Planar Crafting Explained

Senior Game Designer Noah “Morticus” Holmes has explained what Planar Crafting will entail in his latest series of posts on the RIFT Forums. Let’s take a look at his latest posts whilst pulling up some of his older posts and PTS datamining into the mix for a better picture of this new feature coming in RIFT 3.3: Waking Nightmares.

You can check out his forum post here.

[Update 06.22.15 – Planar Crafting recipes are up on PTS!]

Briefly:

• Planar Crafting is a new sub-system being added to RIFT in 3.3: Waking Nightmares. It will allow chosen professions to make new planar fishing poles, dimension items and ‘powerful’ upgradeable weapons, armor and accessories.
• All weapons, armor and accessories have at least one upgrade path. 2-pc set bonus on armor with bonuses never seen before (like +250AP).
• A Weekly Crafting Quest obtained from Tephael @ Choreburg, Draumheim will allow you to obtain Planar Crafting Rift Lures that you can open.
• These lures can only be opened in Tarken Glacier.
• Planar Crafting Rifts drop a ton of crafting mats + chance at new, rare materials used to craft the new gear.
• There’s new planar-themed fishing poles that act like normal fishing poles but also have a chance to drop the new rare crafting materials.

Weekly Quest & Planar Lures

Morticus showed off a screenshot teaser in the past on the new weekly quest:

Crafting Weekly Crafting Rift Lures 3.3

It seems from the “Planar Crafting – Armorsmithing” title that either you can get one weekly per crafting profession that you have, or (like Howard), you might only be able to pick one of the weekly quests (so one lure per week per char).

As you can see, there’s one lure for each Plane. It’s unknown at this stage whether they will work just like old crafting lures where a specific Plane is associated with a specific crafting profession. However, the fact they don’t directly use a profession’s name in their lure (unlike the old ones) might indicate that their drops are random.

What we do know is that the crafting lures will have a chance to drop rare craft components required for the new Planar Crafted gear that is specific to their Plane. So for instance the Crafting Rift Lure: Air is likely to drop the relic crafting component ‘Imperishable Wind’.

The lures will only be useable in Tarken Glacier but don’t fret, they can be solo’d. [r]

Planar Crafted Gear

As part of Planar Crafting, there’s also weapons, armor and accessories that can be obtained.

Destroyer’s Charged Barbute Crafted Item 3.3

An image Morticus posted up in the past shows an example of a Warrior helm that is part of this new line of Planar Crafted gear.

• It has at least one upgrade path.
• A new 2-set bonus is available called “Electrocution” that increases Attack Power by 250 when you have two of the set bonus gear equipped.
• It uses an existing in-game appearance, so no new appearance for wardrobe-hunters.
• It uses Nightmare Tide materials and a rare ‘Imperishable Wind’ relic craft component that is likely to drop from Crafting Rift Lure: Air.

The 2-set bonus is rather interesting because it allows you to have both the 4-set synergy crystal bonus as well as this 2-set bonus at the same time (since you have 6 armor slots, excluding capes that don’t have bonuses). Given the large bonus (+250AP) and depending on the stats on the upgrades, this new Planar Crafted gear might be better than some existing raid gear! That and upcoming Relic-upgradeable Nightmare Saga weapons could have raiders going back to their spreadsheets.

Note: There’s no Hit in the screenshot, but Morticus has noted that the gear will have Hit when it hits Live. Unknown what the Hit value will be at this stage.

Planar Fishing Poles

Morticus also mentioned that there would be new planar fishing poles that you can obtain. These will be able to fish like normal fishing poles, but with the added bonus of having a chance to fish up the rare relic crafting materials.

Previous datamining shows that there’s a variety of fishing poles, including a ‘nightmare’ one.

• The planar fishing pole will have a chance of fishing up the relic crafting material related to that plane. I.e. Air fishing pole will have a chance of catching up the ‘Imperishable Wind’ crafting component. [r]
• The fishing poles act as normal fishing poles so they can catch fish like normal.
• These are not recipes that you have to fish up. Unknown how to obtain them though. [r]

The ‘nightmare’ one might be related to the Nightmare Saga though because there’s no associated ‘Nightmare’ crafting rift lure. However, it’s also feasible that the nightmare fishing pole will be able to have a chance of catching any of the crafting materials since it doesn’t relate to a specific Plane.

Planar Fishing Pole Skins

Datamined skins of the fishing poles seems to indicate that they will have quite varied looks and possibly even some vfx/color changes such as with the Earth fishing pole. It will probably be beneficial to use these new planar fishing poles over existing ones just for the additional chance at rare crafting materials.

Testing

Planar Crafting will hit the PTS “very soon” and there will be a special merchant inside Dummy Foundry with recipes/materials to test out. If you are unfamiliar with the PTS or accessing the Dummy Foundry, there’s a guide you can check out here.

CM Ocho will also be setting up scheduled playtests in the future, so keep an eye out for those!

[Source: Morticus]

Look forward to Planar Crafting in RIFT 3.3: Waking Nightmares next month!

[Update 06.22.15 – Planar Crafting recipes are up on PTS!]