[Off Topic] Fae Yule 2016!

So, Fae Yule is back for another round! I am pretty excited for the holiday after seeing all the awesome new things introduced in the holiday livestream, but also because I really enjoy this holiday in particular. All the in game snow, the cheer, the fun quests, I dunno, I can't explain it but there's just something I really enjoy about Fae Yule in particular. This year, I was definitely more active in the Fae Yule activities. I spent so many hours doing the sledding quest so I could get Snowflakes, and also quite a few days were spent tracking down all the dozens of holiday artifacts so I could add them to my collection. I really like artifacts. Mostly because when you complete them, there's always the chance of getting a really interesting lore book to read that will tell you something new about an aspect of the story of Rift, but also because I'm a collector and there's just something innately satisfying about seeing the little green checkmark and the "complete" that shows up in the corner of your artifact window when you've completed all the artifacts for a given set. So I went around to various zones and collected as many of the holiday artifacts as I could and I even managed to complete one whole achievement for some. There are a lot of artifact sets listed in the Fae Yule achievement column actually, and I am quite proud that I was able to complete so many before the event ended. Anyway, on to the actual details!

Links to previous years of Fae Yule blog posts:
Fae Yule 2012 
Fae Yule 2013 
Fae Yule 2015

     Fae Yule 2016 Tips:

• You can earn currency on your alts, buy the item you want, and mail it to your "main" or the character you want the items/achievements on. All Fae Yule items except the holiday minks are BoA (Bind on Account) and can be mailed to a different character!
• Do not spend any of the Dark Icicles until the 3rd phase when you've gathered all of the Icicles you can. This allows you to plan out how best to spend your currency, since you only ever get 30 Icicles per character, unless your exceptionally lucky to gain 1 or 2 from Minion missions.
• If you are a Patron, or are willing to buy a Patron Pass, you can use the Currency Token item gained from Patron boxes to increase the amount of snowflakes you gain from quests.
• The easiest and fastest way to gain snowflakes is to do the Sledding repeatable quests, since you can do as many as you want every day, and you gain at the least 10 snowflakes per slide down the hill and at the most 25 (With Patron status token as well as going through each of the portals at the top of the last ramp!)
• There's a Fae Yule Store located in Iron Pine Peaks that has items for sale that IS NOT found on the Rift Store! Go check it out!
• When doing Stocking Stuffers Achiev, move between shards, even the pvp one, to gain an extra chance at finding an item! Have patience with this one, it will take a while.
• Don't try doing all of the achievements/events on the same day. You will get desperately frustrated and bored fast.
• If you plan on collecting the Fae Yule Artifacts, use Opie if you have him, Artifact Tracker if you have that Patron ability, or purchase something along those lines. It will save you so much time! Keep an eye out for the Artifact zone events, and ask guildies/friends to swap or give you duplicate artifacts so you can have a better chance of completing the sets.
• Log into as many alts as you need/want in order to do the Dark Icicles quest so you are able to purchase all the items you want from the store. 
• Try to do at least a few Fae Yule IA's each day to ensure better odds at gaining some of the items needed to finish the achievements.
• The PvP portion of Fae Yule is impossible to complete unless you have a character that can get into the end game brackets of warfronts, since low lvl pvp is dead and gone. Also, Whitefall was removed from Rift and only added back with the holiday event later in the Fae Yule event, so if you don't see it on the Warfront list, that's why.   

     Details on quests and event activities have already been mentioned in those links above, so I don't feel the need to go into that. There are a few new things, or additional things I'll add here that were removed/changed, or added to the Fae Yule holiday event in 2016. For one thing, I've got more of a handle on how the Minion cards work, and as such, I was able to start the Fae Yule minion quest chain and complete it! It took some time, and I had to buy the starter Minion with store credits in order to get the others, but I got a few rewards along the way to help with my efforts. Here's the list, in the order that I received them:   **The quest chain starts with the minion card "Grish" that you need to purchase from the s tore for 250 snowflakes and 3 Icicles, or 450 Credits**

1. Fae Yule Is Here! Grish Has Come To Bring The Hate
1. Spread some Fae Yule cheer to stop Grish
2. Duration: 1 minute
2. Locate Clues to Grish's Whereabouts
1. Duration: 4 hours
3. Prove Your Might and Gain the Help of Sundereth
1. Duration: 8 hours
2. Rewards Minion Card: Sundereth
4. Deliver Alcoholic Beverages to Atrophinus
1. Duration: 8 hours
2. Rewards Minion Card: Atrophinius the Festive
5. Show Everyone the Festive Festivities with Atrophinius the Festive
1. Duration: 8 hours
6. Xharlion Joining Grish? Convince him to join you instead!
1. Duration: 8 hours
2. Reward Minion Card: Xharlion
7. Seoras Must be Stopped!
1. Duration: 8 hours
2. Rewards Minion Card: Seoras
8. Gather Food and Set a Trap for Grish
9. We've Located a Village that Needs Cheering Up
10. Grish is Near, Hunt him Down!
11. Use Fire to melt the Ice Blocking the Way to Grish
1. Duration: 15 minutes
12. Gather Food for the Poor Villagers
1. Duration: 5 minutes
13. Subdue the Grendelkhan
1. Duration: 8 hours
2. Rewards Minion Card: Grendelkhan
14. Someone Get Atrophinius a drink
15. Return Stolen Gifts
1. Duration: 4 hours
2. Requires Adventurine or Credits to launch
16. Build up Siege Camps
1. Duration: 4 hours
2. Requires Adventurine or Credits to launch

     Another change this Fae Yule is the fact that last year's holiday currency carried over to this Fae Yule! So all the hard earned snowflakes and Icicles I had last year that I never had time to spend, or never found anything I wanted, added up this year, and combined with the currency I got this year. This helped quite a lot for buying all the companion pets I needed for the "For Whom The Jingle Bell Tolls" achievement. Even then, it took quite some farming to be able to buy all those pets!

     Since I took more of an active interest in this Fae Yule and participated in a lot of the achievements, I also have a list for a different achievement, named "Stocking Stuffers" This one took a while too, since it doesn't even really explain what it means. What you have to do is click on little dimension like items that will pop up over the Mathosian content. You need 50 of them in all, so you need to find 50 of these items, and they can be anywhere in the old world. The easiest places to find them of course, are in the 2 capital cities, Sanctum and Meridian. Another handy thing to note about this particular achievement, is that if you happen to find one of these items, you can shard hop to a different server and with luck, find the same item in the same place, and still get a point towards the achievement. It's definitely worth noting the places you found these items and come back to them every few hours to check to see if they have respawned yet. Here's a list of where I've found them, but I'm sure there's tons more, it's hard to predict where they will pop up, and they are sometimes in out of the way locations, hidden in discrete spots. Very tricksy Trion, very tricksy!
Stocking Stuffers Locations:

1. 7553, 3000-Candy Cane-Sanctum
2. 7585, 3032-Candy Cane-Sanctum
3. 6677, 7028- Candy Cane-Fortune's Shore (Shimmersand)
4. 6643, 7047-Gift Box-Fortune's Shore (Shimmersand)
5. 6629, 7032-Candy Cane-Fortune's Shore (Shimmersand)
6. 6188, 5179-Candy Cane-Fortune's Shore (Shimmersand)
7. 6123, 5217-Wreath-Fortune's Shore (Shimmersand)
8. 5974, 5157-Gift Box-Meridian
9. 4552, 1489-Candle-Chancel of Labors (Iron Pine Peaks)
10. 3727, 1737-Gift Box-Whitefall (IPP)
11. 3703, 1766-Candy Cane-Whitefall (IPP)
12. 3602, 3796-Grove Keeper's House (Scarwood Reach)

     Another change to this year's Fae Yule was one that annoyed me a lot. The achievement that rewards you the black Vaiyuu mount, "Nightmare before Fae Yule", had a few of the requirements removed, so now there's only 3 achievments you need to complete in order to get the mount. These 3 achievements are such a pain in the butt, it's not even funny. And the frustrating thing is, they all rely on luck of the draw to complete! It requires you have completed the Snowmancer achievement-collecting all 4 of the clickable snowmen you can set on the ground, the 25k Lights-collecting all the little glowing ball companion pets, and lastly, the Puppet Master achievmenet- collecting all the puppet pets. I've gotta say, I worked on the Fae Yule activities for a long time this holiday, logging in just about every day to try and complete just a little bit more, and I never once saw any of the puppets, lights, or snowmen that I needed to complete the achievement. I'm not sure if that was because they were super rare, or because of some lame glitch that prevented me from finishing it up. I was pretty depressed by it though.
      I put all that effort in specifically because I was hoping to get that black Vaiyuu, but no dice. Sad panda!

     While we're on the subject of frustrating Fae Yule activities, I'd like to point out another that really irritated me. The PvP one! Because pvp is like dead in Rift, it is literally impossible for me, as a low lvl character (lvl 40 at the time I started the Fae Yule) to complete the Santa Claws pvp Fae Yule achievements and get my little festive werewolfy pet! I was pretty sad, not going to lie! I even debated spending the Credits/money on getting a boost to lvl 60 JUST So I could participate in the pvp activities. Although it turns out, that didn't even matter because Trion, for silly reasons that did not help the pvp situation AT ALL, removed most of the warfronts, Whitefall included. Since Whitefall Steppes was the warfront needed to complete the pvp achievements, all of us Fae Yule achievers were screwed over. Finally, after a lot of forum talk and such like from players, we were able to get info saying that the warfront would be added in the ....was it second or last phase? of Fae Yule. This was rather frustrating.

     There were a few cool new additions to this year that sort of made up for it though. One of those was the Fae Yule Costume Bundle, which was a really neat long winter coat, a fur hoodie, and warm gloves and boots. It was the perfect set for when my character starts doing the Iron Pine Peaks story arch, since I can dye it an appropriate color and say it's her cold weather gear! There was also a really pretty mount that was like the Levitation mount, but it lifted you in the air with a spinning ring of brightly colored gifts. So cool! I want one so badly, but unfortunately, you have to spend real money to get one since they are in the lock boxes. And I have horrid luck with the lock boxes, so I guess I won't be getting one of those! :( There were also 2 new pets, "Tags"-a floating gift box, and "Chibs"-a little Greenscale looking dragon with large eyes and tiny wings. There was also another new set of wings added to the Rift store, which I NEEDED to have since I absolutely love wings. Like seriously, I love wings! I can't remember what they were called in game, but I call them turkey wings because that's what they look like. They dye really nicely, but sadly, it's a completely solid color, with no way to dye say the secondary or tertiary feathers a different color or shade. We also got a hat costume item that gave us beards, even the female characters. This was an item put in game because of one of the Trion peeps, who really wants her female dwarf to have a beard lol.