Healing Reduction~

How do you kill a healer in Rift? At the moment either put a healing debuff on them, or gang up on them with a few other players. People all through the Rift forums have been either calling for a healing nerf, asking how to kill healers or both at the same time. For now though, until healers eventually do get nerfed we need to find a good way to kill them. The best way to do that would be make one of your roles solely for pvp. Most people, including my self are usually just hopping into warfronts in our PvE specs and finding ourselves in trouble pretty quickly. With the fact that we can have four roles at all times makes it easy to have an off pvp spec that we can just throw on even if we do only pvp once in a while. Because of the fact that healers are so hard to kill in pvp right now we need to be building our pvp roles around healing reduction. Each calling has a few ways to reduce the healing that the heal is doing and since you only really need one it shouldn't be that hard to spec around them.

This mini guide is going to be about which callings/souls have healing reductions, where, and how much does it reduce.

The warrior calling is one of the callings with the least amount of ways to reduce healing. They only have two souls that can do it, Champion and the pvp soul Vindicator.

•  Lingering Wounds: Requires 15 points in the Champion soul.

•  Trauma: Requires 15 points in the Vindicator soul.

The rogue calling has a few ways to reduce healing. They have three souls that can do it, Ranger, Nightblade and the pvp soul Infiltrator.

• Master Huntsman: Requires 25 points in the Ranger soul.

• Fell Blades: Requires 32 points in the Nightblade soul.

• Anathema: Requires 15 points spent in the Infiltrator soul.

The cleric calling is the other calling with the least amount of ways to reduce healing other then warrior. They only have two souls that can do it, Druid and the pvp soul Templar.

• Spiteful Spirit: Requires 44 points spent in to the Druid soul.

• Retribution: Requires 20 points spent in the Templar soul. 

The mage calling has the most ways to reduce healing. They have four souls that can do it, Chloromancer, Dominator, Necromancer and the pvp soul Archmage. The Dominator soul has multiple ways to reduce healing unlike the other souls.

• Blight: Requires 38 points spent in the Chloromancer soul.

• Void Shroud: Requires 18 points spent in the Dominator soul.

• Chastise: Requires 30 points spent in the Dominator soul.

• Draining Presence: Requires 51 points spent in the Dominator soul.

• Essence Link: Requires 10 points spent in the Necromancer soul.

• Withered Veins: Requires 15 points spent in the Archmage soul.

Those are all of the ways to reduce healing as of now. Hope this helps a little, I can't write any good guides until the beta comes back up so there wont be many posts over the next few days. Once it does though check back once in a while for new updates and new guides. Thanks for reading and leave any comments you have below. Also do you guys think healing should be nerfed or do you think it is fine where it's at? Leave your comments in the comment section below!

Miku~

Mouse-over macro and my thoughts on healing~

Ahh! Everyones dieing, BLAME THE HEALER! 
Sound familiar? Well from what I have seen in beta we should expect to see a lot more of this in the future. From what I have experienced as a tank(trying to do anything just to live) and from listening to my friends who have played healers in beta so far, healing in this game is tough. Before coming to Rift I played World of Warcraft for many years and spent most of my time on World of Warcraft healing. I am a healer at heart even though I will probably be playing a warrior at launch. I know that personally something I would never want to heal without is something called a Mouse-Over macro.


What is a Mouse-Over macro? A Mouse-Over macro is a macro where instead of having to (target someone, click a heal, target someone else, click another heal, target previous person, click another heal) you can set up a macro to remove the targeting steps while healing. This will make your life much easier when healing. All you have to do is have your mouse over the portrait of another character (or your own) and then click your heal and it will heal the person with that heal that you used that you had your cursor over top of. This can sound kind of confusing so I took a few screenshots, unfortunately I wasn't thinking that the game wouldn't take a screenshot of my mouse so I had to go into Paint and draw a bad cursor on each of the pictures.
Here are two pictures which will hopefully give you an idea of what I am talking about with mouse-over macros. 

 See how in the picture I have my badly drawn cursor over my characters portrait while I have the enemy targeted? If I did this and now clicked 5 I would heal myself without ever having to target myself.

In this picture I have my badly drawn cursor over my pets portrait while having the enemy targeted, now if I click 5, my heal it will heal my pet even though I don't have it targeted I just have my cursor over it. 


Because of this I don't have to waste time clicking and I can keep any boss or enemy I want targeted to either cast spells at or watch what they are casting so that I can react to what they are using against me.


How do I set it up? You set it up by unfortunately making a macro for each one of your heals. You set up a macro by typing /macro which will open up a menu with an option to create a new macro. You can leave the picture as a question mark and name the macros whatever you want. You will be leaving the picture as a question mark because the macro is set up so that it will show the picture of the heal you have the macro set up with. Here is an example of what it should look like and what you should be typing for each heal.

Sorry that the picture is kind of big, I wanted to make sure it was big enough for everyone to read the text. For my macros I set the name as nothing because I can clearly see by the pictures which heal I will be casting but some of you might want to name them just to keep track of them all. 
In the command box you should be typing.


#show (Name of the Heal)
stopcasting
cast @mouseover (Name of the Heal)


Then when you are done hit save and drag your new macro down onto your bars and you should have a working Mouse-Over cast for your healing spells =) They don't take very long to set up and they are very useful. When you don't have your cursor over top of anyones portraits you will just heal yourself just like if you were to use a heal with no one targeted or an enemy targeted.


I'm really looking forward to testing out healing in beta 7, especially in pvp. I made a build for myself that includes two self shields and lots of instant cast heals and heals over time so that I shouldn't have to be stationary for very long if ever. If I like healing enough I might make a cleric upon release instead of a warrior I'm not to sure yet, I love healing but I've been healing WoW raids since the start of BC and I'm thinking of trying something new with Rift so that I don't burn myself out playing something familiar to what I have been doing already for the past 4-5 years. Anyways I hope to see you all when beta 7 comes back up, for all who haven't heard yet beta 7 is supposed to be up February 15th to the 21st. The new level cap will be 42. 


Hope this helped, 


Miku~

Combat Parsing part 1~

I walked into the Realm of the Fae instance and was blown away at how amazing it looked. It was actually interesting, each boss hard their own mechanics which personally I was not expecting from the first bosses in the first instance of the game. The second time I walked in though I felt like something was missing, I had already learned of the encounters, gotten loot from the bosses, done the quests, so why would I run again? I knew what I was missing, a damage meter. Something to help me personally top my own best dps from one pull to the next.


I looked into the forums and I heard tons of posts of people who do and don't want damage meters. People who want and don't want addons. People who thought addons were aloud and people who thought addons weren't aloud. It was very hard to find a useful post about how to find out what my dps was. Eventually I came by a post of someone asking my very question and with my luck someone had replied with one brief sentence. Use Rift combat parser. Well, what is it? Where can I get it? How does it work? I have to say it wasn't easy to figure all of this out. I could find no step-by-step guide on how to make this work and because of it spent numerous amounts of time just trying to get the stupid thing to work. So for all who read this, here is my step-by-step guide on how to make this work.


1. Downloading the parser. I found the parser at http://www.riftjunkies.com/combat-parser/. It showed the features to the program and I thought it would just be a quick download, run, then I'd be playing with my new combat parser. If only I knew how wrong I was. First before you can download it though you have to register for the website. While this is annoying you should be used to it by now as almost anything you do online nowadays requires you to sign up or register for something before you can do anything. By my delight I didn't have to go confirm it on my email which is something I hate having to do whenever I sign up for anything.


2. When it's done downloading all you have to do is run the program and possibly have to do a small update. After that the parser should open up and be ready to use. You should see lots of options, boxes with check marks, etc. I'll get to those eventually but for now just go on to step 3.


3. Log on to Rift, when you are actually in the game type /combatlog
If you did it properly you should get some white text saying Combat Logging Enabled. It will create a Combatlog.txt file in your Rift folder which you will need to start your parsing. 


4. Go back to the parser now and either hit the button that says Start Parsing or go up to the menu bar, hit menu and then hit Set Log File. Go inside of your Rift folder and you should find CombatLog.txt and Set your parser to it.


6. If you were like me, I closed my Rift while I was doing all of this, so re-open Rift, if you still have Rift open then just ignore that. Now that your parser is all set up and ready to go in the future all you should have to do is whenever you log in to the game and you want to use the parser you will have to type in /combatlog every single time. If you don't the parser will not work. 


7. After that you can change your boxes around to have it show what you want it to show. Go attack something and have fun recording your data!


My next blog post will be combat parsing part 2, it actually has screenshots (Sorry my time was limited when writing this post) which will be about what each option does, the overlay, getting the advanced breakdown to see which move was hitting for the most etc.

I have finished the part two of combat parsing so I'll make a nice link here since they should be linked together. 
http://thisisnotarift.blogspot.com/2011/02/combat-parsing-part-2.html
I hope this helped some questions you may have had and I hope to see you in game!


Miku~








Links:
Rift Junkies website - http://www.riftjunkies.com/

Getting Started~

Read at your own rift! I want to create a blog where I can post on a regular basis about the online game Rift. This first post is just a post to get me started, let me test things and eventually get this blog off the ground. If you haven't played rift yet or want to check it out there will be a link in the bottom of my post to the site. For my getting started post it only makes sense to help people get started on Rift if they don't know how themselves.

At this moment Rift is currently in beta but is fairly easy to get into if you would like to try it out.

There seems to be three ways to get into beta, you can pre-order the game which will give you beta access in all of the remaining beta events, you can get a vip beta key from anyone willing to give you a key, or lastly and possibly the easiest way, you can just sign up for the beta on the website after creating an account. I had a friend sign up for the beta on the website and within ten minutes he had an email with a beta invite. 

I have had people ask me where they can download the client for the beta? After you have been invited to the bet, go to your account management page and there will be a link.

How long will the beta last? and will I get to keep my character when beta is over? 

Each beta seems to last about 4-5 days and from what I've heard there will be one more beta event before the head start launch (If you pre-order the game you can start seven days before people who didn't pre-order it. February 24th.) In a future post I will announce the date of the last beta when I have found it out and how long the beta event will last. As for now, the sixth beta event is from Friday Feb 4th till Monday Feb 7th. That could be changed though so check for updates on the dates, beta 5 was extended one more day and I can see beta 6 being extended an extra day or two seeing as there have been quite a few more bugs in beta 6 then beta 5. Many people have asked will I get to keep my character when beta is over, the answer is no. When the game launches and beta is over you will have to start over from scratch.

I hope this helped some questions you may have had and I hope to see you in game!

Miku~

Links: 

Rift Website - http://www.riftgame.com/en/