Rift: Dragonheart's Always Recruiting

My guild, Dragonheart, is recruiting on the Alsbeth server. I was recently promoted, so I said I'd put the word out (not that my blog has any/many followers, eh?).

It's a pretty good guild that's been around for awhile, and the only guild I've been in on my Cleric. (The only other Rift guild I've been in, period, was Suspiria, on my now-deleted Rogue, which as a whole struck me as very wholly end-game progression based, with a large pressure to get to 50 as fast as possible).

Right now, we have a healthy 50 population and do experts, rifts, etc. very regularly (I'm just starting to gear up; I turned 50 a few days ago! More on that later). The best part about the guild, in my opinion, is how very friendly everyone is. It's not small but it's not downright enormous, either; you grow to know the names that log on or off, and you make friends. I've been in the guild since 20, and that was because at the time they were recruiting 20+ players only, or I would have joined earlier.

Guild activity is very high. Everyone is allowed to speak in guild chat, as usual, and everyone does. Inactive members are kicked from the guild about every week. The guild leaders listen to complaints and pay attention to member activity. Active, helpful members get promoted; negative or abusive members get kicked. If you're a good person and play well with others, you're 100% safe, so don't worry! That's not to say that we don't have debates, mind you, and if you ask ten of us the answer to a question you'll as likely as not get twelve answers.

Dragonheart is always recruiting, though there's no active campaign right now. (Our slogan is apparently something along the lines of "have fun, run experts, eat pie..." or something.) I'm going to say that any friendly players, even (especially!) newer ones who need friendly explanations to mechanics they don't understand or suggestions on builds or gear, who are level 20 or higher, are completely welcome in Dragonheart.

Rift: Level 30 + Healer Spec + Guild

I checked to see if Rift had fixed the lag issue, and it was fixed miraculously. Hotfix 4? Coincidence? Does it matter? I'm playing again!

In a nutshell, I quested until low-experience level 29, then queued for warfronts the rest of the day. Slow leveling, but fun. I finished my "win 5 Black Garden matches" quest, and finally managed to win my first Codex match. Of course, right as I won the Codex match - and I mean the very moment it ended - I leveled up, taking me to level 30 and a new warfront queue bracket. So now, since I'm level 30 in the 30-39 bracket, I suck at warfronts. Again. Ugh.

In any case, my guild has a shiny-new level 30 on her way to 50, and we could use more 50s. Speaking of which, I've never hit an MMORPG cap, and have only gotten to 30 once... so this is a major milestone for me! The other 30, in case you're wondering, was my Dancer spec in Dream of Mirror Online... bet you didn't guess that one, huh?

Heh.

Well, speaking of which, I finally put my healer spec into practice. It's very strong on the Warden soul (new favorite healing soul!) and almost as strong in the Sentinel soul, with a couple points in Purifier for instant-cast attacks, which I was severely lacking on. While I was questing, I activated it on a whim, and learned a lot about how to effectively organize my skills into my... what, four bars, now? The bars are sorted into attacks, buffs, shields, HoTs (heal over times), instantaneous casts, and non-heals/attacks (Kelari camouflage, mount, etc.), with my crafting, tracking, etc. on an out-of-the-way fourth bar to the side. I figured out that my healer isn't at all a good spec for PvE. But I can deal with it well enough, and it's good to practice.

When I healed for Black Garden, I discovered something amazing: I am nigh invincible, assuming I have a good team. You cannot fell me. I will hold the fang for five minutes before I will die, and even then, it'll be a one-hit K.O. because of fang damage. I am invincible.

Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. But that's okay. Now, in the Codex warfront, on the other hand... well, I can heal, but I die. A lot. I die, and I die, and I die over and over again. Maybe because it was Defiants Suck Day? We declared it this after losing fifteen Codex matches in a row before I finally got that first win ever. Took long enough.

But I now have three good specs: tank based around Justicar, dps (which is really best for 1v1, but feasible) based around Inquisitor and Cabalist, and healer based around Warden and Sentinel.

In the meantime, while I was queuing, I talked a lot more than usual with my guild. Involved myself a bit more, gave out advice that I knew was right, asked questions, answered questions, even sold a ton of iron with a friendly "guild member discount," and got free runes from a person training up his runecrafter skill. In the end, the money loss that I suffered for that iron sale was worth it (and the runes were definitely worth going out of my way for). I made a few friends in good places, kinda got a bit more public, got congratulations on an achievement and got good-byes when I logged off kind of familiarity. I figure the longer I stick with the guild, the more fun it'll get to talk with them, and it never hurts to start early. Right?

This has been Vaethereal/Mnemosyne, signing off at an obscene time of the morning.

Rift, again: Crafting, questing, lag.

Original post from I Think in Black and White.

Anyway, I've recently figured something out: teenagers aren't supposed to play MMOs, apparently. There was a guild conversation today where age came up. Some kid said he was thirteen, and got laughed at. Apparently, "Healers should be 30, tanks should be 20, dps should be 13." I'm mostly a tank and sometimes a healer, and I'm fourteen.

Lucky me. Am I very mature, or very misplaced?

That aside, Rift has been going well. I might as well make this into a gamer blog with the way I'm going. :B

I leveled up a whopping ton. I got the level 20 achievement and I'm level 27 as I type. Level 30 will be a milestone for me, because in MMOs I usually don't get to level 30, sometimes even level 20. It just goes to show that Rift has my attention for the time being. It probably helps that my summer break just started (well, two weeks ago, but that's about how long I've been playing).

So I'm level 27, and I realize that I need to complete this quest in the Saga of the Endless chain, which involves going into a dungeon that I won't be able to go into after level 31 again until level 50. I get worried, so I go and spend my time farming mining mats and pumping up that skill, then working my armorsmith so it's actually useful before I get to level 50 (assuming I reach 50). It's not really a noticeable kind of armor upgrade from the quest rewards I get, but it's still useful to train the skill while I have the mats in my quest hub area.

I'm an Expert Miner and an Expert Armorsmith now. I wish there was a title there with those so that I could have a different title than "Champion of Freemarch." Oh, well. And I didn't bother to farm rams for my Butchering skill, so that's going to come back and bite me in the ass. Actually, it already did when I had to buy linen cloth rather than make it. But that's another story.

Anyway, I quested all the way through Stonefield, and finally got to go to Scarlet Gorge, the official third zone. (I say official because I accidentally took a brief sojourn into Scarwood, but it doesn't matter.) I'm pretty far in that chain as well, though lately I haven't been doing EVERY SINGLE QUEST like it's so tempting to do. I keep rerealizing, oh, yeah, this quest isn't necessary. Why am I going this far out of my way to accomplish it?! It's totally healthy, ha.

All this was going perfectly well, and I was slaughtering miners, you know, same old, same old, when suddenly the LAG MONSTER APPEARS AND EATS MY FACE and two minutes later my computer/the server/whatever catches up and I am dead, hurray.


But it's really awful. Constant, horrid spikes of latency, making the game basically unplayable. When something that I can't escape aggro'd on me, I'd have to hope that I could beat it with the few shots I could get in, because I certainly couldn't play very well. I was stuck running up and down the main Scarlet Gorge road looking for chromite so that I could go craft instead. That would have been great, except that lagged and I disconnected an endless amount of times and I died an endless amount of times and shops took ages to open and once the soul resurrection technician's speech box wouldn't open so I was trapped in soul walk mode... Then, while crafting chromite bars, one bar took eight minutes and all the while was that highly irritating crafting noise for armorsmith and a bar that appeared to be full.

If this doesn't get better, I'm cancelling my subscription, and I am taking my money somewhere else. This is ridiculous, and I'm not paying for a game I can't play.

Rift: Rogue and Cleric

Original post from I Think in Black and White

Rift is my game right now. In my parting with mage (ranged dps, oh how I have come to dislike you), obviously it was a choice between warrior, cleric, and rogue. And I've never been a person for warrior... I don't know, but it just doesn't appeal to me, plus warrior doesn't have that flexibility I want to expect from this game. It's pretty much just dps and tanking.

So it was a choice between cleric or rogue. I went rogue.

On the Alsbeth server, which was medium popularity when I started but now has a huge-ass queue (supposedly - I guess the times that I get on just aren't popular times), I began playing as Vaethereal (hey! that name sure sounds familiar), a Defiant Bahmi rogue. I'm a Defiant through and through, story and attitude (and race) wise, and the Bahmi are awesome, so it was a given.

Anyway, I started with Assassin, added on Bladedancer, and much to my chagrin finally nabbed... Ranger. Oops. Stuck with that horrid choice for the rest of the tutorial, I even eventually had to get rid of my pet tank pig (ahem, I mean, RAZORBEAST) because he stopped following me. A glitch? An inopportune button-press that I didn't know how to reverse? Whatever it was, I never found out. End ranger career.

I finally got out and chose something else, I don't even know, and those solo dps days were fun, sure, but I had just discovered bard when I finally cracked and figured out that rogue was simply not for me. As a dps Assassin I was vulnerable and didn't think my damage was quite up to par with what I wanted, plus melee dps isn't my thing. (All this talk of dps! What have I become, a scientist?!) At least, not here, in this game. And as a Bard (support), I just felt too un-useful, especially at early levels. I got to level 18 before quitting.

Also on the Alsbeth server, I began a cleric character (look me up; my username is Mnemosyne, another alias of mine. I'm elusive like that). This went much smoother, much better. I decided early on that I was gonna be a fucking tank for once. Cleric in Rift has healing of course, but also tank with the Justicar soul, and dps if I wanted cruise control. I like tanking. I like healing. So here I was.

I pumped my Justicar full of steroids AHEM I meant points. Eventually reset it because I had points in Sentinel that I didn't really need, so I tossed those over to Shaman for extra defense and damage. When I finally got up in the Justicar soul enough that I had the AoE attack Even Justice, I considered myself ready to tank. Add that to another attack whose name I forget that forces monsters to aggro to me, and I'm not the best tank ever, but still half viable at least.

I messed with a healing role (alternate build), but haven't put it into practice yet. I just wanted it just in case it was the only way to get into a group.

Speaking of groups, on Vae I got invited to the cross-MMO guild Suspiria, but since I dropped that character for now, I was getting lonely in the middle of my kill quests with no one talking. I don't talk much, so it was good when I finally got invited to Dragonheart. I'm not sure if I like the guild yet - too much social, not enough help or events or dungeon runs, etc. - but it's better than listening to battle chat all day. "3 hit points! 17 hit points! Critical hit!" Ugh.

When a quest finally required it, I did my first real instanced dungeon, ever. (I never do level caps, remember?) But this was only level 20 or so, so I jumped right in and tanked as best as I could. Again, the only problem with cleric tanks that I can see is the aggro, but Mein of Leadership helps with that. It's the best possible thing they could have done for the Justicar tank, I think, because it gives 300% threat, 100% more armor and 90% more endurance. I messed up a few times... but it was my first instance! And the people were nice, considering my newness, and the two "veterans" helped a lot and didn't let the three newbies, including me, down. All in all, I thought I did pretty well, but I didn't ask them. (I only had to apologize once, and apparently people wipe often in these instances, so I have no complaints!)

I now play primarily as a level 22 Defiant Kelari Cleric named Mnemosyne on the US Alsbeth server. Find me and chat me up. :)