As I mentioned earlier in the week, I finished up Freemarch and was moving into Stonefield in Rift Prime. While the leveling via quests dynamic was holding me a bit behind in levels, I was still about set, entering Stonefield and hitting level 18.
Stonefield tiger in the wild, find a quest hub for this child
But it wasn’t too long before pushing into Stonefield that the quest trail started to pull away from me. Quests are pretty manageable at up to two levels ahead of your own level, but after that the situation gets a bit dicey and it wasn’t too long before I was wading around in quests three or four levels above me. I was level 19 by then, but the quests were 22 and up. Not a viable position for me.
After looking at the map I realized that the lead-in quest for the zone teleported me a ways into the zone and that the quests from there had only sent me back to the previous quest hub.
Stonefield map
Something in the back of my head told me that there was something to be found in the gap between that first quest hub and the boarder with Freemarch along the road between the two.
Sure enough, there were a few quests there, which helped me along. But it wasn’t enough to catch up. I was still lingering at level 19. And then Wednesday’s patch hit.
There were a few items in that patch, but the key one was this:
QUEST EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN DRASTICALLY INCREASED! The exact percentage of the increase varies by level range, but is substantial– about 3x overall!
Increased quest experience, enough to keep me on track I was pretty sure. But first I would have to get back on track. Boosted quest experience only helps when you can actually do the quests.
I had an idea. I went back to Freemarch and picked up the daily rift event related quests from three different quest hubs and ran after some rifts for a bit. That was four quests total and I can confirm that the experience output was noticeably higher. After closing a second rift to finish off the last of them, I hit level 20.
So many notifications
That was just enough to get me back on the rails in Stonefield.
Still, all was not as well as one might have hoped. There was a report that invasion experience was wrong now and that something was amiss with warfronts (battlegrounds), the latter coming into play because somebody grabbed the PvP guild quest. We were knocking out the PvE ones too quickly I guess.
Anyway, there is another emergency maintenance downtime today to address issues as yet unspecified. Lag and server stability are still issues. We shall see how things look tonight. I am sure this is all a learning experience for Trion. Daybreak has the advantage of having done the retro server a few times and they still stumble a bit at every launch.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 