Rift – The post 1.2 plaque grind

It has been a few weeks since the release of Rift’s 1.2 patch that brought an end to my beloved daily quests and the rise of the LFG tool. I complained quite a bit about it and have continued to do so off and on. I thought it would be fair to review the issue now and reflect on my original opinion. I also thought it would be interesting to see if the opinions of others may have changed now that they’re seeing more of what the plaque grind is.

Less Plaques Still

Beyond a shadow of a doubt I as an individual am getting less plaques per day than I was prior to patch 1.2. Not only am I getting less plaques the gear I am trying to purchase costs more. To this point I still say there is no reason other than an intentional plan to slow progression of players that weren’t already raiding. It is far to easy to blow through all of your bonus awards and end up stuck with only one a day. This severely reduces the amount of incoming plaques each day.

More Plaques

On the other side of the coin my guild, as a whole, is earning more plaques. Due to the relaxing of the difficulty of the zones in question we’re able to form more groups and run more people through. We now can run parallel groups instead of waiting to form more ideal parties. Each individual is earning less but guild-wide we earn more per hour. This also allows more people to be involved in content and that is always a good thing.

Repetition is Repetition

To say that Iniquity is running a lot of dungeons is like saying the Cookie Monster only kind of likes cookies. We are running a metric ton of instances on a daily bases. We blast through any tier two without much trouble and do so repetitively. We have no other choice. To get the gear we need for Greenscale we have to keep the new people going through the dungeons. That means those of us that are ready to go still have to run the dungeons. They present no challenge, frequently don’t offer any reward other than plaques, and are really starting to lose their appeal. Interest in waning and I can tell that if we weren’t just on the cusp of pushing into raiding we’d risk losing some people. We have already dropped a few. I have to ask again: is this really what Rift should be? Is this worth it to slow progression down?

Drop the costs

At a minimum I still think we need to go back to the old plaque costs. This would at least reduce the repetition. I know I am not the only guild leader that wants to stop running people through huge sums of repetitive dungeons and risk losing them to more entertaining things. We make them fun by cutting up but when you run two CCs back to back and get the exact same drops off every boss both times you really start to wonder.

At least the tool works

I will give Trion some positive feedback on getting the tool working. We’re now able to queue up without any trouble. Our members who were unable to queue have figured it out so it at least works for us all. That gives us access to the bonus plaques until we run out of them and are stuck getting a mere ten per run. That is a whole lot of APs to get a breastplate.