So rift has been out for 4 days for the head start crew. What's the verdict?

Ride a turtle. (Like a Boss!!)

I'm playing a cleric with both Tank and DPS specs (you can have up to 4 and swap between them in 3s outside of combat whenever you want). I totally loathed one of the betas. But last night is a great example of why it's SO refreshing to me. Class mechanics, graphics, 'is it revolutionary' aside, here's how it went down.

I was doing some boring "kill X of these guys" quests, which are always lumped together nicely for awesome bursts of xp, when a zone-wide message about thundering earth appeared. General chat freaked out, and suddenly my map was dotted with earth rifts (10-15 of them!). "QUEST ACCEPTED" appeared on my screen, and I ran to the nearest rift.

15 other people were there waiting, I joined the public group (no need to ask for an invite) and we got decimated. Generals were pouring out of the rift and it needed to be closed ASAP, but we had no tank!

I swapped from DPS caster spec to Tank spec on-the-run and instantly pulled aggro from the rift's boss. My group seriously gave me a high-five and assisted me like pros. We destroyed the rift, sealed it, then continued the hunt.

Our leader tracked down our next target, marking it on our map. Some invading generals had snuck by and were terrorizing a small town on our way to the next rift. We showed up to find 5 stone behemoths with 4 mini-mobs each wiping out the town. I ran in the middle and we fought hard for 15 minutes until the town was cleared. Has to be one of the most intense PvE fights I've had in a while.

We Rift-hopped for a half hour until they were all sealed and a zone-wide message alerted us that a stone titan had emerged somewhere in the zone.

General chat hastily revealed the location of the boss: a towering stone giant on his way to destroy our primary town in the zone. My raid raced to him to find another public group already hacking away at him. We combined groups and, after 10 minutes of hacking and slashing while invading generals continued to stream in from the roads, we downed him. I got a great epic hat out of it and had a blast.

5 minutes later I was back at my quest area soloing some mobs when another server alert went up. I finished off the last two of my enemies, mounted up, and headed to battle. This time: death was invading. I went to sleep 2 hours later than I had planned, but loved every minute of it.

I haven't done any warfronts, and PvE soloing is pretty vanilla. The dungeon I've done was well laid out, but uninspiring. If it weren't for public events like that, I'd find the game a total drag. But rift hunting and the HUGE zone-wide events are a total ball for me. Seriously awesome.

I did keep thinking "I bet this is what guild wars 2 will be like!" the entire time...