Well well well WoW 4.3 looks funnier than expected

Yes, I'm teasing, this is RIFT.


Tonight I had insomnia, so I drifted towards WoW news, found out that 4.3 is coming to Europe next week, and found my old character has ALREADY got transmogrified.

Yes, Netcownt armory data features the T4 I used in the last days of my June playing, together with my purple 359 items. AH AH AH !

On a more serious tone, patch 4.3 looks fun.

. A new Dragon Soul raid will be able for randoms. I don't know if that will play well or not, but I'm willing to try and kill Deathwing.

. There's a promising legendary questline for rogues, so why not check it ?



. A new Darkmoon faire is coming, so may be I'll make a few more decks to get me to exalted !

. There's a void storage, finally the guys at Blizzard realized that a lot collectors like myself had their banks full of crap they wanted to keep, e.g. for vanity usage. Now, with transmogrification, it will pay off. A pity it's only 80 slots. I think I have the whole bank main slots + 5 x 16 bags full of that stuff.

. And last and best, three new dungeons to fool around and piss off those "I take it seriously FFS". That looks GOOD ! After all, when was the last time a new dungeon came up ? More than 1 year ago, for sure. ZG/ZA doesn't count !



Guess I'll have some fun December, alternating between WoW 4.3 and RIFT as I level up from 25 to 50 on my warlock-necromancer-chloromancer-mage.

D'rifting towards Star Wars

While waiting for SWTOR to get going by Christmas time and thanks to a promotion I decided to see Rift in full. 5 Eur for 30 days of discovery is cheap. Graphics for the 2nd zone 21-29 Gromwood are fantastic. It looks like Silverpine, it has pvp and the nightfall brings hostile undead like the village near SFK I used to have fun as a human lock during the day with pvp, before Blizzard ruined it.

D'rifting away

The last weeks I tried a few new MMORPGs, including (7-day free-to-play) Rift.

WoW.

Yes. it's WoW. A better Wow. It's Warhammer. A better Warhammer. It seems a bundle of all the MMORPG's since 2005, packed together.



Stunning graphics, fluidity is better than WoW. FPS ? Quite configurable, from 20-40 in my machine, depending of the settings. It uses DX11, and unlike WoW, you can see it. Quests ? Same as LOTRO or the first WoW quests, you level up fast, it has some escorts, some grind, some walk-to chains. A bit too repetitive, but that's the nature of these games, the designers are afraid to run away from what they know people like or are used to.



I leveled a Mage/Warlock up to level 20, did all the quests in the first Silverwood zone, I went for PVP in their Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin (better copies), went for an instance (forgot it's name), visited their main city, and played both factions (Ascent guardians and defiants)



There are Rifts all over. It has public quests like Warhammer. It's more unpredict
able than WoW.
It has professions, I leveled foraging, alchemy and runecrafting (WoW enchanting).
It has guilds, I joined one.
It has LFG and battleground(Warfront) queues, I joined them.
It even has a Prince like Arthas. It's called... Prince Hylas. Guess why ?
It has a lvl 50 cap.
It has achievemens. Lots of them.
It has artifacts.
It has triple talent trees up to 51 points, so called Soul Trees.
It has world events, it seems like father Snowfrost or something is coming. Ha !
It has addons. I'll try their DPS/HPS meters.

All in all...WoW universe seems bigger, but Rift is the absolute best copy of WoW I've ever seen. Honestly.

Needless to say, all the people I played with are old WoW players. And ofc, like WoW, it's not F2P.

That's the bad news.

First impressions

This is supposedly illegal at this beta point so..

Well, cinematics are absolutely GREAT. It beats Blizzard by the mile.
The game is heavy. On my machine, I get 17 fps average, sometimes goes 30, rarely, sometimes goes 5 fps, on Alliance or Sith (Bounty Hunter - Hutta) starter zones.

So unless you got a 3Ghz dual core or so, forget SWTOR.

As I expected, for a ranged player that shoots from afar, the playability and realism is nice, lasers go back and forth, explosions are fine, killing moves too.

For a melee/jedi player, it sucks. You have to run to people that is shooting at you, slicing them with a jedi sword that doesn't kill them immediately, and there they stand, on their feet, point at you with a gun and shooting. It's laughable. As a Jedi, I went up to 3 mobs and all 3 were shooting at me for 1 minute or so as I sliced them slowly. Not realistic at all.

Quest cinematics are nice, you can go at a slow pace and listen to all the conversation and choose which answer to give (weird, the written answer and what the toon says most times are quite different, sometimes with different meaning).

I'm level 2 atm, so I'm not exactly an expert.

PVP seems to open at lvl 10, hopefully I get there this weekend.

I saw some people flying around with bike. Looks fun.

Overall... I've got a problem: SWTOR requires me to buy a new PC and to move all my crap to it. Good thing I tested this before I bought it.

Pedro Lucas Goes to War of the Stars

Ooohooo I've been selected to (stress) test Bioware's SWTOR.

A new adventure awaits me.

First things first. Install and set it up ! And then... lets go to War.