PBN Artifacts
Poison, Burning, and Nightmare Artifacts can be found in the zones of Stonefield, Gloamwood, and Planetouched Wilds.
The PBN artifacts can only be seen/collected when you have a special buff. Each artifact type has its own special buff.
Gaining the PBN Sight Buffs
The main way to get the buffs is to go and pick up normal artifacts in one of the 3 zones.
- Each normal artifact you pick up will have a chance to give you the poison buff, you can then pick up poison artifacts. The poison buff lasts 15 minutes.
- Each poison artifact you pick up will have a chance to give you the burning buff, you can then pick up burning artifacts. The burning buff lasts 10 minutes.
- Each burning artifact you pick up will have a chance to give you the nightmare buff, you can then pick up nightmare artifacts. The nightmare buff lasts 5 minutes.
Picking up each artifact type also gives you a chance of refreshing your current buffs.
Picking up rare or epic artifacts will give you a greater chance of adding or refreshing the buffs.
For instance: Picking up an epic nightmare artifact has a chance to refresh all of your sight buffs.
The sight buffs HURT! Especially if you have all 3 running at once! You will want to use a spec with some healing, preferably passive healing with some spot healing.
There are some other ways to gain the buffs that may be quicker than picking up artifacts. Firstly, be sure you are stood in one of the 3 PBN zones for the sights to be applied. Then you can try…
- Opening Epic or Relic Opie’s Artifact Stashes – These often contain PBN artifacts and will often proc the sights when you loot them.
- Collecting a 4 hour artifact minion mission – If you loot a PBN from these then it may proc the sights.
- Fishing – Using a rare artifact attractor will often give you a nice rare normal artifact which will proc the Poison sight.
PBN Artifact Tracking
Poison artifacts show as green sparkles on the ground.
Burning artifacts show as orange sparkles on the ground.
Nightmare artifacts show as purple sparkles on the ground.
You will often find them stacked on top of each other, giving a beautiful rainbow effect.
The very best way to track PBN artifacts (make them show as white diamonds on your mini-map) is with a patrons artifact tracking vial. This is because the patron vial will track all 3 artifacts types at once, giving you the opportunity to farm all the artifact types at once.
There are also individual vials that can be used to track PBN artifacts.
These vials can be bought with credits from the rift store, or with platinum from the vendors in Callweddi. You will need to have completed the entirety of the Callweddi puzzle to be able to buy these vials with platinum.
These vials are great as they last a full 30 minutes and don’t hurt you!
Be careful to only use ONE AT A TIME, or you will over-write the one you already have on.
With the vial buff active, you wont be able to proc the other buffs, leaving you able to concentrate on one type of artifact.
Lastly we have the Opie Mount. This mount has special abilities to track various types of artifacts. You will need Planar Pellets as fuel for the abilities. Each ability lasts 5 minutes and you can only use one at a time. You do not need to stay mounted on Opie.
Poison sight costs 20 Pellets.
Burning sight costs 26 Pellets.
Nightmare sight costs 32 Pellets.
As with the tracking vials, you wont be able to proc the other sights while you have an Opie buff on.
Rare Artifact Locations
Every zone in Rift has hundreds of locations where artifacts can spawn. Only a certain percentage of artifacts will be spawned at one time.
As you pick up the artifacts, the game will start a random timer and then respawn the artifacts in random locations.
In the PBN zones, there are two types of artifact locations..
- Normal spots – Will spawn White/Common, Green/Uncommon, and Blue/Rare artifacts. A Normal spot will never drop a Purple/Epic artifact.
- Rare spots – Will spawn Green/Uncommon, Blue/Rare, and Purple/Epic artifacts. A Rare spot will never drop a White/Common artifact.
It can be helpful to know where the rare spots are located, to ensure you check them during every hunt, however you should always grab the artifacts from the normal spots too. If you don’t pick from the normal spots, then after a few respawn cycles there will just be artifacts in all the normal spots and none in the rare spots!
Try to completely clear busy areas and then the routes between each area. This will give you the best chance of respawns in the rare spots.
Stonefield Rare Artifact Locations
In Stonefield the rare artifact spots are usually up on the mountains or on difficult to climb buildings.
A few of these locations are much easier to get to if you use a jumping mount, either Opie or the Jet Pack.
Gloamwood Rare Artifact Locations
A few of these locations are much easier to get to if you use a jumping mount, either Opie or the Jet Pack.
The spider cave in Darkening Deeps has a bunch of rare spots high up in the roots. It is challenging to get up there! If you manage it, try to park an alt up there with an artifact tracking vial so you can log that alt when you see there are artis up there while hunting with your main.
Planetouched Wilds Rare Artifact Locations
This is still a work in progress for me..
In the meantime, you can have a look at the imgur album of rare spots.