Six weeks into Secrets of the Obscure and the community’s split on rift hunting has fully crystallized. One camp calls it mindless farming that feels like a chore. The other calls it the most efficient gold-per-hour activity in the game right now. Both camps are right. Here is the full picture.
Key Highlights:
- Rift hunting is SotO’s primary open-world endgame activity, involving tracking and clearing portal events across the new maps
- Completing rifts earns Kryptis Essences, required for crafting Obsidian Armor (the new legendary armor set)
- The activity is designed for solo and small group play, scales with participation, and has no time limit
- Community criticism centers on its repetitive design and its position as mandatory content for legendary armor
- Community defense centers on its gold-per-hour efficiency and low-friction entry point
- ArenaNet has not yet addressed the structural design feedback, only the reward tuning
What We Don’t Know Yet:
- Whether ArenaNet plans to expand rift mechanics in future quarterly updates
- If Obsidian Armor crafting will receive alternative essence sources outside of rift hunting
- How the rift map distribution will change as the quarterly updates add new zones
What Rift Hunting Actually Is
A rift is a portal to the Mists that spawns Kryptis enemies into Tyria. They appear on the maps added in Secrets of the Obscure and need to be tracked down and cleared. The process: you find the rift (via the UI indicator or community tracking), approach it, fight a few waves of Kryptis mobs, defeat a champion, and collect the loot.
The encounter takes roughly three to five minutes per rift. The enemies scale to the number of players present. Solo play is viable and the intended experience for much of the content. Group play is faster but not required.
Essences dropped from rifts come in three tiers based on rift difficulty. Higher-tier essences are required for Obsidian Armor, which means players pursuing the new legendary armor set are spending significant time in rift content.
That is the core loop. It is straightforward by design.
The Case Against: Why Players Are Frustrated
Let me steelman the criticism because it is not just complaining.
The core complaint is that rift encounters lack mechanical depth. After completing your first dozen rifts, you have seen most of what the content has to offer. You track, you fight auto-attack-level enemies, you loot, you move to the next one. The individual encounters do not evolve in a way that keeps the engagement curve interesting over hundreds of repetitions.
That would be acceptable if rift hunting were purely optional content. You could rift hunt when you want and do something else when you do not. The problem is Obsidian Armor.
Obsidian Armor is the expansion’s new legendary armor tier for open-world players. Legendary armor is one of GW2’s most significant long-term goals. Putting that goal behind an activity that a meaningful portion of players find repetitive creates a frustration loop: players who want the armor feel obligated to do content they do not enjoy. Content that does not feel fun becomes a chore when it is mandatory.
The word “chore” comes up constantly in community feedback about rift hunting. That word is worth taking seriously when players use it about endgame content. GW2 has historically been praised for respecting player time. Content that feels like obligation runs against that identity.
The efficiency argument also cuts both ways. Yes, optimized rift farming with the right map rotation and Kryptis Motivations is one of the better gold-per-hour activities currently in the game. But optimizing an activity you find repetitive is not the same as enjoying it. You can find something worth doing and still find it dull.
The Case For: Why It Works for a Lot of People
A different portion of the community is actively happy with rift hunting, and their reasoning deserves equal space.
The “chill content” argument is real. Not every player wants high-stakes, attention-demanding endgame content. Fractals and Raids require full mental engagement, voice communication, and coordinated group play. Strike missions have mechanics that punish inattention. Rift hunting asks you to show up, participate, and move through a loop that you can complete while listening to a podcast or talking in Discord.
For players who log in after work and want to make meaningful progress toward a long-term goal without the overhead of organizing a group or clearing a CM, rift hunting delivers that. Thirty minutes of rifts in the evening, across several weeks, builds toward Obsidian Armor at a pace that matches a casual schedule.
The scalability matters too. Solo players are not disadvantaged by rift content. You do not need to find a static group or wait for a specific event cycle. You log in and start. That accessibility is something the GW2 community has asked for in endgame progression for years.
The gold-per-hour numbers are also not trivial. Players running optimized rift routes with Kryptis Motivations are reporting returns that compete with traditional farming methods. If your goal is income rather than legendary armor specifically, rift hunting is worth evaluating against your current farming method.
The Obsidian Armor Problem
The legitimate design criticism is not that rift hunting exists. It is that Obsidian Armor is almost exclusively locked behind it.
Legendary armor has historically been accessible through multiple game modes. Raid Legendary Armor requires raid progression. WvW Legendary Armor requires WvW participation. Fractal Legendary Armor requires fractal CMs. Each mode has its own armor tier, and players progress through the mode they prefer.
Obsidian Armor is the open-world legendary armor, and its primary crafting requirement feeds through rift essences. The design intent is presumably “open-world players have an open-world armor path.” The problem is that rift hunting, as currently designed, is the only meaningful path to those essences.
If open-world players had multiple activities that yielded rift essences at comparable rates, the criticism would be much quieter. Some players love metas. Some prefer dynamic events. Some want harvesting loops or exploration goals. Locking the legendary progression track for open-world players into one specific activity type is a narrower design than the mode deserves.
This is worth watching in the first quarterly update. If ArenaNet adds alternative essence sources or adjusts the Obsidian Armor crafting requirements, it will signal that they heard the feedback. If they do not, the “mandatory grind” criticism will only get louder.
How to Make Rift Hunting Worth Your Time
If you are pursuing Obsidian Armor and rift hunting is your path, here is how to approach it without burning out.
Use Kryptis Motivations. These consumables significantly increase the essence drop rate from rifts. Do not farm rifts without them if your goal is legendary armor progression. The efficiency difference is large enough to change the feel of the grind.
Rotate maps. Running the same map repeatedly accelerates boredom. Use the rift spawn timers to rotate between Skywatch Archipelago and Amnytas. Different visual environments reduce the monotony.
Set a session limit. Do not try to rift-farm for four hours straight. Thirty to forty-five minutes is a sustainable session length that keeps the content from becoming oppressive. You are building toward a long-term goal. Pace yourself accordingly.
Use the weekly tasks. Wizard’s Vault weekly tasks include rift hunting objectives that award bonus essences. Completing these weekly tasks means you are earning essence at an accelerated rate during your normal Vault task completion. Do not treat rifting as separate from your Vault routine.
Check community event schedules. Some guilds and communities run organized rift sessions with commanders calling out spawn locations. Running in a coordinated group is faster and more social than soloing the map.
The Verdict
Rift hunting is not bad content. It is limited content. There is a meaningful difference.
Bad content wastes your time and delivers nothing. Rift hunting delivers real rewards, real legendary progression, and real gold income. It is not wasting your time.
But it is also not deep. Doing the same encounter 200 times does not reveal new layers. The game is not teaching you something more sophisticated the 150th time you clear a rift than the first time.
Whether that is acceptable depends entirely on what you want from your endgame session. If you want challenging, skill-testing content that rewards mastery, rifts are not that. Run fractals. Do CM strikes. WvW in a coordinated group.
If you want a sustainable, low-friction path to legendary open-world armor that fits around a casual schedule, rift hunting is the content ArenaNet built for you. It does that job.
The real issue is the same one we flagged with Gyala Delve: mandatory content should offer more entry points. As the quarterly updates add new zones and new content, ArenaNet has the opportunity to add alternative essence sources. If they do, the frustration will ease significantly.
Some endgame content asks you to be great. Some content asks you to be present. Know which one you want before you judge which one you are getting.