In another jab at the PvP crowd I reached rank five in Rift on Saturday! By playing part time between raids and with a whole lot of losing I managed, without potions, to go from two to five in less than 30 days (not played, just dates). Now the real work begins! I have to earn slightly more prestige but the truth of the matter is, nothing changes. Six is just as easy as two. You just have to do the same inane, repetitive tasks more often (not to suggest that Rift PvP isn’t fun. It is all games). In my time as a PvP player I’ve learned some really interesting things! I’m actually getting better and learning the strategies behind the various warfronts. Unfortunately my team doesn’t always follow those strategies but, as I said, it doesn’t matter. You can fail your way to rank eight so why not embrace it?
Battlegroup whoopsies
I’ve discovered what seems to be like a mistake on Trion’s part. In my battlegroup (the collection of servers that you can find in your PvP war fronts) Briarcliff, a PvP server, has been included. Now I have to ask, why would a warfront mix PvE and PvP servers? Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of people we play against are from Briarcliff and they’re all running premade groups and invest a lot of energy in PvPing. Suffice to say, they have a pretty big advantage over the “fail to eight” crowd. There are plenty of PvP servers, and I truly think they should get their own battlegroup. I prefer to play against other people who are on the same level as me: recreational PvPers. Leave that hard stuff to the “red server” crowd. They shouldn’t be treated to easy kills! Oh, and before you say, “But you’d get Guardians from Briarcliff too and that will balance it out,” let me stop you. As best I can tell there are six guardians on Briarcliff. The ratio of them vs defiant in warfronts is about four to one.
HammerKnell gear is overpowered in PvP
If you’ve ever uttered the words above you’ve never actually participated in Rift PvP in a meaningful way. HammerKnell gear doesn’t have any valor on it. I don’t care how high your statistics are. If you don’t have valor you’re going to did. In fact, I invite any HammerKnell geared person to try and prove me wrong. Outside of the weapons the gear is junk for PvP. This incessant need for “better gear” for PvP players is simply insane to me. There is still a massive gear gulf between rank ones and rank eights. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: in a one on one fight the chances of a rank one defeating a rank eight is near zero. Adding more ranks and gear would just make an already frustrating situation even more frustrating.
Rank eight gear is horrible in PvE
This is more PvP player propaganda. I’ve spent some time looking at my tier one raid gear and the rank eight armor. As soon as I’m rank eight and have the appropriate amount of favor my tier one raid armor is going in the trash. But Ferrel, rank eight armor doesn’t have focus on it. That is correct, it doesn’t! I’m a purifier and heal a tank. My required amount of focus is 0 and, honestly, the argument is still limp. You can easily get 300+ focus on your “right side” items and on runes. For Akylios the gear might not work but by that point you’ll have some HK pieces to replace it with. Going in, however, you can’t beat it and, as I’ve pointed out, you don’t need any skill to get rank eight. You just need to be willing to invest time.
I have skillz
I’ve been enjoying watching “highly skilled” marksmen just spamming fan out in warfronts. Nothing like just standing there and AoEing constantly into the enemy. What is fun is getting behind them and beating them senseless while they continue to shoot on. The same is true with mages using void life. It doesn’t take skill to do that either. They all make a great argument for skill! At least they’re easy to defeat. There are some pretty awesomely skilled folks out there but, in general, there are just a lot of folks like me, failing their way to rank eight. We should have our own special warfronts!
All characters are © 2007 - 2012
How can it be humour when it’s true?
Void Life (if it’s the skill i’m thinking of) at least takes charge to use, so the Mage has to use some other skillz :p to get access to it (unless you mean the 51pt Chloromancer skill, and it’s been an age since i saw someone running 51 Chloro in a warfront).
Do people really make either the claim about HK gear being too good in PvP, or PvP gear being rubbish for PvE? I only gear up via PvP (and highest alt is only R6), but any of my alts can kill raid-geared enemies: their 44 DPS weapons are getting 35% damage reduction due to my valour; my 31 DPS PvP weapons are getting 0% damage reductions; and PvP gear always seems to have greater amounts of endurance on.. thus they don’t win, even against my R3 alt.
The prevalence of MM spamming Fan out *is* very amusing – Fan Out, prior to 1.5, was so weak no-one even had it on their hotbars; in 1.5 it was so OP that all you needed to do to do decent DPS and high survivability was spam Fan Out – but in doing so you negated the *real* benefit of MM, which is very high burst DPS O.o – and in 1.6 it does decent DPS and has no impact on survivability (apart from saying ‘hit me, hit me’).
There are still 20 billion rogues in warfronts though; looks (in my battlegroup) that the memo announcing that mages are our new gods hasn’t been widely read.
I think the pve thing is based of weapons mostly. No reasonable person is mad about someone having Aky relics in a war front, but anyone serious about pvp knows you need a set amount of hit to offset some different class combos. This leads to HK weapons in general being better with a full set of pvp other stuffs. I am not sure that is a problem honestly, same as i do not think using a pvp weapon in pve is huge issue. Someone that spends 1000 hours in pvp and 1000 hours in pve should outclass a person who does just one or the other. The function obviously breaks down when someone does 2000 hours in one or the other, and I am not sure any game could ever solve that in a realistic fashion.