Machiavellis Cat was formed in 2005. I was level 35 at the time. I had been looking for guilds to join but none of the available options really appealed to me. My goals were to find a group of people that would: a) not use slurs; b) encourage intelligent interaction; c) run Mauradon with me. My recruiting mantra was “only people that I would have a beer with in real life”. I remained the guild leader from May 2005 until.. yesterday.

I’d been thinking about it for a while, of course. Most of my guildies don’t know that I came right up to the brink, planning succession with the officers, shortly before Cataclysm. I backed off because it didn’t seem right to leave in the middle of pre-expansion doldrums when my recruitment experience was needed the most.

Almost ironically the instigator this time was this post by the lovely Larissa of the Pink Pig Tail Inn. I am the Anonymous who posted here, yesterday. Almost as soon as I left my comment, I started to ponder it. I’ve talked about stepping down quite a bit in the last six months. I had felt for a while that raiding was more of a chore than fun, and real life was starting to close in on our Eastie-friendly raid times. Maybe… maybe I should take my own advice.

So here I am. Liore, citizen.

Six years ago I was not in the best place in my life. I was in a very strange and negative job environment. I had recently lost my closest friend to a drug addiction, and since I had moved for said job I didn’t really know anyone in the city. I was in the middle of a pretty powerful fugue of depression and anxiety. I didn’t talk to anyone. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t like to leave the house. I hadn’t even had a haircut in a 18 months. I was a mess.

Guild leading was not the only thing that helped me get better, but it certainly was a large part of that. When I first started recruiting I would actually hide in a dark corner of a building in Ironforge before advertising MCats in trade chat (yes, I started as a trade chat spammer) because it was too scarily close to public speaking. But I did it because I wanted a nice guild, and if you wanted a nice guild you had to get out and advertise so I was just going to have to suck it up and get it done.

Over the years I learned how to have difficult conversations and how to deal with the burden of making difficult but correct decisions. I learned about group dynamics and communities. I developed a knack for advertising through recruitment posts that serves me well in my current job. A few years ago I had an ex-guildie go off the deep end and publish horrible, hateful things about me, and I learned that I can survive that. I have met over 35 guildies (with more to come this summer), arranged three real-life meets, designed swag, wrote loot policies, interviewed strangers on Vent who applied to us. And some of those people even became my honest, real life friends.

Everything isn’t perfect now of course, but for years having the title of guild leader somehow gave me the extra fortitude I needed to move things in the right direction. And now.. I don’t need it anymore. I could possibly contort my life to accomodate raiding and guild leading again, and in the past I would have, but that would have been a bad decision. I almost feel that guild leading was like a brace that did the essential job of keeping me upright for the longest time, and then the bone mended. It feels.. really good.

I was a pretty damn fine guild leader and community builder, if I do say so myself. Now it’s time to see what Liore, casual WoW player, proud Cat, and hopeful human being, is capable of.

Last night myself and two other guildies decided to head to the PTR and check out the new troll instances. The executive summary of our trip: while I’m still kind of meh on more recycled content, Zul’Gurub is a pretty fun little instance with some mechanics we haven’t seen before.

The PTR
PTRs are strange little clusters of the WoW universe. Everything is selling for 10 gabillion gold on the AH, and uber angry hardcore kids end up mingling with windowlicking premades who can’t figure out how they blinked into a corner. The PTR, anyway, has a queue option for “any random Zandalarian heroic”. Terrifyingly, it took ~3 minutes to get two DPS for our team. Not many people were queueing for the new instances, but there were a whole ton of people LFM for ICC which makes no sense at all. After sloughing off the first two lame puggies we got a warrior and warlock who knew their stuff, and we were off!

New ZG vs. Old ZG
There are a few areas from old ZG that are blocked off now, like what was once Jeklik’s room (bat boss) and Mar’li’s cave (spider boss). You can’t get into Mandokir’s old area, but both he and his raptor are out front for you to fight. The tiger boss is no longer present but instead somewhat surprisingly replaced with a giant void miniboss. There are still fights in the  panther room and Jin’do’s corner, but they are with different characters. The old alchemy boss is now an archaeology boss. Hakkar’s ghost is on his platform, but the actual final boss is.. someone else you’ll recognize. I didn’t have a chance to check the old fishing knoll, but I was eaten by a “Spawn of Gahzranka” at one point so he may still be around.

Frogger and Other Gameplay Elements
There are a few tank and spank fights in Zul’Gurub, but there are equally a lot of neat new concepts. There are at least two moments where trash has “Frogger”-like elements, requiring players to weave around obstacles on the fly.

Sprinkled through out the whole instance are cauldrons that imbue the players with a particular helpful power for 30 seconds. These are, if I recall, nature resist, a freezing stun, and an AoE fire nova. These are always extremely helpful if not downright mandatory for certain trash pulls, and one of the bosses requires you to run around clicking the right cauldron at the right time.

Gear
It’s the PTR so I didn’t really pay that much attention to gear, but the new panther boss did drop shoulders that will be my next upgrade unless Cho’gall stops holding out on me. Each boss dropped one epic, except for the last one who dropped two.

Difficulty Level
So my party all had good gear with a number of raid epics. Three of us had not run the new ZG before, but the same three were also on Mumble with each other. It’s hard to say how much my group reflected an “average” group, but I can say that this instance was pretty tough! I was often very low on mana, and there are a number of things that cause a great deal of damage to the entire party at once.

My opinion is that as of last night’s PTR build, Zul’Gurub is going to be quite difficult for your average LFD user upon launch. My guildies and I found it to be a really fun challenge, though, and we’re all looking forward to trying Zul’Aman out soon.

Still here! Still raiding, still rocking things in the face until they die in RIFT. Plus I have a copy of Dragon Age II burning a hole in my Steam library.

If things go well we should have a Nef kill tonight or next week. We’ve got Phase One down smooth. It’s mostly about positioning, and the bulk of the work in that department is done by the Onyxia tank. We have a 40% success rate for P2 right now, I’d guess. There are two issues: interrupts, as a missed one = blast wave = more work for healers already on the brink, and jumping on that stupid pipe.

Can I just say here that I HATE JUMPING PUZZLES? Hate. I sucked at Mario back in the day, I sucked at the jumpy levels of Doom and Quake, and I suck at jumping on the freaking column in Nef. As someone who takes their own contribution to the raid quite seriously, nothing is more disheartening than bobbing up and down in the lava, slowly watching everyone die.

Our few P3 attempts have given me the impression that it’s quite reasonable, although it will take a bit of practice.

And yes, for those regular readers, after a disastrous first few attempts I do give healing assignments. (And the raid leader has a spreadsheet for pillar teams, but that is why he is the raid leader and I just talk about dessert in healy chat a lot.)

Anyway, that is not the reason I am posting! I am posting to say that I have started up a new website thingy with a focus of gaming, genre* movies, and geek-related internet oddities. It lives at prolixity.org, and y’all are welcome to go read things and click buttons and stuff. Thanks!

* “genre”, for those unsure, means horror, fantasy, sci-fi, exploitation, and those other subjects that you never see at the Oscars.

So I’ve become unexpectedly attached to RIFT. I still raid in WoW, still hang out on the guild forums, still stay up on the patch notes and whatnot. And I’ve been playing with guildies almost every day… just in Telara.

I didn’t even expect to still be playing RIFT, honestly, after the head start. Despite some of the more exuberant praise of the game you can read on other blogs, RIFT isn’t revolutionary. It is not the “3.0″ to WoW’s “2.0″. Instead it’s an amalgamation of everything you’ve liked about MMOs from the last five years: ample quests (WoW!), public events (WAR!), fancypants graphics (Age of Conan!), slightly more advanced crafting (LotRO!). And that’s fine! It’s fun to play an MMO that really seems to have learned from its predecessors, if it hasn’t exactly built a new foundation of its own.

The one exception to this is the soul (class) system, which I come to appreciate more and more every day. Trion’s unique design means that each and every one of the four classes can tank, and three of them have the ability to heal or off-heal. (Can warriors off-heal?) So let’s say you’re a stabbin’ rogue doing an instance when the tank DCs. What do you do?! Easy: switch specs to the Riftstalker one you have in reserve and tank that sucker yourself! At the low levels you don’t even need to switch gear, although I can’t say how much that will hold up at the end-game. No more waiting around for a tank and healer — it’s pretty ingenious.

Even if most of the gameplay isn’t new, the game itself is. After six years with WoW it’s kind of fun to have unseen zones, new quests, new characters, new lore. I don’t know where anything is.. heck, I don’t even know what all my buttons do. It’s refreshing to not be in Azeroth some nights. (And that sensation was only reinforced by the 4.1 announcement about ZG and ZA. While I think both of those instances were pinnacles of raid design in their time, I’ve kind of killed those bosses before. A lot. A lot, a lot.)

Now keep in mind that I’m saying this after one week at the robust level of 18. (A bard, for those playing along at home, and I luffs it.) It is entirely likely and perhaps even probable that I will get bored of the game before nearing the level cap of 50. As I’ve said before, the quests are not very interesting so far, and I have no first-hand experience with the instances. Perhaps they’re boring or too easy or something.

And certainly a huge part of it is that newbie leveling doesn’t require a policy-weilding guild leader with a vision and recruitment and schedules and man it’s fun to shirk responsibility and just jump in circles for a while.

There are reasons why I’m enjoying RIFT that have nothing to do with the game itself, and those reasons will likely dissapate. However, I think it is very safe to say that right now, today, at this moment, I am enjoying RIFT a whole hell of a lot more than WoW.

Liore can be found vacationing on the Byriel-US server in RIFT as Accolade, the Defiant Bard. Feel free to say hi. :)

In the first few years of running the guild I would get anxious whenever someone mentioned another game, MMO or otherwise. I would try to slyly discourage it: “Oh, Aion! I hear… it gives you rickets.” Over the years, though, I learned from experience that there is room for more than one game in most people’s lives, and even if a Cat DOES leave WoW for another game (this has only happened once, though) few people ever actually leave our community.

I do feel a bit like I’m cheating on WoW when I play another MMO, but I really enjoy checking out other games, particularly at their launch. Despite its popularity World of Warcraft is not the best MMO currently available. It definitely wins in some areas but loses in many others such as crafting, cosmetic items, and honestly just some of the core gameplay.

Anyway, all this is just a really long preamble to explain how and why I found myself in the RIFT: Planes of Telara beta over the past few weeks. I played in the beta at the end of January, and again over the weekend in the Open Beta.

a dwarf rogue, kinda

Character Options: I did enjoy the character creation menus, although honestly it’s painfully easy to beat WoW on this front. There’s a height slider for certain races, two-tone hair colors, and options for things like eye rotation and nose size. The array of races seems interesting, too, from dwarf-ish to big giants elves.

Classes: This is one of the places that RIFT shines. You can make a warrior, rogue, cleric, or mage — but wait! You’ve probably already read the details by now, but essentially you have three talent trees and an almost unlimited number of spec options. That means you end up with healing mages and tanking clerics, and a rogue could be be a stabber or a hunter or a bard. Eventually I’m sure the community will math out ideal specs and set the dogs loose on anyone who does not comply, but until that point players can enjoy being truly unique (if not always efficient!). Over the weekend I made a bard/riftstalker who by level 9 could stealth, blink, buff stamina and attack power, and AoE heal a raid or party. It was a blast.

Gear: The gear paradigm of “pants on males, bikinis on females” is alive and well in RIFT, and honestly it seemed a lot more obvious than in WoW. At one point my adorable rogue sold off a chest upgrade because it looked like it had been sexily mauled by a bear. Cleavage is one thing.. melee in a half-shirt and no pants is something else entirely. The esteemed Spinks noticed another example. Guardian faction, in particular, seems to have a surplus of slutty elves. (I leave it up to the individual reader to decide how they feel about that.)

Quests: Honestly, the quests were not that impressive. It’s the “rails” style of questing that Blizzard introduced in Cataclysm, which I don’t necessarily dislike. However the quests are a little obtuse sometimes, and they’re just not interesting. Kill 10 of the local mobs. Collect 10 trinkets from different local mobs. Now kill their leader! Great, go to the next town. I know people complain that Blizzard’s questing is heavy with gimmickry now, but I LIKE those gimmicks! RIFT is seriously lacking in their equivalent of bombing run quests or vehicle quests or something that doesn’t involve just killing ten rats.

Graphics: I hear the graphics in RIFT are awesome, but I wouldn’t know because the game brings my 18-month old video card to its knees. I play on the Low Graphics settings. It makes me sad.

Rifts: These are fun!! I know they liberated the public quest concept from Warhammer Online, and I feel sure that one day Blizzard will liberate that concept from RIFT. As a social gamer, I like seeing everyone in a zone stream out from the trees to band together and kill bad things. The spontaneity of the events is also a blast.

All in all I don’t think RIFT has done anything that much better than WoW. If you are looking for a first MMO, or you have very tenuous ties to WoW and want to play something new I think this will be a fine game to make your “main”. For me there’s certainly not enough to warrant moving me or the guild. I expect I’ll play for a month or two, have some fun, and then move on to whatever is new and shiny then. (Helloooo, Dragon Age 2!)