RIFT Online (Part Four) ~ All You Need to Know About Games

Gameplay (Continued)
Player versus Player (PvP)

Warfronts
From what I could gather, PVP gameplay in Rift Online mostly takes that of a backseat position. It is not an important aspect of the game for the devs to emphasize upon and thus appears to be merely "added in" as an "outlet" for the more competitive folks.

Most of what you would call the "PK" experience, here in the game, is found in the form of team vs team "instanced arena" fights, called "Warfronts".

And basically, these work somewhat the same as when your joining instant adventures or dungeons.

To participate, all the player needs to do is press "K" to bring up the queue window. Hit the "Join" button to queue up and you would be instantly teleported into any available warfronts, of the appropriate levels and map-type that you've specified.

If you wish to join as a group with your friends, then party up first and then make use of the "Group Join" button instead.

As far as game modes are concerned, most of the warfronts makes use of some "point system" whereby teams are required to accumulate a certain number of "points", say 500 or 1000, by killing enemy players, capturing and holding certain relics or strategic points.

Depending on whether your team have lost or won, as well as your level of participation (be it healing/supporting your team or tanking/killing off the enemies), you will be awarded with an appropriate number of "favor" points.

These favor points can then be used to exchange for all sorts of favor goods/equipment such as weapons, armors and consumables. But they don't come cheap I tell ya...
Open World PVP

In Open World PVP, things aren't that very much different too. The rewards for killing are still favor points, but the mechanics behind them are slightly different.

If your in a PVE shard, you will be required to flag yourself available for PVP before you can start any blood-shedding. If your in a PVP shard, then your character will almost always be flagged for PVP and open to attacks, except for the beginner zones like Silverwood and Freemarch. For those zones, you will have to flag yourself manually, just like in a PVE shard, before you become vulnerable.

The option to flag yourself for PvP can be accessed by right-clicking on your character's portrait.
But as I've mentioned earlier, since Rift Online ain't made for PVP fights in the first place, this is as far as the open world pvp content goes.

The clashes, if any, found in this open world is purely for fun and holds no viable objectives as far as I know. Likewise, because there ain't no objectives or causes to fight for, these PvP fights will likely be gank-fests whereby the high-level player kills/slaughters the low-level one, just becoz (they can)...or perhaps to display their prowess over the other.

Leisure

Crafting
Not sure which one's older, but if you've played SWTOR before, then I reckon you would be awfully comfortable with the crafting that is offered here in Rift. Its mechanics and systems are actually quite similar to be honest, minus the crew part of course.

The overall crafting process first starts out with resource gathering out in the open world.

Upon learning the appropriate resource gathering skills (at their respective trainer NPCs), "Butchering" (Animal Parts), "Foraging" (Plants and Wood) and/or "Mining" (Ores), players will then acquire some sort of toggled "tracking" skill and be able to hunt down, gather and refine resources of that particular type.

After having gathered the necessary ingredients, the player can then proceed to converting those into more useful products like weapons, armors, runes and other whatnots. Provided that you've learnt the necessary manufacturing skills, that is...
- Apothecary - Crafts consumables like potions, vials and dyes (used to color your armor or clothing). Works best when paired with Butchering and Foraging.
- Armorsmith - Crafts shields, chain and plate armors. Works best with Butchering and Mining.
- Artificer - Crafts necklaces, rings, wands and staves. Works best when paired with Mining and Foraging.
- Outfitter - Crafts leather and cloth armor as well as bags for holding items. Works best when paired with Butchering.
- Runecrafting - Crafts runes and enchantments that can be used to enhance the power of armors and weapons. Its crafting ingredients can mostly be obtained by breaking down stuff only.
- Weaponsmith - Crafts all other weapons (except wands and staves). Works best when paired with Foraging and Mining.
Note that certain ingredients required in the crafting process might not be obtained from resource gathering but rather from elsewhere. Some of these can be from breaking down stuff like magical armors and weapons while others can simply be purchased off the local skill trainer NPC.
And that's roughly the gist of it. There's no chances of success or failures and there's no such thing as the same crafted item coming out with different stats. (Unless you've added some planar augments into the crafting process, which will attach some kind of bonus stats to the crafted item, depending on the augment used.)

The rest of its system is just the plain old (boring) leveling routine where you keep repeatedly crafting items or gathering resources to skill up and gain access to new ones. Its a no-brainer and hardly worth the effort of going into detail, so I'm skipping it.

Just know that, without having to pay real life cash to overcome the limit, any one character can only learn up to three of these skills and so my suggestion is to let your "main" pick up the resource gathering skills.

Use an "alt" to learn the manufacturing ones as those do not require any movement around the game world nor character level in order to progress up the skill ranks. Just plenty of in-game money will do.
Fishing
Now the reason why I've taken this out of crafting, as a standalone, is because Fishing as a skill is given to each and every character by default (along with Survival), does not take up the "three skills only" limit, does not in any way interact with the other crafting skills and requires the use of a fishing rod "tool" (plus some kind of "dumb ritual" in order to catch the fish).

Basically, the idea is that so long as you have your body of water and a fishing rod in hand, you can fish. But if your fishing at a more special spot (with sparkles), like a school of fish or sunken ship, then your chances of fishing up something uncommon or rare increases.

These spots can be tracked by activating your "Track Fish" ability and looking for them via your minimap. They appear as a blue diamond-shaped icon.
Anyway, to fish, all you need to do is right-click on the fishing rod, cast into the spot where you intend to fish and wait. (You can also place the rod on the hotkey bar for easier access.)

Once your mouse cursor turns into some sort of "fish" icon, click on it (once). If the fish doesn't come up, wait some more. The cursor will turn into the same icon for a second time. And once it does, click on it again and keep repeating this "ritual" until the fish is caught. (Generally, the more times you repeat this process, the better the rarity of the fish or item that you will get.)

As for the stuff that you get from fishing, these can be processed into either foodstuff or fishing lures. The foodstuff can be used "out of combat" to help you heal faster, or they can offer you temporary stat buffs.

The fishing lures, on the other hand, allows you to have an easier time fishing by reducing your chances of obtaining junk items. These can be applied onto the fishing rod by right-clicking on the lure first and then left-click on the rod. (Do note that each lure has a specific number of charges. Once consumed, you will need to apply a brand new one.)

And since the making of these operate in the same way as crafting, I doubt I'll need to advise you any further on this subject.
Dimensions
Dimensions? Well...these are just personal spaces for you to decorate with special items that you've found throughout your adventuring or bought from the Rift Store.

Different keys grants you access to different dimensions with various sorts of background settings. And in these dimensions, you can place, move, rotate as well as scale special "dimensional items" that are meant to be used as decorations for the place.

Its kindda like a social area where you can invite friends to visit, sit around to chat or even open it up for public viewing. Its a place for you to show off your talent and creativity, or perhaps just to show how affluent you are.

Once you've decorated it, that is...