The Glade 4.0

Got my invite this morning.

Yep me too, I'm waiting to log on now =o

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

Still at work here unfortunately. Won't be able to get on for another several hours. =/

I have a buddy who's playing now and he's reporting good things.

Just played a bit, got to level 10. Very solid game and reminds me of Warhammer Online. At least the style does. I played WAR a lot so that's a compliment.

Overall a big thumbs up, I'll be subscribing. Gotta find out how to get in on the PvP though, didnt do any of that yet. I think they have some battleground type stuff just not sure where.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

+1 on the short beta events. I had most of the last event off from work and enjoyed the game. But this entire beta event I'm working, so I won't be participating much if at all. Not a fan of these beta event type betas. But at least this one has more than one or two days in a row of game access like some I've been a part of.

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Women are from Hoboken, men are from Trenton. ~ Jimmy Kimmel

EDIT: NM, it's apparently a spam your bow ability fest. Not sure if that's good yet . . .

got my invite.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Ok, so it's started to grow on me more after I've figured out the basics.

I love the 3-class gestalting. And it's very much like WoW in execution, which means not having to learn a completely new mechanic from scratch. And yet it has unique enough elements to give it its own identity.

We'll see how it goes, I guess.

Also:
Sweet smokin Jeebus.



http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v281/ ... ?start=all

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Holy shitsnacks!

^^^
LOL yeah

/sing in Satchmo voice "I see rifts of green, red flaming ones too . . ."

Seriously, I think they go overboard on the amount of Rifts open sometimes.

Also, I don't think I've ever used that open your own rift ability. They open on their own way too often for that to be even useful.

They have it turned up to *high* for the Beta to stress test.

And I've opened rifts before. Its easy planarite.

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Holy shitsnacks!

read: pretty much the only source outside of Invasions.

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

Champion - Riftblade - Void Knight.

I have to say the class system is certainly a lot of fun to geek out with.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

That's what I'm running as well. Really a lot of fun, and the PvP warfront is a great time. Not sure when you get access, but I've been doing it since lvl 15 and it's a blast. Very fun variant of capture the flag.

Overall I've been really impressed with the game. I need to check out the dungeon content yet, but so far it's been great fun.

One of the features I really like is that I can change up what souls and even apparently what role I want to play. So if I start out and pick 3 souls as a warrior that I end up not liking together, though a couple of fairly simple quests, I can change that up and get to what I want. Or it appears, I can even change from being a warrior at all and switch to a rogue or cleric if I want. Really great flexibility.

Aizle, you can't switch classes. The role is basically different builds from within the class you are. So you could have a paladin/reaver/riftblade as one role, and a champion/void knight/warlord as another.

The idea is to let you have a solo build, a group tank build, a pvp build, etc. But still of the same class.

Which is nice, in a way, but I wonder whether it'll lead to a lot of cookie-cutterishness. Everybody in PvP is the same 2 or 3 strong builds, because even if that's not their preference, they can have a build dedicated to excelling in PvP and play the way they want to elsewhere, etc. I guess I wonder if the answer to "assassin is really weak in PvP" will just end up "so run a ranger instead."

I have a feeling there won't be a lot of "class" identity/solidarity with this system, I guess. The souls are essentially commoditized.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Aaah, I gotcha. How many roles can you have? Is there a limit?

Yeah, I agree. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. It's nice in PvP for example that I can't just assume, "Oh a warrior I know how to deal with those..." because there's so much variety in possible specs.

The limit is escalating prices to buy them. From the chatter I was hearing, the 4th role costs like 4 plat or something. I've only purchased a second, and didn't look at the price for the third. I don't know if there's a hard cap, though it might be 4.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

And, at the same time, if there's so little "class" identity where people become attached to a soul (and there might not be much identity there, because the souls are commoditized), then there might NOT be much variety in likely specs. That was kind of my point.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

This is a pretty neat chart: http://shadowcompany.guildportal.com/Gu ... ID=9474918

As for roles, I believe you can have up to 4 yeah. So as a Warrior, my understanding is I can have 1 role set to Champ - Rift - Void, and another one to Paladin Warlord Reaver or whatever.

Still not sure if I'm going Mage or Warrior though. Champion at 50 looks crazy.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

Word.

The Champion looks like what the Arms Warrior in WoW should have been.

Having multiple roles just makes my day. You can bet that one of those will be a 51 point Champion build.

I have to say, I started out intrigued by the paragon. The warrior attack point mechanic appeals to me more than the combo mechanic of rogues, and I liked the idea of picking up parry boosts and a good damage warrior.

However, as I played with it, I found it to be incredibly one-dimensional, and was struggling to decide how to optimally play it. To be specific, it appears to get most of its damage out of the Strength of Iron attack point consuming buff and the follow-up attack. But trying to pump these out regularly is just SO limiting because the buff is only long enough to alternate with just one other point-consuming power, and I found myself stretching those point-consuming powers to every 4 point generators, just so I could get in the extra 120% weapon damage follow-up. When solo fights really only last long enough to nail 2, maybe 3 consuming powers, that's just not a lot of room for variety and dynamism.

I found the void knight's pact mechanic to be way more forgiving in that regard. Sure, I was hammering mostly the same attack point generating attack (the one that does bonus damage per pact stored), but I was okay with that, since it was outdamaging all the other attack point generating attacks I'd seen if my pacts were capped, anyways. But the fact that the pact duration was a good 30 seconds, and would frequently get refreshed naturally, it left my way more open to get all the variety and synergy out of the attack point consumers other souls offered.

It's also rather disappointing how the 4 offensively geared warrior souls offer no threat generation that I can find. I was looking forward to making a parry-whoring group off-tanker out of paragon/riftblade/champion.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Kaffis: I wanted to like Paragon because ... well I just like the title Paragon heh. Maybe a result of playing Mass Effect 2, but I'm with you on not feeling it.. Void Knights do appear to be very solid though.

Aizle: Yeah i'm planning on this for PvP if I go Warrior:

http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0ckLt.EAsdqRrGudz..Ex

Titan Strike plus Cornered Beast and throw in Disruptive Strike... all with Destroyers Bearing giving 50% more damage to finishers.

Oh and by the way Mark of Extermination on them and guaranteed crit with Proper Timing.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

I'm definitely digging the strong Void Knight Riftblade builds I've given a try so far. I'm wavering on what I want to pair with them, though. I have a feeling Riftblade will make it into both my tanky and my dpsy builds, because it seems to be a solid source of damage for both and I like the theme of the elemental warrior.

I'm on the fence about what I want to try to support them with, though. My initial inclination was warlord, but one of my friends is doing a paladin/warlord/void knight already.. Maybe I pick up paragon, and milk it for the parry bonus low in the tree.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yeah, I've similarly felt boxed in with the Paragon. Really, if they just changed the Lion buff so that it lasted longer, that would free up a lot of flexibility. But it's so much of a dps boost, that you HAVE to keep it up all the time.