It’s that time again, time for another RIFT Junkies giveaway! Hosting giveaways is one of our favorite things to do, we get to giveaway awesome stuff to our awesome readers. This time we have some really special treats, in-game RIFT items and Official RIFT T-Shirts we picked up while at PAX. There will be different prizes for both regular members and Premium Junkies. However, Premium Junkies will be eligible to win from both categories. If you’re not a Premium Junkie, you can become one here.

Read after the break for all the details.

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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We’ve seen the thread.

Getting additional sinks for the currencies, and additional incentives for players to go back and do dungeons is on our big “list of things to do”. I can’t promise a patch date, or a course of action, but its on the radar.

~Daglar

This is great news for those of you out there like me that have 300+ Marks of Achievement and 600+ Plaques of Achievement just sitting there. Now only if they made older raid bosses give a ton of Planar Attunement experience thus giving me a reason to clear Greenscale’s Blight.

Note: These are a replica of older notes, but with many additions as of 11/8/2011.

PTS NOTES:
* Riftstalker: Annihilate: Reverted functionality changes back to the 1.5 version [A finisher that deals damage and increases Attack Power by 15%].
* Riftstalker: Guarded Steel: Reverted functionality changes back to the 1.5 version [A finisher that deals damage and increases Armor Value by 30%]. The duration of the Armor buff now lasts 30 seconds instead of being increased by using more Combo Points.
* Justicar: Thorvin’s Law: Now properly states the scaling damage reduction based on points in Justicar in the ability tooltip.
* Justicar: Mien of Leadership: No longer causes Mien of Leadership or Mien of Honor to cancel on nearby targets.
* Reaver: Fixed a bug allowing Binding of Affliction to enhance damage done by Spotter’s Order.
* Reaver: Binding of Death: Increased damage mitigation per application to 4%.
* Void Knight *– Devourer has been reduced slightly. Now it increases mitigation on Void by 1-5%
* Void Knight: Fixed Tempest still draining Pacts.
* Planar Attunement: Mage: Flaring Glyph now increases Spell Power by 120.
* Planar Attunement: Mage: Razor Edge now increases one-handed weapon DPS by 3.
* Planar Attunement: Mage: Keen Edge now increases two-handed weapon DPS by 6.

Another video by our friend Warbs that goes over the latest addition to the PTS, the Fae Yule Festival.

As patch 1.6 draws to a close, Trion has started testing for the next world event on the PTS, and folks, the holiday season has finally begun in Rift.

The fae are tired of every other race in Telara getting to celebrate Yule without them. With Greenscale dead, the Fae have decided to make up for 1000 years without Yule, and one bogling in particular, named Grandfather Frost, has risen to the impressive challenge of giving a present to every single person in Telara. All is not well, however, as Crucia has begun to rear her ugly head now that Greenscale and Akylios are out of the picture, and it’s up to the Telarans to free the mind-controlled Fae before Yuletide.(Picture of Grandfather Frost, to the right)

It appears that we’ll eventually see a tweak to experience gain toward Planar Attunement according to this statement by Adam Gershowitz.

Originally posted by Gersh_Trion (Source)

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Figured I’d hop in on this one b/c we are in fact doing a little bit more tuning on PA experience in 1.6.

As a whole we’re not planning on making any radical shifts but we are carefully watching what people are doing and tuning the values. For example with this patch you will see some improvements in the following areas

• Instance Bosses will be seeing a boost in XP rewards
• LFD Daily quests will be seeing a boost in XP rewards
• 10 / 20 man raids will be seeing a small general XP boost across the whole zone
• Select quests will be getting some additional XP

We are also looking at possibly turning on rested XP for PA experience as well. Like I said before these boosts are not going to be dramatic game changers, but incremental updates until we hit a good balance.

As far as Raids specifically go we don’t want people to feel like they make no PA progress while raiding, but at the same time they will never be the most competitive XP content.

-Gersh

Proof that Trion isn’t exactly happy with the speed of the gain of PA levels. There have been many complaints lately, with the unlocking of Tier 2, that it might take a bit too long to get to the good stuff.

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Patch 1.6 is coming soon and we get a whole new slew of screenshots, shown above. If you haven’t been over to the PTS yet, ZAM put out a good interview with Hal Hanlin that discusses all the new features. We find out that Instant Adventures are not coming right away, but they will be in before 1.7. There will be a new 5 man dungeon that is Rift’s biggest yet which includes up to 11 bosses on it’s hardest difficulty level and a non-linear design. No raid will be included with 1.6′s launch though Ember Isle hosts two different Dragons.

Other features include Onslaught, which is a new invasion tactic. There will be Sourcewells all over Ember Isles that have turrets you can upgrade. Once upgraded, invasions will start to target the Sourcewell area thus starting an Onslaught.

The major addition at the release of 1.6 will be Onslaughts. “We have areas called Sourcewells, which are the genesis of the sourcestone. You’ll actually see crystal deposits of sourcestone lying around that you can use to charge your planar charges up. If you find a Sourcewell, you’ll also find some old broken turrets around, both offensive and defensive. You can use your planar charges to activate and level these up, make them more powerful, and create defended areas to hold off enemies. And that’s good! Because as soon as you start leveling these up… what’s gonna happen is something we refer to as an Onslaught, which is a series of invasions that are targeted at that location. So in effect, you’re telling the game ‘All right! Bring it on!’… that’s kind of a fun, ‘push button, get to kill things’ gameplay.” Hal notes though that it really becomes critical during zone events, as the Sourcewells need to be defended to defeat the zone boss… but upgrading the defenses incites even more invasions through the Onslaught system. Thus, it becomes a strategy of “Is it worth upgrading this turret if it means another invasion?” Hal did mention that perhaps the Onslaught spawns need a bit of spacing saying, “They don’t come slowly! My first feedback point last week was ‘maybe we need to spread the spawns out just a little!’ because if you have 45 things that hit all at once…” It remains to be seen if the spawn rate of Onslaught invasions will be changed prior to the 1.6 going live!

We can’t wait for 1.6 to go live as it will feature some major additions to RIFT!

Confirmed today by Daglar, Planar Attunement buffs like dps gain and stats, do not stack with consumables. Here’s the quote in response to this question:

But as Qia rightly pointed out, that would be kind of pointless, when everyone has the ability to buy a better conumable from the auction house. So I am still assuming they will stack.

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

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They do not stack. They are intended to be a nice “I dont want to waste a good consumable right now” sort of buff. Not a “requirement to play the game”.

~Daglar

This seems to hold true that they did not want to make PA necessary for raiding.

On Gamespot’s “On the Spot” this week they discussed some of the up coming additions to the game. Unfrotunately the video is currently not working, however they did discuss a surprising addition to the game. Soon we will be able to play mini games and chat with people in game from an Android App.

Interesting news and we can’t wait until we get more information.