Initial Nightmare Tide 3.0 Expansion information has been released this week!
We’ve got a summary below:
- RIFT: Nightmare Tide is the name of the 3.0 expansion.
- There will be the usual dungeons, raids, raid rifts, slivers, massive dynamic battles, quests, open-world zones, artifacts, new crafting recipes/etc.
- Access to all of the above content is 100% free.
- Nightmare Rifts are a new rift that has scaling difficulty and “nearly endless waves of foes to test your skills and determination” [r].
- New Account-wide Collectible: Minions. Pets that can gather resources, collect currencies, find items and gain their own levels. They will have actual missions.
- Level cap will increase to 65. Each new level provides you with a “Mastery” from a list of options based on your Calling rather than you Soul. “Masteries are designed to expand your choice in builds, add new synergies, and let you further customize your character so you can play how you want to play.” [r]
- New Equipment Slots –
32 [r] new equipment slots that can either be purchased with a digital edition of Nightmare Tide, or earned in-game. - Current BiS gear (Level 60 Tier 3 gear) will last you until Level 65 and a bit beyond that. Thus, you can gain an advantage in leveling and maybe even gearing up for Levle 65 Experts by continuing to gear up now.
- Aquatic and Amphibious Mounts confirmed. One of them being a Shark-like mount.
- RIFT 2.8: Madness Wakes currently under development. It will include the new AH system as well as The Nightmare Coast dungeon (prelude dungeon, just like Exodus of the Storm Queen for 2.0: Storm Legion). There will also be a some prelude quests.
Other important tidbits:
- There’s also going to be a RIFT 3.0 Livestream at 1:30PM PDT on Friday, June 27th! You will be able to view the livestream on Trion Worlds’ Twitch Channel.
- There’s a new website page for Nightmare Tide that is likely to be updated over the next few weeks that you can access here.
- CaptainCursor talks about the inspiration behind Nightmare Tide in a forum post here.
New Shark Mount
RIFT showed off a small snippet for a new Shark Mount on their twitter. Click the link below to check out a small video clip on the mount in action:
Aquatic Mounts bring a whole new dimension of travel to RIFT: Nightmare Tide. This mount is jawesome! http://t.co/E9CNfiaMXX
— RIFT (@Riftgame) June 26, 2014
Also, RIFT’s Facebook Page showed off two sweet images for the new Shark Mount.
You can check out the main article at RIFT: Rift Producer Talks Rift 3.0.
RiftGrate will be keeping an eye out on all sources of information and bringing them all here to you so you don’t have to run around all over the place trying to find info on 3.0!
Look forward to more info in the coming weeks and don’t forget to check out the 3.0 RIFT Livestream 1:30PM PDT on Friday, June 27th on Trion Worlds’ Twitch Channel. Don’t fret if you miss it though, we’ll have a detailed Livestream Summary up shortly afterwards!
RiftGrate 
Thoughts:
-I hope Nightmare Rifts aren’t as tedious as they sound. At the very least, it sounds like they’re designed to be like Hunt Rifts except longer and with more activities… but will the rewards match the time and effort player put into them?
-If Minions do not include my current Companions, I’m already iffy on this feature :(. I guess if they make Minions a much more specific type of thing, then okay. I’d want them to be more than a damn duty roster though.
-Do levels still include a few more soul points? I hope so. But regardless, Mastery looks like it is there to compensate for 3.0 being more of a ‘1/2 expansion’ in terms of power jumps; “Hey don’t worry about hard gear resets, here’s some coolness anyway!”
-Very concerned about these ‘equipment slots’.
-Looks like one will be able to enter the Lv 65 Expert Dungeons with Storm Legion Tier 3 Raid gear, Tier 2 gear will last til late leveling, Tier 1 gear will last til early/mid leveling, and Expert gear will start being replaced in early leveling.
I think I support this. Very few will be in Tier 3, and I think they should be ‘rewarded’ for that.
Nightmare Tide looks like an ‘elder game’ to Storm Legion anyway. An extension to it, not a full full expansion of Rift progression (story and stat-wise).
-Convert my Crocnard and other mounts to Amphibious please.
-I get a sense that part of the motivation behind Nightmare Tide is to do things like get Water assets created and done with, get the ‘lots of swimming’ stuff done with early, basically just push through the more iffy Planar stuff before moving onto the more blatantly epic sounding material. That doesn’t mean it’ll be bad, but I do see it as more of a stepping stone towards the possibly better stuff that would come in 2015-2016. Might be my bias against Water stuff (except the madness theme) showing though :P.
– Nightmare Rifts have me excited. There seems to be up to 125 stages; but this could be very enjoyable content – depending on how they proceed with it. I can imagine a Ragnarok Online ‘Endless Tower’-like content (that had 101 or so floors, every 5 floors having a Boss mob). Obviously RIFT is kind of different with their bosses, but something similar would be fun (and it’d probably have to be non-raid bosses).
– According to MikeD’s post, only 10% of quests will involve swimming and you can largely avoid the ‘water’ portions of content if you choose not to do them.