A Grain of Salt

It is with some reservation that I make this post.  Always in the past I have tried my best to get verification from either Trion directly, or multiple sources before posting anything.  I plan on continuing this tradition, but this little nugget is so near and dear to my heart that I simply cannot resist sharing the info.  Namely I have to think Rilgon for tipping me off about this.

Knocking Out Number Five

Awhile back I made a post entitled “Five Things I Wish Rift Had” in which I outlined the features from other games that I most wanted in Rift.  As various commenter’s mentioned I left out a few, but this was the list that was especially important to me.  The number 5 item on the list, was the inclusion of an appearance slots system.

20110421090907 

Based on some chatter this morning on the rift forums, apparently this feature is now in on the Alpha shard.  The above image and some various nuggets of information was posted this morning by the player known as Festo.  This if true is a pretty amazing advancement in the game, and is one of the first bones thrown at role-players.  At this point there really is not a lot of information.

I titled this update “Grain of Salt” because this is exactly what we have to take this news with.  At this point there is been no verification from anyone within Trion that this feature is going into the game.  As the morning has gone on, and the original thread has grown in length, additional players have chimed in claiming that it is in fact on the Alpha Shard as Festo stated.

Original Post From Festo

http://img856.imageshack.us/img856/7…0421090907.jpg
First extra wardrobe costs 10p, next costs 50p, last probably costs 100p, I didn’t have enough plat to find out for sure.

Post From Lilliemunster Clarifying Pricing

1st slot (Free)
2nd – 10p
3rd – 25p
4th – 50p
5th – 100p

So based on this smattering of information from two players combined it appears that the system will give all players a single wardrobe slot for free.  Then much like bank tabs, or roles we can purchase the additional slots for a more expensive fee.  There is a bit of rumbling around the pricing being out of range, but in truth it seems about right for me.  In many games, you only have the option of a single appearance tab, so the ability to have multiple outfits that you can swap between is well worth the platinum sink.

We can only assume that if this feature does go live, it looks like it would go live with the rest of the confirmed 1.2 features.  So at this point, 1.2 is shaping up to be a very significant patch to say the least.  While I would have liked to have seen a guild bank in this patch, it is nice to at least have one feature off my wanted list.

Disclaimer Again

Just wanted to get this out here again.  At the time of posting this update, this feature has not been confirmed with by anyone at Trion.  So like every internet rumor take this one as questionable until we get official word.  However like I said, to me this is a very major feature, so I wanted to get this info up asap.  I know for alot of my readers, this too was a major feature.  I did take the time to read through the user Festo’s post history on the Rift forums, and based on the frequency and type of posts they seem as reliable as anyone is.  However, still proceed with caution until we get an announcement on this one.

Damming the River: Hotfix 19

Throwing up a quick post to get this information out there to those readers that have been relying on this site for their patch notes (I know I have a few).  Today the patch we have all be expecting is dropping.  Basically for all intents and purposes this shuts off the River of Souls event. 

The vendor will still be available for a few days so that folks can make purchases, but the items from the rifts and invasions have stopped dropping.  This also brings into play the “consolement” package that Scott Hartsman spoke about last saturday.  So when we all get home tonight, and log in we should have waiting in our mailbox the following…

Symbol of Purity – This item starts a quest you can complete to obtain

  • 250 Otherworldly Sourcestone
  • 1x – Purified Treasure Cache – Contains a random chance of obtaining one of the special world drop event rewards from the day of the event
    • Common – Grave Goods Bag -Unique 20 Slot Bag (NEW ITEM)
    • Uncommon – Shroud of Anti-Life – Lorn non combat Polymorph
    • Rare – Nimble Spectral Horse – 90% Speed Mount
    • Ultra Rare – Swift Spectral Warhorse – 110% Speed Mount
  • Shadetouched Weapon Cache – The starter item for the Rare Death weapon quests. You can choose whichever level appropriate one you’d like.
  • The following two Achievements, since not everyone who was (or wanted to be) present was able to obtain them.
    • Grim Hero
    • Grim Protector

Now for the actual Hotfix patch notes.  The original posting can be found here.

Hotfix #19: 4/20/11


RIVER OF SOULS
* Expect mailbox delivery of your River of Souls Event Reward Pack shortly after this update hits your shards, for each character that existed prior to the River of Souls Phase 2 start point – see the River of Souls World Event Wrapup thread on the General Discussion forum for more details on the reward pack itself.
* River of Souls event merchants will remain available for several more days to give you time for last-minute purchases. These will eventually be removed, so don’t delay too much!
* The River of Souls daily quests have been removed now that the event has concluded.
* Characters are now required to be level 50 to enter the River of Souls raid zone.
* Discordant Pillar can no longer drop loot.
* Plutonus: Adjusted the placement of the ‘lightning fence’ during the latter phase of this encounter.
* Plutonus: Thundering Fists no longer reduces Death damage dealt by Plutonus.
* Alsbeth now spends a bit less time on the ground between air phases.
* Shadetouched Weapon Caches have been renamed so players can tell which cache awards what level of items.
* Swift Spectral Horse from River of Souls Raid has been renamed to Swift Soulbound Charger.
* Swift Spectral Warhorse from River of Souls Raid has been renamed to Swift Soulbound Warhorse.

GENERAL
* Dueling works again.
* Fixed loot windows from accidentally closing, causing you to lose out on items.
* NPCs that can fly in the air no longer get stuck unable to cast abilities.
* Corrected a badd typo in one display of the ‘Riftblade’ soul name.

SOULS
* Resolved an issue where Distorted Shadows [Cabalist] and Shards of Light [Sentinel] could be exploited. These abilities should once again be available for use.
* Champion: Lingering Wounds: Fixed a bug causing this ability to stop applying.

GREENSCALE’S BLIGHT [Raid]
* Prince Hylas: Should now reliably drop a full four pieces of loot.

ITEMS
* River of Souls event currencies and quest item drops will no longer appear.
* Due to outcry from the Telara Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Spectral Horses can no longer be Runebroken.
* Shroud of Anti-Life: Corrected the text in this item’s buff tooltip.

Rift Patch 1.2 Rundown

Well folks I still feel rather horrible, so once more you guys are going to have to get a minimal update.  At least some good happened along with the pain, I am posting this from my new laptop.  So far I am exceedingly happy with it.  Being able to run rift on 1080 with ultra settings, all the while my laptop stays cool and quiet is pretty amazing.  I probably would have skipped today were there not news to share.

Over the last few days there has been a good deal of information being released about the 1.2 patch.  Going to give a summary of what is coming down the pipe.

Class Balance Updates

The first bit of information is a series of posts regarding each of the classes.

Cleric Update

original posting

Greetings, Clerics of Telara. I’m Zinbik, the guy in charge of Clerics. I am here to discuss… THE FUTURE! Before I begin, I just wanted to thank everyone for their feedback so far. Whether in-game or here on the forums, we really appreciate any insight we can get as to how you’re perceiving the game. Now, on to the changes!

We’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback on the ranged DPS souls. For this next patch we’ll be focusing on the Inquisitor, working to make their DPS more reliable and comparable to other DPS souls.

Inquisitor

  • Life and Death Concord is just too random. When it procs a lot, you’re having a blast! When it hardly procs at all, you want to strangle me. We really want to make this more reliable so their DPS isn’t so variable.
  • The Armor spells don’t offer much of a choice. You’ve got “the damage and defense one”, “the different damage and defense one”, and “the mostly useless one”. We’re going to change that into “the defensive one”, “the offensive one”, and “the big stick”.

The Healing souls have gotten a fair amount of feedback as well. Right now we’d like to focus on the Sentinel with a little Purifier love on the side, examining how we can make certain abilities more useful and interesting. Below are a few examples of these changes.

Sentinel

  • Healing Breath, while fantastic for a 0-point ability, just isn’t where we’d like it to be for those heavily specced into Sentinel. As long as its HPS is inferior to Healing Invocation, it just ends up being a liability when you try to use it on the tank in response to a minor damage spike or stun. We’d like to fix this, but only for those with a heavy investment into Sentinel.

Purifier

  • Ward of the Ancestors is nice and all, but with its current setup ends up being something you only ever cast on the tank. We plan on lowering the cooldown, but adding a blocker to prevent you from casting it on the same person for the next 30 seconds. This allows you to use it on more targets without allowing one target to be shielded 100% of the time. Once we’ve had time to observe this change within the LIVE environment, we can evaluate the addition of scaling to absorption for a following patch.

Remember, just because I didn’t mention an issue here that you’re concerned with doesn’t mean we don’t share that concern. This is not an exhaustive list of changes that will be happening to Clerics this patch. We’ll be releasing more information when the ALPHA patch notes go live.

Mage Update

original posting

Hey everyone,

I have some information for you on some of the upcoming changes with the next patch. Most of the changes and fixes coming with this update have come from forum posts and feedback sent to us. While we’re always looking into issues and concerns of all sizes, those below are the ones with the largest impact that will be part of the 1.2 update.

First off, there will be a good number of fixes and updates. Among these are ones such as fixing the Pyromancer’s Combust so the effects now stack correctly, fixing the Elementalist’s Charged which wasn’t affecting the top ranks of Lighting Strike and several issues with weaker buffs overwriting stronger ones have also been resolved. We are also taking a look at pets and hope to resolve a number of the most reported pet bugs, such as pets no longer attacking after being stunned.

As many of you have been posting the Pyromancer ability, Ground of Strength, is an amazingly powerful ability. In many cases it is more powerful than it was intended to be, and as a result, is effectively the required choice as the mage PVP soul. It does need to be desirable, but also does need to have its power brought in line with its intended balance.

Another issue, that in many cases is connected with the Pyromancer, is the Dominator’s Controlled Opportunity. As many people have experienced, if you get Transmogrified by someone the next hit you take is really going to hurt. The main issue we found with this ability was critical hits on the target were receiving double bonuses, one from critically hitting and another from Controlled Opportunity, which generated much more damage than intended.

We looked into several possible changes that would help mitigate this while leaving Controlled Opportunity both useful and desirable. The change we have arrived at is having the damage bonus remain, and while an enemy is affected by the debuff the next ability used on them is guaranteed to hit and cannot be resisted but cannot critically hit. If when you attack an enemy with this debuff you are affected by an ability such as Nenvin’s Lament, which gives you a 100% chance to critically hit, your attack will hit the enemy and the Nenvin’s Lament buff will not be consumed until you attack again, preserving the special crit from Nenvin’s for the later attack.

Once we get closer to the patch day, a full list of the fixes and changes included with the patch will be available. We look forward to your feedback on all of the changes when the next update comes to the Test Server.

Rogue Update

original posting

To my fellow Rogues,

Thank you for posting your feedback and suggestions in the forums. I really appreciate your time and effort trying out various builds and sharing them with the both the community and us. Many of the changes we will be introducing in the next patch are a result of the community’s hard work and dedication to the calling.

Assassin
As we all know, the Assassin is the cold-blooded killer who selectively picks his target and vanquishes his victim with ruthless efficiency. Unfortunately, they lack the punch we want them to have. As such we are looking to improve both their initial burst and their overall DPS over time. In addition we have been working on many of the Stealth bugs people have been reporting and we hope to get them fixed for the next patch.

Bladedancer
While the Bladedancer is an excellent soul for soloing and brings some fantastic utility to the table, they are still not hitting the DPS goal we expect them to. As such, we are looking to tweak a number of their core abilities upwards to make sure the Bladedancer’s DPS is more in line with what we’d expect from a whirling dervish of destruction.

Marksman
Finally for the Marksman, there are two areas of concern we are looking to address. Firstly, the Marksman’s overall DPS is not at a level we are happy with. Secondly, the Marksman is too reliant on the use of cooldowns to get the most out of its soul. With these in mind, we are reviewing their situational long cooldown abilities and DPS abilities with the intent of improving their overall performance and reducing the number of buttons players need to worry about.

Once again, thank you for all your feedback. The preview above is an outline of our intention for the upcoming patch and does not include a complete list of changes and fixes. More details will be added as we move closer to patch day.

Warrior Update

original posting

Hello all, we have been following the forums and feedback over the last few weeks and I wanted to take this opportunity to talk to you all about some changes we are looking to make to the Warrior souls with the upcoming patch. We picked through the feedback and looked over the souls and we decided to make some changes to a couple souls that are not quite fitting in like we want them to. The Void Knight and the Warlord.

The Void Knight has always been intended as the premier choice in tanking magical mobs but we don’t feel like it does that as well as we would like it to, so we are looking at several changes to help it fill that role. Just a couple examples, though not by any means everything we are looking at.

1) Giving them a new self buff that reduces the damage they take from non-physical melee attacks.
2) A revision of the Pacts system in which we are ending the practice of using a full Pact dump for each ability. The goal is to make them easier to use, easier to understand, and more balanced.
3) Fixing Fusion of Flesh to be more useful. This change will be independent to the bug currently affecting Rank 5.

We always wanted the Warlord to be a solid tank that could be useful in more situations. He currently fits a dual role of being a tank while bringing useful buffs to the table. Right now we are happy with their ability to buff their party, but we feel their ability to tank is below where we want it to be. Here a couple things we are working on to help change him into the tank we want him to be.

1) Giving him a new high level ability that acts as Sergeant’s Order but as an AOE, allowing him to pull in multiple enemies.
2) Taking a look at his tanking ability and seeing where we can make tweaks to help his mitigation out.

We also have a whole bunch of bugs we are fixing across all the souls and we look forward to being able to give you more detailed patch notes on these changes and bug fixes in the near future.

PVP Changes

original posting

Evening!

We’ve gotten a ton of great feedback for PvP since we’ve gone live, so much that we’ve had quite a challenge weeding out which things we wanted to tackle first. Today I want to give everyone a preview of changes in our upcoming patch, as well as some hints as to where we are headed next.

Improving Reward Quality
There’s been a lot of concern about the quality of the Rank Sets, and the effectiveness that Valor has in PvP compared to the rewards from Tier 1 and 2 dungeons. With 1.2, you’ll find that Valor has received a significant boost, granting reduction in damage taken from Players. In addition we’ve also updated many of the PvP rewards. Here’s a few highlights:

• Retuning PvP items to have more offensive punch.
• Updated & added a number of items to Rank 1 & 2 that will be on par with T1 dungeons.
• Updated & added a number of items in Rank 3 & 4 so that this set is on par with T2 dungeons.
• Reduced the current Rank requirement for Rank 5 weapons to Rank 4, and introduced all new Rank 6 weapons that are on par with Epics from Raid dungeons.
• All Rank Set pieces can now be tinted.

Crowd Control
Crowd control continues to be an item we’re watching carefully. There is a fine line to walk between too much CC and CC being considered useless. With that in mind we’ll be making a few changes in the next patch:

• Increasing the window of time that Diminishing returns is effective, which should reduce the chances of being chain CC’d through an extended encounter.
• Adding a small immunity buff to Break Free in the PvP souls that way players are not immediately CC’d after using their abilities.

Warfront Notoriety
Another area of improvement slated for the next patch is improving the flow of Notoriety advancement so it’s more fun.

• Increased the notoriety rewards from warfronts and warfront related daily quests
• Updated the Notoriety rewards for Port Scion, with the goal of moving some of the better rewards to an earlier notoriety level so they are more in line with the new rank set progression

The above is the bulk of the changes we plan to release with our next patch. However there is no rest for the weary and we’re hard at work on adding some new PVP gameplay into RIFT. We’ll talk about this in more detail once we have things hammered out. That being said people should expect to hear more about things like PvP open world zone events, weekend events with alternate game mode warfronts, and PvP leaderboards & statistics soon!

Dungeon Changes

original posting

Hello my fellow Rifties. I want to give small preview to some of the planned changes to our Expert dungeons. Note: This is not a complete list there are plenty of other things that should be updated (such as various achievement bug fixes).
As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, we’re generally happy with the overall difficulty but will be making a few adjustments for 1.2.
– Reduced Health on non-boss encounters
– Caelia the Stormtouched will be modified to be more understandable
– Gronik’s power gain will be nerfed
– Rictus ground target ability will be nerfed a bit
– Gatekeeper Kaleida will have the range of some of the crystal abilities reduced and will ignore line of sight
– Scarn’s smouldering bones will stay on fire longer
– Ice Talon and the Falconer will have their health pools slightly reduced
– King’s Breach Manticores will not instantly use their special abilities
– Shadehorror Phantasm will no longer spawn minions on pets

We will also be making some particular changes to make some encounters more melee balanced
– Ragnoth’s whips have reduced range, duration, and effectiveness
– Fae Lord Twyl will no longer have any ‘safe’ locations
– Sparkwing’s PBAE will have a reduced range. His chained bolt will now work properly on ranged targets.
– Konstantin’s cleave will no longer be 360 degrees. Players that are in melee range will get a damage bonus.
– Glubmuk’s poison bolt will no longer hit melee.
– Chillblains’ elementals will no longer prefer to spawn on the closest targets
– Queen Valnara’s ground effect she drops on her location will hurt less.
– Ouldare’s special abilities will share a cooldown.
– Luggodhan’s goo will no longer target the tank

The Wrap-up

Looks to be a lot of good and needed changes coming down the pipes.  These are a few days old but collecting them all in one post.  Hopefully soon the antibiotics will kick in and I will feel like writing up some of the various things I have floating around in my head.

Admitting You’re Wrong Is Awesome

Well this weekend was kind of horrendous for the aggronaut.  I am still in a lot of pain from my previously mentioned ailments.  One of my good gamer friends happens to be a doctor elsewhere in the country.  So prior to today I had simply been following her directions.  At the urging of my wife however I mad a second attempt at getting in to see the doctor, and was successful.

The positive that the doctor doesn’t think it is nearly as dire as originally planned.  The negative is, it is still a major infection that several days worth of powerful antibiotics will hopefully clear up.  As a result, since I am still very much in excruciating pain you my readers are going to get a rather crummy post today.  I figure it is better to post something than let a day lapse with no updates.  Here’s hoping I am right.

In the Blink of an Eye

This weekend the river of souls event wrapped up.  Like so many I was unfortunate enough to miss it.  I spent the early part of my afternoon performing necessary wife maintenance as we ran around town doing errands.  When I made it back around 4pm I got the privilege of sitting in a 1 1/2 hour queue.  After fighting through the queue, I logged in only to find the event was over.

So several weeks of lead up were gone in a flash.  I had been warned that this might be the case, that phases 2 and 3 would only take a matter of hours, whereas phase 2 took a matter of weeks.  All that said I was prepared to miss the event, and spending time with my wife was a better choice of my time.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean I am any less bummed about having to miss out on the content.

Why I Love Trion

Interesting thing is, when Trion saw how fast phases 2 and 3 went, the immediately realized they had screwed up.  I give them massive points for trying to carry out an event of this scale weeks after the launch of the game.  As a result they had no real way of knowing how popular it would become, nor did they really have any live data to determine how to scale those last few phases.  Once built and deployed they were pretty well committed to the conclusion.

One of the things I truly love about Trion is the level of interaction they have with the community.  For example I know of several Trion employees who have read my blog, and I still feel like an unimportant voice in a sea of millions.  So if they are engaging with the little guys like me, that tells you they are doing it at all levels of the echelon.  However the biggest sign that they care came in a post from Scott Hartsman on Saturday after the events wrapped.

Official Thread on Rift Forums

When we set out to get this unveil event in front of you, it was all about some serious ambitions.
Great new types of content to unveil a brand new raid zone. Events that really push the edge of what’s possible not just in Rift, but in any MMO of its kind. All within an incredibly rapid amount of time following launch.
In this case, while we did get to "what’s possible" we didn’t get to "solid gameplay for the entire game universe." The later phases of the event were too concentrated and time-compressed, which caused issues on a number of worlds.
Ambition is important — It’s what keeps us improving day to day, week to week, month to month. But, it’s equally important to know when you walked too close to the edge and got cut.
Between our previous experience with zone events and now with world events, we have a much better idea of the range we can create "fun" for at a mass scale in the future, and the steps we need to take to continue progressing the more solid gameplay experiences that only happen in RIFT.
As I had posted earlier, our next world events will already be taking everything we learned, as well as all of your comments about the event, into account. Please do keep them coming — I guarantee we’re here reading them all, weekend or not.
As developers, none of us are happy when anyone who chooses to spend their valuable time in our game feels like they got the short end of our aspirations.
To that end, even if something goes great for some, when it doesn’t go great for all, we’re going to go out of our way to make it up in some way wherever we can.
We’re going to assume that if you are an active subscriber you were intending to participate in the final stages.
1) Operating on that assumption, later this week everyone will be receiving an in-game mail with the River of Souls Event Reward Pack containing:
Symbol of Purity – This item starts a quest you can complete to obtain

  • 250 Otherworldly Sourcestone
  • 1x – Purified Treasure Cache – Contains a random chance of obtaining one of the special world drop event rewards from the day of the event
    • Common – Grave Goods Bag -Unique 20 Slot Bag (NEW ITEM)
    • Uncommon – Shroud of Anti-Life – Lorn non combat Polymorph
    • Rare – Nimble Spectral Horse – 90% Speed Mount
    • Ultra Rare – Swift Spectral Warhorse – 110% Speed Mount
  • Shadetouched Weapon Cache – The starter item for the Rare Death weapon quests. You can choose whichever level appropriate one you’d like.
  • The following two Achievements, since not everyone who was (or wanted to be) present was able to obtain them.
    • Grim Hero
    • Grim Protector

2) The achievement for kneeling to Alsbeth will remain available in her incarnation inside the River of Souls.
3) Additionally, we’re also going to continue the Otherworldly Sourcestone drops for the next few days, for those who haven’t yet finished off their collections and would care to.
4) And since the question has come up quite a few times — the ability to complete the quests from the Shadetouched Weapon Cache will continue, such that you’re always able to finish them.
We do thank you for your patience with us during this first ever World Event. We know that patience isn’t infinite. We do respect that fact greatly, and you have our word that we’re listening and reacting smartly for the next round.
– Scott

Basically they realize that they misjudged the popularity of the event, and for all of us who could not participate fully like we wanted to they are going to give us some of the things we could have gotten from participating in the event.  This feels so much different than the Call to Arms debacle, this feels like a company who truly misjudged the scale of an event and is going out of their way to let us know that they will plan better in the future.

I managed to get almost everything I had wanted from the event prior to phases 2 and 3, so in the grand scheme of thing this is not a huge deal to me.  I knew that by choosing my wife over the game I would be giving up my shot at the cool stuff.  For me it was a good decision, but I am sure there are others who feel far more distraught over the chain of events.

I have faith that future events like this will be scaled in a way so that each phase lasts  a number of days instead of a number of hours.  Initially I was disappointed in the entire event, I was expecting non stop invasions.  But I have come to a point of peace on it, I did enjoy the new rifts and I hope they will stay in the rotation for awhile.  I was just expecting something more grand.

Make the pain stop

Well there you have it, that is about the best post I am able to muster while under pain.  I hope these antibiotics will work quickly and return me to a blissful state of not hurting all the time.  Hopefully this post will tide you all over until something slightly more substantial can be posted.