Originally posted by Ailion (Source)

---

Just a heads up, some Bladedancer and Ranger changes are already up on PTS. Patch notes haven’t been posted yet.

1. Bladedancer: Dauntless Strike: No longer increases the Critical Hit chance of group members. It now applies a debuff to the target, increasing the target’s chance to be critically hit by 5%.
2. Bladedancer: Blade Hustle: An additional effect has been added. You now gain Blade Hustle every 3s, increasing the damage of your next Quick Strike or Precision Strike 3-9%. Stacks up to 10 times.
3. Bladedancer: Disengage: Can now be used anytime. Now on GCD.
4. Bladedancer: Dancing Steel, Hundred Blades: Now on a 30s cooldown, down from 60s.
5. Ranger: New ability added to the Blood Raptor. The Blood Raptor can now charge at the enemy, dealing physical damage.
6. Ranger: Escape Artist: Cooldown has been reduced to 1 min, down from 2 min.
7. Ranger: Fleeting Instinct: Effect can now be applied both in and out of combat.

Daglar shared a bit of good news for Warrior players who enjoy using Combat Veteran Warlord specs that also include abilities found in the Paladin soul. The Paladin soul still has a few clunky “flavor” ability requirements that require the use of a shield. This won’t be the case for much longer!

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

---

The flavor is nice on the Paladin, but at the end of the day the game play and synergy suffers for it. I’ve asked Aillion to remove the shield requirement on a number of Paladin abilities – and to rename the ones that would be silly without it.

Hm, that means a change in name for Shield Charge. ‘Shiny Wings O’ Light Charge’, anyone? Nah, probably not.

…Well, kind of, anyway. Since this week’s Daglar-styled forum hint about our two class devs being hard at work designing brand new souls, the RIFT community’s been abuzz with all sorts of speculation and opinions on what we’ll see as far as new souls go and when exactly we’ll see them added to the game. Daglar tossed out a couple of additional hints yesterday and briefly mentioned the fact that Trion seriously considered adding in another calling for Storm Legion, but decided to go with new souls instead.

This reply was in regards to a question on whether we’ll see specific souls this time around or a completely new calling:

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

---

New soul yes. New calling no.

We played around with a variety of ideas for a new calling for Storm Legion but felt that the game and our players were actually best served by expanding the class system we have.

Later on in the thread, Dalgar answered a forum poster who asked if we’d see the new souls in a few months time with, “Nope, not a few months. Longer than a few.” He posted one more time to remind players that creating new souls and continually balancing them can be an extremely involved task and tends to take longer than most players realize. “Quite a few tasks that people think are “super fast” are actually the result of multiple months worth of work,” he said. “WTB magic wand that makes things go faster.”

Sadly, we’re lacking that magic wand to help Daglar and his team out. We are left with a larger hint about what type of time frame we’re looking at, however. It definitely sounds like these new souls are nowhere ready to meet the public eye just yet. That just means we have more to look forward to!

You could always guess that new souls were always coming to RIFT, but in the first two years of life they were only hinted at by going into an expansion. With the shake-up with senior management that hit recently, are we going to be getting more souls sooner than the next expansion?

Will we finally see some of the original Telara design where souls are treated as rewards or loot drops? Interesting times ahead.

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

---

There is a difference between being unaware and having to many other tasks on him to address it. His full time job is not to read and respond to the forums and address every issue – though he does an absolutely amazing job of making additional time to do so. I on the other hand can go ask him to re-adjust his priority for the day and modify something.

I hate talking about things that are not close to being ready, but Kervik and Aillion are pretty busy working on brand new souls and other class related features for the future right now.

Daglar
Creative Director: RIFT

Free month of subscription time if someone can guess what those souls are.

Here you’ll find a quick roundup of some of the interesting dev tracker official forum posts from yesterday. Yesterday’s highlights included a fairly welcome departure of love, er, I mean the Love Bug, as well as some good news for players who grumble at the raid loot window when 2-handed weapons drop week after week. Oh, yes, and Kerilar gave achievement goers a summary of how the Codex: Wheel of the Fate alternative Warfront is supposed to work. Does it work that way in practice? Usually not, but it’s still an interesting read.

Keep reading to take a look.

Over the weekend, an interesting phenomenon happened across our shards. Thanks to the new tier 3 Planar Attunement ability rift group summons added in RIFT 2.2, players are now able to temporarily teleport to new shards in order to take part in Great Hunts, raid rifts, zone events, world PvP, and more. All that’s required is a group invite from someone on the new shard and someone in that group to use their group summon PA ability.

As more players realized this, we began to see call outs in level 60 chat for events happening on different shards. Volan was one popular attraction, of course, which did cause some lag issues during peak hours. Cross-shard Volan participants can fight him, it turns out, but not enter Biofoundry afterwards. Still, it’s a nice chunk of extra Infinity Stones.

Cyzo, a member of RIFT’s developer dungeon team, recently announced that Trion will be offering future dungeon and raid content player testing on the Public Test Server from now on instead of holding private tests. After the success of the recent Hard Mode Endless Eclipse and Frozen Tempest encounter tests on the PTS, the team decided it was simply a wise move due to the amount of feedback available with open testing. Cyzo gave us another update yesterday, this time with a few important details that strike a compromise many raiders were asking for:

Originally posted by Cyzo (Source)

---

Thanks for the feedback everyone, bear in mind we are still a ways away from testing the next tier of 20-man content so we have plenty of time to refine the system that works best both for us and you: the raiding community. I’m only going to address some updates to the 20-man system with this post since I feel like everyone is on board with 5-man and 10-man content being completely open.

• We want Raiders to maintain an interest in testing and not burn themselves out by spending weeks or months on an encounter before it goes live. To this end we are planning on doing a rotation of which bosses are available on the PTS; most likely one or two bosses a given week. This will give us a very quick feedback loop, allow for noticeable iteration, and keep things fresh for those that are testing content.
• We want to maintain some sense of progression and competition between guilds. Depending on the size of the raid we will keep the last one or two bosses more guarded. Exact testing procedures aren’t nailed down yet but these specific encounters might only be active for a day or two at a time to test the more complex mechanics with a developer observing. There is also a good chance that we will keep some mechanics on ALL of the raid encounters internal until they hit live.
• We want to respect your time and for you to have fun! We’re putting in measures that make testing as quick and painless as possible. Apparently some of you enjoy the dev presence as well so if you let us know when you are testing we can try and drop by. The new 10-man will help us perfect these new measures and get situated with guilds that want to have a larger part in the raiding scene.

I realize that change is hard and that many of you enjoyed the old system but with more content open to more people we can create a fairer testing environment while getting the bug count to as close to 0 as possible before the content goes live.

This approach makes a lot more sense.

When Trion started testing the first couple of encounters in Hard Mode Frozen Tempest and Hard Mode Endless Eclipse back in January, the dungeon team decided to utilize the PTS (Player Test Server) for player testing instead of holding private testing sessions with select guilds. This led to a bit of guild drama, naturally, but it also led to Trion receiving a solid amount of testing feedback in the way of bug reports, etc. Feedback, as we all know, is vital to releasing bug-free content, and Trion’s dungeon team seems rather pleased with the results of this trial of sorts for PTS raid testing. They’re pleased enough, in fact, to plan on moving all dungeon content testing to the PTS.

Keep reading to read the dev tracker post.

Chloromancer healers are in excellent shape right now as far as balance is concerned except for one little issue in groups that feature more than one Chloro– their veil abilities (Lifegiving Veil and Lifebound Veil) do not affect other Chloros if they, too, have a veil buff up. This generally isn’t an issue if a group has both Mage and Cleric healers, but for groups that end up stacking Chloros, this sometimes presents a challenge. Chloro healers have been popular in Storm Legion so far, and some players on the official forums are asking Trion to reconsider how veil abilities work for the soul.

Daglar issued the following response regarding the suggestion:

Originally posted by Daglar (Source)

---

I hate coming out and saying no, but that is what I’m going to do here.

There are no plans in to change the mechanic with Chloros where their veils do not affect other veil holders.

Trion’s stance on the matter is most likely due to a couple of reasons, one of which is probably to prevent groups from stacking Chloros in excessive numbers.

During yesterday’s RIFT 2.1 Hotfix #9, Trion threw in an unexpected change that took most of RIFT’s PvP community by surprise. Our PvP gear now has quite a bit more valor on it. Trion felt that players, overall, were dying too quickly during PvP, and this was somewhat evident by the fact that most DPS souls ran with a pocket healer or used a special survivability/tank spec just for PvP fights.

Is the change a step in the right direction? Most players think so. The time to kill (TTK) between two DPS souls is quite a bit longer now, giving players more time to utilize more abilities. This ideally means we should see a greater variety of specs in Warfronts. Healers, however, seem to be extremely powerful now, which means that the system may need further adjusting.

Daglar spoke out in defense of the changes yesterday when players argued on the forums that the changes made PvP battles far too long. Keep reading to see what he had to say.