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Slave To The Grind
Hiya folks. Lets face it. Rift has gotten grindier than a teenager learning to drive stick. Getting yourself raid ready is a pretty daunting task. If you don't have as much time on your hands as a forever-alone college kid or as wealthy as an investment banker you're going to have to seriously optimize your time. I can't and won't say that this will magically reduce the time required for grinding to something manageable, but I hope it at least helps you reduce the pain a little. Think of me as a little novocaine for the root canal that you're about to go through. I've broken this down into a few simple sections.
Plat grind
Here you go Vladd. I'm using the quote, "You'll be swimming in plat." I don't know who at Trion set this up but we are absolutely not swimming in plat. We're drowning in debt. Most of us are at least. There will always be a select few who have mountains of money. (Trion, please stop trying to kill them off. You're hurting your regular players.) Enough with that though. Here's how to make platinum in rift. Generally all these methods are slow, persistent and take continued effort. You have to spend time. (Or you can sell REX if you're rich in that other game called IRL.)
Celestial grind
For your BiS crafted helm and ranged weapon upgrades you're going to need a massive amount of Celetial Matrices. Here's a [breakdown](Link to breakdown) of exactly how much you'll need. You can buy them all, or... If you have a decently leveled alt you can craft your Crift lure on your main and send it to that alt so you don't waste your main's Individual Reward Charges. Save those for something more useful. Find yourself a group of 20 with lures and bang your head against Crifts for a couple hours a week to stack up on materials and celestial motes and matrices. This will also help with your planarite grind.
Captured Intel grind(Here is a video guide.)
- This is similar to your Celestial grind. If you have an alt that does decent DPS you can run then through the Vostigar Peaks raid rifts repeatedly to not only get a decent amount of intel, planarite and your much needed BoA crit power essences (and crit power fire fragments). Again, this will save the individual reward charges on your main.
- If you'd rather just do what everybody else is doing. Just sit at the crossroads and wait for the next Vostigar Peaks boss to spawn.
- Additionally, if you can clear it weekly, BoS drops a large amount of Captured Intel. However, if you can clear this raid chances are you don't need too much more Captured Intel.
Planarite grind
Do you ever think back to Nightmare Tide and think longingly about all those Nightmare Rifts you did? The endless sea of green tinted mobs, washing over you . Such a peaceful thing... Yeah, me neither. But that's where you'll be when you run out, again and again. Grinding more nightmare rifts. Its not hard to find a group for this. Everybody needs them. The Rift team has even contemplated making a NMR 7 to compensate. It would be nice if a better planarite grind were available in PoA content or a reduction to the overall planarite costs required, but this is the current grind. Try and enjoy your endless sea of green mobs.
PROTIP: DO NOT loot your Planarite or Captured Intel until your rift bag is just about full. Use a token tablet right before you loot to greatly increase the amount of this currency you collect. This may or may not get fixed sometime in the future but it works for now.
Eternal grind
This breaks down into a few categories. I'll include all the separate parts of your eternal but I'll also be slapping most of the stuff for your other gear in here too. The "active upgrades" are really what it's about. For a breakdown of exactly what you'll need for your eternal chain go here. Now come back and read on how to min-max it all.
Invasions
- There are a few places to clear this quickly. If you have a group the fastest way to clear these is by doing onslaught events. If you want to have fun with it, or need a specific type of pokemon (Fire, earth, etc.) head out to Planetouched Wilds. Each city has an elemental theme where you can build up a node (similar but different to an onslaught) and get swarmed with the particular element type of that city. Be sure to bring a group of 3-5 people as you'll get between 50-500 invasions. (Thanks Samuraiko!)
- Shal Korva: Earth invasions (butcherable) - wardstone appears at 10302 5976
- Ovog: Air invasions (butcherable) - wardstone appears at 9236 1081
- Woe: Death invasions (not butcherable) - wardstone appears at 9370 4993
- Jad: Earth invasions (butcherable) - wardstone appears at 11663 5751
- Khort: Air invasions (butcherable) - wardstone appears at 9697 7070
- Sky Fishery does not appear to have one
NOTE: These will spawn a central wardstone (requiring 3 charges to make, and 3 more to upgrade), 4 turrets (4 charges to upgrade), and 2 healing sourcewells (instead of the usual 4, at least for all the ones OTHER than Shal Korva) (4 charges to upgrade).- If you're running solo or working on your Colossi head out to Ashenfell and grind them at the onslaught location while you wait for the zone colossi to pop. Generally there will be a bunch of folks here to help make fast work of it.
- If you're doing element specific elements pull up YARET and look for the zone events for that element. Generally these are an easy grind to handle.
Rifts
- This part is the easiest piece. Head out to Ember Isle and clear the underwater rifts. They're by far the fastest rifts you'll find. Don't forget to shard hop. This is generally best done during low population times so fewer people are clearing these. There are only so many servers to hop to.
- If you're doing element specific elements pull up YARET and look for the zone events for that element. Generally these are an easy grind to handle.
Footholds
- This was probably the longest of the easy eternal pieces for me. Don't be like me. I mean, running Stonefield while collecting burning, poison, etc. artifacts wasn't horrible, but there is a better way. In the Dendrome, in front of hive Kaaz G'fuu (the elite spot used for powerleveling) there is a single node. Kill this node, upgrade it ONCE and shard hop. And invasion instantly spawns to take the node. When you run out of planar charges go smack one of the crystals near the entryway.
- Another spot with high yield is in Broken Marsh in Ashora. These don't appear on the map. Additionally, some of these nodes may not trigger as a foothold. The unlisted fire nodes in Dendrome do not trigger.
- If you're doing element specific elements pull up YARET and look for the zone events for that element. Generally these are an easy grind to handle.
Colossi
If you have invasions to do as well do these in Ashenfell when available. Remember to watch YARET and flip back and forth between Ashenfell and Vostigar Peaks. You'll need the Captured Intel as well. If by some stretch of imagination you don't need Captured Intel or just want to clear the colossi quick find the lower level zone events. Those clear much faster generally speaking.
Wicket
We all have our own names for this lazy slacker. Even at max level he only has 20 endurance points. To min-max him, only use him for the 1 minute events until he has 10 endurance. Then use him for the 4 hour premium missions. Be sure you have enough of the minion points to have him finish instantly so he can go back to gaining endurance. Additionally, you can restore Wicket to full endurance once a day, if you're willing to spend credits. It will take you between two weeks to a month or more to bring wicket to level 25. But once you're done for the day you can sit back and relax. Go enjoy life....oh who am I kidding? Get back to the salt mines! You still have too much stuff to grind! *cracks whip* (A more detailed guide can be found here.)
Expert Dungeons
This part can suck out your soul faster than a pack of dementors. Your saving grace here are friends. People who are willing to help you endure the pain because you're the only player of your class left in your group and they desperately want your eternal buff. The better geared and more efficient the people you run with the faster this grind will be. In general there are two "tricks" to making this go faster: A tank who can raid heal, or a healer that can keep DPS up without a tank. Generally the healy tank is the better way to go though.
Super secret grind - Currently the only way to get your T1 death crit power fragments are from Mages of Allitu fragment boxes. Either the 1,000 or 750 variety drop them, but "supposedly" the 1,000 flavor drops them more frequently. If you're running your dungeons IMO this is your best bet on wasting your individual reward charges...or you can buy these with credits and use your IRCs elsewhere. (Funny that one of the things that increases your DPS the most would be sold for credits, but hey, not my circus, not my monkey.)
Boss Kills
With the exception of the 16 Malannon kills in LFR Tartaric Depths, this is another time gated upgrade. A lot of people are still stuck here. You have to kill the same boss over a 16 week time frame. Every reset. There is no way to power through this. It's just time and clearing the instance. Some of the guilds that can clear iRoTP aren't running it anymore. If your guild is one of them be aware that you'll have more luck looking for a PuG to clear it now. Additionally, one would expect the next tier of your eternal to be related to repeatedly killing the last boss in BoS but gate remains to be seen.
How to cope
Doing it with friends. Drinking heavily. Accepting your descent into insanity. Crawling up into a ball to cry a little but end up crying a lot. Letting Trion know they win and go play another game instead of grinding through all this. Buying your way through a good chunk of it. There are plenty of ways to cope with what is becoming what feels like an insurmountable waste of time. But this is a game. It's not supposed to be a painful chore. It's supposed to be fun. It's not fun to do all these things. Please stop forcing them Trion. Please.
NOTE: If there are better ways or something's wrong let me know so I can add or fix it. Thanks. (And thanks to those below and in Discord with handy tips.)
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). The amount of invasions that spawn to take back this foothold is truly amazing, (you have to see it to truly believe it) literally several dozen invasions at a time in wave after wave. You can get hundreds of invasions killed in about 15 minutes before they give up with this method. If you are doing this solo the invasions will either overwhelm and kill you by their sheer numbers, or you will be pushed back and/or be bypassed by some of the invasions which will kill the foothold and stop more invasions from spawning. (Make sure to loot and skin the hundreds of dead mobs that will be at your feet to sell for plat; before they despawn)
Originally Posted by thunder 1 
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