Rift Strats Says Goodbye

As of today, Rift Strats is no longer being maintained.  The site will remain online for the foreseeable future, but it will not be receiving any more updates.

The two main writers have decided to move on to other games, but we would like to thank you tremendously for all of your support over the past year.  We've had a blast writing these guides and we hope they've helped you and your guild out along the way.  The progression rankings portion of the site will still continue to be updated for the remainder of ID, but only until the next 20 man comes out.  If anyone would like to carry on the torch for quality Rift raiding guides, you have our full permission to copy all of these guides to your site as you see fit.

To Trion: thank you for the great game, we've had a blast playing it but all things come and go.  And to everyone: thank you again for your support, and we wish you the best in your future Rift endeavors!

(For those of you who are interested in Diablo, please check out my stream, which goes live tonight at 3 AM EDT!)

Maklamos the Scryer & Rusila Dreadblade

Maklamos the Scryer & Rusila Dreadblade guides have both been released for early access.

Rift Strats Presents: Progression Rankings!

We're happy to announce that we have just finished developing our new web site for progression rankings.  Please take a look here!

The site has all that you're familiar with in Rift progression sites and hopefully a bit nicer of a design to it.  The site is updated with new data at least once a day, but we'll be trying to update it as often as possible during ID progression.

First Set of ID Guides Up!

Guides for both Ituziel and Warboss Drak are now up.

Also, please check back here for a potential announcement in the next day or two.

Infernal Dawn

Update #2: Bumped the release date back another week based on the info given by Trion.  Remember that we do not know exactly which hour ID will be released, we are just simply basing our predictions on the times that HK opened.

Update #1: It appears that Infernal Dawn will actually be released on Wednesday, April 11th -- not April 4th as we originally predicted.

At least that is the planned day for patch 1.8.  It's entirely possible that they could deploy the patch on Wednesday and then wait for Friday or Saturday to actually open the instance.  Personally, I think that would be wise, to give people a day or two to adjust to the patch changes and make sure everything is stable, but that's just pure speculation/wishful thinking.  If it means anything, Hammerknell was released on a Wednesday.

This is the second major raid zone that Rift Strats hopes to support, and I wanted to give everyone a rough idea of how we plan on releasing strategy guides.

Being fairly hardcore progression raiders ourselves, there is a balance we have to find between releasing information too soon and too late.  Guilds that don't consider themselves very hardcore are usually eager to just get the information as quickly as possible to maximize their progression with what little time they have available to dedicate to it.  And on the other hand, progression-oriented guilds usually feel offended in someway when the strategy they just worked so hard to develop on their own is released openly to the public.  I completely understand and empathize with both point of views.

With that in mind, our current plan for releasing ID strategy guides is this: We will release a guide for an encounter once either 5 guilds have downed it, or it has been 7 days since the first recorded kill.  If someone else decides to release information before that (on the official forums, their guild web site, YouTube, etc.) we will, of course, have to release our guide ahead of schedule as well.

At least the first two encounters will be released free of charge, but we do expect to have a few early access guides somewhere along the progression path.  Which encounters are released for an early access fee will mostly depend on their difficulty (or the time it took to down the encounter).  Hopefully people understand why we choose to restrict some guides to early access.  Rift Strats doesn't use advertisements, so it's the only way to support the site costs and to encourage the writers to continue producing quality material.  $5 for an entire guild to access it (less than 25 cents per person) is perfectly reasonable and modest in my opinion.

Edit: I've had several people email me asking how to acquire early access for ID guides (probably people that weren't around for early HK days).  The early access guides won't be made available until after the boss has been killed on live servers, and even then it may take a couple of days for us to write and publish a guide.  Remember that at least the first two encounters will be released for free and adhere to the "5 guilds or 7 days" policy, after that just check the site daily for updates.

If a new early access guide has been added you will see a news post and an entire new page for it, along with a method to purchase access via PayPal.  Please do not use the PayPal donate link for early access guides.  Donations, while greatly appreciated, are entirely separate from early access guides.  If you would like to be notified via email when a new page is posted, I recommend using feedmyinbox.com and entering www.riftstrats.com/feed for your feed URL.

If you haven't already, be sure you are preparing yourself with a fire resist core for ID.  Please note that I am only familiar enough with the mage class to provide accurate stat weights for it.  Stat weights for clerics, warriors, and rogues, are all just my best guess.  If you have more accurate stat weights to use please reply to this post and I will update the links.

Mage Fire Resist Planar Essences
Cleric Fire Resist Planar Essences
Rogue Fire Resist Planar Essences
Warrior Fire Resist Planar Essences

All of these weights assume people reach the 45% soft crit cap in raids, and again, everything but mage is just my best guess.  There will be a +20 fire resist planar focus enchant next patch to use these with (30k planarite and 60 ISS).  The enchant can currently be used on the water resist planar focus, but that may be a bug.  We don't know yet how useful earth resist will be, but it's probably safe to assume it will be similar to death resist in Hammerknell (minus the mage tank probably).  The above links can be used to see earth resist by just changing one of the filters and one of the stat weights.

And finally, a quick shameless plug for our guild.  Voodoo is still looking to pick up 1-2 mages and 1 rogue for Infernal Dawn progression.  An ideal applicant would have 300+ PA levels, a decent amount of Hammerknell gear, and be able to meet the raid times and other requirements listed on our recruitment thread.  Recruitment is difficult right now due to so many people feeling complacent since they're 11/11, but rest assured that this will change just a week or two into ID.

Good luck to everyone in Infernal Dawn!

-- Veev

Rise of the Phoenix

Very brief (temporary) strategy write-ups have been released for the bosses of Rise of the Phoenix.  We will be updating these later to be a bit more polished and comprehensive.

Dec 3rd update: Akylios has been made available for public access and all of the RotP guides have been updated.  Thanks for your patience.

Lord Jornaru and Akylios

- Inwar Darktide has been released for public access
- Lord Jornaru and Akylios has been released for early access

Our Lord Jornaru and Akylios guide will be made available for public access either on December 1st or once 20 guilds have downed the encounter (whichever comes first).

Inquisitor Garau & Inwar Darktide

Several guide updates today:

- Grugonim has been released for public access
- Inquisitor Garau has been released for public access
- Inwar Darktide has been released for early access

We have also released a short teaser video for Akylios:

Estrode & Grugonim

Lots of updates today!

- Our King Molinar and Prince Dollin guide has been released for public access
- Our Estrode guide has been released for public access
- And our Grugonim guide has been released for early access

And the maintenance on our web site is now complete.  If you made any posts in the past few days, they were more than likely lost.  We apologize for this, and it should never happen again.  We moved our domain registration and web hosting to a more reliable provider, so there should not be any more pages that fail to load, or are just slow to do so.

King Molinar and Prince Dollin

Our King Molinar and Prince Dollin guide has been released for early access.

And we have now finished uploading videos for all of the current Hammerknell bosses.  Expect these to be added in a more timely fashion in the future.