Well I made it! Finally managed to enter the rift and experience it for myself first hand.
Boy is it one heck of a freaky place. After spending 2 and a half hours in there I think I shall reinforce my point that wearing heavily crit padded brigandine armor is really useful against the voids and it also allows you to manage the lack of DS that wizards suffer. I was taking end rolls of 160-170 against lunatics and only endured 15-20 HP loss with no stun. The voids did a max stun of 3 rounds, but on average I got 1-2 rounds and sometimes even a crit without a stun.
Oh and... PEER in every room before you walk in it. Peering in the next room is so helpful when hunting in the rift.
- Lord Kranar, human Archwizard reg