RIFT 1.8 has gone live and here are the key features of Update 1.8:
Features
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Infernal Dawn: The new 20-player Raid that challenges players with seven new boss encounters as they enter Mount Carcera to prevent the rise of Laethys and the release of Maelforge from his imprisonment beneath the volcano.
- Kick back on the shores and relax, or go on a wilderness adventure; the new Fishing and Survival skills let you do both! See more under FISHING AND SURVIVAL, listed below.
- Players and Guilds can have an easier time finding each other through the new
Guild Finder tool. See GUILD FINDER below for how to use it!
- New Leaderboards feature allows you to compare and compete against your friends, guildmates, and other players in a variety of categories. More under LEADERBOARDS, below.
- All-new appearances and animations for Druid Faerie pets, Beastmaster Primal Companions, and Ranger pets!
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Instant Adventure comes to Ember Isle; level 50 characters can now join the action immediately with the new Ember Isle queue available in the Instant Adventure menu.
- Achievements that are partially completed are now highlighted in the In-Progress Achievements list on the Achievement window.
Infernal Dawn: New 20-player raid
- Deep beneath Mount Carcera on Ember Isle, Laethys and Maelforge have joined forces to escape the ancient volcanic prison. It comes to the Ascended to fight back their efforts and prevent them from bringing fire and rage to Telara along with their followers.
- Infernal Dawn is a new Raid zone intended for 20 players who have gained some prior experience and spoils from battling Telara's threats in Hammerknell Fortress.
- Access to the deeper bosses of Infernal Dawn will be released in several stages following the 1.8 update to give raids time to learn and experience the different encounters over time.
See Forum Thread Here about the release.
- Even Hammerknell-geared characters will find valuable equipment obtained throughout the Infernal Dawn raid.
Fishing and Survival: new tradeskills
- Two new tradeskills are now available: Fishing and Survival, which deal with fishing equipment, catching fish, turning them into handy buff foods, and camping gear that provides the Rested buff.
- Either or both of these skills can be learned alongside your existing three tradeskills and will not take up one of those slots.
- See the new Fishing trainers in Sanctum or Meridian, or go talk to the introductory NPCs and trainers in Argent Glade or Kelari Refuge to get started!
- The enterprising Fisher will find various treasure, artifacts, or even companion pets in addition to food materials.
- An adventurous Survivalist can not only cook fish into delicious meals - that provide a variety of benefits - but also craft tents and bedrolls to bring some comfort to the outdoors.
Guild Finder
- To better assist the meeting of guilds looking for members and free agents looking for a guild to call home, the Guild Finder tool has been introduced in 1.8.
- Press Shift+G, or select Guild Finder from the Social menu, to pop open the Guild Finder for characters not in a guild.
- Choose from several criteria on your search for a good guild match such as guild size, roles needed, playstyle, and more!
- Contact guild recruiters directly from the tool; they'll receive a message if online or a mail if not currently available.
- Recruiters can also accept your invitation request if you happen to be offline, and you'll receive an in-game mail letting you know.
- For guilds, Senior Officers and above will have access to edit the guild's Recruitment tab by default.
- Access to the Recruitment tab and flagging of Recruiters are controlled via guild permissions.
- Guilds can set up their recruitment criteria and enter a description of their guild to control what appears in the Guild Finder.
- Guilds will only be listed in Guild Finder search results if they have checked the List In Guild Finder option on their Recruitment tab.
Leaderboards
- Characters can now compete and compare their activities via Leaderboards that track various stats and achievements in a wide variety of Ladders - PvE, PvP, Raiding, Crafting, and more!
- Characters will be placed in a League (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond) and Division for each of these Ladders. Compete on the Leaderboards within a Ladder to increase your score, gain a higher rank, and reach a higher League!
- On each Leaderboard, see where you're at among your Friends list, your Guildmates, the top 50 of your Wargroup, or Divisions that attempt to match your character up against similarly progressed characters.
- View Leaderboards via the Social menu button, or use the default hotkey ';'.
- Leaderboard positions are tracked and can be shown for the current week, the previous week, and the best overall week (historic high).
- Your character's League is refreshed daily. In cases of extended absence, your character can rise or drop at most one League, as it will be updated on your next login.
- At the release of 1.8, Leaderboards will be using some recent historic data, but expect to see quite a bit of shuffling as the first week of live activity is shown.
- For some of the more involved boards, mousing over the Leaderboard's icon will show a tooltip with details on what activities count toward scores.
- The Leaderboard for Expert Darkening Deeps is temporarily disabled due to a timing issue. We are working on a fix and will re-enable the Leaderboard as soon as it's ready!
General
- We've changed how quests that grant rewards through the diamond-shaped treasure icon (most noticeable when completing dungeons) are queued before you elect to obtain the reward. These now have a maximum limit on how many can be pending before the oldest outstanding rewards are lost.
- Starting with 1.8, cash and experience-only rewards will be granted automatically at quest completion. You'll still need to manually redeem the ones that require you to select a reward.
- You will be notified when approaching the cap of pending rewards from these types of quests. You'll always have access to the most recent ones gained, but the oldest ones in the list will be forfeited when you exceed the cap.
- A new equipment slot for crafted Seal items is now available. Recipes to create Seals are available beginning around level 40/skill level 225 for all production crafting skills with the exception of Runecrafting, and can be found on various crafting recipe merchants.
- New Chronicle daily quests are now offered. These can be picked up at Raj Tahleed in Meridian or Abbess Katia in Sanctum.
- Traveling between Porticulums within the same zone now has a cost of 1 gold for Stillmoor, Shimmersand, Iron Pine Peak, Moonshade Highlands, Droughtlands, Stonefield, and Gloamwood.
- The Treasure UI now displays on the right side of the screen by default, beneath the Rift progress meter.
- Fixed an issue causing the option to never auto-flag PvP to occasionally be ignored when attacking neutral but opposite-faction NPCs.
Nimble mounts (90% speed increase) no longer require you to wait until level 30 to purchase them. They're now available for 25 platinum at level 25.
- Players can no longer un-equip their weapons while Mind Controlled. I'm afraid we can't let you do that, Ascended. :>
- Added some variety to loading screens for higher level characters loading into Meridian and Sanctum.
- Daily and Weekly quests on offer should no longer change after a shard-only restart.
- Fixed a rare bug that could leave characters locked after transferring shards.
For more details:
RIFT GameZone
