At the very least, everyone has access to a fifth new role slot, and an improved map interface that lets you know where major invasions are taking place throughout the world. Beyond that, the patch adds a server-based tool for finding random dungeon groups, a handy wardrobe manager, new types of rifts, and a host of other minor-but-noticeable changes. At first glance, it's all great stuff -- but it's all-too-clear after a mere week of playtime that the growing rift in the game's population keep these changes from reaching their potential.
But let's backpedal a bit. You see, I play on a server that's now so comically underpopulated that running a search for everyone in my faction's capital at prime time reveals only 15 or so people... and almost all of those people are in the same guild. My own guild evaporated in the wake of patch 1.1, and I've since resigned myself to begging for dungeon groups in the capital's trade chat. It hasn't been going so well. If text could echo, I'm quite sure you could have heard my cries of "LFG" mournfully reverberating among the arches of Sanctum. I once even got most of the way through Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech in trade chat before someone told me to shut up. It's not like this is some isolated case; several of Rift's servers now suffer from similar voids, to the point where diehards are making new characters on the massively populated Wolfsbane and Briarcliff servers. Yet, that spawns issues of its own: Thanks to a change in how long you can spend away from your keyboard before Rift kicks you offline, players on these packed servers can now expect to linger a couple of hours in a queue before getting to play.
This is a serious problem, particularly since Rift currently doesn't allow you to pay for server transfers or faction changes. In fact, it's a problem that spoils many of the best "spoils of war" offered in patch 1.2. I, for one, have no interest in creating another character elsewhere when I've already put so much time into my existing ones.
So, naturally, I saw the dungeon-finder tool as the Messiah for my troubled server. Rift's version allows you to queue for all three types of dungeons at level 50, in addition to rifts and certain group quests. It's also restricted to your server, which in theory means that you'll avoid the anonymous cross-server jackassery plaguing The MMO That Must Not Be Named (as many of Rift's players like to think of World of Warcraft). I'm sure this is true on Wolfsbane, but on my server, it means that I sit and wait for hours with no hope of getting into a group. Last Saturday, I jumped into the queue and did some daily quests, farmed some resources for a bit, tried to solo some rifts, and -- frustrated -- I played a bit of Dragon Age II while glancing over at Rift every now and then. In all that time (around three hours), my lonely mage was never pulled into a group.
Again, it all comes back to the population issue. I don't recommend opening the dungeon-finder to multiple servers (since I like playing with my server's four other Guardian players when they log on), but it's all-too-clear that merging a few servers would make the tool much more useful. Rift simply created too many servers at release to account for the inevitable drop-off after the free subscriptions expired, and now many of the excess servers are suffering for it. Merging might look like defeat, but I can't help but feel the game would be better for it.
Sadly, things don't get much better once you actually manage to get into a dungeon. Trion got a little vicious with the nerf bat in this patch, and now the game's tier 2 five-man dungeons (i.e. the hardest available) are laughably easy. On the good side, Trion's decision to reduce the health of non-player characters in each instance means you don't spend hours of your life clearing unnecessary trash; on the bad side, it means they weakened the bosses at the same time. And when you couple these sweeping changes with minor damage increases to almost every class, it means that formerly epic jaunts through the Realm of the Fae now sometimes feel like playing Care Bears: Care Quest. In my favorite example, our healer had to leave mid-instance, leaving our rogue to switch over to a healing tree that he was barely familiar with. I was using a new spec, and I'll admit right here that I really had no clue what I was doing with it. Regardless, the four of us plowed through the remaining two bosses as though we were running newbies through a level 20 dungeon.
This breaks my heart. I know the excuse is that it makes the dungeons more accessible to random players working together, but it removes the few challenges the game provides for non-raiding types like me (and mind you, I only avoid raiding because my guild disappeared about two weeks ago). Thanks to a severe reduction in the amount of plaques you get for completing an expert dungeon, it has the unexpected effect of making the instances much more of a repetitive grind than they were before. I've got a soft spot in my heart for Rift's expert dungeons, since they hark back to the early days of World of Warcraft, before Blizzard started catering so heavily to casual audiences. But now, if anything, Rift's dungeons seem easier at times. And when you toss in the enduring problem that they're just harder versions of the exact same instances that you plowed through while leveling, they lose their novelty altogether.
But hey, at least I look cool. One of the most noteworthy additions in 1.2 is the wardrobe tool, which lets you keep the cosmetic look of one item, even if you're really wearing another. I love this feature. One of the things I've always hated about World of Warcraft is that Blizzard still can't get a mage hood right after six years, but now I can geek out with Rift's better hood models and role-play a wizard in the streets of Sanctum... where, of course, no one is around these days to see me. Fortunately, Trion decided that you can only use the wardrobe tool for gear appropriate to your class, which means you won't see warriors tanking bosses in cloth robes. You only get one out of four costume slots free, though, and each new purchase grows ridiculously more expensive.
Patch 1.2 contained some minor content additions, most notably in the form of crafting rifts and a new type of rift called a Sliver. Crafting rifts are particularly fun since they drop a lot of materials for a particular profession, and you can only open them if you've completed a daily quest that awards a specialized lure. I hear it's best to do these with a group of four other people with different lures to maximize your return, but I've had no such luck on my own server. Slivers, on the other hand, are actually the game's first 10-man raid instances, which transport you to another reality so you can knock around some bosses for loot. The only one that's available now is a desert-themed instance known as the Gilded Sanctum -- but more are planned for the future.
All in all, Spoils of War breathes some new life into Rift... at least, on the servers that have more people than McMurdo Station. Apparently, these goodies simply weren't enough to bring people back to my pathetic little server, and I know that other servers haven't seen much of an increase in traffic either. The good news is that several of my complaints here might be out-of-date by the time you read this: Just in the last week alone, Trion has already released three extensive hotfixes that could pass as full patches for other MMOs, and you have to give the developers credit for responding so quickly to player concerns. As a result, I haven't even mentioned the pages of class changes here.
But Rift really needs some new great new content for 1.3 in order to keep people interested. The successes of servers like Wolfsbane prove that Rift certainly isn't dying, but it's hard to argue that a heavy pall of boredom isn't starting to hang over the whole game. This patch largely set things up for good things to come, and one could view the changes to the dungeons as an effort to cater to a more casual audience -- but even that audience will get bored with the current offerings if Trion doesn't release some new dungeons soon. In the meantime, however, re-rolling on a server with more than 20 players in my faction is starting to look more and more appealing.
Anyone looking for a good mage?
