Tips and Tricks: Starting Zone - What I wish I knew at level 1

Hour 2:  You have your soul point spent, and your ready to begin your journey.  The first step is to journey through your factions starting zone and learn the basic movement, combat, and quest formats.


When you start your activities, you will get a tutorial pop up that will tell you the basics of how to move, how to accept and complete quests, and how to interact with items, among other things.  Although this is a Rift for beginners blog, the basic movement is easy enough to learn with this tutorial.  I instead will focus on the things that you might miss as you are progressing.  Things that the tutorial glosses over and that I wish I had known when I started playing.

1)  The starting areas, for both Defiant and Guardian, are filled with rare spawn enemies and named enemies that drop weapons and armor that have skins unique to this area.   If you are a collector of things rare, keep an eye out for these enemies.  While in the starting area, you are in an instanced event.  When you complete the area you cannot return.  If you want to stake them out, a full list can be found on many of the data base sites, as well as by googling "Terminus rare spawns" or "Mathosia rare spawns".

2) Also on the topic of often missed out on, watch out for the lore items and vignettes. If you are interested in lore, take your time going through each area (even going backwards from where you enter the zone), clicking on anything that is sparkling, and watching the scenes.   You will learn a lot about the past or future you come from as well as get a good grounding in your faction.  Can you find Asha Catari in Mathosia?  Marshal Kain in Terminus?  These small things can teach a great deal about the lore.  And as for collectables, there is only one book in the Defiant starting area (the other 11 are in Meridian), but there are 12 in the Guardian starting area. These tell the stories of the souls, as well as a little general history.

3) If you need to sell grey items in your bag to make room, you can do so with one single click.  The "sell all" button is located in the merchant window in the bottom right.  It looks like a stack of coins and will sell all your grey items.  Non-greys you wish to sell will need to be done individually.  Also it is good to know about the buy back feature... but it is not fool proof, so be careful when selling.

4)  If you are given an item, or tasked with collecting items, for a quest, you can find those items in your quest bag at the bottom of your quest log. (Character menu, quest log - or clic "L").  Items you need to use for a quest are usually clickable from your quest sticky list, but if not, you can drag it from your quest bag to your hotbar.

5)  You start out with 1 hotbar, but can add more.  (we'll go into User Interface customization later) If you want something on a hotbar but wont need it all the time, you can put it on an alternate bar.  On the right hand side of the hotbar are up/down arrows.  You can use these to set up different rotations, or, as I like to do, little used spells (like crafting).

I hope these little tidbits will help you on your travels.