From the beginning of Beta till now, rifts, invasions and zone events have probably gone through the most iterations of any aspect of the game. In the beginning anything that had to do with rifts rewarded players with tons of xp, planarite and other consumables. Since they they’ve toned down the rewards, boosted them in some places, touched them again etc. But all things have remained constant: once you hit max level, rifts themselves were pretty tame or low on rewards with the only exception of Rift Raids. Even on the Rift Raid tier, the gear was good as it was an equivalent to expert level gear and all end-game players ran these events for Lesser and Greater Essences and other currency.
However, the long term growth and usefullness of this system was limited. What motivation did you have to do any rifts at level 50 once your source engine was full and you were neck deep in 10 and 20 man gear? Well with the new addition of Planar Attunement, Rifts get a breath of fresh air.
I had found myself skipping zone events most of the time because they were either a waste of time for my Hammerknell geared character. Those who are less progressed in the game weren’t even doing them and they began to stagnate. A lot of events ended up being ignored entirely on some servers because there was zero motivation or reward. Now with the addition of Planar Attunement, I get pretty decent experience to fill up my grid. Not only that, but you get a decent chunk of the previously stingy inscribed sourcestones. With the new synergy crystals and they need for offspec greater and lesser essences, it gives me something to do.
As a side note: Why do synergy crystals use inscribed sourcestone rather than T1 Marks?
Since 1.5 went live, people now flock to zone events. Now don’t get me wrong, the content itself is amazing fun but I always needed some motivation to do them, and now I do.
Now that we have that motivation, Trion needs to step up their game and push out more zone events, and get them to trigger more often. They need to happen constantly in my opinion. I’ve been pining for this for almost a year now. Rift events is this game’s bread and butter. It’s content everyone has access too with zero barrier for entry.
I love the zone event in Silverwood where you have to destroy captains and big colossus guys and finally push to the center of the map to defeat the bad guy. Why can’t we get Alsbeth to pop her head out of River of Souls and our objective is to push her back? Instead of putting story in instances why not let it walk over the open world?
In the end I’m happy that Trion is finally giving Rifts a purpose again for all players new and old.
