PTS Update for 4th September 2014

A large 1.53GB update hit RIFT’s Public Test Shard for the 4th September 2014. TEST-300-10-A-936964. Datamining of this update can be found here.

Updated information shown below:

Summary:

• Reaver Changes – Warrior Reaver is now a DPS spec.
• Earrings are up on the PTS!
• Minions UI on PTS! – Heavy WIP version up with a few Adventure Card examples.
• New Achievements – Handful of new 3.0 achieves added.

Reaver Changes

Warrior’s Reaver soul has switched from a Tank spec to a DPS spec. You can check out full information here, including screenshots of the soul tree/root and all tooltips.

Earrings are up on the PTS!

The character screen has now changed to include earrings with your weapons now placed underneath your character model:

New Earrings UI

You unlock the earrings either in-game or through the Nightmare Tide Digital Editions.

Minions UI

How to access Minions UI

A “very very super rough” [r] version of the Minions User Interface is now up on the PTS. It can be accessed via either hotkey ‘v‘ or through the mini menu bar -> Activities -> Minions.

Note: Currently, Trion are not looking for feedback or bug reports on the new Minions UI window as they are aware it is pretty much not working. A more working version will be up next week. [r]

The Adventures Tab

RIFT Minions UI WIP Adventures Tab (PTS Version)

RIFT Minions UI WIP Adventures Tab (Massively Version). Src: Massively

The ‘Adventures’ tab is the default tab for the Minions UI. It contains a selection of adventures in the top half and it shows your Minions in the bottom-left and the current Mission/Adventure Slots that you have available in the bottom-right section of the UI.

At present you can’t add Minions and any you consume from the vendor will be lost.

Massively’s screenshot above looks to be a mockup version of what the UI should look like once Gingers updates the UI on the PTS next week.

Process of Selecting Adventure Card

Process of selecting Adventure Card

As you can see above, you simply click on an adventure card of your choice and it gets placed in the middle slot. Similarly, you probably just need to select a Minion from the bottom-left section of the ‘Adventure’ Tab and then click “Send Now” and it’ll be added to the bottom-right ‘Slots’ area.

Pretty straight-forward UI.

Adventure Cards Rotating

An obvious question comes to mind with these Adventure Cards: How do we get new ones?

Senior UI Artist Gingers has provided us with that answer!

Yes only 4 adventure cards are visible at a time but as soon as you send a minion out on an adventure, then a new card is flipped over. The plan is to have the 4 displayed cards also reset daily though I don’t know if this is functioning yet.

So once you use an Adventure Card, a new one will pop up in the place of the old. The Adventure Cards will also reset Daily providing you with – hopefully – a card that matches one of your Minions’ attributes!

Adventure Cards – A Closer Look

RIFT Minions Closer Look Adventure Cards

Let’s take a closer look at the adventure cards currently up on the PTS. It shows time in the middle and some attributes.

• ‘Firebolt’: There’s a ‘firebolt’ icon in the left with a number underneath. This could potentially represent ‘charge’/’energy’, perhaps to prevent a single Minion from taking on too many activities or forcing them to ‘reset’ to recoup energy.
  This icon could also indicate a minimum Minion level requirement with the ‘9/30’ for ‘Nickname’ Minion in the Massively image perhaps indicating that the Minion is Level 9 with maximum level of 30.
• Duration: The middle orb indications the duration of the adventure.
• ‘Attributes’: To the right of the duration orb are various attributes. The “Design a Sand Castle” shows a ‘Water’ icon, so Minion Cards with that attribute will probably have a faster adventure or better rewards.
  The number below the ‘Attributes’ might indicate a ‘minimum’ requirement for attributes.
• Reward Types: The bottom images show what types of rewards you can get when your Minion returns from their adventure.

The “Share Dreams of Distinction” adventure card is slightly different from the rest. It seems it has an extra cost of either 5 platinum or 5 Credits (probably placeholder). It takes a lot longer but changes are it provides better rewards. The ‘Reward Type’ it is Notoriety according to the screenshot that Massively was provided with here (thanks to Xxii@Brisesol for the info!).

The Minions Tab

RIFT Minions UI Minions Tab

The Minions Tab is supposed to display all your minions. ‘(200)’ shown in the top-left could be an indication of the maximum amount of minions you can have (or it could just be completely irrelevant).

• As you can see in the top-right, you can give each of your minions a nickname.
• Looking at the sorting, your minions can probably have up to 2 attributes.

New Achievements

180 new achievements points are up, bringing total to 31,717.

• Zones -> RIFT: Nightmare Tide. ‘Pilfered Purses’ – these probably refer to the mermaid purses that were datamined a while back. Quite a few of them to find, and on top of all the other similar achievements for 3.0, the expansion is looking like it could be quite the explorer’s paradise.
• Zones -> RIFT: Nightmare Tide -> Draumheim. 150 to 165. “There’s More Than One Of Those Things?” added.
• Zones -> RIFT: Nightmare Tide -> Tarken Glacier. 120 to 160. Added “Rust Bucket 2” and “Frystfall Fauna”, “Staying Frosty” and “Takin’ Tarken”.
• Dungeons -> RIFT: Nightmare Tide -> Return to Empyrean Core. New category. 100pts. No achieves.
• They removed Return to Iron Tomb from the list. Originally had 40pts. No achieves.

The “Takin’ Tarken” achievement is rather interesting as it sounds similar to Dendrome Open Raid Weeklies, with the objectives being quests to kill each boss. There’s quite a lot of players who participate in the Dendrome Weeklies each week so it makes sense to have something similar in RIFT 3.0: Nightmare Tide.

Big changes to Reaver finally up and we get a glimpse of the Minions UI. Look forward to more as we get increasingly closer to the Nightmare Tide expansion release! (8th October)

Datamining of this update can be found here.

For past PTS Updates, click here. You can also find past datamining and 3.0-related news updates.
Want to know what’s coming in RIFT 2.8: Madness Wakes? There’s a few bits of information we’ve been able to obtain prior to tomorrow’s patchnotes here.