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Rift: The Bounty of Souls
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Many have claimed that Rift is not breaking much new MMO ground but are polishing the best of many other MMOs' features. In his Rift Weekly #2 column, MMORPG.com Lead Writer Bill Murphy contends that the soul attunement system -is- ground breaking and breaks the stereotypical class system of other MMOs. Check out Bill's thoughts and then let us know what you think.
Last week I prattled on about how Rift may not be doing too much to shake up the genre, but that there’s nothing wrong with the traditional approach. One of the features Trion is implementing to make their fantasy MMORPG stand out from the crowd is the way in which they handle their class system. Now I know it won’t please everyone (what does?), but to me the way in which Rift allows players to mix and match souls across the four archetypes goes a long way towards lessening the restrictive nature of your typical class-based game. It’s definitely one of the primary reasons I’m looking forward to launch day.
Read more of Bill Murphy's Rift Weekly #2: The Bounty of Souls.
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Comments
Yeah the soul system is AMAZING, you literally could spend weeks perfecting a special build
The soul system is the main reason I am going to play Rift. The rifts themselves are fun for awhile, but have been too frequent during beta. I hope that changes and they become more of a novel experience. But I digress: back to the souls. Mixing and matching abilties is my favorite gaming pastime. It's why I think Magic: The Gathering is the best game ever made. If one doesn't feel the need to have the "build of the week", and gets creative, the possibilties are endless. Rift is giving me a small slice of that kind of building freedom, and it is gonna be fun for the foreseeable future.
I have to agree the soul system is by far Rift's strongest point and the one thing other developers will copy in the future from rift much like rift borrows from other mmo recipies. I loved the cleric classes all seemed interesting, even had a paladin beast master thing, full plate wearing tank with a pet.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
I for one will be working on trying to make a melee taht is still viable as a main healer.
Not a paladin, but closer to an EQ shaman
Indeed the soul system is excellent, there isnt even anything close to being as good in other mmos.
It's a cool idea, and I've had a lot of fun with it so far during the beta. My only concern is that, come end-game, will the content suffer? If everyone is essentially a hybrid, will content be tuned toward groups of hybrids? Will static groups and guilds with characters that have rigidly defined roles (all dps, no tanking, etc.) blow through content at a much faster rate?
Not a terrible system - in fact, it's pretty fun, but again, I worry about what it means down the road.
The instances that are open so far indicated that you need some form of pure tank and some form of pure healer. Some form of support makes the life of the previous two a lot easier.
It's great for my characters that want to be hybrids, but it sucks for my characters that want to be pures.
-I want a Platformer MMO
Trion's "theme", if they have one is choice. Being able to choose what you want to do without having to sacrifice too much by making that choice. I don't see them tuning things to punish people for a particular soul build or for really wanting a string AoE dps class.
That said, there's no telling what players will do. Players might require lots of hybrids or lots of strong focused builds. Who knows. I think there will be much more pressure from players for specifics rather than the specifics being pushed by the encounters.
* edit *
My impression of the soul system is that you can build 4 distinct strongly focused builds. At least, that's what I did. I think your hybrid builds are going to be more for questing, soloing content or even PvP. With four different builds available at any time you're out of combat, your "Hybrid" status comes from switching, not from having multiple different strong points in a single build.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The soul system is rift is my favorite aspect of the game so far.
I played through beta 6 and tried out so many different build combinations...
Been playing WoW for a long time and Rift made me realize how much I hate what blizzard has done to their "talent" trees.
I can't help but be non-plussed by the soul system. If you try to be diverse, you get a watered down character with the weaker abilities of all 3 sub-classes, many of which are near duplicates of each other. How many finishing moves does a rogue type character need (all with some minor benefit that's different, but not big enough to make me care that I hit "5" instead of "6" in a given battle.
And if you want to get the cool stuff in your class, you can't afford to put points into the other souls (the abilities you get are worthless compared to your own classes, etc). So you end up with the "single class" again...
The soul system gives a LOT more freedom than what you typically see in games. Like you've already been told, you just have to go in deeper. You even have a lot of choice within each individual soul tree: Do you spec for just the 31-point talent, or do you spec even deeper, going for the 51-point abilities? Or do you do less, and cherrypick only the abilities you find useful?
Each soul tree usually also has multiple uses, even some that are not aimed towards the main focus of that tree. A good example would be my build in the betas - My main soul was a Paragon, an offensive soul. I went and paired it with a Riftblade (also offensive), and a Paladin (tank soul).
The Paragon has a number of defensive abilities built into the tree, mostly centered around parries and reactive abilities from parries. Since my main concept was a one half of a duo, I needed to not only be able to crank out dps, but also be able to take a beating, so I went ahead and got those. Pair that up with some more offensive and defensive abilities from Riftblade, and, oddly enough, mainly offensive abilities from the Paladin (tank) soul. There's a nice +10% damage with one-handers to be had from the paladin tree, making it a viable choice for a dual-wielding DPS warrior.
The end result was a dps/offtank hybrid. While I did not have the damage mitigation or threat generation of a pure tank, I had pretty good dps, and I was able to offtank stuff very well - with self-buffs, I could temporarily get my parry to 100%. If I -really- wanted to tank, I should replace my offhand with a shield, without even switching specs, and add a lot of survivability and a few tricks (from the paladin soul, which has a lot of shield-specific skills).
It was a quirky build for sure, but what it did for me was that it enabled me to duo-quest very effectively, and at the same time, the dual-purpose tanking and dps'ing ensured that I would rank top in pretty much any Rift I participated in, to the point where I could miss the first couple of phases and still come out on top of the leaderboard. More importantly though, the soul system enabled me to play the character pretty much exactly how I wanted - As a dual-wielding death-machine who was also quite sturdy.
http://machineborn.guildportal.com - Now recruiting players!
DOes your party need DPS? Switch to your markmen/ranger build! Does your party needs support?Change to you Bard/something role? Does your tank sucks? Thank god you have a Riftstalker role in your hotbar.:)
"you are like the world revenge on sarcasm, you know that?"
One of those great lines from The Secret World
Not true. 32 and 44 point builds are common on the Rift Forums. While the soul system is very dynamic it is not that dynamic. It is more of a pick your style than an all out custom built character. This style that you can pick can be swapped quickly and easily based off your situation.
It is hard to describe, you sound like you have played though. A HoT healer can sprinkle in some added elements (pet, range dps, melee dps, tanking) to flavor thier character however they see fit. But no, its not a do it all build.
Warriors have 3 Tank Styles, and then several DPS styles.
Clerics have 3 Healing Styles, 1 Tank style, and several DPS styles.
Mages have several DPS styles but only 1 healing style.
Rogues get several DPS styles but only 1 tank style.
Not entirely true actually - there are two "marks" to hit within each class - the 31-point ability, and the 51-point skill:
31 points is all you need to get to the top of each soul tree, and with a total of 66 points at your disposal, it means that you can get that in two of your 3 souls. This means you can get a wide range of abilities at max level if you so choose.
The 51-point skill is for those who choose to specialize deep into a single tree - by no means useful for all trees (some of their capstone skills are kinda useless), and to get to that, it requires you to spend more points in a soul than needed to get to the top. Doing so does mean specializing though, and anyone choosing this should know that. It is by no means neccessary to do this to get a "viable" character. In fact, unless you have a specific plan in mind, you'll most likely be gimping yourself by doing so. But the choice is there, and with proper planning and playstyle adjustment, you can make it a viable choice.
http://machineborn.guildportal.com - Now recruiting players!
You could go for this but the effort might be futile as long as your not in combat you can switch soul builds on the fly meaning you could go from melee to main heals in 3-4 mouse clicks. Though its completely possible to spec in such a way as to be a hybrid healer for sure.
Not true if you look at the soul builds going purely one soul has big advantages also. The general consensus has been specing into 2 souls and leaving the 3rd w/o points for one of the initial skills. if you look deep into soul trees there are some rewarding skills http://www.riftrolebuilder.com/ Now if you mean pure by role (heal, tank, support, etc) then its another story because if you choose the main role for that pure build then you are going to get more than one soul that can fulfill or help to fulfill that role ie ranged melee dps you have ranger, marksman, and sabo. Ranged dps mage elementalist pyromancer and stormcaller. Tanking reaver void knight paladin and it goes on in that fashion.
in my experience isnt this system just a better version of CoH power pools....I mean look its a good system that is very enjoyable..but I wouldnt call it that great. It is just making each character be able to fill in more in one role...while a respec system given so you can auto respect at given times....it is noting more then making one character the jack-of-all-trades. Yes I know you wouldnt see a lot of warriors healing or mages tanking, but it still is just a way to expand one character while not having to break down each class into multi tress. Rift is fun...but in no way is it a really new system (it is cool...but not ground breaking)
Loving the soul system. It allows all kinds of options and builds. I dont feel pigeon-holed into certain, limited talents. I am finding merit in building to the 31-point talents in two souls with the couple extra pt.s into a third. Also, I am finding with being able to have four talent builds I can build deeper than 31 pt.s and get more specialized and effective at tanking or healing for instances (probably for endgame as well).
Moew freedom = win
More choice = win
Gaming since Avalon Hill was making board games.
Played SWG, EVE, Fallen Earth, LOTRO, Rift, Vanguard, WoW, SWTOR, TSW, Tera
Tried Aoc, Aion, EQII, RoM, Vindictus, Darkfail, DDO, GW, PotBS
It's no bad system. However, it seemed to me that many of those abilities become redundant quickly, because you got abilities that are 100% or 90% equal from different talent trees. It would be nicer if the abilities would be more different, and if there'd be also abilities that would only show up if you'd have a certain combination of talent trees.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
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The great thing is, you can create three various hybrids and one full or true class because you get four builds/specs.
you dont say anything about support or anything. every single souls is very unique. take pyromancer and stormcaller. played both sooooo much more different than you would think. archon buff, ele support/pet, warlock has dots, chloro heals not as well as cleric but still. it seemsed like you really made these souls out to be very bland and all the same. i played alot of mage but even rogue has the bard who heals and buffs. this class system is as dynamic as you make it. sure you can put 51 points in 1 soul and nothing else. me? ill take 2 souls thats all. get only the skills i want and need. screw if people think my build isnt as good as the cookie cutter internet builds
I don't know how you came up with this considering beta only let us get up to 35 ? I believe the last even was?. The way they have the skills set up a person that wants to be a tank isnt gonna have skills from just one tanks soul but three. And with the "roles" the possiblities are endless without gimping yourself.
I wouldn't assume anything yet until you get to the top level and see for yourself. I personally love the game and I hope to see you guys in there. Look me up!! JerseyJay
I both love and hate the soul system equally.
I love it because it does offer such freedom of choice and a truly immeasurable replay value.
However I hate it becuase there are no "right" answers, at least not yet.
I guess I also love it because there are no right answers.
Thankfull Trion planned ahead enough to know people like me could use 8 saved builds, or 10 but they gave us four.. twice as many as "other game(s)" but enough? We'll have to see.
Four builds should be enough to experience all aspects of the game on a single character and have the freedom to try out different play styles... but come on Trion, I could really use 3-4 more!