It is not without a certain amusement that I greet the news of CoH's Issue 20.5 Incarnates Ascend launching today. Try as I might, I cannot help the impulse to scan through the CoH boards, though it's now more of a morbid curiosity. As usual, the hostility that has become customary is present through nearly every thread topic even vaguely to do with Incarnates. Some remark that at least the dissent is growing less each day. I have to grin wryly at the thought, as that only suggests people are either quitting or giving up.
The slippery slope tumble has gotten worse. I note, again with some amusement, that there are now a couple variations on the outcry. The major one is the Incarnate trial-gated costume unlocks. True, it's a global unlock. It's also ridiculously steep. And it involves massive repeated grind of oh... count 'em. Three trials. The minor one was some bitching about getting very very sick of grinding two trials over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
No kidding. WELL, says the optimists, now you have a THIRD trial to play! Oooh. For the next 3-6 months.
Fun as it may be, let's put the sarcastic irony aside and take a long hard look at what I am doing in Rift.
While I have the option of leveling up my other three alts, or starting in on my second account's baby cleric in my ambitious little multibox project (I couldn't help it, Rift was on sale, and I was $25 away from a fiery horsie, I ride the $25 shiny pony wherever I go now - the only thing that makes it different from WoW's sparkle pony is that I get a second account with all that potential inherent within), what I am actually doing is choosing to grind.
I'm steadily doing the crafting dailies faithfully. This usually means sauntering over to the forge, clicking on the requisite option, buying the requisite items from vendors, and waiting for a bit, before riding over and paying the porticulum fee (ooh more money sink) to wherever I'm supposed to FedEx the bits of armor to. The biggest challenge is trying to free up 15 spaces in my inventory to fit the boots and pauldrons and thingamjigs. That or I run out of the metal ore, which leads to some aimless riding around looking for nodes.
I do enjoy that little sense of incremental progress wherein I rack up tokens, wherein they can be potentially exchanged for recipes that will eventually benefit my alts. (And one or two awesome pieces of armor to look forward to in the future, provided I can level up enough crafters or buy mats on the auction house for it.)
It's done in my own time though. And doesn't take too long. Ditto some level 50 dailies. Now and then, I run and do them to earn some money and increment some faction. I don't feel obliged to complete them everyday if I don't feel like it though. If I miss it, I miss it.
One notable point of irony is that after biting the bullet and installing a combat parser to track my own progress in dungeons - I have been embarrassed enough by my own performance dps-wise mostly, I do a very decent healing (though no one has ever called me out for it, thank goodness) to test out a cookie cutter spec popular on the forums.
My performance raised from about 200-250 dps to 350-400ish, with relative equivalency in heals. The tradeoff, alas, was my pet, my ally heals and my silence. Granted, dungeon running really doesn't need the pet to complicate matters with positioning.
I miss the ally heals, as I feel a little more helpless to help out in spot healing, but given that most healers run around with 2-3 healing souls, they probably DON'T need the 'help' unless they've lost link. And I contribute more damage to make things die faster, lessening the need for spot healing. I just miss it all the same, it's a different perspective, now one is focusing more on one's individual performance over looking out for someone else's health bar.
And the silence, oh I miss the silence too. Everytime a tank fails to position the caster properly, I used to love to throw it. And the mob would amble obligingly over to clump up. Except that if you wait, the tank can probably use LOS, or use his own 'pull mob' taunt, or just take long enough that the caster will amble over by himself, or you could burn shit down fast enough that you can walk over to caster and burn it down before it can do much damage.
I guess I have a support/tanky mentality that turns out to be not quite necessary under the circumstances.
To take the testing further, as the cookie cutter spec is supposed to exceed a lot more than 400ish dps, I bit the bullet again and put in the recommended macros for single-target and multi target aoe damage. Dayum. My performance (mind you, this is dungeon tested performance, as I have very little patience to sit and spam a combat dummy, I just took it out for a solo test drive before queueing for a random dungeon) went up again to around 500ish dps to 800 easy on multiple targets.
Let's face it. I can hit the number '1' repeatedly a lot more times without having to pause and think about which combination of keys to press X, 1, 2, alt-1, c, shift-c, and in which order they would be best at. All I swapped out was the basic melee spam attack, leaving the other keys available for me to fire them out of order if I chose.
But I found that more often than not, it was much easier to just hit the macro over and over and let the computer figure it out, if I was in range but not in melee range, then shooteth the ranged attacks. If I was in melee range and my reaction was up, shooteth it without waiting for my GCD. And the faster the reaction shoots off, the faster it goes back on cooldown and cycles back up again. Actually pausing to react and note that it is up, and picking the right reaction key (Z) takes away 1-3 seconds in which it could have been on cooldown cycle. And the macro fires off all the big heavy hitters first, promoting frontloaded spike damage, before cycling in the weaker skills to bolster the damage until the hitters come off cooldown.
And all that, without too much loss of potential offhealing power, as the justicar soul converts all the damage I do into aoe and tank healing. The only thing lost, as mentioned, was my two direct ally burst heals. I would either have to spam doctrine of loyalty to hit everyone and consume extra mana, or transfer righteous mandate before using doctrine of righteousness. Still doable. Just a bit more taxing.
The tradeoff though, was probably worth it.
Yes, in a way, it is kinda sad that most of my combat performance can be reduced to the choice between a single target and a multiple target macro. On the bright side, it does help me focus a little more on positioning for boss fights, and it bodes well for my eventual dream goal of multiboxing 2 or 3 or godhelpme, 5 characters for the sheer hell of it. If performance can be reduced to a couple of macros, then bring on additional complexity by driving more characters, eh?
The other thing that I have been steadily striving (read grinding) towards is the improvement of my gear to the point where I 'qualify' for tier 2 dungeons. This really boils down to queueing for a random tier 1 dungeon over the last one or two weeks and crossing one's fingers that we can complete the dungeon, and luck into getting nice loot drops, while earning little plaque of achievement tokens that can be used to buy passable or nice level 50 equipment (the passable equipment costs a lot less, of course. the nice equipment is probably on the scale of grinding a ton of Incarnate trials to earn.)
I may have done 8-10 tier 1 diungeon runs, normally one per day, though on weekends, I do two or three, and on some weekdays I skip 'em. Most of my equipment has now progressed to the point where there's about as much purple as blue, which I -think- implies that I might look fairly decent a beginner now, instead of a total embarassment, and I have started to bite the bullet (so many bullets to bite) and pay a couple of platinum for rune augments on the auction house to improve the gear just a teensy bit more. (Which I think is basic WoW101, except I am broke and never had the benefit of a WoW background.)
Now how is this different from Incarnate Trials, and why am I (more or less) enjoying one but allergic to the other?
Well, for one, dungeoneering for me is a learning experience. I've never done it before. It's a small team of five people, which makes it a little more cozy, and yet each person is also more integral to the team. There are five tier 1 dungeons that are randomized, and each is an increase in difficulty/complexity over their normal level counterparts - so it is a mixture of familiarity and yet new learning at the same time. Generally, the polish is there, Trion has got its doable ladder just right. And the loot drops are a good mix for all four classes, so there's a good chance that you will win a nice loot drop every 1-2 dungeons, in addition to the tokens.
Incarnate trials on the other hand are an exercise in large masses of people herding and coordination. In which if the team fails to coordinate, they can be failed/lost/wiped.
Granted, in both cases, a few people in the right overleveled gear can make the difficulty trivial and 'carry' the rest of the party through. But I think it's just the large masses of people that get to me.
I went for a crafting raid the other weekend. Or a long series of crafting raids. About 20-40 people, milling around in Shimmersand, riding to the nearest rift tear and waiting for some people to open it with a crafting lure, and then desperately trying to target and hit ONE mob with ONE ranged attack so that it recognized that I was present before all the mobs fell over and died. And out popped crafting loot like candy. Repeat ad nauseam until your bags burst.
Ok. So it was pretty easy. I much rather easy than hard as hell when in a big group, to be honest. Because it was easy, I put up with it, and greed was a big incentive.
But y'know, I didn't really like it. I much preferred it when the raid had diminished to about 10-15 people, and there was actually a bit more time to react, heal the tank, and overall, get some team synergy going before things died. And I'd probably like it a lot more if I had a regular group of 5 people in which to do the rift with - which was the appropriate number the crafting rifts were set at. Throwing 5 more people at it just makes it easier. Throw 20 more people at it and it goes past trivial to the point of damn, it's so hard to get a fair reward distribution. :)
Maybe I just don't like mass chaos. Who knows.
Maybe in CoH I just expected a lot more than the usual standard MMO dungeon grind, whereas in Rift, I knew what I was signing up for when I paid the monthly sub.
Maybe as a seven-year vet in CoH, I feel obliged to be leet and catch up with the Joneses, whereas in Rift, if I can learn enough to not look like a total n00b (and not get screamed at in the process), I feel like I've already accomplished a ton.
Different set of expectations perhaps. I don't expect that I'm going to collect every single piece of shiny armor in Rift. For all four classes. Whereas if I don't get all the shiny stuff for CoH in a reasonable amount of time, I was going to be quite unhappy. Why? Because CoH was never about separating the haves from the have-nots. Elitism is the world-killer. And CoH's issue launches imply that you have to be so-high in order to see the next bit of story or unlock and so on. Which puts a time limit on the grinding.
In Rift, the steps to unlock and progress are all there. In fact, they seem to be nerfing each prior step as they unveil the ultimate toughest step for the hardcore to gnaw on. So it becomes easier for the slower to eventually catch up, or at least realistic enough a possibility.
And I like that the gear is itemized to suit one's interests. If you're a PvPer, you have no use chasing dungeon/raid gear. All the cool Valor stat to make you more immune to player damage and do more damage to players is on PvP prestige gear. Dungeon/raid gear means you chase toughness/hit/focus in order to do more mob damage or resist mob damage. Shiny costumes with no meaningful stats are unlocked through faithful grinding of soloable dailies.
Certainly it makes more sense than unlocking emotes and shiny costumes through grinding Incarnate trials repeatedly. *cough*
Who knows, maybe I will tire of the dungeon / raid grind pretty soon. Most of what I'm doing now, I'm doing because it's new. I haven't seen all the tier 1 dungeons pop yet. There's still Lantern Hook to go and to learn and see and earn the shiny achievement that says been there, done that. If I had to sit and farm them all, then that would be much dodgier a question. The thing is, it seems like by the time I see all the tier 1 dungeons, I might be well equipped enough to go to tier 2 dungeons and learn a new set of five dungeons.
I feel like I have a choice in my progression in Rift though and the pace of it. If I felt like soloing, I could grind some faction with solo quests. If I feel like a group, then I'll do a dungeon. There's no pressure to go OMG OMG Hammerknell Raid, all the cool World Event shit is inside, come, let's all go to the instance!!!1!! The World Events seem to be a little more carefully crafted this time.
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