Yeah, I still can’t figure out exactly how that works. There’s a few big threads about it on the official boards, but nobody seems to agree on anything besides the fact that you can only earn them during the major invasions, but I’ve done several of those without getting any purple shards.
Razgon
1642
They drop if you fight hard mobs during a rift…probably if you have a high score regarding that particular mob.
You’d think, but it doesn’t always end up that way. I suspect you only have a chance to get a purple shard for participating.
Teiman
1644
I have that problem too.
I managed to get a few in Gloomkeep (or whatever is called) then foolishly wasted then. And since then, nothing, I seems to get a lot of the less quality stones, but not the high levels.
And since I have outleveled the zones, I am now in new zones with yet another new type of highlevel sourcestones. So we have zero stones in more than one type… and probably this will happends again in the next zones.
Just for reference, I am bard, so I heal a lot in rifts, and do decent damage, and sometimes I debuff the boss. Still, I only play mostly the weekends, so maybe Is lack of “dedication”?, maybe you have to practically live inside the game, or something.
I am wondering if something is bugged with them at the moment. Yesterday in Freemarch I helped close out 3 major rifts, on one I was part of stopping 20 of the required 30 invasions, plus 2 rifts and the end boss, and did not get a sourceshard.
DeepT
1646
I seem to have an XP problem. I did almost every quest in freemarch, and as I was on the way to stonefield I found some message that opened up some epic quests. One to close death rifts in freemarch and another that had several steps (all completed) with the last step to kill some NPC (Iron king or something, I can’t remember) with no hint as to where this individual is.
Anyway I go to stonefield and am doing all the quests there. I get to the falls area with the teleport back to the main city (they need more of these) do a few quests then proceed to move farther down the road for more quests. Here is where I run into trouble. All the mobs are now +1 level to me. Just a little bit further on, they are +2 levels to me.
Somehow I have fallen behind. Fighting a group of +1 mobs is chancy at best. What did I not do to miss an apparently large block of xp. Like a full level’s worth, perhaps 2 levels worth?
Aonshix
1647
Have you done the quests in Iron Tomb and the Deepstrike Mines? There might be a level and a half in all those quests plus the dungeon runs. You don’t have to worry about missing the Iron King, (who was in his Iron Fortress) as that doesn’t chain into anything crazy.
I can’t really think of what you might have missed, seeing as all the quest hubs link sequentially. On the other hand, I remember being a level higher than most of the mobs in that bit. Have you taken part much in rifting in general? That might be where the deficit lies, particularly if you havn’t happened across one of those zone wide invasions.
It might be worthwhile to check a wiki of some kind to double check that you didn’t bypass some hub in Stonefield though.
DeepT
1648
Ok the guy I need to kill is Jacob.
The deepstrike mines area is the one I am talking about where all the mobs are higher level than me. It is where I started running into problems. I did the iron throne dungeon once. Its hard to get a group for that.
Those quests that pop up automatically are for the invasions. If you didn’t participate in them, and/or failed the objectives, they should disappear.
But yeah, I was about a level behind when entering Stonefield but caught up just by doing the quests there. Also keep in mind that closing rifts and just generally participating in the zone events give XP, too, so if you’re not doing very many of those you might be behind a bit.
For getting sourcestones, I agree it’s really a puzzle. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a purple sourcestone except in the initial zone, and that was in fighting one of those “bring 200 sourcestone to the generators, defend wardstones, defeat invasions, close rifts, then beat the big boss” type of things. All the other “major” invasions I’ve seen only have rewarded me (and everyone else in my group that I saw) blue stones. And for that purple thingy I worked my butt off, closing rifts, stopping invasions, and hauling about 20 sourcestone to the generator.
On one character I hardly participated in one of those invasions - got to the final boss - helped kill him -and got a purple shard. Other times it’s been exactly the opposite. So really, it’s a mystery.
As for you guys who have run out of quests, I’m shocked. I almost always end up one or two levels higher than the area I’m in when questing. That said, I usually do a couple of PVP runs (and I try to do the PVP quests, as you can just hang out in the capital city, run some PVP instances, and eventually turn in the quest when you get it done. I have also tried to do the instances, which have all been very fun so far and which I’m sure provide a ton of experience. Plus I try to participate in the invasions, so I’m sure that helps too.
But in general, it seems that whenever I turn in a quest, 5 more open up, so I’m at a loss to see how you guys ran out of quests. It also seems like whenever I run anywhere in a zone, I find one or two dudes hanging out with a quest.
@DeepT, the Jakub quest will get you a lot of XP. There are a number of quests in Meridian that you get from the Faceless Man and his cohorts. I think it’s like a 4 part quest that involves closing rifts, killing Jakub, finding someone in the castle area and getting shards from three towers in Freemarch (the kind of towers that when you attack them they spawn mobs). After you do that one I think you get a quest to retrieve stuff from the Iron Tomb instance, so if you followed through on that questline you would end up getting a lot of XP and some very nice items.
DeepT
1651
I think my lack of XP is that I was not participating much in the big rift invasions. I did one major one in the “wild west” area (I forget its name) and picked up a good 1/4 of a level I think.
As for the loot quality, I think it is pretty poor. Every single “blue” I have gotten has been upstaged by a green I found or was awarded 1 or 2 levels later. I am currently having trouble with my mining skill. It seems that I finish all the quests in an area and start running into the next tier of mineral while my skill is 20 pts behind. I really do go out of my way to mine nodes. It just seems that when I get to the next mineral level area I need to spend an hour or two farming the previous mineral to get enough skill. To bad there isn’t a gatherer addon.
Erik_J
1652
I haven’t run into this one yet, either. Last night I got to Scarlet Gorge about 8 points back of being able to mine Chromite (and thats with sharing mining nodes with my brother the whole time). Iron/Silver is in the area, too, so I just putzed around until I got those 8 nodes. So far I think the area progression has been relatively smooth. I participate in PVP and Rifts, though, so I’m usually on level or 1-2 levels above the quest I’m currently on.
I’d like to specifically mention how much I like the design so far, though. Gloamwood was pretty cool, and Scarlet Gorge (although it reeks of Thousand Needles) is interesting as well. Also nice to finally run into some open world PVP.
Yeah, when I got to the Gorge the first thing I thought was, damn, Thousand Needles! Except with undead instead of Tauren. The best thing there though and in subsequent zones is indeed the open world PvP. Fighting epic invasion bosses with competing raids is a blast, and the challenge of questing around the other side’s hubs is pretty neat as well. Sadly, my mage is pretty much player-bait.
Teiman
1654
I got one of these yesterday. While the boss was alive, both factions focused on the boss. People naturally gravitated to his side, so there was a side of red players, and a side of blue players. As soon the boss got killed, there was a “what now moment” followed by war. Good times :D… I got another vile whatever sourcerock.
That’s what seems to happen usually; there’s a sort of temporary truce, though I don’t know how rewards are parsed out to the two sides. In the one I was in yesterday, some of the people on the other side had been fighting with us earlier so during the boss fight I confess to sneaking in a few lifetaps and DoTs. Of course, they were already beating on our tank before the boss dropped anyhow. We Guardians didn’t waste any time switching targets to Defiants after the boss dropped–it was kind of like Bull Run, with us chasing them back to their camp. Sometimes it’s the other way around though, but it’s all pretty fun.
I’ve been rather pleased at the amount of world PvP on our PvE server, actually. I like world PvP from time to time, but I also need to be able to opt out. Rift has treated wme well on that front so far.
A guide to some of the secret loot caches & puzzles in rifts. I haven’t read through all of it myself, since I’m enjoying discovering everything for myself, so I don’t know how thorough it is. I will say this though: it’s oddly satisfying to go climb mountains just because they’re there, pick up 8 or 9 artifacts along the way, and then get rewarded with a blue item from a cache at the top of a mountain. A friend actually got some Purple (!) shoulders that were perfect for his class from a cache.
I started exploring around some hills in Moonshade last night. But I kept getting stunned by these stupid assassins, so I stopped. No better way to discourage exploring than to have invisible assholes knocking me out every couple feet.
Skorin
1659
I did the Moonshade puzzle today and it took about 90 minutes to get the timing right. It’s the most frustrating thing I’ve seen in an MMO and I will never do it again on any other character because the reward is just not worth the headache.
I did get a purple (tanking) dagger on my rogue, though.
Kurri
1660
Completely agree Skorin. I tried for about 15 minutes but couldn’t complete it at all due to latency.
