The only new unique reward from it are the essences
To get to higher tier rifts, you need consumable 1-use "motivations" that let you open tier 2 rifts instead (which give higher tier essence)
Are there any other ways of getting motivations except crafting them? Are there any other rewards besides the essences, and do we know if they are actually used for anything besides crafting the new legendary armor once it's available in 9 months?
Either I'm missing something or they don't seem that interesting or lucrative to run a lot, especially if you're not interested in the armor? What's your experience with it so far?
I haven't really looked on the rewars yet. I have done quite some Tier 1 Rifts. My main proposal is to reduce the health/amount of the trash mobs in the first phase and triple the hp of the "boss" monster. I don't know how others feel about this, but clearing trash never feels great, fighting boss like monsters is great. Right now the trash clearing part is very long and the "boss" barely survives the breakbar burst at best.
Not quite, they only had one bounty modifier and could still be killed pretty fast with 5-10 players. I'd say PoF regular bounty, and then tier 3 is gonna be a PoF legendary bounty-level fight.
Tier 2 rifts have a proper champion miniboss that's much tougher to kill so I think it's only an issue with T1s (and those are meant for < 5 players anyway). My bigger possible issue is with rewards since I'm still not sure why are we closing them, at least PoF had the new armors, elegy mosaics, trade contracts in addition to regular drops like unids and money.
Okay that seems plausible, just wish the pre-event was shorter then.
Out of curiosity, have you unlocked the astral ward masteries? My guess would be that you need the rifts to get the non legendary armor unlocked by the madtery.