Trion had their 19th September 2014 Friday Livestream where they showed off Nightmare Rifts and one of the upcoming dungeons, Gyel Fortress.

Click here for a replay of the 19th 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 19th September 2014 Friday Livestream with Livestreamer “Cole” Marshall, Lead Content Designer Mike “MikeD” Daugherty and Dev Anony. Executive Producer Bill “Daglar” Fisher was also on the Livestream Chat Channel answering a bunch of questions.

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

• Nightmare Rifts
• Gyel Fortress
• Other Info including responses by Daglar in Livestream Chat Channel
• Livestream Giveaways

Nightmare Rifts

Nightmare Rift Eye Centrepiece

Nightmare Rifts are a new rift type coming in Nightmare Tide that you can spawn with Nightmare Rift Lures.

Stages

Nightmare Rift Stages

Unlike other types of rifts, Nightmare Rifts have no limit to the amount of stages there are. Fights just get harder and the rift ends once the timer hits 0 and you kill the next mob.

• Each stage becomes harder and harder. Unlike in Great Hunt Rifts, you can’t just stand in poo and survive. You will also need to make effective use of powerups.
• There’s trash mob stages as well as multiple boss stages in a single Nightmare Rift.
• There’s a large amount of mob variety that dishes out a whole heap of different mechanics to deal with.
• Lord Arak will also occasionally spawn and use certain mechanics to make it that much more interesting.
• Each tier of Nightmare Rift (I-V) has their own set of bosses.
• There are ‘mega-bosses’ which are immune to Nightmare Powerup effects.

Unlike Hunt Rifts, there’s no ‘down-time’ for Nightmare Rift stages so it will be intense through every stage.

Lord Arak in Nightmare Rift

Stage Skipping

Nightmare Rift Stage Skippers

You can skip stages with Nightmare I Skipper and Nightmare I Advancers for Nightmare I rifts. These will skip between 2-5 stages each between a certain range of stages.

• Skipping stages does not count towards achievements.
• These can be upgraded with Illusory Motes that are required for both skippers and to upgrade essences found in Nightmare Rifts. Upgrading them simply skips more stages, but doesn’t increase the stage range limit.
• Illusory Motes are (assumed to be) gained in Nightmare Rift loot drops.

Ranks

There are 5 ranks/tiers of Nightmare Rifts. Just like with Great Hunt Rifts in Storm Legion, you will need to beat the boss achievements of the previous tier in order to be able to buy the lures for the higher tiers.

(thus it’s probably a good idea to ‘ride the wave’ of the massive raids that will probably be doing these Nightmare Rifts back-to-back at launch to get all your achieves asap to unlock higher tiers that reward better items.)

Power-Up Generators

Nightmare Rift Powerup Generators

You can upgrade power-up generators that spawn to become buffs. There’s a variety of benefits with some powerups having both a passive ability whilst they are up as well as a single-use active ability. These buffs include healing auras, AoE dmg placement, increased dmg boost to a single ally, friendly add spawns and even a mass-pull-in ability.

Rewards

Rewards include Void Stones, Nightmare Cache of Horrors and temporary bonus exp.

Nightmare Cache of Horror

• Void Stones are planar currency for Nightmare Tide in a similar fashion to how Infinity Stones were used in Storm Legion.
• Nightmare Cache of Horrors “contains a random selection of equipment, boosters, currency, artifacts, and essences. Contents may be appropriate for your level range.” It also has a low chance of dropping “TBD greater essences”. These containers are Bound to Account.
• Temporary Bonus Exp. For a few seconds when you complete bonus stages, you will gain 2x or 3x (and perhaps more) bonus experience from mob kills.

Nightmare Rifts will be available everywhere, including Mathosia and Storm Legion – not just the Plane of Water.

Gyel Fortress

Gyel Fortress

Gyel Fortress is both a quest instance, outer questing area and a Normal and Expert Dungeon in the north-most region of the Goboro Reef zone. It has 4 bosses.

DEV_Anony showed off the encounter, but with dev cheats and by himself so any group-based or mechanics that only work on non-tanks probably aren’t shown.

Seathe

Seathe. 3-way rotating inferno.

• Seathe is the first boss of Gyel Fortress and has a rotating inferno AoE ability that has three cones of damage.
• There’s adds as well as totems in the encounter.
• He pops crystals as well as some kind of laser on a player.

Houndmaster Kytus

Houndmaster Kytus with hounds in background.

• Houndmaster Kytus is the second boss of Gyel Fortress.
• He has a lot of dog adds.
• He drops mines.
• Various other AoE.
• Laser between larger hounds in the instance. Goes between the 6 and 12 o’clock positions as well as occasionally 3 and 9 o-clock positions.
• Hell Hound adds spawn and leaves a trail of fire behind them.
• Infernos Rex add spawns with AoE cleave mechanic.

Admiral Nezavar

Admiral Nezevar Encounter Area

• Admiral Nezavar is the third boss of Gyel Fortress.
• He rains firebolts at random parts of the encounter area that produces medium-sized AoE.
• He switches his weapons out during the fight that produces different mechanics.
• Spawns a variety of adds.
• He will chase after a random player.

Lady Glasya

Lady Glasya

• Lady Glasya is the fourth and final boss of Gyel Fortress.
• She has several Oculons surrounding the encounter that moves towards players and then casts a damaging AoE effect.
• More and more Oculons appear throughout the fight.
• The Oculons casts a lightning/laser effect on players at some point.
• At some point a mass amount of Oculons will appear and cast yellow lasers between each other. Avoid touching the lasers.
• At some point they rise into the air and start falling to the ground with AoE indicators. Avoid those AoE.
• Lady Glasya herself also spawns AoEs.
• A green vfx on the player seems to indicate a pull-in mechanic; so a random player might get the green vfx and end up pulling the rest of the group into them.
• A large fireball appears and seems to follow DEV_Anony whilst he has a blue AoE attached to him.

Lady Glasya. Oculons beginning to cast mass-lasers between each other.

Other Info

First up, Open Beta for Nightmare Tide will occur shortly before the launch of the expansion. No exact ETA.

Daglar also answered a variety of questions in the chat channel during the livestream.

Briefly:

• PvP Upgrade Pieces will have their requirement removed. (Note: PvP and PvE gear are merging in 3.0)
• Autumn Harvest World Event will occur after 3.0 (Previously mentioned early Nov).
• There are 3 main sets of new models spread out across content.
• Port Scion Raid confirmed? Might just be a troll by Daglar though.
• In terms of Customer Support – they’ve been bogged down but hiring new staff – some of the new CS staff have just finished their training.
• You will only be able to download Nightmare Tide expansion at launch – 8th October 2014.

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, MikeD, Anony)

CM Ocho has also posted an ‘Informal PvP Stream Summary’ here and has also been posting responses to players’ questions in that thread.

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.