Ald Demo

June 22nd marks the release of yet another huge patch for Rift. The Waves of Madness events kicks off leading to the eventual opening of the new 20-man raid zone Hammerknell, the dwarven city in the hills of Moonshade Highlands.


   Trion released a nice teaser trailer:


   Russ Brown takes us on a walk through of Hammerknell:


Along with the new raid comes the implementation of free character transfers, which hopefully should take care of having way too many servers to accommodate launch. A very smart way of handling server merges without using that dreaded term and scaring people away. Everyone should hop over to Keenblade obviously!

The other huge nugget of info for 1.3 is of course the addition of an addon tab. Whether or not this makes it into 1.3. i'm not sure about, but it definitely is exciting to say the least. While i'm not really a fan of some of the crazy healing and threat addons out there for other games, i absolutely love UI customization.


Lets nitpick a little and talk about esthetics. I'm going to be honest, i'm so disappointed in the look of the new leather set compared to the current set. Chain sets always look amazing and makes me wish i could equip them, even if it's just in my wardrobe slot. Leather, on the other hand, looks like some low level junk you'd find on the street. Lets compare!

   Tier 1 leather raid set. Dyed to my personal color scheme of purple/light green.

   Tier 2 leather set, also dyed.

Not only is the set hideous but there's no fucking bow!!! I acnnot state enough my distaste for guns. I'm going to have a fucking headache listening to that shit go boom boom boom. I'm too sound dependent in game to ever turn the audio off so i'll have to manage and curse out Trion for this.

Let's get to the good part though. The stat increases are ridiculous. On average after a few parses, i'd say the minimum is a dps increase of about 300. Keep in mind also that there's 2 version of the new t2 sets; an epic and a relic version. The 300 difference was a jump from t1 to t2 relic.

Breakdown of my stats self buffed on ranger in t1, t2 epic and t2 relic.



   
Lesser Essences also received a minor boost in stats, probably to make up for the fact that you'll no longer be able to equip them in greater slots. What really annoys me is that we started working on water resist source machines in preparation for Hammerknell, only to find out that there's also a new source machine with 20 water resist already on it! That really wouldn't be so bad if i hadn't already put my 50 stone greater in my machine already -_-.

Updated essences.
                                                                      

Much to our enjoyment, Trion decided to release a 2nd 20-man raid instance called River of Souls. Despite the lackluster server wide event leading up to its opening, the zone itself didn't disappoint. Well except for the fact that we've dubbed the zone River of Trash instead for the ridiculous amounts. This of course is right up our alley since we love wiping to trash over and over while 1 shotting the bosses themselves.

Here's my link for anyone wanting to try out Rift for free for a week. Enjoy you filthy animals.

Ascend-a-Friend

VI becomes just the 8th guild in the world to achieve the Perfect Greenscale. We were rewarded with what has now been renamed The Staff Of Tentacle Rape. The ladies in the guild are all over Gisli now.

First guild on Keenblade to clear Greenscale's Blight! After countless wipes and strat revisions, we've finally downed the first raid instance. Feels good to finally beat this. Now we can hopefully get this on farm and gear everyone up. All i have to say is, Greenscale must have been a piece of cake before his HP was more than doubled and his stupid breath attack triggered every 45 sec instead of the 25 it does now.

Thought I'd mess with my UI and try to recreate the horribleness that was the FFXI UI. Best i could do! I have too many options.

Once you're 50 and geared yourself up in expert dungeons, it's time to rock. Raid rifts are essentially open world 10-man encounters that drop some ridiculous gear and essences. Drops from expert dungeons are required to open these so save up! The fights themselves are pretty tough for 10 undergeared players but since it's open world, you can bring more.






Greenscale's Blight is the first 20-man raid encounter. The instance has 5 bosses and of course loads of trash. Our first crack at it was a bit rough to say the least. Most of us didn't have the gear or dps to get much done but we managed cleared to the first boss, which of course handed us our asses.

What does one do when his favorite class, marksman, is nerfed to the ground in beta and completely subpar for anything? You become a bard of course and get invited to everything! Flashbacks of FFXI incoming. Despite hating the fact that my motifs (songs) only last 30 seconds, i have to admit i'm rather enjoying barding it up. Don't tell anyone though or i may have to full time it, not that i don't anyways!

So what does one do once level 50 you might ask? Well you do expert dungeons of course. There's 10 in total, 5 tier 1 and 5 tier 2. Both have a minimum stat cap before they can be done successfully.

Rocking some Expert Foul Cascade
 

Random graphical glitch!

Oh and of course the weekly raid quest on Baron in Stillmoor.

Level 50! Seven whole days to hit cap sounds like a grindfest eh? Not at all really. It's a bit weird because i didn't rush, nor did i take my time. I'll be the first to admit i wouldn't have minded if the leveling curve was doubled, but in all honesty, it was fine the way it was. There's so many paths to level that i really didn't even think about it, i just played without noticing. Shocking isn't it? Not having to stare at your exp bar and calculate how many mobs til your next ding.