So back in beta (I know, bring on the hate) those zone-wide invasions — y’know, the ones that pop a quest into your log — used to give quest rewards. Then they were taken out because, really, the system was kind of borked. You had to do very little to ‘complete’ the quest and you’d get the same rewards as someone who’d fought constantly to drive back the Rifties.

I was working up a good rant about these invasions… how winning them got you nothing and losing them cost you nothing and so they seemed pretty pointless to worry about unless you were in an RP mood. (Hold your hate and corrections for just another moment, please.)

Then the other day I was bashing around with a new character; a cleric. I fly in the face of logic with my characters…this dude is (for now) Shaman/Cabalist/Warden and at low levels he’s a total hoot to play. So I’d just gotten into the real world (Guardian side) and was doing that first quest hub (putting out fires, fighting wanton destroyers and those ember dudes). I was level 7 or 8. And one of those zone-wide events started up.

Then I heard Rudi’s Wagon was under attack. “Poor old Rudi!” I says to myself, “He needs help!” So I jumped on my turtle and took my lowbie self into the fray.

And OMG what a fun fight that was! We had 3 invasions hit at once. I was healing (OMG #2….me healing. I’ve been playing MMOs since there’ve been MMOs and I never heal) which worked pretty well considering both our raid and all the invasions were level 8 or so. And we prevailed! Rudi’s Wagon was saved, and my Rift goody bag was overflowing with knick knacks and planerite. I collected it all, disbanded and went back to questing (at my level there was no sense trying to help the rest of the zone). Just a few minutes later the call went out that the Guardians had prevailed. Huzzah!

And I noticed my Rift goody bag was lit up again. I opened it to find a blue sourcestone item; a reward for taking part in the event.

Call me a nub, but I’d never put 2+2 together like this before, because generally when one of these events happens I either jump in for the duration or ignore it completely, so I’d thought whatever rewards I was getting was for the “local action” that I was taking part in, not the greater event (since I’d be fighting when the event completed). This is the first time I’d seriously fought through part of the event and then disengaged and been able to notice the reward for completing the event. I don’t know what the threshold is for you to get it, but (for my level) I was chain-healing (plus tossing out the odd nuke) for probably a solid 5 minutes of chaos. It felt more like an hour. So (again for my level) I’d contributed a significant amount to that particular battle.

Anyway this was news to me and I figure somewhere out there is someone else who didn’t realize there were zone-quest rewards. So I figured I’d share.

While I have your attention, I also wanted to belated point out a good Rift post at Massively. Karen Bryan offers some good tips on buffing Wardstones and public groups. I always buff Wardstones…I think there should be an achievement with a title for doing it enough times.

Anyway one tip I wanted to add, sort of related to public groups. People talk about forming groups to take on a named mob so that players don’t have to queue up to wait for respawns. I’ve found that as often as not you can get credit even if you don’t form a group. Just attacking the mob during the fight is often enough. Also lots of times the quest isn’t to kill the mob but to do something heinous to its still-warm corpse, and again you seem to be able to do that even if you weren’t the one to kill the mob. So check it out. It doesn’t always work, but it often seems to, at least at low levels.