Fortress Sieges, Individual Loot & LFR Arrive in Hotfix

Rift has been updated with a new hotfix patch that brings some much-anticipated content into the game: Fortress Sieges, Looking for Raid and the individual loot system. Fortress Sieges allows individual players or groups up to raid size to take on Xarth's Skull zone. Individuals assist by working along the exterior walls taking on vulnerable targets. Small groups take on enemies further into the fortress while large raid groups can tackle capturing siege weaponry.

Fortress Siege events will take place approximately every four hours.

To help players find groups to run sieges with, the Looking for Raid tool has been enabled. Players will also be able to freely join groups with the additional bonus of the individual loot system enabled.

The process of joining a raid can be streamlined through "raid karma", a new system that encourages players to participate in raiding: "The more LFR raids you successfully complete, the higher your raid karma will be. This will result in having a higher priority over other players when queuing LFR."

The LFR will note if the players in the queue have a role combination that makes it impossible to complete. For example, if a boss in the raid requires two tanks, but you have three people queuing as tank only, there is no way you can meet the required roles. Therefore, it will not let you queue unless the roles are adjusted.  Another way the matchmaking is different from LFG is that LFR has a specific set of roles that must be met on a per-boss basis, as opposed to LFG which just always requires a static set of roles. LFR checks your raid composition against every boss' role requirements, so if one boss in the raid requires a certain composition and the next boss requires a different one, and so on, it will ensure that the people it forms your raid with will always be able to meet some sort of valid role distribution for every boss in that raid.

Read the full details on the Rift site.