It was an 875 MB patch that a lot of people were looking forward to, and although my Rift account currently sits cancelled I still have 8 days to play around with the new goodies. I didn’t get a lot of time in game but I did see enough to form up some opinions. First of all, I really wish it asked for confirmation before sending achievements to twitter. As it was I spammed my 1-3-6 month veteran rewards upon login unknowingly. Not that I mind sharing my achievements but there’s a certain unspoken rule that says thou shalt not spam.
One of the biggest changes in 1.5 was the addition of planar attunement which is basically aa – something else for players to do 50+. I was looking forward to this but then became sorely disappointed for a number of reasons. The first one being that it’s an enormous grind. I mean, if you thought EQ1 was a grind this puts it to shame. You need an incredible amount of experience in order to finish off accumulating the aa required, and not only that but they provide a very insignificant boost to the ability that you’ll be working on. I saw +1 to wisdom and thought to myself, wow. That’s it?
It’s not all doom and gloom. The new chronicles (1-2 person dungeons) are fantastic. I really enjoyed the entry level one that required me to attend a personal party in Meridian. The rewards were not upgrades for me personally but I did earn some plaques and was able to sell the loot I’d obtained. I really enjoyed the stories a lot, and from a lore perspective I think these dungeons will be quite popular.
I didn’t try the new master dungeon, and I doubt I will get the opportunity to since you need to complete it without the LFG tool and very few of my friends are playing these days.
I do enjoy the new crafting changes, although I wish I could convert my artisan marks to plaques. I am happy they changed plaques from craft specific to one general type so that if you wish to change your craft you’re not stuck with useless plaques. It was a smart move.
Those are my initial thoughts for now – what did the rest of you think of this update? Let me know in comments! As always, happy gaming no matter where you find yourself!
The party/ceremony instance was fun, and the mobs in it worth a surprising amount of xp — I’ll admit to grinding on some of the insta-respawners for a couple of minutes.
I also did the Greenscale chronicle. Kinda fun to solo a dragon ;-) And by the time I finished that up I was way past the time limit I’d set for myself. Hammerknell chronicle tonight, plus if I have the time may do the Greenscale one again — the gear rewards sucked, but I got some plaques and the xp was really nice, after all. That was really all I did. No open world adventuring or anything.
From the stat changes I seem to have lost about 200 HP, but gained about 400 mana. Since mana’s only an issue when I’m healing, I didn’t care about that, but it was still a 10-12% bump in mana pool size, which is nice overall, I guess.