Originally Posted by Ocho

Do you fill multiple roles in group content? Are you tired of carrying around all that extra gear that clutters up your inventory? Are you frustrated with needing twice as many item drops of everyone else? Well look no further, because RIFT has the answer for you! Starfall Prophecy will take your gear from ordinary to extraordinary… with Planar Fragments! Collect Planar Fragments throughout your adventures in The Celestial Lands, trough questing, PVP, dungeons, Planar Assaults, crafting, and Planar Fortress Sieges. With these fragments, you’ll be able to customize your stats for the role that you wish to play. For example, if you want to bolster your tanking ability, seek out fragments that have Dodge, Block, Guard, and Endurance as their primary attributes. If you want focus on damage or healing, collect fragments with Attack Power/Spell Power, Crit Chance, Crit Power, and the main stat of your calling (such as Wisdom for Clerics). With Planar Fragments being the only source of tertiary stats, RIFT reduces the burden of obtaining multiple sets of gear and hoarding pieces of gear that might be required at some point in the future if you need to swap roles. Now you can do everything with just ONE set of gear and a few sets of Planar Fragments! Over the past few updates, we've been working hard to reduce/remove the need for different sets of gear based on your role. For instance, in Mind of Madness, we removed the chance for gear to drop as tank specific, and instead provided side-grade paths for all DPS drops to change into tank gear. This certainly helped with dealing with the challenge of players who Tank and DPS in obtaining their desired role gear, but it still wasn’t the complete solution that we were looking for. Planar Fragments are a much bigger step in that direction, and we think you'll like them! Whether a Planar Fragment is desirable for your character or not depends on the sum of its parts: The first is the primary attribute. This is the stat that you will focus on when judging if you want to equip a fragment and invest in it for the long term. For instance, if you're going for a more PVP focused build, you'd probably value Endurance and base HP forat survivability higher than you would offensive stats such as Attack Power or Crit Rate - those may be preferred by someone aiming for PVE group content. A fragment can also carry up to four secondary attributes. These can never be the same as the primary attribute, nor can they be the same as each other. Therefore, an Aggressive Fire Planar Fragment with Attack Power as the primary attribute cannot have Attack Power among its secondary attributes. Depending upon the rarity of the fragment, these secondary attributes will either be hidden or revealed. For now, rarity levels start at Common and go up to Relic. For each rarity starting with Uncommon, a secondary attribute is revealed on the fragment. As such, a Rare quality fragment will have two of the possible four revealed, three for Epic quality, and so on. Once you have some good Fragments to work with, they can be improved through Infusion. By default, Fragments drop at Infusion level 0 and can increase to level 15. Each time an infusion level is completed, the primary attribute is increased, with a extra large increase at level 15! The secondary attributes also have a chance to improve and be revealed as the Infusion level is increased. The final aspect affecting a fragment is planar affinity. The combination of the affinity and the primary attribute denote how much the fragment gains between infusion levels as well as what the maximum attribute value will be at level 15. For instance, Fire is an offensive-oriented affinity, so stats like Attack Power and Spell Power will more potent on a Fire fragment than on one with a planar affinity of Earth, which is more defensive oriented. However, Guard would be very potent for Earth. This combination of aspects creates a compelling reward system that will help even the most die-hard of Rift players invest further in their character and advancement. Additionally, fragments are account bound by default, so your main character can find fragments for your alt characters and help gear them up, something that we've heard you asking for quite frequently of late. We are excited about the introduction of Planar Fragments to Telara and can’t wait to see the imaginative ways you’ll put them to use!