Rift leveling tips

In hopes of inspiring a person or three to play Rift I've decided to take today to give a fist full of tips on leveling up as the title suggests. The good news is that it will be far more then the painfully obvious "go here at level 10 do every quest, then go here" that you'll get in essentially every paid guide out there. Now you are going to get proper leveling tips for free ad free, imagine that! The bad news is that the only way it relates to making the rift plat is that you can't level your crafting unless you level your crafter. Enjoy!


Get a pet to tank.
Every calling has a soul that can summon a pet and only clerics don't have a tanking pet to start off with. Clerics don't necessarily need one, but more on that later. Warriors get beast master, mages get elementalist or necromancer, and rogues get hunter. Either way having a pet to tank is such a massive boon I cannot imagine leveling without one or a pocket healer.

The big thing that you'll have to get used to is that tank pets can actually, ya know, tank! It was amazing being able to not worry about pulling threat single target. Some pets are even able to aoe tank, but won't hold threat if YOU aoe. In other words, they can keep a few mobs occupied while you pick them off one at a time. Clerics don't need a pet because they are able to spec into cheap instant heals which will negate that necessity for the most part.


Level your crafting professions now!
Each crafting prof gets two daily quests to donate crafted items to the war effort. You should do these every day fro two reasons. First being that you get artisan's tokens which let you buy the "valuable" recipes and the sooner you start the more you'll have when you are able to invest in making some of them. The second is they don't give a pithy 200 exp at level 1, no they give a full quest reward of several thousand experience. Doing that every day twice a day is going to be a huge boost to hitting 50.


Leveling gear.
Simply put, ignore it entirely until your mid 30s. Don't ever bother with buying greens as you'll get all you need to be comfortably well off from quests. Blues however can last as long as 15 levels, this is especially true for the 33+ range and you can even be wearing a few pieces to 50. So save yourself some time and a bit of coin and don't bother buying anything until then. As for low level purples, as you may expect they're generally too expensive to be worth while and aren't going to last much longer than an equal level blue item.


Become a pack rat.
There are more profession overlaps than you can imagine in this game. That's probably why you can have 3 professions at once instead of only 1 or 2. If you're not using your cloth, stash it away for a toon that will use it. The same goes with any leather and boe greens. If you're reading this blog then you're probably going to level them eventually to make some money off of them so save yourself the hassle and save it all up for when you need it. When bag space becomes an issue keep an eye on the cloth and bag market. It's fairly often to see them being dumped from leveling up OF. The extra bank space if pretty cheap for the first 2-3 slots so it won't be a major investment.


Get the portals open early.
This is going to be a lot more handy then one might imagine and I recommend doing it as soon as you get your mount and have some spare time. Yes you'll be going through a ton of high level zones with mobs that will om nom nom your face, but stick to the roads and you'll mostly be fine. If you level up your professions higher than the zone you're questing or farming in then you won't be able to turn in your prof dailys, this will make that possible at early levels. You'd think that this is hard to do at first or require an hour or three of doing corpse runs, but that's not the case.

When I ran my baby level 24 cleric all over the world I died three times total. One time I died because I was busy writing up a wonderful entry for you all to read while auto running into a group of 5 mobs 20 levels above me. The second time was intentional because there were 10 mobs between me and the portal and I didn't want to spend 5 minutes walking around them. So I died on purpose and soul walked right on past them. All in all it may take 30 minutes depending on what portals you have open already and won't be filled with corpse runs.


Get all of your souls early.
You get new souls (talent trees) from quests that are opened up at level 13ish. To do them you have to close a rift to get a quest item which you have to use at a death rift. You'll most likely want to experiment with different soul combo's so get them done early. This is important because the quests give good experience and it's something that you'll be doing eventually anyway so you might as well get half a level out of it.


If you're doing it all solo.
Enjoy the rifts in rift. These are going to give you a lot of experience and items that you'll be wanting at 50 so take advantage of them any time you can. Again focus on the fire and earth ones for the egg shells, I cannot emphasize this one enough. Also be sure to do every quest that you can dig up and try to find groups when you have to kill elites, trust me you won't be able to solo them unless you're OP and leveling in style. Luckily enough you can use the LFG tool for the quests as well.

Deciding on what zone to go to next is fairly straight forward due to the bread crumbs that you're given, but if you see a quest is orange don't bother. To avoid the back and forth between zones and questing hubs just stick with a single zone until most of the map is uncovered. Also try and take part in the zone wide invasions as well. You're almost guaranteed to get at least one of the epic versions and several of the normal wide scale ones. With these you'll get killer exp, more planar mats, and special currency to buy some very long lasting gear. Oh yeah and they're fun as hell too. Nice little perk there eh?


Thanks for stopping by!