Trion had their 12th September 2014 Friday Livestream where they talked the Minions System, Crafting and Dimensions in RIFT 3.0: Nightmare Tide.

Click here for a replay of the 12th September Friday Livestream video on twitch.tv.

Legend:
Black/Normal Text = Livestream Summary.
[Dark Blue Text] = My own comments. i.e. May not be indicative of actual content.

Trion had their 12th September 2014 Friday Livestream with Livestreamer “Cole” Marshall, Senior UI Artist Amber “Gingers” Alexander, Senior Systems Designer Lisa “Faratha” Boleyn (Dimensions & Crafting) and a brief appearance by Senior Game Designer Nicholas “Captain Cursor” McDowell.

As always, everything can be subject to change prior to the content hitting Live.

• Minions System
• Crafting in Nightmare Tide
• Dimensions in Nightmare Tide

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Minions System

The Minions System has been mentioned here before and for the most part everything is still the same. You can find out most of the stuff you’ll need to know about Minions here.

First up, Minions can be accessed via the default hotkey “v” which also happens to be what the ‘Look Behind’ hotkey used to be. Thus if you are still interested in looking behind your character, you will need to go to ESC -> Keybindings and re-map those keys.

The other method is to go to your Mini Menu-bar -> Activities (‘play’ button) -> Minions.

Obtaining Minions

You start off with a quest to obtain your first minion – Stofie. This quest can be accessed in Sanctum, Meridian, Tempest Bay and the Atragarian Well in Goboro Reef. Below you can find the location for Tempest Bay.

You can also speak to Koris Ekscita in the Atragarian Well who will provide the same quest to Stofie. (That said, the Tempest Bay NPCs are easier to reach and they are right next to each other).

• Stofie also sells a handful of starter Minion cards.
• Other ways to obtain Minions include Store, questing, dungeon drops and a variety of other methods not mentioned in detail during the livestream.
• Minions will appear in your inventory. Simply right-click to collect and they will appear in the Minions window.

Taking Your Minion on an Adventure

You take your Minions on an Adventure by first selecting an Adventure Card from the top row of the Minions UI and then selecting a Minion in the bottom-left hand corner. By clicking “Send Now” the Minion will then go off on the Adventure, using up a Minion Slot in the bottom-right hand corner.

There’s a few things to note about Minions:

Adventure Cards

There are 4 adventure cards present at any one time. A 1min, 15min, 8hr and 10hr Adventure Card.

• The 1min adventure card rewards Minion Experience. It currently displays the wrong reward type.
• The 15min, 8hr and 10hr cards reward other items/notoriety depending on the reward type displayed.
• The 10hr card is a ‘promo’ card that costs either platinum or credits, or only credits to begin the adventure.
• The higher the time, the greater the rewards.

Adventure Cards are reset upon daily reset, although you can also get new cards by using up an existing card – the ‘blank slot’ will be replaced at random with another card.

• Note that there is a ‘perfect’ Adventure Card for each Minion. I.e., their attributes will match up.
• Artifact-reward Adventure Cards can even give Unstable Artifacts as rare chance.
• Dimension-reward Adventure Cards can even give Dimension Keys as rare chance.

Minions

Minion cards come in a variety of rarities with white being uncommon. There are a variety of features to them that are mentioned below:

Leveling

In the top-left hand corner is your Minion’s level. The cyan bar shows its progress towards the next level.

If you notice in the first image with the Minions UI, the Minion about to be activated has a yellow bar instead. This tells you how much experience your Minion will obtain from the Adventure Card selected.

Leveling has the following benefits:

• Every now and then your Minion’s maximum Stamina will increase.
• Every now and then your Minion’s Attribute levels will increase.

Note, however, that:

• Not every level will increase your Minion’s max Stamina or Attribute levels.
• Your Minion will not gain new attributes.
• There’s currently a max level of 25.

Attributes

There’s up to two attributes present on both the Adventure Cards as well as your Minions. These are either planar (Fire, Earth, Life/etc) or Reward-based (Dimension, Artifact/etc).

• If your Minion has the same attribute as the Adventure you are sending them out on, the stats of your Minion will be added to the loot reward roll. I.e., you have a higher chance of getting better items.
• As your Minion levels up its attributes will increase. Higher level attributes will increase the loot reward roll.
• You can have up to two attributes. If you have – say – a Fire + Dimension attribute on a Minion and you match it with an Adventure Card that has Fire and Dimension attribute; you will gain a much higher bonus on your loot reward roll.

Stamina

The firebolt/lightning icon refers to ‘Stamina’. Each Adventure Card has a ‘Stamina’ requirement and going on that Adventure will consume that amount of Stamina for your Minion. Each Minion has a certain amount of stamina based on level.

• Stamina is fully recovered over 24hrs, regardless of the amount of Stamina a Minion has. So a Minion with max 10 Stamina will recover all their stamina within 24hrs, the same as one with 20 Stamina. This is not a ‘reset’-type deal though; they will recover the Stamina bit by bit over those 24hrs until they reach max.
• Leveling up to certain levels will increase maximum Stamina.
• Certain Minions (usually the rarer ones) will have better Attributes and Stamina gain than others.

Minion Slots

Minion Slots refer to how many Adventures your Minions can go out on at any point in time.

• Normal players start off with 1 Minion Slot.
• Digital Edition purchasers who purchase a pack with the Minion Slot Unlock will have 2 Minion Slots.
• You can obtain more Minion Slots with the “Unlock Slot” button in the bottom-right hand corner of the Minions UI.
• Currently there’s a maximum of 5 Minion Slots in the system although this may be changed prior to the Minions system hitting Live.

Hurry Up!

Once on an Adventure, you can choose to have your Minion ‘Hurry’ its adventure by clicking on the ‘Hurry’ Button. This costs either platinum or credits (amounts placeholder) and allows you to automatically complete the adventure.

• The cost will depend on time left. So it will be cheaper to use the Hurry button when there’s only 5hrs left in a 10hr Adventure compared to if you use it when there’s 9hrs left.

Minions Alert

You will be alerted that you have completed Adventures waiting to be claimed via a small ‘ram skull’ icon in your alerts bar (the same one you see ‘Leave Instance’ and ‘Mail’ alerts). Left-clicking will open the Minions Tab.

Minions Achievements

There’s a few Minions achievements found under Achievements -> Character -> Minions. Trion went over the ‘Astounding!’ achievement:

• ‘Achieve critical success on a long Artifact Mission’ refers to the highest reward payout possible for going on an Artifact Adventure. This involves matching up all attributes between an Adventure Card and Minion and with some luck thrown in.

Trion also mentioned that the Artifact Adventures can even reward Unstable Artifacts.

Note: Achievements refer to ‘Missions’ but these will be changed to ‘Adventures’. ‘Missions’ were the original name for them but they have since changed to Adventures.

Collecting Rewards

You can send Minions out on adventures with any character and it won’t affect the end rewards when you claim. You can also use any character on the same server cluster (NA or EU) to claim the rewards.

HOWEVER, the character you CLAIM the reward on will affect some reward types.

For instance, if you are claiming some gathering materials, the level of the character you use to claim the reward will affect what reward you will receive. So if you have a low-level character claiming the reward, you will receive low-level materials.

Some More Minions

Trion also showed off a few Minion cards not presently obtainable by PTS testers:

• Deeps – Water and Dimension attributes. Rare card (blue).
• Dead Simon – Unknown origin, but as expected has the Death and Artifacts attributes. Rare card (blue).
• Bloop – Bloop is exclusive to some Nightmare Tide Digital Editions, although Faratha seems to have indicated that this is tradeable. Currently the only Epic card (purple).
• Atrophinius – Although not shown, Trion indicated Atrophinius was also a Minion Card.

Other Minions-related Info

A few other things to note about Minions that were mentioned:

• The ‘Edit Minion’ function under the Minions Tab that was supposed to allow you to provide a nickname to your Minion has since been removed. It may be re-instated at a later date but won’t be available at launch.

• Minions are Server Cluster-wide so collecting a Minion on one character on one NA Shard will provide that Minion to all characters on all NA Shards. NA and EU shards are separated though.

• Minions cannot fail. Minions cannot fail their mission to bring back items. They are guaranteed to at least bring back one item.

• No Limit. There’s no limit to the amount of Minions you can collect. However, you can only collect one of each Minion. 144 Minion are currently in the works, although they will be making more.

• No Money, no problem. Besides, Bloop, you can get all the Minions without spending real-life cash. That said, Faratha did seem to indicate that Bloop was tradeable, so even that won’t require real-life cash.

• More Bang. There’s going to be more animations and sound effects that occur whilst doing various actions for the Minion System that have not been implemented yet.

• Dimensions. Trion showed off the loot for an 8hr Death-attribute Adventure Card using a Minion that also has a Death attribute. Loot was as follows:
  • Freemarch Ground Cover
  • Crawling Root
  • Ram Skull
  • Earthscape Amphora
  • Full Flour Sack
  • 4x Building Block: Granite
  • Defiant Wardstone
  • Snowy Alder
  • 4x Building Block: Green Wood Triangle
  • Crate of Apples

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Crafting in Nightmare Tide

Crafting for Nightmare Tide is mostly completed on the PTS.

• The new level is called Savant and goes to Level 450 for all crafting and harvesting skills.
• No Savant Crafting Rift lures.
• Trion mentioned there would be a new bag with higher slots created by Outfitters – but the Savant Outfitter trainer on PTS does not have this recipe – so it might be a dropped recipe or not yet implemented.

Savant Trainers

Savant Trainers can be found at the Atragarian Well in Goboro Reef. Just speak to a Savant Trainer when you are at least level 370 in that profession to begin unlocking Savant and Savant-based crafting recipes.

Materials

For Savant recipes, there’s only:

• 1 type of ore
• 1 type of plant/wood
• 1 type of meat
• 1 type of skin/leather
• 6 types of new fish.

Also, Dreamweavers will require Dream Bolt and Dream Ribbons so that doesn’t change. Dream Bolt is simply 99x Dream Ribbons that you can currently convert back and forth by right-clicking on a stack of 99x Dream Ribbons or a Dream Bolt.

Recipes

Savant only has a single set of items, although there are ‘Amender’ recipes you purchase that act as upgrade components, upgrading your crafting set to a new tier.

• Certain recipes will require craft components obtained from using Void Stones or Abyssal Marks (Nightmare Tide planar and dungeon mark currency).
• Good Seals and Cape Recipes will be dropped, but everything else is available at vendors.
• Cost of Recipes will involve existing currencies. There is no new craft currency so you will still use Grandmaster, Master and Artisan Craft Marks. Recipes will simply have increased costs.
• The maximum amount of craft marks you can hold will be increased.
• Savant Dailies can be found at Margle Palace in the Draumheim zone. They provide increased mark rewards compared to Grandmaster dailies. They also reward notoriety.

Given the Savant recipes use existing currencies, you might want to make sure you max out on all your Craft Marks and build up as much Artisan Marks as possible once you max out on Grandmaster and Master craftsman marks.

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Dimensions in Nightmare Tide

Trion briefly showed off the four new Dimensions coming with Nightmare Tide as well as a few dimension items.

The four keys are:

• Shadow Scion
• Polyp Promenade
• Moonriven Breach
• Izbithu’s Demise

Faratha showed off the open world versions of these dimensions. Note that any mobs will be removed from the Dimension version and certain plants and rocks might be culled to allow for better building space.

Shadow Scion

Shadow Scion is located in the bottom-right hand corner of the Draumheim zone. The Dimension version will include the stairs/bridge, the fort’s outer walls, death tendrils and the green, swamp in front. Mobs will be removed.

Shadow Scion is obtainable from the Ultimate Nightmare Digital Edition Pack.

Polyp Promenade

Polyp Promenade is located in the top-left corner of the Draumheim city area. It contains a whole bunch of coral trees and other aquatic flora and fauna.

Faratha is hoping to be able to include the ‘ocean’ that exists above the area that you can swim across – but no promises.

The Polyp Promenade dimension key can be obtained from a Savant-level Dreamweaver recipe.

Moonriven Breach

Moonriven Breach is located right after the starting area – Luminous Passage – in Goboro Reef. This area is a relatively large open field surrounded by water volumes. Faratha hopes to include some of the water volumes into the dimension.

You can basically enter or exit the water volumes, with the areas being swimmable.

You can obtain the Moonriven Breach dimension key from a Savant-level Dreamweaver recipe.

Izbithu’s Demise

Izbithu’s Demise is located in the top-right area of the Tarken Glacier zone. This will be another dimension in Nightmare Tide. Faratha noted that there’s a special surprise inside Izbithu’s stomach. No hints on what it is.

You can obtain the Izbithu’s Demise dimension key from a Savant-level Dreamweaver recipe.

Dimension Items

A few dimension items were shown off – mainly from the Aquatic Algae, Aquatic Fungal and Coral Flora Kits found under RIFT Store -> Dimensions -> Plants. A Jellyfish Tank was also shown off.

As shown above, these were some of the coral trees and plants gained from the Kits mentioned above.

And here’s the Jellyfish Tank. You get two of them from the Aquatic Dimension Pack, available from the Infusion or Ultimate Nightmare Digital Editions.

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Livestream Giveaways

During the Livestream, a handful of livestream chat channel viewers received:

• 1x Ducklar companion pet to 5 livestream viewers.
• 1x Nightmare Tide Ultimate Edition Pack to 1 lucky livestream viewer!

Congratulations to all the winners!

(From Left to Right: Cole, Faratha, Captain Cursor and Gingers)

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Minions, Crafting and Dimensions in 3.0. A relatively lengthy livestream for RIFT this time round.

Don’t forget to join in for future RIFT Livestreams with the recent schedule:

• 17th September 1:30PM PDT [TC] [CD]: First look at Nightmare Rifts and Gyel Fortress. [r]
• 19th September 1:30PM PDT [TC] [CD]: First look at Tarken Glacier and the Glacial Maw Dungeon. [r]
• 24th September 1:30PM PDT [TC] [CD]: PvP in 3.0. [r]

You can check out other Nightmare Tide Content information we’ve compiled here, or delve a little deeper and read up on all the latest Nightmare Tide-related articles here.

Past Livestream Summaries can be accessed here.