[Xanadu/Xanadu Community: Public Boards/News] Rift: Planes of Telara News

Of Infernal Dawn, Merge and other stuff

Ayame — Thu, 31 May 2012 10:57:01 UTC

Well well... This set of news is certainly long overdue: RIFT 1.8 update has been out on the live servers for over a month already and it brought us a new raid tier in form of the raid instance "Infernal Dawn". Despite what the lack of news updates on the front page may have implied (after all, the front page has been stuck with the squid news for quite some months now) - we have been busy killing bosses (and wiping) at Infernal Dawn and in fact, our current raid roster is back to numbers we haven't seen since the launch of the game!

Which bosses we have killed? Why has the roster size grown so much? Read more to find out!

First of all, I'd like to take a moment to explain why the news updates have been on a little slow side and why they will likely continue to be so for at least some time (unless someone else takes over the news writing bit), for the past few months I've been having bit of a creative block when it comes to art or writing and each time I try to come up with something... Well, lets just say that it isn't going too well and I just end up doing something else instead.

That being said, to the actual news then! As everyone knows, recruiting for endgame raiding tends to become more and more difficult the further an MMO progresses in its lifespan, this is due to various reasons such as: Playerbase shrinking down due to people leaving, timesink based requirements for raiding (AA's, resist gear etc.) as well as a huge portion of people simply being gated out of the new raid content due to their gear, as the progressive nature of the raid content requires you to gear up from the previous tiers before progressing on to the next one. Of course, on a server such as Blightweald where you have multiple endgame raid guilds the competition for recruits is quite huge. With summer just around the corner and major game releases scattered throughout the year (such as Diablo 3 release recently), it isn't all that surprising that reruiting has been at an all time low for a number of guilds (including us)

Just recently, we were approached by the raiding core from Insanity with a proposition about a partial merger where their core raiders would merge in to Xanadu - thus resulting in a large raid roster which should be strong enough to raid through the upcoming summer time. After considering the offer for a while, we accepted and as such, we got a whole lot of new folks in the guild now: So once more, welcome!

Hopefully this partial merger will not only ensure that we won't be lacking numbers to raid anytime soon, but also bring that a bit of that competitive aspect we have been missing for quite some time now.

Infernal Dawn

Rather than spending too much time trying to come with some form of a lore babble that makes sense, I figured that this time around it would simply be easier to resort to a copy & paste from the official website. As well as embedding the RIFT 1.8 trailer from youtube (one of their better trailers thus far), as it gives a nice overview of the bosses as well as briefly wraps up what it is all about.

QUOTE OF riftgame.com
As the Age of Dragons wound to a close, Telara’s heroes overcame the flames of Maelforge. They bound the red dragon of ruin deep under Mount Carcera, at the heart of Ember Isle. Held fast by the calming power of Earth, he slipped into a long, sullen sleep. Then the rifts opened, and the Wanton surged forth across Telara. The great volcano bubbled over as Maelforge thrilled to the reborn cycle of destruction. He sent his thoughts of passion and violence out into the earth, and Laethys responded. Her Golden Maw minions softened the stone around his prison, and smuggled her dormant form to Ember Isle. Now, with the aid of corrupted spirits like Caduceus, Laethys has joined Maelforge under Carcera, poised to reduce Telara to glittering ash… …unless the Ascended can brave the volcano’s core, face the dragons’ fiercest lieutenants, and bring down not one, but two mighty gods of the Blood Storm in Infernal Dawn.

QUOTE OF riftgame.com

As the Age of Dragons wound to a close, Telara’s heroes overcame the flames of Maelforge. They bound the red dragon of ruin deep under Mount Carcera, at the heart of Ember Isle. Held fast by the calming power of Earth, he slipped into a long, sullen sleep.

Then the rifts opened, and the Wanton surged forth across Telara. The great volcano bubbled over as Maelforge thrilled to the reborn cycle of destruction. He sent his thoughts of passion and violence out into the earth, and Laethys responded.

Her Golden Maw minions softened the stone around his prison, and smuggled her dormant form to Ember Isle. Now, with the aid of corrupted spirits like Caduceus, Laethys has joined Maelforge under Carcera, poised to reduce Telara to glittering ash…

…unless the Ascended can brave the volcano’s core, face the dragons’ fiercest lieutenants, and bring down not one, but two mighty gods of the Blood Storm in Infernal Dawn.

Infernal Dawn is a raid instance that takes place within ruins of a temple like structure that is built inside a volcano, there are total of 8 boss encounters as well as 3 mini-bosses. While several of the encounters are rather fun when looking at them as a whole (even if on invidual level you might get stuck on some crappy special duty), I have to say I've been a little disapointed in the difficulty/tuning of the encounters as they do not feel as challenging as some of the Hammerknell content did back when it was first introduced - but perhaps the goal here was to make a 20 man raid instance that is more accessible than HK.

First of the boss encounters is Warboss Drak and his endless horde of minions:

Warboss Drak could be best described as an encounter that checks whether your raid force has the needed coordination to perform in ID, as such the encounter is incredibly easy once you figure out how everything works. After disposing of the Warboss, you are presented with a choice of continuing to either Fire or the Earth wing of the instance: However, entrances to the both of the wings are guarded by mini-bosses, whose primary role, if I'm not mistaken is to act as loot pinata's that are even easier to kill than the average trash mob inside the instance - which is a shame in a way, since the mini-boss Vladmal Prime in Hammerknell was actually a properly designed encounter (even if it was an easy encounter it still had a lot more mechanics than the mini-bosses of ID).

Once you progress further in to the fire wing, kill some more trash mobs and yet another miniboss, you will bump in to Ituziel - the bodyguard of the ember conclave, who happens to be a rather badass looking fire demon (who, according to one of our warriors, apparently has finely sculpted buttocks... Suppose as a warrior you get to stare at them at close range :P ). Ituziel is one of those boss encounters that looks absolutely fantastic on the paper, however, reality it is far too easy to almost completely bypass one of the primary encounter mechanics (which, who knows, may have been the original design anyway) leaving it as more of a heavy DPS check with a lot of healing needed in the latter phase of the encounter.

Once Ituziel is beaten, you can progress up the gigantic set of ramps leading to an awesome looking area where the Ember Conclave awaits:

Upon arriving to the platform of the conclave, you can listen to the bad guys planning the cults’ campaign and plotting their their super mega awesome evil plot of fiery grand destruction of truly terrifying doomy stuff (tm): Which could be summed up along the lines of "Kill, Burn, Eat, Kill more, Burn more"... I suppose that's... original? Oh well, at least it wasnt about a stolen nuke or the destruction of high heavens for a change. Ember Conclave itself consists of 3 bosses (one of them - Emberlord Ereetu - is actually familiar from the 6 man dungeon Fall of the Lantern Hook, which takes place in an alternate timeline where Maelforge has already conquered Telara), each of the bosses have some unique mechanics and based on the kill order of the bosses, they also gain some new abilities which drastically change the way the encounter plays out. As an additional note, it is also the first encounter where Trion has implemented a "hard mode" which in this particular case is simply about killing the bosses in a specific order that results in better loot upon the completion of the encounter. Once the council has been defeated, you are done with the Fire Wing of the instance.

Next up is the earth wing...

After taking out some trash (no pun intended!) you arrive at a pretty looking crystalline chamber where Maklamos the Scryer is busy scrying all the possibilities that the future may lead out to - which makes me wonder though, if he can see the future, then he would know that there are 20 loot hungry people coming to gank him and he shouldn't be there in the first place! Oh well, classic bad guy logic there I suppose. Maklamos could be considered as a prime example of what happens when everything goes wrong with an encounter, don't take it the wrong way though, when looking at the way the encounter is supposed to work, it is a really nicely designed fight with various different tasks on top of a DPS check. So what's the issue? Well, there are so many bugs & issues with the encounter that pretty much the only way it could be more buggy was that if the boss was a bug himself (okay, that was an exaggeration)... But the point being, despite the multiple hotfixes that attempted to fix Maklamos encounter, it still remains as quite a mess, which is a shame.

After clearing out some more trash and progressing bit further on at the earth wing, you will arrive at a gigantic lake of lava where the Golden Maw (dragon cult of earth) is building up the lava ship Dread Fortune (which looks pretty damn awesome btw)... Aboard the vessel there is a stolen nuk... Oh sorry, my mistake, this isn't Call of Ascended: Black Ops... Okay, so aboard the vessel, there are zombie... Nah, not that either. Oh how the heck should I know! All you need to know is that lava ships are bad mmkay!? So you need to blow it up.

This leads to a rather cool part of the instance, where you fight your way up a series of ramps which are filled with pirate goblins, snipers with laser sights and also gigantic fiery turrets. After annihilating everything blocking your path, you finally reach the deck of Dread Fortune.

Aboard the Dread Fortune, Pirate Queen Rusila Dreadblade welcomes the ascended and informs them of their upcoming horrible deaths. Not only that, but she has apparently infused her very soul with Dread Fortune, so the ship is now totally evil too and is trying to kill you! Oh dear... Rusila fight itself is a rather funnily designed multi phase fight, where you first fight against the ship itself in a way (it tries you kill you with chains, buzz saws and stuff) and you need to find a way to destroy it while fighting off a horde of smaller minions. Of course, employing the good old bad guy logic, someone has built gigantic cannons capable of sinking the ship and conveniently placed them so that you can fire them towards its deck (and even generously provided barrels of ammunition).

After blasting the ship to oblivion, Rusila gets a little ticked off and rushes to kill you - unfortunately for her, the fight mechanics themselves are rather simple and it doesn't take all that long to figure out how to beat the encounter. Only downsides to the Rusila encounter are that you are more likely to die out of boredom if you are stuck on the ammunition carrying duty in the first phase of the fight or if you have ingame sounds enabled, you might be simply tempted to jump off the deck and down in to the lava pool to "MAKE IT STOP!!!!" in order to get away from Rusila and her terribly delivered voice overs. But other than, that it is one of the better encounters thus far at the Infernal Dawn.

So, that's our progress at ID thus far: 5/8 bosses - for the exact dates of our raid boss kills check out our progress page: Rift raiding progress

Aside from that, I have to say that the art team is definitely continuing their excellent work with environment design and even some of the mob designs as well (Laethys for example), although Infernal Dawn is not quite as grand / epic in scale as Hammerknelll was - I think the place definitely has some really cool looking things.

Plans for the future

As far as our plans on the raid department go: It is pretty much what you would expect, gearing up the raid force so that we can have some serious attempts at the Laethys encounter sometime in the close future. Now what comes to the upcoming stuff in RIFT: Update 1.9 shouldn't be too far away, as it is already partially on the PTS and at least judging from the initial information available, it should contain a new form of PVP gameplay called "Conquest" and possibly even a new life themed 10 man raid instance called "Primeval Feast", although the latter has not been confirmed officially yet.

Now what is considerably much more exciting news, is that Trion just announced the first expansion pack:

And its feature list certainly contains a lot of things that the RIFT community has been asking for:

Adventure across two huge new continents that more than triple the size of the existing world
Experience epic stories that reveal the true power in Telara ... and the gateway to the planes
Make your move to the island city of Tempest Bay, a new stronghold for both Guardians and Defiant

A new Soul for each Calling expands the Ascended Class System - build the hero you want!
Rise to new heights of power through 10 challenging levels, increasing the level cap to 60
Play your way! Choose how you level with questing and Instant Adventure everywhere, onslaughts, rifts, events, and more

Achieve greatness with 7 new dungeons, 3 raids, a Chronicle, and more!
Join the Hunt: New rift gameplay propels you into battling increasingly-challenging planar bosses
Fight legions of fantastic creatures, including a Colossus that interacts with - and ravages - the world like you've never seen

Dimensions: Customizable spaces allow players and guilds to own a sliver of Telara
Take your professions to new heights with Grandmaster crafting
Become the talk of the town and boost your stats with stylish new capes
New puzzles, artifacts and collectibles, achievements, mounts, pets, titles, and much more

More information can be found at: http://stormlegion.riftgame.com/en/

Last but not least... Time for some quotes!

Umm, okay?

Bet you also hoped this didn't end up in the news!

*ahem*

So you're trying to say they aren't delivered by birds? :susp:

...

Ewww... That's just gross...

Ever get the feeling you stepped inside a room in middle of some really awkward conversation?

... ... I really don't know what to say...

The Madness from the Sea

Ayame — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 23:07:38 UTC

Is it really that time again? Indeed, it is time for some news from our Rift branch. Come to think of it, it has been quite a while since the previous set of news - nearly 4 months to be exact. Past few months have been both uneventful and eventful: When looking from the raid progress point of view, things have been rather uneventful or at least they were until February which is when we started making a good progress on Akylios and finally on February 28th, we killed Akylios!

What else has been going on? What kind of recipe we used to make Calamari Stew from Akylios? Read more to find out!

Tales of Telara

I know I've said this before and could probably keep yapping on about it until everyone is bored of hearing about it (or maybe you are already), but I'm still so impressed about the pace Trion keeps pushing out new content, anyway I guess that'll do for that subject. Now as far as the new content goes, there's been a decent amount of it in the past 4 months.

First up we got the Ember Isle, which is the largest overland zone in the game up to this date. While the screenshots don't really do the place any justice, I have to say the isle itself is stunningly beautiful - sunny blue skies, a lush jungle with scenic waterfalls and such. All over the isle you can find ruins of the temples and cities built by the Kelari that used to inhabit the isle before their exodus to Freemarch, many of these ruins are partially overgrown with vegetation, although some of them are still in use by the tribal like Kelari who chose to stay behind.

At the centre of the isle stands Mount Carcera, an ominous looking volcano which is said to be the place where Maelforge, the dragon of fire is imprisoned within.

Entire zone was designed for the players at the level cap and as such, content there is slightly more challenging than in the original areas of the game. There are roughly 70+ new quests, lots of repeatable quests, new achievements, puzzle, zone events and the isle also features sort of an in-built tower defense type of minigame. Within a few of the quest centers at the isle, there are defense arcs, healing wells and turrets which players can repair/upgrade and the mobs can destroy. If a defense arc is destroyed, it results in the mobs taking over the outpost - these are utilized in the new Onslaught daily quests which trigger waves of incoming invasions at an outpost against which you need to defend as well as in the zone events.

Just like with every other overland zone in Rift, there is a dungeon (in some zones it is a raid instance) within the Ember Isle called Caduceus Rise - CR is slightly less linear experience compared to other dungeons in Rift and in fact due to the size of the dungeon, the expert version of CR is split to two different instances, lower & upper. However, in the master mode version of CR, you'll tackle on the entire dungeon and its 11 bosses which can easily take up to couple hours if not more depending on your group setup/gear and such.

On the raid department, a couple new raid rifts have been added which are fairly casual in terms of their difficulty. As well as a new 10 man raid instance called Rise of the Phoenix, which roughly equals Hammerknell in difficulty and the loot quality - on the positive side, the boss encounters are RotP are rather entertaining for a 10 man instance.

Other new features worth mentioning are Instant Adventures, which could be best described as, click a button to join a zerg at either Stillmoor or Shimmersand and then the zerg is given small tasks that take them around the zone which they can complete for fast XP and other rewards. River of Souls: Chains of Death - Chronicle instance which gives solo/duo players a chance to take a look at the River of Souls raid zone along with an unique plot tailored for the chronicle. Also as somewhat of a rarity in MMO's these days, even the roleplayers haven't been forgotten when it comes to content additions:

Perhaps on slightly amusing side, after the ingame weddings went live, Trion aimed to become Guinness World Record holders for the most in-game marriages in a 24 hour period and succeeded with 21,879 ingame marriages in 24 hours. How cute!

Calamari Stew with Garlic Toast

When we first attempted Akylios in November, I don't think any of us could have forseen how much of a struggle the next few months would prove to be to the guild. Already at November our roster size was significantly smaller than it used to be, as we had been bleeding out members at a steady rate ever since Hammerknell Fortress launched and things weren't looking too good on the recruitment side either.

During December the raid attendance hit pretty much all time low and we lost a few more people, some due to being frustrated over the raid situation, some due to RL things and of course there was also the SW:TOR launch - ultimately it all brought the guild to the verge of not even being able to field a full raid during majority of the raid days. By the end of December, things were looking bad, incredibly bad: It had reached the point where the game had become a source of frustration and stress, rather than fun and I think it may come as a surprise to some, but there was a time when Sondrax & I were seriously considering closing down the Rift branch.

Finally in January, things started to look better on the recruitment department - it was pretty clear that many other guilds had experienced similar struggles during Nov/Dec and some had folded as a result and of course, there were folks who had checked out SW:TOR and noticed that while the journey from 1-50 was indeed quite a blast, the endgame lacked longevity and much of the endgame content was poorly balanced and bugged, which to be blunt was a mess compared to the endgame in Rift.

Roster size kept growing (although we still have room for more, so keep those applications coming!), new apps were getting kitted out with HK gear and Akylios progression was back on the track.

Akylios encounter is an incredibly well done multi-phase fight - the fight itself is quite demanding with a lot of things going on especially in the latter phases. By the time we started our proper progression, the encounter had been lowered in difficulty both by some bug fixes/tweaks, tuning the DPS requirement to be a bit more forgiving and of course, players had the planar attunement bonuses - still it was a good challenge.

First phase of the fight takes place at a small pier in the harbor area somewhere at the depths of Hammerknell Fortress. You fight against Jornaru (an Abyssal Cultist who is attempting to free Akylios), who keeps casting damage dealing geysers on the ground, summoning waves of mobs from the surrounding waters and occasionally creating three tidal waves that sweep across the pier in an attempt to knock people off to the water for an instant kill. Eventually Jornaru retreats and manages to break Akylios' bindings which causes a brief earthquake resulting in a portion of the roof collapsing down in to the waters, the raid must immediately move ahead and jump to the new platform that is formed from the fallen debris. Few seconds after Jornaru appears on a floating bit of debris and proceeds to cast a spell that covers the entire pier in watery stuff which will instantly kill you didn't move to the new platform.

Second phase of the fight consists of Akylios' gigantic tentacles trying to crush you & nuke you to bits, while Jornaru keeps summoning more of minions from the water and occasionally attempts to nuke a random person with a projectile orb that uses a split damage mechanic. After hurting enough many of Akylios' tentacles you manage to anger him, which triggers another earthquake resulting in yet another portion of the roof collapsing. Once again, you need to move fast to the next platform, as soon after Akylios will crush the previous platform with his tentacles and anyone caught in the way will be sleeping with the fishes for the rest of the encounter. (at this point, falling to the water means you cannot be rezzed, so you're out for the rest of the fight)

Third phase begins with killing a few more tentacles and then Akylios himself emerges from the water...

Fortunately at this point, Jornaru has run out of minions to summon - so he just settles to trying to occasionally nuke someone with the orb I mentioned previously. Meanwhile Akylios will employ a series of tricks in an attempt to deal with the pesky raiders, a breath attack which will hit either left, middle or right side of the platform, a mind decay mechanic where 3 raid members become infected with mind decay and must immediately gather next to each other, if the players fail that they are driven mad by Akylios (mind control) and start attacking their own raid members. In addition to that, every now and then some smaller tentacles will pop up from the water to nuke the raid and if left alive for too long they will heal Akylios - occasionally Akylios submerges back to the depths and attempts to kill the raid with a bunch of tentacles.

Eventually you damage Akylios enough to trigger the fourth phase and Jornaru teleports down from his floating platform and joins the fray. Raid must then deal with both of the bosses at same time, with all of the encounter mechanics used in the 3rd phase but also with the addition of Jornaru summoning the three Tidal Waves again in an attempt to sweep people off the platform. Eventually Akylios gains one more ability where he attemps to bore in to the mind of a certain raid member and in the process creates a massive sized channeled AOE around the targetted person. Once you've damaged Akylios enough, the fight enters the last phase where Akylios no longer submerges - at that point the raid needs to drop Akylios to 1% health (he cannot die while Jornaru still lives) and then proceed to kill Jornaru. Akylios enrages from the death of his loyal servant and then the raid must DPS him down before the frenzied squid kills everything on the platform.

That being said, apologies for the somewhat poor screenshot quality regarding Akylios... But the giant squid thing doesn't give a metric shit about posing for the screenies, it just wants to kill you... Now ain't that just plain rude!

Seeing as Akylios was such a meanie who tried to drown entire Telara in a flood of madness, wouldn't it be just appropriate if someone would instead make something helpful out of him? Like cooking a tasty calamari stew out of him? Plus I've heard some of the guys in the guild need to learn to cook, so it's like swatting two flies in one stroke - considering how gigantic Akylios is, I guess you'd end up feeding at least half the Telara with it.

Oh and I wasn't kidding about the recipe earlier!

QUOTE OF Recipe by Giada De Laurentiis
Calamari Stew: 2 tablespoons olive oil 2 cloves garlic, cut in 1/2 1 3/4 cups tomato sauce 1 cup white wine 1 teaspoon fresh chopped thyme leaves 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 2 pounds calamari (squid), bodies thinly sliced and tentacles whole Warm the olive oil over medium heat in a medium pot. Add the garlic and let cook until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Remove the garlic. Add the tomato sauce, white wine, thyme, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper. Bring the mixture to a simmer. Add the calamari and stir to combine. Continue to cook until the mixture comes back up to a simmer, about 2 more minutes. Serve immediately with the Garlic Toasts.

QUOTE OF Recipe by Giada De Laurentiis

Calamari Stew:
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves garlic, cut in 1/2
1 3/4 cups tomato sauce
1 cup white wine
1 teaspoon fresh chopped thyme leaves
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 pounds calamari (squid), bodies thinly sliced and tentacles whole

Warm the olive oil over medium heat in a medium pot. Add the garlic and let cook until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Remove the garlic. Add the tomato sauce, white wine, thyme, red pepper flakes, salt, and pepper. Bring the mixture to a simmer. Add the calamari and stir to combine. Continue to cook until the mixture comes back up to a simmer, about 2 more minutes. Serve immediately with the Garlic Toasts.

Might need to adjust the recipe a bit on the tentacle size though...

What's next?

As usual, Trion is busy coming up with some new content to chew at: First up is the Carnival of the Ascended world event which is scheduled to launch later on at evening tonight (Feb 29th), which as the name might imply is a party event that celebrates the 1 year anniversary of Rift. Event is supposed to include things like carnival games, piñata's scattered across Telara, chances to relive some historic events along with a horde of new fluff items to obtain such as masks, cute minipets and even a couple new mounts which are both very nice looking.

As an example, one of the carnival masks and a cute little Laethys balloon:

Also sometime in close future (probably in a month or maybe bit more), we're going to have Update 1.8: While the update details haven't been announced officially, there are a lot of class tweaks being tested on the PTS, as well as a new PvP warfront. Last but not least, a new 20 man raid zone is currently undergoing some testing, although not much of details are known about it yet: Currently it is being referred to as "Infernal Dawn" and players expect that the zone revolves around the newly forged alliance of fire & earth dragon cults and the fire dragon Maelforge, who is imprisoned within the volcano at the Ember Isle. There have been some speculations about a possible April release (which would probably time in well with 1.8) due to the name of the world event phase that is taking place then - whether that happens or not, well that remains to be seen.

Apart from that, some folks datamining the Rift files did uncover some interesting things, such as a map for another new overland zone which may or may not be called Planetouched Wilds, models of Estrian architecture as well as a continent layout that looks nothing like currently ingame. However, none of these are officially announced and as such remain a pure subject of speculation - one thing is sure though, it looks to be shaping up to an interesting 2nd year for Rift.

Fortunately, or unfortunately this time around - there will be no quotes, as I forgot to backup my archive of quotes while formatting my comp a few weeks back. I suppose I could have added a few recent quotes, but lets face it - some stuff is better left unseen. :P

Insert Awful Title Here

Ayame — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:36:37 UTC

It was a dark and a stormy day, once again Telara stood at the brink of destruction - on the rooftop of Hammerknell Fortress, Inwar Darktide and his minions were plotting to unleash a flood of catastrophic proportions and drown every living beign on Telara, thus bringing on the Age of Akylios...

A Lizardfishmonster man thingy is up to no good! To the Xanamobile, let's go!

Upon arriving at the rooftop, the Ascended discovered two of Darktide's minions: Aqualix and Denizar, who had just summoned their master on to Telara - while Inwar Darktide was busy with his monologue regarding the flooding of Telara, filling peoples lungs until they burst and other weird kinks like that, a fight between the Ascended and his minions broke out...

SMACK....

KAPOW...

OOF

Soon after, his minions were defeated and then, like any completely sane and totally not ridiculously dumb badguy: Inwar Darktide continued his monologue and revealed that his evil grand plan consisted of using the two Tide Wardens he had summoned on the rooftop of the Hammerknell Fortress to gather enough energy from the growing storm to unleash the flood... This plan was so foolproof that no ascended could possibly spoil it, unless they would destroy the two Tide Wardens simultaneously... Oops?

Angered by the failure of his plans, Inwar Darktide summoned yet more of his minions to fight the Ascended, but as expected they were disposed of rather quickly. Finally Inwar Darktide had no choice but to engage the Ascended himself... Long story short, the evil lizardfishmonster man thingy got made in to sushi on October 25th and Telara was safe once more! (at least for the next two minutes).

After disposing of Inwar Darktide (and once again, saving Telara from certain destruction), a portal leading to the darkest depths of Hammerknell Fortress appears. There, in a what could be best described as a ruined underground harbor section, a horde of nightmarish creatures from the plane of water stand between the Ascended and Lord Jornaru who is attempting to free Akylios from his prison.

Once the trash from the plane of water has been defeated, only one thing remains: The final confrontation between the Ascended, Lord Jornaru and Akylios. However, one thing is certain - Akylios will do everything in his power to break free from his imprisonment, he even goes as far as empowering Lord Jornaru who then turns in to the fearsome CRABMAN!

Together the batshit crazy Calamari and the terrible Crabman form an absolutely terrifying duo:

note: Akylios actually looks significantly cooler than the above photoshopped version

But how does the story end? Well, well... That remains to be seen, as we aren't quite at that point yet!

Either way, as this time around the actual content of the news is rather limited, I figured it would be a good opportunity to turn this in to a "Xanadu news - The Quotes Edition" - as lately, the guildhcat has been even crazier than ever. But first, a little funny dev/cm "whoops" on a server broadcast message and then continuing on to the guild quotes. :P

Testing instructions!

The hills are alive with the sound of Elof

:coffee:

Err... What?

Is this the part where I should get worried? :eek2:

Oh well, at least we had 4 quotes before the dirty ones started

I don't even want to know how this got started...

:doh:

Whatever floats his boat...

*cough* Don't even ask... Must be the evening doing weird things for the guild chat quality

Nope... Xanadu, "quality" chat 24/7

Tale of a King, a Slimy Slug & the Kinky Demoness

Ayame — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:24:08 UTC

A Dwarven King who speaks with a female voice, a slimy purple slug which has more spikes and skulls than something... Umm, very spiky and skully! A kinky demoness with fetish for getting her non-existent hooves licked and the evil tentacle monsters from the darkest depths of the abyss - Oh my!

Quite the ingredients for a tale beyond your wildest imaginations, are they not? *Ahem* On the otherhand, perhaps I'd rather remain blissfully ignorant of what sort of tales you readers might be imagining... After all this is about raiding! Short version: Double Regicide, cutting down the slimy slug, spanking the demoness and making sushi out of the evil tentacle monsters - for a longer version, read on to find out what exactly we have been up to and what's going on in Telara in general.

Tales of Telara

A bit less than a month ago, RIFT update 1.5: "Ashes of History" was pushed to the live servers and as expected the contents of the update were aimed more towards the casual players (after all, raiders have enjoyed very regular content updates thus far and Hammerknell is still keeping the majority of guilds busy), as well as fixing some of the issues rogue souls have been experiencing since the launch of the game. The most significant of the new features probably was the Planar Attunement system, which is RIFT's version of the Alternate Advancement system: Rather than going towards an AA system which makes a significant impact on the usefulness of your character for example like in EQ2 or AoC, Trion chose a bit more old fashioned route with the AA's. There is no AA cap, which means you can pretty much grind your ass off for the years to come in an attempt to max out the AA's. But as a tradeoff, the AA's themselves only give very minor bonuses to your characters (with the exception of perhaps a few), which isn't entirely bad idea if you ask me - although as such, it doesn't really encourage you to spend much more time ingame than you did before.

One of the more advertised of the new features are the "Chronicles of Telara" solo/duo instances, which are aimed towards players who have just reached level 50.

Currently there are 3 different Chronicle instances: An Ascension party (Takes place in Meridian or Sanctum depending on faction), Greenscale's Blight and Early Hammerknell one. Out of which the city one offers more of a brief story constructed around the Planar Attunement system and the GSB & HK ones offer a possibility to experience a dumbed down version of the 20 man raid instances for the players who might not be able to experience these instances otherwise. Although it has to be said that the Hammerknell one only contains a tiny portion of the instance and leaves many of the awesome looking areas out (but perhaps there are more of HK chronicles to come)...

In general though, Chronicles aren't all that different from your standard PvE instances: They are fun for the first couple of times, but after that they become rather repetitive and dull. Although one of the redeeming features is that the chronicles are a decent source of PA XP and sometimes even drop a useful consumable or two for your few minutes of trouble.

Similar to most of the previous major updates, "Ashes of History", also includes a world event (which started about a couple of weeks after the update had been released). This time around, the world event focuses on the story of the newly formed alliance between the two dragon cults: The fire cult Wanton and the earth cult The Golden Maw, as well as the long forgotten Travel Stones (which, shockingly enough are ancient means of traveling between point A and point B) which have started to resurface after the defeat of Akylios (which happened already lore wise).

While storyline wise, the Defiants and Guardians are busy trying to figure out why would the fire cultists form an alliance with the earth cult to transport things en masse via the Travel Stones to Ember Isle, where their dragon god Maelforge is imprisoned under an active volcano (Quite a mystery eh? This calls for Sherlock Holmes! HINT: The Butler did not do it!!!) - ingame wise this translates to providing people with a bunch of dailies to grind for a new event currency with which you can buy some new items, including the Ash Strider (sounds better than raptor chicken thingydingy) mount.

As well as bridge the storyline for the totally unexpected and shocking turn of events that occurs in RIFT's storyline upcoming update 1.6. Which will contain a plethora of changes and new things including: More class revamps, Instant Adventure (click to join a rolling zerg at Stillmoor or Shimmersand), Rise of the Phoenix (a new 10 man sliver) and Ember Isle - a new overland zone which features a significant amount of new content from quests, zone events, new factions, achievements to what seems to be a new 5 man dungeon. As a bonus Ember Isle looks incredibly impressive and definitely provides a nice change of scenery from other zones in RIFT. All in all though, Trion continues to amaze with their rapid content deployment speed... But that is another story to tell once Update 1.6 actually hits the live servers later on this year.

If I had a Hammerknell, I would...

The past couple of months were quite a challenge for us as a guild, even though running a raid guild with a relatively small roster has its advantages - things can easily spiral in to nightmarish proportions when you bump in to a period of time where you lose a few members over a small timespan, especially if it happens during a time when several of your members are busy with RL things and are regularly posting AFK's. In a game like RIFT, where server communities are practically non-existent due to the cross shard LFG and free shard transfers - replacements aren't always so easy to find and such was the case for us during September and early October, which significantly hampered our progress in Hammerknell.

After we had killed Sicaron, we started working on the King Molinar and Prince Dollin encounter which at the time proved to be rather challenging - especially when we often didn't even have a full raid. After working on the encounter for a while, we were pretty close to a kill but before we had a chance to do that - a patch that tuned down the encounter was applied and we pretty much killed the King Molinar and Prince Dollin right after it on September 19th (screenie of the King & Prince vs the Faceless man can be found above, in the Chronicles section of the news ).

After defeating King Molinar, a nearby wall collapses, thus exposing the route to demoness Estrode who had been possessing the kings body as her shell. (explains the feminine voice I suppose :P )

Soon after we had arrived in the crystalline chamber where Estrode awaits, we discovered that the scantily clad demoness obviously has some form of a fetish regarding getting her hooves licked - odd thing is though that she doesn't seem to have any, but I suppose that is just a minor detail.

Either way, the Estrode encounter is one of those things that looks simply awesome on paper and would have quite some potential to be a very dynamic raid encounter.

Aside from the usual stuff that the raid mobs do, Estrode has couple of core mechanics out of which the first one is a mind control mechanic that acts as a soft enrage timer of a sort, as well as brings a bit of the RNG element to the fight (as the amount of the charmed people increases in time and the people targetted by the MC are random). The second one is a Soul Stealing mechanic, every now and then during the encounter Estrode will pick random people and steal their "souls" and gains pre-determined abilities based on the souls she just stole.

As much potential as the encounter would have had to be fun, the current tuning of the encounter makes it a snorefest where people are forced to play relatively horrible specs in order to gimp Estrode as much as possible - after all, why make it difficult for yourself? Plus picking many of the fun soul builds would actually cause her to steal souls that make the encounter borderline impossible to beat unless the raid is significantly overgeared. Which is quite a shame, regardless of that though we made a short work of the demoness on September 22nd.

Thus leaving us with only one more boss to deal with before we could progress on to upper floor of the Hammerknell Fortress.

The spiky purple slug, Grugonim, who resides down in the underground quarry section of Hammerknell. This mob turned out to be our nemesis: Not only we hit the period of time where our raid attendance was at an all time low, but on some of the days it felt like the performance of the raid was so bad that we would have even wiped if we were playing Hello Kitty Online - I have to admit though, I don't know if that would even be possible, but hell... If it is then it must be pretty damn dreadful, unless the characters would bleed rainbows which would be pretty fucking awesome, or maybe not.

Either way though, as far as encounter mechanics go - Grugonim isn't all that difficult as the encounter is simply about positioning and precise movement. However, the mechanics are extremely unforgiving and as such, anyone who fails at the movement may either get themselves killed or in the worse case scenario, wipe the entire raid. In a way it reminds me a bit of some form of an unholy union of a modern day raiding and the old school raids - which makes it one of my favourite encounters in Hammerknell thus far. Finally on October 12th, we managed to bring down Grugonim - which allowed us to progress up to the upper floors of HK.

While the lower floors of the Hammerknell are filled with the death tainted abominations. The upper floor is taken over by the servants of Akylios who are up to something fishy... Crab men, Fishmen, Lizardfishmenwhatever things with tentacles and Abyssal cultists (dragon cult of water) who are attempting to free their master from his prison underneath Hammerknell.

One of these creatures is Inquisitor Garau, who seems to have some dominion over the remaining runebound golems at Hammerknell Fortress. As far as the encounter mechanics go, Inquisitor is one of the easiest bosses in Hammerknell and as such is pretty disapointing fight. After all, one would expect the upper floor bosses would be a lot more difficult than the ones at the lower floor.

Inqusitor fell quickly on October 16th, thus leaving us with only one more encounter, Inwar Darktide, to go before we'll reach the giant Calamari and his deadly servant, the Lobsterman at the dark depths far below the halls of the Hammerknell Fortress. That being said, that's all for this news folks!

Last but not least: Time for some quotes! Due to the complaints that the quotes in the previous news have been far too tame, I figured I'd see this collection does any better.

Errr... What? :susp:

Lalalalala....

"That's a great idea!!" "Really?" "NO"

Men... :headbang:

Be careful of the pink bits OMG! :rabbit:

Raiding: Doing wonderful stuff to your head since 1999!

:eek2:

*ahem*

:help:

STOP! Hammerknell time!

Ayame — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:44:39 UTC

On July 27th, after several weeks of working towards a common goal, Runeguard and the Ascended finally breached the sealed gates of the Hammerknell Fortress. A long time ago, Hammerknell was the shining bastion of the Dwarven civilization - an underground city where dwarves created wonders of craft and magic, a place where mead-songs once rang out in the vast halls of the city, a place a that was once thriving with life...

"Close the doors. Destroy the wheel. Never let them leave. There is no one left"

Now the city lies long abandoned, its former inhabitants gone, consumed by the aberrations of death that now linger in the silent halls of Hammerknell.

New threats await the Ascended deep within the delve, but the greatest threat of all slumbers beneath the earth, a threat that would drown the entire...Oh what the heck, despite the overly dramatic start this isn't supposed to be a lore writeup - so in a much less dramatic tone, one could write that after a lenghty wait, the much anticipated raid instance "Hammerknell Fortress" finally became available in Rift. Although the world event, which could be best described as something between abysmal and poor in quality tortured the raiders for weeks with the carrot that was dangling in the end (HK access), it all turned out to be worth the wait. As Hammerknell Fortress is not only probably the best looking raid zone I have seen in any MMO, it also features several really well designed and challeging boss encounters.

Obviously for the past few weeks we've been incredibly busy kicking ass and chewing bubblegum, although truth to be told, to the raid dev teams credit, a huge portion of the time it has been the bosses kicking our ass and going all nomnom on the corpses (or something equally gross...) but hey, at least the defiant rescue medic has piled enough plats from the soul mending bills to spend rest of her days on some sunny beach sipping down cold drinks.

So, what has been going in Rift for the past few months and how far have we progressed inside Hammerknell? Read more to find out!

Approaching the half-birthday

Time simply seems to just fly by these days... September marks 6 months from Rift's launch and I have to say, it has been quite a ride so far - looking back to the time around the release, Trion stated that they would be taking an aggressive approach to patching and content additions in Rift. At that time I think many of us were quite sceptical about that statement, after all, it isn't all that uncommon practise in the MMO industry that the PR folks write up fancy tales that promise wonderful things to come but in reality it all just ends up to be building up the hype with empty promises.

I'm very happy to say though that Trion has stayed true to their promise, thus far the amount of content added in Rift is on par and in some cases even significantly more than I've seen being added in a span of 1 year in some of the other MMO's I've played... That is quite an achievement in my opinion, especially when adding that the level of QA/Testing on majority of the patches has been reasonably decent - even though there has been few of those cases where a patch has caused more issues than it fixed, but those are all part of the ups and downs every MMO has at some point of their lifespan.

What we've had so far content wise (in addition to normal tweaks/fixes/balancing etc.):

- 2 x 20 man raid zones (total of 14 bosses and 4 minibosses)
- 2 x 10 man raid zones (total of 8 bosses)
- raid rifts
- expert rifts
- crafting rifts
- pvp rifts
- alternate version of an existing warfront
- truckload of live events
- plenty of new quest content
- Scarwood Reach visual revamp
- and much more...

All in all, a whole lot of stuff - even if the focus thus far has been heavily in favour of raiders ( which from the raiders point of view is a pretty darn nice thing :p )

During GamesCom, Trion also spilled out some details of what's upcoming in the next few major patches (1.5, 1.6 and beyond)... These included things such as a new warfront, story driven "Chronicles of Telara" solo/duo instances, add-on support, Alternate Advancement System, Master Mode versions of existing 5 man dungeons, a couple new overland zones: Ember Isle and Planetouched Wilds, new expert and raid rifts and a new 10 man raid zone titled "Rise of the Phoenix" and some other features which will be discussed about when their release time approaches... Quite a list of things to come, eh?

Aside from that, something that may or may not be of interest to those thinking about giving Rift a try or perhaps returning to check how the things are these days: Starting from August 25th, Trion is kicking off a half-birthday celebration week for Rift which will last until September 1st. During that time, the players currently subscribing the game will receive various ingame bonuses and the new & returning players can play the full game free with no leveling or zone restrictions. For more information about that, you can check the official announcement at: http://community.riftgame.com/en/2011/08/17/rift-half-birthday-celebration-kicks-off-august-25th/

That being said, I think it is about time to move on to what we've been up to lately in Rift.

Another place, another time?

Even though the 10 man raid content isn't exactly in our guilds primary field of interest, the so called Slivers - which are the 10 man raid instances in Rift - provide a reasonably entertaining distraction for the offday raids, as well as a chance to grab some gear for alts and even on occasions a chance to grab some bits and pieces for the slots you haven't managed to fill with drops from 20 man raid instances yet.

These "slivers" provide the players with sort of an alternate dimension type of "what if" scenarios, where the things have gone from bad to worse for the Ascended and in some way or another the bad guys are now much much more powerful... Typically the bad guys are up to no good (shocking eh?), and you need to prevent the annihilation of the entire world or equally predictable but totally cliché bad thingydingy from happening.

Out of the two slivers currently ingame, "the Drowned Halls" which was recently added is aimed as an entry level raid instance that takes place in the following scenario:

QUOTE OF http://www.riftgame.com/en/world/dungeons/slivers.php
Telara is doomed, having fallen to mad Akylios. Now Hydriss, the profane dragon’s sorceress-lieutenant, masses her most vicious and sadistic servants to invade our time. These would-be conquerers, armed with the best gear Akylios’s mad genius could devise, threaten to drown us in misery. Gather your allies and turn back their tide!

Being an entry level raid instance, I suppose it isn't much of a surprise that we pretty much flew through the instance and collected a few shiny loots in the process. Despite being an entry level raid, The Drowned Halls is a pretty fun addition to the 10 man raids available in Rift - there are a bunch of decent items on the loot tables and 2 of the boss encounters (out of total of 4 bosses), despite being very simple fights feature some rather funny encounter mechanics.

Of Madness and Ruin

Which brings us to the department of 20 man raids. It has been all about Hammerknell Fortress lately... When the patch notes for Update 1.3 hit the forums on June 22nd, many of the raiding guilds were more than happy to see the patch notes listing the much anticipated Hammerknell Fortress as one of the features in the update - Hammerknell would bring the 2nd raid tier to the game in form of a truly massive raid dungeon with 10 boss encounters and at least 1 miniboss, as expected people were eager to sink their claws on this content. But first a world event would play out, which would set out the story for Hammerknell and progress throughout various stages before the raid dungeon would be unlocked at the end of the event.

I don't think anyone could have foreseen how painful the wait for the new content turned out to be, with literally no word of the event progress schedule, people were left to speculate which would be "the day" and it certainly did not help out that it quickly became pretty apparent that the world event wasn't much to write home about. A couple weeks later, while the event had its share of fans, a good portion of people would have rated it somewhere between abysmal & poor - I thought particularly appropriate description would be that the world event felt like an pointlessly dragged on RNG based POS that would have fit better in to some korean MMO that prefers mind numbing and repetitive grinds.

A few weeks later, July 27th was revealed to be the day Hammerknell would go live... and so it did - at a worst possible timing with several guild members having a break for their summer vacations that were scheduled to start during that week, the weekend or the next.

While the waiting period was incredibly painful, I have to say Hammerknell Fortress was definitely worth it - it lived up to all of the expectations and on some departments perhaps even surpassed them. The dungeon itself is massive: It is split in 3 initial wings, one underground section, upper floor areas and somewhere deep beneath the earth should be the area where Cthul... I mean Akylios is imprisoned. Despite being a massive dungeon, visually it is truly really amazing and it is easy to see why it would be called the crown jewel of the art team - up to the date it is probably the best looking raid dungeon I have seen in any MMO.

So now we come to the boss encounters, which have been well designed and challegnging so far - some even to the point of being nerve wracking due to no margin for error. I think it speaks well of the boss designs that no guild thus far have cleared Hammerknell fully.

Speaking of the boss encounters, the first one of them is Murdantix (unfortunately i don't have a screenshot to post), a fairly standard encounter mechanics / gear check fight that acts as sort of a guardian to see if your raid is well enough prepared to tackle the other bosses of Hammerknell. As expected, Murdantix fell down fairly quickly although this time around we lost the shard first kill on the boss by 2 minutes.

After killing Murdantix, we were presented with a choice of 3 different wings... We picked our route and eventually arrived at a boss called Soulrender Zilas, who (with typical Xanadu luck) turned out to have a reset bug, preventing the encounter mechanics from fully reseting after the boss has reached a certain hp % - which essentially meant that the boss was borderline impossible to kill as after a wipe, the boss reset but the mechanic that periodically requires players to get near Zilas was looping and kept 2 shotting anyone who wasn't near him. As we decided to head to another wing, we then received a realm wide broadcast message informing us that the King Molinar & Prince Dollin encounter had been disabled due to the prince attempting a coup by abusing an exploit - at that point, we simply decided to call it a night. It definitely wasn't the most ideal launch day for the dungeon, but then again encounter bugs are nothing new on the bleeding edge of raiding.

The next day we started working on the Matron Zamira encounter, making reasonable progress on it. Eventually the Soulrender Zilas encounter was back to a working state - we changed our focus back to him, which eventually turned out to be a bad choice. Being indecisive as we are, at some point we switched back to working on the Matron Zamira encounter and following the trend that started with Murdantix, we lost the shard first kill on Matron Zamira although this time it was by 21 minutes.

This of course meant that we were now more determined than ever, after all - we now had some competition on the server. We shifted our focus back to Soulrender Zilas and after countless of wipes - on August 14th, the king of RNG fell, this time as a shard first kill.

Which was quickly followed by the miniboss, Vladmal Prime on August 15th in the underground section of Hammerknell...

At this point, it came down to a choice from 3 boss encounters... Either King Molinar & Prince Dollin, Grugonim or Sicaron. In this particular case, the choice wasn't all that difficult and we decided to start working on Sicaron - who not only looks totally badass, but was also somewhat jokingly titled as the "guild killer" due to the fact that the encounter is rather execution heavy and a single mistake is enough to wipe the entire raid. So we headed down to the death corrupted Mausoleum area of Hammerknell and pretty soon, we ran in to Sicaron...

Although I can't quite tell if thats a smile on Sicaron's face (maybe it has a deal with the soul mender and knows he/it is about to become filthy rich or something)... Anyway, Sicaron is pretty keen on the saying "Feel the pain of a thousand deaths!", whether this is intended as a lore related voice over or simply a devious developer predicting the outcome of the encounter - it certainly felt like a very appropriate choice of words, as the amount of wipes on this encounter was rather high.

Regardless, eventually we got the execution and the DPS right and on August 22nd Sicaron fell down as yet another shard first kill.

Well well... That ended up to be a lot longer bit of news than I had planned but I think that's about it for now folks. In the meanwhile we'll wait for the update 1.5 and the upcoming AA system, as well as focus on downing more bosses at Hammerknell Fortress - after all, there's plenty of them left, so expect news of more boss kills soonish!

Oh and what would our news be without the usual random, odd and downright awkward quotes from chat... After all, I've had plenty of time to gather some.

Choose your next words carefully... :flee:

Well that's new... Uh, are we raiding a panty drawer or something? :hide:

Uh oh... So what's next, asking for some lashes with a riding crop?

:idea:

If you want to say something that comes out the wrong way... This would be a good choice. :notsaying:

Uhh... Are you absolutely sure the cat is ok? :eek2:

The wall of news...

Ayame — Thu, 12 May 2011 11:04:21 UTC

It has been quite a while since our last news update, way too long to be honest. But despite that we've actually been incredibly busy ingame and have downed all the 20-man raid content that Rift offers so far.

What have we been up to since the last bit of news? Read more to find out!

Oh my... These news have been so long overdue that I am not even quite sure where I should start from. At first, these news got slightly delayed as I felt wrapping up Greenscale's Blight by itself was not enough to write some news about, but once there was more things to write news about, I managed to hit up a proper block on any sort of creative activities and as such, writing the news just kept being delayed and delayed under some briliant excuses of finding something else to do than to actually take some time to write the news.

Anyway, looking back at the past month or so, things have been quite hectic for us, between putting up some proper effort on getting shard first kills on various raid bosses and other things filling our raid schedule as well, we bounced up to full 7 day raid schedule on couple of occasions, which certainly took its toll on the guild and I have to say I'm pretty pleased that we have the 20-man raid content on farm status now - as it leaves time for other things than just raiding on every evening.

Prior to update 1.1 and River of Souls

In the previous bit of news, I talked about how the guild was working on the remaining 2 bosses at the Greenscale's Blight raid instance. Shortly after posting the that set of news, on April 4th we downed Prince Hylas, who back then proved to be quite a fun adversary and a challenge - much due to the fact that there are a lot of things going on in the encounter and there isn't a whole lot of room for error if you happen to screw up things. Even though these days, Hylas is one pulled on our GB runs, but for some reason or another, he still remains among my favourite boss encounters in Greenscale's Blight.

After disposing of Hylas, the only boss remaining at Greenscale's Blight was Lord Greenscale himself. After numerous debates on the subject, we did not quite figure out if the chubby dragon was actually imprisoned in the cavern due to being bound down by the corrupting death magic in his prison or simply because he ate too many things and wasn't able to fit out of the narrow doorway leading to his prison. Regardless of the reasons, Greenscale did not look amused when we first arrived at him:

However, Greenscale's grumpy mood quickly faded away as he realized that a snack (or 20 snacks) had just walked inside his prison room. Suddenly Greenscale burst out of the restraits, followed by a few words "I'm so very hungry!" in a bellowing voice as he charged towards the raid.

After few days of being repeatedly crushed, smashed, strangled, melted, blown up, exterminated, eaten and whatever horrible ways of wiping you can think of, we finally managed to bring down Lord Greenscale for yet another shard first kill on April 8th.

For the very first 20 man raid instance in the game, I would say Greenscale's Blight did a great job - the instance was fun in overall and bosses ranged from basic to slightly more advanced while still saying within reasonable limits for an instance that essentially acts as an introductory instance to raid mechanics in Rift. Obviously as with any new MMO and their endgame content, there were some bugs and issues, even though we happened to be relatively lucky on that department and didn't really encounter many of them.

Update 1.1 and River of Souls arrives (eventually...)

In patch 1.1, Trion introduced a new raid instance River of Souls. But in order to access this new instance, every server had to first take part in a 3 stage world event which lasted for one week and ended up in a two-stage finale - after this event RoS would open up for raiding. Due to some unfortunate technical issues, as well as perhaps the developers underestimating the interest in such a world event - it turned out to be quite a disaster as soon as the two stage finale started.

In phase 2, the entire world was under attack from minions of Alsbeth, zone by zone the sky turned dark and the river of souls was visibly flowing through the sky and some powerful undead minions attacked the major outposts. The problems already begun in this phase, as way too large crowds of people gathered up to defend the outposts and kill the minions of Alsbeth - disconnects, some folks with not quite as beefy computers suffered from bad performance, even the event mobs despawned on occasion when the server decided it is better to despawn them than to crash the server, causing the event to reset over and over again.

It all culminated in to the Phase 3 finale, which happened a top of Caer Mathos, where Alsbeth would tear open a direct passage to River of Souls and then send resurrected versions of various dungeon bosses, but this time as a mass raid event versions to fight the players that were gathered atop the massive castle. Truth to be told, it was clear that the brown substance would hit the fan as soon as something would spawn...

Why is that? - you may wonder, especially when looking at the above screenshot, as it doesn't look all that crowded. The screenshot doesn't really tell the truth, as the client automatically starts to cull player models as soon as there are over amount X of them in an area in an attempt to maintain acceptable framerate, but the area atop Caer Mathos was literally a sea of people. Wherever you moved, seemingly endless amount of people rendered and some estimates were made that on our server there was perhaps a total of close to 500 people packed in that tiny area... I'm sure everyone is able to guess how the servers reacted and what was the overall result when such a horde descended upon the poor mob that stepped out of the River of Souls portal which is seen behind Alsbeth herself in the above screenshot.

In the end, the event ended up being cancelled/delayed, RoS opening postponed by 1 week which as expected caused some pretty tearful posts on the official forum. One week later, the finale event played out again, this time the phase 2 was considerably more stable and for a while it looked like everything would actually work out well - but at the end, the GM's simply had to /kill some of the mobs in order to drag the event through. Phase 3 finale started up and everyone expected the worst, only to notice that the developers had actually cut out the entire mob fighting phase and phase 3 finale simply turned out to be a lore treat.

Which (surprise surprise), caused yet more tears on the forums but Trion quickly responded, and compensated by giving every account/character a RoS finale package that contained some ingame goodies... But far more important to us, the River of Souls was now open for raiding.

What comes to River of Souls itself, in my opinion RoS proved to be a rather fun raid instance as a whole: A rather dark and gloomy death themed instance in an outdoor setting, which features a slight hint of that old school raiding style where you actually needed to consider your pulls carefully while progressing through the zone combined with some pretty creative boss encounters, all in all, the instance was a very much welcome raid content addition only a bit more than a month from the official release.

Of course, there are some things that divide the opinions about the instance, such as the relatively large amount of standard pull mobs, or trash mobs as most people prefer to refer them as (or to be precise, it was a large amount of them, but due to the complaints on the official forums, the amount of them got reduced although by how much - we haven't had a chance to check yet), regardless it didn't take that long to clear the route to the bosses after paying some attention to the patrol movement routes and learning to deal with the somewhat larger social aggro range than the usual.

Aside from that RoS features 4 bosses, Warmaster Galenir, Herald Gaurath, Plutonus the Immortal and Alsbeth the Discordant, as well as 3 Dark Foci, which would be ranked as mini-bosses. On the first day RoS became available (April 16th) we downed Warmaster Galenir rather quickly, followed by the Dark Foci, both as shard first kills. After which we proceeded to work on Herald Gaurath, who proved to be our nemesis at the instance.

After being more or less brickwalled on Herald Gaurath, and refusing to use the exploit that many guilds abused to get their first kills on Herald Gaurath, we simply shifted our attention to Plutonus the Immortal, who according to many was easier than the Herald. Which proved to be quite an accurate statement and we downed Plutonus the Immortal for yet another shard first kill on April 18th.

After Plutonus is killed, Alsbeth lashes out at the raid, she screams angrily about how we had just killed her favourite servant, whose knowledge of machines was only second to Orphiel Farwind. Immediately after, Asha Catari shows up to examine the Soul Cipher Plutonus had created but is soon interrupted by the pesky guardian Cyril Kalmar - after which the two proceed to provide a nice a lore treat for those of us in to reading ingame lore:

After killing Plutonus, we started working on Herald Gaurath again and we were progressing along nicely, but as usual at some point in the raiding progress - the Xanadu luck (tm) we have suffered from in past MMO's kicked in and after a certain hotfix, a bug occured where RoS lockout kept reseting daily for certain raids that were locked to RoS prior to the hotfix (including us). This caused the Herald Gaurath kill to take far longer than we had hoped for, as every day we had to clear the way to Herald again and again, just to have some more attempts on it.

But finally on May 2nd, everything clicked together and we downed Herald Gaurath as shard first kill.

At the end of the River of Souls raid instance, Alsbeth the Discordant, bride of Regulos, who has been portrayed as one of the main villains throughout the Defiant side storyline in Rift awaits for the raid to face her. Titled as perhaps Telara's most powerful sorceress, we expected a fight that would be nothing short of an epic battle.

Although a fun encounter, Alsbeth did not quite live up to her reputation and proved to be perhaps a little disapointing opponent, as she did not offer quite as much challenge as we expected. In fact it seems even Regulos himself had finally got tired of Alsbeth's numerous failures (as the players keep ruining her plots throughout the entire game) and in a somewhat cliche evil overlord fashion he tells Alsbeth that he has had enough of her failures and that he would find a more worthy servant as reply when Alsbeth begs for more power from her master just moments before she is about to meet her demise.

After Alsbeth dies, Regulos decides to share a few words with the raid in a speech that reminded me oddly much from a monologue by a certain villain in a popular RPG, just that only the epic music, Normandy SR-2, dramatic camera runs and a massive explosion were missing. :P

I suppose most of the disapointment about Alsbeth revolves around the fact that we killed Alsbeth the very same day we started working on the encounter, this is mainly due to the encounter being simply an execution fight without too much of a gear or DPS checks involved, thus significantly reducing the pressure on the raid and allowing some room for small errors to occur mid-fight (unlike with Herald Gaurath for example, which really requires a spot on execution along with a massive DPS check).

That being said, with both Greenscale's Blight and River of Souls cleared, we're done with all the 20 man raid content that Rift has to offer for now. But so far Trion has kept their promise about regular content updates and in fact, yesterday patch 1.2 went live on the EU servers and this update introduced some more 10 man raid content to chew at during those days when GB & RoS are on lockout. This new content comes in form of couple new raid rifts as well as a sliver called Gilded Prophecy, which presents an alternate timeline version of a portion of Shimmersand zone as a raid instance.

But more importantly, on the department of 20 man raiding, we have something to look forward to - as sometime in future, although still at an unannounced date, the doors of the Hammerknell Fortress will be breached and inside the fortress, the next tier of raiding along with a doubledigit figure of boss encounters await. Certainly a worthy reason to keep farming the existing instances and gearing up for the future challenges.

As for the Hammerknell fortress itself, the lore relays a rather grim picture of what awaits inside Hammerknell, but how true to the lore does the raid content stay? Well that remains to be seen:

QUOTE OF Last days of Hammerknell
The account of Forgul of the Runeguard, put to record in the days following the loss of Hammerknell: A large number of our forces were gone, marched off to fight beside Zareph Mathos against his corrupt brother. When the first wave of death magic hit and the rifts started, we were overwhelmed. Moonshade was overrun. We shut the doors, and only a few of us, the Runeguard, stayed out to defend. It was always our place to be outside of Hammerknell, and so we stayed, even though we were sure it meant certain death. We had no idea what would happen. It was some kind of a cruel joke. Those of us who were ready to die ended up being the only ones to survive. We fought, and even though sometimes it seemed like we were done for, we lived. General Stanig was lost, but he was lost defeating the worst of the demons in Moonshade - Gorvahlt. And with him gone, we thought maybe we could open the doors of Hammerknell once again. But when we opened them, we found a terrible sight. Death. Everywhere. Our families, friends, affectionate rivals... All gone. And feasting on them were some of the most terrible aberrations of death. We didnt quite know what happened then. We would only piece it together later. But the message had been left for us, scratched into the very stone walls of Hammerknell so the dead could not erase it. "Close the doors. Destroy the wheel. Never let them leave. There is no one left" So we did. We shut the doors, and the great wheel, the only contraption capable of moving their immense weight, was destroyed.

QUOTE OF Last days of Hammerknell

The account of Forgul of the Runeguard, put to record in the days following the loss of Hammerknell:

A large number of our forces were gone, marched off to fight beside Zareph Mathos against his corrupt brother. When the first wave of death magic hit and the rifts started, we were overwhelmed. Moonshade was overrun. We shut the doors, and only a few of us, the Runeguard, stayed out to defend. It was always our place to be outside of Hammerknell, and so we stayed, even though we were sure it meant certain death.

We had no idea what would happen. It was some kind of a cruel joke. Those of us who were ready to die ended up being the only ones to survive.

We fought, and even though sometimes it seemed like we were done for, we lived. General Stanig was lost, but he was lost defeating the worst of the demons in Moonshade - Gorvahlt. And with him gone, we thought maybe we could open the doors of Hammerknell once again.

But when we opened them, we found a terrible sight.

Death. Everywhere. Our families, friends, affectionate rivals... All gone. And feasting on them were some of the most terrible aberrations of death. We didnt quite know what happened then. We would only piece it together later. But the message had been left for us, scratched into the very stone walls of Hammerknell so the dead could not erase it.

"Close the doors. Destroy the wheel. Never let them leave. There is no one left"

So we did. We shut the doors, and the great wheel, the only contraption capable of moving their immense weight, was destroyed.

Hammerknell from a distance

And last but not least... Time for some quotes! :P

Okay... :susp:

So umm... Those previous messages about "I've had 5 red bulls today" and "eating pizza atm" were about... what!? :eek2:

I don't even want to know where the idea for this rule came from...

The First Month

Ayame — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:27:08 UTC

It has been about a month since Rift went live and I suppose it comes as no surprise that the first month has been incredibly busy - everything from leveling from 1 to 50, invasion events, warfronts, gearing up with expert dungeons and even some raiding.

So how did it all go? Read more to find out about our first month in Telara.

Rift: Planes of Telara went live on February 24th in form of a headstart period (official launch took place on March 4th), looking back at the very first day, if I would have had to describe it with one word "chaotic" would be the first to come in mind. From the Defiant perspective, you as a player, take the role of an ascended who is resurrected in a machine born body in a future scenario where Regulos, the dragon of extinction (the main villain of the game) has consumed everything else on Telara save for the small area where the last remnants of the Defiant faction are taking their last stand on the day the world ends.

Most of the folks wanted to rush through the introductory area as fast as possible in hopes of reaching the actual gameworld fast enough to make it there before the bulk of the horde of new players arrive there as well - but despite the mad rush to reach the failsafe device at Terminus, which lore wise sends the players back in time to prevent the destruction of Telara (and in to the actual non-instanced gameworld) it quickly became pretty apparent that a lot of other players had the same idea.

The sight was quite something to behold: Hundreds of players, all rushing to the quest mobs and npc's while hoping to get their quest updates - but not only that, with the rift invasions (planes invading Telara via rifts) also scaling with the amount of players in the area it resulted in massive mob raids at the player quest outposts. Early on the majority of the invasions focused on the outpost of Kelari Refuge, where at one point of the evening you could more or less fight 30 minutes in a row against a seemingly endless horde of planar invaders that clashed on the beach with equally large horde of players, resulting in a zerg fest of epic proportions where players and the mobs kept fighting over the control of the outpost. For most part the server handled things pretty well, although at some point of the evening - the inevitable happened and the occasional lagspikes started hitting in.

But in overall, the launch day itself was rather smooth.

After that, things went around in quite an usual manner, people leveling up, getting to know new guildies be they applicants or previously from other branches of Xanadu, forming dungeon groups and generally pushing towards the max level. Some enjoying the leveling aspect more and some simply hoping that it would go by faster - but in general, as a game, I think most of the guild agrees that Rift released in quite a polished state with a decent amount of content - even though no MMO is perfect and Rift is no exception there. The game has its flaws, bugs, balancing issues and especially during the first couple of weeks the game was plagued with quite a lenghty login queues on the more popular servers such as Blightweald which we play on.

As far as raid content goes, Rift provides a decent amount of raid content for a game that has just launched: 10 man content wise, there are 4 raid rifts and 2 overland mobs (quest/weekly repeatable) and 20 man content wise, there is one raid instance which has 5 bosses. Out of these raids, perhaps in a little unexpected manner the 10 man raid rifts (which are not encounter locked, so doing them with a full 20 man raid is viable) have proven to be an excellent source for gearing up due to their "on demand" type of triggering that uses components from the group dungeons.

Even though the raid rifts may not be the most exciting form of raiding due to being aimed for more of an entry level content, and especially when done with more players than intended they become rather trivial. But for now the fun factor is still there and being able to get some decent loots does help.

Obviously our primary focus is on the 20 man raid content, which in this case is the instance called Greenscale's Blight, which is named after Greenscale the Primeval, a dragon of life/growth that is bound inside the cavern by death magic. While a big underground area may not sound like the most exciting place for a raid dungeon, the developer team has come up with a nice little gimmick that spices up things a little.

Soon after entering the instance, players will encounter Prince Hylas and his 3 lieutenants who are attempting to free Lord Greenscale. In order to buy himself some more time, Hylas teleports the players back to the cave entrance and conjures a gigantic hedge maze inside the cavern with his life magic. The maze then gets filled with mobs, and the players need to navigate through it to reach one of the lieutenants - after killing one of the bosses, the maze shifts in to another form and more mobs will spawn inside it, as well as the next lieutenant appears. This continues until all of them are dead and you are left to face Prince Hylas himself.

Once we started raiding, we downed the first of the lieutenants: Duke Letareus relatively fast on March 15th. However, for some reason or another, our progress at the instance was gated for about a week more by the next boss, Infiltrator Johlen which proved to be a source of many frustrating wipes at 5 to 1% HP remaining. But on March 22nd we finally managed to bring Johlen down, which was quickly followed by the 3rd boss Oracle Aleria on the same day. While the kills didn't fare that highly on the world wide list of the boss kills, we did manage to get shard (server) first for all 3 of the bosses.

As far as what the future holds: Trion promises that Rift will have what they would call an aggressive update schedule and this will start up with the patch 1.1 - which is scheduled to go live on either tomorrow or Thursday (depending on the NA/EU patch schedule with major updates), 1.1 will contain a new raid zone called River of Souls, as well as a week long world event which will lead to unlocking the said raid instance.

It will be interesting to see how regular these content additions will become and if the developer team really manages to push out polished content at regular intervals, but regardless of that, a proper content update just 30 days after the official launch is an impressive feat especially when looking back at some of the MMO releases in the past few years and their content patching speed.

For now though, we will focus on gearing up our characters and bringing down the remaining two bosses at Greenscale's Blight. That being said, I think that about wraps up the first of hopefully many news posts for Rift, oh and what would a news post be without some quotes from the guildchat?

Oh, you would think so wouldn't you? Not being online... Merely an inconvenience.

Must be some new form of roleplaying...

Some of our members just cant help it. :P

Guardians are bad, mmkay?

The dentist did... what!? :eek2:

Item Database!

Sondrax — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 15:35:20 UTC

Rejoyce! Its time to launch our item database for Rift:Planes of Telara!

http://rift.xanadu-community.com/items.php

In line with what we have for EQ2 and VG, it will support endgame content!
You can browse by location or search for specific items.
Everyone (registered users) can also add items on his own, which will show up once an admin approved the item.
The how-to should be pretty self explaining, but if theres any questions or suggestions, pls make sure to use the Rift Loot Discussion Board.

:bounce:

Launchtime!

Sondrax — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:33:43 UTC

Now that the next big chapter in the history of Xanadu is about to start, here's some more details about our presence in Rift:Planes of Telara!

We will start our adventure on feb 24th, playing on Blightweald!
And as you probably guessed from the image above, we will play on the Defiant side there!

The recruitment board is up now. Due to very high interest, recruitment will remain extremely limited though, for the time being!
You are welcome to post (or pm) applications anytime however. We will consider it.
We will have a raiding squad and a community squad (that one has no raiding obligations) on our roster.
Note, that we will only recruit for the raiding squad though. The community rank is reserved for long term members!

Our raids will start at 17:00 on Sundays and 19:30 on Mondays-Thursdays. Fridays and Saturdays are typically off, but we might be adding them to the schedule when progression is important enough.

Features:
Big thx to Mabs again for providing us with an awesome parser that you can find here!

We also have an item database ready for Rift! Going along the idea of the eq2 and vg databases, it is aimed to feature end game content! For Rift, that means it will start with expert dungeons and expert rifts, and then obviously all raid content :)
The item db will be made public shortly after launch!

Xanadu visits GamesCom!

Kalbuir — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:00:00 UTC

The honour is mine to bring you guys one of the first news article for the game RIFT: Planes of Telara. Those of you who know me from Xanadu and/or the official RIFT forums know how big a fan of the game I am. It therefore really excites me to have this opportunity to bring the first RIFT news to all the friends, allies, and members of Xanadu.

From last week's Thursday to Sunday, Köln (Germany) was the host of the GamesCom convention: the biggest gaming convention in Europe. This year the GamesCom pulled over 200.000 visitors. As a multi-game community, Xanadu couldn't let this opportunity slide and multiple of our members travelled across Europe to attend the convention. Rift: Planes of Telara provided the attendees of GamesCom with the opportunity to get hands-on time with the game for the first time! We got to play a large selection of souls, some already revealed and some new ones. One of the later was the bard, which as a guild we have always loved greatly throughout our time in EQ2 and Vanguard.

A large group of Xanadu members visited the GamesCom convention over the course of the 4 days it lasted. It goes without saying that most of our attention went out to the MMORPG we are all waiting for: RIFT: Planes of Telara. We knew there would be hands-on time with the game, but the extent of this hands-on time was more than we could have hoped for. A small group of Xanadu members had the honour to run through a few of the game's mid- and low level instances. Portions of our group fighting its way through the dungeon were also displayed on the big screen hanging above the TRION booth. I must say: what an amazing experience!

Xanadu members meet eachother for the first time in the world of Telara.

The instances we went through were Deepstrike Mines, Iron Tomb, and Darkening Deeps. During this time I had the honour of getting the first hands-on time with a soul combination of the Assassin, a starter soul, and the Bard, a heroic soul. The experiences I had during this play time I would like to share with you all here. Please keep in mind that these are my impression from a relatively short gaming sessions and are not in any way based on feedback or confirmation from the RIFT team. Moreover, RIFT is still in it's alpha phase of development and between now and release everything is subject to possible changes.

The Bard
My first thought when setting up this Assassin/Bard character was that both souls appeared to have a good synergy. Supplementary DPS from the Assassin with strong group enhancement from the Bard. While playing, I found that the synergy wasn't as good as I initially thought it would be. The main problem I faced was the limited availability of combo points. The assassin used these to do high damage abilities, and the bard uses these to play musical buffs. However, in my opinion this is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that certain souls might complement each other better than others. Some souls will work better together, where others will take more effort to combine with the same efficacy.

This is why I ended up doing either one task (DPS) or the other (buffing), as I did not have the combo points available to do both tasks with the same efficacy as I could do a single task. With this soul combination I thus created a bard/DPS hybrid which did not exclusively focus on buffing the group, but could also blow out damage quite well. I suspect that with more practise, experience, effort, and progression it will be easier to do both tasks. However, sooner or later the player is going to need to make a certain choice, namely, What do I want my character to do. And if you ask me, that is exactly what RIFT is about!

Now let's take a closer look at what a bard actually does. In short, the bard focuses on buffing his or her group. However, I also saw some DPS abilities in the ability list, so it does not appear to be a pure buffing class. All the bard's buffs revolve around music, which is similar to most games that employ bard classes.

So far I have seen a few different types of buff mechanics:
- Toggle buffs. Without cast time or duration, which you can switch in combat.
- Long duration buffs. With cast time, which overwrite each other.
- Short duration buffs. Which takes away combo points.

Now this last buff mechanism is by far the most exciting one for me. It reminds me a little bit of song twisting in EQ, but without the painful and repetitive experience. To elaborate. You have attacks and abilities that grant you combo points. These short duration buffs take away your combo points, but also become more powerful the more combo points you have (the most powerful buff resulting from a maximum of 5 combo points). However, this means that it will take you more time to get your selection of buffs up, as well as provide micro-managing effort to keep all of them up.

What exactly does a bard buff then, you might ask. To provide a few examples, I saw buffs with a minor heal over time, a critical chance increase, a damage increase, and (perhaps more of a debuff) a damage received increase on a specific mob. There were a variety of other buffs, but I honestly can not remember them in enough detail to describe to you.

In conclusion, I want to thank all TRION employees present at GamesCom for their interaction with us fans, it was really amazing to see how passionate they were when talking with us about the game. Overall our anticipation of RIFT: Planes of Telara has only grown since attending GamesCom. The soul system is not only dynamic and diverse, but also provides an enormous challenge. It will not be easy to find the perfect combination and setup so you can play just the class you want with maximum efficacy. Moreover, we can't wait to sink our teeth deeper into RIFT's content. As a raid guild it is very exciting to know that, if the group instances are any indication of the raid content to come, we are up for one hell of a ride!

Xanadu in Rift:Planes of Telara!

Sondrax — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:23:02 UTC

After Counterstrike, Planetarion, EVE, EQ2, Vanguard and AION im glad to officially announce Xanadu's next main community game:

In Rift: Planes of Telara, we will play on a PvE (Player vs. Environment) server. There, we want to progress through the game's content together, with a focus on the raid aspect of the game. Like in previous games, we aim to compete on high end level of raiding.

In order to reach this goal, we will have a mandatory raid schedule for all our members. Although the exact schedule will be announced at a later point, our core times will fit the evenings of central europe.

Rift: Planes of Telara features two factions The Guardians and The Defiant, however we have not yet decided on a faction.

In Rift: Planes of Telara we strive to maintain our reputation, not only through fair play and resepectful interaction with fellow players, but also by having characters with great equipment, that are played by dedicated people who are skilled and work well as a team.

Due to the popularity of Rift: Planes of Telara within our community, there is no public recruitment at this time. Watch our site at www.xanadu-community.com for news about that, in case you are interested.