But wouldn’t you think that making the basic questing experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible would be a priority? That the devs would err on the side of making mobs too easy to kill rather than too tough? Now, as I’ve said before, this might be a result of the increasing difficulty of balancing the game as players get access to more powerful and diverse abilities and equipment. And it’s not that the mobs are too difficult otherwise, just that they have enough hit points to rival other MMOs’ raid bosses.Įarly on in RIFT, it was a sheer joy to play these classes because no matter what your build, you could have a lot of fun mowing down packs of mobs and gradually improving your spec.

And that’s my hardest-hitting build - the build I actually like takes a half-minute or longer for a single mob. Every fight, I have to punch about a dozen separate buttons, and my hand does not thank me for that. My highest DPS build on my Cleric - a primary Defiler build - takes about 20 seconds to down a single mob, and that’s after putting about 10 DoTs on it. But it seems really, really high here and mobs take wayyyy too long to kill. It’s not the first time that RIFT started in with the mob HP inflation the past two expansions were guilty of this too. Packed-in mobs with huge hit point pools equals no fun for anyone. Every time I play I feel the urge to rant about how simple it would be to fix this: decrease the mob density and cut mob health down at least by a third.

The problem is that, as I’ve said before, the mobs make standard questing onerous and a chore. It isn’t the smaller scope of the expansion. The core problem isn’t the story of Starfall Prophecy, which is - to me - somewhat interesting and occasionally surprising. So I keep making an effort to love this game, but RIFT seems bound and determined to make it hard for me to do so. Genuinely great guilds aren’t always easy to find and I do enjoy the companionship that they provide. I swear, if it wasn’t for one of the warmest and friendliest guilds I’ve ever been a part of, I probably wouldn’t log in at all these days.

Morelike, it’s been weeks of logging in to do minion quests and then getting quickly frustrated with the combat and then logging out. It’s been a good long while since I talked about RIFT here, and that isn’t because I’ve been so enraptured by Starfall Prophecy that I couldn’t bear to rip myself away to jot down a few words.

Starfall calendar november 2018