Shortly after my last post I finally nudged my Cleric into his level 50 spot. Since then I’ve pretty much done my crafting dailies, scoured Shimmersand for Carmintium, and dick else with that toon. I’ve rolled an alt instead, as I’m going to need someone to do my weapon crafting after all. So yes, he’s a crafting alt, but I’m leveling him entirely different from my Cleric. The Cleric was primarily leveled via quests, and there’s plenty of those to go around. I’ve done maybe 20 Warfronts across my 50 levels with him, and ran a grand total of 4/10 dungeons with him (Iron Tomb, Deepstrike Mines, Kings Breach, and Runic Descent). I managed to collect just enough Planarite to get the best focus, and really didn’t get a whole lot else from Rifting. My biggest goal was hitting 50 with the Cleric, and quests were the most reliable route to get there for me.

So my crafting alt is going to be a Warrior, supplemented by crafted armor from my Cleric throughout the game he’s also working on Weaponsmithing as he levels. I’m considering dropping Mining to pick up Runecrafting and leaning on the Cleric to provide materials as I level him upwards. Of course, that means I’ll need to take some extra time during my gathering to collect lower level materials as well, but it’ll probably help me finish off some of those Artifact collections and achievements while I’m at it. Oh, and dailies for rep grinding, as soon as I find a nice table that lists all the different rep merchants and what they peddle. I’ve seen a couple that are entirely uninteresting with their rewards, but hopefully they get fleshed out with more recipes as time goes on.

Right, so playing a Warrior. Probably would have been siginificantly more rewarding if I had rolled one before the 1.1 nerf, but the silver lining is that I have no idea how badly they were nerfed in the first place. From what I can tell the Warrior is can really be broken up into three roles, Tank, DPS, and Harass. For the majority of my leveling I’ll be running a DPS build based around the Champion soul, and I’ll keep a sword/shield for the occasional Tanking experience. I’ll have to get some links to the Soul Builds later as pulling them together while sitting in this all-too-open environment is going to draw a bit more attention than I want. Perhaps on lunch via laptop. Basically from what I’ve seen the good Warrior builds lean on conditional abilities for burst damage, being able to pop off three or four non-GCD abilities all at once seems to be a very effective way at dropping hp bars.

I’ll get into more specific builds in a later post, similar to the Justicar post that I wrote up. For leveling the Warrior I think I’ll be sticking to running the dungeons at my level and chasing Rifts inbetween finding groups. I’m not sure yet how this is going  to work out with being a crafting alt since I’ll still need to collect materials (which don’t seem to spawn in dungeons), but if I’m lucky with drops I might not even need the crafted gear anyway. The other reason I want to stick to dungeons for leveling is to get these damn Epic quests finished. I totally missed them with my Cleric, and I think he’s still stuck on the Deepstrike Mines leg of the questing. I hear the rewards from this are quite literally the best gear in the game (at the moment anyway) which makes me quite happy. 

It’s nice to have big, massive even, quest chains that reward you with some seriously epic loot at the end. It’s one thing to get lucky on a drop and find some amazing purple item, but the luck factor that catches me. I’ve dealt with the luck factor in other end-game situations before and while the rush of finally getting that roll on your drop is certainly desirable, it’s a different sort of feeling to work your way to a solid reward. Perhaps it’s a mindset, but when I run dungeons I try not to think about the potential drops, you can avoid a lot of anxiety this way. Having other long-term goals, guaranteed “welfare” gear, and crafted items which are on-par or above the standard greens for your level help out in this regard immensely.

One last thing for my second run through the world of Rift is the end of the free month for launch day subscribers. I wonder, will the game hold up? Is it going to continue to accrue players with the new content being actively developed?  Freemarch thus far has been anything but devoid of players, although that 30-day mark has been passed. I wonder what Stonefield and Scarlet Gorge are going to look like in this post-launch era. Something to take away from this post would be looking at rolling an alt, and playing it as differently as possible if only to see a different side of the game as before. My first play through I missed a majority of the dungeons and focused mostly on leveling.This time I’m going to focus mostly on the more unique experiences and leave all those silly quest-givers alone.