Fragment farming

[Ieatacid]

Hi

is there a guide or info somewhere about where to farm specific planar fragments?

For almost a year I have done TDEM,TDNM,ITROP+golems weekly, maxed all notoriety standings etc and yet I have 6 slots with crap fragments. I have also spent good 100k+ tower frags on death boxes and yet I have mediocre death frag with 2 stats not for my class.

Even back in the EQ1 I got my epics and rares done in 3-6 months, but Rift is a whole new level of RNG crap...I never have spent a year in an MMO trying to achieve something. Like them damn chronicle rares never spawn or planar fragment crap.

[Isp]

Hi

is there a guide or info somewhere about where to farm specific planar fragments?

For almost a year I have done TDEM,TDNM,ITROP+golems weekly, maxed all notoriety standings etc and yet I have 6 slots with crap fragments. I have also spent good 100k+ tower frags on death boxes and yet I have mediocre death frag with 2 stats not for my class.

Even back in the EQ1 I got my epics and rares done in 3-6 months, but Rift is a whole new level of RNG crap...I never have spent a year in an MMO trying to achieve something. Like them damn chronicle rares never spawn or planar fragment crap.

That is an original idea for fragments. You have only crap fragments in game, you spend a fortune on upgrading them (because it hard to do stuff without them). Then gradually better fragment would be introduced and you would have to spend a fortune again and again. But in current state of the thing most likely nothing would be done about fragments anymore and we stuck with crappy ones. From the other hand most likely we would not have any new challenging content anymore and current fragments are enough for current content - so there is no need to change anything.

[Citizenfour]

Add new content or not, what he asks for shouldn't be so hard to do, even with a few devs, that are left, would not take much effort or long probably.

[Holyroller12]

Hi

is there a guide or info somewhere about where to farm specific planar fragments?

For almost a year I have done TDEM,TDNM,ITROP+golems weekly, maxed all notoriety standings etc and yet I have 6 slots with crap fragments. I have also spent good 100k+ tower frags on death boxes and yet I have mediocre death frag with 2 stats not for my class.

Even back in the EQ1 I got my epics and rares done in 3-6 months, but Rift is a whole new level of RNG crap...I never have spent a year in an MMO trying to achieve something. Like them damn chronicle rares never spawn or planar fragment crap.

The extreme plat sink stems from them listening to the tiny minority of players that sit and have been sitting on ungodly amounts of plat for the last 2 expansions and complaining that they have nothing to spend it on and so the plat sink that was originally only intended to be around in beta for testing purposes (you could buy bags of plat from a vendor during beta) was then carried over to live even after they told us it likely wouldn't be.

As far as aiming for specific fragments and Tiers. The notoriety boxes are the only way to get them, but because of the RNG, you're about as likely to get what you actually want as just doing any other piece of content that drops fragments. The chance is only slightly better. You realistically want to aim for at least 3 (bare minimum) to 4 good stats on the fragment. The few people I know that have actually gone out of their way to min/max 5 stats have spent over 150-200k plat so I wouldn't bother with it. Others only upgrade theirs to level 12 which is sufficient enough for the current raid Tier so they don't have to spend as much.

At the end of the day, fragments were a good idea on paper and something we needed compared to the gearing system in NT, but it was implemented very poorly to say the least for a bunch of different reasons.

[Dico]

At the end of the day, fragments were a good idea on paper and something we needed compared to the gearing system in NT, but it was implemented very poorly to say the least for a bunch of different reasons.

I disagree. Fragments are really terrible on paper. They rely heavily on RNG. If you remove the RNG, nothing is left. I really can't see anything good. Rift had already enough gear slots, no need to add more.

[Holyroller12]

I disagree. Fragments are really terrible on paper. They rely heavily on RNG. If you remove the RNG, nothing is left. I really can't see anything good. Rift had already enough gear slots, no need to add more.

The intent was to get rid of the constant gear swapping (as well as freeing up bag space) that was rampant in NT on top of crafting/buying new runes, dream orbs and in some cases buying rune removers. The idea was to upgrade your tertiary once (to 15) and then you're done which in turn would've made it easier for more people to decide what is and isn't an upgrade. If it had more base stats then it was a straight upgrade. Not much to think about at that point, but then they decided at the last minute to throw in suffixed gear and make the RNG even more complicated than stat swapping was in NT.

[Faerugue]

The whole fragment stuff was either about to be taken out of the game or some kind of serious and total overhaul was planned, not sure which they were going to go with anymore .... it was poor to begin with and only has gotten worse and worse....

[Holyroller12]

Prior to the acquisition, salvatrix was going to change it so that caster stats would only roll on caster frags once you leveled them up. The same goes for martial and tanking frags. There would still be some rng, but only on the fragments base stats when they drop.

If you got a frag with Dex, AP, Strength and leveled it up, it would only roll CP and PC. That along with another price reduction were planned out, but the last we heard with Gamigo at the helm was that they're unsure what they want to do with the system as a whole now. It would've bee nice to still get those changes out in the meantime.

[dundare]

Just another example why Trion was the worst company ever and ruined Rift. The fragment system and gear system in this expac was like dropping a second nuke on a city you had already nuked. It just bounced the rubble.

[MarginalSteve]

The entire fragment system as it was implemented, from acquisition to function, is garbage and should have never seen a public release as initial community feedback indicated. This will never be fixed, so I feel the best advice regarding fragment farming is to find a game that doesn't include similar 'features' and spend those countless hours playing that instead.

[Elayara]

And Vladd was so proud when he introduced this new system:

However, fragments have a decision tree deeper than any single item has ever had in RIFT and for that matter probably any MMO.

The original thread seems to be removed, but you can still see his post in the devtracker. It was that thread where the community could talk a tiny bit of reason into Vladd, so that at least caster and martial stats where no longer combined on a single fragment; but he was adamant to mix DD and tank stats, because reasons.

Long story short: the system sounded horribly on paper, and felt horribly in the game. It either needs a total rework, be completely removed, or just ignored by players (which was the route I chose happily, so I could spend my plat on fun things in the game

[MarginalSteve]

Complexity for its own sake is a cardinal sin in programming and any developer worth their salt would have voiced that in the first project planning session. Going so far as to publicly defend this atrocity after putting it in place is professionally damaging. There's a reason that post doesn't exist anymore. Decision tree? More like decision barbecue fork. The only options are 'ignore fragments' and 'hate yourself for not ignoring fragments'.

[Andracleric]

Adding complexity for no particular good reason is nuts- especially in programming. "Let's make this requirement more complex" said no programmer ever. In fact- the opposite is usually the case- in my field I spent a lot of time reviewing software and getting annoyed too many shortcuts were taken. The bottom line is that planar fragments- no matter who wanted them- were terrible. They were completely unwanted, unnecessary, and are deleterious to the game. Adding the RNG to it just made it even worse. To the OP- I would point you towards the Ghar Station or some other viable and living web site to see what the latest advice is.

[Flashmemory]

They were looking into using the "new" fragment rework to draw another plat sink. One of the devs said it would reduce the price of REX. I laughed a bit about this because the price of REX nearly tripled due to the fragment plat sink and it only benefited a small minority and people who farmed plat and sold it for real life money. It made me think that they must have had a side hustle to say this.

There was no need for RNG. Rift outdated gear quite fast and this was the way it always was and the players never complained about that. They tried to change that and it caused Rift population to drop enormously. They made huge itemization mistakes in the process of adding the convoluted system to the game as well.

As for those who needed a plat sink, I am guessing it was less than 100 players.. since all the rich folks created alts and never had any problem getting plat abusing plat farming strategies that netted them 10s of thousands of plat per week like the crafting plat guide which was public and available for years. People were even doing it on Prime servers. There would never be enough plat sinks for those who virtually had unlimited plat. What they needed to do was like other MMO's and make plat a worthless commodity. It would have been better if they allowed players to trade raid upgrades etc for REX directly instead after a new tier came out so those unfortunate players could invest some money to catch up to others.

They could have just created a real hole in the floor for dumping plat and made a title or reward for being able to dump the most per week and it would have been far better than what they did. Honestly, I think Rift needs to be open sourced at this point.

[Linolea]

I have played most days of this expansion and my main (and pretty much only character - I have a very part-time alt) still has plenty garbage fragments, and not for lack of trying. If you get 3-spec based stats on your fragment, that's plenty. Half my frags are like that, and I upgraded all to 15 back when it cost 2-2.5 times as much to do so. It took me probably a year to replace my death frag with CP main stat and all tank off stats, despite spending every tower frag (TF) on death chests. Even now both my death frags still have 2 non-DPS stats.

The system is garbage ... don't waste too much effort trying to get the perfect 5-stat frags. I have one in my entire set, and probably 2 or 3 of the 4-relevant-stat frags.

Basically spend all tower frags on 750TF death coffers if you need CP (every DPS class, basically) until you have half decent ones. Most other frags will appear from TDez, IRotP and BoS etc. The 1,000TF death coffer give the same chance of T1 (for CP) but cost more, or so I am told.