Also, no matter what the dungeon drops, everyone is able to walk away with something. Each expert dungeon boss drops “plaques of achievement” (tier 1 bosses drop one each, tier 2 bosses drop two) which can traded for epic gear from vendors in the main cities. There are tier 1 and tier 2 armor pieces for plaques (20-50 plaques for tier 1 gear, 100-200 for tier 2 gear), so even if you are exceedingly unlucky, you can eventually save up for gear just by collecting plaques. There are also daily expert dungeon quests for both tier 1 and tier 2 dungeons which award 10 and 20 plaques respectively. While other games certainly have similar systems, I always appreciate the system anew when I encounter it in an MMO, as it cuts down on competition between grouping players to “win the gear roll” when a piece they want drops.
Rifts, the dynamic content I’ve detailed before, have a similar system. There are expert raids your party can open (with the right materials) where you also have the chance to get epic loot. Expert raids recommend at least 5 people and are more difficult than the minor and major rifts that require no reagents to open. The group that opens the expert rift receives a chest after completing critical stages of the rift. This chest contains a rare or epic item for players to roll on. Players that are not part of that group can also participate in these expert rifts, but they will only receive standard rift rewards and no have access to the item chests.
Beyond expert difficultly, there is also raid difficulty. Raid dungeons are 20-person dungeons where all participants are expected to be suitably geared out in mostly tier 2 dungeon equipment. Raid rifts are 10-person rifts with the same kind of gear requirement. At this time, I haven’t had the chance to try out any of the raid content, since I’m not yet geared out in tier 2 expert dungeon equipment. There is certainly plenty to do endgame in RIFT, and most of it is group-oriented!
One last thing I wanted to give a mention is world events. To promote a new raid dungeon being put into the game soon, Trion’s kicking it off with a world event. For almost a week now, death rifts have been opening across the world that are story-related to the raid being added in (the River of Souls raid). Players of all levels can participate to progress the event and, in doing so, gain special event currency which can be used for unique loot (of both functional and cosmic kinds). It’s pretty cool to see players of all levels working together for an event, and I’m looking forward to seeing the world event progress through future stages.
Are any of you folks out there playing RIFT? What co-opportunities are you liking the most? What do you think of the world event and expert and raid dungeons/rifts?