Well, I’m really digging myself a hole in Rift. After abandoning my low-20s cleric for a Necrolock mage I got her to the low-40s. Then I decided to make a warrior and rogue to reserve my preferred names for each. I ended up spending a lot of time on the warrior because, really, I’m a melee player at heart.
As part of my messing around with my warrior I delved into Rift’s rather tepid macro system. The warrior souls I’ve chosen are chock full of reactions and cooldown powers, each I would prefer to use in different situations but there are some priorities I’d like to maintain. In the end I have several buttons which now have 2-3 powers bound to them in a specific sequence.
Now, for some reason I decided to log into my cleric. I thought I’d never really want to play her again. But now I approached her with the macro-fu experience gained from my warrior. It clicked. After about fifteen minutes of playing to reacquaint myself with the cleric powers I decided on two macros. A few minutes later I had taken her 12 buttons and consolidated them down to 4. Only two of those are single-power buttons. Amazingly I was able to fit 3 reactions and 3 cooldown powers, along with my basic attack, into a single button.
I have complained before about the shear number of powers available to the souls. I think this might be what Trion intends for these characters. For players to take those powers and overload the buttons to prioritize powers as they see fit. Kind of like the sequences in Aion only custom made by the players.
As a programmer I really don’t have a problem with delving into macros like this. They’re exceptionally simple concepts to grasp. But I can’t help but think there’s a better way to do this. Why don’t they have a GUI to set up these priorities? I can see being able to open up a dialog which has slots and simply drag/dropping the powers you want into those slots in the sequence you want them to cast. I think if they did that, provided some visual, non-progammer gamers would be better able to understand and manipulate their game to suit their taste.
