Postcards From Telara

Whachu lookin' at? It's a chainmail skirt. So? Go look at my almost nekkid faerie instead.

One of ubiquitous rifts that pop up of nowhere. Purple-black = death rift. Also seen water rifts.

This is an invasion. NPCs from the Guardian faction are attacking one of our quest hub village wardstones.

I understand that rifts and invasions have been cranked up to the max in this beta #3. There were certainly a lot of them spawning. It hasn't got to a ridiculously intense level yet (apparently it can, I saw screenshots of maps where 10+ invasions were all over the map) but yeah, quite a lot of them. Fortunately, there are a lot of players around as well.

I wonder what would happen in a scenario where much fewer people were around. The rifts do not close by themselves when ignored. They send out invasion forces into the quest hubs. I have seen soloists reluctant to take on 1 elite + 2 lieutenants + 4 minions - which is very understandable because even my 3-heal wannabe tankcleric gets overwhelmed by the damage. All the NPCs charging you at once and running you over is kinda off-putting. So we kinda dart around the edges, waiting for someone higher level, preferably one of the beta max capped level 20s to get bored enough to tank. If no one comes, we wander off.

Then the invasion force hits a town. The NPCs do help, fortunately. So it's a little easier to single-pull one away from the NPC and fight that. And in a town, chances are more likely that there's more than one player around. So far, 100% of the invasions I've seen have been stopped. But I do wonder what happens if things drop to one soloist in the lowbie zone and the invasions overwhelm the NPCs... then the poor soloist has no quest giver to turn in anything, no way to kill the invaders. Will they just give up in a huff?

Boredom and tedium may also set in. At higher levels, it may be worthless to bother with a low level rift. Even on a rift of appropriate level, one may get tired of gaining the rewards - which are mostly rift/planar based consumables - I haven't used any yet, being too lazy to analyze them and keybind them on my hotbar, they may come in handy fighting rifts in specific, which is a nice touch, giving activity-appropriate rewards.

I have to admit, the game is growing on me somewhat. Except that I understand the endgame is raid-based rifting and dungeons - which would be irritating if folks ended up forced back into super-specific class roles and get ordered around by one or two raid leaders and necessitate the joining of guilds, etc.

It would be nice if rift-based raiding could be a world-based an affair as the current rifts... BOOM, a raid rift opens, someone sees it and sends out the call, and everyone converges into it. But chances are more likely for the former to evolve than the latter though.

Pfft.