Future Changes: Looking Ahead

Editor’s Note: There are lots of things to get caught up on. This weekend I got married so I’m just catching up!

Happy Friday all!

As we head into the weekend we wanted to give you an update on what you have to expect to see in the near future.

The team here has put together posts for each of the 4 Archetypes about upcoming changes to their respective souls, in addition to an update on PvP, Crafting and Expert Dungeons.

Please see the links below for all the info – thanks and have fun!

• Soul Updates
• Warriors
• Rogues
• Clerics
• Mages
• PvP Update
• Crafting Update
• Expert Dungeon Updates

Soul Updates
Time for another quick balance update, we’re working hard on the next major patch which will include a number of changes. I wanted to quickly go over some general issues in this post while specific Calling posts will be going up in their respective forums from the Calling leads.

Auto-attack
Just a quick note here, we’ve identified a bug where ability execution can block auto-attack. This issue most noticeably affects Rogues especially those who make heavy use of procced effects. A fix for this will be included in the next major updated.

Hybrids vs Pures
One of the biggest issues we see regarding balance is min/maxed Hybrids vs 51 point Pures. Every Calling right now has multiple hybrid specs that can be extremely competitive in whichever role they’re trying to fill. Unfortunately in a lot of cases spending a high number of points in a single Soul is not the most effective approach. One of the goals we’re focusing on right now is increasing the effectiveness of the Pure builds to help reduce the gap between Hybrids and Pures.

Warriors
Hello all, we have been following the forums and feedback over the last few weeks and I wanted to take this opportunity to talk to you all about some changes we are looking to make to the Warrior souls with the upcoming patch. We picked through the feedback and looked over the souls and we decided to make some changes to a couple souls that are not quite fitting in like we want them to. The Void Knight and the Warlord.

The Void Knight has always been intended as the premier choice in tanking magical mobs but we don’t feel like it does that as well as we would like it to, so we are looking at several changes to help it fill that role. Just a couple examples, though not by any means everything we are looking at.

1) Giving them a new self buff that reduces the damage they take from non-physical melee attacks.
2) A revision of the Pacts system in which we are ending the practice of using a full Pact dump for each ability. The goal is to make them easier to use, easier to understand, and more balanced.
3) Fixing Fusion of Flesh to be more useful. This change will be independent to the bug currently affecting Rank 5.

We always wanted the Warlord to be a solid tank that could be useful in more situations. He currently fits a dual role of being a tank while bringing useful buffs to the table. Right now we are happy with their ability to buff their party, but we feel their ability to tank is below where we want it to be. Here a couple things we are working on to help change him into the tank we want him to be.

1) Giving him a new high level ability that acts as Sergeant’s Order but as an AOE, allowing him to pull in multiple enemies.
2) Taking a look at his tanking ability and seeing where we can make tweaks to help his mitigation out.

We also have a whole bunch of bugs we are fixing across all the souls and we look forward to being able to give you more detailed patch notes on these changes and bug fixes in the near future.

Rogues
To my fellow Rogues,

Thank you for posting your feedback and suggestions in the forums. I really appreciate your time and effort trying out various builds and sharing them with the both the community and us. Many of the changes we will be introducing in the next patch are a result of the community’s hard work and dedication to the calling.

Assassin
As we all know, the Assassin is the cold-blooded killer who selectively picks his target and vanquishes his victim with ruthless efficiency. Unfortunately, they lack the punch we want them to have. As such we are looking to improve both their initial burst and their overall DPS over time. In addition we have been working on many of the Stealth bugs people have been reporting and we hope to get them fixed for the next patch.

Bladedancer
While the Bladedancer is an excellent soul for soloing and brings some fantastic utility to the table, they are still not hitting the DPS goal we expect them to. As such, we are looking to tweak a number of their core abilities upwards to make sure the Bladedancer’s DPS is more in line with what we’d expect from a whirling dervish of destruction.

Marksman
Finally for the Marksman, there are two areas of concern we are looking to address. Firstly, the Marksman’s overall DPS is not at a level we are happy with. Secondly, the Marksman is too reliant on the use of cooldowns to get the most out of its soul. With these in mind, we are reviewing their situational long cooldown abilities and DPS abilities with the intent of improving their overall performance and reducing the number of buttons players need to worry about.

Once again, thank you for all your feedback. The preview above is an outline of our intention for the upcoming patch and does not include a complete list of changes and fixes. More details will be added as we move closer to patch day.

Clerics
Greetings, Clerics of Telara. I’m Zinbik, the guy in charge of Clerics. I am here to discuss… THE FUTURE! Before I begin, I just wanted to thank everyone for their feedback so far. Whether in-game or here on the forums, we really appreciate any insight we can get as to how you’re perceiving the game. Now, on to the changes!

We’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback on the ranged DPS souls. For this next patch we’ll be focusing on the Inquisitor, working to make their DPS more reliable and comparable to other DPS souls.

Inquisitor
Life and Death Concord is just too random. When it procs a lot, you’re having a blast! When it hardly procs at all, you want to strangle me. We really want to make this more reliable so their DPS isn’t so variable.
The Armor spells don’t offer much of a choice. You’ve got “the damage and defense one”, “the different damage and defense one”, and “the mostly useless one”. We’re going to change that into “the defensive one”, “the offensive one”, and “the big stick”.

The Healing souls have gotten a fair amount of feedback as well. Right now we’d like to focus on the Sentinel with a little Purifier love on the side, examining how we can make certain abilities more useful and interesting. Below are a few examples of these changes.

Sentinel
Healing Breath, while fantastic for a 0-point ability, just isn’t where we’d like it to be for those heavily specced into Sentinel. As long as its HPS is inferior to Healing Invocation, it just ends up being a liability when you try to use it on the tank in response to a minor damage spike or stun. We’d like to fix this, but only for those with a heavy investment into Sentinel.

Purifier
Ward of the Ancestors is nice and all, but with its current setup ends up being something you only ever cast on the tank. We plan on lowering the cooldown, but adding a blocker to prevent you from casting it on the same person for the next 30 seconds. This allows you to use it on more targets without allowing one target to be shielded 100% of the time. Once we’ve had time to observe this change within the LIVE environment, we can evaluate the addition of scaling to absorption for a following patch.

Remember, just because I didn’t mention an issue here that you’re concerned with doesn’t mean we don’t share that concern. This is not an exhaustive list of changes that will be happening to Clerics this patch. We’ll be releasing more information when the ALPHA patch notes go live.

Mages
Hey everyone,

I have some information for you on some of the upcoming changes with the next patch. Most of the changes and fixes coming with this update have come from forum posts and feedback sent to us. While we’re always looking into issues and concerns of all sizes, those below are the ones with the largest impact that will be part of the 1.2 update.

First off, there will be a good number of fixes and updates. Among these are ones such as fixing the Pyromancer’s Combust so the effects now stack correctly, fixing the Elementalist’s Charged which wasn’t affecting the top ranks of Lighting Strike and several issues with weaker buffs overwriting stronger ones have also been resolved. We are also taking a look at pets and hope to resolve a number of the most reported pet bugs, such as pets no longer attacking after being stunned.

As many of you have been posting the Pyromancer ability, Ground of Strength, is an amazingly powerful ability. In many cases it is more powerful than it was intended to be, and as a result, is effectively the required choice as the mage PVP soul. It does need to be desirable, but also does need to have its power brought in line with its intended balance.

Another issue, that in many cases is connected with the Pyromancer, is the Dominator’s Controlled Opportunity. As many people have experienced, if you get Transmogrified by someone the next hit you take is really going to hurt. The main issue we found with this ability was critical hits on the target were receiving double bonuses, one from critically hitting and another from Controlled Opportunity, which generated much more damage than intended.

We looked into several possible changes that would help mitigate this while leaving Controlled Opportunity both useful and desirable. The change we have arrived at is having the damage bonus remain, and while an enemy is affected by the debuff the next ability used on them is guaranteed to hit and cannot be resisted but cannot critically hit. If when you attack an enemy with this debuff you are affected by an ability such as Nenvin’s Lament, which gives you a 100% chance to critically hit, your attack will hit the enemy and the Nenvin’s Lament buff will not be consumed until you attack again, preserving the special crit from Nenvin’s for the later attack.

Once we get closer to the patch day, a full list of the fixes and changes included with the patch will be available. We look forward to your feedback on all of the changes when the next update comes to the Test Server.

PVP
Evening!

We’ve gotten a ton of great feedback for PvP since we’ve gone live, so much that we’ve had quite a challenge weeding out which things we wanted to tackle first. Today I want to give everyone a preview of changes in our upcoming patch, as well as some hints as to where we are headed next.

Improving Reward Quality

There’s been a lot of concern about the quality of the Rank Sets, and the effectiveness that Valor has in PvP compared to the rewards from Tier 1 and 2 dungeons. With 1.2, you’ll find that Valor has received a significant boost, granting reduction in damage taken from Players. In addition we’ve also updated many of the PvP rewards. Here’s a few highlights:

• Retuning PvP items to have more offensive punch.
• Updated & added a number of items to Rank 1 & 2 that will be on par with T1 dungeons.
• Updated & added a number of items in Rank 3 & 4 so that this set is on par with T2 dungeons.
• Reduced the current Rank requirement for Rank 5 weapons to Rank 4, and introduced all new Rank 6 weapons that are on par with Epics from Raid dungeons.
• All Rank Set pieces can now be tinted.

Crowd Control

Crowd control continues to be an item we’re watching carefully. There is a fine line to walk between too much CC and CC being considered useless. With that in mind we’ll be making a few changes in the next patch:

• Increasing the window of time that Diminishing returns is effective, which should reduce the chances of being chain CC’d through an extended encounter.
• Adding a small immunity buff to Break Free in the PvP souls that way players are not immediately CC’d after using their abilities.

Warfront Notoriety

Another area of improvement slated for the next patch is improving the flow of Notoriety advancement so it’s more fun.

• Increased the notoriety rewards from warfronts and warfront related daily quests
• Updated the Notoriety rewards for Port Scion, with the goal of moving some of the better rewards to an earlier notoriety level so they are more in line with the new rank set progression

The above is the bulk of the changes we plan to release with our next patch. However there is no rest for the weary and we’re hard at work on adding some new PVP gameplay into RIFT. We’ll talk about this in more detail once we have things hammered out. That being said people should expect to hear more about things like PvP open world zone events, weekend events with alternate game mode warfronts, and PvP leaderboards & statistics soon!

Crafting
Hello Crafters!

It’s been a few weeks since our last update and we have a number of new things coming along that we thought everyone would be interested in hearing about. Many of the below changes will be coming out with the next major update and should be going live in the next few weeks. As always there are a lot of things in progress and this is only a preview of some of them!

• Weekly Crafting Quests – We’re looking at different ways of awarding plaques for crafters. We’re currently working on new, endgame crafting quest content that will give you ways to earn plaques more reliably. In addition these quests are going to be tied into special Rifts that have been tailored for crafters with crafting specific rewards!

• Runecrafting Materials – We’ve mentioned previously that we wanted to take a look at Runecrafting recipes and their ingredient costs. Some ingredients have been used more frequently than others, so we have gone in and updated many of the recipes to better balance out the need for kinetics, perpetual and sentience ingredients.

• Daily Quest Objectives – We’ve reviewed through all the crafting dailies and have fixed a number of issues related to them. Previously there were some daily quests that required very rare and hard to get materials in their recipes, and we’ve gone ahead and updated those to be more reasonable. We’ve also fixed a variety of other issues related to daily quests in the process including: dailies where the recipe is above the quest’s skill requirement, dailies not awarding exp, and we’ve improved the variety in crafted items (particularly for Armorsmiths). You can find details about these changes in the patch notes once they’re released!

• Crafting UI – We’re working on new features to improve the usability of our Crafting UI, specifically sorting and filters for the Recipe Window.

• Rare Material Quest Items – We’ve slightly increased the chances of getting crafting quest starter items from harvesting and mobs! We have added more locations in which the quest starter can drop. For example you can now get a Discarded Pickaxe Head from both Iron and Chromite, instead of just Chromite. In addition, we’ve slightly increased the drop rates for these items.

•Bug Fixes – We’re working diligently to fix bugs as they keep rolling in. The patch notes will call out all the issues that have been addressed recently. Fixes you can expect to see soon include fixes for recipes sorting incorrectly in the recipe list, necklaces salvaging for incorrect materials now drop silver, gold, and platinum respectively, and fixes to items sorting incorrectly on the Auction House.

Expert Dungeons
Hello my fellow Rifties. I want to give small preview to some of the planned changes to our Expert dungeons. Note: This is not a complete list there are plenty of other things that should be updated (such as various achievement bug fixes).

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, we’re generally happy with the overall difficulty but will be making a few adjustments for 1.2.
- Reduced Health on non-boss encounters
- Caelia the Stormtouched will be modified to be more understandable
- Gronik’s power gain will be nerfed
- Rictus ground target ability will be nerfed a bit
- Gatekeeper Kaleida will have the range of some of the crystal abilities reduced and will ignore line of sight
- Scarn’s smouldering bones will stay on fire longer
- Ice Talon and the Falconer will have their health pools slightly reduced
- King’s Breach Manticores will not instantly use their special abilities
- Shadehorror Phantasm will no longer spawn minions on pets

We will also be making some particular changes to make some encounters more melee balanced
- Ragnoth’s whips have reduced range, duration, and effectiveness
- Fae Lord Twyl will no longer have any ‘safe’ locations
- Sparkwing’s PBAE will have a reduced range. His chained bolt will now work properly on ranged targets.
- Konstantin’s cleave will no longer be 360 degrees. Players that are in melee range will get a damage bonus.
- Glubmuk’s poison bolt will no longer hit melee.
- Chillblains’ elementals will no longer prefer to spawn on the closest targets
- Queen Valnara’s ground effect she drops on her location will hurt less.
- Ouldare’s special abilities will share a cooldown.
- Luggodhan’s goo will no longer target the tank