Rift Headstart with a Side of Destiny of Velious

Due to a recent change in policy at work, I had yesterday afternoon off, so I figured I’d use that time to jump into the rift headstart.  I’ve decided to go with the Multiplaying.net crowd’s “Circle of Trust” guild on the Faeblight server, so when I 1st logged in I picked that shard and. . . estimated 5 hour queue.  I expected a queue, but 5 hours?  Yowza!  So I started clicking around on various other shards and found one with a mere 20 minute queue on it and started to wait on that one.

While I was waiting I logged in to EQ2 since it was “Free Server Move Day” for up to 5 toons and I’ve been wanting to move at least a couple of toons off Oasis and over to Antonia Bayle.  I’d actually done the prep work for them to be able to move in the morning, so at this point it was largely just a matter of logging in the toons I wanted to move, grabbing the coin, and using it.  Sounds easy, but my EQ2 client tends to crash when it’s supposed to go to the character selection screen, so there was much restarting of the client.  On the bright side, this let me watch the queue for Rift easily since it was sitting behind the EQ2 client, so when it crashed out . . there was the queue countdown!

Once the queue was done I made a toon on (I think it was) Dimwood server and started running through the tutorial zone.  realized about halfway through that since this wasn’t my “preferred server” that one could argue (and I am “one”) that I was wasting my time doing it, but it all worked out becuz they brought all the servers down a few minutes later for “performance tweaks.”  I still had 2 more toons to move in EQ2 so I logged back in there to do that.  Once done, I went back to Rift andf checked Faeblight and it was only showing a 40 minute queue!

So I selected that and pulled up Hulu to catch up on Castle.  I’d missed 2 of the 3 past weeks, after all.  The counter fluctuated a bit and actually went up to over an hour, but then started to drop at about 3 positions per minute and was actually only about a half hour, all told.  So I still have to catch the end of the episode I was watching later, but such is life.

Surprisingly, the tutorial zones were fairly empty.  I guess with the throttled login queue keeping people logging in relatively infrequently and only half-ish picking a faction that it made it seem. . .there were people around yes, but at the end of the zone the public groups for that fake rift event was only me and 1 other person 3 of the 4 times, and we had 3 people on the 4th time.  Yes, I made 4 toons in order to reserve my names that I wanted.  With the removal of the racial characteristics other than a little fluff spell, I found during the open beta that I prefer the Eth (Human) sprint ability to the Bahmi (Barbarian/Orc) leap, and I didn’t like the Kelari (Elf) fox illusion at all, so. . .I have 4 Eth toons.

I’ve already run the tutorial zone many times in the beta, so I just blasted through with each character, which easily gets them to level 6.  In the actual starting area I immediately ran to the mailbox to get their mounts.  Grabbed the harvesting skills I’d want for the planned crafting classes and started trying to get as many resources as possible, since that’s been the bottleneck on the crafting in the prior betas.  Between last night’s session and an early morning one today (baby woke up and once I had her back down I knew I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep before my alarm went off) I have the ability to craft items to level 11 for all of them now, but the characters are only level 8 or 9, so there’s a bit of growth to go before I can be “fully kitted out.”  Which is a good thing, IMO.

This morning there was an armorsmith getting server discovery dings for the T3 crafted items.  Pretty impressive to be making level 23 gear already, I thought.

As it is, for me I’m going to try to get my toons all to level 11 at a minimum this weekend to be fully geared up.  I will probably try to get the “main” (my mage) up to level 16 and do a few runs through the Iron Tombs as healer (love that Chloromancer!), and if I have time, might try to get 1 or 2 of the others to level 13 to be able to start their soul quests.  Time will tell on that.

Happy gaming wherever you find yourself!