Death himself is afraid
Regulos the Destroyer, the Devourer of Worlds, and dragon god of the Plane of Death … is afraid. He fears Crucia’s Storm Legion, whose power and numbers swell with ancient and powerful magitech. He recoils from her mind, her ability to invade, persuade, and compel. He obsesses over the rumors of her discovery.

What match are his pale warriors for her disciplined Legion? How can shades and corpses withstand her sea of mechanical aberrations? How might he murder her in her prison before she escapes to a distant continent shrouded in storms that do her bidding, protected by an army set to cross the planes?

Good news for the RIFT lore junkies out there. Last Friday, while Scott Hartsman was chatting it up on Reddit with RIFT fans, both Massively and MMORPG.com had some cool, new Storm Legion lore information to share. Some new Storm Legion screenshots and artwork were revealed as well.

The Infinity Gate

Amid the Steppes of Infinity there stands a massive ruin gazing up toward Crucia’s storm-tossed sky. Floating impossibly above this structure is an intricate construct of interlocking lenses and disks, their surfaces covered with bas reliefs.

If scholars were to brave the Storm Legion forces patrolling the Steppes, they would say the ruin is capable of opening portals to other dimensions — portals large enough to send armies marching through. This is the Infinity Gate, and sending an army through is just what Crucia has in mind.

Be sure and check out Massively’s RIFT exclusive: Storm Legion lore bonanza for the full article, and keep reading for MMORPG.com’s lore coverage.

Trion Studios conducted their question and answer session on Reddit today with Scott Hartsman taking the stage. The Executive Producer took part in a RIFT AMAA, which stands for “Ask Me Almost Anything”. This meant that, unfortunately, some questions remained unanswerable, especially most pertaining to Storm Legion and patch 1.10. Still, some interesting questions did get answered, and similar to yesterday’s AUAA session with Trion’s Community Team, we received a rare glimpse into the work place where Telara comes to life.

The entire AMAA session can be found on Reddit, but for a distilled version with only the questions and answers, keep reading. Note: it’s still quite a long read, though I’ll do my best to cut out some of the unneeded fluff.

With Summerfest behind us, it seems like now’s a good time to begin wondering about the future of RIFT’s world events. Trion is adopting an annual model for many events, including Summerfest, and there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that the developer team definitely tried out something different for the summer holiday. Will the trend continue for the next event? Should it?

To begin answering that question, first we must ask ourselves if Summerfest was enjoyable. Everyone has their own opinions, of course, but let’s face the facts– a lot of folks were disappointed over Summerfest, and that disappointment became pretty evident early on. Many players had issues with the original mazes, and there was a solid number of buggy quests and quests that really needed some more tweaking before they were released on live servers. A few of the scavenger hunt quests in particular. What’s truly disappointing is the fact that many of these issues were reported during the PTS phase.

This week, Trion’s hosting a two-day AUAA (Ask Us (Almost) Anything) Reddit chat. Yesterday was day one of the chat, and Trion’s community team members– James ‘Elrar’ Nichols, James ‘Walsingham’ Weeks, and Amanda ‘Amary’ Fry answered a whole bunch of questions. The entire Reddit chat can be found here, but in case you want the short version, here it is, with only the direct questions and answers. That said, it’s still quite a long read, and you can definitely tell the team had fun with some answers!

Not all questions asked were given answers, unfortunately, but there’s still one more day of questions and answers to come. Today, Scott Hartsman is supposed to be among the team members answering questions from the community, so it’s possible that we’ll see answers to some of the more design and developer-focused questions then.

After yesterday’s hotfix #10, a very small number of players experienced a minor rollback of around a few hours. The rollbacks, for the most part, seemed to happen on the Threesprings shard. At this time, the cause is unknown. For players who were impacted by this rollback, they are encouraged to contact RIFT’s in-game costumer service department. Elrar issued this announcement late yesterday:

Originally posted by Elrar (Source)

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Hey guys,

This appears to have impacted a very small number of people, but if you were one of them simply contact Customer Support in game and they can assist you.

We’ll be sure to investigate and root out any possible causes – thanks for letting us know and apologies for the confusion it caused!

GENERAL
* Instant Adventure: Once assigned to a group using Random Queue, you won’t be automatically moved to another group or queue after some time has passed.
* Characters below level 25 can once again queue for random normal dungeons.

PRIMEVAL FEAST
* The Ritual Shaman should always spawn, even if his sacrifice target dies during the spawning script.
* The Sacrifice debuff itself no longer kills its target.
* The Sacrificed targets can still be killed by mobs if the mobs are not tanked.

INFERNAL DAWN
Laethys:
* Increased time between minion spawns in the first phase of the Laethys encounter.
* Increased casting time of Annihilating Flare.
* Decreased damage done by Golden Cleave.
* Molten Gold will no longer be cast immediately after Metallic Orb.
* Increased duration of Stoneseer’s Wisdom.
* Reinforced Laethys scripting against the vile ‘Gold Piles bug’.

Elrar gave us some updated information yesterday on this weekend’s Conquest Weekend. Trion even listened to the player suggestions of including sourcestone gathering in the Specialist title requirements. Now there will be multiple Specialist titles going out– one for crafting, and another for harvesting.

Originally posted by Elrar (Source)

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Hey all,

A couple of things -

On the Faction titles:
- We pull the stats for each day, to earn the title you just need to play a majority of your matches on one of the days to qualify for that factions title.
- Play a majority of your matches on a different faction each day for 3 days and you’ve earned yourself all three titles.

For the Specialist title -
- We will totally award top Empowered Sourcestone harvesters for each day with the Specialist title in addition to the top crafters, thanks for your feedback – good idea!

From the clarifications, it seems like we’ll be able to play as long or as little as we want, and still grab all three titles by simply playing one faction per day. That definitely makes obtaining all three titles possible.

The weekend starts a little early around Telara this week. From Wednesday, July 25th to Sunday, July 29th, Trion’s hosting a special Conquest event, and inviting everyone to take part. The team is even giving players with previous subscriptions a few days of free, unrestricted game access. Conquest itself doesn’t seem like it will receive any special limited time bonuses during the event, but there will be special titles obtainable for players who take part. And just in case you’ve ever wanted to chase after a RIFT developer and smash them in the face with a virtual sword– well, now’s your chance!

With Patch 1.9 we’ve seen the introduction of IA into the zones of Silverwood, Freemarch, Gloamwood and Stonefield respectively. Even though it provides an alternative way of levelling, there might be some kinks in this new system that do not sit well with people. Especially with Storm Legion on the horizon, this complication might be worth looking at.

Now let’s face it, levelling by IA is superior to ordinary questing for the levels up until 50. Having levelled my mage up in record time in comparison to some of my other characters shows this. This, in turn, leads to IA being very popular among levellers. However, at the same time its biggest detriment is the lack of story.

An example, the story in Stonefield culminates in researches playing with an old Titan Gate which accidentally summons Centius, an ancient Titan. When levelling in Stonefield through quests, one slowly but surely finds out about the researchers and about Centius and where he came from. However, when a particular player is teleported to the Titan Gate and told to kill 10 ‘Centius Spawns’, he really has no clue what’s going on story-wise.