So I took another dive into Rift figuring I might be able to knock out another level or two tonight in the long slow grind that it’s going to take me to get to level 60 and start raiding again. Lucky me, I’m one of the many that have been cursed by the Curse Client failing to launch, which apparently is only fixable by reinstalling your OS. Yeah, like hell. After going through and manually updating about a dozen addons, then reconfiguring half of them, I popped an XP potion and queued up for Instant Adventures.

Two things about that. First, the XP pots you get with your veteran status are only a +100% bonus UP TO level 50, after that they’re cut down to a 10% bonus (You still get 100% for Planar Attunement levels however). Second, Instant Adventures are more like Directed Grinding than anything else really. When I started there was still a section of the holiday themed IA’s going on, but I was rolling solo for the first 15 minutes or so. Finally when someone did show up to help, I was out DPS’ing them in my tank spec. Maybe I’m just a boss like that. I dunno.

During the 14 daily IA segments there was a zone invasion that started. We needed to go and capture two objectives while another two objectives were defended. What we didn’t realize, the group of 4 others that had managed to sneak into our IA group, was that one of the objectives was sitting on top of an Onslaught camp. These are exactly like that camps that you would find in Ember Isle. The main sourcestone is captured by baddies, there’s a handful of turrets and healing springs around it that you can level up to help fight them off. Maybe it was just our group, but we thought that it needed to stay captured, and thus we ended up fighting endless waves of mobs for about 20 minutes before I walked away.

Hey wait! Wasn’t the whole point of IA’s the Endless Grind anyway? Why walk away from a Good Thing? It seems to me that Onslaught invasions are worth about 10% of the XP a normal mob is. We were doing a lot of work, and dying quite a bit, for not a whole lot of payoff. A little annoying, but hey, we didn’t really need to move all that far. The zone event wasn’t ending though, and a new thing they added to IA’s, if you’re in the zone any events become your new objective. I just wanted to get these IA’s out of the way. Apparently I was leading the group, because the rest of the party started following me. We managed to stumble upon a boss (not marked on the map as a zone objective, urgh), and proceeded to whittle away his 1.6 million hitpoints with a whopping combined DPS of about 3000.

That’s the equivalent of my Shaman spec solo. 10 straight minutes of clawing at this thing, and then the 600k foothold underneath it.

Finally, the zone event ends, and I can get back to my Endless Grinding adventures, which eventually led us up the side of a mountain, totally confusing my party, and leaving me to solo this cute little boss.

 

 

There was a pretty nice view from up here, overlooking a waterfall, some Storm Legion tower, and the landscape stretching off into the distance, mostly devoid of detail because it would lag my machine all to hell (or whatever that justification is). Something was bothering me about the Endless Grinding adventures though. I had been out here for a solid two hours at least, my XP pot had run out, and I went from 20% into level 52 all the way to 52% into level 52.

 

Shouldn’t the leveling be a tad faster than this? At this rate it would take me about 6 hours just to hit lv53, and then 7 more levels of snails pace leveling? I get it, there’s a lot of content to see. I’m totally down with that, but the guild I’m in is here for the raids man. All the raids are at 60. This could be a really really long couple of weeks if I want to catch up. Granted, I don’t think anyone in the guild has been sounding the horns to get a full 20-man group back together just yet, but hopefully it’ll come around. I want to be ready.

Then I realized what was bothering me. You see, I didn’t level from 1-50 by grinding out mobs or following a quest line. I’m a tank. I need to walk backwards through a dungeon and taunt things while my healer is cursing OoM in my headset and my DPS are crying that I keep pulling mobs out of the AoE damage. I need to walk into rooms, over-pull a dozen creatures, and then laugh gleefully as I pop my long cooldowns and tank it all anyway. This grinding shit is just not for me, but where the hell are the dungeons? Luckily there were a couple of high level guildies on to straighten my ass out.

I had been peering at the LFG screen wondering why queueing up for Expert dungeons kept tossing me into the old world dungeons. It totally slipped my mind that the NEW dungeons are part of the Normal leveling system, as we’re back to getting normal XP and relying on dungeon drops to advance. I know I’ve looked at this before, but apparently, when you scroll down just a tiny bit, voila! There’s all those Storm Legion dungeons that I need to be doing.

So hopefully with this new realization I’ll start to make some solid progress. I’ve heard that the dungeons aren’t terribly difficult and all of the HK gear that have should push me through at least the first couple of them without too much of a problem. Now that I’m thinking about it, this should actually be quite exciting. It’s been a long ass time since I was able to get significant advancements in gear simply from running dungeons. Wish me luck, it’s all pug for me from here on out (or alternative hop on and add my ass in-game, cross-server dungeon queues are a thing now. Grimnr@Byriel), and likewise good luck to all of you Telarans pounding away for that next ding!