T1 gearing in the open world (4.2)

Today, Hepatitis@Greybriar has lovingly crafted a guide for how to get T1 geared purely through open world (and a little bit of dungeon) content.  This is a good way to gear up solo, and make the most of your power.  Read on!

YOU TOO can be a decked out T1 player without requiring much skill or talent. All you need to do is grind, grind, grind. You’ll probably need to buy a few Individual Reward Charges as well, but that depends on how quickly you burn through them. So, lets get started, method by method.

NOTE: This does NOT include any upgrades.

CRAFTING (Helm, Ranged)

Your helm and ranged weapon BiS items are found through crafting. You can either buy the mats or run Crafting Rifts (Crifts) for them. If you have an alt that can make crafting rift lures run your alt through the crifts and use their IRCs on the Celestial Motes/Matrix drops. Save your main’s IRC for other things. I won’t get into specifics about the crafting materials other than to say you’ll need 8 Celestial Matrices for the initial pieces of gear and 6 for the first step.

ETERNAL WEAPON

The moment you hit 70 find the guy outside Alittu and start yourself on the chain. It will take an exceptionally long time to go through all the steps. Fortunately, only the last two steps require any raiding. Here is the official thread related to eternal weapons and upgrades: http://forums.riftgame.com/general-discussions/public-test-shard/493123-official-eternal-weapon-quest-chain.html

Your Eternal weapon will be a 2H Weapon for all classes, except for Rogues. Rogues will need to find an offhand until your Mainhand Eternal reaches Eternal quality.  Warriors and Clerics will also require a 1H + Shield for tanking until their 2H Weapon reaches eternal quality.  When the Warrior and Cleric 2Hs reach eternal quality, they are also awarded with an Eternal sword and an Eternal Shield.

QUEEN’S FOCUS (Seal)

Your Seal comes from Queen’s Focus (QF). You’ll need 60 tokens to buy and upgrade the seal you get from here. Fortunately, this is permanently open now and won’t take you 60 runs if you do the quest whenever you have the chance. However, after the first couple you’ll need to start using your precious IRCs or wait until next week.

VOSTIGAR PEAKS RAID RIFTS (Essences)
The best essences you’re going to find drop from the three raid rifts in Vostigar Peaks. Run these until you’re out of IRC. Buy more IRC, run more of these. Maybe get a couple Crit Power Essences but probably not. Try to only cry a little. Sob uncontrollably. Pull yourself together and buy more IRCs to run more RRs.

RAID RIFT ESSENCES (Upgrades)

Before you start spending your Captured Intel on gear you need to put everything you have into upgrading the essences you’ll be getting (With a little luck anyway, the droprate is about 5%) from the new raid rifts. Getting to Crit Power cap is one of, if not the most important things to do to your gear to improve your DPS. As a note, your CP target for this expansion is 8540, as you’ll hit the actual cap of 9074 with a Gedlo Curry Pot and Sigil (Your guild IS running with Sigils, right?).

VOSTIGAR PEAKS TRINKET (Trinket)

Your BiS trinket is also for Vostigar Peaks but also requires Glorified reputation and 20,000 Intel to buy, 40,000 to upgrade. This should be the first actual item you focus on but not the first thing you spend Intel on (Essences being the first).

There are other ways to get T1 gear that you really should be doing, such as killing golems and trying actual T1 raid content.  Let’s take a look at the other world methods.

VOSTIGAR PEAKS GEAR BOXES (Shoulders, Chest, Gloves, Belt, Legs, Feet)

If you absolutely can’t get T1 gear the regular way or by farming golems for marks, each one of these boxes cost 8,000 Intel. Try to consider this gear a filler method for acquiring T1 gear if you simply can’t get a specific piece to drop for you (and have bought everything else you need). It will cost you 48,000 Intel to complete your T1 gear if you have nothing. While the upgraded T1 gear is superior to anything other than eternal gear it’s still partitioned by five separate affixes with stats based between pure DPS and pure tank. The breakout is as follows:

  • “of the Preserver” – Lowest DPS stats, highest END (tank focus)
  • “of the Hero” – Low DPS stats, moderate END (tank focus)
  • “of the Vindicator” – Moderate dps stats, low END
  • “of the Conqueror” – Higher dps stats, lower END (higher secondary stats than Vindicator)
  • “of the Overlord” – Highest dps stats, lowest END

NOTE ON INTEL

You’re going to be spending a lot of time grinding intel. After you’re done with the story chains you’ll be doing your dailies. You’ll need those for your Glorified reputation. While you’re doing that, be sure you shard hop to pick up any events that are going on (as well as the rare/colossal daily mobs that are close, but don’t go out of your way or it’s a time loss). This is effectively the fastest way to grind out Intel. Alternatively, if you get a very fast group, spamming RR’s can be about as fast, but you’ll burn out of your IR charges. Either way, this will take a lot of time.

PATRON SPARKLES (Random)

Before you get too crazy with collecting loot pick up your patron sparkle quest so once you get your 500 sparkles from doing all the stuff you have to do for your other gear, you’ll get a free random T1 piece. What’s that? You’re not a patron? Well you only have to be patron to pick up the quest and turn it in. Patron is not required to collect sparkles.

Now we could go over the benefits of maintaining patron for all the other related actions, increased rep, increased tokens, etc. but that could be an entirely new post… or maybe just a link: http://www.trionworlds.com/rift/en/store/#become-patron

PLANAR DEFENSE FORCE (Focus, Synergy Crystal)

Your current BiS Focus and Synergy Crystal can be purchased from the Planar Defense Force for Celestial Remnants. These should probably be the simplest items to obtain. There’s a little rep involved but you’ll cap this one fairly fast if you’re doing any of the other stuff.

EVERYWHERE ELSE (Fragments)

You’ll get these through doing general “stuff”. Outside of raiding your primary source of quality fragments will be through the reputation boxes. Your best price per opportunity will be the mid-grade boxes. More than likely, you will be missing your T1 Death and T2 Fire Crit Power fragments.

Remember that the max power of a fragment is reduced with each higher tier. You should be replacing your higher tiered Crit Power fragments once you reach the Crit Power soft cap of 40% or 9074.

Remember to account for raid buffs for Crit Power, so you should have a bit less, 8540ish.

Crit Power Fragments by Tier:

  • T1 – Death
  • T2 – Fire
  • T3 – Water
  • T4 – Air
  • T5 – Earth
  • T6 – Life

RAIDING REQUIRED (Cape, Neck, Rings, Earrings)

The only six pieces you can’t acquire outside of a T1 raid are your cape, neck, rings and earrings. The rings and earrings are fairly easy to pick up. Just run a few “Golem and TD Mini” runs and they’ll drop for you. You might get lucky with a Crit Power fragment or two here as well. Just about any schlub can luck their way into one of these and get carried in a pinch. You don’t even have to be good. (Obviously it would be nice if you were good and knew how to play your role well, but people can squeak by since it’s readily farmable.)

For your cape and neck you need to do Normal Mode Tartaric Depths bosses, Beligosh and Malannon respectively. More than likely, Fae Yule (or maybe Autumn Harvest) will have a T1 clone neckpiece if you can wait until December. If not, all that snazzy gear you ground out from doing everything mentioned above should get you to the point where you can be an effective raider. In the meantime, pick up your crafted neck and cloak until you get lucky with something else.

Good luck and happy grinding!

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