During his visit to Trion Worlds' office for the third Gamer Day event, Staff Writer Paul "LockeColeMA" Cleveland stepped into the Abyssal Precipice instance and prepared for high-level Warfronts.

At around 11 a.m. during our Gamer Day visit to the Trion Worlds offices in Redwood City, California, the fan site and press site folks parted ways temporarily. The fan site crowd went on a tour of the offices and met with the development team, while members of the press were led to a room with a long line of computer consoles. Taking seats around the table, we found Rift accounts with several level 50 characters waiting for us. My own computer had two Defiants and two Guardians, one of each calling. Since I primarily played a mage in the beta events, I took control of one 20 levels above what I was used to and logged in.

The zone we entered was snowy and placed us right outside an instance. “This,” the representative told us, “is the Abyssal Precipice instance. Have fun!” I looked around the room at my fellow news folks. Given level 50 characters pre-made and set up with tier 2 gear and the best spells would make it a blast, right? Right?

Before I go into more detail, here's an Abyssal Precipice trailer to give you a feel for the instance:

My mage was specced as a Warlock/Necromancer/Chloromancer (approximately this build), which was relatively what I was used to, although I would rather have had some of the 51 point abilities highest talents. The rest of the crew saddled up with two rogues, a warrior and a cleric healer. Unfortunately I didn't get their builds, although I believe the Warrior had a Paladin soul. While we were still figuring out our abilities (I didn't even have my pet out yet), we had our first pull and quickly died. The tank didn't know what to use to keep aggro; in the first pack, all but one enemy ran straight past him... and on to me, who thought it would be a good idea to hit him with Bloom. Oh, healing aggro. In less than 10 seconds, despite my tier 2 dungeon armor, I was lying face-down in the snow.

We all soulwalked and tried it again, with similar results. By our third attempt we managed to win (I still died, aggro-hog that I am), and that was probably because we knocked out an enemy in the previous attempt. Not that none of the enemies were especially difficult; we just were really, really bad. The packs mostly consisted of cultists and wolf pets; most of the cultists were melee fighters, but a number of the packs had casters.

As we moved on, I noticed we were gaining reputation with the Icewatch faction; expect reputation grinding again at max level. Non-elite seacap enemies would swarm out in relatively clear areas, posing more of an annoyance to casters than any real damage (although a half dozen enemies doing 200 damage per hit each could kill someone given enough time and no healing). The bigger issue was watching for patrolling enemies; giant water elementals would at times run into us while we were fighting cultist packs, leading to a few more wipes.

After crossing a long, icy bridge, and clearing a few more packs of cultists and wandering elementals, we came to the first boss: Kaler Andrenes. Without any thought for tactics we rushed in for our first attempt. Things were going fine for the first 20 seconds, and then we were all hit for around 9,000 damage, instantly wiping the party. Huh. Running back, we decided to have one of the rogues attempt to stun the spell (it had a fairly long cast, around 6 seconds). Early on she hit her stun, just to get an immune message. Figuring the only other alternative would be line of sight or range, the tank and I opted for LoS behind a pillar while the others ran for distance. The tank and I survived, and I got the chance to play healer while the others ran back. We quickly figured out that the boss summons a pillar you can hide behind, and the rest of the fight went swimmingly (although one of the rogues was killed while running back).

Continued on Page 2.