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.

Warcraft Lore: Who is the most powerful being?

Sargeras concept art, Wowwiki

Someone recently asked on the MMO-Champion forums, "who is the most powerful being in WoW?" Predictably, this spawned a long thread, the consensus of which seems to be that the correct answer is Sargeras. I'm not so sure. Here's my response to that thread:

Sargeras isn't the most powerful, lore-wise. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that he was corrupted by ... something. We know that it had something to do with being exposed to the twisting nether for too long, but that's all we know. There's a sort of White Wolf/Mage: The Ascension (not Awakening) thing going on in the Warcraft universe. Space isn't just an empty vacuum (or even a roiling quantum foam), but a sort of boundary layer between the worlds (Azeroth, Draenor, etc.) that we know and something... else. This something else seems to be hostile in the extreme (hence why Sargeras was off fighting to keep it at bay). We know almost nothing about what's out there, but most things in the Warcraft universe seem to have a motive intelligence, and there's no reason not to assume that that's the case when it comes to the Nether.

So... I propose that the Old Gods are a sort of cyst created by the intrusion of whatever it is that corrupted Sargeras, into Azeroth. This is why the Titans are so worried about it, not because they're unable to cope with the Old Gods directly, but because they're just the tip of the iceberg, and they can't cope with whatever lies beneath.

WoW Insider had a great article on this recently, where they speculated that Azeroth was actually a prison, built around the Warcraft universe's equivalent of Lovecraft's Azathoth (and therefore that the name similarity was a deliberate reference).

Whether that's true or no, I think there has to be a big bad planned for WoW's post-Sargeras era... and that's the only source I can see in the works.

In the same thread, someone asked about Ragnaros, and I think that topic dove-tails nicely with the above:

It's quite absurd for a group of adventurers to defeat Ragnaros, isn't it ?

Is it? Certainly, since his power nearly rivals that of the Titans (at least in the sense that he was able to champion the Old Gods against them and make some headway before being banished, though we don't know how he did this, or in what sense he went up against them "solo") I think it's pretty clear that a one-on-25 against him would likely fail. However, that was the old Ragnaros who was defeated in Blackrock Mountain due to his being incompletely summoned to Azeroth from his elemental prison. We have no idea how much that defeat weakened him. It's entirely possible that you're facing Rags at half or less strength in Firelands.

It's also important to realize that we have no way of understanding what the power-level of the Titans or their adversaries are. They're powerful, to be sure, but they also employ a number of highly sophisticated magical and mechanical systems to support their activities. Can a Titan re-shape the world with a thought, or are they merely very powerful, immortal mages with an eternity of engineering at their disposal? Would we be able to tell the difference?

If that's all they are, then measuring Ragnaros in terms of their power might be highly misleading.