f13.net

I figure we ought to have one of these to mirror the WoW one, for shit that doesn't warrant it's own thread.

Does anyone know of a good spoiler site for Rift?

Anyone know how exactly hit works?

Is there a base chance for abilities and base melee swings to miss?  Does this depend on weapon type equipped (1h, 2h, dual wield)?  Or does it work to offset chances to dodge/parry/block?   I know it seems to work, since after putting points into hit, I notice less misses (with my finisher especially).

It's essentially the WOW system.  End game dungeons and raids require their own hit caps.  T1 Experts (Heroics) require zero hit/focus, T2 Experts require 100 hit/focus, Raids require 200.

Same thing for Toughness (Essentially WOW defense), it's 50/100/150 for T1/T2/Raid

So it does nothing for leveling then? Good to know.

Back to le-drawing board. 

From the things I wish I knew thread.

:heart:

:facepalm:

When (if ever) does a LFD tool activate? I finally got Warfront access at 10. (Yay, murderball!)

No LFG tool, I think there's a channel you can join with /lfg but I don't know if many know about it. The whole group does get the option of being ported to the instance as soon as one person enters, though. First dungeon is level 17 (you can get away with being below that but not by much), at least for Guardians.

If you associate your twitter account it will also take screenshots and post automatically on achievements.

My skill trainer offers to:

Reset My Souls -  0G

Purchase a New Role - 30G

What exactly do these day?

Do they cost more if you do them multiple times?

Is there some up to date, overall game documentation somewhere that I managed to miss?

EDIT: turns out telarapedia.com has a pretty useful wiki....

So apparently a Role is a set of three souls.  You may have up to four.  The first is free and is setup during the intro areas.  Second costs 30G, Third 3P95,  Fourth 21P95.  Each Role has its own set of skill points which may be allocated to the souls in that role.

I'm assuming "Reset My Souls" is for respecing, but I haven't found an explanation of how that works yet.

Resetting souls simply takes the role you are currently using and returns all your talent point so reallocate.  So if you're 30 points into bard, and 11 points into Nightblade, 0pt Assassin, you can change up those points however you want, say putting 30 points into assassin and 11 into bard with 0 pt nightblade (numbers pulled out ass for example only).

I am unsure, however, if you can swap souls while at 0pt.  I've been under the impression that when a soul is 0pt you can swap them out for other souls free of charge, so if you're reset you could conceivably juggle souls to completely redo the spec you're working with?  At least that's how I understand it.

Just tried Reset Souls and it did return points to 0 and let me reassign them.  I haven't finished one of the quests to gain additional souls, so I only have three.  If you click on the icon for a soul you have zero points in a dialog box pops up, which in my case had nothing in it to choose.  I assume if I had additional souls I could swap.

The cost to reset remained 0G after resetting and relearning.  I wonder if this will always be free?  Completely free respecs would seem like a nice way to deal with balance -- if you build a role you don't like, tear it down and rebuild it!

I liked that I didn't have to pay to train skills again -- once trained they stay trained.

In beta, if you had more than three souls learned, if your tree was allocated with one of them zero (as in 10/30/0), then you could switch out the 0 to whatever you wanted on the fly. 

Just confirmed that you can switch souls with 0 skill points allocated on the fly.

This system is pretty slick, really.  Four roles composed of three souls and skillpoint assignments.  And your quickbars are also per-role, so when you switch roles you get the set of quickbars for that role.  You can switch when not in combat, almost instantly.  Fun!

If you open up your skill window "P" and go to "Roles" (I think that's what it is), you can drag the Role icon down onto your hotbar for quick swaps.

Also respecing is a consistent cost of 1g per character level, so at 50 it's 50g to respec.

Cheap respecs will be the savior of this game.  When playing one way gets old, you can quickly try a new tactic.  When an ability gets nerfed/balanced, it's not the end of the world.  The difficulty will come in making all 4 primary classes feel different while keeping them somewhat equal in feel to those that play at an average level of ability.  Right now, mages take a lot more tact in the pre-40 levels than about any of the other 3.  If they can sort that out, I think that the players may find some really interesting builds to toy with.

Actually at 29 I am paying 20 gold and some change for respecs. I am pretty sure the first 10 levels are free respecs.

On the launcher screen there is a button called "Manual". It allows you to download a PDF game manual, but I don't know how up-to-date it is.

Is there a mechanic to reward support classes during Rift/invasions?

For healing yes.  Probably not for buffing/debuffing.

Is there a way to enable some sort of click casting for healers?

I've used the @mouseover macro's, but that's not what i'm looking for.

Are you sure? Has anyone tried spamming the hour-long buffs during a rift to see what happens to the contrib meter?


Unrelated: I used the Ranger's Rain of Arrows to open a fight during a rift, and the meter didn't move at all even though many many numbers were floating over the mobs. Then I used a single Quick Shot and my meter suddenly jumped from nothing into silver. I'm still trying to understand what's going on...

The contribution mechanic is... a bit flakey.  I've done rifts where I've just gone all out on my Assassin, and I am losing contribution.  Other rifts, I've filled the bar, and end up with a couple planarite, and a random damage/heal item for the rifts.

It makes no sense to me, at all.  Much the same as War's PQs.

I do wonder if they are doing the random roll thing like WAR -- where you could land in the top in terms of actual contrib but then your contribution number is added to a random number roll (so sometimes low-contribs get lucky and get a higher reward ranking than the high-contribs). You could see this very clearly in WARs PQ/Fort reward results. The results system in RIFT are a black box to me so far.

Bards in my guild say spamming motifs gets them top rewards every time.

Good to hear they thought of that then.

Do the rare planar items only come from major rifts? Purple ones from zone events? At level 35 I've found about maybe 10 rare ones total, and no epics.

Does anyone know where the Plat you get for completing guild quests goes? My guild should be owed around 20 plat from the quests, and we cant find it.

Rares come from Majors, bonus rounds, or just random low chance. Also, ancient ward stone quests,

I've never seen an epic outside of a zone event.

To the person who turns it in as far as i know.

Hmm you're right.  In any case, it's 50g at level 50.  I suppose it catches up at some point.

Actually, I believe one of the mechanics of contribution is actions per minute, so spamming a buff may give you a boost!


I haven't seen purple tokens from anything other than zone invasions, however the higher level the rift, i.e. Minor, Major, Expert, Raid, the better chance you have at getting rarer items.  It might be an extremely low percentage to get a purple token from a minor rift.

It was free at level 13.  Haven't tried again since then.  Maybe somewhere between 15 and 20 it starts costing you?

I'm not exactly rolling in the gold over here at level 15-16, but maybe gold is cheap at higher levels?

I've probably had about 30p total at level 35. I'm sitting on 11 now, gained in the last level or so after blowing all I had powerleveling my Runecrafting.

Either it ramps up post-20 or I'm doing it wrong!

It ramps up at a huge rate once out of the opening zone (Defiant here, so once you hit Stonefield). Assuming low-expenditure, you'll hit 8-10 plat by level 25, 15-20 by 30 and 25-30 by 35. At least that was my experience on beta and now live.

Could someone give me a hand on setting up ACT for Rift? I downloaded it and the Rift plugin, got the plugin installed, but I'm not sure where to point it for the log files.

It's in the "About" tab.

Or you can use the parser from my website :)
http://www.riftjunkies.com/combat-parser/
It's a bit more user friendly, but not as powerful.

I found it in ACT, what I can't find is my Rift log file.

Assuming you enabled logging, it should in one of the game subfolders ([install path]/Rift Game).

Then you need to do a /combatlog in game.

Then initiate combat or something loggy and it'll appear in your main Rift directory.

Ahh /combatlog, thanks.

This is probably a really stupid question (or I screwed up)

- when I created a stormcaller, almost right away (level 2, 3?) I got another soul to add (I added Elementalist).
- when I created a Riftwalker, I'm already at level 5 and I only have the Riftwalker soul

Did I screw up, or do mages get their souls faster than Warriors?

You screwed up somewhere.  You usually get an additional soul around lvl 3.  That's unless you stood around grinding mobs in the very first area for a long time.   

I'm not sure you could even progress without doing that quest.

 :headscratch:

You screwed up. You should only have to do like 3 quests before you get your second soul. You probably forgot to talk to the second quest-giver at the very first quest "hub".

(fake edit: curse you, Rasix!)

Thanks!

There is a bug I believe. My warrior came out of the tutorial zone with only two souls as well. You get one to start, one at the fountain, and one at the end with crazy dude before the rift. The fountain one was missing for my warrior, but both my rogues got it.

Something is definitely going on because this happened to me once through as well and I reported it in game as a bug until I went all the way back to the starting area and found I'd missed a quest.

It appears that either:

1. The quests to kill 6 corrupted knights (Knights of Aedraxis) offers the 2nd soul as a reward and it doesn't appear right away when it should. So you take the other quest (Steel Reckoning -- collect 4 imbued swords) and may think you also have the quest that gives the soul but you don't, so you even though you kill the 6 knights, you don't get offered the second soul reward by Shyla at Thontic Fountain.

OR

2. You pick up both quests but there is a bug that wipes the Knights of Aedraxis quest from your quest log somewhere along the way.

But I have run it several times since that happened and never seen the issue again. So I chalked up my experience of this "missing soul" to my own carelessness/mistake. I have run that starter area so many times now that I think it's possible I *thought* I picked up the quest when in fact I didn't.

Does anyone know what level the various puzzles scale to? I know Freemarch stops at 20, and I think Stonefield is 25 or 30 (I did this one early because I didn't realize they scale) but ideally I'd like to do the rest at the cap so I get the most valuable item possible.

Where are these puzzles found?  I have not heard about puzzles...

There's one in every zone, they give a random blue or purple reward which scales up to a certain level. Draegan's site has some nice videos for some of them: http://www.riftjunkies.com/tag/puzzle/

I think it's likely that I missed it due to carelessness, as I was talking to work while running through that area.  Going back and doing the quest gives you the soul, so no permanent harm.

Another stupid question - what do artifacts do?  Why do I want to apply them to "a set"?  Should I save them, or use them willy-nilly?

Use them as soon as you get them.  Finishing a set and turning it in gives you a lucky coin, you can spend them on non combat pets and i think an epic turtle mount and funny hats with no stats.  You'll get repeats too, send them to alts or try to sell them.

Those 'consumable' rift-affecting items (wardstone upgrade, anti-planar buffs, pocket soulhealer, etc)? They're only 'consumable' in the same way that recipe scrolls are consumable - you use them once to learn the ability, and then the original item evaporates.

So, where is the stripper angel that lets you unlock more soul options? And what level do you have be for it?

Soul quests unlock at level 13 and are located throughout the main city (exception: Guardian mages are in Quicksilver College, not Sanctum). To do the quests,
1) Close any rift (doesn't have to be Death).
2) Collect planar loot.
3) Use the quest item you got when you started the quest (not the one you just looted).
4) Kill the dude.
I spell this out because the quest text is really unclear and people are constantly asking in broadcast how to do it.

Its not that bad anymore, now the item you have to click is on the quest tracker just like every other quest so its fairly straighforward.

Anyone have a general PvE Elementalist/Pyromancer/X build?

I'm having a hard time finding the synergy sweet spot with the two.  All of the first tier points in pyro are to up fireball, yet elementalists would want to spend their first five in buffing Crystalline Missile. 

http://www.kfguides.com/rift/puzzlesguide.php

Warning: That site also spoils how to do them (some explanations better than others).

Just in case you don't want spoilers, here's the level caps for puzzles/cairns in each zone:

Freemarch/Silverwood - 30
Stonefield/Gloamwood/Scarlet Gorge - 35
Scarwood Reach - 40
Moonshade Highlands/Droughtlands - 45
Iron Pine Peaks/Stillmoor - 50

Being obtuse here mostly because I don't want to spoil myself, but is it recommended that they are done at cap for maximum item quality?  I'm trying to keep the mystery without gimping myself, if that's possible...

I mostly just want to know where the puzzles are, without having their actual puzzly-ness spoilt. I am also curious about the caps -- is that a cap on the reward, or can you actually not do the puzzles if you have exceeded that level? (Producing an insurmountable gap in my hypothetically one day perfect Achievement record!)

The cap is on the rewards, that is the maximum level the reward will be.  Just look up the puzzles on youtube, usually the first minute or two are showing you were to find them.

Thanks, that's perfect. 

In my opinion, I'd focus on one soul for nuking, then pad out with your second soul putting points in either utility, or stuff that applies to everything (eg. crit chance for elementalist). Pyro isn't great for flexibility, so I'm not sure it makes for a good second/third soul - there is very little there in the early points that applies to other souls.

Buff up your pyro nukes, then aim for elementalist picks that improve the pet, or generic mage improvements.

Puzzle Locations:

Perfect, thanks.

We made a visual for you.  Spoiler for size.

That's awesome, you rock!

Dumb Question: what is a cairn?

Question: in Gloamwood there is a spider cave near DD that has artifacts up above.  There is a lower one that was pretty easy to get, but I could see two more that I couldn't figure out.  Anyone figure out how to get up above?

Edit: Goamwood doesn't exist, Gloamwood does!

Cairn is a little treasure trove.  Open it up and get a chance at a level appropriate blue/purple.  Each cairn has a level limit to it so you won't get an item over that level.

All you have to do is get to them.

Yeah seriously Draegan that kicks ass.

I ran around and did all the lake solace cairnes at 30 and I must say it was nice to have 4 good blue items I could use for a few minutes swimmin around.

Speaking of cairns, and the Lake Solace ones in particular, is there some sort of limit on the number of them you can loot in a day, or something?  I've done the Lake Solace achievement across a couple different characters now, and every time, I'll get one blue/purple, a green or two, and then the rest of the cairns just give useless junk items that only sell for 1s.  I had one character that got a green item on the first two, and nothing but junk after that.

Is this intended, crappy luck on my part, or something else?

If you want added entertainment, wait for one to respawn after you've looted it once and loot it again.  


I believe (given my experience with them) that it's intended.  They are a nice reward for finding them.  Not a treasure trove to be used repeatedly. 

Some of the junk loot is entertaining... which is what I was getting at in the first part.

Lake Solace was bugged before the last patch: you'd get the achievement after 4 cairns, and the rest would just give junk. They fixed this in the patch, but I haven't gone there with my alt to see how it works now...

Carins are a one time thing, after that it gives grey items.

Blue/purple might be exagerrating, I've only gotten greens out of them.

Doing the puzzles and cairns in Shimmer, IPP and Stillmoor I received 4 blues and 2 purples, all level 50 items.

Yeah i've yet to see anything but blues and purples.

"wait to do them until you're 50 or you screw yourself out of a blue/purple"

K

I'm not 50, i've been doing them at the appropriate level for max benefit from the rewards.  Jackass.

Same here.. I've been doing puzzles/cairns when I was at the zone's level. Most of the time I'd get blues; I got purples twice (both 'of the fortress' though, ffuuuuu), and greens 3 times or so. The weapon my level 45 cleric is using right now was from a level 45 puzzle, which is nice.

Don't be a dick.

Each zone's puzzle and cairns have a level limit.  IPP/Shimmer/Stillmoor are 50.  Droughtlands and Moonglade are 45.  etc. etc.  So if you want the maximum possible return, do them at that level.

If anything you should just do them when you really want some new items, unless you are auctioning or salvaging the item I really don't see how a blue item at level 30 is any better for someone than a blue item at level 23. Either way you get a blue item that you might be able to use for the next X levels.

This. Except for those that scale up to 50. Best to wait till 50 for them.  It might be a while before you outlevel them.

As a Justicar I should be prioritizing Int over Wis (since Int is SP/Crit into AP/Crit while Wis is just SP into AP), right?

Edit: Should I be using a 2h, or sword/board if I'm just leveling with no intent of tanking?

Clerics, as I understand it, get 75% of their spell power from wisdom and only 25% from intelligence, unlike mages who apparently get 50/50.  So I think the additional 25% spell power is probably more valuable than the crit, though I haven't looked into it in enough detail to be certain.

Ahh, good call. I only briefly glanced at the tooltips to see that they both provided spell power; I didn't look at the actual %.

If Justicar is your primary source for DPS I would use a shield since the best Justicar melee attack requires a shield.

Justicar is a healtank, no? I enjoyed playing it but I grind through mobs way faster with a druid/shaman build.
Using a one hander / shield with a soultree like that doesn't help either.

Justicars need a shield because their mana regen comes from block.

I wouldn't say 1h+shield is necessarily the way to go. I use 2h almost exclusively; there are two mana regen abilities on 1min cooldowns that each get ~60% mana back if you use an ability every GCD. I just alternate them and only run out if I have to spam even justice for more than 15-20 mobs [!] when chain pulling. If you use a shield, your spellpower will be gimped, which makes you do less damage, get less parry from the spellpower->parry talent and do less self-healing. I'd probably use a shield in dungeons to make damage predictable for the healer, but that's about it.

Oh yeah, if you want to go 1h+shield, you have to wastespend at least 6, but up to 11 points in justicar for it to be worth it (precept of refuge, the regen-from-block 5-point talent, and improved precept of refuge is optional). Those points are at a premium when leveling, and you can instead spend it in the shaman or druid trees for shields, better self-healing, extra mana regen (see above) and more damage. Just my opinion, though.

e: when soloing, the only attack I use (except when killing solo mobs, which is slow and kind of bad in a justicar build -- go inquis for that) is Even Justice, which kills 5 mobs at a time...

I never had mana issues while playing a two handed justicar. Pop the mana regen ability at 60% and you are good to go. Soloing that is. In prolonged rift battles I use the occasional mana potion through a cooldown but that's really rare.
Unless you are tanking I can't really think of why you'd use a one hander and a shield. It slows you down.

Thing I learnt today: Right-clicking on an item in your bag while in the AH browse tab does a search for that item. Useful, if you're looking for typical selling prices.

Ok, 2h it is. Thanks guys.

Some of these have moved slightly - the Gloamwood cairn for instance is at 5575 3210.

What is the max level of the cairns in Lake of Solace?

Lake of Solace counts as Freemarch, so max level 30.

Popped every Lake of Solace secret loot today with a lvl 18 rogue and all I got were greens. Daggers & leather, but all greens.

I did it on my new Rogue a day or so ago, and I got mostly greens as well, with two blue items.  The problem, however, wasn't the color, but that 70% of them were 'of the Fortress'.  The rest were 'of the Dominator', which is Str/Dex, and 1 item that was 'of the Malicious', or something like that, that was Dex/End.

As a Runebreaker, it's fine, as I can just turn them in to mats for crafting, but it would still be nice to get something other than 'of the Fortress' all the bloody time.

Yeah, about 4/5 of the blue/epic stuff I got on my cleric was 'of the Fortress'. It's an easy way to get the "omg you disenchanted an epic!" achievement, though...  :why_so_serious:

They really could use a big influx of new goodies in the itemization end of things. Magic items are really dull and mundane (and pretty goddamned rare, at least for anything worth using).

This might just be a Good Thing. I hate the idea that there is gear you just *have* to have at any level, as opposed to having mostly mundane gear you augment with runes and temporary buffs (scrolls, potions, etc.).

If all gear is going to have the same stats and just more, there is no reason to even have them. Might as well just be level 25 tank chestpiece, level 40 tank chiestpiece etc etc. Rift seemed to want all those neat consumables to be a big thing but they are all on the same timer and most dont seem very useful, or at least more useful than using a potion.

Just mixing up the stat bonuses and names of the items (OF THE FORTRESS!!!) would be nice.

There is just as many stats as any other MMOG, though the gear at the top end is a bit lacking.  Need more itemization for certain specs, but there is variety.

Just figured out a pretty awesome trick for crafting.

If you keep all of your crafting mats in a bank bag slot, you can drag that bag into one of your 4 slots and just swap bags to craft, and then swap back again when you're done.

No more 15+ clicks every time you feel like crafting, as long as you keep that bag full of only crafting mats ^_^

Best tip I've seen for Rift yet!  Nice one.

Anyone know if Lust for Blood works on non-Shaman skills (specifically Even Justice)? The way it reads implies that it should, but EJ didn't seem to be consuming the buff.

Yeah, that's pretty amazing.  Also so much easier to upgrade your bags now too.

OMG Help!  I can't find the ancient wardstonein Scarlet Gorge "North of Rock Ridge"  I've found it once, got the achievement for activating it, did two damn quests for the dwarf that pops up, now I can no longer find it anywhere!  And I've checked online too!

I think that's the one up the lift from Crimson gorge. 

Although replying to myself is stupid, having tested this I can confirm that it IS increasing the damage of my Justicar skills, but only Shaman skills consume the buff.  :awesome_for_real:

Is there a setting to change the number of quests in your hud? I "lost" a quest because it fell off my hud list, and I didn't think to look for it in my quest screen until I found myself with nothing in the hud and no npcs that wanted to talk to me.

Yes, in Settings under Interface->Display there's a slider to change the number of Quest Stickies.  The max is now 10.

This is an awesome change.  I've got so many dailies saved up over the last week for Mathos that it's now like 10.  This will help sometime this weekend when I can grind them out.

Is there a level 50 Rare planar goods vendor other than the one in Fortune's shore?  He only sells chest and leg pieces. 

Thanks.

For Defiant, there's one in the first camp west of the portal in the SE of Stillmoor if I remember correctly.

^^

That's it?  One level 50 Planarite gear vendor for each side?  No wonder I'm starting to see people ignore invasions while they continue with their faction grinds. 

You need rift faction as much as anything else too.

So you want more vendors or more gear?  There's a lot to buy off those vendors.


There's another vendor to spend all the Rift Raid tokens at as well in patch 1.1.  Lots of new Lesser and Greater essences that are class/soul specific.

I'll take another look.  My first glance only saw chest and leg armor and I can get better chest armor from faction vendors.  

I have another question for you Draegan: How much content will you and your organized crew have left to conquer after the end of the first month?

Well we finished the first raid.  Downed the last boss.  But we're still hungry for loot.  The zone was designed for a 3 day lockout.  Five bosses, two drops each, 20 man raid force.  It was switched to a 7 day lockout so the gearing up is very very slow.

Last night we cleared the first 4 bosses in about an hour, hour and a half and we can cut that down another 30 minutes due to stupid mistakes.  So the zone isn't on farm yet.

Sooo.. yeah.  I still need to finish the epic saga quest line.  There are still raid and expert rifts I need to farm for resists and essences.  There is rep and tradeskilling.

Oh yeah, by the way....

New 20 man raid comes out next Wednesday, just in time!

Is there a cleric class that can do melee/support?  I'm trying to get something working with X/Warden and Shaman/Warden is currently not getting it done.

What I'm looking for is a combo that mostly does dps, but has a few abilities that he can pop that support the group.  Warden doesn't seem to have group-level hots at the level of spec that I'm at.  Maybe if I go Warden/X?

Cabalist is decently amusing, but all his spells are long cast/channeled and you have to go all-in to make him do decent damage (which makes the support side of dps/support suffer).

Justicar is what you're looking for, and there are a few options available. Basically, justicar gets you infinite[ish] mana, cheap powerful group heals (as long as you're beating on stuff to get convictions) and steady passive group healing from reparation. Put up mien of honor and reparation, put mandate on the tank, all the justicar self-buffs you have and go to town on the mobs. Use doctrines as needed.

Sentinel/justicar is more healing heavy and closer to a traditional healer (low damage, good consistent AOE heals, never runs out of mana), while shaman/justicar is more damage-heavy, but does less healing. Heck, you can do fine with a 'tanky' justicar/shaman spec as well as long as you use mien of honor instead of leadership and just bash the enemies with strike of judgement / even justice.

If you don't mind range, inquisitor/justicar is also very common; same idea, passive group healing via reparation (fanaticism + soul drain = lots of yellow and green numbers, though that's only for aoe situations). Note that since most of your damage will come from inquisitor, the healing will not be as significant as with other builds.

Druid has some great buffs and melee's pretty well.

So far I'm really liking Shaman/Justicar/Sentinel ... good melee dps, highly survivable, able to toss out support heals.

This sounds like what I'm looking for - without a gap closer, I find cleric melee to be annoying (does any cleric soul have a gap closer?).  I'm not looking to become a primary healer, just looking for a dps/support build.  Thanks!

Shaman has charge high on their tree.

Would you mind linking the build you use? I really enjoy the Justicar tree, but it kills things a little too slowly and I'd be interested to see where you put your points. Also - do you mainly use Justicar attacks? Shaman attacks? A mix of both? My points are mostly in Justicar, but I have 6 in Shaman for the absorb, and this gives me a couple shaman attacks that I never use due to lack of synergy with Justicar.

Put enough points into Druid to get the Satyr, then dump everything else in Shaman.  Then macro all your abilities together in order of importance, with your reactives at the top.

Proceed to smash shit with a very large hammer.

You don't need the reactives at the top, since they go off even while you are under the global cooldown it might actually be more beneficial to put them after everything else.

At first I thought, "that won't work!"... then I thought, "hmmm".  Then, "that right there is good thinkin!"

So, you basically take all the buttons in your rotation and macro them to a single key?  I guess that would help me spend more time watching the game and less time watching my cooldowns.

Is there a simple guide to creating macros anywhere?

Forums are down for maint right now, but this is a good list

http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?59433-A-Guide-to-making-Macro-s-in-Rift

The only reason it works for the Shaman is because most of his attacks have a cooldown (or are reactive).  So

#show Basic Attack
suppressmacrofailures
cast Cooldown One
cast Cooldown Two
cast Basic Attack
cast Reactive One
cast Reactive Two

is really all you need.  The stack you have for the Shaman is extreme.  I couldn't really create a macro stack at all for the Reaver, because none of his abilities (except for the life tap dots) have a cool down.

Yeah my champio/bm/paragon macro is something ridiculous like

#show rising waterfall
cast rising waterfall
cast backhanded blow
cast flesh rip
cast path of the wind
cast fierce strike
cast inescapable fury
cast turn the blade
cast bloodthirst
cast frenzied strike
cast flinching strike
cast bash

It works flawlessly, as long as you don't put two abilities without a cooldown on the same macro because that will cause the first one to go off first every time.

Depends on the reactive I guess, but I'd want mine to go off ASAP which is why it's at the top of the stack.

I'm only level 28, so this is my build:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00nrj.Ecd0tr0z.tu (http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00nrj.Ecd0tr0z.tu)

Mainly using Shaman attacks (with a 2-hander of course), with Bolt of Radiance from Justicar as an opener/pulling instant spell, and I'll mix in a Justicar attack if I need to build conviction.

My level 50 build would be this:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00nrj.Eed0trcVk.Eu0ooxco (http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00nrj.Eed0trcVk.Eu0ooxco)

So you get the self & group healing from attacks from Justicar, plus the great 2h weapon damage from Shaman. I like it. Thanks!

That instant heal from 0-point Sentinel also comes in handy if you need a quick heal and don't have conviction built up.

Yeah, i rather have rising waterfall go off rather than anything else and it is only usable after an attack that gives an attack point and it gets canceled if you use a reactive in between so i much rather put them at the end.  Specially since most of them give you a 5-6 second window to use them.

I guess it's obvious but the key to using these macros effectively is to hit the key several times per global cooldown so that any available instants fire AND the highest priority available global cooldown action fires without missing a cycle.

Yep. Prioritization is also important -- you'll want paragon follow-ups like rising waterfall to go off first (like Threash said), and you want to put your biggest/baddest/rarest conditionals (like bloodthirst) up top. My "spam macro" as a champion/paragon is something like this:

rising waterfall
bloodthirst
frenzied strike
turn the blade
inescapable fury
disruptive strike
path of the wind
debilitating strike <-- I should probably take this one out
power strike

This makes RW go off first, then the hard-hitting reactives (if I'm low on energy or sommat), then the AP builders. Disruptive Strike gives 2 APs and is on a 15-sec cooldown, so it goes first in the AP builder queue; after that, Path of the Wind increases crit on RW and is ranged (6-sec cooldown). Debilitating Strike is a debuff on a long-ish cooldown on its own, and Power Strike is the generic melee AP builder for champions.

I don't put bash and flinching strike in the macro, though... they're way too useful to use them as interrupts.

Same one for finishers:

deathblow
strike like iron
punishing blow

Deathblow only works if the target is low on hp (and if he is, you DEFINITELY want to use deathblow instead of any other finisher), and SLI is brutal now that it's been buffed and no longer on the GCD. I keep my last finisher (Titan's Strike) on its own button due to the stun + burst.

I find that the biggest issue with monster macros like this is running out of energy and/or not being able to generate APs reliably. A tradeoff for ease-of-play, I guess...

Regarding the Shaman/Justicar builds; here's mine that I had posted over in the Soul Opinions thread. Up to level 19 you focus on Justicar:
 http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00nra.V0z.Eu0ooc

You run Mien of Leadership to make yourself MUCH more durable, but as a consequence you take a 40% damage hit to non-Justicar skills, so don't use (or take anything that improves) the main skills of the Shaman tree. You're primarily going to be using Even Justice once you hit 19, and just pull 3-5 mobs every pull; the reactive from Shaman is still worth using since it's off the GCD. As you go forward, start pumping the Shaman tree exclusively now that you have the AoE. By 39 you should look like this:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=00nra.Eed00Mshk.Eu0ooc

Now you've got a 1.5m CD that makes everything crit for 7s, all your crits restore mana, 2 separate mana CDs, and 30% more damage whenever you crit. After that you can either finish out Justicar for more durability and a single-target stun, or drop 10 points in Druid for 5% more crit and some more AP.

My hotbar set up is clearly a disaster -- I have one or two macros but none of them include more than 2 or 3 abilities except for my generic 'reactives' macro. Bloodlust gets its own key, since it's not really like other reactives and also because it initiates such a potent burst of damage. I have ranged attacks on a different key from regular ones as well.

I do find it valuable to have reactives on a different macro than GCD attacks, if only to keep a nice rhythm to play without button-mashing. This probably comes from playing Aion as my last MMO, since autoattack damage in Aion is much more significant and your abilities interrupt auto-attacks, making timing of abilities increasingly important. Though now that I have started using Rising Waterfall it makes my usual pattern of mixing non-GCDs in between the GCDs totally frustrating -- why RW (and, I assume, other follow-ups) works totally unlike similar Rogue abilities is beyond me.

I am curious, though -- how many times do you guys hit this macro per GCD, on average? Do you just kind of mash it in case of reactives, or what? It doesn't seem like it leads to very methodical play, but on the other hand having all my more situation-relevant abilities on more accessible keys would definitely help in that department.

After I just score a kill I hit it 3-4 times a gcd at least, provided I can stick on my target; otherwise maybe once or twice a GCD. I keep an eye on the reactive bar for that. If I'm at range, I'll hit it every 4 seconds (due to path of the wind's cooldown).

I do have a lot of other stuff on my bar [at 38]: charge, cc breakers, hamstring, my two interrupts depending on which one is better to use, knockback, aoe fear, disarm, titan's strike, the two 'mark' skills, my two aoe skills, proper timing (the auto-crit champion skill), mount / consumables / etc, and of course the self buffs. I'll probably get 1-2 extra skills added to that on the way to 50, but it's not going to be anywhere near my cleric's 4 full hotbars-of-stuff. Everything is keybound, clicking is death (in pvp).

I'm still not sure what to think about ubermacros like this one.  On one hand it makes stuff a lot easier to handle; on the other hand you lose some complexity..

It's the trade-off between having control of your character and being able to watch combat instead of your cooldowns.  I think the use of macros really highlights the fact that you're not playing the game so much as managing your interface.  This is especially true for healers. 

Compared to wow or aion were i had three full hot bars of abilities i used regularly and actually had to stop using some because i had no room for them i think i much prefer it this way.

This is where I'm at in Rift WITH macros.  I've got several sets of keys that I use based on the circumstances, all grouped on the left side of my three bottom hotkey bars.  My bottom row - the natural numbers, holds the keys that I spend most of my time spamming - my closer, my primary melee AP-builder dots and debuffs, and my standard finisher. With a couple dots and a couple debuffing attacks that recycle on the global cooldown but last considerably longer, I can't put them all on one macro or only the first would ever fire.  So each has it's own macro that starts with my two reactives followed by my 8 second time bomb thingy (fires 8 secs after I put it on someone, with damage multiplied by the number of my other dots currently on the target) and ending with the unique dot or debuff attack for that key.  Also on this row are my situational attacks (stuns, interrupts and such).  I think the finisher has the macro on it, but definitely the situational attacks stand alone.

My second row has my few non-dot non-aoe ranged attacks, my aggro grabbers, and my other consumables.

My third row has all my AOE attacks including my contagion that makes my dots into aoes for a few seconds, plus my oh shit stuff like the AOE attack that heals me, lay hands, heal potion, etc.

My typical attack is mouse-click my shield toss, hit "1" to charge/close, then once I've closed, mash "2" repeateadly until I get an AP, then "3" until I get an AP, then "4" until I get an AP, then "5" until I get an AP, then back to "2",  with a "6" (my closer) tossed in any time and as long as I have 3 APs.  If there's more than two mobs I'll toss my AOE's into the mix but that will drain my stamina quickly whereas I can go almost indefinitely if I stick to the primary cycle. Sometimes if I pay enough attention I'll toss in the situational stuns and such where useful, but its really pretty hard to do that and keep up with positioning and watching that nothing is beating on my partner and managing the infection stuff and keeping an eye on my own health and just the simple mashing 2222-333-666-444-555-222-666 etc.

It was interesting figuring it all out, but its kinda overwhelming, boring and/or seriously fatiguing to do it now.

Eh, I dunno, I don't find much interest in those multi-ability macros, personally my setup is using key abilities on Q, E, two mouse buttons, and 1,2,and 3 - and a shift version of each. That's 14 buttons within easy reach and I've always found that enough for all frequently used abilities. I like knowing exactly what I'm firing off at any given time.

If you make the macro right you know what you are firing every time.

yeah, I actually know what will fire when I mash a key most of the time, and I don't have to hunt around the keyboard to select it.  In a few cases I really don't care like between my two same-but-different dots or which of my two must-use-in-5-seconds-or-lose reactives if both happen to go live during the same 0.2 seconds since my last keypress.  *shrug*  I've always preferred to be a precision player rather than one that just madly presses keys hoping something good happens, the macros just make that a bit easier for me in a system that otherwise truly overwhelms me with reasonable choices.  Now I'm marginally overwhelmed!  :why_so_serious:

I have one main macro, but I keep a sidebar open with the icons for the macro abilities in order from top to bottom.  It's a big macro, sometimes I need to know what's on the near future menu for asskicking.

Anyone have an idea on contribution scores for zone invasions? I have yet to see a purple shard drop since the opening zone regardless what soul i am on (rogue) or whether I participate in 80% or 10%. I get that it should be a very rare drop, but I do wonder what it takes to even qualify...especially at the top level zones.

They removed competition from the rift reward system.  Purple shards on the top level zones only drop from specific epic events, not the regular kill a boss ones.

I have not seen a purple shard from a zone event since I was level 15 and I've been level 50 for several weeks.  I'm starting to doubt their existence. 

The purple shards come from the big zone event. Can usually tell the difference from the small zone event because the sky of the entire zone turns dark. It also has more steps to complete than the smaller event. Unfortunately very rare are enough people in one zone to spawn the big event outside the starting zone. Freemarch has two big events. A death based one and a water based one. I have seen the death one I would guess about 12 times and the water one 4 times. By comparison have seen the big event twice in Stonefield, once in Scarlet Gorge, twice in Scarwod Reach, and once in Stillmoor. Only reason have seen the big events that many times is because we call them out in guild vent if not Freemarch.

edit: Is also frustrating that have to get 2 purple shards to be able to buy any armor. So have to participate twice in a very rare event.

I have a level 50 Cleric and I haven't seen a big event since Silverwood.  Not sure what the point is of all that gear restricted by purple shards when there's no way to get the purple shards.

Fake Edit:  I think I may have seen one in Gloamwood, but it was so long ago I nearly forgot about it until I was about to hit Post.

Half or more of the servers have very low populations too, regardless of what the shard thing says about population. There hasn't been a big large invasion on my server in a long time.
't

I've gotten like three top level purple shards when my guild has tried doing raid rifts during prime time, not from the raid rift but just from the increased population in the zone.

Also a problem is that on my server sometimes we will get a big event and fail it because not enough people are watching the wardstones.

I wonder how long we'll have to wait for server transfers and/or consolidation.  

The Rift mechanic is really going to suffer as the game ages.  We're already seeing the population become skewed toward the endgame.  I'm finding myself getting impatient with faction dailies as there are too many people fighting for too few spawns.  On the other extreme, The level 20-40 zones are a ghost town.  


I'd say the problem is that people don't know to or don't care to defend the wardstones.

Though I'm only level 32 this has been my experience too .. I'll check out what the planar vendor has for sale in a new zone, but never get a chance to buy the good stuff because I also haven't seen a major event since the starting zone.

I'd say the problem is that people don't know to or don't care to defend the wardstones.
[/quote]

I have heard comment before that people won't defend the wardstones because they are worried about total contribution to the event and trying to clear rifts/boss for that elusive aforementioned purple shard.  After the initial invasion quest component (20/20 invasions) people are not interested in defending wardstones.

I mostly clear rifts and look for invasions in my gameplay and I haven't got a purple shard since sliverwood where I have like 10 of them.  I fucking loved full blown invasions in the beginning, but haven't seen anything like it since.  I see quest hubs (scarwood) with 10+ people not even interested in clearing a major rift 10 feet away.

 

It's also due to the fact that if the invasions are on the other side of the zone as you there is almost no quick way to get there. If every wardstone camp had a portal it wouldn't be so bad but as it is even with a fast mount you're up for a log run, especially with mob density as it is.

What I don't understand about the major invasions is why Trion has not simply modified the numbers required to spawn the invasion. They can't be unaware of the problem, and it seems like a pretty serious one with a pretty simple solution. I thought they were supposed to be able to like, hotfix changes to invasion numbers without even taking the servers down? But they can't figure out how to tweak the numbers to allow players to actually experience a significant portion of their game-selling content? It's just bizarre.

Trion has somebody in a powerful decision-making position who is too easily blinded by The Vision they have in their head of how the game SHOULD work.  I have no clue who it is, I hope it's not Hartsmann but I really don't know. Most of the team seem able to get past their individual blind spots and allow their cherished pet ideas to be modified for the greater good, but every once in a while some glaring stupidity gets through, and it seems to me that this can only be evidence some relatively powerful person's ego getting in the way.  Trash mob density, the inability to EVER outrun ANY mob even if you're mounted, the running away debuff, and a lot of the odd automation decisions seem to fall into this category.

Also, as others have said, the few major events in the middle level zones mostly fail due to wardstones falling and that is entirely because Trion have the incentives all wrong.  They spam various mission objectives on your screen and the general knowledge/belief is that your best/only chance of getting a purple shard is to participate in as many of the spammed mission objectives as possible, so that is what people do.  Defend one wardstone against one attack, then off to the next mission objective, etc.  The players are doing EXACTLY what Trion is incentivizing them to do and until Trion changes something in either how the mission objectives work or how the rewards work, purples will continue to be outrageously rare and folks will give up on them (either by quitting in frustration or by ignoring that entire segment of the game).  Personally, I think they need to be tweaking the rewards calculations a whole lot more, such that spending an entire invasion defending against wave after wave of invaders attacking a wardstone counts just as much as chasing off all over the map for this and that objective. 

Which reminds me of another gripe.   Those waves of  invaders attacking remote wardstones apparently cheat in order to make the story progress the way it was scripted.  Has anyone ever been able to stun or otherwise interrupt one of those bastards summoning their own anchor thingy during one of those scripted events?  I haven't and I've tried a LOT.  Goddamn elites, often 5 or 6 waves worth, with zillions of hitpoints each just sit there and trash your wardstone or summon their own no matter what you do to them.  Kill their wardstone and they just summon it back again, ignoring you the whole time.  Bull fucking shit to that noise.  I quit bothering to defend wardstones right then and there once I figured out that was going on.

Just got into Rift recently, toying with a mage (necro/warlock/archon) and cleric (Shaman/Justicar/druid).

A few questions if there's any kind souls with the answers to share :

1) Does the Neddra's Strength End buff stack with Archon Shared Vigor? Does the Tempered armor buff help pet toughness significantly? Does soul purge scale sufficiently at higher lvl in terms of damage / healing, or is chloromancer soul needed for pets to solo harder mobs? Will Vitality of Stone buff your pet significantly?

2) For melee clerics, most of the melee abilities are WPN dmg + x, like mortal/crusader strikes in Wow. Should I be using a staff with the Spell power stats, or should I be using 2h Maces without spell power? I noticed that 2h maces without spell power have significantly higher dps and damage range, similar to non caster weapons in Wow. 2h maces with spell power seems rare or at least uncommon.

3) Other than the Zam soul calculator, is there any webby on Rift to recommend?

Cheers and thanks in advance....

They did, but it wasn't enough in some cases.  On Stillmoor there is a zone wide (minor?) event every 20-30 minutes or so.

1)  Most buffs of the same stat type don't stack.  There are some isntances where they do, but it isn't often.  I don't think your case is that case though.

2) Melee Clerics get a spellpower/crit to attack power/melee crit conversion buff.  Stacking Wis and spell focus/crit is good.  However, dps is dps, so you if you find a better dps weapon while leveling you're probably better off using that.

There are some legacy weapons in the game still from when this worked a bit differently.

3)  Not sure what you're asking here.  You want a website for Rift?  (shameless plug) You can check out mine, see the sig.

The first question was raised because the Archon class will be pretty much useless if they can't stack their buff as their main role is as buffer, and almost all their buffs have 1hour equivalents from other souls. Also I thought I saw in a warfront a mage's share vigor stack with my cleric's end buff. Not sure if that will work for the lock end buff, or whether it have to be a buff from a different player.

Second, I do know about the passive caster to melee stats conversion for melee cleric souls. And specifically because spell power is translated into attack, not using a staff is a huge loss. Have found some poster claiming that his parses indicate that melee abilities (yellow dmg) is normalized to dps with weapon speed being irrelevant. Will know the answer soon as I found a 2h mace (lvl 19) with spell power (3.8 speed) thats very comparable to the staff (level 18) my cleric is using (3.0 speed)- can test once I ding next and equipment the 2h mace.

Last - yea did come across Rift Junkies, was reading some of the guides there for inspiration to mixing and making my selection of souls and abilities.  :-)

Well Archons and Bards are different.  Some of their buffs don't stack but they offer better versions.  All raids have at least one of each.  However, they're not great for 5 man groups. 

I'm not into the warfront scene so I can't really help you there.

Weapon damage is normalized so weapon speed really means nothing so go by your weapons dps rating rather than actualy damage range numbers.  The only time weapon speed matters is when you have procs without internal cooldowns.  It's theorized, but could of changed, that Rogue poisons have a chance to proc on every swing, so the more swings the better.

So when choosing a weapon while leveling always pick the weapon with a higher dps rating if there is a significant upgrade, however if you have a weapon that has cleric stats, but slightly less dps, then go with the one with the better stats.

And thanks for visiting RJ. :)

Shared Vigor and Neddra's Might do stack, I believe the theory a guildmate has was you could have 2 things of the same type if one was a 60m buff and one was a nontimed/aura. Like you can have the Beastmaster +dex bond and the BD +dex buff at the same time too (IIRC).

That sounds right.  Same thing with the Riftstalker endurance buff which stacks with normal 60m endurance buffs.

Yes I wasn't referring to the frequency of minor invasions, though I'm glad that those have been adjusted. But when the majority of your playerbase literally never see a significant portion of your open world content (but can see all the items you made specifically to tie in to that content's rewards), isn't that the sort of problem you try more than once to address?

Anyone have thoughts about filling a planar focus? I accidentally "discovered" I could slot lesser essences in the greater slots when I was starting to put together a healing focus for my chloro spec. This got me to thinking, are those sort of gimicky greater essences worth it?

The soul specific ones? i haven't seen one worth using yet.  The regular healing greater essences are quite good though, specially the chance for a hot/bubble when healing and for pvp the heal another random person for 50% of heal ones.  For warrior dps i filled my sigil with epic lessers, probably do the same for rogue.

I slot the one for my chloro with two epic greaters: Crystallized vines (from Stillmoor vendor) and a greater deep one tear (from IPP).  They proc a ton and provide some nice extra healing.  There are only a couple of T2 bosses I don't feel 100% confident about solo healing. 
 

I've been que'ing as Support/DPS. I am now very confident in my support role or sole healer on trash or static fights. Movement and target switching fights have me nervous though, in particular after my experience last night in my first pass through RotF and with another Chloro as a main healer. I really should have been logging it so I could see what he was doing, but even with me as chloro we were wiping frequently. For that matter I would have liked to see his spec to see if he perhaps missed some of the key chloro things.

For example, the last boss in Fae has the portals. For the Fire guys we kept wiping on the splits. Part of it was that this guy was terribad at target switching, but I had particular problems when we got down to the masses of non elites. They weren't dying fast enough that the tank did not take much damage, but they were dying too fast for me to really get cranking on one of them to keep the heals rolling. How do you handle those sorts of things?

Two things make life really easy for a chloro: a tank with good gear and well-played dps.   The only fights that I really struggle with is one of the middle bosses in CC with all of the moving lasers and the end boss of AP.  Both require tons of movement rendering the use of nature's touch almost impossible.  Bosses that require a lot of heals and cleansing still make me twitchy as well. 

Droughtlands - there are a pair of dailies from the Hunter camp thing. You get two tokens per day. You can buy good low 40s blue gear with them, 4 for shoulders and pants, 6 for a chest. So, does anyone know why I see two or three 50s routinely farming there?

Material farming? 

Are we talking just the rare-blue currency tokens?  Probably making a quick Planarite buck by selling them back?

No it isn't that.  There are special hunter tokens from a random daily down there.  Back in the day they were repeatable quests so you could farm them all day long and get some blues if you wanted.  Now they're dailies and you out level them in like a day with a single dungeon run.

Hmm...haven't gotten that far yet to see the items they're selling...are they salvage/runebreakable?  Can one get Arcane Hand faction from doing the dailies?

Big Tom (http://rift.zam.com/en/npc/331405544/Big-Tom#Sells) sells the stuff. I don't know if they are runebreakable.

For a casual player they are pretty good. You can reasonably start doing them at 40. 7 days gets you all of the tokens you need. I've done it now and finished out about 44 with my last piece both times. Granted if you get lucky and can find groups the dungeon drops are better, but even with the dungeon finder I have only gotten a couple of groups out of it. Heck, this weekend I played with friends and we queued as tank, healer and support at 35 and we spent 45 minutes waiting for 2 DPS.

I don't think one can get Arcane Hand faction from anything except the regular quests and Lantern Hook.  I'd love to be wrong about this, though.

Crafting dailies that I turn in in LH give the rep too.

That's 100 per?  Blargh.  I guess if I really want to check off that achievement, I will have to run that instance.

What tradeskills are worthwhile and which ones are poopy?

At endgame, I'd say Apoth and runecrafting.  The gear you make with the other skills is easily replaced by dungeon/pvp gear.

Depend on what you want to do.  Weapon/Armor are moneymakers when using decent augments. I can't make a dime with alchemy.  

Exquisite Whenstones and Weaponstone make a ton of cash though.  Mining/Herbing make money.

Alchemy helps if you want to supply your own pots, but they are pretty cheap in the first place.

VERY server dependent.  On Dimroot, pots are crazy expensive on the AH.

And I am playing on Dimroot!

My cleric is an apothecary, so that's nice. I was kinda thinking of picking up weaponcrafting or armorcrafting on my warrior, just because it feels like no one sells low level shit and it makes me sad. I'm also pondering making my warrior only a miner and doing weapons AND armor on her, because it feels like I get way more crafting materials than I actually need just running around leveling on my cleric, so he has fucking piles and piles of leather and wood. I dunno how good idea that is for higher levels though.

Nobody sells anything lower level because you lose money. The AH fees are too high.

Yeah, it's understandable, but it's sort of frustrating when it's been a while since I've gotten a weapon upgrade. :P

Thanks for the input guys, I find being a newbie again both fun and confusing.  :heart:

Every time I make low level stuff and put it on the AH, it sells.  I don't price it to get rich, and I don't make a lot of one thing - just one or two things.  I use cheap augments.  The return on low level crafting seems to be better than on high level stuff - seems like the market dies out by lvl 20.

Judging from prices, it seems miners and foragers are making money, but I don't know how much they actually sell. Every time I post herbs that apoths use, they seem to sell for a bunch, which explains the high price of potions.

I play (2) 50's on the same server, one defiant, one guardian.  I make money on the defiant side selling carmintium ore and certain foraged items.  People pay almost stupid prices defiant side.  Guardian side I make about 1/4 of what defiant are willing to pay, its very weird.  Im also 300 WS and havent made a dam dime off it.  You cant sell a 50 Purple you make for even break even pricing.  I actualyl just dropped WS because of it and went Rune instead.

You don't make money making purples to sell, you make money making purples on commission.  People want to use their own augments.  Also the consumables from weaponsmithing sell for a fuck ton.

just started this on the free trial.  Fun.

Is there a way to configure  tooltip delay?  I can't find anything in Settings and I'd like a way to stop tooltips from appearing with every mouse over in combat.  Thx.

Not that I have seen, but you can move the anchor in the layout editor to at least get it out of the way.

Joined a raid guild and attended my first raid last night. Got through the first four bosses in Greenscales Blight in fairly short order and then spent the rest of the evening wiping on Greenscale.

The reuse of the space with the collapsing hedge maze was kind of interesting, though a bit "Your Princess is in another castle." This stuff is way more involved than intro raiding ever was in WoW. This place laughs at MC. Also, they really toss around the gibs. The number of ways to get wtfpwned it kind of amazing. This felt like a good crew, but we were battle rezzing with regularity.

Anyway, my question is what do bards bring to raids? The DPS and Heals are less than mediocre and the buffs are mostly covered by other people. Are the motifs that strong?

Yes, they are that strong. Remember, their buffs are increasing 19 other people's effectiveness. So while you don't think 5% crit (both melee and spell) and I forgot how much sp/ap (62 maybe?) are that great on you, remember to multiply that by every other dps person as well as the increases to healing spells by 5% and a reduction of incoming damage on the raid. That adds up to a lot of damage reduction, healing increases, and a big dps boost.

A bards addition to a raid doesn't end there either, as you still need to add in verse of joy and 10% stats to everyone (not every souls scales that well right now, but 10% stats is still pretty big).

Bards are pretty shit.  Until 1.3 they are the 3rd best buffers in the game.

Warlords with Spotters Order is single handledly the best group buff in the game.
Archons do everything Bards do but better except for a few unique buffs.

Here's what Bards bring:
5% Crit (As gear gets better, this gets worse due to the recent softcap on crit.  Crit is easy to cap)
5% more Healing (This game has an amazing amount of over healing, this is less useful than you think)
62 AP and SP (Does not scale, will become worse as gear gets better but is pretty good now)
5% Damage Redux (Pretty good)

Which isn't terrible, but given how that's all you're there for is prettyshitty.  Bard raid healing is crap because it's all smart healing and is usually overheals.  The only time it's useful is if the raid encounter is taking massive raid damage like during Hylas, and even then it isn't powerful.

Bard's debuffs are eclipsed by Archons since Archon debuffs last 5 minutes as opposed to our 1 minute versions.  

Bard dps is comparable to an Archon if and only if you rotate 4 motifs, ignore Motif of Regeneration, and spam Blade Dancer attacks and keep a Fiery Spike rotation up.  In Hammerknell, in a fight where I can pretty much stand in one spot and dps, I managed to pull 700 dps in nearly BiS gear.  No healing though.

Even a Bard's 51 pt ability which extremely limits a Bards build choices is annoying.  Verse of Joy is great when coupled with other cooldowns as it regenerates Charge and Energy at a pretty good clip.  But you have to take an extreme amount of useless talents.

There is absolutely no difference between a 32pt Bard (For Fervor) and a 51 pt Bard (for Joy)

Oh, Bards to bring decent stat increases in Fanfare of Knowledge and Power.  They don't scale though, so unless we get more ranks in the future, we'll be softcapped on stats and an extra 50 Dex/Str will be less and less important.

Bards are probably one of the worse designed souls in the game from a mechanics point of view.

-Rant Over-

Edit: Resonance is only 5% stat increase, which is pretty nifty.

That's right, resonance is 5%

Though remember Draegan, you're in a different situation then a guild who's wiping on Greenscale. IMO the bard is better for them as I doubt they're sporting a number of relics in their raid and missing a lot of BIS gear. Put yourself in their shoes and remember how big of a different a bard's buffs made when you were still in t1/t2 dungeon gear

For them, that 5% crit, 62 ap/sp, 5% healing taken increase, and 5% damage reduction is much more beneficial

Well, that's something to know. I'm not sure they are shit. But I will say they are uncompelling. Once you are good about keeping the motifs up every 30 seconds, there's not much more to do other than pick good times to use verse of Joy. I can't really refresh harder.

I didn't even get to use LoS shennanigans on Greenscale for using both fanfares. They wanted vigor for the more HP.  Is there another HP buff that's even close to vigor? All of the others I know are 40 compared to the 52 for it.

Speaking of Greenscale, something happened on the third add wave everytime. We were always really strong through the first two phases, no deaths and Regeneration hardly ticked. Then comes the 25% transition and things fall apart. Does something happen there we should be watching out for that we missed? The first wipe was the pollen, but we were good on that following.

I was talking more of a future point of view.

I still remember doing GSB the first few weeks.  The only things Bards were really awesome for was runspeed.  Bard healing was better back then because it hit everyone rather than just 5 or 10 people.  Bards definitely help, but they aren't amazing.

At 25% the fight really starts, before that, it's pretty easy.

Few things:

1)  You should be using both fanfares and letting clerics do the endurance buff.
2)  After 25% you should let a few ranged dps (mages) to prioritize killing pollen and brakken.  The Brakken sap mana, slow you, and damage you.

You need to have raid awareness so when plants start stacking up in the back, that he slowly moves the dragon back.  Also, have your melee switch between back legs as plants spawn.  You should do this throughout the fight.  Start on the left leg, plants spawn, move to right leg.  Repeat.
Bards:

For Bard Motifs:
Use Autohotkey to cast all 4 motifs with a single keypress.  Put Motif of Regen on it's own key as you don't need it all the time.  As far as I know it's legal.  They allow you to use your G15 keyboard to do this in any case.    

Bard Spec, always in melee range:
Spec into 51 Bard, 13 Bladedancer (Deadly Dance), and 2 Night Blade

If you need healing: Cadencex2, Deadly Strike.  Fully raid buff my cadence crits for 480ish a tick.

If you need dps use this macro:

Rotation should be:  Fiery Spike, Macrox4, Deadly Strike

Fiery Spike before and after every time you refresh your motifs.

Fully raid buffed, in T1 Raid Gear you should be able to hit 700ish DPS.  Make sure you stack all AP.  Fill a Source Engine will all AP essences and a Mortuous Shadesource.

Script:

Thank you very much.

Should I be using Coda of Cowardice and Distress?

I caught an off hand mumble asking someone else about that last night, but was not sure. And the debuffs seemed to disappear occasionally but not reliably enough to make me think someone else was overwriting them with something better.

Other classes will handle the debuffs for cowardice/distress.


You should be using clerics/pallies for 40end buffs while the bard gives melee and caster buffs to everyone. The couple hp vigor gives compared to the benefit of str/dex/int/wis isn't worth it.

For your last phase problems: If things are falling apart slowly and you're not being one shot when he's landing then I'd guess it's due to missed pollen (they continue in phase 4, keep them as your priority) or missed bracken/plants and people aren't moving or killing what they need to and have bad situational awareness. I've found the best way for phase 4 is having all ranged dps cover pollen and melee will help with ones close to GS and under him, while all ranged dps are on bracken (when needed, not every bracken needs to die, just the ones in your way as you should have enough dps to drop GS before they become much of an issue, especially since some could even be pulled away by the secondary tank).

DPS GS when able and then the last couple percent ignore ever spawn besides GS. When you ignore all but GS will vary on your raid, you can ignore them earlier as your gear and raid get better, but at first I'd say wait until about ~4% or so if 18- 20 people are alive still while you still aren't very geared just to be safe with it



If talking more of a future point of view, I'd still say they are worth having in raid but they are not as valuable as they were when first getting a raid group started in the gearing process due to awful scaling.

The bottom line, imo though, is they are worth having in raid as long as it's not someone dying to mechanics

Not in a raid.  Archon's have the same debuff and their's lasts 5 minutes.  They also need the effect on the boss for their other spells I think.

Bards will always be worth having because of VoJ and Fervor or Runspeed.  The Crit and AP buff will scale into uselessness if other ranks aren't created.

My main beef of the class is that it's NOT FUN.  They don't scale with gear, they don't show up in parses.  You can take a naked Bard or a BiS Bard and you'll never know the difference in your raid.  HK raids do about 22k DPS or so.  Bard dps is typically 300-500 of that.  That's the issue here.  Bards do not have an incentive to gear up.  Bards don't require any "skill" to play.  There is no rotation or theorycrafting.  Keep your motifs up and VoJ when it's off CD and you're pretty much a pro.

Every Bard in a raid must be 51 pts.  It doesn't leave you with any options to mess around with cool builds.  Easiest "fix" to bards is to increase Motif time from 30 seconds to 5 minutes.  Swap Virtuoso (31pt ability) with Verse of Joy (51pts).  At least you'll give them the ability to use other souls to do fun things.

Bard mechanics are shit though, same with their tree.  The bard today is a bastard of what it used to be.  You can tell the Devs have no idea what to do with the class.  Just look at the Greater Essence you can purchase and the Synergy Crystals.

The best thing about a bard is you can play one in your sleep.

Well yeah that's obvious. If we're turning the discussion that way, then be ready for 1.4 when the mechanics get even worse when they give reason to NOT use any finisher at all. It seems the lack of direction from Trion on Bards has led them to believe a bard should only spam cadence and motifs and their idea of variance is supporting a 20% reduction in verse abilities as the alternative...

Edit: removed something not needed

Forgive my non-raiding ignorance, but if a bard sucks on a raid, can't you just switch to a dps spec or something and happily plink away and show up on parses, etc? Isn't that one of the great strengths of Rift, that no matter how much they nerf a soul, you've got something else you can switch to?

They are still improving 19 other people enough to make them worthwhile over another dps though. Even in pure dps races, having a bard is still improving those other dps enough where it's worthwhile keeping the bard.

I don't know why rogues complain.  They have great ranged dps, great melee dps, and can main tank many raid bosses.  Mages get to play chloro and archon... yipee.

You need a bard on a raid though.  They are beneficial.  My main complaint is that their mechanics are terrible.  Someone has to play one, no one usually wants to.  They are boring.


From a raid POV:
Rogues are 2nd best in single target melee DPS behind DW Warriors.
Rogues are the best at AOE DPS.
Rogues are the best boss tank in ROS/GSB.  They are subpar in some of the fights in HK.  Though usable.  Rogues are terrible multi target tanks.
Rogues ranged DPS is not even competitive if you are a min/maxer.  They are about 300-500 dps behind their melee counter parts.

Mages can compete single target and AOE.  They are just behind rogues and they can achieve 2300 dps on Plutonous with the Zoomancer (Necro/Dom) specs.

Edit:
I won't complain at all about the results of Rogue PVE dps.  My only complain is that they are pigeon holed into having a base of 13 Blade Dancer and 17 Assassin.  That's where any DPS build starts; it's mandatory.   I consider that really shit design.

We got Greenscale down. I took the suggestion for the Autohotkey. That was really useful, but someone else took the bard spot so I did the sabdancer thing. Turns out that our problem was the transition into the last ground phase. The entire raid was moving as one group to spread out and the first plant spawn was slaughtering us. So, we broke that clump up and the tank started moving Greenscale faster to better space plants and we got him down with just two dead at the end.

Not sure Bard is something I can do. I can DPS/tank/heal and maintain situational awareness. I can't remember to buff, DPS and maintain awareness. As I found out in Gilded Prophecy last night, even with autohotkey, the simple act of paying attention and reclicking the hotkey is beyond me at the moment. It was more than a little humbling. I kept dying to stupid stuff, which reminds me that Trion really likes their gib mechanics.

Question time for the brain trust still playing.

Murdantix. Wtf?

We are doing a square kite thing around the outside and turning at the fenced doors. We kite with the melee on his back left leg to bounce the melee into the wall on the knockback and have the seven ranged in the middle. We are having problems with controlling the Blast. We keep getting it in the melee instead of our seven ranged people. The most common occurrence is a blast right after a knockback. We generally get two ticks of the blast and then the knockback drops us in a puddle killing four or five people. None of the videos seem to have this problem.

Outside of apparent blind luck, we have seen 8% three times in 40 attempts over three weeks.

Those little fucking adds are no help either. And someone needs to bitch slap Scotty and tell him to quit helping.

Are we doing something wrong?

You have it right, you just need to position yourself better.  You seem to have some unlucky moments though.

I've got a "quick question", I'm levelling my first character, and just about to hit 46, should I stop at 49 to grind PVP valor or favor or honor, or whatever the point mechanic is?  I know this was the norm in WoW, stay one level below cap, grind points and not get facestomped repeatedly at the top level bracket.  Does this work as well?  Or is there a different currency for every single level in PvP? (That's only /half/ sarcastic)

Thanks for the input
Ralence

Not worth it, you can only get prestige to raise your pvp rank at 50 and that is the main thing you need to not get roflstomped.

Now that I have done it a couple of times, I preferred it when I had the rank 2 stuff bagged so I could just put it on. So, I might recommend grinding out some favor while you are still in the best bracket. At 46, you are a god on the battlefield.

Anyway, the HK nerf  and some re-positioning (melee switched to ass end charlie instead of staying wall side) helped. We downed Murdantix last night.

Keep in mind that you can do PvE quests for favor and prestige at 50.  Between those and doing a few wf's a night, you'll hit rank 3 pretty quickly.

Advice: 40-49 bracket is very balanced.  If you enjoy the wf's, this is as much fun as you'll have until you hit rank 6. 

So, Rift's on sale on Steam again.  I assume I get a CD key I'd be able to apply whenever I want to my Trion account (so I don't have to start now) like with other games?

So I got an email about candy canes? Never actually played, but if someone wants more candy: GTG9-ZMR9-JEZ2-Y7E2-9FMF

Interesting new hotfix note today.


This was a long time peeve of mine once games started adding point gear. The point gear always had the set bonuses, making them markedly superior to the regular dropped stuff. I always wanted a way to upgrade or attune stuff to the set. Now, Trion did it. The interesting thing is that you upgrade things using dungeon exper currency. With more of the population maxed out on PA xp, I was noticing that the dungeon queues were getting long again. Now with raiders "needing" dungeon marks, hopefully the times will come down.

That's pretty neat. I general I like the new upgrade system in Rift. Other games like WoW give you the ability to upgrade loot with dungeon/quest currency, but the upgrade system in Storm Legion manages to feel like less of a grind. I suppose I may feel differently once I hit 60.

It's kind of grindy, but the currencies can come in at a fair clip if you want to work at it. You can get a piece of dungeon mark gear with your first 7 dungeon dailies. It's a bit better if you have a guild to get the occasional bonus mark from the perk. The first tier of Infinity stone gear is reasonably priced as well. Upgrading things is kind of annoying. It's essentially double the price each level.

Has anyone figured out how to claim loyalty rewards in the new store thing? I see the icons and they say Claim! under them, but clicking on them does nothing and if I find the item in the store itself, it is a different cost/currency for it.

There should be a little arrow button near the claim thing to move on to the next one. I had one I couldn't claim, arrowed past it continued picking up stuff I had no use for and when the thing I couldn't get came back around it worked.

Speaking of loyalty, how much do vets get, and is there a list of the rewards anywhere other than that one pic on the official site? I think I have about a year's worth of past sub time along with the expansion... I know I should log in to check, but I'm on vacation for 1.5 more weeks without a pc.  :awesome_for_real:

I've not seen a good listing of the rewards and the "mini dings".

This has a crappy picture of the tiers. (http://www.riftscene.com/featured/rift-2-3-empyreal-assaultfree-2-play-compilation/) I've been subscribed since the beginning and I am half way through the orange tier. The other half is very long.

While breakfast heats up:
Green tier:
Mini dings - 40% experience vial, currency cap removal (1 month worth of loyalty), Veteran vendor (dupe of Cadbury/Jarvis), more stuff on the veteran vendor
Complete tier - Title, Mount, Costume hat (Bowler hat), Weapon Wardrobe thingee (single use), 1 Dimension, 1 dimension pack of items
Blue tier:
Mini dings - More veteran vendor items x2, 40% currency drop token, 40% noteriety vial, a dimension tree
Complete tier - Title, Owl companion pet, Tp to Tempest Bay, 1hr cd, Box of greater vials, Another box of dimension items, 2 role slots
Purple tier:
Mini Dings - 4 veteran vendor items (has mounts and a companion pet in the last two), summonable mailbox, a dimension item.
Complete tier: Title, another dimension, a murdantix mount, a 32 slot bag, another pack of dimension items, player portrait now looks like an elite mob.

Breakfast is ready.

That was a productive breakfast, thanks.  :grin:

Lots of good info on that link too... if I had just subbed for 1 more month, I could've received even more shiny things. Oh well!

I signed up to play this and I picked a "purpose" when I made my character. Now it won't let me spec my points anywhere than what is supposed to be my purpose? I'm confused. Is this a F2P thing or a handholding thing?

You can't customize your talents until your character is generated and in the world.  They put in the templates and "hand holding" because too many people weren't "getting" the free-range class thing.

I logged into my character and I completely have forgotten how to play, and have no idea how to spec really. I should probably just delete the toon and make another but mehhh.

So what happens if I want to do other talents?

Once you're in the game you can put talents wherever you want or switch out souls, doing so will just disable the 'purpose' effectively giving you a custom class and making you slot talents/abilities manually. They added it because it confused new players and because of...


Trying to jump back into a mid/high level character when you don't remember abilities is a pain in Rift. Fabricated, reset your talents at a class trainer and then pick a purpose. The Purpose screen will tell (briefly) what the purpose is, how to play it, the main abilities, and it will even slot the abilities on your hotbar in a logical way. No need to reroll. Once you are used to playing with the training wheels of a Purpose you can customize from there. This is the method I used to jump back into my character at 50 when Storm Legion came out and all the trees were revamped/reset, and it worked fine. Hell, it's still the method I use to test out a new Soul Tree I'm not familiar with, if a Purpose is available for it.

Is 127 platinum a lot?

Yes and no. Early yes, later no.

I just came back to this to check out the changes... used the "Purpose" selection to see what the new projected synergies are supposed to be.

Then, just close the purpose, select your souls and build a'la carte - some of the synergies are good recommendations, but not necessarily the most fun or very best way to spec.

If you are just returning, the Macro system you used needs revising.  It is both better and worse.

The bad is that many abilities no longer have a cool-down... this is also the good in that it requires you to make more decisions during combat rather than having a single priority macro.  The "mixed" feeling is that a couple of abilities where I'd like there to be a cool-down for insertion in a macro do not have one.  In all, I like it better, though would like to see it tweaked.

Also, they have greatly consolidated the skills so that later abilities (50+) generally are straight-up replacements to their lower tiers rather than more situational clones - my hotbar is as clean as GW2.

Finally, there is a gear reset... so if you are returning with crappy gear (like me), resist the temptation to buy upgrades as New Zone greens are better than basic lvl 50 blues (and some purples).

Oh, and this might be obvious, but the new zone starts at 50... if you skipped the last expansion like I did, you might think you need to work through it... nope.  Proceed directly to the new zone at 50.

I don't know about that. You still want to use everything just like always. With the new no CD regime, you now need to track all the dots and whatnot effects from those abilities and keep them up and running.

I can only think of three souls that replace abilities as you progress past 50. Inquisitor in Cleric gets a new main nuke and buff that makes their old main nuke instant cast. In Rogue, Bladedancer gets a new main builder and an additional spam finisher, but you still want to use it's old finisher. Ranger also gets a new finisher, but everything is the same.

I always hated macros.

Macros were and are a crutch to deal with the fact that skills are almost never obsoleted. It's almost never a bad idea to have every skill running for it's dot or associated effect. At least when things had a CD, you could macro them together to keep the attention fatigue to a minimum.

If you need to use macros, your game sucks.

The end.

I'll buy that.