RIFT’s Lead Systems Designer, Andy “Vladd” Kirton, lets fly with information on all the ways you can become more powerful in our upcoming expansion, Starfall Prophecy!
Greetings Ascended,
With Starfall Prophecy on the horizon, I thought I would take a bit of time for a high level overview of some of the new features the RIFT Systems Team is working on. We’ll go into each one more as we get closer to the expansion, but this introduction will hopefully give you a good idea of what each feature is and how it will impact your experience in Telara.
Active Upgrades:
If you boil down upgrades to their core concept, Item Upgrades are quests to make your gear more powerful. In order to upgrade your gear to its maximum potential, you’ll need to procure the required ingredients one way or another. Our goal with Active Upgrades is to embrace that they are quests, while providing exciting thematic experiences and flavor. As an example, and this is by no means going to be an item, if we wanted you to upgrade your mace from Tenebrian Maul to say, “Drathgar, Maul of Undead Slaying” you would need to kill a certain amount of undead with it along with meeting other requirements.
There are a ton of ways that we can use this new system to make your items more a part of your character’s personal story. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities it gives us.
Eternal Items:
With Starfall Prophecy, we are adding a new item rarity: Eternal. Forged by god-like beings from the cosmos, these are artifact tier items in both rarity and power. While some of these artifacts will be found with their Eternal rarity already unlocked, others might need to be upgraded through active upgrades to unleash their full potential.
It’s important to note here no one should expect to wear full suits of Eternal quality items – Eternal Items are much more rare than that! You might have one piece, maybe two if you’re exceptionally diligent and fortuitous. Slots covered will be based on the calling, but because of the powers that each Eternal Item embodies, they will be calling restricted. This allows for more custom tailoring of passive or active effects. Another important note: we are throwing our normal concepts of item balance out the window – that’s how powerful Eternal items are!
Planar Fragments:
One of the things that we’ve been trying to address over the past few major updates is reducing/removing the need for different sets of gear based on your role. For instance, with Mind of Madness, we removed the option for any gear to drop as tank specific, and instead provided sidegrade paths for all DPS drops to change into tank gear. This certainly helped with dealing with the challenge of players who Tank and DPS in obtaining their desired role gear, but it still wasn’t the complete solution that we were looking for. Planar Fragments are a much bigger step towards that solution.
Generally, gear being for a Tank or DPS is determined by the amount of endurance on it along with tertiary stats such as Dodge and Crit Power. With Starfall, gear will no longer drop with tertiary stats attached to them – Planar Fragments give you the ability to customize your stats the way you like! The fragments will have their own tab in the Character UI where you slot in the fragments with the stats of your choice. Similar to the wardrobe system, there will also be saved sets that you can swap on command. In other words, you can keep the same set of gear equipped but change between Tank and DPS stats by swapping out your Planar Fragment equipped set. This can be done via the UI or through a command in the chat window. This will make an amazing difference for folks that have been maintaining multiple armor sets. We also have some changes coming for runes and dream orbs to help out with this, but I’ll save that information for later.
You’ll gain Planar Fragments from throughout Telara; you might find them in dungeons, get them through crafting, see rare examples as world loot, or obtain them in PVP, LFR and raids. By default, Planar Fragments are bound to your account, so that if you get an awesome fragment for your Warrior alt, you can mail it to yourself. Each character will maintain their own individual inventory, though. Speaking of inventory, Fragments will have their own separate inventory similar to Quest Items so that we don’t take up your normal bag space. If your Fragment inventory fills up, it will overflow to your regular inventory.
Legendary Powers:
Legendary Powers are how your character increases in power and flexibility, in addition to just gaining more stats per level as you work toward the new level cap of 70. Each level past 65 will award a Legendary point which can be spent to unlock a Legendary Power. You’ll be limited to a maximum of 3 Legendary points spent per soul and only if you have more than 44 Talent points invested in said soul. With 0 to 14 Talent points invested, you can spend 1 Legendary point and 15 – 43 Talent points invested allows you to spend 2. As for which abilities will be targeted for Legendary upgrades, we can say for sure that each soul will have the 61 point, the 41 point, and one of the 0 point abilities will have options as well. There also will be a sub-15 option, but that wildly varies from soul to soul.
Our goal with Legendary Powers is to change up how your character plays, based upon the powers purchased. For instance, an ability that is normally a 6 second channel that doesn’t allow movement might become a 3 second channel with double the ticks, allowing movement, and also applies all of a certain type of buff to you instead of needing to individually cast each one.
Another interesting twist to Legendary Powers is that the 0 point Legendary is not designed to be taken by anyone that will invest more than 15 talent points in a given soul, but to appeal to more off-soul choices than what is supplied by just the talent point investments. An example is Legendary Flame Bolt, where it increases the damage of your next non-fire damaging ability by 20%. Clearly this is of no benefit to the Pyromancer as all of their damage is fire-based, but for an Elementalist or even Warlock, that’s awfully tempting!
So, as you can see, we have a lot coming down the pipe for Starfall Prophecy and I still haven’t talked about Looking for Raid or Personal Loot yet! I’m super excited about all of these systems and how they will change Telara. I can’t wait to see the imaginative ways you’ll put them to use!
-Vladd
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