Last night was probably one of my most active nights of Rift yet. There’s a couple things I want to touch on, but almost all of it is over the 1.2 patch. The blog hasn’t been as active lately. Been busy drinking. Watching the Red Wings finish out an amazing series against San Jose. Getting ready for warmer weather finally. There was also some blips on the radar called Portal 2 and Brink that got in my way a for a couple days. I suppose I could have blogged about any of that, but they’re pretty static events. The progression of MMOs, the encounters, conversations, interactions with people. Those are all things I find more blog worthy really. 

Something that’s had me stumped about Rift, and what I rather enjoyed in Warhammer, is the room for improvement. WAR had tons, and I could rant on that for days. Rift, not so much, or so I thought. It’s probably just the learning curve that I feel like I’m on the rising edge of now, but for a while there I was just as green as the guy next to me. Now I realize I can lead and tank all the T1 dungeons with an amount of proficiency that regularly has people sending me tells about how awesome I am. Most of the time I laugh about this because I really consider myself an average tank at best, but I guess knowing the pulls and moving briskly makes up for not being an un-killable rock out there.

Every run of the night was formed using the LFG tool. This is mostly because the dungeons lock out if you manually enter them with a static group, I find this retarded, but whatever. I knew it was going to be a good night when lo and behold I find Herc and his ragtag band of holy-shit-amazing. Herc tanks like me, keep pulling until everything stops moving, I love this tank. Herc on Faeblight, you’re the MF’ing man. Rock on you! We crushed the PISS out of FoLH and picked up the Rapid Assault unlock as well as the Kitty Conservation unlock on Rorf. There might have been a third one in there I don’t remember. The Achievements in this game for difficult tasks do make me quite happy. They were also pleased to have me along with my DPS Shaman, and I managed to keep up with the other top DPS, with the lead trading back and forth the entire time. I think he was 2% ahead of me by the end of it! Great run! Tasty!

I MUCH prefer being a top-of-the-line melee DPS player than a creative and quirky tank. One is a dime a dozen, while the other is much more memorable, so I concede when needed. My personal highlight of the night was entering an xKB run with the LFG tool that was stuck on the last boss Konstantin. This boss is tricky because the environment is just as hazardous as the boss. Spikes shoot out of the floor and walls, and there’s a solid 20s phase of him doing increasingly deadly cleaves that you have to kite around while avoiding the spikeage. I recall running up to the boss stating that it’s really not cool to enter a dungeon that only the last boss is standing, but we gave the tank a chance.

He didn’t survive past the first cleave.

I’m not sure what he was going for, but maybe having me melee next to him got him all confused. When the cleaves started he sorta stood there all stoically and died, well, not quite heroically. Once the boss took down the MT, I picked him the boss and started kiting. They tossed a battle rez on the tank, who taunted the cleaving Konstantin over to the pile of healers and casters, promptly wiping the group. I did a /sit and waited my turn to die, facepalming all the way to the respawn button.

Mr. Tankopolous began whining, the group was collectively facepalming as well I’m sure, but they were ready to give it another shot. Tank asked me to go RDPS with the rest of them so I wouldn’t be in the way when the cleaves started. -blank stare-. Uh, buddy, I didn’t get hit by the cleaves. Ergo, not in the way, but whatever. Switched to my caster spec and proceeded to be interrupted every time a spike rammed up my ass. Tank almost started kiting, but died shortly after LoS-ing the healers behind the pillar. Starting to see how this group lost two players which opened up the spot for me and the unfortunate rogue. Hey, Mr. Tank, mind if I give it a shot?

Be my guest.

Done. Pop over to my Justi-Druid spec, pull out my Satyr, flip on a buckler and dagger. Yeah, it looks weird, but they didn’t see much alternative. Why do you have a pet out Grim? Well, he puts out another 100DPS that I can’t do. Also, I think it’s funny to watch creatures die helplessly because you tell them to stand in the fire. Sick sick man. Of course, after I one-shotted Konstantin their jaws were on the floor (as in, didn’t die the first time through). I can’t imagine how many attempts they made at this boss that causes two players to drop from the group while on the last boss. Everyone said grats, two of them sent me the customary “you’re awesome” tells. The Tank gave me a courtesy tail-between-the-legs thanks for picking up that boss. The night continues…

Shortly thereafter one of my inner circle gaming buddies hit 50 (FINALLY YOU SONOFABITCH) on his Cleric and was immediately dumped on by a full load of L50 blue and purple gear. This was cause for celebration! We hopped in a group together, queued up for the remaining T1’s, and almost immediately picked up a DPS and Support toon. Every run thereafter for the night resulted in at least one achievement unlock as we were all hitting our stride perfectly. It started to feel like the old days when I would tank while walking backwards in many of the dungeons in WAR because the heals were that good and the DPS could kill mobs just in time to pick up the next set.

We managed to rock out everything except for RotF as I can’t stand the snow blindness on the third (?) boss. xIT we picked up the achievement for not killing the spider adds and the Big Heals achievement for the Ragnoth. I believe we got Gnarly Gnars AND Corrupted Queen in Foul Cascade. The only one we picked up for Kings Breach was on the first boss for killing him with 6 puppies on me Dogs of War . It was, all in all, the best night of Rift I’ve had in quite a while. Getting a solid core group of players together makes all the difference in any game, and being able to PuG two people without batting an eye makes these runs all the smoother. We just have to get lucky that one of them is semi-competent and these runs tend to be pretty cake so far. I suppose once I pick up another piece of toughness gear we can see how these T2’s are going to treat us as a whole.