A new ~120mb update has hit the Public Test Shard. There’s some achievements added, new ’tiles’ and promo images. The rest is likely Tier 3 raid refurbishments and soul changes.

Summary:

• Further Bindings of Blood achievements added.
• Refurbished Hammerknell Fortress textures for Bindings of Blood: Akylios.
• Bindings of Blood: Greenscale loading screens.
• New White Squirrel Mount.
• Soul Pack Promo Images.
• ‘Spring’-based images.
• Dimension Banners.
• Possible Dimension Tile Images

Note: As always, anything listed below is subject to change prior to hitting Live and some of the stuff mentioned here may never make it to Live.

Bindings of Blood Achievements

A couple of new Bindings of Blood (“BoB”) achievements have been added in.

BoB: Maelforge Achieves

There’s some new Bindings of Blood: Maelforge achieves including one that rewards the useable interactive item “Tritium Core”. 42m CD. It’s a small flash but with an earthquake-like shaking effect for a few seconds.

It’s interesting to see an item reward for a Raid achievement that isn’t rewarded for Conqueror achieve. Usually it’s just titles. This must be a rather hard achievement to complete.

BoB: Minibosses

There’s two minibosses that are known thus far – Mallaven which appears in the BoB: Laethys instance and Magcilian that appears in the BoB: Maelforge instance.

It will be interesting to see whether the Goldirocks achievement (to defeat Mallaven with 14 Rocklings still alive) has taken into consideration the upcoming changes to Justicar.

Refurbished HK Textures

Datamining by TehFrank has shown a whole bunch of Hammerknell Fortress textures that have been refurbished. All these have “pristine” in their name so they are likely related to the Bindings of Blood: Akylios instance since the raid is during a time when The Runeguard dwarves of Moonshade Highlands have only just discovered Akylios.

Bindings of Blood: Greenscale Loading Screens

Two screenshots showing off either the Tier 3 instance, Bindings of Blood: Greenscale or the Blighted Antechamber Warfront.

New White Squirrel Mount

There’s two mount skeletons up. One has been shown before: what looks like the Spectral Cyclone Mount – likely aimed for the Autumn Harvest Annual World Event (like most of the other Spectral mounts).

The other is brand new: “mount_squirrel_white”. Obviously a White Squirrel Mount.

And here’s the skin! The mount looks kind of ‘more furry’ than the others. The fur looks wavier as well.

Given that it is white – is this slated for the Fae Yule Annual World Event this year? Or perhaps it’ll be release for a limited time during Easter long weekend between 18th to 21st April 2014?

The Easter Bunny is sometimes depicted as white or gray-ish and Trion could always pretend the squirrel mount is close enough to a rabbit. In any case, look forward to a White Squirrel Mount at some point in time.

Soul Pack Promo Images

3.0 Soul Pack Promo

Datamining has shown a new 3.0 Soul Pack Promo image that you’ll likely see in the featured page of the Rift Store when Patch 2.7 hits (ETA: ‘Early May’).

No price has been announced yet. It is highly unlikely that the souls will be sold individually.

2.0 Soul Pack Promo

Datamining also shows a new 2.0 Soul Pack Promo image. Again, the souls won’t be sold individually.

‘Spring’-based Images

Datamining shows a whole bunch of ‘Spring’-themed skins. Some look like they could potentially be for new Summerfest armors or costume pieces. Others could potentially amount to decorations, new dimension items or quest items used for this year’s Summerfest.

Dimension Banners

Possible new Dimension Banners. Could potentially be for something completely different like new factions or groups of NPCs.

The first one could potentially be a Bloodfire Army banner or maybe even Shi-Ming (wouldn’t that be interesting?). The other looks like a generic Crafting Guild-type banner.

Perhaps if they ever decide to allow us to place the crafting stations in a dimension (other than the Dream Focus), they could add that Crafting Guild-type banner to help enhance the crafting station area.

Possible Dimension Tile Images

There’s a whole bunch of what looks like either dimension ’tile’ items, ‘paint’ items or simply images used in the refurbishment of the Hammerknell Fortress for the Tier 3 Bindings of Blood: Akylios instance.

Even if they are just for BoB: Akylios, it would be nice to see some of these as potential ‘wall’, ’tile’ or ‘paint’ items for Dimension use.

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A few things revealed with the latest update. Look forward to a White Squirrel Mount and a Spectral Cyclone Mount at some point in the future. There’s also some Summerfest-looking related stuff.

The 2.7 souls will be available with Patch 2.7. ETA on Patch 2.7 is ‘early May‘. ETA on the first two Tier 3 Raid encounters is the 16th April 2014.