RIFT can be quite an immersive game, especially for the role-playing community. The gorgeous maps, the risky world Telara’s lore is based on, the range of racial options, and the unique cultural environments– there’s a lot of material for creative minds to play with. Trion has recently stepped forward and offered a helping hand to our RP community, in hopes of creating a richer, more prominent and dynamic playground for not only RPers, but all players of RIFT.

Last week, during a developer Q&A post, it was announced that RIFT will feature a wedding system in the future:

We’re looking at ways to empower roleplayers to have the ability to run their own events and control over their RP experience. What that means is still being defined but to start things off we’re proud to announce that weddings will be making their way to Telara. You’ll have the dress, rings, and even an instance with a ceremony if you decide to use it! Expect to see them pop up on PTS in the near future and we’ll keep in touch as our plans for improving your RP develop.

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Vender trash, useless loot, the never looked for grey item. They were meant to be sold and are mostly ignored, however grey items do add to immersion, that all important quality in successful MMOs. But what else can they do?

For my guild, they add a bit of humor to in game mails while allowing us to connect between raids. We collect greys and send them to each other with short notes detailing why this grey was meant for them. I’ve sent Werewolf Ears to secret supporters of Team Jacob and Burial Shrouds to the DPS that spent our last Isskal fight face down. A Pretty Bauble can get you in the good graces of the Guild Leader or a set of Elven Shin Bracelets can show you’re at the forefront of fashion!

My current favorite Grey spam is the Fractured Logic Matrix -

You hold in your hands a slightly Fractured Logic Matrix. You remember having a Logic Matrix as a kid, but you don’t recall ever solving it. It looks like someone was very close to getting all the colors correctly aligned. You can almost see how it would look if it had been solved, but you can’t quite tell which blocks to move.

You try to slide one side over, but it’s stuck. You’re frustrated because it’s so simple, yet still it evades you. You’re reminded of that douche Preach, who solved his Logic Matrix in 21 moves during History of the Planes in forth grade. Loosing your head you slam the Logic Matrix into the pavement, shattering it’s already Fractured casing. Yeah, that’s how you solved it when you were a kid too..

So what will you do with your greys today?

No matter who you are on Telara you will have felt the impact of Regulos the Destroyer. The dragon of death does not tempt you with wealth, threaten you with endless chaos or seek to subvert your very will. His goal is much more simple and easy to understand although by no means any less terrifying. Regulos wants nothing more than the end of all things.

Regulos is the former leader of the Bloodstorm, the combined forces of the elemental planes that sought to control Telara 1500 years ago. However his brothers and sisters turned on him when their own ambitions for Telara conflicted with his vision of absolute destruction, after all why should Telara and its abundant supply of sourcestone be destroyed when it could simply be controlled? This betrayal caused the schism in the undefeatable alliance and allowed the heroes of old to gain the advantage and imprison the Bloodstorm one by one, eventually leaving Regulos alone. He was cornered and his body destroyed, his very essence banished back to the plane of death in the hopes of ridding Telara of his threat once and for all.

Hello again, fellow RIFTers. It’s time to wrap up the Ember Isle Guardian Quest Guide with Part 3, the final installment in this series. If you missed the other parts, here they are: Part 1 and Part 2. We left off last time at the journey toward Fell Fields. Let’s jump right to the action.

Everyone loves zone invasions. There’s nothing better than running an event and getting rewarded for it. This type of content is perfect for everyone because it’s something you just jump in to, you can complete it within 10 minutes, and you get rewards that you like! It’s the perfect combination of incentive, gameplay, and time invested. As I was doing a few of these after my Hammerknell raid last night, I thought of a few ways these can be improved.

First off the bat has been mentioned several times here. We need more of these. I get excited when a zone invasion kicks off but the 10-20 minutes waiting for the next one is boring. The war with the Rifts needs to be happening all the time. Why can’t there be an invasion going on at all times in every one of the three max level areas? Why can’t three of them happen at once? Why is the Life and Death events not only competing to take over Stillmoor, but why are they not competing against each other?

Have any of your co-workers recently come up to you and ask you about some game called RIFT? There’s a good chance that if they haven’t already, they will soon. Recently Trion has pushed with a large media campaign placing RIFT ads in many different places. For example, we’ve already seen Rift on the back of a bus. And now, you might of seen Rift’s logo in an episode of “Big Bang Theory”.

One of RIFT’s best features is its large array of small group content. A small group of friends and guildmates can go rift and zone event stampeding, crack open their own expert/raid/PvP/crafting rifts, or group up for warfronts, 10-man raids, chronicles, or dungeons. The varying difficulties of rift content and dungeon content make grouping up with players of different gear levels easy as well. Groups seeking a challenge can try out a master mode dungeon, for instance.

Addons are still in their infantcy in RIFT, but they are growing quickly. By far, the most dev posts on the forums are coming from the the Addon Feedback forums. In the first few weeks since Patch 1.5 went live, I test plenty of different mods, but ultimately never used many of them because they were exactly right. However that has changed recently and today I want to share with you all Wire’s Raid Killer.

The addon has a few different components that are really amazing. The first might be familiar to MMOG veterans that have seen encounter targets before. This addons gives you a display of all the NPCs that your group or raid has targeted and shows a cast bar for each. This is amazingly useful in raid encounters like King Molinar and also gives you a quick view of the status of all the mobs in either a trash pull or other encounters.

The only con to this feature is that you can’t target through this UI element.

The main feature to this addon, however, is that it acts like a Deadly Boss Mod. This portion is very raw, but the most useful part is just the screen perimeter flashing. For example, if I need to interrupt the Prince during King Molinar, I can adjust the addon to flash yellow for me. You toggle all of the triggers in the config window if.

One other thing to point out is that this addon supports all group content in the game, not just raid content. I’d recommend checking out this addon today, even just for the encounter list that becomes useful in some rift encounters and especially PVP.

Host: Jason Dodge
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One of the best qualities that all successful MMORPGs share is immersion. Now, there are a couple different definitions of immersion floating around when it comes to gaming. My definition simply means: the details in a game that make us eager to return to an MMO’s world. Do you remember the first time you were simply awed by the graphics in RIFT, or amazed by the fact that you could come up with five different leveling builds and actually use them all? Do you recall charging recklessly toward that first shiny artifact in the grass? That’s immersion.