Rift's Creative Gameplay

If you just read the title, you probably think I am crazy. Rift and creative? And why, of all things, the gameplay?

Well, in the beginning I played Rift just like World of Warcraft. I had my skills on my hot bar and pressed the hotkeys while moving with the mouse. Some time ago I made a warrior and I decided to advance him predominantly as a "Champion". That's a mock-heroic name for a guy who uses two-handed weapons.

While I leveled I got more and more abilities. And a lot of these abilities were off the global cooldown and reactionary. One specific ability would become usable when I scored a critical hit, another when I was parried or dodged and yet another when I parried myself.

Add these to several abilities that build up points and abilities that consume points for a 'finisher'. All the while looking at your energy bar that is as far as possible from your hotbar. Needless to say, playing a Champion was really stressful. I was constantly looking at my hotbars to find out whether one of the reactionary abilities would become available. It made sense to execute them as soon as possible. First, because they were good on a damage per energy basis and second, because these abilities overwrote each other and were on their own cooldown. So, often, the faster you executed them, the faster you could execute them when they became available next. Since they were off the GCD, every millisecond mattered.

My biggest problem were hotkeys. Where do you put three hotkeys that you need to press ASAP when they light up? Honestly, I was really challenged by this and was constantly much worse at execution than I would have liked. In battlegrounds, I would need to watch closely,
1) the enemey's movement
2) the enemey's actions (i.e. castbars)
3) my energy
4) my points
5) the three reactionary abilities

All the while I would need to stay in melee range, stay in heal range and line-of-sight, watch my health, whatch my debuffs, watch the enemy's debuffs, consider using special abilities like a AoE fear, charging somewhere and interrupting somebody. In addition to that, I would have liked to watch my healers and last and maybe least the objective of the battleground. Instead I was fighting the user interface! I was overstrained.

Keep in mind that this kind of gameplay is not new for me. I have some 500.000 kills on my WoW characters combined. I played WoW battlegrounds for 5 years. If anybody is a veteran at this, I am. But three reactionary abilities (and a few other things) on top of everything was too much.

One evening I was browsing the internet and found something remarkable: A macro.
Now, macros aren't new to me, but what was new was how they worked in Rift: You can write a lot of abilities into a macro. When you execute it with a hotkey, the server goes through the macro and executes the first of the abilities that is executable. Obviously, if the enemy is out of range for an ability, it is not executable, nor is it executable if a condition of the reactionary abilities is not met. So I made a few macros that looked like this

#show Debilitating Strike
suppressmacrofailures
cast Frenzied Strike
cast Bloodthirst
cast Inescapable Fury
cast Debilitating Strike
cast Rising Waterfall
cast Disruptive Strike
cast Mighty Blow

There's more to say about this macro, but the point is this:
I play Rift with maybe three to four macros. The actual game is all about spamming these buttons. Spamming, because you want the reactionary abilities to fire as soon as possible and never know when they will become available.

You don't play perfectly this way, but the fact that the execution is so simple makes it way superior to any other way to play the game. The fun of the game has been transfered into the metagame of coming up with the best macros. That's actually an interesting thing. But, of course, you can read macros up on the internet.

Now, I had my doubts about this kind of creative gameplay. Was it fun? In the beginning it was fun like hell! I would charge into the enemies and would finally have time to look at them and not just look at my buttons! I could protect my healers, I could focus their healers, I could move to where I was needed and if I wanted to kill somebody, he was as good as dead. The poor souls who mostly played without macros had no chance against this awesomeness.

Of course, the superiority feeling stopped being fun a few days later. It always does. Was this gameplay fun? I am not sure.

What I love about it is that I can finally play with tactics again and not completely focused on the execution and my user interface. I can look the enemy into the eyes, instead of staring at my hotbar. That's great. I like to play against enemies instead of against my user interface. The gameplay has certainly been too stressful without macros.
But, unfortunately there's another effect: I didn't care about my abilities anymore. Any button I pressed would fire a multitude of abilities which I couldn't predict.

So instead of

Power strike, Power Strike, Debilitating Strike, Execute

I was just spamming anonymous abilities that I couldn't care less about. I even forgot their names.

In the end, I think, it would have been better to not create so many abilities in the first place, when all I did was to copy/paste them into macros, anyway.

Did Trion create this "creative new gameplay" on purpose? I doubt it. I guess they considered it a good idea at the time without fully realizing what it does. It's a complete game changer for some speccs.