I never see anyone in Lanys Refugees and there is no other activity here other than my own...

We've been pcs'ing to new base so move from Texas to Ohio, why I've absent last couple weeks

It's summer time! I know I've not been around online because of that. But my character is only 30 ish soo...much much he can do.

I think I'm done. Since the people who asked me to start playing quit, it felt like I had to be on more than I wanted to be. And the last thing I need right now is a time sink.

Leo, if you guys want the Lanys Refugees to do anything, there needs to be an officer or two promoted. There are several guild points that need to be allocated, some active people need to be promoted, and some otherwise general activity.

Let me know if you need me to facilitate anything. I am on Ghaani in the guild.

Yeah I just couldn't get into it. Not entirely sure what it lacked that failed to hook me....but it didn't hook me.

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Larreth Wolfsong (long retired)
Lanys T'vyl, Everquest

Zinky, Lvl 60 Warlock
Thunderhorn, WoW

Thanks, Krby. I'll try to facilitate that.

I am enjoying Rift. I don't have any characters that are 50 yet. But I have been able to get into dungeons as a healer, DPS, and support. Some nights are quicker than others while some nights I don't get in one at all. I don't worry about it. I quest, I do rifts, I battle invasions, I craft, and I do the dailies. I am not stressing to get to 50 to get to each tier and progress progress progress. I am letting the game come to me. I am reading the quests, I am reading the books, and I am talking to the various NPC's. For a game that is not six months old I feel that Trion has and is releasing a lot of content. No, it all isn't the OMG best thing ever, but it is something and it is improving.

I guess the reason why I like it, is because I log in and there is stuff for me to do. I am learning the game, still learning what I can (and cannot) do with my characters, and learning the world. I think my choice to not blitz through everything has aided in my current enjoyment.

I'm playing it still, but mostly only on weekends, as the rest of the week is too busy. I started a tank and really enjoy it. Was disheartened to see nearly no one online in Lanys Refugees anymore, though.

I'm still playing the game, but not on this server with the rest of Lanys folks tho.

I've been stuck on BOQ Internet the past month or so. Hoping that will change soon. The new patch looks like it brought a lot of good stuff.

now for my general musings about my time in Rift.

First, things got interesting guild wise over the past week or so. I had my Warrior, Laarz, in a small startup guild <The Fall of Jericho>. They are a social/leveling guild with some good people. I got to know the GL a little bit and he made me an officer. Since I was playing my cleric, Gabbath, most of the time, I moved him into the guild. Well the GL decided to take an "extended break" and made me GL. Most of the primary PVP players left the guild (hated to see them go, but all they wanted to do was PVP so it wasn't all that bad). We now are a tighter knit group of people that are working on getting to 50 and enjoying the game and trying to get to know one another.

:::Shameless plug::: If any of you are Defiant on Belmont and would like to join a friendly, helpful, leveling guild, look for me in game or ask any of the members of <The Fall of Jericho> to invite you. We are a (soon to be) level 5 guild with a guild bank.

Now for my character stuff.
My Cleric, Gab, is still primarily running the Duracell build and I am still loving it. He is 47 now and has finished all of Droughtlands. I have all the "hunter armor" from the area and can take on most things and win (can't handle the level 50 rifts yet but not too far off). I am finishing up the quests in IPP and after taking the weekend off should be 50 by the end of the week. I have been enjoying the cross-shard LFG as I have been able to get in a handful of dungeon runs as Duracell in a support role. I have been in some surprisingly good groups too. Having a tank that wanted to AOE pull and able to do it was nice. I think I was top DPS and top healer (mandate on tank while taking little to no damage was huge). Still working on Artificer (235 skill atm). I have been doing the new dailies. They are a bit corny but as I am leveling a nice quick xp and coin boost. On Friday I changed my "tank" role build into the ranged dps 51 Inq build. This leaves me with the roles of Duracell, 3x/3x Warden/Sent healer, and now Ranged DPS.

This weekend I started playing my rogue, Ghaani, again. I had been using this character primarily as a craft toon (Runecrafter, 230, Outfitter, 225, and Butcherer, 115'ish). I needed to get more leather to really push forward in outfitter (and was running low on cash) so I decided to take this level 23 character out for some questing. As a Ranger/Marksman I was not having that much fun. My pet hog was getting killed too often (have more than one mob of equal level and it died. My DPS seemed slow and I was really energy starved. I added a new role, the Cuisinart build, and steamrolled through Stonefield doing all the quests and many invasions. With somewhat limited play time I have gone from 22 to almost 30 since Saturday. I am questing in Scarlet Gorge trying to find beasts to increase my butchering. My bags are overflowing with runecrafting materials and I have been enjoying the class.

I haven't been playing my Warrior, Laarz, much as I am building him as a tank. I haven't had enough time to get in the LFG queue and run a dungeon so he is "stuck" at 23. I am still using him for Apothocary means and have him up to 200+ skill.

I know this is a long and basically meaningless post for you. I just wanted to put my "adventures" down to share it with anyone that may care. It kinda sucks not having some people IRL to talk about the game.

I sold my main account a few weeks who but I still have a recruit a friend account I bought for the mount on the Main. Mostly playing EQ again working on my zerks epic weapon ATM. Been thinking of messing around with rift in my off time. Maybe ill roll a toon on belmont and loom you guys up.

How are the war fronts there? I generally level a alt to 40 with just the collectors mount then I buy the pvp mount with favor to save myself 40plat.

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I don't know. The only PVP stuff I have done in Rift is two "PVP Rifts" and there really wasn't any PVP in them as the Defiant dominated the zones.

Played again a bit last night. Did a T1 and T2 w/ guild, but it really just felt like button mashing. /shrug

Sorry to have missed you last night, Leo.

I re-upped for a month, so I'll be on at least a few more times.

I must have missed you too Leo. I was on with Ghaani for a couple hours starting around 10pm CDT

Probably by just a few minutes then, yeah.

Tranthas is aaaalmost geared for Hammerknell. Been clearing River of Souls and Greenscale's Blight once a week, and I get into the 10-man content when there's time in the week. I still have alts in Lanys Refugees, but I generally log them in long enough to pick up the stuff I've mailed them. I'll play them up to 50 when Chelsea shows renewed interest in the game, or when work calms down again.

I am literally shocked to hear that people are bored of Rift.

Is the honeymoon officially over yet? Bad game was bad?!

No, Lanys guild is Lanys guild.

Rift is fine.

It's a combination of the two. Rift isn't really a bad game, but like many others, it gets very boring if you're doing the same thing all the time. Lots of us went into it with different expectations and that doesn't work out well for a guild. Just speaking from my own experience, it wasn't what I expected. You could play the entire game in silence, practically. There's little or no sense of community. That trickled into the guild a little bit, too. People went off to do their own things and there wasn't much chatter.

As for the game itself, it's way too easy for the amount of content. I applaud Trion for continually adding content and keeping things somewhat changing, but if you can play by yourself and still see 90% of what the game has to offer within 2-3 weeks, I don't know how it'll fare long-term.

This is my issue with the end game in every MMO I have played so far. It's a gear grind or some other form of grind to keep people playing/busy. I'm not going to do it anymore. I enjoy the whole adventure of leveling up, and stuff but that is about it for me tho.

I don't think Star Wars will be any different once I'm max char...unless BioWare pumps out tons of very good story quests to offer gamers instead of a gear grind. We will see, but I don't have my hopes up high atm. On the other hand, I will love leveling up in Star Wars tho!!!

Can't wait to see all the kick ass quests content the game will have

Gear grind is the perfect term for it, yeah. That just doesn't hold my interest anymore.

Yep I agree. And Rift is going to add AA's to the mix too...more grinding to do. Nah, I'm done with all that but I will buy Star Wars just for leveling up and story content.

I'm going to think of it like any other BioWare RPG game At the end game, it might be more of the same, but at least I'll enjoy the ride getting there

Leveling up was great with all the diversity you had in the quests / rifts / instances / pvp but once we hit 50 we hit that dreaded MMO wall where we sat around waiting for needed classes to log on or level up to be able to do instance groups (before they were made a lot easier) and anything higher than an expert rift was almost always out of the question with the numbers and class makeup we had on at any given time.

I really had no expectations for the guild when I started recruiting people, I started with a handful of old 7Ders and it just blossomed from there. I figured whoever came came and we'd see what happened when we hit the peak, which unfortunately was not a whole lot... but it was definitely fun and nice to have a mini-reunion while it lasted.

If Rift actually adds AA's, and they're the same kind of feature as they were in EQ, I'll walk. I don't think they will, though. They made a point of not inflicting a terrible grind on you between 1 and 50, and they haven't seen reason to regret that decision (they certainly have done nothing to change it). A long AA grind would effectively neutralize that position, and it doesn't make strategic sense for the designers to put an advancement vector in next to gear when they've built so much around gear dependency.

AA have already been announced.

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I never quite understood why people looked at AA's in EQ as a "grind". I suppose if you arrived late on the scene and you had zero AA's to your name and some AA's finally became considered crucial for a raid environment, sure you had to work on those as soon as you could. But overall, many of them were somewhat optional. If you were deadset on becoming the absolute best character you could be? Sure, but that's a personal preference.

I think there's this mindset among certain players that see any point of progression that's similar to leveling as "OMGAH, I'm not maxxed yet, I must hit that point!". I'm not going to say AA's were done perfectly in EQ - in the perfect world, they should be an optional way to continue improving your character at a power rate that is far smaller than actual levels.

Personally I had a blast with AA's, and never once did I feel like I was grinding. I explored dungeons I had never gone into before with slow exp rates, and got a few AA's on the side for every little side mission I did without ever worrying about it.

Too bad. If the rest of the game didn't look like a copy/paste(and if the PVP actually looked like it took skill) I think I'd give it a try. They're definitely making the right calls on some things. The question now is how they implement it.

Like everything else, it is considered a "grind" when it is necessary. Guilds won't take you unless you have X amount of AAs or particular AAs (MGB, etc), thus you must grind away to get them if you want to get anywhere in the game. They aren't just some neat things to keep you busy in-between raiding (like collecting Shinies in EQ2), they actually become something you MUST do, just like gaining traditional levels. I don't have a problem with it, personally, but I can see where it is a "grind."

It's a self-imposed or community-imposed grind. Do developers just never add experience-based content because people get their panties in a twist and decide to grind things out rather than do them at a gradual, relaxing pace? I don't think devs should base their decisions on those types of people, personally.

That also goes with what I was saying about being there when it starts, also. How many guilds demanded that you have MGB on day 1 of AA's being released in EQ? I remember seeing it on recruitment pages maybe a month or two after they came out. Sure, ultra-l33t guilds started sooner, but that doesn't represent the majority population.

I just always viewed them as a midway point between levels and... say... collecting gold or loot. Something you MUST do? Sure, at a certain point and only if you were away for some time after release and never did any before that, but not something you have to "grind". In PoP, most characters were reasonably effective at most encounters without AA's in a standard 72-man raid. To me at least, it felt like more of a necessity in GoD and beyond. But PoP IMO is proof enough that it can be done(even though AA's came out afterwards, they fit into the scheme nicely). If I hadn't been to a few planar boss raids where the majority of people had 20-ish AA's, I'd almost agree.

Even so, there was no requirement to "grind" anything. Go to places you haven't explored before, clear some areas out that you had difficulty with before for nostalgia's sake, go help some friends with a quest they're having trouble with. If the game has solidly implemented PVP, it'd be even easier to find an excuse to have fun and collect AA's without even thinking about it.

LoL, ok dude. By your logic, there's no such thing as a grind in any game. Nothing is "forced".

If the AA's are good there will be things that make your character much better than what you already have and thus those will be required to be in the top end guilds. If there are things that are not "required" then the AA system will be a waste of time. What was learned in WoW and has continued into Rift is that players will spend time looking for the ultimate combination of talents, gear and spell/talent rotation. That in turn makes people that are not doing the "ultimate combination" wrong. However, what I see in Rift it is not the ultimate combination that is the only way but the variety of combinations that allow you to get the job done. The Elite Gamers will primarily look for the elite builds, players like me will look for a way to get it done and have fun while doing it.

BTW, I finally got Gabbath to 50. Hit it last night. My total played time is about 5 days, but it took me about two months to get that played time.

EQ AA were easy to come by. At one point i was charging people 15k plat to sit in my group while i did all of the work. So i made money while doing something that kept me from sitting around being bored.

In rift your high levels are bored with dailys and shit like that, raids only take a few hours to complete and you are done for the week. AA will be pretty nice to have when you are doing your dailys and you are getting that wasted xp.

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Yeah, I'm still torn on the topic of AA's.

I like the fact that in AA systems, pretty much everything you do remains useful. The problem with a lot of games is that the moment you hit max level it seems like 95% of the game world becomes useless to you. AA systems help with that feeling at least.

On the other hand you have systems like Age of Conan where extremely powerful, class-defining abilities got stuck at the bottom of a massive time-consuming AA tree and no one was worth a damn until they got down there.

A happy balance would be nice. I always thought EQ handled it somewhat well...a lot of AA's were just small bonuses that weren't a huge deal. Others were pretty "required" material though.

As promised, I stopped playing when the news about AA's confirmed my fears.

Necros + Tables = win

Rift AA is system is pretty terrible bad so far, not enjoying it in the least

it is very underwhelming right now. I don't like how we can only see one "level" and the rewards are not that great. Plus 500,000 XP for 100 point and it take more than 100 points to get skills past the first one is weak.

screw it, I'm done.

How do I keep choosing to play broken classes?

With 1.6 Trion was supposed to have improved tanking across all classes. What they did was make the Warrior tanks godly and kick Cleric tanks to the curb. Their idea to "fix" the horrible Cleric threat is to increase threat generation while under Mien of Leadership to +500% for Justicar abilities. Now Single target tanking threat is good, when tanking multiple mobs threat is still bad. Also they nerfed Cleric damage reduction. Clerics take more damage now and have the least amount of HPs vs equally geared tanks.

They are "looking" at the sad state of Cleric DPS. In raid environments a full DPS speced and geared Cleric is anywhere from 25-35% behind the other DPS classes. The problem is the complete lack of scaling of abilities. As gear gets better the gap will continue to grow.

Trion's answer to this? Create a new DPS Mien for all DPS specs that increase Single Target base damage by +25% and reduce healing 20% while under the effects of this Mien. This is a nice increase now, but when the game adds new gear the gap will once again grow.


It is sad that the Cleric Dev doesn't seem to understand this. I don't know if he raids at all because all the changes that he has suggested actually hurt raiding clerics.

I don't want to level another character or spend time getting marks for gear again. I am letting my subscription run out and going to get SW:TOR when it comes out.

The dip-shits are taking over the game too. The "mantra" against Clerics are "you are a cleric, you heal, you don't DPS". That is not the game that I signed up to play. I wanted to play a game that allowed classes to spec into different roles. There may be a "best" for a certain encounter but multiple classes are able to fill in multiple roles.

I'd tell you to quit this hunk of shit and play Star Wars when it comes out, but you probably already know this.

in fact he said that's what he was going to do :p

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Then my work here is done!

So what is the least broken class (and least likely to be broken) in SW:TOR?

Here is why I ask:
I was a Ranger in EQ from Vellious through OOW

I was a Hunter to start WoW (They were god-awful at first through the first revamp in 1.7?)
I then played a Paladin from 1.6 through the first big patch of WotLK. Yes, pallies got some serious love in BC and to start WotLK, but they still had many issues.

Then I play a Cleric in Rift.

I don't want to play a class where the Dev is absent and the class is always behind the curve on performance.