Quick Hits: Early May Edition

SOE

I did not intend for the meltdown at SOE to be the only thing to read about here for a week, but RL sort of snuck up on me. I was actually in NYC most of last weekend. On the subject of the SOE meltdown, it is now starting to seem that all SOE games are going to be down at least until June. As Wilhelm notes, this does not bode very well at all for their future. I can't help but think most of SOEs stable will have lost a decent hunk of customers by the time the servers go live again.

Rift

Sunday afternoon I made it to the ripe old age of 31 in Rift, an Elementalist with a dash of Dominator and a few points in Stormcalling to get my crit rating up with air spells. I have to say that the Elementalist only seems to get better the longer you play it. Whether due to me sucking less or due to my build coming together, I have had very few "close calls" recently.

Magaera and her pet Kronk

While Rift may not be the most innovative game on the planet, Trion certainly stole the right mix of ideas from previous MMOs. The resulting admixture is still gelling really nicely for me. I also don't think they are getting nearly enough credit for the small tweaks they have added here and there. For example, the crafting dailies to get epic recipes, the ability to customize recipes by boosting the one stat of your choice, and the ability to deconstruct items for mats are all nice additions to their otherwise WoWish crafting system. Likewise rifts may be very similar to PQs from WAR, but the fact that they scale to party size and come to you instead of always occurring in a fixed location makes all the difference. Having a rift open up on top of you when questing, or having riftspawns overrun a quest hub really does make the game feel more dynamic than most MMOs.

LoTRO

Speaking of MMOs that don't get enough credit for small innovations, I'm still playing a good bit of LoTRO. Due to the generosity of one of my kinmates last night, I finally got my first level 65 second age bow. I promptly disassembled all of the LIs I was leveling, which gave me a good number of legacy replacement scrolls and numerous assorted slot-ables for it. I'll need to level it a bit more before it will be able to fully replace my maxed out first age bow, but it already has a slightly higher top end damage.

Shiny!

I've also been having a lot of fun in skirmishes. Lately the system has been clicking for me in a way it previously didn't. My skirmish warrior is becoming a force to recon with, he's almost hit max level and is fully traited out (though many of his traits are still in the teens). I decided to make him a dwarf (a purely cosmetic choice), because dwarves are tough and know how to party ;-)