Farm Orichalcum, Shadethorn and Twilight Bloom

This is both an exploit and a guide, I'll start off with the guide portion of this.

This guide requires:
You play a Rogue
You have a 31 point Assassin build for "Improved Stealth" and "Slip Away".
You have an 8 point Nightblade build for "Lost Hope".
Access to the following Instances: "Charmer's Caldera" (in Shimmersand) or "Abyssal Precipice" (in Iron Pine Peak).

My Example Assassin/Nightblade Build

This guide takes from the same concept of old stealth farming methods in World of Warcraft: Sneak around the mobs that can be easily avoided, crowd control those that are in your way. Abyssal Precipice and Charmer's Caldera are the only places to get these three types of materials. I do not have a youtube account, nor any knowledge of video recording/editing so I will use my limited knowledge of taking screenshots and Paint to, well... draw you a picture. Here is my farming rotation for Charmer's Caldera.

Enter Charmer's Caldera, stealth up and move passed the first set of 3-4 mobs and cross the first rock bridge. As you are passing it you will notice a Magma Elemental heading your way, use "Incapacitate" and keep moving along. Will you then approach this area:

You will then use "Lost Hope" to ranged CC the second Magma elemental.

Point A is an Orichalcum spawn point: Hide behind the rock to mine it.
Point B is a Shadethorn spawn point: Stay behind the same rock and gather it.
Point C is a Twilight Bloom spawn point: Move behind the rock and gather it, use your Incapacitate if you need to on the raptor closest to it if you're afraid it will aggro you.

Once you have gathered any spawns, continue on to this next area:

re-CC the elemental if it comes near you.
Point A is either a Shadethorn or Twilight Bloom spawn point: Move behind the rock near it to gather it.
Point B is a Shadethorn spawn: Move behind the rock to gather it.

Once you have gathered from those two potential spawns, move to the third and final area:

There are two very important things to note in this area:
1. As long as the hounds and imps are fighting the humanoid mobs, you can walk next to them and gather without any aggro, as long as you stealth up before the humanoid dies.
2. There are two wandering Magma Elementals in this screenshot, be careful. The first is in the top left-hand corner of the screenshot, the next is inside of a wall to the right of Point B.

Point A is a Twilight Bloom spawn. As stated, you can walk up next to the mobs and gather it without aggro as long as the humanoid is still alive.
Point B is a Shadethorn spawn. Wait until the Magma Elemental has come out of the way and started to fight the nearest pack of mobs, then gather it.
Point C is an Orichalcum spawn. Move to the right side of the rock to gather it.

Once that is done, head to the entrance, zone out and reset. Rinse, repeat. Use Slip Away to vanish anytime you might get aggro.

You may ask yourself, "Where is the exploit?". After 5 resets you will get the following message.

"Cannot reset your map instances yet."

At this point, log your character out to the character selection screen and log back in. Voila! You then right click to reset your instance and your instance resets will go back to 5 until you have to do it again.

Enjoy your farming, as this will be fixed in the first patch coming out soon. They are going to make it so all gathering nodes spawn passed the first bosses in these two dungeons, which are blocked off by invisible walls.

Read rest of entry

A Beginner's Guide to Macros

What are they? Macros are a tool enabled in many video games that let you string commands together to a custom button.

Why use them? Generally they allow for some optimal customization. This works well in a game like Rift which does not allow add-ons but has a ton of abilities to let you make some shortcuts to save on keybinds or help with healing targeting.

Where do I find this option? In Rift, you can either go to the Menu options and bring up the Macro menu or simply type /macro. You will see a list on the side of several empty icon boxes. You click on one, rename the title and then in the area beneath you can write your macro.

How do I write a macro? Macros are fairly simple in concept. The most basic of them is "cast [Ability Name]". So if I wanted to write a macro to cast Healing Breath, I would simply write

cast Healing Breath

Each line of a macro is separated by a line break. So with multiple commands to chain them you would write:

cast Healing Breath

cast Healing Grace

So I can chain my entire rotation to one button? Neato Burrito! Not exactly. You can not chain multiple abilities to one button press. Nor can you chain a rotation exactly. What you can do is set a priority list by cooldown. Basically in the macro above, Healing Breath has an 8 second cooldown. It will attempt to cast Healing Breath and if it is able to, it will. If not, it will move to the next spell on the list, Healing Grace. It will ONLY cast Healing Grace if Healing Breath is on cooldown.

How does this work for Reactive abilities or follow ups?: Pretty much the same way.

cast Rising Waterfall

cast Power Strike

This will attempt to cast Rising Waterfall first. When you start a fight you won't be able to since RW is a reactive ability. So it will cast Power Strike. The next time you press the button, you will able to cast RW though because it is now enabled by you using PS.

cast Path of the Wind

cast Power Strike

Because Path of the Wind has no restrictions, this macro would only recast that over and over.

cast Power Strike

cast Path of the Wind

This however, will cast PS if you are in melee range, but cast Path of the Wind if you are out of melee range.

So...about targets? You are able to also customize targeting with macros. There are a variety of things but they use an "@" modifier to indicate it is a target.

cast @self Healing Breath

If you macro it, the macro would always cast Healing Breath on yourself, no matter who you have targeted. Other options are:

@lasttarget [Your Last Target]

@mouseover [The target your cursor is over. Great for healing]

@focus [Your focus target]

Is there anything else I can do with them? Lots! But this is a beginner's guide. Macros can do a lot of things, such as set targets, set focuses, marks. There are some guides on the official forum if you get more curious.

Edit: My reddit editing fu is kinda bad. Sorry if this looks messy.

Read rest of entry

Basic Easy Chloro Healing Guide v. 2.0

Thanks to the 1 minute editing rule (bleh) here's a new version with a couple of adjustments to focus on easier game-play and add a few other basic tips.

Basic Tips on Easy Chloro

Soul Choices

I reckon that for a beginner or somebody uncertain about the ins and outs of the Chloro, the Warlock is the best secondary soul. Most of the benefits are passive or long term buffs... so you are getting used to focussing on the Chloro tool-set and the Chloro strengths and weaknesses. Archon and Necro are the other most common secondary souls, but both have more active tool-sets for contributing to the Chloro and so require more choices to be made and perhaps a more in-depth knowledge, so that you can be making the right choices of the right times to use which abilities.

For beginners, by using Warlock, you're able to focus on the Chloro abilities. So you just have to deal with less and are less likely to get into trouble.

Note: Chloro healing at levels below level 15 is very different to what's described in this guide. Personally, I would only start using Chloro as your Main soul from level 15 onwards. You only need to really need to main heal from level 16 in the first instances. You can go for more at lower levels and there's some nice builds for that... but there's really little need at lower levels and there are more efficient builds.

Warlock Point Investment

Once you have Chloro/Lock as your main souls, then the Warlock tree for Chloro support is pretty straight-forward. As of Beta 6 you're aiming for it to look like this. I've included Neddra's Influence - which is a DoT enhancement. It is believed that this affects Stream of Reclamation (SoR) damage and Withering Vines (WV) damage (but not the heal element of Withering Vines and not the DoTs from Nature's Corrosion).

There are other options and things you could extend this with... but for the basic tree, that's basically what it will look like.

Apart from the first 6 points in the Warlock tree for the mana regain tool, you'll be pouring all your available points into the Chloro tree. By the time you reached a level with your Chloromancer, that you were able to get as high in the Warlock tree as linked above, you'll be making all your own decisions about what things to take and where, primarily based on your own experiences.

It's important to let your own experiences guide you most strongly. Test what other people say in your own play and decide for yourself what is better.

Chloro Point Investment

As of Beta 7, Call of Spring isn't working on the core heals of the Chloro: Radiant Spores (RS) and Lifegiving Veil (LV) heals. Since these represent 90% of the healing that you'll do as a Chloro, that makes it a lot weaker. The Chloro Shield ability, also got a big rebuild in Beta 6 and is much stronger now, with the mana regain built in. Also, the present state of the Nature's Corrosion improvement, is that it will enable your Ruin and Vile Spores to do ~30%+ more healing (based on logs). That may be bugged like Call of Spring - and both may be fixed - but as things stand, Nature's Corrosion is a strong contender for points and Call of Spring a weak one.

As a result, most Chloro/Locks will probably aim toward a build that looks something like this, which leaves 4 points over... about which endless discussions could be had... but none of them will affect you much right now, since you'd need to be level 47 to get to those decisions pretty much.

It's important to let your own experiences guide you most strongly. Test what other people say in your own play and decide for yourself what is better.

Important Equipment

If at all possible, you should get a sigil that will take a Greater Essence and put into that slot one of the Essences that gives you a chance of proccing extra healing whenever you cast a healing spell. Lifegiving Veil heals will proc these Essences. This can add a huge amount of healing to your Chloro, as it can proc separately on every single target that your Lifegiving Veil heals hit.

Your basic priorities in casting should 90% of the time be:

1) Radiant Spores must be kept up.

Explain to your group, that if they're taking damage, more dps = more healing from Radiant Spores. Faster consistent hits are probably better than slow big ones in that situation (because you may or may not get that 30% roll on a slow big hit... but if you do 5 other hits in the same time, you'll probably get healed by a couple of them).

2) Nature's Touch is your first active healing priority.

If there's ever a choice of which active heal to cast, Nature's Touch should be your first choice. It's the best nuke for both tank and group heal.

3) Ruin is your second active healing priority.


4) Vile Spores when there's nothing else you need to be doing


Keep Entropic Veil up when you can. I personally tend to hit it when charge is up to ~50%.


Your Nukes are your Heals

When everyone/several people in the group/raid takes damage at the same time, trust in Lifegiving Veil and Radiant Spores to bring everybody back to full health. Your nukes and Radiant spores will usually do the job just fine. Most situations like this don't need a direct heal.

Direct Heals are for Emergencies

Direct Heals (Bloom/Flourish/Wild Growth) should be used when the above is all failing. They are to be viewed as your emergency heals.

Your first instinct when people in your group start taking damage, should be to hit another nuke not a direct heal. Direct heals are for when you're sure that nuking and radiant spores isn't going to work any more.

Rotations

There is no real 'rotation' for Chloros, because to a certain extent you're reacting to a situation. But the basic healing rotation should probably be something like:

Ruin, RS, NT, VS, VS, NT, VS, VS, Ruin, RS....

I put Ruin in before Radiant Spores because when Ruin recycles, I use it and know that I have to use Radiant Spores straight after it to keep RS maintained (Ruin cooldown = Radiant Spores duration - 1s). You'll have slightly different ways to lead into this rotation at the beginning and will always be making adjustments because of using your mana regen tools, Bloom/Flourish/Wild Growth etc... as well as other bits and bobs in the Chloro tool-set. But at heart, the above is the basic Chloro rotation.


Entropic Veil is a decision thing. Some Chloros prefer to save it for when they need a bit of a burst of healing. My approach is to maintain a consistently high level of healing, so that you're less likely to get into a situation when you need that burst in the first place. Also, with Warlock you get such good charge regeneration, that you will find that you swiftly get 50% charge back again - so if you do need a burst at some point, you're likely to have enough charge to give you that.

Your Chloro mantra is:

"My nukes are my heals... My nukes are my heals.... My nukes are my heals...."

Repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until you can think nothing else, young grasshopper - and you shall truly be a masterful Chloro. 

Withering Vines

Withering Vines creates an AoE heal for more than Vile Spores - but only heals targets within 7 metres of the mob you cast it on. You get the Withering Vines HoT and also a Lifegiving Veil heal from the first tick of the DoT.

Vile Spores creates a much wider radius AoE heal, for less than Withering Vines... and also heals the Synthesised Tank for far more than Withering Vines.

All in all...

* If you need to maintain high level of healing on the synthesised tank, then you should always use Vile Spores in preference to Withering Vines.

* If you need to AoE heal group/raid members further away from the mob, then you should always use Vile Spores in preference to Withering Vines.

* If there are several melee group/raid members taking damage from a mob - and you don't need to worry about the synthesised tank. Then Withering Vines will be a better heal.

Balancing toward DPS for Group Contribution

If you are healing extremely comfortably, you may want to improve your contribution to the group, by increasing your DPS. You can do this by choosing to use Stream of Reclamation more. Stream of Reclamation is a channeled spell but doesn't use up charge. It delivers a great deal of damage and the first tick will give a 90% Lifegiving Veil heal. At the same time, each tick increases the proc chance of Radiant Spores on that target. Nevertheless, you could cast 3 other healing spells in the time it takes to channel Stream of Reclamation... so you will lose some healing overall when using it.

So you gain a lot of extra damage but lose some of your healing. Use Stream of Reclamation only when you're healing the group very easily and can be confident that the healing you lose by using it, won't cause problems for keeping the team alive.

Also, if you're healing very comfortably, then you may want to stagger your usage of Nature's Corrosion enhanced Vile Spores a little more. Nature's Corrosion adds a 6 second DoT to the end of Vile Spores (and Ruin) which does 100% of the damage done by the nuke. The Vile Spores DoT will be over-written if you cast Vile Spores again. You'll always get the extra heal from the first tick... but you may not get the 2nd and 3rd ticks of the DoT. So some people like to try to leave the next Vile Spores as long as possible, so that you get more ticks of the Vile Spores DoT. This is quite advanced though... and you should make sure that you don't let your healing drop too much, just because you're waiting for a bit of DPS. Your prime goal is to heal - not to DPS.

Read rest of entry

Making Money via PVP Guide

In the current Open Beta, I leveled mainly by doing PVP. After I finally got my mount at 22, which is late compared to questers, I was constantly broke.

I then found out, that you can make money by spending Favor and selling what you buy. 

The Black Garden

Guardian/Defiant Name	Cost (Favor)	Sells for (Gold)	Silver/Favor
Vigilant Warden's Crest/Aender's Crest	994	25.76	2.59
Custodian's Baton/Declining Vigiliant's Scepter	994	23.42	2.36
Curator's Blazing Wand/Wanton Blaze	994	23.42	2.36
Vigilant Warden's Breastplate/Aender's Breastplate	612	11.25	1.84
Custodian's Coif/Declining Vigiliant's Coif	489	8.55	1.75
Watchman's Leggings/Last Gasp's Leggings	612	10.41	1.70
Curator's Mantle/Doomed Soul's Mantle	489	8.15	1.67
Watchman's Medallion/Last Gasp's Medallion	870	9.29	1.07

The Codex

Guardian/Defiant Name	Cost (Favor)	Sells for (Gold)	Silver/Favor
Tacit Arbiter's Wand/Lore Seeker's Scepter	489	13.62	2.79
Hushed Erudite Gloves/Arcanologist's Gloves	367	7.13	1.94
Mute Death's Bandoleer/Claimant's Bandoleer	367	6.24	1.70
Silent Vigil's Choker/Inquirer's Medallion	428	5.40	1.26

What Notoriety do I need to buy what?

Notoriety	Items that cost less than
Friendly	700
Decorated	1500*
Honored	5000
Revered	Everything

*Also, the tokens.

Missing Items

The Black Garden

Guardian/Defiant Name	Cost (Favor)	Sells for (Gold)	Silver/Favor
Custodian's Crest/Declining Vigiliant's Crest	2137	?	?
Gatekeeper's Knowledge/Decrepit Wardstone Fragment	10687	?	?
On Regulos, and his Domain/Forbidden Knowledge	2137	?	?
Overseer's Rage/Degenerate Wardstone Fragment	10687	?	?
The Black Garden Token	2500	?	?
Vigilant Warden's Vengeance/Aender's Guarantee	4275	?	?
Watchman's Authority/Last Gasp's Retribution	2137	?	?

The Codex

Guardian/Defiant Name	Cost (Favor)	Sells for (Gold)	Silver/Favor
Cavernous Nothing/Recaptured Knowledge	10687	?	?
Hushed Erudite Pantaloons/Arcanologist's Pantaloons	1243	?	?
Hushed Erudite Robe/Arcanologist's Robe	2672	?	?
Mute Death's Boots/Claimant's Boots	746	?	?
Mute Death's Shoulderpads/Claimant's Shoulderpads	2137	?	?
Silehnt Vigil's Great Helm/Inquirer's Helm	2137	?	?
Silent Vigil's Gauntlets/Inquirer's Gauntlets	746	?	?
Tacit Arbiter's Shoulderpads/Lore Seeker's Mantle	994	?	?
Tacti Arbiter's Mark/Lore Seeker's Medallion	1870	?	?
The Codex Token	2500	?	?
Whispered Silence/Words of War	10687	?	?

Read rest of entry