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Ten levels of RIFT: A guide to your first day in Telara
With two RIFT beta events under my belt, I was given the supreme honor of creating a guide to the first 10 levels of the game. Naturally, I fell apart under the stress, assumed the fetal position for a couple days while whimpering about "frame rates," and then was prodded into action by our editors. That's quite literally "prodded," mind you -- Massively purchased a pair of cattle prods last year at a police auction. It's going to be years until the scorch marks fade from my spine. The purpose of this guide is two-fold. First, we want to give anyone who's interested in RIFT but couldn't get into the beta a chance to vicariously experience RIFT's newbie path. Second, while RIFT is careful to hold your hand during your first steps into Telara, there are always a lot of things that can be easily missed while one is partaking in the wonders of a new virtual world. So this guide is here to share a few tips and pointers that beta testers may have missed. What are you waiting for? Roll up a new character by hitting the jump!
Death Knights and racial bonuses
Death Knights are in the unique position of being open to every race (Warriors can choose any race but Blood Elf). This means you will have a lot of options for trying to pick the best racial bonuses for your new DK; complicating the matter is the fact that DKs can both tank and DPS. Milkgas, of Anvilmar (US), recently wrote in with the opinion that Dwarves would be optimal for a tanking DK, due to their frost resistance (speculating that frost will be prevalent in Wrath). But let's go over the options (listing only the racials that seem relevant to DKs): Horde: Orc: Blood Fury would be handy for DPS, not so good for tanks; Hardiness, on the other hand, would be nice, if not essential, for a tank to have; and Axe Specialization is helpful, given that axes will be available for DKs to use as rune weapons (as well as swords and maces) Tauren: War Stomp is great for PvP. Endurance is probably the best overall tanking racial out of all the races. And Nature Resistance will probably be handy somewhere, though it's not a huge deal. Troll: Berserking is a useful, if occasional, boost. Forsaken: I still contend that Will of the Forsaken is overpowered. May certainly come in handy while tanking, and of course in PvP. Shadow Resistance, like Nature Resistance, is a marginal benefit. Blood Elf: It remains to be seen how the Mana Tap/Arcane Torrent system will work with DKs' Runic Power, but this has the potential to be very useful. Magic Resistance is, numerically, stronger than any other race's inherent resistance - you wind up with 25 points of resistance overall.
Insider Trader: When good patterns go green
Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Nothing interrupts a peaceful night of crafting like a lunatic guildmate ranting about learning a coveted new pattern, only to find that it's already green in skill level – nothing, that is, except that sickening feeling in your stomach as you consider what you'll do when your favorite patterns go green. Skilling up a profession can be a rollercoaster ride, if you don't hit the right patterns at the right time. (Of course, all the professions have those infamous "dead zones," when skilling up seems to be based on either unfathomable luck or unfathomable finances – or maybe both. But we'll cover dead zones in another installment.)Skilling up in a profession can happen when you create an item that's listed in green, yellow or orange in your tradeskill window. Items listed in grey will not give you any skill points for creating them; red listings anywhere means you don't have the required skill level. Just as it does with creatures you fight, pattern color indicates difficulty and skill-up potential. Green items raise your skill occasionally, yellows about half the time and oranges every single time. (The exception to orange skill-ups occurs in skinning, in which successfully skinning an orange creature does not guarantee a skill-up.) As a burgeoning crafter, your goal is to find patterns that are relatively easy to get the materials to make while providing a solid shot at skilling up. While orange patterns offer a guaranteed chance of gaining a skill point, the best bang for the buck is often a yellow pattern.And that's where things start getting murky ...
