I’ve only had one solid play session since 1.8 hit, and tonight we’re going to take a crack at the new raid zone, but I have some initial impressions.

First off, if you feel like your class got nerfed, suck it up and deal with it. Warriors, I’m talking about you. You are not a single cookie cutter class, you can still DPS very well. Sorry Trion took a shit in your cereal bowl, but really it’s coming down to a Learn To Play moment. I can tell you inside and out all the intricate details of running a Cleric. Learn your class, adjust, and get back on top of the charts before your guild is too embarassed to have you hanging around.

Sorry, there were a lot of tears in Global when I logged on. Then I played with a couple competent warriors whose DPS hadn’t changed in the slightest.

So yeah, there was some chatter about the new raid zone Infernal Dawn as well. We have our share of elitist guilds on Byriel, only one of them were able to down the first boss, and these were guys that had a full 20 in Gmark gear decked out with legendary weapons and all that stuff. They swear it wasn’t the mechanics of the fight, just that it might need to be tuned a little more to make things reasonable. I’m not sure what boss it was. A couple of the guilds tucked their tails and walked away after a few wipes. I hope that’s what we do tonight, smacking my face against a wall for hours at a time is bad form. You can either do it, and there’s little things you’re getting hung up on, or you can’t and the encounter isn’t right for your group yet.

That’s almost always been the case for us. As we’ve been progressing there’s certain phases you go through with new bosses. You learn the mechanics, 20 people take their time to do this. Often multiple pulls. You tweak the party layout for specific healing and DPS requirements, sometimes Tank changes are needed. If you’re still not dropping the boss at this point there’s probably some gear requirements that aren’t being hit by all 20 people. It’s a process. However, I’m pretty sure we’re gonna walk in there and be lucky to get whatever boss it is down to 80% at any point. Maybe I’m a bit cynical.

We could always get back to fishing I suppose. Yeah, fishing. It doesn’t take up a normal skill slot either, neither does Survival, which means you can have your three crafting skills of choice, plus these two. Or maybe you can have 5 crafting skills total. I suppose I haven’t tried that part just yet. Fishing is simple, kinda like in real life. You stand near some water, use your pole to cast, and right click to collect fish. Theres a difference in fish caught depending on deep or shallow waters. Shallow is water you can stand in, deep is water you swim in. You can catch smaller fish to make bait, which appears to increase your chances of catching different rarities of fish. Some of them can be turned in for zone notoriety or a box with some lures in it.

Survival is basically cooking and learning how to pitch a tent. Yeah, that’s the line they use in-game at the trainer. You catch fish and buy ingredients to make all sorts of things that rival the Drink vendor. A couple of the food items have little buffs on them which one would assume would be desirable. The buffs are spread out over levels too, so you’ll probably be coming back to lowbie zones to pick up ingredients to make sure you’re maxed out. It’s a nice incentive, but I don’t see a whole ton of people picking up on Survival, it’s a little more intricate than the rest of the skills. Unless fishing takes off and people are throwing all kinds of fish on the AH for cheap anyway.

There’s new artifact sets that you can collect from fishing, a whole slew of new achievements from fishing, apparently there’s new gear across the lower level ranges (or that might have been broken, saw shard unlocks constantly), there’s leaderboards for various activities in case you don’t think you e-peen is quite big enough on it’s own. It’s just Rift being Rift man, they added a whole bunch of content. Instant Adventures can now take part in Ember Isle, which is really cool if you’re out trying to get some XP. The Ember Isle raid rifts apparently have some new high end gear as well.

I guess I’ll have to go with “no” on the title question. This release is just as solid as any other adding things to do in and out of combat, adding new items, achievements, and areas to explore along with new ways to explore. They seem to be on a good pace for adding things. One day, I’ll have to write about another MMO, and I’m sure I’ll look back to Rift wishing they had the same development process.