Rift is now on Patch 2.4!

There’s a massive 1.53GB patch download.

CM Morgana has posted a long, long list of Patch Notes on the forums. Check them out!

Not going to quote the entire thing here because it is just too big.

Go check it out for yourself!

Besides the usual new Raids, Dungeon, Chronicles, Raid Gear/Rank/etc that has already been discovered by people on the PTS prior, there’s also a lot of QoL changes and bug-fixes that weren’t readily noticed prior to this patch.

Lots of old-world improvements as well including streamlining quests and dropping their quest requirements. Looks like Trion must be noticing a drop-off of new players who lose interest in the game prior to reaching end-game so they’ve quickened things up a bit.

Just a few things that seem ‘interesting’ that you might have missed amongst the plethora of stuff in these patch notes:

“SERATOS

* The adventures of Sereborn continue with a new quest chain that begins in The Crawl.”

[New quest chain? Might want to check that out. Could help those completing quest achievements in the Seratos zone if this adds to that achieve.]

“DUNGEONS AND INSTANCES
* Experience granted from Storm Legion dungeons has been increased.”
* New artifact sets now drop in all lvl 60 expert dungeons, with new titles for collecting each set.
* New cloak recipes can be found on expert dungeon bosses as rare drops.

[Some very nice changes. Experience increase and new artifact sets? Very nice. New Cloak recipes have been known via Dev posts on the forums. There’s also new Augments that also drop from Experts which aren’t mentioned in these patch notes.]

ENDLESS ECLIPSE
* Leaderboards have been added for this raid.

[Took a while.]

PVP AND WARFRONTS
* Fixed an issue with Conquest quest timers disappearing after players leave and re-enter.
* You can no longer follow other players while in a warfront or conquest map…for real this time.
* Players who crash during a random warfront and then reconnect now properly get the random warfront bonus if they win.

[Hopefully CQ quest timer doesn’t get bugged out again, which was what happened before. Noticed the Warfront bonus problem when you crash or get disconnected whilst in a random warfront. Good to know it has been fixed.]

CRAFTING
* New cape recipes now exist for Outfitters and Armorsmiths – These recipes can be found in Storm Legion Expert Dungeons as random drops. Epic and Relic versions exist.

[Further information about the capes. So there are Epic and Relic versions.]

* New Augment Recipes has been added for all professions. These recipes can be found in Storm Legion Expert Dungeons as random drops, as well as from Strongholds in The Dendrome. Each augment has its own 20 hour cooldown.

[New information here too. There was no mention prior that the new augment recipes would be able to be dropped from Strongholds. Looks like we’ll see some more SH farming groups so you can go after the Greater Essences and these new recipes at the same time.]

DIMENSIONS
* Placed dimension items that are soulbound due to formerly having a soulbind trigger (bind to account, bind on pickup, etc) can now be picked up by anyone with the appropriate dimension permissons.
* NPCs now rarely drop dimension items in the sub-level-60 zones.

[Nice new dimension additions. Not a lot, but they’ve stated before there won’t be much for this patch.]

ITEMS

CURRENCY
* Frozen Eclipse Stone has been converted into Empyreal Slayer’s Marks at a one to one ratio.
* Freelancer’s Marks have been converted to Freelancer’s Marks of Conquest at a ratio of 2:1, rounded up.
* The cap on Frozen Eclipse Stones is now 6,460.
* The cap on Empyreal Slayer’s Marks is now 14,355.

[Big news. FES stone conversion was known prior to these patch notes being posted. However, I haven’t heard about the Freelancer’s Marks being converted to Freelancer’s Marks of Conquest at a 2:1 ratio, especially since Daglar had mentioned in a livestream that there would be no PvP conversions. So this is interesting – partly why I didn’t notice is probably because I’ve been maxed on my Conquest marks for months now.

New caps on FES and ESM are higher than before afaik.]

RAID TIER ONE

* A small number of Frozen Eclipse Stones can still be found in the raid zones.

[That’s interesting. So whilst the Tier 1 raid bosses drop ESM now, some FES is still available? Interesting to see how you gain this.]

GRIM AWAKENING
* A new Relic upgrade tier has been added to the Trinkets from Grim Awakening, increasing the usefulness of the effect. For example: Upgrading the chain-healing trinket, Substantiating Hand of Enrichment, will cause it’s heal to leave an additional Heal Over Time Effect on each target. Upgrading the Tanking trinket, The Lightning Shield, will add an increased incoming healing while the shield is active.

[More new info. A new Relic upgrade tier for trinkets from GA.]

EXPERT DUNGEONS (LEVEL 60)

* All dungeon dropped Epic armor pieces offer an upgrade path to the same tier as the new Empyreal Avengers armor set.
* End-Bosses in expert dungeons no longer drop Rare items! These items can be found on other bosses in each respective dungeon.
* New Epic items can be found in every Expert Dungeon.
* New artifacts can be found dropping in every Expert Dungeon. New achievements and unlockable rewards for this are “coming soon.”

[Very positive information. Whether you would actually upgrade your dropped gear into Avengers-level stats will depend on the cost of the upgrades since they are likely to use ESM, and the Tier 1 raid gear also uses ESM so it might be worth saving up for ESM and skipping this whole new tier of dungeon-level gear.

It’s great that the End-Bosses will no longer drop Rare (blue) items, because that means they only drop the Epic loot. Will be much celebration from those who have been trying to farm these end-bosses with no luck. It’s also good that the Rare drops still remain.

Interesting to see the stats of the new Epic items. They’ll obviously be Expert-tier gear, but would be interesting to see if any of them have new procs or provide, say, better loot distribution for Tanks.

The new achievements and unlockable rewards sounds very exciting.]

CHRONICLES
* “Hard Mode” fights in Infernal Dawn: Laethys’ defeat awards Empyreal Slayer’s Marks.

[Very nice! To activate hard-mode, click on the red orbs opposite the Communicators just before each boss fight.]

* Significant performance improvements made with shadows. If shadows were too slow for you before, try turning them on again!

[Optimization stuff we haven’t heard of yet! This is in addition to the other stuff like Pixel Granularity that were mentioned before.]

* Dragging an ability from your Soultree to your action bar while using Storm Legion souls now uses the proper rank you have trained, instead of rank 1.

[What? What does this mean? *goes off to check all my Defiler abilities on ability bars*]

Lots of stuff this patch. Mainly concentrated on the 2x Tier 2 raids, Chronicle, 5-man dungeon and gear upgrades – but still a lot of other stuff included.