Stranger Guildies

It was a light, ordinary evening in Rift. I did a blissfully un-dramatic random expert SL dungeon (Archive of Flesh) with a good tank/healer duo and ended up with a nice purple mage dagger at the end, which is probably the best I will ever see until or unless I start raiding.

So I’m in this guild, right? But it’s one of those guilds that basically takes anyone, no-questions-asked, so it’s got thousands of random people in it, so I see a lot of fellow guildies out in the wild even though I don’t know any of them. It makes it somewhat awkward. Sometimes I’m grouped with a guildie in a dungeon but I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything or not. Like, “Hey guildie who is a complete stranger that I’ve never seen before, what’s up?” Am I supposed to greet them? I usually opt for silence when in doubt.

I spent some time last night working on optimizing my Pyromancer rotation. I could read a guide - and I have - but it sticks in my head better if I work things out on my own. I added a separate key just for Fireballs when Extinguish procs so I don’t waste them (my spam macro throws Flamebolts before Fireballs). Then I did something I should have done long ago: Setup KaruulAlert.

I only use three Addons for Rift: One is a damage meter of course, and the second is the King Boss Mod which everyone used to expect you to have for raiding.

The third is this thing called KaruulAlert, which is a very complicated Addon to setup and use, but I’m starting to fall in love with it. It appeals to my programmer nature. It lets you setup “alerts” that trigger when your abilities are ready, buffs are expiring, or just about anything else you can think of. The “alert” is just a picture or text that shows up on the screen to notify you. The idea is get a reminder to tell you when to hit certain abilities so you can maximize your effectiveness.

No, it’s not cheating. Shut up.

For example, I setup one to alert me when my Charge is over 100, so I know when to trigger the Internalize Charge ability, which increases damage. Previously, I had to glance up at my charge meter periodically, and most of the time, I forgot to do that. I setup another alert to tell me when I have 5 stacks of Combust on the target, so I know when it’s safe to use Fusillade. And I setup alerts for when a bunch of abilities come off of cooldown.

(Incidentally, I just noticed last night that Heatwave resets all your cooldowns. Doh! Now I need to remember never to trigger Heatwave without hitting Fusillade first, because then I can throw two Fusillades almost back to back. Fusillade-Heatwave-Fusillade. Big damage there. Other than that nifty trick, it doesn’t look like Heatwave is nearly as effective as it used to be.)

http://community.riftgame.com/en/2013/06/25/freemarch-silverwood-under-siege/ I tried out the Silverwood/Freemarch Invasion event thingy. I mentored my 60 down to 14 and went to Silverwood for a couple of invasions. It brought back memories of beta and launch. Ah, those were the good old days, when there were invasions all the time and nobody knew what they were doing. This event is clearly a ploy by Trion to populate lowbie areas and get us high-levels to interact more with F2P players, but it was still kind of fun. I don’t understand the gift boxes though. I can only assume there’s some kind of achievement to be gained by throwing gifts at NPCs.

I’m glad to see that they now nerf high-level people in low-level zones so they can’t one-shot the event bosses and ruin everyone’s fun like they used to. Still, I once saw a 50+ run in to tank an event boss that was scattering people left and right in Freemarch a while back. He may not have been doing any damage, but he was sure generating plenty of threat. (I know this because I was on my lowbie tank at the time and kept getting swatted like a fly because nobody was healing.)