This information is a bit dated and covers the progression of getting into raid dungeons. I’ve since written and update to this guide that covers progression once you reach the point where you’re ready to zone into Greenscale’s blight. View Rift raid dungeon progression. -Ferrel
Iniquity is gearing up for Green Scale in Rift and I really have to say how impressed I am with Trion’s ability to put together a very clear and thoughtful progression for reaching that goal. In the past I’ve seen a lot of games bog players down in all their various offerings by confusing the path. At the same time I think there is a lot of confusion about what Rift has to offer. I’ve seen a lot of players talk about how little content is available when, in reality, there is an extreme depth of options for the max-level character. Today I’m going to share with you the process by which you can get your guild ready to kill Green Scale.
Tier One
One of the biggest misunderstandings I’ve seen in Rift is the assumption that as soon as a character hits level 50 it is ready to start doing expert dungeons. This is not the case! A little bit of preparation must be done to be ready for tier one expert dungeons. Tier one is comprised of Iron Tomb, Fall of Lantern Hook, Foul Cascade, Kings Breach, and Realm of the Fae. That list is in a relative order of difficulty. To be successful in those dungeons you’re going to have to rely heavily on an appropriately geared tank and healer. You’ll also need at least one well geared DPS class. If you want to succeed you’re tank should have about 75 toughness, your healer should have about 750 spell power, and your DPS classes should have around 85 hit/focus. These are rough guidelines and if your tank is really over geared it can make up for an under geared healer. Assuming everyone is new to experts and just starting out those are the average statistics you should shoot for.
Tier one dungeons reward one plaque per boss and the daily quest found in the guild tavern gives ten (Tam Daggerborne gives the daily quest). You can use these plaques to purchase tier one armor from the holy relic vendor. He is also in the guild tavern. Once you’ve collected a decent amount of tier one armor via drops or plaques you can move on to tier two.
Tier Two
The difficulty jump from tier one to tier two is pretty heavy. The tier two dungeons are Charmer’s Caldera, Abysmal Precipice, Deepstrike Mines, Darkening Deeps, and Runic Descent. To be ready to those dungeons you need roughly 110 toughness for a tank, 1000 spell power for a healer, and 130 hit/focus for a DPS class. Again these are not hard and fast statistics but if you’re going in without anyone that is over-geared you’re going to need them. A lack of gear will be most noticeable on a tank or healer.
Expert Rifts
Each time you complete a tier one dungeon you’ll get a Malformed Soul (zone invasions can drop them too). Five can be combined with a lure from the elemental quarter masters to summon an expert rift associated to their element. These rifts are of tier two difficulty and are designed for five players. They can be done with twenty (or more) however. They also have a daily quest linked with them that can be picked up from the Abbess next to the quarter masters. The loot that is dropped from these rifts can be quite good and quite bad. It is really a crap shoot but this is an outlet to getting additional gear during the week.
Raid Rifts
Each time you complete a tier two dungeon or expert rift you’ll get a Corrupted Soul (zone invasions can drop them too). Ten can be combined with a lure from the elemental quarter masters to summon a raid rift. These rifts are roughly tier two or two and a half and are designed for ten players. As with the expert rifts you can bring twenty or more players. They also have a daily quest linked with them from the same Abbess as the expert rifts. The loot quality is higher than experts and will help a guild gear up for Green Scale.
Akala
Akala is a weekly four group raid in Shimmersand. This is a no loot raid that basically exists to give players an extra plaque bump per week. The event is pretty straight forward and can be completed by smaller groups.
Tier Three
Tier three includes both Greenscale’s Blight (GSB) and River of Souls (RoS).
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Gosh great minds think alike! I’ve been writing a post on the same topic just now, mainly about Expert rifts.
I can fill in details regarding Akala. And also another weekly raid quest boss Krevic.
Krevic is in Stillmoor in the castle at the west end. You can do him in a pug of 20 as long as you have two tanks with 100 Toughness. Tanks need to alternate because of a stacking debuff, dps need to prioritise adds (a third tank for adds is useful), everyone needs to move out of the fire. It’s a very well designed entry raid boss, showing the basics to people who’ve not raided before. You get Order of Mathos rep which (eventually) will let you buy a nice belt enchant in Zareph’s Return.
Akala is in Shimmersand, north west corner. She spawns two rock elementals that heal her – they need to die fast. It’s essentially a test of dps ability to change targets and crank out some decent numbers. We pugged it with less than 20 although I’ve heard it’s harder than Krevic.
Just a word on Expert Rifts and Raid rifts. You can take more than the nominal amount of players which makes for quite a nice change from the normal raid restrictions. I really liked being able to take everyone who wanted to come with us. Tell your guildies to always take the quests and not to delete them, you can store each quest until you get a chance to do it. I completed all five expert rift “dailies” yesterday.
One other thing – I think your requirements are a little high. The usual numbers I’ve seen quoted are
T1: 50 Toughness/Hit/Focus
T2: 100 Toughness/Hit/Focus. 800 sp for healers.
T3: 150 Toughness/Hit/Focus. 1000 sp for healers.
I’ve seen those too but to be honest we didn’t find them to be too accurate for a group of people just starting. If you’re going with a mixed group of gear levels you can take an individual along with those. If the whole group is starting together and is at that level things are pretty rough. Of course we’ve also had people who aren’t even close to the lower numbers succeed.
Just rough guidelines!
The thing with this is, I have 546 SP as a healer and I have single healed the 2nd boss in GSB and solo healed T2s and all expert rifts we have done as a guild, thats without a support. 800 SP for healers? im calling BS, on that. 500 SP is fine if you know how to heal. but the toughness/hit/focus are correct.
This post is a bit dated. These numbers were based on the pre-nerf of the dungeons.
Thank you for this post, it’s a good guideline for those starting out.
We did our first round of Elite Rifts and Akala this weekend (I seen you run by Saturday night Ferrel while we were reforming for pull number 2
!). We had 19 folks, we had alot of fun just going around steam rolling elites…Akala threw us for a loop at first.
Our tanks and healers are well geared, our dps not so much. We had trouble taking down both of her healing adds…so we killed the one closest to the raid, then heal debuffed her before the other finished casting, it worked most the time. Watch out for those second phase adds, but that’s all I’m gonna say.
Anyways, we plan on doing elite rifts, and some of the weekly raid bosses for a few weekends to get some gear, so far I have enough souls for 2 rift raids…so we’ll see…aiming for early june for our first rift raid.
Thanks for the superb article and great reply by Stabs. Although our guild is only slowly getting folks to level 50, we have a great team… and I am posting this on our Guildlaunch website. Keep up the good work!