Rift Invasions and You

I've been having a blast in the Rift Beta, and I thought I would explore one of the parts of the game that I enjoyed the most: the rifts, the thing that give the game its name. I was most skeptical about this.

Moonie I said to myself, because that's how I roll, how good is this going to actually be? Rifts opening up while you're trying to quest? That sounds stupid. I'd just want to finish my stupid quest and have the bad guys go away! And how is this supposed to work where if you leave it open too long it forms an invasion. Come on how can that possibly work out?

Well as it turns out it works just fine. I took a few screenshots here that should help explain. This is in Freemarch, the Defiant 6 to 20 zone.

Enough Water Rifts have been open long enough that there is a beachhead. It happens to be on the beach, but it could be anywhere. At this point everyone in Freemarch gets a quest called "The Ebb of the Tide Lords" We as a zone have 45 minutes to kill 5 abyssal lords (super elite water element bosses) and stop 50! abyssal invasion forces.

You can see there's invaders all over the place. The blue X's are invading mob groups. Usually one elite with a pack of four or so non elite mobs of their element. The black boxes with the blue +'s are footholds, stronger gatherings of abyssal forces that have a Beacon. When the beacon is taken down that foothold is destroyed.

Here you can see if you put your arrow over one of the invaders, you can see all sorts of crazy arrows. The invaders head to a specific spot on the map. Its a good idea to stop them before they get there!

As you see here. Once the bad guys stop, the elite guy starts casting a spell called 'summon foothold' You really want to stop this from happening, because if you don't, all those invaders turn into new footholds, that will in turn start sending out invaders! This is officially bad.

And this is what happens. Random elite guys start wandering around beating people up and you have to get together with whatever random strangers are around to beat back the fishy hordes.

So there you have it. Invasions are a lot of fun, even just to watch develop. As you can see, the elapsed time on those maps is about 12 minutes. So these things move quickly. They're a ton of fun and the whole zone, pretty much, gets together to beat things back.