Rift – Tempest For The Win

I spent most of a whole weekend playing … Rift! Man that game is awesome. Have I mentioned that? It’s the best WoW-clone of all the WoW-clones. Definitely more better than WoW itself.

I leveled my Warrior from 53 to 57, using a combination of quests and Instant Adventures. Mostly IAs. I used up three 160% Experience potions that I had from some Trion gift or another, and then I got a 30-day Patron status so I could use the daily 40% Experience bonuses for the rest of the trip to 60, which will probably occur during the week.

The biggest problem with Rift is that, tragically, nobody is playing it. It’s really quite sad. I only managed to get into a single normal dungeon as DPS over the entire weekend. And just my luck, it was Storm Breaker Protocol, which is the weirdest, most hated dungeon in all of Rift. (You run around half of it in mech suits. Sort of like the Praetorium instance in FFXIV, only way more obnoxious.) Even the Instant Adventures rarely had more than three or four people in them. And these are all cross-server tools.

Anyway, one reason I made so much progress is that I found a Warrior build that works well for soloing. My theory was correct: As the Storm Legion Harbinger is a great soloing soul for Mages, so too the Storm Legion Tempest is a great soloing soul for Warriors. It does decent damage and has fantastic survivability and self-healing so that you can run from mob to mob without any down time in between. It is not good for packs of mobs, though. During IAs I switched to a Champion build.

The other thing I did in Rift was finish the Dendrome quests with my 60 Mage. Of course then I had to go into the Queen’s Gambit Chronicle and exact bloody revenge upon those evil Architects. It takes a while to solo, but I got through it without dying. The loot was worthless to me, but I got some achievements out of it, and spawned some other quest to find things in other Chronicles.

All-in-all, a fun time was had by all.