Feedback about Rifts from a new player

I would like to provide some focused feedback about progressing my first two characters (Level 132 Hammerzon, Level 122 Melee Sorc) through the Rifts the game has to offer.

ISLAND OF THE SUNLESS SEA (110)

This area does a good job of introducing the uber challenges and areas to come. Difficulty and reward progression felt fine on both characters.

The Secret Cow Level (110)

It's the Cow level. It's actually quite fun.

Torajan Jungles (110)

Love this area. It feels diverse, fun, rewarding. Forest Keepers are slightly annoying with their knock back.
The best thing about the Jungles is the very direct sense of progression. You get to play this zone regularly from 110 to 125 when you need to traverse it on your way to Kurast / Teganze / Toraja. The difference in clear speed and power from my 110 TU geared characters to ~120 with some Sets / SUs was very noticeable and satisfying and made me look forward to further progression. As a bonus, the drops in the Jungles are also quite good, with lots of juicy Signets. Well designed area and great idea to drop the various connecting portals here.

Kurast 3000a (115)

Another great level that is very fun to run. There's just something enjoyable about crushing lots of skeletons and the sounds they make when they "die".
This zone also has the best monster density in the game.

High Heavens (115)

I see this more as a Dungeon with a boss objective that you complete and then never bother with again rather than a true Rift which you farm for loot and XP and it's fine for that. The mechanics in this area are slightly annoying but perfectly fine to deal with. I did not overly enjoy my time here and was glad when I was done with it.

Tran Athulua (115)

This rift is a bit of a gear check - and for that it's fine, even though it feels a bit cheesy and you need to eventually turn down the audio from the endless amazon dying sounds. I had a great time with both characters and ended up farming here from 115 to 120.

Teganze (120)

Teganze is a miserable experience for me. After some gear adjustments I can clear it just fine on both characters but it's just so unrewarding. The drop rate of the essences are too low for the fact that you need them both to craft runes (for which you usually need not just one, but up to 6 of one rune) *and* you need them to level up the Umbaru Treasure, which is no one-time affair either as you might need several attempts to produce a usable outcome. I ripped two Treasures after dropping a bunch of essences into it and getting nowhere on my needed stats and it felt crushing.

I love a good grind, but Teganze is too much for me.

The Triune (120)

While The Triune is not my favorite zone either, it feels a lot better than Teganze. For once, the boss fight is actually interesting, although I can't imagine running it repeatedly for the trophy as it takes just too long to navigate Lucion around.
The overall drop rate of cycles is fine - but good luck if you're looking for specifc cycles (in my case Dex ones), this can take a long time to grind.
On another plus side, there is a very rare drop of a Golden Cycle.

Duncraig (120)

Bit of a love/hate affair initially, but after a while I got accustomed to it and ultimately I quite enjoyed running it after my characters became powerful enough. Especially the Hammerzon has a really good time in Duncraig (thanks for the guide, Crash!) and achieves a very high clear speed.
What's great about Duncraig is the Sacred Unique / Sets drop rate. I leveled my Hammerzon here from 120 to 130 and managed to fill two mules with loot and gear up both characters significantly. The potential for dropping SSUs is a great boon as well.

The downside is that if your character is having a hard time in Duncraig then leveling to 125 can become a severe road block that takes a lot of grind to break through. With Teganze and The Triune being pretty bad for leveling, Duncraig is really the best hope and it can be quite frustrating initially on a weak character.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of characters get stuck here and never make it to the 125 bracket as they hate all three 120 Rifts and expect things to only get worse from here.

Toraja (125)

I haven't figured this Rift out yet, but I suspect I need to swap gear a lot to minion focused items. Going in there as a non-minion build didn't get me anywhere in a reasonable speed.

Viz-Jun (125)

A bit of a gear check but a fun little zone to run.

Fauztinville (and Bremmtown) (125)

Reaching Fauztinville was a RELIEF after having had to endure the Kabraxis Elementals and I feel that is the design intent. Figuring out how to kill the Elementals was quite a challenge, but not an unwelcome one and the reward of reaching Fauztinville was worth it.
The monster density reminds me of Kurast, there is a good diversity as well. The XP gain is actually insane when I compare it to the 120-125 grind.
I also appreciate that you have the connected little farming zone of Bremmtown for a bit of a change of scenary.
Finally, let's not forget that you can access this zone without having to run somewhere first.

There are only two things I would like to highlight as worthy of improvement:

- The layout: There is an unnecessary amount of staircases and hardly visible altitude "levels". Initially I got constantly stuck and it's sometimes a pain figuring out if an item has dropped on low ground or high ground (and consequently having to teleport there). You get used to it after a while and just use fast teleport to move around.

- The drops: The drop rate of Great Runes feels ok, but the drop rates for Sacred Uniques are a bit underwhelming, considering that this is *the* endgame grinding zone. Unfortunately SU / SSU drop rates can't compare to Duncraig. Shame you need to run this for SSSUs.

There also seems to be a very noticable bias towards dropping rare / unique Rings and Amulets, which I find curious. Could somebody confirm this?

In Summary...

- Improve XP progression in the 120-125 bracket
- Improve Rune drop rate in Teganze
- Speed up Lucian a bit
- Fix drops in Fauztinville (too many rings / amulets, not enough sacred uniques)

Had a great time overall, but this game is not for everyone (but you all know that).

a few mentions:

- High heavens feels indeed unrewarding to farm, will look into improving drops and make it worth/fun running.

- Teganze: will receive multiple improvements still. Not sure if you farmed it after the last hotfix-patch iterations, but at least it's a bit less worse now. Some of the plans are:
- Umabru treasure cubable with runestones
- Better terul boss battle with guaranteed essence/runestone drop
- Increased drop chances
- Guaranteed +1 skills from Mystic Shard

- Triune: the luring part will be considerably shortened as its too long, agreed. In fact the idea was to separate these bosses into their own boss room, but didn't get to this yet.

- Duncraig: it's true you hit some sort of a wall here if your build is weak. However this is pretty much intended, as it forces you into looking gear improvements, for example: jewelcrafting. This is an example of a feature that is at the start "optional" but becomes very important from 120 onwards, especially HP stacking is fundamental for some builds to perform better in dunc. This "need" to have a HP pool of 9k+ will also put chars in a good place when it comes to certain dungeon mechanics as well, such as QT, Xazax, Triune, etc.

Also this is another time where trading starts to pay off, on MP where drops/exp are lower. Slow dunc is doable by pretty much any build, and with enough patience, you can start finding some items that can be cashed out for TG - due to the area dropping really powerful items. This greatly alleviates the grind / wall at this point. It's important to have char prepared, otherwise they will fail miserably at soulstealer dungeons and pretty much any other 120 ones.

Teganze should hopefully be much more newbie friendly - just stack some pgems & witchhunter's hood for example, the exp isn't fantastic but it's a place you need to run eventually, and 120-125 is a good time for it.

Toraja: this quest pretty much becomes a "dungeon" instead of rift unless using a summoner spec. Just need to rush to the bottom corner, and with edyrems, take it up from there. I'm not sure a lot of improvements can be done here, without removing the edyrem mechanic, which is pretty much what the uber is entirely about. Since a lot of people decide not to farm this place, it has a great role in the GR economy lategame - for the people that want to spec builds to farm this area.

Fauztinville: as far as the kabraxis gem upgrade goes, that pretty much slipped through this patch. This mechanic was introduced back when rainbow builds dominated & Kabraxis was the second hardest quest (below Laz), and at this time, respecs were free and frequent too. Fauztinville reward was moved here mostly due to lore reasons, but yeah these immunities need to go.

As far as drops go, fauztinville isn't the best SU-hoarding place and that is intended. If it was, then duncraig would become fully obsolete. That aside, fauzt still plays a vital role in the economy, offering GRs (needed for samael), area level of 130 which allows more super-rare uniques to drop that don't appear in dunc, and the bias towards jewelry is really good too - can find some incredibly good unique amu/rings there.

Anyways thanks for the feedback, really happy to see that you had a (rather) smooth progression on rifts as a new player. Agreed on most of the issues you pointed out and these will be addressed in next 1.1 patch.

Nice to see a well written and thought out post like this.
Something people can really take seriously.

Hi, I am also relatively new and just wanted to share my opinion as well. I have very similar impressions to OP for content till 120. Overall I have a great time in Median, but the following matters need to be adjusted :

- Teganze has abyssmal drop rates, feels very unrewarding and time consuming. It needs some more love.
- High heavens. Never seen anything dropped there.
- Triune. Drops are just fine, managed to find some cycles but that lure is taking forever. Please make this boss encounter shorter. Also that teleporting spam during boss fight seems rather annoying than anything else.

I enjoy mostly Kurast 3000BA and Duncraig. Both are super cool and rewarding and despite I die from time to time the feeling of chance for your set part or potential SSU is amazing.

Cow level - its cool. If you are patient you may find sets. Okay for that level range.
Sunless sea - if it shouldnt drop anything , alright :-p. It' s great indeed for introducing "Uber" feel though.
Tran athulua - dont like that. Killed zounds of Amazons and I see no reason why I shoudnt be doing Kurast 3K instead. Drops are poor there.

Leveling from 120-125 seems very slow.

All in all good there is Duncraig and K3K :-D

. Oh.....I would forget , I noticed there is a popular game name on TSW - "f k Teganze":-D.

Good read OP. I personally have only one major gripe with median, and as you pointed out its about Fauztinville. For a deathaze barb like me, the terrain is ultra annoying. Getting stuck or unable to pass literally every second step isn't exactly fun. Bit of terrain flattening in the future seems like a good thing to me, i don't see a reason for the endless amount of barely visible steps that stop you dead to exist.

ya relatively new myself as well. I'm kind of trying to figure out duncraig. I can get through most of it without any issues really, it's when i need to teleport into a pack so large, my 11k hp just poofs before i can breathe as my only means of progression. due to my gear most likely, it's a full melee sorc set, with all 115 and under charms at solid rolls (not all trophy's yet), and most of the 120's as well. Resistances are like 82ish, defence about 140k, about 11-11.5k hp, block rate is only sitting around 30% though. If i manage to start attacking and get an AoE debuff of dmg off, i can survive most rooms, undoubtedly needing to kite back and drop a fussilade on occasion (survival will go up after i farm up the sigs needed, as i'm barely over 100 atm. and work on more mid game sacred uniques/crafts instead of sets. . . which is a shame to have sets only highly valuable for such a short time considering when you get them.)

I might reroll a barb or something though instead of investing that much into sorc, simply because some zones are just murder for any non summoner as you and many others have eluded to. It's doable to do it without them, but the amount you need to accomplish that seems pretty intense. Hammer zon looks rather nice though with it's high wdm ratio for life % heal which doesn't rely so heavily on spectral damage/magic conversion to substantially restrict it's survival effect. And at 130 when you get the +1 teleport charm . . . . just like old hdin days with enigma.

edit: i'd like to see your thoughts on an Assassin playthrough. I can't seem to figure out how to make it work and not die to every 2 attacks with only 50% or so evade as my only defense.

cyborgtemplar wrote:edit: i'd like to see your thoughts on an Assassin playthrough. I can't seem to figure out how to make it work and not die to every 2 attacks with only 50% or so evade as my only defense.

Depends on the type of assassin but here are some for clawsin:

Go for max block. Use the following:

The Doom Gong of Xiansai

The Doom Gong of Xiansai
Aspis (Sacred)
Defense: (3146 - 3539) to (3672 - 4131)
Chance to Block: 5%
(Assassin Only)
Required Level: 100
Required Strength: 550
Required Dexterity: 559
Item Level: 105
2% Chance to cast level 12 Thunder Slam on Melee Attack
1% Base Block Chance
Adds (10 to 40)-(50 to 100) Damage
(10 to 20)% Life stolen per Hit
+(140 to 170)% Enhanced Defense
20% to Dexterity
Socketed (4)

until you get

Khalim's Protector

Khalim's Protector
Shields
Except Barbarian Shields
'VenLoVenAmn'
Runeword Level: 100
+(1 to 2) to All Skills
2% Base Block Chance
60% Block Speed
-15% to Enemy Poison Resistance
+(171 to 200)% Enhanced Defense
Maximum Poison Resist +4%
Poison Resist +25%
+50 Life after each Kill
50% Bonus to Defense

Make sure to keep Bloodbath and Shadow Refugee up at all times. This is very important as it gives us 50% DR without items as well as flat/ele/magic DR.

It's also important to hit all your breakpoints and if possible try and reach 100% uninterruptible attack, this can be done with the following:

Scales of the Serpent

Scales of the Serpent
Gothic Plate (Sacred)
Defense: (7481 - 8308) to (9074 - 10078)
Required Level: 100
Required Strength: 675
Item Level: 105
15% Chance to cast level 40 Arachnomancy on Melee Attack
4% Chance to cast level 12 Time Strike on Striking
(31 to 40)% Hit Recovery
+90% Damage to Undead
Adds 200-300 Poison Damage over 2 seconds
-35% to Enemy Poison Resistance
5% Chance of Crushing Blow
Weapon Physical Damage +(25 to 30)%
+(144 to 171)% Enhanced Defense
+100 to Strength
+50 Life on Melee Attack
Socketed (6)

(Goes up to 40%)

Knight's Grace

Knight's Grace
Greaves (Sacred)
Defense: (2232 - 2481) to (2519 - 2799)
Required Level: 100
Required Strength: 780
Item Level: 120
2% Chance to cast level 35 Knife Throw on Striking
+1 to All Skills
25% Attack Speed
(10 to 40)% Movement Speed
Adds 10-25 Damage
+(170 to 200)% Enhanced Defense
+(15 to 25) to all Attributes
Physical Resist 5%
Requirements +20%
Socketed (4)

(If you can afford it..) (10%)
A Rare amulet with Uninterruptible attack (Goes up to 20%)
Rathma Trophy (10%)
Jewels (Up to 5%)

And as always Life Leech and LoA.

Also it's important to note that Assassin only starts getting decent survivability at approximately 125 as that's when you start getting your flat life charms.

This is just based on my experience playing assassin.

these are also requiring sacred uniques, and a rathma trophy which I believe is 130+. I'm looking just as much at the transition into the farm content where I'm able to work on builds. SU/SSU is worthless as a transition if you can't even farm content that drops them. LoA i believe is decent as it's mo'd on the weapon but not past that, my leech is also a little on the very low side since it's a full poison/fire damage

bloodbath + shadow refuge is up 100%. and the only thing that keeps me at 2 shot range instead of 1 shot range most of the time. and kill speed is what has allowed me to make it this far as is with a twin fang build due to bloodbath + blink stuns. The ennead challange defense is very nice to have. but if it's not incremental damage that's killing you and rather a very large hit, then it doesn't really do much.

I really appreciate the devs weighing in on a good feedback thread. Cheers all around!