Building a Better Wardrobe

Allergy Apocalypse

I have been more than a bit out of it over the last few days.  Here in Oklahoma every allergy index be it mold spore or tree pollen has been through the roof.  This means that I have been living in a permanent daze.  The frustrating thing is that sooner or later it starts to piss off my Asthma and over the last few days that has finally happened.  It is extremely hard to keep a constant thread going in my head when I am in this situation so I want to thank you all for bearing with me.  I am sure I will be making the occasional unintelligible statement.  I promise the things I say make sense in my head, but often times there is a translation layer that gets obliterated by the allergen haze.  The frustrating thing is I am quite literally taking as much as I possibly can to combat it.  I am not really sure why things are so bad this year, but even people who do not normally have problems are struggling.

So for the time being I am going to keep pushing forward and trying to write posts that make sense.  Sometimes this will work, other times it will very much not work.  Unfortunately this same stupor has been extending to my gaming.  All night on Tuesday night I felt like I was disconnected from reality, and it was significantly more than just being in a funk with Warcraft.  My reflexes are much slower than normal, and I get frustrated with myself when I don’t perform at the level I have come to expect.  My instinct is to hide away for awhile and simply not group with other people, but I am going to try and fight that since my guildies are extremely understanding individuals.  Hopefully this will pass soon, and I will start to feel like a human being once more.  In the mean time…  this really sucks.

Building a Better Wardroberift 2015-04-16 06-04-09-97

Yesterday I vented some of my frustrations about the reported 6.2 content patch in World of Warcraft.  The bulk of my frustrations centered around the timewalking system, and how I expected it to finally be a mentoring system.  I was reminded in the comments however that there is another game out there with an extremely robust mentoring system.  So as a result I patched up Rift yesterday and poked my head around it once more.  It turns out that yesterday just happened to be the day the latest patch dropped.  Among other things this introduced an extremely robust wardrobe system,  one that I would honestly call the best available currently.  If you have read my blog for any length of time you will know just how important cosmetic systems are to me.  I like swapping the appearance of my gear, and I tend to collect looks to reuse later.  In fact my bank in most games is full of items that I thought might be interesting to use eventually.

rift 2015-04-16 06-05-00-63 What makes the system so awesome is that as you are out in the world each time you pick up a new item you collect its appearance.  Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3 have similar systems, but what sets the Rift model ahead of these two is the fact that you can swap your items around freely without a currency or token expense.  Another nice feature is that in Rift you have forty wardrobe slots that can be unlocked allowing you to create a vast array of interesting looks.  While the wardrobe system had that functionality before, what it adds is the ability to also control the dye options at the outfit level.  It seems like I got a basic set of dye colors with the ability to unlock more.  Also an improvement is the removal of the item appearance system and inclusion of it into the wardrobe system.  Instead of having to use a bauble to change the look of your weapon you now just item slots that allow you to pick from the weapon graphics that you know.  To make all of this more awesome, the unlocks happen at a region level meaning you have access account wide across all of your characters on that server region.

Freeing Bank Space

rift 2015-04-16 06-28-35-38 Since I had collected weapons and armor that I happened to like the appearance of over the course of my time leveling in Rift, I had stacks of the stuff in my bank.  With the addition of this new wardrobe system it meant that every last bit of it could be removed either through selling it or what I ended up doing… salvaging it for crafting materials.  The problem with the implementation of this system coming so late is that I have gotten rid of so much already.  The cool thing is that I am a high level crafter for pretty much every armor type, so at some point I want to burn through some of my old materials crafting sets of stuff just to get the appearance unlock.  This seems like potentially the easiest and least expensive way to get lots of unlocks quickly.  For the time being I have enough items to give me a wide range of options to swap back and forth between.  I especially like having access to some of the gear sets I purchased for my rogue, letting me mix things up a bit with the heavy plate gear my warrior wears.

rift 2015-04-16 06-33-09-55 Admittedly one of the biggest things that keeps me from playing Rift is the fact that my inventory is out of control.  I cannot bring myself to get rid of anything… and thanks to the Minion system I am absolutely swimming in dimension items.  The vast majority of the items in my bank are somehow related to the dimension system.  At some point I need to actually start working on a zone.  For the time being I have a Stoneflask Tavern instance loaded with lots of other big objects that I have picked up along the way.  Right now I have something like six additional buildings that I picked up along the way and added to the instance.  The problem is it makes no sense currently, and I will need to spend some time making it make sense.  I really like the large prefab buildings, because it gives you a lot of space while only consuming a single dimension item slot.  I keep thinking this is going to be a weekend project, of working on my dimension…  but that never actually happens.  In fact Rift as a whole has been one of those games that I wanted to return to, but find myself just not logging into it.  There is so much interesting stuff going on, I just wish it grabbed my attention more often.

6 thoughts on “Building a Better Wardrobe”

  1. Your bags look like mine!

    The other trick that’s out there now is to spend plat or marks on equipment in the rift store and then sell it back. That’ll give you the appearance in your wardrobe, and you don’t have to hold onto the item. It’s a quick way to build out your options (assuming you have the marks or plat to buy the items).

    Regarding dim items, I had the same hoarding problem as you did, until I realized that the market for dimension items was flooded. I’ve taken the perspective, if I want something later on, I’ll buy it, since prices are so many things are in the range of a few gold.

    When opening adventure caches, unless there’s an item I like and can immediately place, everything else goes into the guild bank. Alternatively, it could be destroyed.

    But it made a big difference in clearing out my bags and bank.

    Good luck!

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