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~

Changes to the site~

Over the next couple of days I will be spending most of my time doing changes to the blog to spice it up a bit, it has gotten more popular then I would have thought in such a short time and is looking a little too bland since I do plan to keep putting up guides and more. Thank you all for reading the blog posts and I hope you will keep checking back in the future for when I release more in-depth, screenshot filled guides. For now though I can't get any screenshots until beta is back up and I don't want to be releasing any lazy guides with little to no actual useful information. So again thank you all for reading my guides and I hope you keep checking back for more future updates. 


If you don't like how it looks leave a comment in this post as to what you don't like about it so that maybe I can make it appeal to more people =)


Miku~


Side note~ I added a way to contact me in my profile. I also want to say sorry to all of those people who were viewing the site as I was making my changes.

Callings? Trees? Souls? Branches? Roots? Builds?

When I first heard about this game having 9 soul trees for each class I was stunned. The first thing that came to my mind was, "I must play this game.", my second thought was "They are going to have a hell of a time balancing the classes." Anyways I came to the Rift forums and eventually found a soul calculator and started making builds before even playing the game. At first I was a little overwhelmed, what calling should I play? what souls does each calling have? what does each soul do best? Ahh! That's what I want to help people with. Especially with open beta coming up in a few days when better to make a post about classes/souls and how to make your own build.


First there are 4 callings, Warrior, Rogue, Cleric, and Mage. These are pretty generic and if you have ever played an mmo before you should know what each calling is generally like and good for. While the callings are generic the souls aren't. Each class has 9 soul trees, while each class has 9 soul trees, only 3 can be used at the same time. You can swap them out anytime at a trainer by reseting your roles. (Your roles are your 3 soul trees you have picked.) You can purchase multiple roles to equip at anytime as long as you are not in combat but you may only have one role equipped at a time. (3 trees = 1 role.) Now each tree has branches and roots. You are probably confused right about now, because when I first looked at the game I was like "whaaat????" but once you see it, it's really not that bad. In each tree you have branches and roots. You spend points you get from leveling up on the branches (for example +1% chance to critical hit when attacking.) when you spend enough points on the branches you will get root skills. The bigger you make your tree the bigger the roots get to support the tree. Root skills are skills that you get that are based off of the tree you put your points into.


Now you are probably more confused then when you came here right? That's why I'll be explaining the classes/the souls and how to make a decent role (With screenshots!) using the soul calculator.


When leveling through the starting zone you will eventually get to pick your three starting trees. You can pick from any of the trees and once you have picked them you cannot unlock the other 6 until later in the game. 5 can be unlocked by doing soul quests in your main cities once you hit level 13 or higher and the last one through pvp. Once you have more souls, you can change your tree's around in your role by going to your calling's trainer and selecting reset my role.


In my guide I wont be explaining the PVP soul that each class gets, eventually I will make a PVP post and will explain about them then but for now they can't be gained until later on by doing PVP (getting enough favor to buy the soul.) and even so, you can't put points in the soul past the first row until you get level 50 and do more PVP.


For each soul I will list if it is either a defensive soul, offensive soul, support soul or a healing soul.


The warrior class souls: Offensive/Defensive
Beastmaster - Offensive Soul, Uses a pet and pet based skills.
Champion - Offensive Soul, Uses Two-Handed weapons.
Paladin - Defensive Soul, Uses shields and Life based attacks.
Paragon - Offensive Soul, Uses 2, One-Handed weapons.
Reaver - Defensive Soul, Uses Death Based attacks.
Riftblade - Offensive Soul, Uses elemental skills, they have a decent amount of ranged and melee skills.
Void Knight - Defensive Soul, Uses Pacts, strong against magic.
Warlord - Defensive Soul, Uses buffs and support based skills to help the group.


The rogue class souls: Offensive/Defensive/Support
Assassin - Offensive Soul, Uses poisons.
Bard - Support Soul, Uses sound to buff the group, heal the group and deal damage at the same time.
Bladedancer - Offensive Soul, Uses Rhythmic actions to buff themselves.
Marksman - Offensive Soul, Uses ranged attacks.
Nightblade - Offensive Soul, Uses fire and death attacks.
Ranger - Offensive Soul, Uses a pet and ranged based attacks.
Riftstalker - Defensive Soul, Uses plane shifts to catch enemies off guard.
Saboteur - Offensive Soul, Uses bombs and explosions while attacking.


The mage class souls: Offensive/Support/Healing
Archon - Support Soul, Uses buffs and debuffs to strengthen the group and weaken enemies.
Choloromancer - Healing Soul, Uses healing and life based abilities to heal the group while attacking.
Dominator - Support Soul, Uses debuffs to control fights and weaken enemies.
Elemental Summoner - Offensive Soul, Uses different elemental pets.
Necromancer - Offensive Soul, Uses death damage and a skeletal pet.
Pyromancer - Offensive Soul, Uses fire spells.
Stormcaller - Offensive Soul, Uses air and water spells.
Warlock - Offensive Soul, Uses death spells to deal damage to enemies while healing yourself.


The cleric class souls: Offensive/Defensive/Healing
Cabalist - Offensive Soul, Uses death spells.
Druid - Offensive Soul, Uses life damage and pets. Has ranged,melee and healing based skills.
Inquisitor - Offensive Soul, Uses both life and death spells.
Justicar - Defensive Soul, Uses a shield and life based attacks.
Purifier - Healing Soul, Uses shields to protect others and long casting heal spells.
Sentinel - Healing Soul, Uses life based attacks and uses big heals to heal multiple people.
Shaman - Offensive Soul, Uses melee based attacks.
Warden - Healing Soul, Uses water based attacks and healing spells that heal people over time.


*Phew* That should give you an idea as to which callings and which souls do what, but how do we use this information to make a build for you to use? Open up zam's soul calculator. http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html From there pick the calling that you wish to use. For this guide purpose I will be clicking rogue. You should then have 3 tree's and 3 little boxes. Click one of the boxes and now is where the fun begins. What soul should we pick first? A good option when making any build is to almost always pick your three souls with, a main soul in mind, a soul to mix together with the main soul, and a soul to dump a few points into and get a few extra nice bonuses. For now just choose your main soul though, the one you want to play and the one you want to base everything else around. For the guide I am going to pick Assassin.

From there whenever you put points into your branches into certain skills, you will get root abilities based off of the number of points you have spent on the branches of that soul. See how each root has a number on it? If it has a number 2 on it then it requires 2 points to be spent into the branches of that soul to get that skill. Simple right? 


Now what should we pick? Well we picked Assassin which is an offensive soul so we should be getting offensive abilities. When choosing talents look at your roots and see which ability is and does. Try to think about which moves you will be using most often and pick your branches based off of that. Also look to see if you can find any branches/roots that work together.

There, you have spent 26 points into the Assassin tree and are focused around poisons and critical hits. You can tell what level you need to be up in the top corner for this to work.

Now we should decide how far you want to go into this tree. Each tree has an added up number of 51 points that can be spent into each branch. Most of the time it is not beneficial to put all 51 points into the tree because you are wasting points that would be more helpful spent into another tree. Right now the only other roots we will get that work with poisons or critical hits are at 38 points and 51 points. Lets try to get the 38 point root but ignore the 51 point one. Now you need to pick 12 more points to put into your branches, we picked all of the stuff that had to deal with critical hits and poisons so now try to take abilities that will help those out as well. For example we could put 2 points into getting 4% more physical damage. That will make you do even more damage when you do critical hit. Or 15% more damage when attacking from behind with Savage strike and Final blow, two of your main roots that you will be using to do attacks with.


Once you have spent your points now we have to pick a second soul. Try to find a soul that also has a lot of critical hit branches/roots or poisons branches/roots to try to merge the two. A while back I had someone helped me to find out that branches DO stack. If you have one branch that says 5% more crit and another one in another tree that says 5% more crit also, that is 10% crit.


For this guide I picked Nightblade. As you can tell after compairing them all most souls don't mix very well together. Nightblade has some crit talents but also has some talents that increase non-physcial damage. Your poisons are non-physical damage since they deal water damage. I spent about 22 points into Nightblade branches getting the ones that seemed to increase or help my Assassin abilities but also ones that would be increasing the damage of some of my new Nightblade abilities that I was going to be using along side my assassin moves. 


That left me at level 45, but we still have a 3rd soul tree. We can only get to level 50, so we dont have many points left to spend. Some builds will be able to mix 3 soul trees together really well while others may have a hard time mixing a 3rd soul tree in. Since we only have about 6 points left you should look for one tree that has a branch with 5 points in the first row that are going to help in some way. For this guide I picked ranger. It will not only give you a pet to increase your damage and help you while leveling but it has a first row branch where you can increase your critical hit chance by 5%. Now we have 1 point to spend where ever. 


At this point you can really pick anything. I picked foul play in the assassin tree because it never hurts to be able to stun someone or something for 4 seconds. Here is a screenshot of what my build looked like when I finished!

There you go! Hopefully this guide can help all of you guys make your own interesting builds that you love to play and hopefully there will be less "cookie-cutter" builds out there if everyone is off making their own! Remember that you are able to purchase 4 roles. You dont have to have that many at the start, for now I'd sugguest just making one good one that you really like, but eventually you will probably have to have 4 separate roles so don't be afraid to try new things out and have fun with making your builds, if you aren't sure if something will work or not go test it! You can always pay to have your role/roles reset by going to your calling's trainer.


You can also get the link to your build so that you can save it for later by clicking link to this build.


Hopefully this helps some people, especially those people with Riftdrawls. Go make some builds and have fun with it. Beta is still six days away, ugh, beta 7 will be starting up February 15th and remember everyone it will be open beta which means we may see tons of people logging on just to try the game or just to complain or bug people. It might be a good experience but it could also be a bad one so just watch out and possibly ignore your chat until launch!

Miku~

Short post about mounts~

Mounts! Mounts! and more Mounts! Everyone wants to run faster, get to quests and back, get from rift to rift as soon as you can, but where can you get them? when? for how much? and how fast?

The first mounts you can get used to be level 20, but with the recent beta they removed the level requirement and you can now get a mount at any level as long as you have enough money. How much money do the mounts cost? (This is a picture of the mount vendor in the main city Meridian for the defiant side. The mount cost the same for both defiants and guardians though.)

The mounts cost 2 plat, 50 gold for the one that requires no level and is 60% speed, 35 plat for the 90% speed one and 125 plat for the 110% speed one.

What do the %'s mean? The cheaper, slower mounts are 60% faster running speed while on the mount, at level 40 you can get 90% speed mounts in your main cities and at level 50 you can get mounts that are 110% faster running speed.

 

Lastly, where can you get them? Well, they aren't far from the starting zone, they are just a few quest hubs away. The guardian's mount vendor is here, just south of the Argent Glade

The Defiant's mount vendor is here ~

There is also mount vendors in each main city.


Also as a side note, when pre-ordering the collectors edition, on the website it says that it comes with a mount that can be used at level 20, ever since the change towards mounts you can now use that at any level even though on the website it still says that it can be used at level 20.


Hopefully that helps with any mount questions you may have had!

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 2~

Since beta Rift Junkies has released a pretty much brand new version of the combat parser. Because of this I'm re-writing this guide with the new version of the parser. Hope it helps!


The new version of the combat parser, looks better and is way easier to use.
First you have your settings tab.

From here you can turn the overlay on, which is explained more later in the guide. You can hit start parsing which you only need to do once every time you turn on the program. And last there is the new session button. The new session button needs to be pushed whenever you want to reset the data. For instance when you start an instance you don't want to have all of the data from leveling and killing random monsters, you just want it to show the data from and during the instance run.

After that you have the Encounter Stats tab,

I did a water rift so that you guys could see what the encounter tab looks like and with a few different people not just myself. As you can see you can select each individual encounter and look at all of the different information that you collected during that encounter.

After that you have the Session Stats tab,

The Session Stats tab will show you all of the information you have collected since the point where you pushed New Session in the settings tab. It has all of the same information that the Encounter Stats tab has except the Session Stats tab will add it all to give you information over a certain amount of time instead of for each fight.

If you look at the very top of the combat parser you should see Menu and Advanced tabs also. Menu is your generic menu but Advanced has three options that you might want to look at. Get Damage Breakdown, Get Damage Type Breakdown and Get Healing Breakdown. When selected they will open up a pie chart showing you information on your hardest hitting abilities, etc. (In the picture I'm using a picture from the old parser because it hasn't changed.)

All of this information from the combat parser is great but you probably don't want to have to minimize your game to look at stats after each pull or spend 15-20 minutes after the instance scrolling through the logs to see how much damage you did on what bosses. Thats what the overlay is for, unfortunately though it only seems to work with windowed or windowed full screen settings at the moment so if you are a full screen player like me :'( you will have to change your window mode settings in Rift when you want to use the program. It works great though and I love it. Just turn overlay on and this is what it should look like in game. (Again another old picture because it has barely changed though it has changed a little. It now shows damage done and dps at the same time.)

Hopefully that will help you with anything you could have wanted to know about the combat parser! Now I am off to fix up other parts of my older guides to make them more current with the changes since beta.

See you in game!

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/