RIFT‘s 1.9 update has finally landed and has brought with it all kinds of goodies as well as the standard tweaks and fixes. And, as is customary, Trion has made a nice “little” post about all the changes that have been made.
A very large portion of the notes have to do with the things we’ve all been waiting for: Conquest, the new Instant Adventures, Global Chat, the Barber Shop, The Primeval Feast and — my favorite — Mentoring.
Because I like you guys, I’ve gone through the notes and pulled out some of the details we haven’t really gone over before in regard to these things.
Starting with Conquest.
As you may know Conquest is the new three-faction PvP that will take place in Stillmoor. Players are allowed to align with whichever faction they want but must remember they will be part of that faction until battle ends. Conquest is won by taking control of 60% of the Extractors on the map or by the faction holding the most Extractors when the cutoff number for PvP kills in the match is hit.
After a faction wins the round they will enter a phase that allows them to defeat Planar foes in order to gain additional rewards. Members of the opposing factions will no longer be allowed to respawn on the map. However, players from the opposing factions who are not dead will remain and will be able to thwart the winning faction’s attempt to earn extra rewards.
Players involved in Conquest during the event will gain Conquest Power for defeating opposing factions in PvP or taking and holding extractors. Conquest Power unlocks benefits for a player’s character that will remain outside of Conquest.
Next up is Mentoring.
Mentoring allows players to set their level lower in order to play with low-level friends. However, players can use this even if they are solo in order to go back and play content in older areas should they feel like it. It’s also intended to allow players to make use of the Instant Adventures in lower areas.
Players must be at least level 15 to use mentoring and will be asked to choose a mentor level that is at least five levels below their standard one. During this time stats, abilities, etc will be reduced to match the mentor level. It should be noted that in order for characters in a group where someone is being mentored to receive bonus experience, the Mentor must be within 3 levels of the character being mentored.
As mentioned above, Mentoring can be used for grouping in some of the new lower level Instant Adventures.
There are new IA’s in four zones: Silverwood, Freemarch, Gloamwood and Stonefield. The adventure levels are appropriate for each of these areas and players can mentor to the zone’s level in order to participate in them. Higher-level characters can also queue for a Random Adventure. This will place players in lower or higher level IA groups as needed.
Random Adventures will provide bonus rewards daily and players are allowed to gain them for the first 14 they participate in during the day. Any experience and sourcestone rewards gained will be for the character’s actual level, not their mentor level.
Trion has also set up Instant Adventures so that players who are still leveling will receive items equal to quest rewards for their actual level. In other words, you can do quite a bit of leveling in Instant Adventures if you want to.
For all the PvPers out there, Trion has raised Prestige Ranks to 50.
They have included new milestone titles and an additional Planar Attunement bonus experience of 2 levels for each rank. There will also be a new set of PvP armor to go along with the rank increase.
Finally, we have a few more details about the all new Global Chat. Yes, this chat is game-wide and tells can now be sent to any player on a shard in the same region using the Player@Shard format. Friends can also be added cross-shard with any player in your wargroup and of your faction.
Players also have the option to set up channels for specific groups on specific shards as the channels have not been merged together. For example: as a Warrior, I could join the appropriate channel on my server and also one one Seastone.
Now, as typically happens with patch notes, there is quite a long laundry list of changes to things like the different souls, dungeons, items, etc, as well as even more details on the things we’ve discussed here. For the complete list, give the notes a look.
Also, feel free to tell me how you feel about the changes.
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