I had been playing Rift for the last 5 years but with the release of their latest expansion, Starfall Prophecy, I called it quits. I really wanted to like the expansion but I felt like there were more cons than there were pros. It also didn’t help that a handful of the friends I still played with also had no interest in the game (‘cept Kirb, ilubb.)
When trying to think of the biggest gripe I had, I couldn’t even pin-point it. While I appreciate the work the developers did with some of the legendaries, I just felt like it was a band-aid fix. I was also extremely disappointed on some of the souls that never had a rework prior to 4.0’s release. Sentinel and Purifier were two souls I was really hoping would see some love, especially Sentinel give that it hadn’t seen anything for improvements overall (and most importantly on it’s scaling) since 2012. Yeah, that’s right, 2012!
Even so, the legendaries are goddamn imbalanced. It was infuriating in PVP trying to deal with this. And according to the forums, it still is a massive PITA with some souls being buffed/nerfed and then of course various bugs with interactions. PVP is a damn shitshow. And I really loved Rift’s PVP for years.
The other thing is the lack of content. This expansion is just so mind numbingly boring. Three new dungeons were released, one of which is an Intrepid version of a vanilla dungeon. I have no problems with bringing back old dungeons for max level but I have a problem with skimping on dungeons overall. I can understand not immediately releasing a raid (and even reducing it from 20 man to 10 man) but how can you think so few dungeons was actually worthy of introducing into the expansion?!
And then there’s the severe gutting of the QOL aspects of Rift. Removing of an NPC in Tempest Bay to allow you to convert crafting marks around. Or how about the godawful crafting cooldowns that were introduced (albeit changed with a recent hotfix at least for Apothecary.) Or removing Void Dust from the Rift Store to purchase and still leaving it in all NT recipes. But the biggest annoyance has been the comment that we’d be swimming in plat for SP but then there were major reductions to plat earning w/ other methods but no actual compensation made for SP related content. There’s a reason that REX prices in-game are sinking and that’s because people aren’t swimming in plat. They have no damn plat.
But the one thing I can say that I actually hate is removing the tertiary stats from gear and introducing the fragments system. I dislike the concept of them and anything about them. I would rather farm for the piece of gear that I want than rely on RNG system that’s dependent on how much plat you have or don’t have.
tl;dr I really enjoying Legion; I miss Rift still though.