RIFT Online (Part Four)

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...
  

RIFT Online Video Clips

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RIFT Online (Part Three)

Macros

While the combat is pretty simple and straightforward enough that your pretty much just running around casting away spells via your hotkeys, I do find it appropriate to advise you upon the subject of macroing in RIFT Online. (Due to the plethora of active skills that you might acquire just from one soul tree, if not the three of them.)

But if your thinking of those that allow you to do multiple things, within 1 second, all at the touch of one button kind of macro, then I'm sorry to disappoint you...it doesn't work that way.

The "macroing" that you CAN do here, instead, just allows you to more reasonably manage the skills, that you have acquired, via "compacting" and "condensing".

With it, you can group together a variety of different abilities, based upon some purpose or simply for easy access, all into one single hotkey. Think of it as an alternate solution to the "battlemode" that you have in Ragnarok Online.

For instance, in the above screenshot, I have grouped together a couple of abilities that my character can use, based upon their supposed "functionality".

In this single macro hotkey, there are several skills that builds "charges" for my character. (These charges can then be used by my other abilities which consumes them.)

Additionally, I have also grouped them together due to the fact that they are "Air-based". (The reason being that I have a passive ability that circumvents the cast time of Ice Shear, making it instant-cast, whenever I use an "Air-based" attack prior to it.)

And so the logic or purpose behind this macro is that while I'm spamming my "Air-based" charge builders, I can occasionally slip in an instant-cast Ice Shear whenever the passive triggers.

But before you go on building your own macros, there are certain guidelines that you'll need to know, respect and follow.

• Each macro comprises of three basic things, the Icon, the Name and the Script.
  
  • The Icon allows you to click, drag and drop the macro onto the hotkey bar just like a regular skill. You may then activate the macro by hitting the corresponding hotkey.
  • The Name is just something for you to identify the purpose of the macro with. It can be any name, but preferably something short, simple and easy-to-remember will do.
  • The Script forms the heart or core of the macro. Any blunders in here and your entire macro might fall apart or fail to perform as planned.
• Each macro's script can hold a maximum of 25 lines and each line can be made to perform a single command.
  
• As far as skills or abilities are concerned, if the script holds more than one of them, then each activation of the macro will cause it to perform one of the intended skills, starting from the topmost one.
• If it cannot be performed, the macro will then move on to the very next ability in line and so on and so forth. Also known as the "fall through".
  
• If there are "modifiers" involved (shift, alt or ctrl), they should be placed at the top of the script. Or else they will never be triggered as the script might never fall-through enough to reach it.
  
• When planning your skills for the macro, positioning of the skill in the script and cooldown matters.
  
  • If you wish for the macro to trigger Skill A first before Skill B, then Skill A's command line must be placed higher than Skill B's in the script.
    
  • Always put a skill with zero cooldown at the very bottom / last line in the script. If you accidentally placed one with zero cooldown higher than all the rest, then no matter what keys you press or how fast you button-mash it, that ability will be the only one that you'll ever be able to activate.
    

And so, back to the macro example I gave, if I hit "1" multiple times, the macro will first cast "Raging Storm" (20 seconds cooldown), then "Lightning Strike" (10 seconds cooldown) before finally settling upon casting "Thunderbolt" (zero cooldown) continuously. At least until either of the previous two's cooldown is complete, that is.

But if at any point in time, like when my said passive triggers, I can hit "Ctrl + 1" to order the macro to cast Ice Shear instead. Likewise, if any of my enemies become too close to my character, I can also opt to mouse over that target and press "Shift + 1" to knock back the target with "Electrocute", without having to lose focus upon my current target.

And that forms the entire purpose behind this macro that I've built.

Handy? But that's only just the tip of the iceberg. For more commands and ideas for creating your own macros, please visit and read...

Zam Rift - Macros (Rift)
RiftScene - Understanding Rift’s Macro System

(* Before you can use the "Ctrl", "Alt" and "Shift" modifiers in your macros, you will need to clear away its respective key bindings within your game settings. Else, pressing those buttons will not trigger your intended skills but whatever that you've placed in those corresponding slots on your hotkey bars.)

Gameplay
Gameplay in Rift Online can be effectively summarized into the following three categories of activity.

Player versus Environment (PvE)

• Instant Adventure
  
  In Instant Adventure, what you basically do is participate in other players' regular questing events. Stuff you may or may not have done before, while you were out there exploring by your own self.
  
  
  
  Though repetitive, the redeeming part about this feature is that it allows you to teleport around the massive world of Telara, pending on which part of the world that quest may be in, in the split of a second.
  
  One moment, I may be in Silverwood, a beginner's paradise (Level 6 to 20), and the next, I may get teleported to Scarwood Reach (Level 30 to 35)...if my character's level suffice, that is. (Don't worry, you won't get thrown into quests beyond your level.)
  
  And upon finishing the quest, you may either choose to stick with it and let the system queue you up for another...or...you may opt to drop out of it and return back to your original location, where you first signed up for the Instant Adventure.
  
  What's even better is that this feature isn't only restricted to players within your own server (shard). It extends beyond that and can match you up with questing players from other shards as well (so there won't be a lack of players for you to party and play with).
  
  If when partying with players from other shards, you can easily identify which shard they're from by observing the name of that character. They will have an @something appended to the end of their names (eg. Name@Shard).
  
  Not only that, but if your looking for a quick and decent way to level up your character, I would most definitely recommend that you partake in these. A few sessions of them and your character would almost be guaranteed to get to the next level. However, this feature will only be unlocked at Level 10...so until then, I'm afraid that you'll have to settle with playing by yourself.
  
  (A decent suggestion I've found is to sit your character permanently within the capital cities of your affiliation, like Sanctum for Guardians and Meridian for Defiants, leverage upon the "Rest Bonus" that you will accumulate when you log out there and then just do these Instant Adventure thingys without having to leave those cities or needing to run back when you wish to log out.)
  
• Dungeons
  
  These allow the player to group with others to clear instanced dungeons of varying sizes, ranging from small ones which requires perhaps a group of five to large ones that need 10 or 20 men to conquer.
  
  And similar to Instant Adventures, the teleport function is available to instantly warp you to your group's location so you don't have to run there, as well as being able to group up with others from different shards.
  
  
  
  However, do note that these dungeons will take up some of your time to complete and won't be as efficient (in terms of EXP gained per time spent). But for the fun factor as well as possibility of looting decent equipment? I'ld say its well worth the time and effort to give these a try.
  
• Rift Invasions
  Now this third form of PvE that I'm gonna be talking about is perhaps THE most important one of them all. In fact, I don't think it would be an overstatement to say that they form the heart and soul of the RIFT Online experience.
  
  

  So what exactly is a rift? How does it form? And what will it do if left alone?

  
  
  Well...without going into the game's lore, let's just say that throughout the world of Telara, there are these so-called "Tears" opening up randomly and all over the place. Some of these tears are minor and some of them can be major ones. If left alone, minor tears will always evolve into minor rifts while major tears can turn into minor OR major rifts.
  
  When a tear turns into a rift, six resulting types of rifts can occur, Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Life and Death. Depending on the type, the kinds of monsters that you get, coming out of these rifts, will be different.
  
  And though the level of the rift formed would determine the level of the monsters spewing out, it will most certainly be around that of those who would be found leveling in that area or zone.
  
  However, you must note that whether it being a minor or a major one actually has a direct effect upon the "difficulty" of the rift. If its a minor rift, it can usually be handled by a single person. If its a major one, then it might take a group of people to close it. If assuming players are around the level of the rift, that is.
  
  To close a rift, all you need to do is to hunt it down (or rather, get to the scene of the crime), perform the set of tasks required (will be automatically added, as some kind of quest, to the right-hand side of your HUD) and keep doing it until the rift closes. Its as simple as that.
  
  Upon closing the rift, you will be rewarded with some form of loot, certain currencies and some notoriety (but I'ld rather call them "fame"). The notoriety that you get allows you access to purchase certain "special" goods while the currencies are what you might need to actually "buy" those goods.
  
  Well...just pay the NPCs a visit, like those I've shown above, and you would get what I mean.
  
  Apart from these regular rift incursions, from time to time, there will also be invasions on a massive scale. During these "invasions", multiple rifts will simultaneously sprout up all over the zone.
  
  You would need quite a handful of players to successfully fend off all the invading monsters, protect wardstones found lying around the zone, as well as shut down those rifts that popped up (not all of them...just enough to thwart the invasion will do).
  
  If successful, players will be rewarded with an unusually huge "boss" monster spawning somewhere within the zone. This boss monster will have a massive amount of health, powerful attacks and would require many players to take down. But naturally, the rewards for participating in these would of course be better too.
  
  For more info:
  Zam Rift - Rifts and Invasions
  

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