Rift got soul!

On my last post about Rift, i end up forgetting one important aspect of the game, the classes. Rift classes take an extra to most classes in other mmo games.

Like in most mmo's, Rift boost the usual tank, healer dps class, with an added support class - support classe usually is the class that can bring extra healing, or extra dps goodies for the group. Besides that, and much like in EQ2, we have 4 archtype classes, Warrior, Cleric, Mage and Scout. And here is where the big difference comes. Let's take EQ2 example. If you pick a fighter class, you have to pick either an Shadowknight or Paladin or Guardian or Beserker or Monk or Bruiser (lots of or), and from 1 to 90 you only will be the one you pick - sure you can betray between either Shadowknight or Paladin for instance, but it requires a bit of work. In Rift, you create a warrior, and while you progress the game, you get souls for warrior, which each soul represents a type of warrior - paladin for instance. But each possible build allows you to have up to 3 souls, so for instance your initial warrior could be, Paladin, Warlord and Void Knight, all in a single build. The way it ends up on this build, depends on how you invest your points on each soul (it's the same as talent tree in WoW). Fed up of that build? No problem, go to your trainer and reset it and put new souls in. Each archtype has 8 souls, so you can fiddle up with builds quite alot. Got a build you like? Well save it, and create a new soul. Each character can have up to 5 different soul builds, so you have a lot of playground. What it's said here applies for each archtype, so you can imagine how builds one can get in 4 different archtypes. Also each archtype features a pvp soul (that's a 9th soul).

So this is yet another interesting aspect of the game, that makes it stand a bit different of most mmo's out there. Allowing a big feedling around on classes, should be fun for those who like to experiment on different types of play style.

I will try to go further in on each class in a later post.