Rift: Planes of Telara

[Modern Angel]

Remove the duplicate abilities, or similar abilities. I appreciate that this isn't a design choice not everyone will like but they're basically trusting you to not be a retard and use your level 1 root attack from your tertiary soul for fifty levels.

That said, they fling a lot of buttons at you at low levels. It evens out quite a bit, since the root abilities come at you more slowly as you level, but it can still be a bit overwhelming.

[Ghambit]

The low-level abilities that are worth the most are the ones that avoid global cooldowns, have some CC, or are non-related buffs.  They're few and far between, but they're there.  And it's kind of inevitable that low-level abilities across sub-classes would be repetitious.  Half the point of souls is being viable in any one of them alone and being able to switch whilst still being effective.  If they varied the low-lvl skills wildly you'd have an even greater balance issue and people bitching more than they already are.

[Sky]

Well, that's only if you don't want to wait. But 51 points for 50 levels are telling me that I can fill a single soul as long as I can wait a couple of levels without spending points (in a useless secondary-tertiary tree). That's what I felt like doing with my 3rd toon in the beta. After playing around with multi-souls not to be cockblocked, with my 3rd char I was annoyed at the low level skills from other trees cluttering my hotbars and I decided to wait and get more significant perks instead of just spending for the sake of it.

What? Why would you wait? You can't spend more points in a tree than your level (+1 at 50). So why wait, spend 'em if you got 'em.

As far as duplicated skills, the design idea is that you can use every class as a base class. I liked it better when there were classes that /didn't/ have basic functionality and were specialized. But people are stupid and QQ, so now every soul will have the basic functionality to solo with, meaning more overlap. Beyond that, you'd have some overlap if you chose multiple basic souls anyway, and that's good, because you don't want to force soul X if you want to get your basics. Options are good.

But what that means in reality is you'll have some redundant skills from the early root abilities. Pick the best one and put it on your hotbar. You're not losing anything by not using the less optimal versions.

If you think your second and third trees are useless, you're doing it wrong. Look at my example. The shaman is the main soul, mostly about crit and getting benefits out of crits. The justicar also adds to the melee power, and with a conviction self-heal (low-cost instant) I tend to use justicar attacks more. They also return more heal through reparation than the shaman attacks do. Then just enough Sentinel to get the free instant heal and the 4pt +end buff (meaning I don't need the shaman +end buff, allowing me to use a different shaman stat buff). The build really doesn't work without all three, because it gives me three very different instant heals, lots of melee power and survivability (-10% damage!) and a ranged instant (via sentinel) for pvp. Actually, I think I was deeper into sentinel for the last beta because I was using two sentinel instants for pvp.

[kaid]

Yes you have to weed out some redundant skills but overall the combinations I tried were fine. My friend had a bit more issue as marksman/ranger but for me trying out bard/riftstalker/saboteur it worked out pretty well. I have to say for a 0 level power that saboteur snare is pretty sexy and the bomb is fine for aoe situations.

Given how the whole soul system works this has a bit more learning curve than some other games for figuring out your starting skills and what you want to use and what should not be on your hotkey bar than most games and its probably unavoidable.

[Lantyssa]

It also depends upon the two souls in question.  My Reaver/Riftblade/-- had only two overlapping skills up to 15, and one of those was better for certain situations than others.  It also gave me three ranged attacks which is pretty awesome for a warrior.

For melee I used the basic Reaver attacks, usually the Riftblade combo, the Rifblade range was my primary with the two Reaver ranged DoTs as backup.  I used the defensive stuff of Riftblade with all my primary points going into Reaver.  For this beta I was working on Paragon for additional parry, but could have taken something else a little more defensive.  Lots of options!  This is good.

[Threash]

And there are 66 points total not 51.

[Sky]

The thing to bitch about with this game is not the soul system :p

[jakonovski]

Looks like the next beta event is Jan 25th to 28th. I shall have to preorder before that.

[Falconeer]

The thing to bitch about with this game is not the soul system :p

I wasn't complaining, I like it. Just wondering if it was a little less cool than I thought for a while. According to you all, except for that slight redundancy in the lower levels, it is still that cool. I'm happy.

[Threash]

But you are doing it wrong, there is no benefit to saving your points because you can't put more points into a tree than your level.

[Falconeer]

But you are doing it wrong, there is no benefit to saving your points because you can't put more points into a tree than your level.

You are right. I was basing that on the wrong assumption that trees are 51 points "long", and you are only going to get 51 points total at level 50.

Another question, I heard you can switch up to 4 saved "builds" at any given time, how does it work? Couldn't find anything like that in the 4th beta.

[Sky]

You buy roles off your trainer. This lets you save up to four configurations of your soul setup screen that you can switch around on the fly (not in combat, iirc). So you can go dps for trash and healer for boss fights or whatever. Warriors can swap in VK against more mage-oriented areas. You can have solo and group setups, and a pvp setup. It's pretty nifty, especially being able to swap in and out on the fly.

Even the way it worked the first couple betas with 51 points total, there's still no need to stick with one tree. You can buy respecs pretty cheaply, and change things around as you level.

[Shatter]

So how does pvp and gear work?  You do warfronts, etc and gain prestige which is used to buy pvp gear?  Is it similar to WOW's honor system?  Im mostly interested in pvp with Rift and want to gear and level through warfronts mostly(like I did in WAR).  Their website still says that more information in regards to PvP systems is coming but wondering if anyone has some more basic infos...thx

[Segoris]

For what was available, it was similar to WoW's Battleground gear. Earn favor and spend that on items as long as you have high enough reputation with that faction/merchant. Later on, it seems like prestige levels or pvp ranks (whatever they are called, I've forgot) are needed in combination of having enough favor to spend on the gear.

Prestige levels are also needed to move up in the pvp soul tiers.

Currently, Defiants leveling through PvP isn't that great due to long queue timers. Guardians on the other hand plow through with their instant queues. At release though, leveling should be good for both side (or so one can hope).

[Hawkbit]

I looked and forgot by now, but was there a 'resilience' type stat on the PvP gear?  I know there's a reduction to be crit soul abilities, but I was wondering if we have to gear for that too.  I really, really dislike having split sets of gear for different play like WoW has.  Hoping they strayed away from that with Rift.

[Threash]

I looked and didn't see anything on the pvp gear that made it "pvp" gear, it was just regular gear.  The pvp stats are on the pvp soul tree.

[veredus]

As far as builds go I didn't see that many root abilities above about level 26 to 32 that to me were worth the point investment when compared to what you could get by going into another soul. After around there it takes too many points to unlock new root abilities. In most souls it looks like I can have most or all of the branch abilities I want by about 32 points. For example, I got to level 22 on my mage and was running 6 points in  Elementalist, 6 points in Chloro and 17 points in Stormcaller and loved it. Didn't feel the need to keep Stormcaller maxed at all.


Another note about switching builds on the fly. Your builds do not need to be the same three souls. You can have like say a Warlock, Necro, Stormcaller for dps then swap to a Chloro, Archon, Dominator spec on the fly for support or whatever.


edit: grammar

[March]

Another note about switching builds on the fly. Your builds do not need to be the same three souls. You can have like say a Warlock, Necro, Stormcaller for dps then swap to a Chloro, Archon, Dominator spec on the fly for support or whatever.

I am either going to capital L Love that or hate it... just not sure which, yet.

[Draegan]

The sweet spot in all of the builds I've planned out is around 26-31 points per soul.  Anything extra is for special builds for specific situations.  Depending on the calling and synergy between souls, I can see a lot of builds having points spread out almost evenly (to some degree)

[Hawkbit]

I am either going to capital L Love that or hate it... just not sure which, yet.

It's awesome.  It will drive some people bonkers because of how deep it is.  The upside is that you basically pick from four classes at the start and you can become whatever you want. 

Like WoW, where I was a hunter in vanilla and didn't like the BC changes so i rolled a mage.  When WotLK came out I didn't like the mage so I rolled a DK.  Then somewhere down the line I rolled a pally...  and so on.  With RIFT, I just do the soul quests to unlock them and switch on the fly.  No leveling a new toon to fit some niche, just change it up and play. 

It's awesome.  (again)

[Threash]

The sweet spot in all of the builds I've planned out is around 26-31 points per soul. 

32 really, there is no reason not to get the 32 point soul ability if you are going 31 deep.

[rattran]

31 points to the top of the tree.

[Draegan]

The sweet spot in all of the builds I've planned out is around 26-31 points per soul. 

32 really, there is no reason not to get the 32 point soul ability if you are going 31 deep.

There are some 31 pt abilities across all souls that aren't really worth it where that one point somewhere else might make a difference.

[Threash]

But 32 points gives you an extra root ability that is probably very decent.

[Modern Angel]

So does 51. Which illustrates one of the things they did which differentiated it from WoW, even at WoW's worst talent bloat stages: lots and lots of passives in the trees, all of which are good. In WoW most of the talent bloat always came from gimmick talents or decisively PvP related talents. In the standard Rift souls there are legitimate choices to be made in the form of passive bonuses as you climb the tree, since most of the active abilities and buffs (gimmicky or otherwise) are gotten from the roots.

[Ashamanchill]

This is kinda a goofy question, but can anyone in beta tell me if Rift has an inspect option to take a gander at people's talent point allocations? It's one of those small things that WoW has done that makes the game just a little better. It sure makes the few minutes at the start of a BG go by faster.

I dunno, I was thinking that it would be a kick ass feature in this game especially.

[Hawkbit]

iirc, there's no inspect.  50% of that being accurate.

[Spiff]

Well there's an inspect, but last I checked it only showed gear, not souls.
Not sure I'd like it to be there either tbh, inherently it leads to a lot of aggravation (I don't need "duude no one goes 32 pts into Chloro, u'r such a n00b!"-type discussions).

Part of the fun (especially in PvP) of the system to me is not knowing exactly what someone is.
Just got to have some faith that people know what role they are themselves .

About the PvP-side imbalance (i.e.: serious overpopulation on the Defiant side); Is there anyone that didn't see that coming?
Can't imagine that being any different at launch tbh (rebalancing the Kelari racial might help a little though).

[Threash]

Can't imagine that being any different at launch tbh (rebalancing the Kelari racial might help a little though).

That won't be enough at this point.  Giving the kelari racial to guardians might help.

[Nija]

I dunno, I was thinking that it would be a kick ass feature in this game especially.

I'm exactly opposed to you when it comes to this kind of thing. I love the fact that an enemy (or anyone) just sees that you are "Rogue". They have no idea what your build is. They don't know that you're a healing bard until they see you whip out the lute and hear the tune. They don't know that you're a saboteur until they see the bomb toss animations.

I like dealing with a lot of unknowns. That was one of the things that I loved about UO. If you had a robe on with no helm, gorget, gloves, and chain legs (so you're barefoot or wearing cloth shoes) nobody knew just how much armor, or how little armor you had on. They also had no idea what your skills were until it was too late. This was the metagame before Eve. These days in MMOS, there are way too many knowns and not enough unknowns.

[Maledict]

Like WoW, where I was a hunter in vanilla and didn't like the BC changes so i rolled a mage.  When WotLK came out I didn't like the mage so I rolled a DK.  Then somewhere down the line I rolled a pally...  and so on.  With RIFT, I just do the soul quests to unlock them and switch on the fly.  No leveling a new toon to fit some niche, just change it up and play. 

It's awesome.  (again)

Unless something has changed since I last played the beta, you would have to to do exactly the same in RIFTS, and re-roll 3 times to play those classes. Warriors can't become healers, etc etc.

Ultimately, I just don't think the soul system is deep enough. There aren't enough "tank mages / healing rogue" souls to *really* make a big difference, and a lot of the roles just feel like individual talent trees. It's less "Build the class you want" and more of an elaborate talent point system with a lot of duplicate abilities. There needs to be more variety in the roles for souls, and more interaction between each soul tree for the system to be really interesting.

[Threash]

Sure if you pick two of the roles that it is missing it looks that way, but there are "healer mages" "cc mages" "pet mages" "dot mages" "dps mages" "tank rogues" "ranged rogues" "stealth rogues" "pet rogues" "support rogues" "aoe rogues"... etc etc etc.  Clerics CAN actually do every single thing, and warriors can do the least variety of things, but they do have plenty of options.

[Sky]

It's close, but I don't think they're going to pull off the awesome goal of making it so any player can fill any role if he has a role preset for it. There's just not enough time to work all the souls into shape, the cleric is the only one that's close and it's miles away. Great heals, but nobody is going to be bringing them along for dps or tanking. On the one hand, it's nice that you can build a solo (and pvp) role without screwing yourself for the raid game, but it's going to be one of the biggest disappointments in the post-mortem, imo. They're just so close to a true innovation.

[Nebu]

Don't these games rely on interdependence at their core to maintain a need for the social structure that provides long-term subs?

I'm wondering how far you can innovate away from the needs of particular playstyles and class roles while maintaining a subscriber model.

[Modern Angel]

Cleric dps is HIGHLY competitive. The Cabalist is way good. It's tanking where I'm iffy. They seem viable, not optimal. Which is probably as it should be.