RIFT Game Director Bill “Daglar” Fisher has been doing the rounds again.

Yesterday he was on Deepwood (US) telling us that Patch 2.7 would be in early May, and today on Zaviel (EU) he has revealed that the first 2 Tier 3 encounters would be available in 2 weeks’ time!

Big thanks to Elioty@Zaviel for providing screen snippets of Daglar’s responses! Elioty@Zaviel is also the author of the cross-shard/region zone event tracker, Rift Event Watcher.

Summary:

• First two raid encounters of Tier 3 coming on 16th April 2014.
• PvP – No plans for PvP Rifts in 2.0, open world PvP or scrapping CQ: SOI.
• Something will be happening on Easter weekend. Not Easter-related (probably XP bonus weekend)
• Shard-hopping without an anchor is “on the roadmap”.
• EU-Specific: No plans to add new character sets (language), no Russian shards. Evaluating shard-merge.
• No new PA in immediate future.
• Looking at Relic Cape Recipe drop-rate.

Tier 3 Time-Frame

Daglar has mentioned before that Tier 3 Raids would start coming out at the tail end of Patch 2.6 and into Patch 2.7.

On Zaviel he confirmed that the first two Tier 3 raid encounters would be arriving in two week’s time. Given patches are usually added in on a Wednesday, that would be the 16th April 2014.

In yesterday’s Q&A on Deepwood, he mentioned that Patch 2.7 would be coming out in ‘early May’. That will probably be when the rest of the Tier 3 raids begins to come out.

Other Stuff before 3.0

Not much to go off of – but Daglar reiterated that the new souls are coming in 2.7 and added “other stuff as well”. For the bulk of the expansion content you’ll have to wait until 3.0 actually comes out.

PvP-related

Daglar went over a few more PvP questions:

• No plans to expand PvP Rifts into 2.0 content.
• No plans for open world PvP.
• No plans for getting rid of CQ: SOI right now.

Easter-Surprise

Daglar mentioned that during the Easter long weekend (April 18th to April 21st) there will be something going on, but not Easter-specific.

RIFT has never had an Easter-specific event so it’s unlikely to be about fluffy bunnies or colored Easter Eggs. Instead it is probably going to be an experience bonus weekend of some sort.

Shard-hopping

Shard-hopping is “on the roadmap” for not requiring anchors. It’ll have to wait behind the priority tasks though.

Optimizations

Daglar reiterated that they are continuing to work on fixing the bottlenecks with performance.

EU-Specific

Daglar responded to a few questions aimed specifically at the EU shards.

• There’s no plans to expand current set of characters (in terms of language).
• Trion are still evaluating whether to re-merge the EU clusters.
• No Russian-Only Shards.

Other

Other stuff:

• Daglar is excited about tanking on his mage when Patch 2.7 hits with the new souls.
• Reiterated that Kervik will be focusing on mages first after the new souls come out. That said, he’s already done plenty of changes to Cabalist and Justicars for Clerics that are up on the PTS.
• In terms of the ‘Marvelous Augment Recipes Vendoring Bug’ – Daglar stated he’d look into it. (that said, the vendor value is likely attached to the augment, not the recipe).
• No new Planar Attunement (“PA”) in the immediate future.
• Daglar will take a look at the current drop rate of Relic Cape Recipes.
• Daglar responded to item proc normalization by stating that these procs already have normalization applied.
• Daglar also stated he could not confirm or deny the existence of Water Mounts in the near future. Thanks to PantheR for the info!

Thanks to Elioty@Zaviel for providing these screenshots and thanks to Daglar for spending the time answering some of the community’s questions.

Look forward to the first two Tier 2 Raid Encounters on April 17th 2014!