Rift version 1.9 rolled out yesterday. I haven’t had a huge amount of time to check it out, but what I’ve seen so far I’ve really liked.

The Summerfest World Event has some fishing-related quests (maybe too many if you don’t like fishing, but I do) and there’re now daily fishing quests as well. So that’s been fun, though it could be argued that they need the special event fishing spots to spawn in more than one place at a time:

I haven’t tried an Instant Adventure yet but hope to do so this weekend. They’re prominently displayed both in Sanctum and Argent Glade (and I assume the correlating places on the Defiant side).

The mentoring stuff is GREAT. All you do is right click on your portrait and pick your level. Takes just a second and no cost (I’m used to EQ2 where you have to find an NPC and pay in-game gold to self-mentor down). So, for example, I was running through Silverwood doing Summerfest quests and a rift spawns. I’m level 37 and it’s full of level 12 or whatever mobs. So I click my portrait, level myself down to whatever level I want and jump into a Public Group and have a lot more fun than I would have going in totally over-leveled. Once the rift is sealed I right click on my portrait again, cancel the Mentoring thing and I’m back to 37. Great system.

You can also Mentor while doing Instant Adventures. I’m looking forward to going back and doing all the dungeons I missed on the way up. I still have all the gray quests so I’ll scale myself down to an appropriate level and use the dungeon finder. I think you can also just do a random dungeon and the game will scale you down if you land in one lower level than you. Don’t quote me on that yet..I haven’t tried it, but I think I read you can do that (and that you can turn off the mentoring part of that if you just want something random and level appropriate).

There’s a lot more to 1.9 of course but I’m still exploring it all… but those sneaky Trion types sent me an offer for a year’s subscription for 30% off ($116 for the year) right when I was high on the game so yup, now I’ve got the until next June to keep exploring the world at my leisure.