For those of you waiting for the patch to go live later today, there are a few updates floating around.

Scott Hartsman has posted some teasers on what’s coming with Beta 5 and what some of the plans are.  Some very cool stuff as well as some welcome tweaks to the user interface.  Probably the biggest aspect is the size of Beta 5 which is double the size of Beta 4 so there should be lots of fun group adventures.

There’s a number of “cosmetic” fixes including:

• targeting fixes
• key bindings
• visible stats
• user interface tweaks
• better explanation of in-game systems like Planar Foci and Currencies

As well as some system revamps:

• Public Grouping
• Class Tweaks
• Invasion improvements
  • Big area of change is the agro of the invasions such that you might be able to pull them individually as opposed to the whole group
• Discoveries and Firsts

And for those of you in the beta, the patch note are up too on the Beta forums which do require a log-on.

This past weekend with the Beta 4 event we were introduced to the Warfronts system in Rift.  Warfronts are essentially PvP Battlegrounds that are broken up into 10 level groupings, meaning there’s a Warfront for levels 10-19, 20-29, etc.  Many other games have implemented these kinds of systems, so there’s nothing ground-breaking with this in Rift, but like most other things in the game they do it well and add a little extra to the system.

I’m not going to claim to be an expert on the system as I only ran through a couple of them, both times horribly under leveled as I was only level 12 in both cases.  I ran one on my Ranger (a ranged DPS class) and the other on my Paladin (tank class) and while the experience was different on both I really enjoyed the system.  My ranger certainly did better statistically, but I can certainly see that a Paladin could be very useful and fun in that environment as well.  The other aspect I enjoyed was that even though I was quite weak compared to others I was able to contribute and feel successful.

In order to join one of these battles, you open up the Warfront panel (defaults to K) and queue up to join a battle.  Wait times varied, but at most it took me a couple of minutes to hop in and get going.  Once in, you battle the other side in group combat for control of a relic inside the zone.  The relic does constant damage to the one holding it and also leaves a burnt out trail such that you can hunt down the holder much easier.  In addition to the relic, there’s your standard go kill other players method as well.  I explain and show much of this in the video below:

So far, I’m enjoying my time in Rift, but I’m not sure we’ve really seen enough to know how things will work out 2-3 months down the road.  They have a lot of very cool systems in place and a lot of polish, but hopefully over the next couple of beta events we’ll get to see more of the various tricks up their sleeves.