Why Rift doesn’t get PVP

Rift recently released their 3 faction combat Conquest. You pick your faction at the time the match starts. It lasts about 1 to 1.5 hours per. Rift, like usual as of late has really dropped the ball on this. And I’d love to hear your thought on this, but I’ll go over my problems with it.

1. Because you pick your faction before each match, players will always queue up for the faction that wins most often. This negates what makes 3 faction PVP so great. It also makes choosing a faction trivial. Personally I think that picking a faction should be meaningful in some way.

2. It uses the Stillmoor Map, largely unmodified. This means that the map isn’t balanced for large-scale PVP. There are certain points that are important to winning that are simply easier for one faction to control. This causes the problem above to get even worse.

3. Because of issues with Marksman Rogues with Vampiric Munitions (passive buff that can be spammed that provides 50% healing debuff and heals the Rogue), it’s extremely unfriendly to virtually anything but a Rogue spamming Fanout at 35 meters over and over again. All other ranged classes must get within the spamout range for 5 meters before they can do any kind of meaningful DPS. Forget being Melee, so Warriors are largely useless, having to respawn often (personally, I just stayed dead until rezzed or until force respawned soaking in Favor and Prestige).

4. The rewards favor massive farm-fests over objectives. So often, the entire match will be one zerg trying to find the other zerg at a portal (Eye of Regulos or Caer Mathos) and farming them back and forth to get a ton of prestige and favor (allowing PVP ranks and gear to grow faster).

5. No solo play. Since you can’t kill an extractor by yourself (not easily, and not worth the time), there’s not much for you to do as a solo player who wants to not follow the zerg running from location to location and capping objectives or farming.

6. Objectives are boring. You’re literally running around capping these “Extractors”  on the map, standing around for the timer to tick down until you capture it, and moving onto the next.

I like that Rift is trying something new for their game, based on player feedback, but I really think Trion has no idea how to balance PVP. It’s literally the most spammy PVP I’ve ever seen.. couple it with really high stat bloat in PVP gear and there’s no meaningful choices. Conquest only magnifies these flaws.

I really want to say that PVP has gotten better since the early days of PVP in Rift. However, I’d be lying. With passive spammable 50% healing debuffs and horrible class balance, PVP in Rift is a hot mess right now. I imagine that anything short of a complete redesign couldn’t fix it at this point. 

If only Trion would take a few queues from ArenaNet and their PVP design. Horizontal scaling, short CC durations, great use of terrain, etc. 

Less than 3 weeks. Then I’m done playing Rift.