The Karazhan key attument was more or less perfect. A player had to go through a handful of dungeons to get pieces of a key. Gaurding each of these key fragments was a boss (or bosses) that had abilities or mechanics that were also found in the raid itself. If you could get the key fragment (by killing the boss(es) gaurding it) then one would assume you knew the mechanics and abilities of that boss – and could apply them to future bosses.

The community deemed this cumbersome and unnecessary, so they were removed. The current implemtation of “readiness” includes a way for players to not kill any bosses at all. A player can be considered “raid ready” without having stepped foot into a 5 man dungeon. Gear no longer equates to experience in WoW. Therefore can not be used as a metic.

To use gear as a measure of experience, they must remove ways of getting gear that do not require appropriate challenge (I.E. craftables, “badge” gear, etc). Until that happens, it’s just as irrelevant as any other arbitrary measure of player experience.

Until some developer comes up with a way to measure a person’s ability to adapt and respond to in-game situations, gear is going to remain the standard by which we can be judged, for better and for worse. (And yes, I realize that can be measured by completing the content itself, but what we are talking about is a way to evaluate it prior to being in the middle of it.)

Tanks needing a Toughness check? Just grab gear with a lot of Toughness on it – even if it completely lacks other important stats. Same for Focus, Hit, etc.

The other problem with WoW’s gearing system is that a higher gear level is not – in and of itself – indicitive of more experience. When you allow players to get high level gear without going through high level challenges, it defeats the purpose of using gear as a measurement of past performance. (E.G. “badge gear” and epic craftables.) I’m not quite max level in RIFT yet, so I don’t know how (or if) Trion has done this differently at max level.

There’s also the larger problem that gear is not the reason for failure in max level PvE content – but lack of execution (or lack of skill if you want to call it that). Pick any fight in WoW and remember what causes groups to wipe, or even an individual player to die. I’d guess less than 5% of the time it is due to lack of gear – unless you’re in a bleeding edge guild. Most of the time, it was because a player failed to react to an encounter mechanic (standing in fire, etc). More gear can not fix this. (Again, this is a problem in WoW, but I’m not sure how RIFT content is designed.)

That, my friends, is learning from the mistakes of others. One hopes the gamification won’t consume RIFT, though.

For go to expert T2 dungeons the toon need have a better gear than she uses for expert T1 dungeons.

What you are is defined as what you have most points in. So for example when I played my Justicar/Sentinel/Templar aoe healer it defined me as tank.

Support is Bard, Archon, Warlord.

I’m a little uneasy about how it will build groups. Is every group at every level to be tank + healer + support + 2 dps? Or will we be able to control group make-up somehow?

I’m smiling at the idea that the best way to get groups as a Warrior may be to have a deep Warlord spec. There’s clearly a disconnect between what the game considers Support and what the players feel is Support (bard or chloro).

Even as someone who doesn’t play Rift I’m curious to see how its dungeon finder will pan out, hopefully other games will be able to learn something from it.