RIFT news » Echoes of Madness Brings Instant Adventure to Hammerknell!

With Echoes of Madness (update 3.2), not only will Instant Adventure take you to Hammerknell later during 3.2, but there’s a whole bevy of other improvements to IA coming as well!

Hammerknell!

Once a shining bastion of the Dwarves, today it is known more for the foulness and ruin that has overcome its once hallowed halls. Previously, the descend into the depths of the fortress was limited to raiders, and intrepid adventurers could get a taste in the Hammerknell Chronicle. With RIFT’s next update, all Ascended will be able to venture into the once great Drwaven stronnhold, along with your fellow adventurers, to help clear the infestation that has taken hold!

Moving Instant adventure into Hammerknell gives us a whole lot more flexibility in designing Instant Adventures for the space. Normally in IA, each non-kill adventure is fairly stand-along due do necessity, but since the environment and flow in HK is more controlled and predictable, we’re able to design adventures that string together more interesting, longer series of objectives. This will give players all new interactivity with their environment for an IA, as players journey through trees of interconnected quests that lead throughout the fortress. One quick tip, be sure to avoid the runebound barriers!

General IA Improvements

Adding Instant Adventure to Hammerknell isn’t the only improvement to IA however; we’ve been working to make the IA experience even better than before, as well as adding a bunch of new features. The overall direction is to make sure when you enter an IA you’re immediately grouped up with large numbers of Ascended, and get straight into the fight!

• Everyone Fights, No Exceptions – One long standing request that players have had is that rewards be granted to players who actively participate in the Instant Adventure. We’re adding a bunch of new methods to determine who participates, and rewarding accordingly.
• Better Scaling and Pacing – The IA experience in Goboro Reef is one that we think is a great example of how fun and rewarding Instant Adventure should be. Over time, we’ll be retuning existing Instant Adventures to better match the experience you’ll find in Goboro Reef.  Wherever you go, you’ll know you’re going to get experience and loot without big swings in difficulty.
• Less Distraction – While Zone Events are awesome, it’s not so awesome when half your raid group gets distracted from the adventure you’re currently undertaking. Instant Adventures won’t start in zones with active Zone Events, and if a Zone Event starts while you are there you’ll be transported to a more suitable location once the current mission is concluded.
• Notoriety Gains – One of the many rewards from Instant Adventure has been the ability to gain Notoriety in the zone you are adventuring in. With the changes in Echoes of Madness, participants in Instant Adventure will instead earn Tokens, able to be turned in for Notoriety with the faction of their choice!
• New IA Queues – Instant Adventure will have two separate queues; the Random queue and Featured queue. Random is exactly what it sounds like; it will place you in an adventure in a random zone. The Featured queue allows you to join into an IA in the zone most relevant to what is currently occurring in Telara. At the start, we’ll have the Featured queue set for Hammerknell, but in the future it may be targeted towards specific new or seasonal content.

So get ready to get adventuring Ascended, it’ll be easier and more fun than ever before!