In RIFT 2.1′s second hotfix, Trion made a sudden and huge change to how falling damage in RIFT works. Falling damage used to be one of the biggest risks when it came to artifact and cairn hunting, and in the past, the slightest terrain bump sometimes caused us to grumble and Soul Recall. Now? Yeah, not so much. It seems that the Ascended have learned some pretty cool powers after almost two years of thwarting evil dragons.

After the change, Tacitus mentioned that the falling damage change was a sort of live test for Trion, and that they wanted to see how players felt about the lack of cliff-diving deaths before deciding if the change was going to stick around. Daglar made an update over the weekend, and it looks like the ability to leap from tall buildings (and mountains) is here to stay. Keep reading to find out what he had to say.

During yesterday’s RIFT 2.1 Hotfix #2, there were a couple surprising additions. Cross-shard group invites, anyone? That should be a welcome addition for guild alliances and groups of friends across multiple shards. We also received a much-needed answer and action taken to the recent influx of bots in RIFT. Oh, yeah. And have you tried to jump off a mountainside since the hotfix? I think it’s safe to say that the overall amount of death tolls across all shards should decrease by a substantial amount.

In light of the hotfix, Trion’s team members were back to their normal, active selves on the official forums yesterday (even Scott Hartsman, who shared his enthusiasm for Trion’s bot-quenching plans). There were a couple interesting dev tracker posts regarding undocumented additions in the update. Keep reading to find out what they were.