Last night on the PTS, players discovered a couple hints that seem to point to the addition of a cape slot. After last week’s mysterious delivery to PCGamer, this comes at quite a coincidental time, but RIFT players have been wanting a cape/cloak slot for a while now. It’s one of the few equipment slots Trion hasn’t added to the game yet, and one of the best things about capes is the fact that, well, not only do they make our characters look cool, they also serve as an easily-viewable customizable slot.

Capes add a fair chunk of personality to the appearance of our characters, especially in a game with a great wardrobe system already in place. The addition of capes would also open up the possibility of letting guilds create guild symbols, and making special guild capes for their members. Many MMOs have systems like this in place, and the concept of a similar system seems like it would fit well into RIFT, since the game’s guild system is already very customizable.

For a while now, Trion has been trying to make crafting more useful for endgame. Crafting in RIFT is currently useful while leveling, very useful upon immediately hitting level cap, and useful when new content and item expansions cause players to hit the ground running. What’s missing? Yeah, all that time in between. During these large expanses of time when players are happily making the gear ladder climb during raids, PvP, or instances, crafting tends to take the backseat.

There are a couple reasons behind the issue. While raiding and PvPing, vendor-bought gear and drops quickly become better than crafted alternatives until new recipes are added. Leveling crafting is also simple. Tradeskills are easy to max, so during the periods when recipes are easy to obtain, crafted items become commonplace. Crafted items like runes and consumables are needed at all times during endgame, but when crafting is both commonplace and simple, these items become easily obtainable through alts and the auction house.

In TenTon Hammer’s sixth Q&A session, readers got a chance to submit questions to Drew Clowery, Game System Designer, about anything regarding gear. We don’t learn anything specific but apparently there isn’t anything new in Rift regarding gear. There will be different types of rarity, better gear comes from more difficult content and all the typical loot rules etc. will be in at launch.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are there armor sets and bonuses?

Drew Clowery: This is something that I, personally, really want. But that doesn’t mean it will get in right away. We’re not planning on having armor set bonuses at launch, but we will be paying close attention to the community feedback during beta and beyond.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you have an idea of how many armor sets are available?

Drew Clowery: I have a pretty good idea! I work with those guys regularly. (laughs) We have 48 different models, and then each model has a number of texture variants. Those texture variants can dramatically alter the way the model looks. There are 48 underlying models where the physical geometry looks like this, and then a large of texture variants which changes the look of the whole item. We have quite a few.