[Opinion]Nightmare Tide First Impressions

Goboro Reef is the zone where the most important faction are the Atragarians.

I've been wanting to finish this post a while now, but I didn't had much time to play so it took a while to actually see enough stuff to form an opinion. At this point my brave warrior is at level 62 and already delving into Draumhein, so I'm finally able to speak my mind about the introductory zone of the new expansion.

First Impressions

Corals! A bunch of them. This zone is supposed to be the sea bottom, but due to evil forces most of the areas are dry and the water is contained in big water walls. This idea is actually good as the transition between dry and water areas is done seamlessly just by crossing those same walls. Still, underwater combat is tricky and generally not fun - good thing that's there isn't a whole lot of it.

Quests

Ysolda awards one of the dailies you can find at Atragarian Well.

Quests are not very different from what we're already used to in Rift. Not that's a bad thing. There actually seems to be a lot of lore going on with the fire plane and all. And it ends up with you celebrating and inflating balloons so... Also you get a cool rare minion for finishing the quest line.

As usual, almost every foe npc has a Carnage Quest associated and there are a bunch of them. Most of them are usually cleared just by doing story quests while others are a little out of the way. There's also a lot that consist in killing only one elite mob, easily soloable anyway.

In the beginning there's only one or two daily quests available but as soon you end the story quest line of Goboro Reef you end up with a couple more. On this zone there are daily quests that award notoriety with the Atragarians, Pelagic Order and Manugo League. In a future post I'll go into more detail about those dailies and ways to get notoriety with the different factions.

Nightmare Rifts

I still didn't had the chance to do a whole lot of these, but they seem nice. They do provide a lot of rewards as you mown down enemies throughout the levels. On higher levels they look like regular rifts on steroids, very fun to play. When you do one for the first time you actually might get overwhelmed by the amount of achievements you unlock but don't start thinking it's all fun and games: it won't be easy to unlock all achievements needed to buy lures for higher rank rifts. I'll add more on Nightmare Rifts later when I've done a couple more, hopefully with my guildies.

Manugo

Manugo "slot machines". It's hard to not get addicted.

I'm not yet quite sure what's this Manugo thing, but for what I've seen it mainly consists in making a "number go up" by using a machine. You don't win, you don't lose, you just make the number go up. The daily quest at Goboro Reef awards 250 notoriety (around five times more if you bought one of the digital editions of Nightmare Tide) for making the number go up 20 times. That's it. In my opinion so far, it's just an humorous feature added by Trion but let's wait and see what goodies you will be able to acquire with full notoriety or if there's something more to it than just making the number go up.

Professions

I was kinda lost when after leveling a bit my professions I noticed that there weren't any dailies at Tempest Bay, but it turns out they moved them to Margle Palace at Draumhein, so there I went, at level 60, running around avoiding mobs to get there. Still about the profession dailies: crafting dailies now cost much more platinum than what they award since you have to buy some expensive goods from the trainers to finish them and receive not even half of what you paid for. For instance, for Armorsmith you have to buy two itens that cost 1 plat each and you receive around 80/90 gold for delivering it, plus you don't get any box with goodies or extra plat as before. On the bright side, all profession dailies seem to award more tokens than before.

As harvesting profs I have Butchering and Mining. Leveling Mining is actually pretty easy as there are lots of Thalasite veins everywhere. On the other hand, skinnable mobs are not very common and as a result leveling Butchering is slower. Also you'll find yourself on a permanent shortage of meat (Briskets) for your daily Survival quest - good think my guild's bank has a lot of it.

Minions

Sending minions on adventures is very easy and many times awards sweet goodies like dimension keys.

I've been having a good time with my minions. At this moment I have 10 little creatures that help me by going on adventures and returning with artifacts, materials or little notoriety rewards. It is a very simple system Trion implemented, where you just have to match your minion skills with the adventure and send them for good results. As you get better minions you can match them with the adventures even better and reap improved rewards. If you end up enjoying this system you'll find yourself just logging to check your minions and send them on new adventures even you don't have much time to play. Maybe some kind of interaction with the minions is coming for the Android/iOS Rift application who knows?


I've been enjoying the game, but the major problem is that these new zones are very demanding and sometimes they lag and stutter a bit specially when there are a lot of people on the same area. Except for that (big) detail I'm really excited about this expansion and I'm looking forward to what Draumhein has to offer.

See you ingame,
Jimmie@Gelidra