My guild and I are mostly ex-raiders who grew tired of playing that way a long time ago, and we're between games at the moment. One of my guildies is poking into Rift again. I played Rift for a little while about six months ago as well as during the beta, so I am familiar with the game in general, but I would like to know more about how it plays at max level.

My guild likes challenging single-group content. We're coming from Everquest 2, which features both group and raid progression - even if you never set foot in a raid zone, there is still a path of increasingly more difficult and rewarding group content to work through. We like that - it keeps us busy doing what we love doing. We don't care about getting the best gear in the game, we just want a path of progression that suits our play style.

I don't know what it's like now, but at level 60, World of Warcraft was mostly about raiding. Group content at level 60 was limited to a handful of zones that were all on more or less the same plane of difficulty, and they were mainly there for you to farm gear to get ready for raiding. We don't want that. If Trion is mostly focused on the raid game, we're going to get bored and quit.

Where does Rift fall? Does it cater well to group players at max level, or does it try to push you into raiding? Does the new expansion make a difference?

I don't have huge experience with Rift, but their model focuses mostly on end game content over everything else. My understanding is they add a variety of content like dungeons, raids and 1 or 2 man dungeons. They also provide the most end game updates and don't leave the game hanging for months like Blizzard does with WoW.

A better place to ask would probably be mmo-champion.com in their Rift section as there are many people playing the game currently there.

Well, now in WoW you have 10man raids with Normal and Heroic difficulties, and 25man raid with Raid Finder, Normal, and Heroic difficulties. The usual step is RF - > Normal -> Heroic.

Also, dungeons now have Normal, Heroic, and Challenge difficulty.

EDIT: I don't understand what you are asking. What kind of endless challenges you want to see? Of course that you will get to a point where you've cleared out the whole game and get 'bored'.

Yes, we will. No matter what game we play, we will get tired of it, wander off, and come back when there's something new. We just want the same thing everyone wants - a game suited to our style of play. Heavily raid-focused games are not suitable for us, so I'm just looking for a little insight from Rift players.

it is a raid game, and its pretty good, I personally found it very boring though, ymmv. They often have freeplay periods for new and past players, maybe wait for those.

They release fairly frequent expansions to keep it fresh, some new "souls" have been added since I played as well..

I just found it bland and every few weeks when I logged in I would find all my characters skills reset because of another fecking class tweak, it was boring having to reassign them and just when you would get comfortable again, they would nerf/tweak (delete as applicable) the classes again.

It would be OK if I had just one or two characters, but I had about 6 between the two factions.

AFAIK the "factions" can intermingle now and they have reduced the number of servers, so the worlds seem more inhabited, but it's worth a punt, you should be able to get the game for about a fiver..