More Rogue Changes on PTS

Ailion posted more of the following changes that should be on the PTS already by now.

Tactician

• Necrotic Torrent, Infernal Torrent, Glacial Torrent: Damage has been reduced.
• Curative Torrent, Curative Beam: Healing has been increased.
• Restorative Bolt: Healing has been increased. Can now be cast on yourself.
• Torrent Primer: Now lasts 60s, up from 30s.
• Curative Engine, Restorative Engine, Necrotic Engine, Empyrean Engine: No longer on GCD. Now are toggled abilities.
• Empyrean Ray, Necrotic Ray, Curative Blast: Now removes stacks of Torrent Overload based on Combo Points.
• Empyrean Engine: Now also increases the damage and healing done by Cores by 20%.
• Power Core, Curative Core, Necrotic Core, Fortification Core: No longer restricted to setting at most 1 type of Core at a time.

Assassin

• Virulent Poison, Lethal Poison, Leeching Poison, Debilitating Poison, Enfeebling Poison: Base chance to trigger has been increased to 30%, up from 20%.
• Poison Malice: Cooldown reduced from 2 mins to 1 min.
• Debilitating Poison: Now also reduces the movement speed of affected enemies by 30%.
• Heartseeker: Now increases the damage of Assassin attacks by 5-25%, up from 4-20%.

Nightblade

• Hellfire Blades, Smoldering Blades, Fell Blades: Damage has been increased.
• Touch of Darkness: Function has been changed. For the next 6s, weapon ability attacks deal additional Death damage, drain 5 Energy or 5 Power or 3% of the enemy’s maximum mana. 1 min cooldown.

Bladedancer

• Blade Hustle: Increases the duration of Rhythmic abilities by 3-9s, up from 2-6s.
• Hack and Slash: Successful Critical Hits now increases all damage by 3-15%.
• Blade Tempo: Now increases all damage by 30% instead of only Physical damage.
• Strike Back: Now triggered when you deflect an attack.
• Reprisal: Now activated when you deflect an attack.
• Defensive Pose: Now also increases movement speed by 15%.
• T’Scain’s Bladedancer Crystal: The effect from the 4 piece bonus now lasts 24s, up from 21s.

Ranger

• The Dire Wolf now has a Charge ability.
• Ace Shot: Now takes 8% more damage from the Rogue, up from 6%.

Saboteur

• Charge Booster: Now increases the damage contribution from your weapon and attack power contribution to Blast Charge and Spike Charge by 4-20%, up from 2-10%.

Marksman

• Collateral Damage: Now increases the damage of single target ranged weapon attacks by 2-6%, up from 1-3%.
• Bull’s Eye: Now on a 1 min cooldown. Forces the next damaging Rogue ability to Critically Hit.
• Shoot to Kill: Effect is no longer reduced in PvP.

Rogue changes coming to the PTS

Ailion posted the following changes that will be on the PTS soon for Rogues.

I easily welcome the Assassin (especially!) and Nightblade changes. Bladedancer will be nice even though I personally do not touch it almost ever. Sad to see the decreased damage though in Tactician but we will have to see how it plays out and how much it ends up being in the end.

Tactician

• Necrotic Torrent, Infernal Torrent, Glacial Torrent: Damage has been reduced.
• Curative Torrent, Curative Beam: Healing has been increased.
• Restorative Bolt: Healing has been increased. Can now be cast on yourself.

Assassin

• Virulent Poison, Lethal Poison, Leeching Poison, Debilitating Poison, Enfeebling Poison: Base chance to trigger has been increased to 30%, up from 20%.
• Poison Malice: Cooldown reduced from 2 mins to 1 min.

Nightblade

• Hellfire Blades, Smoldering Blades, Fell Blades: Damage has been increased.

Bladedancer

• Blade Hustle: Increases the duration of Rhythmic abilities by 3-9s, up from 2-6s.
• Hack and Slash: Successful Critical Hits now increases all damage by 3-15%.

New Builds Posted

I posted 4 new builds for those interested in trying something different in PVP or about time learned to Bard just as long as it took me to not be lazy and write the guide.

PVP

• 48 Nightblade / 28 Riftstalker
• 40 Nightblade / 36 Riftstalker “PVP Tank”

Support

• 61 Bard / 10 Marksman / 5 Riftstalker

PVE

• 61 Assassin / 9 Marksman / 6 Ranger

RIFT 2.1 Hotfix #7 Rogue Fixes – 2/6/13

ASSASSIN

• Poison Mastery: Now increases weapon damage and attack power of the Rogue’s poison-coated weapons, and increases the chance to apply poison by 6-30% (up from 5-25%).
• Expose Weakness: Now increases Physical damage taken from the Rogue by up to the specified damage. No longer has a limit on the number of times this can occur. The increased Physical damage taken from the Rogue now scales even more with Attack Power.
• Serrated Blades and all weapon poisons can now critically hit.
• Physical Trauma: Increases the damage of your damage over time attacks by 10-20%, up from 5-10%.
• Puncture: The damage bonus from Physical Trauma now applies to the damage over time effect of Puncture.

BLADEDANCER

• Contra Tempo: Increases the weapon damage and attack power contribution to the Rogue’s offhand attacks by 7-35%, up from 5-25%.
• Twin Strike, Compound Attack: AoE radius increased to 7 meters, up from 5.

MARKSMAN

• Static Shock Munitions: Now increases damage dealt by 15%, up from 6%.
• Silver Tip Munitions: Increases damage taken from the Rogue by 5% per stack, up from 3%.
• Electrified Munitions, Static Shock Munitions: Can now critically hit.

NIGHTBLADE

• Ignited Weapons and all weapon enchantments can now critically hit.
• Ignited Weapons: Now causes the target to burn for 100-200% of your weapon damage over 4 seconds, up from 50-100%. Fixed a bug where damage was not being properly computed.
• Ebon Blades: Increases damage taken from the Rogue by 5% per stack, up from 3%.
• Weapon Flare, Fiery Chains: AoE radius increased to 7 meters, up from 5.
• Enkindle: Now increases the damage of Fiery Spike by 15-30%, up from 10-20%.
• Smoldering Blades: Fixed a bug where consuming 5 stacks of the Smoldering Blades effect was triggering the damage effect from the Warlock’s Neddra’s Torture.

RANGER

• Twin Shot: Damage increased.
• Concussive Blast: Now affects up to 5 targets, up from 3.
• Ace Shot: The debuff now causes the player’s pet to deal 40% more damage to the target, up from 25%.

1.11 Rogue DPS Specs

PVE Specs

51 Marksman / 10 Assassin / 5 Nightblade (Ranged, Higher DPS than 15 Ranger)
51 Marksman / 15 Ranger (Ranged)
51 Bladedancer / 10 Assassin / 5 Nightblade (Melee)
51 Nightblade / 10 Marksman / 5 Assassin (Melee)

PVP Specs

51 Assassin / 15 Nightblade / 0 Saboteur (Melee)
44 Marksman / 20 Bladedancer / 2 Nightblade (Ranged)
More coming soon?

My Conquest Review 2

If you have not read my first Conquest review, you should go ahead and read it.

Trion has had a little more time now to take care of the on-going issues and has even managed to fix the spawn camping. While this is great now, the matches are lasting insanely too long for me to enjoy it like I would want. How long are the matches normally lasting? 2 to 4 hours, yes, that long. People are even resorting to asking others to stop capturing points and lose on purpose so that we can earn our Marks of Conquest faster and get in another Conquest match again faster.

You soon then become to realize that Conquest is turning more into PVE and Zerg than it is just PVP and Zerg. Each faction is rolling from extractor to extractor while another faction is behind taking the one you just took or taking them over on the other side. With 12,000 kills to go through, a lot of the matches are barely going past having 3,000 people killed and no where in sight of any of the 3 factions taking over 60% of Stillmoor. They really need to lower the amount of total kills and/or somehow draw more PVP towards one another.

One way that Trion could engage more PVP would be to randomly spawn Collossi throughout the map while also buffing the Collossi’s health some depending on the amount of people in Conquest.

Another way could also be to increase the control rate of some or all of the extractors.

They could also add an area that needs to be controlled after a certain amount of time that would increase rewards or loot of something that all 3 factions could engage against and fight for.

I am sure there is a lot more they could do that I have not mentioned or thought of. I am sure none of these ideas would ever be considered, be it some, similar ideas or all of them. I will do 1 more final review on Conquest in another week or two once Trion seems to get everything tweaked more to their liking and the communities complaining on the forums/feedback.

My Conquest Review 1

This will be my first Conquest Review of either two or three more because of the amount of updates Conquest is receiving everyday so far because of the current problems and performance issues it is causing Rift overall.

Right now people are either constantly spawn camping 1 faction or being spawn camped by another faction while also receiving an insane amount of Prestige and Favor as each person races to hit Rank 50, obtain the weapons and gear as well as work towards getting the best in slot trinket and glove runes.

Overall I like the idea of Conquest and what it should have brought to the game and PVP but not what it is now.

I really do not get how Trion nor any of those who played it on the PTS and provided feedback did not think that allowing another faction to enter one factions base without any actual base protection or penalty would not result in spawn camping. Nearly every game has implementations on spawn camping either by providing that team with another spawn, there being an invisible wall and so forth many different things. Trion even does not allow you to enter the opposing teams spawn in Warfronts, so how did they forget to do the same for Conquest?

Please be rest assured that I am not “QQing” from what I just said, I participated in the spawn camping as nearly everyone else did to. If you did not, you either do not care to PVP, do not care about the gear/trinket/runes or just flat out lying. It was never an exploit or cheating, Trion had the last few days to disable Conquest and still has yet to nor did they rush in any fixes to stop the on-going issues towards this specific issue but still managed to fix other ones.

While I did participate in the spawn camping, I was already Rank 45 before anyone was doing this and learned of this. I hit Rank 45 just around the time they disabled the port to Zareph’s Return which I also was not aware of till after and then people started to spawn camp a lot. I was already on my way to becoming Shard First Rank 50 on Faeblight just as I earned Shard First Rank 8 for Rogue back on Faemist August of last year. It means absolutely nothing though to acquire this, seeing how theatrically people do not have to do much at all to gain prestige in Warfronts (and now Conquest) but it is still something I wanted to obtain first.

Update: My second Conquest Review is now up.