Fighting Rifts gives you Mad Phat Lewts

So fighting these rifts gives you all sorts of weird drops, many of which I have yet to figure out what to do with. However, I have discovered some of them work as currency for amazing loot! Huzzah!

In one of the towns in Freemarch there's a vendor called Rare Planar (something). I wish I'd taken better notes. You exchange things called Corrupted Sourcestones, and things called Planarite. the Sourcestones are much rarer so you need 2 or 3 for an item at this level. The Planarite you need by the crateful.

Fighting in the water invasion in the previous post got me enough currency for this lovely new coat, the Planar Hauberk:

Its a nice blue chest piece for my class. The stats are significantly better than the green drops for my level, about triple the stats in most cases: Armor 194, Int +5, Wis +9, End +4. Not bad for running around smashing fish guys, and it looks quite snazzy, if I do say so myself. It cost 2 of those Corrupted Sourcestones, and 75 Planarite. Also available was a selection of weapons that were 3 Corrupted and 150? or so Planarite.

So this gives you a good incentive to join in the fights against Rifts and to stay and finish off the super elite bosses. One of them, a war golem thing, had 650,000 hp and I was hitting it for about 50 a pop. Took about 30 minutes for it to go down but that got me a corrupted sourcestone!

So basically, you have raid level events and badge gear right out of the newbie zone. That's impressive and it shows a care about the entire player base, not just the elite 1%. I like that. I'm torn though. On the one hand, its great to get all this right out of the box. On the other hand, will there be anything left at level 50? Will I get bored of this by then? Will I ever get to a point where I see an invasion and roll my eyes and yawn?

I don't know. This might end up being a disastrous decision on Trion's part, but so far, it seems brilliant. I'm having a lot of fun, and I don't have to wait to max level for the interesting stuff to happen.

Rift Invasions and You

I've been having a blast in the Rift Beta, and I thought I would explore one of the parts of the game that I enjoyed the most: the rifts, the thing that give the game its name. I was most skeptical about this.

Moonie I said to myself, because that's how I roll, how good is this going to actually be? Rifts opening up while you're trying to quest? That sounds stupid. I'd just want to finish my stupid quest and have the bad guys go away! And how is this supposed to work where if you leave it open too long it forms an invasion. Come on how can that possibly work out?

Well as it turns out it works just fine. I took a few screenshots here that should help explain. This is in Freemarch, the Defiant 6 to 20 zone.

Enough Water Rifts have been open long enough that there is a beachhead. It happens to be on the beach, but it could be anywhere. At this point everyone in Freemarch gets a quest called "The Ebb of the Tide Lords" We as a zone have 45 minutes to kill 5 abyssal lords (super elite water element bosses) and stop 50! abyssal invasion forces.

You can see there's invaders all over the place. The blue X's are invading mob groups. Usually one elite with a pack of four or so non elite mobs of their element. The black boxes with the blue +'s are footholds, stronger gatherings of abyssal forces that have a Beacon. When the beacon is taken down that foothold is destroyed.

Here you can see if you put your arrow over one of the invaders, you can see all sorts of crazy arrows. The invaders head to a specific spot on the map. Its a good idea to stop them before they get there!

As you see here. Once the bad guys stop, the elite guy starts casting a spell called 'summon foothold' You really want to stop this from happening, because if you don't, all those invaders turn into new footholds, that will in turn start sending out invaders! This is officially bad.

And this is what happens. Random elite guys start wandering around beating people up and you have to get together with whatever random strangers are around to beat back the fishy hordes.

So there you have it. Invasions are a lot of fun, even just to watch develop. As you can see, the elapsed time on those maps is about 12 minutes. So these things move quickly. They're a ton of fun and the whole zone, pretty much, gets together to beat things back.

Who the heck is this guy?

Hello and welcome to Rift Explorer! This is my personal blog no one will read about my comic misadventures and occasional stumbling heroics in the new MMOG called Rift. That's my character, a Defiant Bahmi Warden named Moonfeather, from the beta. My live character will probably be the same name and all but a slightly different mugshot.