Rift: Expert Darkening Deeps

Last night we did Expert Darkening Deeps for the Expert Dungeon Daily, and it was our first time. We have no idea what to do, but here are our experience. Our party setup consist of:

Rogue Tank
Chloromancer
Saboteur/Bard
Cleric
Necro-Lock/Pyro

Darkening Deeps is a dungeon at around Gloamwood [4892,2430]. This instance is quite trash heavy as you will have to fight your way around to get to the first boss. But after the third boss, there’s not as much trash mobs afterwards. When you first enter the dungeon, there will be a long spiral staircase. The way to get deeper is to go downstairs. However, you will also have to clear the top first in order to get rid of some annoying barrages and adds. So clear the top first, then when you hear a voice saying something about destroying his minions, go back down and clear out the place until you meet the first boss.

Alchemist Braxtepel

Alchemist Braxtepel comes with two henchmen, Mursh and Squersh, that you have to dispose before fighting him. He will not be able be attacked until the two of them dies. Whichever order you decided doesn’t matter, so put a 1 and 2 on them and take them down. Occasionally there will be a glowing red circle of doom as I would call it since it appears everywhere. This is your cue to get out of the circle and continue pummeling down those two until Alchemist Braxtepel decided to take care of your group himself. The tank should head to him and taunt/provoke it off right away since it may go straight for the healer. The tank should face Alchemist Braxtepel away from the group and the fight is a basic tank and spank. Occasionally there will be a green debuff on the group, I forgot if you can remove that or not but it’s nothing serious.

Fight some various trash mobs after this boss and watch out for stealth mobs around the waters. There’s a nasty pull near the watery area that can wipe the group if not too careful.

Michael Bringhurst

Michael Bringhurst is a pretty easy fight. Like almost all bosses, everything is easy once you know how it goes. What Michael Bringhurst does is gain a stacking buff whenever he is near the beam of moonlight. So what you do is tank him on the shaded area. However, there must also be someone within Melee range otherwise he’ll do a howling move that can wipe everyone. Since we have a riftstalker tank, whenever he walks back to the moonlight then fears everyone, he can easily Phase shift back to him immediately, stopping his nasty howling move. How do Warrior or Cleric tank then? Easy, when Michael Bringhurst runs back towards the moonlight, just have Melee DPS or the Tank be near him. OR if they have some way to break out of fear, use it and just tank and pull him back out of the moonlight. You DON’T want him to get the stacking to be too high. The funny thing is my necro-chloro can Consume the debuff off him and giving me almost infinite mana. You also DON’T want to pull him and run off too far without people near him since it will trigger the howling and wipe the group. Tank, Spank, Repeat.

Tenegar Deepfang

Tenegar Deepfang has a couple abilities that may or may not be a problem. Before encountering Tenegar Deepfang, you will have to clear your way towards the lair. This compose of many, many spiders that pops few at a time from these mound. They don’t have too many HP, and can easily be AoE down. However they can become a problem when there’s a lot of them coming in at once. There is also a set amount of spiders that can come from a mound so you can take your time killing them and then the mound. The mounds has around 60k-ish HP.

Back to Tenegar Deepfang. Another really easy boss. The Tank can just tank Tenegar facing the wall, while the healer and DPS just stand on the back of the spider. That’s it, you don’t even need to worry much about moving around. Tenegar has only 3 abilities. They are: a poison spray move, cocooning a player, and summoning spider adds. The poison spray move is easy to counter, don’t make Tenegar face the group or don’t stand in front of it. Only let the tank get sprayed solo. The cocoon may pose a slight problem if it gets the main healer but it’s not too hard to counter just either use all the CD on it if it’s on healer or just break it if it’s on anyone else. The third ability is summoning adds, which isn’t too bad since everyone is stacking behind Tenegar, the tank just need to AoE taunt and DPS can AoE them down.

Glubmuk

Another easy boss that pose no threat if you’re not new to expert dungeons. Glubmuk is a water elemental boss that has a few ability that shouldn’t be much of a problem. The room is rather small, but it is manageable. Glubmuk have a frontal move so the tank should tank it away from the group. Best way to do this is to tank it to a wall. It also have a move that place a water pillar sprout thing under someone’s feet. Move away from it, and a Fetid Spawn will spawn there. Have the tank grab it and focus the DPS on the add. If you want the achievement, just drag the fight longer and kill 5 Fetid Spawn then the boss.

The Gedlo Council

The Gedlo Council consist of 3 bosses: a Healer (Nuggo), a Mage (Gerbik), and a Warrior (Swedge). That is the order you should do it unless you want achievement for killing them last on different runs. The healer, Nuggo will cast 2 different spells. One is a barrier type spell and the other one is a HoT spell. Someone purge them away. The tank can just tank where they are and the rest can spread a little for when Nuggo dies. After Nuggo dies, Gerbik will gain a ground red circle of doom ability and Swedge will charge into someone. Swedge charge is rather weak so focus on Gerbik and avoiding the red circle of doom. After Gerbik dies, just kill Swedge.

Scarn

Now if you thought all those bosses are easy, you haven’t meet Scarn. He is one mean dragon. What this encounter consist is this nasty Heat Index that does DoT to everyone. You cannot dispell it, you can only try to prevent how much DoT damage you take by not igniting too much Bone piles. It will increase in damage the more bone piles is ignited so don’t ignite too many. Since we have a Riftstalker tank, it is rather easy to gather people around and igniting less bones piles when it goes to phase 2. In phase 1, the ground phase, Scarn will do breaths and tail lashes so under no circumstance should anyone be directly behind Scarn. The tank should pull Scarn towards the wall where he initially is at, but not on top of a bone pile because it will be ignited. The healers and DPS should go to the middle, and once again try not to stand on bone piles because it may get ignited should Scarn breathes fire towards that area. To make this fight simpler, have all DPS go ranged specs. After awhile, Scarn will do a Flame Breath move that has about 2-3s casting time and then does AoE around him and flies to the air. Since our tank is a Riftstalker, he placed his Memory Capture right on the other side of the wall on top or near the bonepile there.

Tips for Phase 2: Before actually aggro-ing Scarn. PRACTICE synchronized walking on the back wall. Have a designated person be the leader and place a number on him/her and have everyone follow/stack on him as you move. Keep practicing until everyone’s response time is fast enough to prevent getting spat by the fireball. If you have a bard, for phase 2 have him/her use Anthem of Competence for the running speed. It makes a HUGE difference for not getting hit by fireball.

Below is the positioning for Phase 1. The bigger red circle indicates Scarn and the arrow indicates the direction he’s facing. The black dot indicates a bone pile where you will be heading. The tank should be positioning in between two bone piles.

Phase 2 begins. For Phase 2, everyone runs to the Memory capture/bone pile that is situated on the back wall (When first taking down the elevator down to Scarn, Scarn is facing that wall). This is about the right timing and what the healers should do:

1. Chloromancer count 1 sec when you see the text saying it lift ups in the air. Use Wild Growth.
2. Cleric healer should AoE heal (or use your best judgement) when you see it lift up in the air.
3. You will see the red circle on the ground, everyone move to the next spot immediately and AoE heal and Flourish if need to.
4. It will do this again for 2 more times, after the 3rd time it will go back to the ground, and Phase 1 starts all over again.

NOTICE: It will ignite the bone piles over there and increases the Heat Index, thus increasing the damage you take over time. 10 Stacks is about 1000 damage DoT. So if able, the Chloromancer should use and try to force a critical Flourish near the end as well. Rinse and repeat until you take down Scarn. The bone piles will start to diminish after awhile since it won’t stay lit up forever so when it goes back to Phase 1, the Heat index will be lowered again.

Rift Rant!

So…here’s the story. We have this pick up group we did for Expert Runic Descent. The DPS was rather low when we did Eliam, but it was still doable. I explained the fight, everything was fine then the Cleric healer and a Rogue got hit by the Blinding Darkness move. It’s fine, maybe they didn’t see it. I explained again to turn around. The rogue got the idea of it and turned, however the Cleric didn’t. It may not matter for the healer, but what if it does? And the reason for him not wanting to turn around? This:

Just so he can do some more DPS to the boss. Even if he want to do more damage to it, he can easily just turn for 1sec!  1 whole sec and he can DPS all he wants on the kiting phase instead of running around aimlessly. Remember, he was a Cleric HEALER. I kept on having to dispell him. It’s so frustrating to carry people on your shoulder or hold their hands to do things. The guy wasn’t a good healer too and we invited him before and he quit on us one time before. This is what I get for giving people second chances.

I can’t wait until my friends catch up to us so we can finally have decent runs. Just a little bit more guys!

Rift: Expert Foul Cascade

Expert Foul Cascade

Krasimir Barionov

Like the standard version, this boss summons 3 phase of mobs at you. Clear them down and on the last phase of summoning, he will be consumed and change into a different mob. What he does is throw these AoE on the ground that you have to avoid and Tank and Spank it.

Matron Verosa

Also like the standard version, Matron Verosa comes with Lesch and Gurze. However, this time Lesch is much more annoying and does Staggering Blitz a lot more. Not too hard since it can be healed through. First knock down Verosa down some, then she’ll unleash Lesch. When Lesch is at around 75%, Gurze will be unleashed. Tank should face Gurze away from the group . After Gurze is taken down some, both will be unleashed. You can either kill one by one, or both at once for the achievement. Just remember to face Gurze away from the party and heal the Staggering Blitz. After both is taken down, Matron Verosa will take on the fight. She will do Death Storm like usual, which needs to be AoE healed. You can spread out, but the targetted AoE is somewhat large.

Surin Skenobar

Surin Skenobar this time is a bit different. Not only does he blink towards someone, he’ll also drop a bomb keg on the person. What you do when there’s a dynamite keg under your leg? You run. You run like hell. Oh shit, you ran into someone else! BOOM! Don’t get exploded by your keg or someone else’s or else BOOM! and no achievement for you. After the 5 kegs, AoE Heal up! Because the keg still does AoE damage. That’s all you need to know.

Sparkwing

Sparkwing is a flying birdy in a puff of storm cloud. He roams all around north east and south part of the map. He is quite far up in the sky, but if you see a lightning storm cloud that would be him. This is an easy tank and spank boss. What he does is PBAoE lightning move. So if DPS can go range, do it.  This is an Expert dungeon; people should have multi roles should they want to continue doing end-game for situation like this to make this encounter even easier.

Tephra Lord Maficros

Before you fight this boss, you actually have to clear an earth rift. This comes in a couple packs of spiders and scorpions. After that, lesser earth elemental (orelings) and these red earth elemental.  Watch out for the red earth elemental since it can do AoE move that hurts a lot, and can 1 shot. In this phase there will also be red glowing half spheres that pop around a random player. What this do is knock you up in the sky, damages you, and place a stacking healing debuff on you. Everyone should avoid it, esp the tank. When you finish the initial stages, Tephra Lord Maficros will spawn along with a sidekick that will unleash Queen Vallnara by knocking the 3 stone pillars down. You can ignore the sidekick and go straight for Maficros. Remember, the red sphere will still be there so avoid it. Also like the smaller version, it does nasty moves to close range melee, don’t stand in front. Ranged DPS would be good. Tank avoid spank!

Optional: You can kill the sidekick first before it kill the 3 things for an achievement. HOWEVER! If you do this, Vallnara gets corrupted and she’ll pop 2 spiders each instead of 1 every time she impregnates people. If you think you can handle this, ie: Heal is good and DPS is good then by all means do it. The sidekick has around 47k HP I believe. Since there will be a lot of spiders, the tank has to grab them all and DPS have to AoE them down since it will get nasty.

Queen Vallnara

This boss is annoying since the poison she spews out from her ass is barely visible. What you do is have the tank walk backwards around and grab the adds. If there are melee DPS, they better be sure they can avoid the poison by not actually meleeing at the back. They are a liability anyways so they should go ranged. Once it impregnates someone, there’s a short time the spider adds that spawns won’t do anything. The tank have to grab the adds and the one that got impregnated should be healed since it also applies DoT to them. Focus all DPS on the boss and have support heal and you can take her down.

Rift: Expert Iron Tombs

Expert Iron Tombs

Bloodmother Venoxas

There will be a new area right before Caor Ashtone. There will be two packs of spiders that need to be cleared before the spider’s lair. Watch out for getting locked out of the fight. Everyone have to step directly past the doorway in order to not get locked. Grab a support heal and the fight is simple, just focus all DPS on the boss.

The fight itself pretty simple:

• Tank it away from people.
• Occasionally there will be small and large spider spawns, the tank have to grab them.
• The room is an L shape, over time it will hop into a mound and summons more spiders.
• The second time it hops into a mound and summon more, it will have this green aura on it.
• The third time it summons, it will do an AoE move that can kill some people, so Line of Sight it after it summons.

Caor Ashtone

Caor Ashtone is just like the standard boss. This time it puts on an Aura of Decay on people. You can clear it by LoSing it for a short time. He also silences people and fear + DoT someone. Heal/dispel that person. That’s the basics of it, just Tank and Spank.

The Three Kings

Just like the standard mode, they all do the same thing. Just interrupt Laric’s Unholy Healing and you’ll be fine. However after you kill 2 of the 3 kings, there will be 5 adds at a time that appears from right and left. You can either go for the achievement killing 40 of them then the final boss or just go straight and kill the final one.

Bonelord Fetlorn

This is a new boss that appears at the orb and shades area. You have to touch every orb in order to open up the area where you obtain the amulet for your standard IT quest. The boss will emote two different things. If it said “blood boils” that means it will fear whomever it sees. If it said it wants bones, then it will summon a bone add for every person that it sees. In order to combat this, you can pull the boss to the entrance of that area and tank him there. Whenever it emotes either of those two things, everyone have to run behind the wall to LoS it. It will stop and pause for a bit, so when it comes back, you have to pull the boss back to the tanking area. The rest of the group can just go inside and heal and dps there and strafe towards the wall to LoS it.

Ragnoth the Destroyer

Also similar to the standard boss, you have to go towards Eliam’s light. However, this time it will snare people. The best way is to DPS/Heal right in the middle so you have a better running start from either side. Follow the standard procedure, don’t face the boss.

Totek the Ancient

Totek shouldn’t be too difficult to handle. Pretty much tank and spank except for his furious move. When you see the announcement/emote message, get away from there. It is a pretty large range AoE that can 1 shot. Tank the boss on a wall since it pushback. After the furious move, it will put a debuff on someone. What that does is after a few sec it will knock back the person and does a large amount of damage. Heal that person up and continue the Totek pounding. Rinse and repeat.

Rift: Currently on Rift

I’m currently playing as “Tata” in the “Dayblind” PVP server. I am currently level 35 Mage with Chloromancer, Pyromancer, and Necromancer roles. Because of these roles, I can easily change depending on situation and what we’re doing. I am Expert+ in Runecrafter, Outfitter, and Butchering. We made a guild called <Chibi>. It is currently a level 2 guild, and it is a friend’s oriented guild. There are only 4 of us that are here and are looking for people to join. We’re semi-casual and just currently leveling and doing dungeons. We did our three guild quests, but unable to finish the last one before they got resetted so we missed out on the next three; pity =(.

We just cleared out the quests in Scarwood Reach, and now deciding to head to Moonshade Highlands area for quests because we did all of Droughtlands in Open Beta already. And now to open up my boxed Collector’s Edition of Rift! See you in Telara, or until next post.

If you want to join our Guild contact Tata, Bonnie, Rukuso, or Sharwyn for invite. Our concept is to invite friends, and friends’ of friends. If you’re looking for a friendly guild, hit us up and let us know. We usually play anywhere between 3PM EST to 5AM EST.

 

Rift: Open Beta 7

Beta 7 was fun. Bonnie, Rukuso, and I manage to get to level 42 and have done all of the dungeon instances available. The Fall of Lantern’s Hook was pretty fun as well. When we first did it with some other people, we kept wiping and wiping and wiping from the guy that goes up the ramp and keep popping two dogs over. The Rogue probably sucked at pulling and constantly pulls links after links. The next time we did it, Rukuso pulls and it was fine. The boss there seems to throw cats at you. That’s what they said, but I didn’t actually look at it and see it ;( Maybe in launch I will do it when I get my levels up. Like with every other zone, we cleared all the zones completely. There was this one quest that was blocked off by the invisible barrier, but with clever jumping we manage to get to it and finish that one.

I’ll make this one short because it’s been awhile and I haven’t had time to actually write a thorough Beta 7 post because RIFT is here and more RIFTing and less of anything else!

Rift: Beta 6

Rift 6 came and even more improvements over the previous ones. There are less sparkles and graphic animations all around the world. There are huge changes to the class abilities as well as the racial abilities. My Bahmi can now take a leap and I am able to access areas where normal jump are not accessible. It is fun, hehe. This time, I completely abandoned my Warrior tank since we’re making Rukuso tank instead. I just focused on my Chloromancer because it’s fun and I can aid as a half DPS and support.

I didn’t abandon my Warrior until later on when I did the long series of quest in Titan’s Well. In this beta, I switch back and forth between my Paladin and my Chloromancer a lot. In order to level my Chloromancer up, I grind through the quest in Stonefield all the way to Granite Falls. Our group (Rukuso, Bonnie, and I) continue to do Deepstrike Mines. This time, it’s easier since we learn from our previous encounter. We got some more members to join and when we finally reached Gatekeeper Kaleida, we were able to kill it because we have enough DPS focusing on the Earth Crystal. Everything else is just Tank and Spank. After the instance, we were excited and so I told everyone, “Let’s go do Foul Cascade!”, and they agreed. Note that Bonnie and I are level 26 at this point, Rukuso is at 27 or 28, the other member (a Mage and another Rogue) are at 30. This is a group looking for disaster, as we kept doing instance at the worst levels possible.

Before we did Deepstrike Mines, I manage to find two things. One of them is the Telescope puzzle, the other is a cairn filled with random magical+ goodies for our level. I told Bonnie and Rukuso to come up towards me to get the free goodies and do the puzzle. It was fun! I only later found out that there are dancing squirrels in the vicinity and that is where we’re supposed to get the “Dancing with Squirrels” achievement. 😦

On our way to Scarlet Gorge

Not far from Granite Falls, we hopped our way towards Scarlet Gorge and on our way to the Foul Cascade (FC). Only to realize how far the instance really is from where we are. We have to reach all the way to the end of Scarlet Gorge in order to get to the Foul Cascade. We grab the Porticulum in Scarlet Gorge, and we all split apart to find the road and entrance to the instance. Aside from being a shared zone, these monsters can be higher level than us and various invasion and nasty treacherous danger can come at any moment. And I was right. I stepped into a Guardian area and the guards instantaneously 1-shotted me. It was hiding behind a wall and when I head towards a doorway, thud! After that I just soul walked and kept on going. Near the end, everyone was confused in how you enter. I started from the bottom of the gorge, and walk my way inside climbing the long passageway only to find out it’s not all the way to the top. I then head around and find the green dot and manage to portal in.

The zone greets us with two quests, we quickly accepted. The beginning was rather sloppy. Mobs would be roaming all around and aggroing us when we were fighting the Gnar Residue. First wipe happens, and it wasn’t the last. After we clear the trash mobs and the Gnar Residue, we head towards Matron Verosa. Bad Idea. The fight itself is pretty easy, but when Lesch starts to face rape random people (namely either Bonnie or I) things gets ugly. We wipe to it many times, trying various strategies with no progress. We were fed up being 1-shotted, and almost call it quits entirely. I then told everyone to do the other bosses before coming back to this one. We head on to Krasimir Barionov and clear any Gnar Residue we come into as well as trash mobs. Those bigass trash mob hurts, but we had no problem with a Cleric and Chloro healer.

Krasimir is relatively easy. The fight is about 4 waves. The first wave he will summon 5 Animate Corpses. The second wave he will summon 3 Reconstructed Corpses. The third wave he will summon 2 Reconstructed Abominations. These Abominations will periodically be buffed by Krasimir and will gain in size, take it down first. The final wave is Krasimir himself. He can cast Dark Touch that can have AoE DoT effect on the targeted person. They can be dispelled and pose no problem if the healer can keep up on the cure. He also cast Void Bolt and does an ability called Shout of Rage. Shout of Rage is a point blank AoE knockback ability. We killed it easily and were looking at the loot. Someone *cough* Bk, the Rogue, decided to touch the altar and a mob spawned killing him while we were enjoying rolling on the item. LoL. We head on to the next boss, Surin Skenobar.

As we head towards Surin, the trash mobs killed us when more adds aggro us. We soulwalked and resurrected and cleared them. Surin is pretty easy, just keep the heals up as she cycles her abilities. Her abilities are Shrapnel Blast (instant cast DD spell), Void Charge (longer casting spell which can be interrupted), and Hail of Bullets (teleports 5 times to random party member and attack them).

When these two bosses are killed we turn in our quest and head on to Verosa again. This time it was progressing smoother than before. We don’t know why though! We manage to get to Gurze, but then wiped afterwards. Once again stacking close doesn’t do jack since Lesch was able to 1-shot Bonnie or me with or without the Staggering Blitz move. We were in close range too, and it still did that. After many wipes and two soul mending, we manage to defeat her. Yes, the whole instance was like 2-3 hours and we all had to recall and heal our souls two times.  On the time we finally defeated Verosa, I actually died on Lesch phase as I got 1-shotted. I quickly resurrected and ran my ass back to the fight. Note that I didn’t walk all the way from the bottom to the ramp to the fight, because of my racial ability I was able to jump over a ledge to get to Verosa. We cleared the fight confidently as we are able to keep everyone healed up and with Lesch being dead. Verosa phase was semi difficult as she sent Death storm towards us. With Flourish and my AoE heal, and Bonnie curing, we were able to top everyone off rather quickly.

After the instance, it was a bit late in my time. We decided to do another instance of Deepstrike Mines, but Bk had to go. We replaced him with a DPS Warrior, and cleared the whole area rather quickly. Kaleida went down even faster than before.

This was the most memorable time during Beta 6. Like all other Beta I’ve played, I also submitted bugs and feedbacks. I didn’t really get to play much due to three things: My brother coming home, Chinese New Year (or Lunar New Year), and the Super Bowl. Hopefully I will play more during Beta 7 since I keep missing out the new content for each Beta. I’ll need to catch up and learn more before I play pre-release!

Rift: Beta 5

So…Beta 5 came and between Beta 4 and 5 I manage to drag a few friends over to play with me. Since they are all new, I made a new character as well to play with them. I decided to be a Warrior tank since one is going to be a Cleric, and another is going for Rogue. In the end of Beta 4, I played a Warrior tank as well until level 13. I didn’t know which soul is good for Paladin so I chose the default compatibility. The best thing about playing games is the ongoing learning process. You improve over your previous experience. Unlike in Beta 4 where I played a lot, I played a lot less in Beta 5.

We all woke up early and wait for the servers to go live. We had no problem because we got in earlier than most people. I was a Warrior, Bonnie was the Cleric, Rukuso and Castellano are Rogues. During this time, the server went crazy. Many people are having problems logging in or even get to the server list. Luckily for us, we manage to stay in the server without interruption. However, Rukuso got unlucky and he was stuck on the 49% – 89% thing. After a while, they patch up the issue and people no longer have problems.

When we’re high enough level we decided to trio Iron Tombs (IT). Caor Ashstone pretty much wiped us when I got stacks of Jagged Wounds and Curses on me. It wasn’t until later when we’re higher level that we were able to do this. I told them that Caor Ashstone drops a 10-slot Bag. It didn’t drop the first time we did it and Rukuso was like Liiiiiiiar! After the Three Kings, we were playing Ghostbuster and capturing the Spectral Screamers. Bonnie had to go to work so we didn’t have a chance to fight the final boss.

The next time we did the instance, we finally had more members! I was doing quests with a random person I encounter in Stonefield. When Bonnie logged on, we decided to go do IT for real this time. We grabbed another player and we went in. Everything went smooth; we split into 3 people tanking the three kings. Why? Because we can lol. I took on Derribec with my Void Knight sub soul abilities, Rukuso took on Laric, and the random took on Humbart. We all took them down about the same time. We did the Ghostbuster quest again because some of them didn’t do the quest before. Now, the fun part is the Orb room. I told them to hop from orb to orb! And we all wipe because there was so many shades. I laughed my ass off so hard. We took on the shades later after we resurrected by moving little by little until they don’t spawn much anymore. On the last boss, I told them I’ll be moving towards the light when Eliam’s Ghost popped up, but I never told them to get into the light as well. Well, we know what happens. LOL, a lot of people died when it did the AoE. We wiped or ran away to lose aggro. We cleared the instance after that of course and that concludes Day 1. It was very late and the sun was rising.

The next time, we did Deepstrike Mines. Once again we did the instance at lower than the expected level. Especially for Bonnie, she was our healer and she was about few levels lower than us, which was fine. The instance itself was pretty easy, except for the final boss. I was fooling around too much and I keep falling down and getting myself killed. Deepstrike Mines is pretty basic; kill trash, tank and spank, repeat. The first boss is the Overseer Markus. On the distance you see him whipping 4 Rotted Dredgers. When you engage him, they all come into you. Don’t get behind the red line since that will reset the fight. The first thing is to clear out the 4 trash mob then focus on Markus. At about 50% HP, he’ll split into 3 Shades of Markus, you then have to kill them all before he returns to battle. He’ll come back at the same amount of HP he left off with. Kill him and head on towards the next boss.

The next boss is Gregori Krezlav. He is a mage mob that doesn’t move. He just cast spells on the tank and summons Baneful Delver from time to time. At some point, three channelers will spawn and put a buff on Gregori to prevent any damage being done to him. I, being the tank, then switched target to kill the annoying Baneful Delver while the other DPS focused on the channelers. After the three channelers are dead, we then focus on Gregori. It was a pretty easy fight.

The next boss we encounter is Bonehew the Thunderer. He’s such a big boss. While not engaged, he likes to play with fire and blast that thing in the middle of the platform. He’s also an easy boss; just have to avoid his Seismic Smash which causes a huge frontal damage knockback move. Bonnie being the lower level actually got hurt more than the rest of us. When we finished killing him we head on down to the lower level to do the Eth Device quest. The mobs are annoying since they keep knocking you away from the device. It was funny being pushed away, and even funnier with those funny sound effects.

After we’re done with the quest, we face the Gatekeeper Kaleida. Well at first we didn’t know about it until we mess around. We were hopping all around the side and see if we can jump over the platform in between the gate. Rukuso took a leap and ended up engaging Kelaida. Now this is one of the hardest bosses we’ve ever encounter because of the Earth Crystal. Every time we took it down, it would just heal back up to 100%. We wiped a couple times, and then finally decided to quit when we didn’t have enough DPS to take it down. This was the last instance we’ve ever done and Beta 5 is concluding. In Beta 6, I no longer played Warrior and switch back to my Chloromancer because it was actually more fun.

In Beta 5, Rukuso and I did a lot of Black Gardens. We would pass the Fang around whenever we died to it just so we could win. I believe we did about 5-6 in a row, and only lost once or twice. I don’t know why, but every time I played it people don’t really know what to do. They would just constantly try to kill people and ignoring the fact that the Guardian has the Fang or even bother to grab the fang and go to a better defensive area. The strategy is to grab the fang and move it back towards your faction area and defend it. It may be a pussy move, and some wants to actually engage in fight, but that’s the goal. There are the attackers and defenders. Once the defender grabbed the Fang, the attackers can just engage the enemies that are coming. Here are some screenshots in the Black Gardens in Beta 5.

Rift: Planes of Telara Beta 4

When I first heard about this game, it was in Beta 3. It was during a short session when a Justin.tv (JTV) broadcaster casted one evening. It got me interested in the game as I search for more information about the game. Little did I know that it was in beta phase, and sign-up are available. I quickly signed up and search all over the web for these beta-keys to guarantee that I would make into the next beta. As an avid MMO gamer, I must try this game I said to myself. And I did as I got into Beta 4.

The first time installation got me a bit frustrated since I had problems with the installation. It was about 7 GB download, but it was fine since I’m downloading at my maximum speed. After the download complete and it installs, there was an error. Some file got corrupted or something and it wouldn’t continue. Perhaps it was because I install to another drive or perhaps a packet of download didn’t download correctly. I had to recover/download the whole thing again. Once again, it failed causing me to download gain. The final one works at least, and I am on the way to play the game on Beta 4 day.

I didn’t wake up early in time for the server to start up; I was about 2 hours late. One of my JTV friends also got into the beta as well. We were both excited the day before the test day. My friend Momo chose the Wolfsbane server, so I went with her. We chose Defiant. When I woke up, Momo was already out of the starting zone. I hurried my way as I do my starting zone quests. Of course, I also took the time to read the text and find out my way around. This is easy because the whole interface is familiar to me. It is about the same as World of Warcraft that I have played before, so it wasn’t hard to learn the system. Prior to the game, I did some research on what seems like a class, or Soul, I would like to play. I know I was going to be a Mage, and since the Stormcaller interested me I chose that as my main one I will spend more points on. The final battle was so interesting in the final starting area, it’s RIFTTTTT. Once I got out of there, I arrived at Freemarch. I followed my way towards the quest waypoint and all of the sudden this NPC just fall down, shocked by my presence as an Ascended. Lots of LOL ensues.

We grouped up and formed a mini two-man party. Various Rifts appears all over the place and we tried them out. It was nice to learn about these rifts and work together with others in sealing them up. When we’re at Kelari Refuge, I began choosing a profession (crafting). I chose Butchering, Runecraft, and Outfitter. It is nice making things we can actually use while we level up. We finished quests after quests and head on towards Meridian. After many, many hours, we obtained all of our souls. All of the sudden, the sky turns dark. This was our first zone wide major invasion. We took on the final boss and are awarded various goods like the Orb of Heroism, and 2 gold O.o. When we are finally high enough level, we went to try our first instance, the Iron Tombs (IT). This is where I learned about the Chloromancer, a healing mage that heals based on the damage they dealt. I bought a second role and chose Chloromancer main. It was fun, and we couldn’t have survived the first boss without it. Momo was a Ranger, Bard, and another soul I forgot. I was Archon, Chloromancer, Warlock. Those are very poor soul choices until I figure out how to actually play it later on. We did IT with her pet tanking, while her bard abilities and my Chloromancer abilities heal the pet. Now, here’s something bad, I never used Lifegiving Veil! Yes, being a noob is bad. I didn’t know how to use the ability until later on. Not only that, I never put any points into reducing the cast time on Bloom and Flourish. My only way to heal the pet tank was the long casting of Bloom and Flourish. We never cleared IT though, but it was fun either way. We finished every quest in Freemarch and have nothing to do except to head to Stonefield, but we never did. As the time draws closer to the end of the beta, we decided to play on the Guardian side and see that part of the story as a new calling.

It was nice being able to choose the Guardian as well on the same Server (Shard). I chose to be a Paladin tank and she chose to be a Cleric. The Rifts here on this side was very different. There are Fire Rifts and it was fun. We did the starting zone, and came out. We took on the Fire Rifts and finally ended the journey at the academy. Torturing students was fun, esp. being Defiant at heart.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Upon out of nowhere, I stumbled upon RIFT. Being a semi-huge MMO (RPG mostly) fan, I like to test around and try out new MMO out there. Let me talk about myself first about my gaming experience in the MMORPG category. It all started with Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds back when I was in high school. I started playing around the summer of 1999 I believe. The game still exists now, but I haven’t register for my account for a while. I usually re-register at least once every year for their anniversary event. I have also played other f2p MMO games, but not really fond of many of them. They got boring really quickly as well as hacks and bots all around. This is not to say p2p games don’t have such thing, but when someone pays for subscription they mostly will think twice before using such hacks since using them will cause their long effort in developing their characters into getting banned. I also played Final Fantasy XI Online since October 29^th, 2003. You can say that this is actually my birthday gift since the game went live on October 28^th, 2003 (which was my birthday). I preordered the game, but it didn’t arrive in my mailbox in college until a day afterwards. I am currently still subscribed to FFXI and enjoy the time with my Linkshell as well as many of the new expansion and add-on available. I also enjoy foreign MMO games as well. One game I played was Yogurting JP which is no longer in service. It was a school themed 3D MMORPG where you have to clear different classroom or stages in order to rank up and to go up a grade. However, due to lack of communication I didn’t play it for long. The last time I played it was when they introduce a new patch with the egg capsule machine. They’re quite fun since some of them dispense these card that makes you dance.

During the time in NexusTK, I made many friends and tried out many new online games. Some of them that came to mind were QuizQuiz and Ragnarok Online (RO). QuizQuiz was a short lived game that never actually went commercial. It just kinda stayed in Beta phase and then died off due to the lack of players. In QuizQuiz, you can configure your avatar as much as you want with items you buy. The main thing I remember about my avatar is that he has a big green bandana and is sucking on a lollipop. The main quiz game I play in there was actually Olla Olla, a typing game where you have to be very quick in typing the sentence displayed after every round. If you are the first to type the sentence, then your bucket goes up. If you fail to type the sentence or fail to type it in time, your bucket goes down. After certain amount of rounds you either earn IQ or you lose them by failing. There’s also a game called Survival OX, this is a True or False game where 32 players are pitted against each other. This is a battle of elimination where you choose if it’s true (O), or false (X). The goal is to be the last man standing by moving to the O or the X side. You can trick your opponents by going to the incorrect side, then at the last minute switch side. Another game was a game show type trivia game about computer and video games genre. Unfortunately all of the game except the Korean version died off, the Korean version got renamed to Q-Play. You can find the similar sprites in the Nintendo DS game called Ping Pals.

I’ve never really got too interested into RO. I did play in the Alpha and early beta, but didn’t get too interested into it until emulation of the server came about. RO was a grind fest…a huge grind fest. After certain amount of levels, it just got too boring to continue. I remember cheating in RO too. Yeah, I know I’m a cheater blah blah blah. In the early RO beta phase before you have to pay for the game, there are bots. APE (or monkey?) bot being the most popular one is one advance bot. It has a map of your location, and it set to auto walk around and kills things and pick up items while you are away. This is mainly due to packets being sniffed out and due to lack of security in the game. That experiment was rather short lived. The game didn’t really get too hooked; this is probably because of the lack of people I know that plays the game. I’ve always been a loner in the game and not many people to play it with. When emulation started for RO, I kinda jumped in and played with it as well. There was the AEGIS (real server that RO uses) and then there was the YARE. AEGIS was stolen and YARE was developed by a person. Early days of emulation of RO was buggy for YARE. AEGIS was also complex to set up since you have to have a dedicated system just for it and set up MySQL and whatnot. Took a long time to get AEGIS up and running, but it was worth if, for the short amount of time of messing around. In YARE, I was also an early tester of it and played a tiny part of bug editing but I was never a coder for it. I had zero programming skills. The only code I played with was the walking code. Back then in early YARE, there was this huge bug with walking around. You would always end up jumping back and forth or running slow. I only slightly fixed my compiled server by changing a line of code. I don’t remember what it was though. Being a GM is always fun, you get to summon a whole load of monster and turn on PvP…but wtf everyone tries to kill you as soon as you turn PvP on lol. Even though I was a GM, I am also vulnerable to attack, except later on, I edited a card that gives me 100% avoid so every hit always misses me. And then I stopped playing altogether.

Yet another game I play was Maple Story…except I never played the US version of it. That only lasted 1-2 days, the emote is kinda cute though which I had posted long time ago in my Xanga blog. I also played Gunbound as well. To those that have never played Gunbound, it is turn-based tank game. My first “tank” style game is Gorilla in the Q-Basic format. BASIC is an old computer language. Being a kid, I have absolutely no knowledge in computer when my father first bought a 486 computer. Since I have the freedom to mess around with computers, I learn computers through trials and error. One of the games included was QBasic Gorilla and Nibbles that my brother and I loved. We somehow stumbled into it and had fun playing them. Gorilla is a tank game, although not a tank, where you go against a second player. The goal of the game is to throw a banana into your opponent and kill them. You input the angle and the velocity and watch your gorilla throw the banana towards your opponent (or away…). The other game that is similar to it is Worms. Although I had the game long ago in this 1000 games collection that I had, I didn’t know about it until my friend Billy told me about it. I was hooked at first as well as Worms 2 that came later on. Worms was fun whether you play it against computer or players. In Worms, you move your worm and try to kill all of the opponent’s team worms. You have various types of weapons at your disposal and you’re supposed to knock down the health of each worm to 0. When they die, they also suicide and explode themselves so neighboring worms will get hurt as well. As for Gunbound, you have various tank available to you, and each tank have different supers and attack type. If the room owner also allows item usage, players can also use items when it is their turn to power up, heal themselves, or enhance their attack. Players can have multiple lives or team lives, and the player or team last standing wins the game. You also gain points to spend to freely customize your avatar.

Although I should test many new MMO games, not many really interest me. If a game really gets me hyped, I would actually go and play/subscribe to it. However, that is rather hard to get me hooked because I’m more into what things are there available to do, how often, and things like the maturity of the players. What is a turn down for me are the players in that particular game. If most of the people are being an ass, the game won’t be enjoyable and the game gets uninstalled. The community in the game is more important to me than the graphics and gameplay. It’s not to say that graphic and gameplay is not as important, there is just so much in consideration when playing an online game. As for now, I will slowly talk about games I have played, am playing right now, and future games that I may play.