comparison, but look at the use of extremely smooth and simple looking patterns. The gear doesn't look like it was assembled from whatever was lying around, but rather like a single, contiguous piece.

Rift, WoW, and all of the other MMOs need to stop trying to cram a much texture as they can into this gear and just make it look good.

Rift Mage: Archon

Archon is one of Rift’s mage souls. It's a versatile soul that brings great benefit to any mage that incorporates it into their build, but it's also a raiding powerhouse when used as the primary soul. In fact, the 51-point Archon is so powerful that in addition to Bard, it's one of the only two souls that are pretty much required in any 20-man raid.

This article is all about the uses of Archon from folding in a zero-point Archon tree to taking advantage of Archon talents in other builds to full 51-point Archon support.

Rift Raiding: Just the Buffs

Bluedot has a great buff/debuff list up on his site, but it's lacking some crucial information that I constantly find myself needing in order to resolve who should cast what in raids. This is his list of buffs with all of that extra detail. I'll be doing a debuff equivalent article soon.

It should be noted that I've been playing Mage for the most part, with some Rogue. I'm almost certain to have gotten some details wrong with respect to Warrior and Cleric, so please double-check my work and send me some feedback if you find a problem.

Rift Mage: 1.7 Update

Update: Props to T Karlsson who pointed out that I'd had a run-away search and replace turn all my Flame Bolts into Fire Bolts... fixed.

Since I first published my How To Do It All Wrong and Win article about pyrolock mage dps, I've done a fair amount of raiding, dungeons, solo and PvP. I have some new info to share with you, and some updates to that article.

First off, the build has changed slightly, as have the macros. I no longer blend in Archon except as a zero-point tree (my fellow guildie, Calvnan, suggested this, and while I still think there's value in the infinite mana of Archon, the flexibility of a zero-point soul combined with the dps increase of this build makes it a great raiding build). This leaves me mana-starved in many situations, so Sacrifice Life: Mana becomes an important part of my rotation, and I have to cast it about every minute in order to maintain a boss fight. This sacrifices one 1-second global cooldown (thanks to the global cooldown reduction from Pyromancer) while giving me a substantial DPS boost from the Warlock tree (remember that both Warlock and Pyro give extra dps based on how many points you spend, so taking additional dps points in those trees gives extra bang-for-the-buck).

Rift: Max-level and raiding compared to WoW

A while back, I posted a comparison between Rift and World of Warcraft. At the time, I'd just started playing Rift after a brief period away from WoW, and wanted to write down what I thought about the two. It's not really meant to be a "rah, rah, go team!" sort of piece, but an honest comparison of my experiences. This is my followup in very much the same vein, but based on my experiences since reaching max-level in two of the classes. I've been raiding extensively, so that will be a big focus.

First, I should point out that my raiding experience in WoW was very limited post-Burning Crusade. The reasons were varied, but primarily I was having fun with friends doing the leveling thing on a new server and then raiding changed and became more machine-like in Wrath, so I never got into it. So, where I talk about WoW raiding, understand that this article talks about WoW in terms of what I saw long ago and what I've read about since.

Rift Mage: How to do it all wrong and win

To skip ahead a bit in my Mage tutorial, let's talk about Parcholock Glass Cannon. I don't want this series to be about me telling you how to play, so consider this an object lesson, rather than "the answer". Really, what this post is about is the idea that a viable build is more about your ability to play and enjoy it than it is about theorycrafting numbers.

This is my primary single-target, dps raiding build. I call this article, "how to do it all wrong and win" because the theorycrafting says: don't do this. The thing is, it works very well and does the most important thing that you can do for any raider: increases situational awareness. I've given up a lot of rotation complexity for simplicity in order to know what's going on around me.

If you're not familiar with the standard pyrolock build, see Bluedot's coverage of the topic. I break nearly everything he suggests, below, and I'll concede that if I had the ability to master my priority casting the way he does and still pay attention, I'd be a better raider. The fact is, though, that you need to focus on staying alive and not wiping the raid first and only then think about doing more damage.

Rift: Macros for mages

Rift has amazing macro capabilities. In some ways, not quite as good as WoW, but in other ways, orders of magnitude better. The primary difference is that in Rift, you can place as many spells in a single macro as you like, and the first one that is currently castable will be the one that is activated when you press the button.

This tutorial isn't about cookie-cutter macros. The macros below don't take additional souls into account and are very specific to one configuration and play style. The point of this article is to teach you how to build your own macros and what to look for when reading your spells and abilities. Once you learn this, you won't need cookie-cutters, though they're still useful to look at, as you may have missed something (for example, my Pyro build wasn't using Heat Wave very often because I didn't see the 50% casting speed increase, and was only using it to reset the cooldown of Withering Flames, a real waste of the ability!)

Rift: Crafting the perfect mage

Mage builds abound on the Web for players of the MMO, Rift, but there's precious little I can find that tells prospective players about the class in detailed and complete terms. I'm going to try to do that, here. Each post will be tagged with "Riftmage" so you can follow that tag to find all of them.

Let me just spend a paragraph on those who don't play Rift yet: mage is one of the four "classes" or "callings" in the game (rogue, warrior and cleric being the other three). The diversity of the game comes from the 10 "souls" that these callings can arrange in any set of 3. If you've played World of Warcraft, then you'll be familiar with the idea of 3 talent trees. That's what your selected 3 souls look like in Rift, but you can select any 3 out of the 10 you like. This means that when I say, "mage", I can mean a necromancer who summons a pet; a pyromancer who throws fireballs around; a chloromancer who heals their party or raid by doing damage to the opponent; or an elementalist who summons an elemental pet among others.

Rift: WoW's next generation

I've been playing Rift of late. In case you're not aware of it, Rift is a massively multiplayer roleplaying game like World of Warcraft, EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online, and so forth. Unlike many other games, however, it's a fairly shameless reproduction of World of Warcraft, in about the same ways that World of Warcraft was a fairly shameless reproduction of EverQuest. Yes, there are massive changes (fewer, I think you could argue, between WoW and Rift than between EQ and WoW), but the core of the games are very, very similar. I believe that Rift uses the Lord of the Rings Online engine, which I think a few other games use as well. Definitely the graphics feel much more like LotRO than WoW.

So, let me review the game in parts.