The Glade 4.0

New MMO, I hadn't heard about it until today.

There's a new Beta phase starting in a few hours. Can maybe get a beta key @ www.zam.com to take a look.
http://rift.zam.com/story.html?story=24904

I'm gonna see how it plays this week. If its as pretty as the screens show, and the class structure is as flexible as it seems... I think I'll be dropping WoW.

4 classes, 6 races. Each class has 7 "souls" that work as WoW's Talent Trees. You can choose 3 at once, and build pretty much whatever the hell you want. Wanna be a ranger that has a pet, and blows stuff up with bombs? You can do that. A tanking cleric? A Healing Mage? A rogue that can tank and play music? Yes. All of that.

Soul Tree Calc:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html

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Holy shitsnacks!

I played in the last beta... was like level 7 or 8 and was doing a quest and the mobs were respawning OMGWTFFAST and I couldnt even do a respawn without agroing and dying...

I logged off in frustration...

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It's not a WoW-killer but it's decent.

It is, from what I understand, the Demon Hybrid Offspring of Pre-Stupidification EQ2 and late Wrath World of Warcraft.

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With better graphics, more flexible classes, and a dash of WAR thrown in

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Holy shitsnacks!

They're making huge changes with every beta patch. It's awesome that the devs seem to be listening to the community so much.

I hope they make this game a faceroll like WotLK was so all of the crybabies in WoW will leave because Cataclysm is too "hard."

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

In all fairness, Cataclysm raids are generally regarded as being the hardest mainstream MMO raids ever. I realize that WoW's hardcore fans aren't the ones complaining and that it's mostly the heroic faceroll retards, but still.

It took Paragon 30 days to clear all content on Heroic.

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Personally I hope they make it fun and challenging so all the WoW crybabies stay there.

Cataclysm isn't *hard*. Its *annoying*. There's a difference.

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Holy shitsnacks!

It's not hard or annoying. It's actually fun. It brings back memories of TBC and Vanilla.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I started playing after BC came out. LK was fun until ToC came out. IC was terribly boring. Gimmicky fights are not fun for me. I've done a couple of the dungeons in Cata, and seen video of others, and it doesn't impress me. WoW is old and stale for me.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Actually, when I think about it; the dungeon encounters generally avoid the.. "screw you" mechanics of BC, but the numbers seem to be overtuned in the direction of brutality.

I do get an occasional flashback to Malchezar and Blackheart (not exactly happy that, for example, Dralga's firething can spawn right next to the tank, and then target and explode before the DPS can do anything about it), but usually, it's decent. The people in the dungeon finder make it frustrating, no matter what role I take, though.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

Cataclysm's encounters are immensely creative and quite a bit of fun. But, what do I know, I'm 9 of 12 Heroic Encounters for raiding.

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If only there were a separate forum to talk about WoW...

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The Dude abides.

I forget, how did that compare to Wrath?

All Launch Content was cleared on Heroic (aka 25 Man) within 72 hours in Wrath of the Lich King. Sarth 25 + 3 Drakes was finished on the Tuesday following the first Lock Out. Sarth 10 + 3 Drakes took an additional week. More comparatively speaking, Paragon killed LK 25 Heroic the day the 5% Buff Went Live and was the only guild in the world to do so. They also did it without the 5% Buff by the end of the expansion. Cataclysm Content is on par with Heroic Non-Arthas ICC Content.

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I'm confused by your conclusion there Khross. Based on the timelines you give, it would seem that Cata content is actually more difficult than ICC content.

Normal Cataclysm Content is in equal in difficulty to Heroic ICC Content if one excludes the Heroic Arthas Fight. Heroic Cataclysm Content is equal to the Heroic Arthas Fight without the Zone Buff.

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Aaaah, reading comprehension ftw. I missed the "heroic" part there on the ICC stuff.

I agree with you, and it seems to be holding true for 10 man content as well. The 10's we're running now feel similar to the heroic fights in ICC.

I think gear has a lot to do with that. My raid group is starting to get geared out somewhat, ~5ish epics per person on average perhaps. The raids seem a bit easy now, though they were extremely difficult when we first started and I didn't even have 1 epic. Our MT went from ~140k hp to ~180k or something. We're only raiding one day a week atm, but we finally got to Valiona and Theralion last lockout and beat them on our 2nd pull, the only struggle numberswise being if people were a bit slow to move out of Theralion's void zones. Conclave of Wind doesn't seem hard at all even with very few epics, with the entire challenge being in the raid arrangement that is done before you pull... which I suppose is an indirect sort of challenge, actually. :p

I could talk about this more, but as was noted, we do tend to have a forum for this kind of stuff... :p Different kinds of difficulty (Naxx40 vs M'uru vs Conclave), the effect of gear (varies by fight!), changing roster, etc make it interesting stuff.

I have heard fairly decent things about Rifts, but I'm not expecting it to make much of a splash. And maybe I'm a child of The Vision™, but I tend to get a bit leery when devs make huge changes based on player feedback. I suppose it can work out alright, and definitely should always be considered, but I'm more inclined to trust devs with the longevity of a game than the playerbase on average. I think Final Fantasy 14 went through with similar sweeping changes and I haven't seen so much as a blip on the radar from that game. That doesn't implicate those changes, necessarily, but I did kinda expect more from that.

Ah well. Any MMO's success is a good thing for anyone in the genre, so even if I don't intend to play the game, I'd like to see some substantive quality to it.

Played Rift in this latest open beta. Meh. I'm thinking the whole public quest thing (like Warhammer) is going to get worse as the playerbase levels. Either it'll be one guy in a zone shouting for help with a rift, or like in this beta event, a million people all trying to get one hit in on a mob through the lag storm.

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FF14 actually had the opposite problem. Devs were stuck in their own little world and didn't listen to the player base at all when they had problems and now they're paying for it. The launch of FF14 was so bad that they're letting people play for free (think extended trial), they've hired a whole new team to rework the game and the PS3 version has been pushed back until the "new" vision is finished.

It is/was an epic, epic fail. They continue to update and improve the game but I'm pretty sure it's too late.

Ah! A friend of mine was playing in beta and said something to the contrary, but she has a habit of blowing things out of proportion, let's say. :p

While I can't exactly say FF11 did poorly, it still is a bit bogglesome how the franchise just has never expanded well into the MMO market. Part of what made WoW an instant success was the established developer and IP. I suppose this is a discussion unto itself though. I don't think I even saw an advertisement for FF14 though.

Well, I just signed up to try and get a beta key for Rift. Seems interesting and the whole soul tree thing looks kinda cool.