Patch 1.2 was a pretty big bombshell to most of the Expert Dungeon-faring RIFT community. The prices on Achievement Plaque items were raised, and the drop rates on Epics off non-final bosses were lowered. To make matters worse, the last part wasn’t even in the Patch Notes. Trion increased the amount of some of the Plaque rewards as well as the Dungeon Daily quest amount in hopes that people would be just as happy, but many complaints appeared on the official forums regardless. The difficulty of Expert Dungeons was also of course altered quite heavily, which left quite a few people frustrated. Trion has since stated that they’ve raised the drop rates on Epics off non-final bosses, but the rates still aren’t quite as high as they once were.

Now that Patch 1.3 is out and people have had time to settle into the new changes, settle into new servers that they’ve transferred onto, and get used to their server’s new transferees, I can’t help but wonder– How does the Plaque grind appear to us now? Is it too much still, or does it seem any different, especially with new content on the horizon?

Massively’s Justin Olivetti spoke with Hal Hanlin regarding many of the changes in today’s patch, including Hammerknell, Character Transfers and most interesting: Population Counts.

Speaking of population, I couldn’t help but relay the accusation that RIFT’s population is not growing but dwindling (or “dying,” depending on your proximity to a cyberprophet of doom). Hanlin laughed and said, “I can assure you — no, we’re not. Uh-uh. We are continuing to uptrend our number of subscribers.”

In fact, he revealed that one of the most-cited sources of this accusation — the population indicators on the server list — has changed simply because the company has severely beefed up the capacity of its server hardware to accommodate more players. So what rated as a “high” population before might be downgraded to “medium” today. He said that this upgrade was done in preparation for even more player trials coming in the future.

So perhaps some of the naysayers are wrong here. Population levels are always tough to gauge, especially if all you have to go by is queues and “High”, “Medium”, and “Low” tags. Now when you actually change what those numbers mean… well you get some bad guesses.

Make sure you read the rest of the article over at Massively.

From an article on PCGamer.com:

In order to avoid this potential problem, Trion found a clever workaround: Rift’s Armor Sets are still defined by your class, but the extra bonuses given for collecting multiple the pieces of gear in that Set aren’t on the items themselves. Instead, those meta-bonuses will be applied through a new, compeltely separate item that will show up in the Character pane when 1.3 launches. They’re called a Synergy Crystals, and each one (there will be 32 different ones at patch launch) gives bonuses to different stats–but only once you’ve collected enough pieces of your Armor Set. Alone, the Crystal doesn’t do anything, but with each Set Item that is equipped, it provides more and more stat bonuses.

For example, a Warrior Riftblade will want to get a Crystal that gives bonuses to Crit, Hit, and Damage, while a Warrior Warlord will be searching for one that enhances his Health and Armor. They’ll both be rolling on the same Plate armor pieces to collect the same Armor Set when they drop from the new Hammerknell content, but the two players will be using them to activate and empower their own, distinct Synergy Crystals–getting completely different bonuses out of the Armor Set. There’s a Snyergy Crystal for each Soul in the game, so there should be at least one good option for every single combination of Souls.

It seems there will be another factor in creating and building your character. It is yet to be seen if these armor sets will strictly be from Hammerknell or will be inserted into current raid or dungeon sets.

RIFT 1.3 – WAVES OF MADNESS – 6/22/11

== KNOWN ISSUES ==
* Guild Banks are not yet available thanks to an excellent find by our PTS testers. We will update you on their status later today.
* Iron Pine Peak daily quests are not properly awarding Plaques of the Mountaineer – a hotfix for this is underway.

== FEATURED ==
* The opening of Hammerknell draws near; the forces of Water and Death stand to unleash their power on Telara while the Ascended rush to contain Akylios and his cult.
* Character Transfers are now open – see below for details on moving your character or guild!
* Quantum Sight and Omen Sight now allow Ascended to see all new Artifacts for all new collections!
* A variety of new costume armor can be found in Iron Pine Peaks, Stillmoor, and Shimmersand.

Gaming Illustrated recently interviewed Will Cook, the dynamic content lead developer, to talk about patch 1.3 that is releasing today.

GI: Will, you’re talking exactly about one of the strengths of the games in my opinion. Can you talk a bit about content and what it really means to get good content updates, such as these events and how they’re evolving as the game is now approaching 1.3?

WC: Well the great thing about what we’re doing with world events is I suppose there are two goals that I always try to have. The first one is that anybody should be able to participate in the world event whether you’re level one or level fifty. We want to make sure that in every single phase there’s something for you to do and rewards for you to earn. The other cool thing we’re doing with world events is how we’re updating our library of dynamic content. A lot of the content built into these world events will exist in a slightly different form after the world event ends. We want the stories to make sense but the world event is in a sense telling a live story that everyone’s participating in and when it’s done, that’s the moment that you will remember forever but it’s not going to repeat itself. However, a lot of the individual story elements are still there because as more and more players join the game we want to make sure that they can experience the full story of Telara as well.

For more on dynamic content and Will’s role in creating it, keep reading the at Gaming Illustrated. We also get a confirmation that the World Event is 6 week long.

For the World Event being implemented today, June 22nd, there are plenty of quests for you to do, including daily quests that are associated with the World Event and it’s specific phases. To begin, there are 1 quest (2 if you do not already have Augment Wardstone Planar Ability) and 3 dailies.

Keep reading for a quick guide for the Phase 1 Dailies.

Hosts: Jason Dodge (Draegan) and Xep from Fires of Heaven

Direct Download: click here.
iTunes: click here.

This week we got got an exclusive interview with James Nichols, a/k/a/ Elrar, and Billy Shaughnessy, a member of the Raid Dev Team that had their hands on Hammerknell from beginning to end, and talked about Hammerknell and the direction of raiding overall. We get some great behind the scenes stories about Greenscale and River of Souls and talked about Akylios’ twitter account.

Talking points:

• Hammerknell Lore
• Design Process and Timetable
• Lessons learned from GSB and ROS
• World Event Time Table, Hammerknell released a few weeks after patch day.
• Addons and Raiding
• Inside Hammerknell: Visuals and Structural Design
• Raid Progression Philosophy and Hammerknell Progression

Also Jason and Xep discuss everything discussed in the interview as well as some of things coming in patch 1.3. If you like raiding and are excited about Hammerknell, this is a podcast you don’t want to miss.

While we work on the rest of the changes in today’s PTS update we wanted to provide the balance change notes first. Thanks for your feedback!

PVP:
* Based on feedback we have removed the mitigation and critical bonus reduction changes to Valor.

Champion:
*Destroyer’s Bearing – No longer increases the damage of only Attack Point consuming abilities, it now affects all ability attacks.
*Two Handed Specialization – Is now called Weapon Specialization and enhances all attacks, ranged attacks receive half the bonus melee does.

Paragon:
*Teaching of the Five Rings – Now enhances all attacks, ranged attacks receive half the bonus melee does.
* Way of the Mountain – The damage increase to follow up attacks has been increased to 30%.
* Way of the Wind – Now deals its damage as Air damage instead of Physical damage.
* Paired Strike – Now deals Air damage instead of Physical damage. The number of follow up attacks that critically hit has increased from 1 to 3.
* Strike Like Iron – The Damage enhancement has been increased to 20/35/50%.
* Deadly Grace – Now deals damage based on how many points have been spent in the Paragon soul tree. The balance is set so that if you take Deadly Grace when it is first available it will give the same bonus that it used to, from there it will go up for every point spent in the Paragon soul.

Beastmaster:
* Fight As One – Now increases the chance to get a critical hit by 5/10/15% and melee damage by 15/30/45%. It has also had its duration increased to 30 seconds and its cooldown reduced to 25 seconds.

Riftblade:
* Avatar of the Rift – Increased the amount that attack power affects Elemental ability attacks.
* Elemental Touch – Now based on a percentage of Attack Power. This percentage is modified by the number of points spent in the Riftblade soul.
* Enhanced Burst – Now 3 points and increases damage by 10/20/30%.
* Empowered Strikes – New Tier 5 talent that enhances Autoattack damage by a percentage of Attack Power. This percentage is modified by the number of points spent in the Riftblade soul.
* Soul Tree points have been reset due to the addition of a new talent.

This latest developer post gives a hint on where RIFT is going with PVP and PVE balance. If you notice in the Pyromancer notes below, they are making separate coefficients for players and NPCs. This is fantastic news for PVE and PVP fans alike, since now balance hopefully won’t affect either side of the coin when the nerf hammer lands.

This is only a logical move on the Dev Team’s part as there are many EQ2 developers on the RIFT team and EQ2 did the same thing.

Keep reading for the Mage changes and PVP balance issues.

Originally posted by Atrius (Source)

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Hello Warriors, I want to thank you all for your continued patience as we work to resolve issues with Warrior DPS, and for the great feedback you have been giving us. The changes we submitted up to Test balanced out our DPS numbers across our DPS souls but the changes also reduced all of the souls to a level that was below what we intended. In response to the changes we made, and your feedback we have made several further changes to improve all the Warrior DPS souls and balance them so that you have multiple builds to choose from and do not feel trapped in a single cookie cutter build. So without further ado, I am going to give you all a preview of the changes you should see very soon on Alpha. Please keep up the great feedback and thank you all for your patience.

Champion:
Destroyer’s Bearing – No longer increases the damage of only Attack Point consuming abilities, it now affects all ability attacks.
Two Handed Specialization – Is now called Weapon Specialization and enhances all attacks, ranged attacks receive half the bonus melee does.

Paragon:
Teaching of the Five Rings – Now enhances all attacks, ranged attacks receive half the bonus melee does.
Way of the Mountain – The damage increase to follow up attacks has been increased to 30%.
Way of the Wind – Now deals its damage as Air damage instead of Physical damage.
Paired Strike – Now deals Air damage instead of Physical damage. The number of follow up attacks that critically hit has increased from 1 to 3.
Strike Like Iron – The Damage enhancement has been increased to 20/35/50%.
Deadly Grace – Now deals damage based on how many points have been spent in the Paragon soul tree. The balance is set so that if you take Deadly Grace when it is first available it will give the same bonus that it used to, from there it will go up for every point spent in the Paragon soul.

Beastmaster:
Fight As One – Now increases the chance to get a critical hit by 5/10/15% and melee damage by 15/30/45%. It has also had its duration increased to 30 seconds and its cooldown reduced to 25 seconds.

Riftblade:
Avatar of the Rift – Increased the amount that attack power affects Elemental ability attacks.
Elemental Touch – Now based on a percentage of Attack Power. This percentage is modified by the number of points spent in the Riftblade soul.
Enhanced Burst – Now 3 points and increases damage by 10/20/30%.
Empowered Strikes – New Tier 5 talent that enhances Autoattack damage by a percentage of Attack Power. This percentage is modified by the number of points spent in the Riftblade soul.
Soul Tree points have been reset due to the addition of a new talent.