PTS Update for 18th August 2014 – Achieves, 65 Pot, ‘Atragarian’ notoriety

A large ~1.3GB update hit RIFT’s Public Test Shard (‘PTS’) on 13th August 2014 with some new achievements, a Level 65 pot (alpha restricted) and a new quest in Tempest Bay that supposedly gives access to the Plane of Water (although it seems to be alpha restricted, or just not ‘complete’ yet).

You can find information about the Datamining for this recent update here.

Quick Summary:

• New Achievements and Organisation of Achievements into RIFT, RIFT: Storm Legion and RIFT: Nightmare Tide. A new dungeon revealed: Return to Iron Tomb.
• Glacial Maw and Gyel Fortress are now up on the Looking For Group ‘Select Dungeon’ window. Locked.
• Level 65 Pot in Master Mode Dummy Foundry (alpha-restricted).
• New Quest in Tempest Bay (alpha-restricted after speaking to Porticulum Master). Confirms ‘Atragarian’ notoriety.

New Achievements

A few new achievements and changes to the achievement window have been made for this latest PTS update. There’s 305 new achievement points. The achievements window seems to also load a lot faster for those with high achievement points – perhaps due to the new achievement grouping.

New Achievement Grouping

Zones, Dungeons and Raids achievements have been grouped up into RIFT, RIFT: Storm Legion and RIFT: Nightmare Tide. This is likely done so the achievement window isn’t so cluttered and perhaps also to make the window load faster.

New Achievements

New achievements themselves are:

• Character -> Advancement has received 5 new achievement points but no new achievements. It is likely that the 5 points comes from hitting Level 65.
• World events -> Carnival of the Ascended sub-category has been completely removed (had 95 achievement points worth of achievements). My guess is that this is a bug.
• Dungeons -> RIFT: Nightmare Tide -> Glacial Maw achievements increased from 50 to 75 points. No new achieves.

• Zones -> RIFT: Nightmare Tide -> Goboro Reef achievement points increased from 210 to 280.

• Zones -> RIFT: Nightmare Tide -> Draumheim achievement points increased from 110 to 150.

• Zones -> RIFT: Nightmare Tide -> Tarken Glacier achievement points increased from 110 to 120.

• Nightmare Rifts have been grouped up under Planes -> Nightmare. No achievements; achievement points remain the same. They’ve removed Rank VI and VII so now there’s only 5 Ranks + the normal Nightmare Rifts. (just like Hunts and Great Hunts).

• New Achievement sub-category under Dungeons -> RIFT: Nightmare Tide called “Return to Iron Tomb” with 40 achievement points, no achievements. This confirms that Trion will be doing a revamp of the old The Iron Tomb dungeon for 3.0.

Glacial Maw & Gyel Fortress

Gyel Fortress and Glacial Maw are now available under the Looking for Group (‘LFG’) window (default key “i“). If you click on the “Specific Dungeons” button in the bottom-left hand corner, it will bring you to a list of all dungeons. These two (and Nightmare Coast) are under Normal Dungeons.

As the image shows, Gyel Fortress is for Level 60-65 and Glacial Maw is for Level 62-65. These are the Normal versions of the dungeons with the Expert versions being Level 65. They are currently locked to non-Alpha-testing players.

Level 65 Potion

There’s a “Make me level 65” potion available on the PTS via the Master Mode version of the Dummy Foundry. Click here for a guide to the Dummy Foundry if you are not up to speed with it yet.

Unfortunately the potion is locked to Alpha Testers. That said, the potion is new so it could potentially indicate that Trion ‘might’ be increasing the amount of players for Alpha.

New Quest in Tempest Bay

A new quest is available in Tempest Bay from “Tempypants McGee”. He seems to be the same dwarf you see during recent teasers right outside the Infinity Gate in the Plane of Water at Goboro Reef’s entrance.

Given his name “Tempypants”, he might just be a temporary NPC to help testers navigate to the Plane of Water.

You will notice that the quest rewards “Atragarians” notoriety, which is one of the notorieties datamined previously. (Atragarians, Cerulean Rhenke, Manugo League, The Onir, Pelagic Order and The Ghar).

The quest itself is very brief – speak to the Porticulum Master in Tempest Bay and you will see the below text:

“Rejoice! It is now possible to travel to the Plane of Water via porticulum.” Too bad once you do speak to her, it doesn’t give the option to go to the Plane of Water. Again, this seems to be restricted to Alpha testers for now – although they already have access to 3.0 zones even without this quest.

This leads me, again, to speculate that perhaps testing is opening up to more players and Trion is adding in stuff like the Level 65 pot and this new quest. Then again, Tempypants McGee could just have been added because he is part of the 3.0 quest chain.

Here’s to hoping for some kind of announcement in the near future about opening up testing to more players given the new Level 65 pot + questchain; but don’t hold out too much hope since Trion has made no official indication of opening up testing.

No Reaver changes yet.

You can find information about the Datamining for this recent update here.

If you are interested in looking up past PTS updates, click here. You can also check out previous datamining that mainly revolves around 3.0 information, as well as specific 3.0-related news updates.