PTS Update + Datamining: Warfront Announcers

RIFT’s Public Test Shard (‘PTS’) was updated on 23rd September 2015 with an approx. 1.04GB patch. Included in the patch were some new achievements and other minor additions. Some interesting data files also popped up including Regulos and Usukhel Warfront Announcers.

Note that with the open testing, a lot of recent updates have been large in size, but contain minimal ‘new’ files. Most are simply edits to existing files to correct for floating nodes, quest bugs and open world bugs.

Patch version is TEST-303-35-A-1040564.

Summary:

• New Achievements. Crafting Achievement Additions; The Wild Hunt updated.
• Other PTS Info. Patron’s Artifact Tracking Tooltip updated; various UI additions; Primalist Berserker updates.
• More Wilds Skins. Updated Wilds Banners; More Wardrobe Skins including 5th Wilds Wardrobe skin.
• Warfront Announcers. Regulos and Usukhel Warfront Announcers.
• Other Interesting Data Files. Greathound SFX; More Backpacks?; Curse AoE VFX; Fishing Poles; Dimension Files.

As always, everything below is subject to change prior to hitting Live and some things included below may never make it to Live release.

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New Achievements

Crafting Achievement Additions

Crafting achievements increased by 126 points in Monday’s PTS Update. However, clicking on the Crafting category crashes your client to desktop for that update. This has since been fixed.

As predicted, some of the new achieves are in relation to the credits-only Lucky Fortune Bundle, which gives you the recipe for Lucky Fortune Biscuits (that contain fluff; no details) and the Oven of Good Fortune dimension item.

Clicking on the Lucky Fortune Bundle found under RIFT Store -> Dimensions (or Crafting/Chests&Keys) now properly gives a preview of the Oven of Good Fortune.

From the tooltip, it looks like you’ll need to be in front of (or click) the Oven of Good Fortune dimension item whilst it placed in a dimension to make the Lucky Fortune Biscuits.

The remainder of the 120 achievement points comes from expansions to existing craft-based achievements.

The Wild Hunt Updated

“The Wild Hunt” achievement found under Achievements -> Zone -> RIFT -> Planetouched Wilds has been updated with a new reward: “Crystalline Scale”.

The Crystalline Scale sounds like it might be a full-body fluff visual effect that might make your body all crystal-like.

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Other PTS Info

A few other additions popped up on the PTS.

Patron’s Artifact Tracking Tooltip

The Patron’s Artifact Tracking buff has had its tooltip updated to reflect the new artifact sets.

The tooltip states that you can see Poison, Burning and Nightmare artifacts on the mini-map. However, you need their respective ‘Sight’ buff. This buff is gained as a random chance from picking up artifact sets in the Planetouched Wilds zone.

As Dead Simon mentioned in past livestreams:

• Picking up normal artifacts in PTW gives you a chance at getting Poison Sight. This allows you to see poison artifacts and will put a %-hp-based damage-over-time debuff on you.
• Picking up poison artifacts in PTW gives you a chance at getting Burning Sight. This allows you to see burning artifacts and will put a 2nd %-hp-based DoT on you.
• Picking up burning artifacts in PTW gives you a chance at getting Nightmare Sight. This allows you to see nightmare artifacts and will put a 3rd %-hp-based DoT on you.
• Picking up nightmare artifacts has a chance of refreshing all three DoTs.
• Higher-rarity artifacts give you a higher chance at obtaining the Sight buffs.

UI Additions

Some further UI additions have appeared on the PTS.

• Wardrobe Dye Tooltip. Hovering over dyes in your wardrobe will let you see their exact names.

• Artifact Set Linking in Achievements. When you click on an artifact set that is listed in an achievement, the artifact window will open and display that artifact set.

• Primalist ‘Energy’ Bar Updated. The ‘bar’ underneath Primalist’s hp bar will show a different color and text depending on whether you are in Harmony, Cunning or Fury.

Berserker Updates

The Primalist’s Berserker soul has had some damage and general ability adjustments.

As per Vladd’s post:

* Standardized the range of abilities to be consistent with each other and for melee souls.
* Fixed an issue where Chill of Death wasn’t properly effecting the cooldowns for Corpsefall and Icefall
* Added contextual formatting for Corpsefall and Icefall.
* Fixed an issue where Corpsefall and Icefall were not working due to a cooldown on their contextual parent ability.
*Fixed Residual Pain to show correct values in the tooltip.
*Swapped the Cunning and Fury sides of Icefall (Berserker) so that the AOE is while in Fury and the ST is while in Cunning.
*Underworld Shards (Berserker) is now Water damage and a cunning ability. Moves Focus 60 towards Fury when used.
*Residual Pain is now 18 points in the Berserker tree.
*Spirit’s Wrath (Berserker) now affects 8 mobs instead of 5.
*Adjusted damage across the board.

You can check out the changelog for the Berserker soul and post up new parses and/or feedback here.

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More Wilds Skins

A few more Planetouched Wilds-related skins:

Wilds Banners

Banner versions of the flags datamined on Monday popped up in the latest update.

It’s also possible that the above skins are a complete replacement of the old one. The above skins seems to look more stylish than the old flags. They also seem to fit better with the blocky, stone-statue architecture in the Planetouched Wilds.

The flags themselves will probably appear across various temples that honor different Primalist souls or clans. There’s several P_PTW_banner_temple_01.ma files in the latest patch.

More Wardrobe Skins

Two more wardrobe skins popped up:

Another Primalist Skin

The image below looks like another Primalist-themed wardrobe set.

There were only 3 different skins associated with this outfit. However, this might simply be because the other slots haven’t been added to the PTS yet, or use existing skins (like from the other Ovog Ceremonial wardrobe).

The 5th Wilds Wardrobe

The 5th Wilds Wardrobe (the blue one) in the icons from Monday’s update has popped up in the data files:

Not too surprisingly, it’s blue. Closer inspection of the blue decorations in the top-right skin and the ‘antlers’ in the bottom-left probably suggests that this wardrobe set is based on the Deer Spirit primal avatar from the Preserver healing soul.

If you missed it, you can check out the other 4 quest-based sets on the PTS under wardrobe using the following search terms:

• Chain = “Ancestor’s Chain”
• Leather = “Crimson Lion”
• Plate = “Sky Hunter”
• Cloth = “Jade Serpent”

Or view them all here.

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Warfront Announcers

As mentioned in last week’s livestream, there’s Regulos and Usukhel Warfront Announcers coming to the game.

The latest patch contains lines from these new warfront announcers that you can check out below:

• Regulos Warfront Announcer. 63 lines.
• Usukhel Warfront Announcer. 62 lines.

Regulos’ volume is a little low, but that might be adjusted in-game. The sound files ripped from the latest patch aren’t going to sound 100% the same when fed through the system in-game; volume, pitch and length of various lines might differ.

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Other Interesting Data Files

A few other interesting data files:

Greathound SFX

Do the Great Hound mounts currently have sound effects? The latest patch contains a few sfx for the Great Hound. Might just be sound files for the swimming animations.

• Greathound SFX. Nothing interesting.

More Backpacks?

There were all kinds of files with only skeletal rigs for:

dwarf_female_wings_002.ma
dwarf_male_backpack_004.ma
dwarf_male_backpack_003.ma
bahmi_female_wings_001.ma

And similar files. Of course these could just relate to existing files that happened to be in the .pak files, or perhaps some minor edits to the existing backpacks and wings from Summerfest 2015 that you can check out here. They are visible in-game via Wardrobe -> Cape slot with “Show Uncollected” checked.

That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trion is planning on letting players wear Usukhel’s ‘Primalist Backpack’ in the future, as shown below:

Or maybe that’s part of her chest piece.

Curse AoE VFX

A few ‘curses’ visual effect files popped up:

– mesh_emitter_curse_of_six_aoe_01.ma
– mesh_emitter_curse_of_five_aoe_01.ma
– mesh_emitter_curse_of_four_aoe_01.ma
– mesh_emitter_curse_of_failure_aoe_01.ma

Either these are new visual effects related to one of the Primalist’s souls, or perhaps its one of the mechanics for a Mind of Madness raid boss. If these visual effects are for a raid boss, it seems like they might relate to some kind of stacking mechanic, with different colored AoE to indicate how many players must stack together.

Fishing Poles

Two fishing pole animation files popped up:

– character/animated_prop/fishing_pole/rig/fptest.ma
– character/animated_prop/fishing_pole/rig/fishing_pole_gold_01.ma

The fishing_pole_gold_01.ma uses a ‘dragon_laethys_01_c.dds’ as one of its textures. Are these new fishing poles, or just existing animation files? ‘fptest’ seems to just be an internal test of the fishing pole animation.

Dimension Files

• The file ‘D_cave_dimension_harrow_crypt_03.ma.’ popped up. Seems to suggest that perhaps a new dimension will be added for the cave below the Harrow Crypt in Stonefield.

• ‘H_D_cave_dreamhive_cocoon_02_a.ma.’ is probably a new dimension item using the Dream Eggs that have been removed for the Dream Hive dimension key.

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As mentioned before in the past two weeks, the PTS has had a lot of big updates with minimal actual changes. Most of the hefty files from Patch 3.4 have probably been stored up on the Live client. Either that or Trion has made a bunch of model optimizations to reduce the client’s file size.

Right now the Live client is 24.4gb whereas the PTS client has 24.6gb. A difference of about 200mb; so most of the several gigabytes of files downloaded over the past two weeks on the PTS have been bug fixes and adjustments to small files within each .pak file.

For past PTS Updates, click here. You can also find past datamining here.