Rift Archives - Page 5 of 20 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Of Obsessions

June 27, 2016 by Belghast

In Search of Trays

I could start this post off with a grumpy rant about changes to a game that I found out about over the weekend. However that would just end up creating a general down point for the coming week, so instead I am opting to try my best and push it out of my mind. Instead I am going to focus on the fun that I had this weekend and the positive points. The weekend also involved quite a bit of chasing wild geese, which in itself was a little interesting. My wife is of course a teacher, and over the summer she does what I figure most teachers do… obsess about the upcoming school year. For the last several years Target has had some multi colored trays that serve well as hand in baskets, but unfortunately the last set became brittle after sitting in the incoming sun for an entire year. So one of the things we have been watching for is them to start stocking them once again, and while we were in Kansas City we found two of the six colors, but did not end up picking them up because we assumed they too would be plentiful in our area. That however was not the case and this past week over lunch I went to check a few Targets, ultimately finding none. Saturday we wound up at our own local store and they happened to have four colors, allowing us to pick up most of a set.

The challenge with the Target dollar spot… is that every teacher ultimately stocks their classroom with the stuff located in it. That meant that we had a very limited window to be able to get the last two colors of trays. So Sunday after my wife got back from church we went roaming around the Tulsa metro area hitting quite literally every single Target store looking for a yellow and a purple tray. Fairly early on we found the yellow tray, but it was not until the very last store we went to that we managed to find purple. Ironically it was at the last store… the one furthest away from us… that they happened to have all six colors in one place. Had we reversed the order it would have likely been the one closest to us that had all six. As I commented this weekend on twitter, this is the life of a Teacher’s spouse. I cannot count the number of times we have made such trips hunting for this specific item or that… be it office supply stores, dollar stores or in this case a Target. Over the years I’ve spent many an hour sifting through disheveled bins of stuff looking for that one item that matches whatever other item we happened to be looking for. The sheer dedication that the average teacher has is just phenomenal, and even more so is the rapid sharing of tips that happens when you get two together. In Kansas City we rolled into the Target dollar spot and found the obvious signs of other teachers… and before we knew it folks were sharing tips on best ways to clean white boards or where you could find this or that item at a better deal. Long story short… we managed to complete the set of bins which marks this mission off the list… which I am certain will only be replaced by a dozen other similar adventures before school starts back up in a month and a half.

Of Artifice

As far as gaming goes I spent the bulk of my weekend running around in Rift, shifting back and forth between several different activities. Out in Twilight Highlands there was a limited time event called Arclight Ascendancy that allows players to run a couple of quests to get a currency… that can ultimately be saved up to purchase an Arclight Rider or Lifter mount. At some point I have apparently completed this event… either that or some account entitlement gave me a slew of currency. Essentially this event allows you to slowly gather the currency needed to purchase what would normally be a store only mount. In the past I have participated in similar events for the Budgie mounts, and in the grand scheme of things these are not intended to be completed in a single pass but instead over the course of multiple events. The interesting thing about them however is that one of the daily quests requires you to mentor down to within the 25-30 level range to accomplish it. As far as that goes Rift’s implementation of that system is probably the best I have seen because you simply right click your name and choose a new level… and then bam you are functioning at that level without having to give up any of your abilities. The other thing that I am enjoying about doing the quests is that it puts me back in Twilight Highlands and Scarlet Gorge on a daily basis… two zones that I absolutely loved from Telara.

The other big thing that I worked on this weekend was leveling my Artificer skill. This is of course slowly bankrupting me, but nonetheless I still felt the desire to keep pushing forward. I spent many an hour this weekend roaming around Gelboro Reef doing quests that I never finished out there… and farming up Thalasite ore and Sarleaf that would ultimately be converted into fuel to feed the fires of industry. Yesterday evening I managed to push ahead and get to the current level cap of 450. Now will I actually do anything with that level other than daily crafting quests? I honestly am not sure… I’ve never had a max level artificer before now. At this point in the cycle I doubt there is anything I can craft that is not better than the gear I can get from a combination of weekly patron chests and instant adventures/experts. However having a whole slew of crafters means that I can rapid-fire through the crafting dailies and get patterns quickly. I need to some time researching what if anything I can craft that is a damage upgrade… or more importantly a hit upgrade. Now that I have finished with another crafting obsession I really need to get back into the process of digging into the Planetouched Wilds. That area is huge and full of all manner of weekly quest opportunities, and I have barely scratched the surface.

Scrap Collector

June 21, 2016 by Belghast

The Wastelands

The Rift resurgence continues and this time around I find myself working on tradeskills. Every so often I find myself stuck in a loop, that winds up with me leveling one thing like mad. The focus currently is pushing as many trade-skills up as I can manage… and honestly afford. I went into this little mission with roughly 1600 platinum, and as of last night I had dropped under 500. Please not this is just on reagent costs and pattern training costs, as I have been going out into the wild to gather materials on a pretty regular basis. The above image was taken on one of these many trips, this time to find Rhenium nodes in the Steppes of Infinity. I am not sure if this is even the best place to look for these, but I figured the highest level zone in Storm Legion would probably have the highest chance of these nodes. Currently I am working on Artificer which as of last night is I believe sitting at 360 of 450, but thankfully it was one of my lowest trades. When the game went free to play, one of the things that I spent a bunch of my “free” currency on was adding tradeskill unlocks to my main. The goal is to eventually turn Belghast into an omnicrafter, which is a term that is common in FFXIV but not possible in most games. Currently my trade-skill load-out looks a little something like this…

Armorsmith – 450
Butchering – 450
Foraging – 450
Mining – 450
Outfitter – 450
Runecrafter – 450
Weaponsmith – 450
Dream Weaver – 390
Fishing – 375
Survival – 375
Artificer – 370

So like I said Artificer is the lowest of my skills or at least the last of my “make gear” skills so I have been focusing on it. Fishing and Survival hopefully I will be able to level in tandem as I have done in the past. Dream Weaver I probably have more than enough material to start pushing it up there in level given that I salvage every single artifact that I get that I already have…. which at this point is a considerable number. The worst part of the artificer grind right now is trying to acquire gemstones which is namely why I am out in the Steppes farming Rhenium for those every so lucrative Heavy gem nodes. The only problem I foresee however is that a some point soon I am simply going to run out of money, probably long before I actually hit the goal of leveling all of these things. I am also lacking one tradeskill on this character, and that is Apothecary the one I have never actually successfully leveled on any character. At some point I will end up picking up one more tradeskill unlock and start working on that, but I think that will ultimately happen at a later date. The only real disappointment so far is that apparently this awesome 38 Slot Cosmic Bag pattern that I picked up can only be crafted with a drop from Tier 3 raid bosses, with no other way to acquire it. That is a bit of a kick in the pants…. but hopefully they will add it to the cash shop or something at a later date.

Low Key Activity

I think that after coming back from our whirlwind birthday weekend… I have just needed something super chill to do and crafting became that activity. The biggest problem is that if I keep on this course I am going to ultimately bankrupt myself. Tonight is going to be a night of fiddling with my desktop upstairs, because in theory I should have a shiny new graphics card to install. If I can manage to get that done in time I will probably end up participating in the FFXIV pony farm and miscellaneous activity night. If I do not get finished with machine upgrades until after the start time, I will likely just piddle around in Rift. I need to get back to doing some Intrepid Adventures because it turns out that they are still a pretty damned good source of upgrades. I also need to get some more Expert dungeons in, as in a perfect world I would do at least seven a week so that I get all of my currency bonuses. As far as raiding goes I am still up in the air as to what I want to do there. There are supposedly a good number of pick up raids, and I would love to see some of the content at least once… namely the new Comet of Ahnkhet raid. I would also love to get some of those bag reagents to craft up a few 38 slotters… but I would imagine that even now those items are in high demand. I wish they dropped form the Mind of Madness bosses in Intrepid Adventure, but as I have not seen one yet… I would assume that is not something that happens. For sheer gear acquisition Hammerknell seems way faster for getting cache drops, but then again that could simply be that people are just more used to those encounters.

At some point I also want to begin leveling my rogue, but in the past my key reason for doing this… was to have a bag maker. Since going all omnicraftery that reason went out the door so ultimately I need to find a spec that I can really enjoy. I somehow down the “grandpa build ” is still as effective as it once was for soloing content. For doing Instant Adventures I am currently running around as Marksman, because standing back and plinking tends to require less focus than getting up close and personal with the mob encounters. Similarly at some point I do want to level a character on the European servers, and I have gotten my Zaviel character up to 22. Right now I am largely just opening patron caches on him every day in the hopes of getting extra loyalty, but at some point I want to start pushing him in levels again. At some point I left the tracks and entered the Instant Adventure zone and it is unlikely that I will ever return to proper leveling with quests on that guy. The IA is a bit of a trap… in that the experience you gain seems so much faster than anything you can get while questing… but as a result it ends up with you being severely under-geared for your level. It also make sure that your tradeskills are woefully behind, and at some point I will have to go on a gathering binge to even begin to catch up. In any case… its been a little over a week now since my return to Rift and I am still finding so many of the things compelling. Even more so I have dove back into the community and am hanging my hat on discord, so if you have any interest in Rift I highly suggest you check it out as well.

The True Endgame

June 17, 2016 by Belghast

Wardrobe System

Last night I had a marvelously relaxing evening working on “endgame content” in Rift. By that I mean the true end game of any MMO… and that is wearing interesting outfits. There are so many different cosmetic systems out there, but I have to say that in my personal experience Rift has hands down the best one. How the system works is you have a tab on your character screen labelled Wardrobe, and at the bottom are a number of alternate outfits that you can save. By default you get one free wardrobe slot, and then up to four can be purchased using platinum, with the second tab costing 10, third costing 50 and fourth costing 100. If I remember correctly the loyalty system has a number of unlocks that come with various ranks in that, gained through either subscribing as a patron or spending money on the in game shop. Up to sixty total wardrobe slots can be unlocked however through the cash shop currency, and each of them costs 144 credits which if you base that on the conversion rate for the $19.99 and if my math is anywhere near correct that is roughly 90 cents a slot. What makes the system so special is that the game saves appearance and dye information at an account level, and simply looting an item into your inventory saves the appearance. You don’t even need to equip an item to save its appearance, which means if you get a sweet bind in equip item that you are not going to use… you can sell it and still have saved its appearance data. Dyes work a little strange in that they are mostly unlocked through cash shop currency… however I believe you have some of the basic colors unlocked for free. The individual unlocks are at tiers of pricing and are either 90, 270 or 450. As I am writing this I am realizing that all of my information may be slightly off given that I have the patron discount applied to pretty much everything. Essentially if you really want a color it isn’t terribly cost prohibitive to get it, however I wish their dyes worked like Wildstar in that they were drops out in the world and not something you simply purchased.

What makes the Wardrobe system so special to me is that for every single wardrobe tab you can save an appearance that you choose from all of the appearances you have collected, a primary and secondary dye color… and even toggle whether or not you want to display that particular slot. What I love the most however is that you can save an appearance for two one handed weapons, a two handed weapon, a ranged weapon and a shield with every single slot. That means when you are running around in this outfit and you switch specs to something that uses a sword and board, or something that dual wields… you don’t have jarring change in appearance, nor do you have the odd feeling of running around and fighting with a shield but it still shows your two handed weapon. When you pick up any item, or look at an item in the crafting or auction pane you see a little note that tells you if you have collected the appearance for it yet. What makes collecting gear so damned fun for me at least is that they have created this tab called “Appearance Sets” that tells which pieces you are missing from each set. For the completionists there are a number of achievements tied to the collection of various sets as well. I have lots of singlets and partial sets but you can see that as of last night I have completed 30 of 323 available item sets. The only thing that I wish it showed… was where you could actually get that specific appearance item be it crafting or drops. That said the Rift team gets amazing marks for me in the way this system works and feels to use. What makes everything better… is that you can use ANY gear type on ANY character…. so I can have my plate wearing warrior in robes, or my mage sitting in full plate.

Bolstering the Sets

So when I say last night that I spent the entire evening working on the true Endgame… what I mean is that I have been on this crafting kick. Another feature that I love about Rift is that I can pretty much make one character do every single crafting profession in the game. Granted this is cost prohibitive when it comes to credits, but when the free to play system launched they gave long time subscribers a pretty massive cash shop payout. This allowed me to add everything but Apothecary and Outfitter to my primary Bahmi Warrior main. At some point I would love to add those professions as well just so I can have a true omni-crafter in this game and to streamline the creation of items. I have a max level outfitter on my Rogue, so last night I had to spend a good deal of time swapping items back and forth for the creation of fabric bolts. Over the last week as I have been out in the world picking up max level crafting materials, I have been spending some time at the end of the evening pushing up my tradeskills and at this point I have several of them at the 450 max or pretty close to it. This is the point where my brain goes a little off the track here, and shifts goals on me. When they put in the Item Appearance system, I was a little disappointed because so many of the items left to collect were things that I had in my grubby little hands at one point. Now I saved the items that really mattered to me, but wound up scrapping the vast majority of the items I handled over the years. I always had it in the back of my mind that at some point I would start running old world dungeons and crafting old world items to help bolster my appearance collection.

So last night while watching The Expanse through the Syfy Roku app… I started in Freemarch and worked my way through the various zones of the Old World collecting ore, wood, leather and cloth and then taking it back to either Meridian or Tempest Keep and crafting item sets. By the point I had shut down for the evening I had made my way through to Titanium and had crafted the Plate and Chain armor sets for each… as well as the armor bundles that were available at various points. At some point I will follow up and do the same with weapons, but there are far more items to craft there… or at least it certainly feels that way. I suppose at some point I will go do the same with my Rogue and collect the various cloth and leather sets, but since I am a pretty plate and chain focused person those weren’t nearly as important to me. The truth is since this system went in during Storm Legion if I remember correctly, I have most of the post Old World craft-able sets already saved, so that leaves me with Carmintium left to craft of the easy sets. At some point I would like to purchase the rest of the alloy metal sets like Steel and the rest of the Orichalcum set… but those involve farming up a bunch of crafting marks to purchase the patterns. In the end I had a blast and knocked out a bunch of those things that I have always said I wanted to do. I love the crafting system in this game because it is just intricate enough to keep my focus… and not a maddening mini-game that requires me tending it as I craft things. I like systems that make the acquisition of raw materials the challenge, not the assembly of those things.

Racing Snail

June 16, 2016 by Belghast

Out of Advice

This month is of course the rescheduled Newbie Blogger Initiative… and I have been horrible at supporting it so far. Normally I have filled my blog with various sundry related information about blogging, and if you really want you can probably still take some of that as completely valid. I know this event works, but the problem is… at this point I just feel like I am out of advice to give without simply rehashing a bunch of old themes. The truth is I really don’t know what I am doing, and while sometimes I put on the front that I do… I spend the majority of my time winging it. Sure before I wrote a single line on Aggronaut, I had planned a lot of stuff like the domain name and hosting provider, but that is not to say I didn’t have a much earlier not fit for public consumption blog on blogger. Back then… I just started blogging, and it is I feel honestly good to just go make some mistakes on your own without the intervention of others. My original blog was a semi-private ordeal talking about my life, my family, and all sorts of random events in large part surrounded on our sudden and bizarre desire to start camping. I say camping… but what I really mean is hanging out at a lakeside resort in an RV. It was real and snarky and sometimes raw… but it had a very specific audience of folks who actually knew me in real life. Those people didn’t care about my gaming, and in most part would probably find it strange.

So when I created Aggronaut it was by purpose designed to be completely divorced from my real life. The idea was I would have the real world blog for people who knew me… and then the other blog to talk about my passions. That didn’t exactly work because I’ve found that while I can write in a mostly anonymous fashion talking about people and events from my real life setting… I can’t exactly keep them out of my topics. I’ve tried not to name names in my blog as a sort of “protect the innocent” fashion in part because my wife works in a very skittish profession. I never wanted anything I might say to reflect badly upon her. I would say that I probably filter myself a lot, but the truth is I really don’t have that many inflammatory opinions. What I personally consider ranting about subject… I’ve often been told is just polite but impassioned discussion. So as I sit down and try and thing of advice to give a budding blogger, I am really finding myself completely empty this year. Just because I have been doing something longer, doesn’t mean I have any better grasp on how things should work. I don’t know what I am doing… and it is perfectly okay to not know what you are doing. I’ve somehow made that work for over seven years now, and I suppose I will continue to make it work for the foreseeable future. I lack the ego however to tell you t hat my way is the correct way, because I know I don’t even know if it is right for me. Next week I might get new information that makes me question everything about what I have done for the better part of this decade, and that is also okay. Basically if you want to write… just go write.

A Good Note

Over the last few days I have become progressively more active in the Rift community. There is something comfortable about coming back to this game, and I find myself obsessing with all of these little details. The experience has been something akin to catching a movie on cable television that you have not seen at decades… and then having a sudden swell of feelings for how much you used to love that movie. Coming back to Rift this time feels very much like dusting off a favorite tome and reading it again with new eyes. There are some things I am coming to terms with, namely that unlike so many games… it is unlikely that I will find many of my closest friends interested in joining me. As I have learned time and time again… Rift is not really their game and especially the AggroChat crew can rattle off a list of reasons why. That said… it has always sorta been my game, and been something that I supported regardless if I was actually playing with it. I’ve said time and time again that Rift is essentially all of the features I ever wanted in a video game compiled in one game… and they just keep adding more features as time goes on. That said it is also a much harder game than I have grown accustomed to, and as a result for the last several years since the launch of Storm Legion I have struggled a bit to find my place in it. I was extremely slow getting to level 60, and I am just now getting to 65, so the speed and difficulty of leveling was something I had a difficult time reconciling now that I am extremely used to the fast pace and ease of leveling in the “modern” mmo. I’ve long said that my favorite time period in World of Warcraft was Wrath of the Lich King, and I’ve just realized that Rift is as though you stopped the clock in a time period before content started to get watered down to appeal to a wider audience. That is not to say that Rift does not have a lot of solo-able features… but if you intend to play at the highest levels of the game you are going to need a group and dedication to your character.

All of this aside I am in this position where I am really enjoying the depth of this game, and finding myself with this entire list of things that I want to accomplish. One of the best parts of the game for me personally is the way that they have changed the wardrobe system. Now when you pick up an item, you collect its appearance and can then assemble outfits out of these appearances without needing to fiddle with any of the actual loot. The fact that there are also zero negatives like a gold sink associated with it, means I am constantly changing my wardrobes around, and I guess at times this is a positive. Within the Rift forums and Discord there was a contest called “Planetouched Style”, the idea being that you assembled an outfit that represented a certain planar theme and then went out into the world and found a location that fit the theme to take a screenshot. The first image was my entry, going for a sort of “Papa Legba” feel for it… and then finding an area out in Seratos that really shows off the deathyness. Much to my shock… I apparently nabbed second place in the contest. So I am now the proud owner of the 5th Anniversary edition racing snail… completely with flames decorating the shell. This goes nicely with my 4th Anniversary mount that I already spent damned near all of my time riding. I am excited and humbled to somehow have managed to win, but it was a great note to end the day on yesterday.