Good game, but...

MCEscher

I'll start by saying that I like Rift. I play it fairly often. I have a level 50 Warrior who has some raiding gear and two tiers of planar attunement. It's a good game, the dungeons are fun and I enjoy logging in and using the LFD tool to run an instance or three. I like to tank. However, I do not raid very often because of my personal life - I just can't play on someone else's schedule, I get interrupted too often.

So, with all that said, let me talk about some of the problems with Rift:

- Balance. They are slowly improving this, but they often break as many things as they fix. There is an issue that one build from a Calling will turn out to be much better than the others, sometimes my margins of 10-40%, and that means you basically get forced into that specific build if you want to be a good player. Rift's unique character system really falls short of its promise. Whether you want to tank, heal, or DPS you will often find there is only one build you can use if you want to be effective and not short your team by making something which you may enjoy more thematically, but will ultimately irritate the people you group with.

They are working on this, though. Rather than letting people come up with their own combinations and try to balance them all to be equal, they are trying to give 3-5 different 'optimal' builds to the different Callings (Warrior, Mage, Rogue, Cleric) so you do have some options and versatility. So while this still doesn't live up to the promise of being effective in any sensible build, it does give you some choices. Unfortunately not every aspect of the game is at this point yet - for instance if you are a Warrior and you want to tank, there is one build that is 20-30% better than every other build so you're pretty much expected to use it in difficult content.

 

-Difficulty. Once you have played a while, like me, there isn't much difficulty except in high-end raiding. The raids can be very challenging, but if you're not in one of them there isn't much to do. The issue is that once your gear even slightly surpasses the Expert dungeons - which make up the vast majority of the on demand, small-group content Rift offers - they become jokingly easy. Mechanics can be ignored in the boss fights and sometimes groups don't even need designated healers, or fully-specced tanks, to complete them. On one hand this is good, because it solves the issue I described in the 'Balance' section. It means you can play whatever you want, because the content is so easy. The downside is just that - it's too easy. They have designed Master Mode dungeons to fix this, but there are only two of these so far and there is no way to use the LFD tool and find them. 

 

There are some good things going in Rift. The Rift system, the invasions and the alternate series of gear you must obtain to be efficient (your sigil/machine and its essences provide the biggest stat boost of any item in the game) give you something to do while solo, particulalry running Instant Adventures, which are sorta fun and sorta mindless. This gives a nice break from running instanced dungeons. There is a lot of gear to get, because you will probably want to gear out more than one role for your character. Warriors need a tanking and DPS set of gear, for instance.

The team also works very hard and gives a lot of feedback on the forums. They update more frequently than any other game I've played. However, they also seem somewhat incapable of truly balancing the options within a Calling as well as balancing the Callings against each other. Even after a year there is a long way to go, and because they have made the decision to nerf as little as possible (yay!) and instead bring everyone else up to the "over-powered" problem, they have created a situation where the difficulty has become too easy.