Well, I really enjoyed this Rifts a lot, as it mixed two of my favourite dungeons together: Parasite and Oryx/WC, and was strongly focused on the core of kill quests to close realm, repeat.
Pic of the last of us online, in the final infested castle before the servers shut down, @Cantoo & @EatLikeMe (@COOLXXXX too but suicided halfway through castle). We killed O1 one last time and had just arrived at O2, started his their 2nd phase, when the plug got pulled.
Am a bit tired to write proper thoughts as I decided to play it until it ended, so this is a bit rambly, but I thought the whole thing from castle to WC was top design.
The barrelling was good fun to do and meant even cowardish players (like me) could join in all the phases of O2, unlike standard O2’s sun & dance which often get a lot of spectators, and you had to be a bit alert of getting barreled yourself, which kept engagement levels high for me.
Other things at O2: the slight tweaks to lessen the suns equivalent phase, the jumping in the chase phase worked nice and gave me a couple of scares, and especially good was the new simple 3rd/halfway phase “fear the painlings” or whatev, which broke up the normal fight nicely vs standard O2. And O2 seemed to behave better as well, seemed more firmly chained to the middle of the room.
For myself: I loved being back on mystic which I’ve not played for ages; I’d forgotten how much I like using the T6 with careful but fast aiming needed to do curse-but-not-stasis, so if that’s swept away in future orb changes I’ll feel like I had a good farewell run with it. Even the slight regret of not being a faster class (nearly went trix again) was lifted when I got a Conflict as I forgot it did speedy—haven’t used it since the old days with its awful long cooldown—and it’s way better being spammable. (Edit: reading the wiki it changed a year ago.)
Main negative to the season was Cemetery, it was the hardest mark by far to get because of the reworked difficulty. I felt really bad for the 0/8s calling Cems desperately in the last couple of days trying to rustle up people to join, for that single completion, with most (all?) people playing seriously spurning them entirely. Comparing it to with how people were shouting Manors, and some always willing to join that - me included! But cems, nope. Despite it offering high XP, there’s something no longer attractive about that dungeon design, most people in this Rifts ignored it after getting the 1 required mark, and focused on the easier OTs, Tombs, Lockers despite them being rarer, for the 3x and 5x mark quests; and the other godlands dungeons for maxing pots…
Before the end people were even offering Deca rings (on prod) to try and coax others into the dungeon to help out. It’s getting off track, but what if the HP scale didn’t kick in until say 25+ players, so large groups can’t steamroll it, but lesser groups aren’t penalised. Anyway gripe over.
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