*Official* Rift Class Discussion Thread

Got a favorite combo? Want to share your latest build? You are in the right place. Come wax enthusiastically about why your Ranger/Bard/Assassin kicks a$$ like an ascended Cuisinart. This thread was made especially for you Mr. Elementalist/Stormcaller/dominator.

Pretty good talent tool here:

http://riftbuilder.lotd.org/

Click on a link for one of the callings and you can experiment with builds.

My pvp experience over the weekend taught me that the Warden soul, combined with some instant cast heals from Purifier, is prolly the most badass cleric you can have for warfronts. The raid-wide HoT is just unbeatable. I can't imagine how frustrated the other team must have been while I easily ran through the center of their group and was able to overcome their focus fire with my shields and instant cast HoTs.

Man I am sorry if I am Female Doggoing too much. I whined a little in game about this recently but the nightblade is very gimp right now.

My highest level and oldest character is a bard/nightblade. The nightblade just doesn't seem to have either much dps (ranged or melee) or utility. I did the quest for an additional soul to grab my new favorite, the saboteur. It totally outstrips the nightblade in dps (ranged, melee and aoe). There are so many ways to go with the nightblade. They just need to go somewhere.

Tyagaraja wrote:

Pretty good talent tool here:

http://riftbuilder.lotd.org/

Click on a link for one of the callings and you can experiment with builds.

My pvp experience over the weekend taught me that the Warden soul, combined with some instant cast heals from Purifier, is prolly the most badass cleric you can have for warfronts. The raid-wide HoT is just unbeatable. I can't imagine how frustrated the other team must have been while I easily ran through the center of their group and was able to overcome their focus fire with my shields and instant cast HoTs.

I missed the pvp this weekend have a case of the piggy flu :(. What level was your character and how did cloth wearing folks fair in it?

fangblackbone wrote:

Man I am sorry if I am Female Doggoing too much. I whined a little in game about this recently but the nightblade is very gimp right now.

My highest level and oldest character is a bard/nightblade. The nightblade just doesn't seem to have either much dps (ranged or melee) or utility. I did the quest for an additional soul to grab my new favorite, the saboteur. It totally outstrips the nightblade in dps (ranged, melee and aoe). There are so many ways to go with the nightblade. They just need to go somewhere.

Looking at the nightblade tree, it does seem a bit unfocused in it's waffling between ranged, weapon enchants and stealth. I can see a few things that might compliment other classes or builds, but I don't really see it working as a primary tree.

I have played around with a primary Assassin, with Nightblade and BladeDancer as my other souls. Nightblade is not that great, however it does have one invaluable skill, a ranged mez at 8 points in. With the ranged mez from NB and the melee mez from Assassins plus always on stealth from Assassins I can pretty much handle any situation.

The other thing that everyone should remember about Rift is the power of Roles, which are basically specs on steroids. You can have up to 4 roles, which allows you to mix and match any and all souls of any particular calling to your heart's content, and you can then switch roles at anytime out of combat.

Using Rouges as an example, you can have a pure Bard build with one roll, a stealth Assassin/Bladedancer/x role, a Ranger/Marksman bard ranged roll and finally a Riftstalker/bladedancer/bard tanking role. Plus, respeccing is really cheap, so make a mistake or just wannna try that crazy saboteur build, knock yourself out.

Mostly the Guardians were getting slaughtered in Black Temple, probably because of the population imbalance. I switched over to heal for Guardians in order to help event things out. I made a great discovery: Posting instructions to raid chat at the beginning of every fight seemed to help our success a lot. People just don't seem to get "kill the guy holding the fang!" Did people not play murderball as children?

I'm thinking I will make a macro for every warfront that goes over the how to play the map. Then I can just send it out with a single button press at the beginning.

As far as rogues go, I've never like the NB either. I just don't get what the hell you're supposed to do with it. On the other hand, it seems like the teleports that the riftstalker get would be killer in PvP. Has anything specced deeply into that tree? You can get 2 different teleport/backstabs and also a blink, iirc.

The blink seems like its about 3-4 steps forward and doesn't work very well on even slightly inclined terrain. Its on a 45 second cool down so its effectiveness seems very low.

The nightblade seems like it is supposed to be truer to a mage/rogue hybrid. It doesn't seem to offer much in either role, however.

The instructional pvp macro seems like a great idea!

Ok so that 8 point assassin talent is really good. It only works on melee attacks and it says it does %300 weapon damage over 6 seconds. So I wonder if its main hand or both weapons? Oh and it stacks to at least 3 and it gets more than 1 stack typically every other fight. Its not an uber killer but its nice to know you are still eroding your opponents health noticibly when they parry or dodge you or you miss.

8 points in assassin is well worth it. You get 2 poisons in addition to that talent. The 1 poison just adds damage but the other increases crit% by 5 on your target. And then of course you get stealth and backstab should you choose to use them.

So this character with 8 points assassin is a assassin/marksman/ranger and I don't have enough points for the marksman to distinguish itself from the ranger. So I don't know where to go with the third soul. Bard and riftstalker are the obvious choices but I'm lookinmg for something to just jump out and say "pick me" but I don't see it.

I think for the most part the best builds are going to be 51-15-0 builds. Spreading your point out over 3 souls so far has been less than effective.

I am going to play around with the cabalist next. I have played with just about every soul and for my own tastes I am looking forward to ranger/bard, Shaman/Sent/Justicar, and Void Kight/Pally.

I havent enjoyed the Mage class that much though thats more by personal preference. I have never been heavy into the magic users.

Bard is an absolute must for the Ranger pet. Coupled with the early boost to pet endurance they become incredibly survivable. 4 legged pocket tank. My fave rogue combo is ranger bard riftstalker or sub assassin for stalker if you don't mind losing the awesome escape.

After testing I decided I cannot stand the cabalist as a main soul. I don't think I can say much about it because I am not sure if the soul changes were in the last beta or not but I am not impressed.

Really? I enjoyed my time with the cabalist but maybe that was because it was secondary to a justicar build? I didn't get very far into it but the signet and aoe nukes were a nice complement to the strong melee abilities. Although I can see that using the aoe nuke in melee range can cause lots of problems drawing in adds when you are trying to finish the fight. There is one caveat also that I haven't played a cabalist in the latest patch.

But I do have some good news! I have found a few more mage souls that I really enjoy. The archon is pretty neat but will need a stronger foundation soul for soloing as it is not a quick killer by any means.

But the stormcaller is really fun! The mechanics sort of work like the rogue combo points except that it maxes out at 3 and the finisher doesn't wipe the combo points. They just last for 15 seconds and you can spam the finisher as much as possible in that time frame. Its an interesting twist in that the points are capped at 3 but they are generated much slower since the combo point builder is a 2 second cast. There is also electrocute which is a channeled 3 sec melee spell that does damage and knocks the target back a moderate distance. Electrocute is also a combo point builder but unfortunately, its on a 1 minute timer. (reducible to 30 seconds with talents) Its understandible that you wouldn't want a spammable knockback but I wish there was some compromise, like removing the knockback or making a debuff that makes the knockback only work once every 30-60 seconds, so that it is on a 15 second cooldown. If they expand upon this mechanic, these guys are going to be very popular!

I have to hand it to the RIFT devs. They have really impressed me with their ability to upend, reverse and tweak conventions with most of their soul designs. And the key point is that not only do these aberrations work well, but a lot of them are fun too.

Inquisitor is a great pairing with Cabalist. I played a Cabalist,inq, warden until lvl 10 and he was pretty fierce. I still am partial to my ele, storm, Dom build, but I am going to look at chloromancer, nec, war for next beta.

Just lookin to see what's being said so far.

I already know my build. Rng/brd/rs

Dbl post. phone.

Just a quick question because I know ranger/bard/riftstalker is going to be popular, but do you know how you are going to break it down? 51/15/0 or 44/12/10 or 12/12/42? Or will you go all of the above and switch between the purchased specs?

I cannot comment at this time on specific point distributions or why. Still under NDA.

I will say that my rogue has 3 completely different purchased roles employing specific soul combinations for each role.

Yeah that's the nice thing with roles. You can mix and match points, souls, etc... through cheap reapers and/or roles.

alexicacon wrote:

I cannot comment at this time on specific point distributions or why. Still under NDA.

Unless you are under some sort of double-secret probation nda that the rest of us don't know about, Rift's beta nda was lifted dec. 22nd.

Unless you are under some sort of double-secret probation nda

That's an affirmative on the beta nda lift.

No other comment at this time.

Alexicacon is speaking of the super secrect 2nd world running currently which can not be mentioned nor can anything related to Alpha still

What's the first rule of fight club?

I figured we can talk about stuff that is in the beta even if its possible we may have been fortunate enough to spend some time in something that could be construed as something as well, whether or not its beta I couldn't say =P

I'll put it this way, things are constantly in flux -- those developers are busy as squirrels in the fall ...

Stuff changes, we evaluate it. Stuff changes more. Anything we could say regarding things that have been released from the nda in the betas would still run the risk of being tainted by insights and thoughts from outside the beta, and I'd rather stick to the letter of the law on that one.

There will be time.

For now though - I really like my riftstalker/bard/ranger, and I'll be happy to expound on why within minutes of release or being cleared to discuss it further.

http://rifts.ru/tallents/index.html#

another pretty good talent calculator.

Ok, nvm, this one's way cooler:

http://rift.dev.zam.com/cluster/stc.pl

alexicacon wrote:
Unless you are under some sort of double-secret probation nda

That's an affirmative on the beta nda lift.

No other comment at this time.

Food for thought, those people in alpha are still under NDA.

Tyagaraja wrote:

Ok, nvm, this one's way cooler:

http://rift.dev.zam.com/cluster/stc.pl

Indeed this one is by far the best.

I've played around with some of the character/talent builders but I'm still a bit confused about how classes function in game.

->I've seen videos claiming you can switch "spec" instantly, how many specs can you have on "reserve"?

->Every class has a specific "pvp" build, the talents of which look to be identical across classes/archtypes and also look to be awesome enough to render any other build moot. Doesn't this kind of kill the diversity? On the other hand I guess it would make pvp balance a whole lot easier.

-> How does itemization work? Someone suggested it is by archtype (ie warrior items, mage items, etc) but how does this work out if your character is say - a warrior with a dps spec and a tank spec? Are the stats set up in a way to render a single item set per archetype sufficient?

You can have 4 specs presets on reserve. You can reset your talents for a TBD fee as many times as you want. So provided you have unlocked all the souls and you are max level, your one character can be any combination of souls within that calling.

Itemization seems to work with a primary stat for each calling. Rogues/dex, warriors/str, clerics/wisdom, mages/int. Its pretty standard fare except that melee oriented clerics will usually have a talent that either adds x% of wisdom to str or x% spell power to attack power. There are also certain souls that have low level talents that add 10% to the callings primary stat or armor or weapon damage.

So I think they are doing this in lieu of making sure they have a set of str gear for clerics. It seems to be working really well so far. I have to admit that my highest character is 15 so that limits my perspective.

I have no clue about pvp but it does seem to me that there are talents in almost every soul of each calling that are pvp specific. There are stuns, silences, snares, mezzes, roots, disarms, blinds, confuses, etc. As a matter of fact you can pretty much tell which ones are which because %50 of the abilities on a 1 minute or longer cooldown are useful for pvp.