Patch 2.n - On the Brink of Infinity
- General
- A new account-wide bank is now available to all players. Any items stored in this bank are available to all characters on that account. Crafting will first look to individual banks for materials but, if none are found there, will then look at the account bank
- New zone event: Varias, Colossus of Air. Queen Miela, as the embodiment of Crucia, has succeeded in opening the Infinity Gate. Before long, the plane of air will be loosed upon Telara. In her first display of aggression, Crucia has unleashed Varias, a colossus of air, upon The Steppes of Infinity. Do you have what it takes to push Varias back into the plane of air and hold back the devastation?
- New quest hub: Infinity's Brink. Come to the aid of the Eternal City Survivors and many others whom are preparing to make their stand against the planes before the Infinity Gate! Many daily quests along with a new story arch are there for well-geared Ascended.
- Dimensions
- A large amount of dimension items have been added to the game. As some examples:
- Strand of rope
- Strand of chain
- Various window types
- Water can now be placed in dimensions! Water comes as rectangular blocks that can be resized. And, yes, you can swim in it.
- The following individual dimensions have been made available. These dimensions have a chance to drop from the final boss of each dungeon. Drop chance is increased for groups containing at least one mentor:
- Foul Cascade
- Kings Breach
- Runic Descent
- Iron Tomb
- After being able to see the impact of dimensions on our infrastructure, we are now increasing the dimension item cap across all dimensions by 50%.
- PvP
- General
- Increased the amount of Freelancer and Warlord Mark's awarded for doing daily Random Warfronts
- Conquest
- Conquest - Iron Pine Peak is now available! The Nightfall, and Dominion return to seek ownership of an alternate Iron Pine Peak as a base of operations against the planes!
- Vie for control of The Chancel of Labors, Whitefall and Exile's Den. The owning faction gains influence with Thedeor, the God of swords. The more influence you earn with Thedeor, the greater assistance you will be afforded. Craft barricades to set choke points. Place cannons to wreak havoc upon your foes from afar. Establish graveyards to hasten the return of Ascended.
- Skirmishes
- Group up with fellow Ascended and challenge other groups to group vs group battles.
- As the party leader, simply right-click on any player portrait and select "Skirmish". The party leader of that player's party will be notified of the request. Upon accepting the challenge, a 10 second countdown will begin after which the battle will commence!
- Rated Warfronts
- A new, rated mode for all warfronts except The Battle for Port Scion is now available!
- Queue together with as many as 15 players
- Statistics are kept based on performance in the Warfront. The statistics taken into account for one's rating are as follows:
- Damage done
- Healing done
- Killing blows
- Healing saves
- Objectives achieved
- Wins
- The better one performs, the quicker that player will "ascend" the rankings. Are you among the greatest Ascended combatants? Prove it. Many rewards may be yours for the taking such as:
- Library of the Runemasters dimension
- Black Garden dimension
- Statue of the Victor dimension item
- "the Victor" suffix title
- Planar dyes
- Callings
- Rogue
- Assassin
- Leaping Plunge: now covers it's distance signficantly faster and roots the target in place upon use. Damage removed but now automatically applies all poisons. Cooldown increased from 8 to 12 seconds.
- Slightly increased the drain amount done by Debilitating Poison. Now also siphons a small amount of health from the target as well (approximately 30% of what Leeching Poison heals for)
- Bard
- Increased the absorb amount granted from Verse of Occlusion by 50%.
- Marksman
- Bullseye: now guarantees a critical hit on the next finisher. Cooldown reduced to 1 minute 30 seconds.
- Nightblade
- Heat Retention now only applies to Nightblade finishers
- Fiery Spike: damage increased
- Ignited Weapons: now causes the Rogue's Blazing Strike, Flame Blitz, and Flame Thrust to cause the target to burn for 30/60% of weapon damage over 6 seconds. Stacks up to 2.
- Ranger
- Increased the damage of Ace Shot and slightly increased the damage increase it gives to pet damage.
- Riftstalker
- Planar Rejuvenation: Now heals the Rogue for 15% of their maximum health over 15s.
- Riftstalker crystals (Gilded and T'scain's): 4/2pc bonus respective increased to award 200 health whenever using Planar Strike or Phantom Blow
- Tactician
- The damage of torrents has been slightly reduced
- The radius of torrents has been slightly increased
- Bug Fixes
- The Rift Mobile application should now more rapidly display chat messages on your device.
- Fixed several terrain issues such as the water abruptly ending in Witch's Thicket, Ardent Domain!
- Adjusted how foliage and world objects are displayed to prevent cases where they would rapidly blink under certain circumstances.
To begin, I offer up Conquest: Iron Pine Peak as an alternate Conquest version that is won through territorial dominance. There are only two factions: Nightfall and Dominion, but three major points of interest along with a handful of smaller points of interest. As you gain control of any of the three major points of interest, you earn influence with the God of Swords, Thedeor, whom empowers you with various buffs. The buffs increase slowly over time based on your influence. Further, an expanding area of dominance grows from the points you control. Strategically place cannons and barricades within an area of dominance you own to give your faction an advantage. Capture graveyards spread throughout the zone to reduce the time to battle for teammates. The cannons and barricades would be craftable and could be placed anywhere. Barricades provide line of sight opening up great opportunities for positioning while also enabling the creation of choke points or even blocking off paths. Barricades and cannons can both be destroyed but have large health pools. Influence fluctuates up and down based on ownership of the three major areas but the buffs you receive from Thedeor persist. The match ends once one faction reaches a certain amount of influence with Thedeor or when the kill count has been reached.
The new zone event in Steppes of Infinity would be a Volan-scale event featuring a new colossus of air, Varias. The area surrounding the Infinity Gate, as part of this patch, would be heavily barricaded and fortified in preparation for the inevitable onslaught from the the gate. Similar to a zone event schedule like Volan's, Varias would emerge from the Infinity Gate and begin to wreak havoc about Infinity's Brink. This multi-stage encounter will consist of Varias knocking through pillars scattered about Infinity's Brink while also lifting into the air and descending rapidly, smashing into the ground, causing a shockwave that knocks all NPCs and players in the area back and down, dealing significant damage. Upon the defeat of Varias, the quest hub would be available for 2-4 hours. In addition to standard fare such as essences, a host of vanity items such would be available for purchase with a new currency obtained through doing dailies at Infinity's Brink. There will also be some notoriety restrictions on some of the items with the Eternal City Survivors.
The new dimension item for water may need adjustment depending on how Rift's engine, Gamebryo, renders "water". Some engines represent water as actual world objects that are textured in various ways. Other engines handle it differently. I don't know enough about the engine so if a "block" of placeable, scalable water isn't idea within the engine, another option could be offered such as "painting" water onto/into areas via some means. Essentially, Trion would need to offer, within the confines of dimensions, a way to place water that is similar to their own way of placing water when they craft the areas of Telara.
The new dimensions made available would be drops from the final bosses of the respective instances with an increased drop chance if there is at least one member of the party who is a mentor. Foul Cascade would take up the area near the waterfall behind where you fight the final boss. King's Breach would take up most of the starting area with the two natural towers opposite one another. Runic Descent would either take up the area where you fight Warden Falidor or down where you fight the treant Wormwood. Iron Tomb would take up the area where you fight the three kings.
Rated warfronts would given more competitive PvPers a chance to challenge themselves against other players while progressing through the ranks. You could queue for rated warfronts as a premade of up to 15. Groups over 10 players would only be able to queue into Library of the Runemasters, The Codex, Whitefall Steppes: Escalation, and Karthan Ridge. Groups of 10 or less could queue for all those but also for Black Garden. The idea behind the statistics would be to give everyone an opportunity to contribute and improve their rating regardless of how they choose to play. For example, a support player such as a Bard would definitely not be near the top in damage done, nor be near the top in healing done, but would benefit from both statistical categories unlike a pure DPS or a pure healer. Further, players can simply focus on completing objectives or doing whatever is necessary to help their team win to increase their rating as well. I admit freely that the math behind all of this would prove tricky but I have no doubts it could be done with the right amount of planning and thought put into it.
The planar dyes I mention as a reward for achieving a certain rating in rated warfronts would be Bind on Pickup (so only those who have actually earned them could make use of them). The dyes themselves would be more complex dyes. Unlike normal dyes that are a single color, planar dyes would give the dyed item the look of that plane. So as an example, a Planar Dye: Death, when used on chest armor, would dye that armor some combination of black and purple that or perhaps even retexture that item with deathly scales such as are found on the protruding death tentacles killed at the end of Conquest: Stillmoor.
For calling changes, I chose to include only Rogue changes since the Rogue calling is the only calling I'm intimately familiar with. My reasoning behind some of the changes are as follows:
- Leaping Plunge is currently a fairly terrible gap closer given its travel time, lack of a snare/root - which both contribute to the fact that a moving player will have long since moved out of melee range when you actually finish the ability. The intention of Leaping Plunge was to give deep Assassin a reasonable gap closer so let's do that by reducing the travel time, adding a snare/root that is applied the moment you use the ability and causing the Rogue's poisons to proc upon arrival - all at the expense of an increased cooldown.
- Debilitating Poison is borderline useless right now. It had one application within the Laethys encounter pre-SL but I never see this poison getting used out in the world, in warfronts or in raids. So, for now, until a new PvE gimmick is introduced wherein this particular poison has a purpose, it'll remain relatively unused. My previous idea of applying a passive snare to debilitating poison to assist with uptime for Assassins (even if it meant we needed to lower Assassin damage across the board to compensate in PvP mind you) got shot down as overpowered so let's offer a small health siphon and a slightly increased mana/energy/power drain.
- Verse of Occlusion, to me, is a pretty lackluster ability given its depth into Bard. The shield is applies is hardly noticeable so let's buff this deep-Bard ability.
- Bullseye is skipped in the majority of Marksman builds outside of pure MM of course and there is good reason for this: it's a waste of a talent point. Let's give Bullseye some love both for deep MM builds as well as hybrid builds that would be interested in grabbing it from Marksman (i.e. PvP burst builds that want to set up a huge finisher).
- This proposed Heat Retention fix is one way of nerfing the ridiculously overpowered Tac/NB hybrid that is capable of 10-20K Empyrean Ray crits.
- Baking a bit more damage into the DoT portions of NB damage will improve NB PvE capabilities, bringing it on par with Bladedancer and Assassin, while affecting PvP very little.
- As for Ace Shot, I've not seen a deep Ranger build in use anywhere since Storm Legion launched. The deepest I've seen any Rogue go into Ranger be it in a PvP or PvE setting is the tried and true 40MM/36RNG hybrid that is currently our top ranged DPS. From what testing I've done, along with what I've read on the forums, Ace Shot is lackluster so let's make deep ranger a viable ranged option again while opening up some interesting Ranger PvP possibilities.
- For the Riftstalker changes, I'm not sure that I need to explain this much. These changes are buffing some extremely lackluster effects.
- The radius adjustments to Tactician are quality of life changes that I'd enjoy but I would understand completely if they were to be omitted.
Let me know what you think! You can do so on the official Rift forums in response to any of the posts linking to this article or you can do so in the comments below.
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