Overwhelmed by all the different early game options

[Deleted]

this whole soul system has overwhelmed me. so there are 4 classes, with 9 souls each, which each give a different playstyle to the class, right? and you can have 3 souls at once? so that's 9*8*7*4 or 2016 different options. Even if you want to play a certain role, you still have 4-500 different combinations of souls to choose from.

I honestly cannot see the forest through the trees. You can build 2016 different classes in essence, and while likely 50% of those will be crap, I cannot fathom the extent of customization. And then I haven't even mentioned planar attunement and the talents themselves...

I feel like I need to do hours of research before I can even start to really play. I doubt that's intended...

[Tuma]

this whole soul system has overwhelmed me. so there are 4 classes, with 9 souls each, which each give a different playstyle to the class, right? and you can have 3 souls at once? so that's 9*8*7*4 or 2016 different options. Even if you want to play a certain role, you still have 4-500 different combinations of souls to choose from.

I honestly cannot see the forest through the trees. You can build 2016 different classes in essence, and while likely 50% of those will be crap, I cannot fathom the extent of customization. And then I haven't even mentioned planar attunement and the talents themselves...

I feel like I need to do hours of research before I can even start to really play. I doubt that's intended...

That's what the preset roles are for. You can choose which one you like the most and it will automatically distribute points according to the preset and you won't have to do anything until you get used to it then you can reset your talents and distribute the points the way you want manually.

[Deleted]

As Tuma says, just pick one of what you want to do (tank/dps/support or heal) and use the preset souls.

Personally I play a mage and a cleric.

My mage i chose the soul with a pet and liked it so have stuck with it

My cleric I heal dungeons so have gone sentinel and for leveling I wanted melee so chose shaman.

I'll use the presets until level 60 and then see what i want to do at max level, but for my mage I may add a healing soul and a non pet soul and may also add a ranges soul for my cleric..... depending on how i fell.

It's all up to what you want to do with your class

[Fencers]

There are the pre set souls, but also the class souls are pretty intuitive once you take a little time to look at them.

It's not really as complicated as it seems. Things are rather simple for the most part- "Oh, I want to do damage. Well, I probably wouldn't be too bad off getting a lot of those +1% damage talents littering all the souls marked as damage...", etc.

Just take a little time to read and put two & two together. A lot easier than it looks, honestly.

[zeropeorth]

As others have said, preset souls will help you adjust and learn. Once you are used to it, it won't be overwhelming and you can start 'playing' with builds, split trees, or whatever you like.

You will find things that suit you. I personally rarely like melee in any game ... so that cuts my choices down by a ton. I don't necessarily like pet classes much (wow's bad pet AI for years), though I do have one I'm leveling (didn't go with the mage pet spec, but leveling a MM/Ranger rogue). I found I really liked the warlock spec, so the majority of time I'm in that; when I'm not Chloro to provide the rare healer in events when necessary, and mess with pyro occasionally.

You just need to feel out what works for you. It is certainly better for me than what WoW has turned into. I love the talent trees in Rift; I used to like them in WoW (even when I didn't have any freedom in point allocation).

The planar attunement stuff, I'm still learning. I initially was going to fill out one plane; but right now I'm grabbing all the intellect on death and fire ... because the people I asked weren't min/maxers and didn't give me a straight answer So I just went for max intellect to point usage first.

Learning and experimentation is part of the fun for some of us. Flexibility is a great thing imo as well.

I don't think there is a lot of 'crap' builds. Maybe if you are mixing things too much (tank, aoe, pet) and splitting the points evenly. But if you read the tooltips on the souls, most of the basic builds are going to be most points in one tree, and the rest in a second ... the third tree can basically give you a bonus spell (mage ex: dominator [I think] gives you a 'sheep' with no points).

What you will find, with the preset souls ... is it will give you talents you may not want (like % stam, CC/CC breakers, or other spells that aren't needed for your build/playstyle). It is a basic build that has to work for new players in pve and pvp; so it may go into survivability or control more than you need if you are just questing/events/rift closing. Once you get the gist of it, you can go and respec (or takeover the preset) and build how you feel comfortable.

Just relax, have fun ... and possibly ask for help in game/guildie/etc. F2P has a few trolls, but the core of the game has quite a few great members.

[Stormcall]

Yeah, if you look at the trees a lot of the stuff is self explanatory. IE, this is a DPS tree, so if I'm planning on focusing on this tree, these talents that add 2% damage per point, or 2% primary stat per point, or grant me a 5% damage buff whenever I crit, etc are probably good things. If you're tanking, talents like "reduces damage taken by 1% per point" or "whenever you dodge, block, or parry an attack your block chance increases by 3% for 10 seconds" are kinda no brainers. Now, it does get a little more complicated if you're splitting between 2 souls(my rogue is a nightblade/riftstalker, so in order to free up the points I need for riftstalker, I basically avoid the talents in nightblade that boost fiery spike, as I'm more about direct damage than a stacking dot) and you may have to give up something nice to get something nice from the other tree, but if you're primarily focused on 1 main tree it's not too bad.

[mmines]

Oh man I had no idea I could just pick a pre picked build. That was the reason I was so apprehensive of diving into this game.

[Underverse]

yeah massive ability clutter

[soniqboom]

also checkout the official forums, theres section for guides on each class which give builds, macros and info etc, alot of good infor to be found there

http://forums.riftgame.com/game-disc.../class-guides/

[Edge-]

yeah massive ability clutter

If you pull everything onto your bars, yeah. Thankfully you can macro a lot of it away, but it's still kinda nuts. Honestly I think all the self/group buffs you can cast should be passively enabled and always running, but I guess there's something hard about that because I've yet to see a game remove the need to cast all self/group buffs manually -_-

[Airlick]

I feel like I need to do hours of research before I can even start to really play. I doubt that's intended...

You really, really don't. The class system seems overwhelming at first, but once you start playing, you should find that it's actually quite simple. Most of the combinations don't work together well or at all. Tanks pretty much mix their main tank soul with other tank souls or simply souls that will further increase their survivability. Healers mix their main soul with other healing or support souls. It goes on, but it's not like, for example, healers mix the healing souls with dps or tank souls. It's quite natural, really.

[nevermore]

I started playing Rift last week and to be honest the presets are way more confusing than they should be.

I mean, you essentially pick a class and each class has 9 talent trees, and you can pick 3 of them and mix-and-match as you like. That's the gist of it, not rocket science.

HOWEVER, all these presets with names, at first I was like ummm what? It took me like a day to realise they're nothing more than suggestions.
So even though the presets are meant to make life easier for the "newbies" it just confused the hell out of me first

[Stormcall]

It goes on, but it's not like, for example, healers mix the healing souls with dps or tank souls.

Depends on what you're doing. For soloing(either levelling or doing dailies/farming), a Chloromancer(heal)/Harbinger(DPS) soul is pretty strong from what I've heard. The same can be said for the Nightblade(DPS)/Riftstalker(tank) rogue I am levelling(I haven't tested it, but at least theoretically it should also do fine if you replace nightblade with bladedancer for your dps soul). Now for raiding, yeah, you're most likely gonna have tanks dipping into the other tank souls, healers doing into other heal/support souls, etc...

[Deleted]

Thanks for the encouraging words.

one more question: is it possible to get extra bars, or is that something you need to buy for cash, even as a prefered customer?

[Deleted]

one more question: is it possible to get extra bars, or is that something you need to buy for cash, even as a prefered customer?

Try settings > interface > action bars... you can add as many to the side and bottom as you need

[Fencers]

Thanks for the encouraging words.

one more question: is it possible to get extra bars, or is that something you need to buy for cash, even as a prefered customer?

It's just a standard option in the setting menu. Just as most other MMOs. No need to pay or anything.

It's a good idea to make the settings menu your first priority in Rift. There are a lot of options from bars to nameplates, your typical video/sound settings, all the way up to full UI customization on-the-fly. And also really useful extras like ability delay, import/export settings, etc.

There is just a lot to tweak the game to your liking. Some of which are fairly important to know about.

[Kelimbror]

Thanks for the encouraging words.

one more question: is it possible to get extra bars, or is that something you need to buy for cash, even as a prefered customer?

I find it difficult to believe that anything is hard to grasp for you Bones. You are a genius.

Like others have said, start simple with a preset role. Just follow exactly where they tell you to put your points until you get the feel for the rest of the game. Spend some time with the settings like Fencers recommended to make it look more natural to how you play.

Once you are comfortable with that, then you can start branching out with new souls and macroing their abilities to remove bar clutter. A lot of classes can be played with macros on one action bar. It really frees you to see the game instead of watching 10 different countdown timers.

[Celista]

? Just jumped into play and thought the best part of playing has been all of the options regarding the talent trees. Don't really see what is so overwhelming about the game...

There is some redundancy with abilities across different specs (for example, two abilities that deal the same amount of damage, just have different names, from different trees) that is a little annoying, I think really that's the only issue I have with the different trees atm.

I have a feeling that you're overthinking things. And based on your questions with the bars, you need to do some exploration on your own in the game (you could have figured that out just by looking through your interface options).

I'd encourage you NOT to go with a premade build, to explore and experiment with it, and read some guides off of the official Rift forums for the game "basics" if you get really confused (or here or elsewhere) and just have fun in the game and not worry so much about your builds. You'll very quickly see what works for you and what doesn't.

A good way to start is to figure out your playstyle and what role you want to take while in group content or pvp. For example, if you wanted a ranged spec with some solo ability, you could go marksman/ranger and have your third tree be healing tree, cc/utility tree, or a melee damage tree; my cleric has been leveling via pvp, and I wanted a strong single-target heal spec with some absorbs and very moderate aoe ability, so I have a sentinel/purifier build with a few points in warden (all healing trees, so my damage output is relatively weak). If I was questing/soloing, I would have perhaps had one tree be a damage tree while leveling, to increase my solo ability, or used a different build altogether.

Good luck. Just explore and have fun

[zeropeorth]

I believe there are 8 action bars (3 and 3 on the bottom, 2 on the right side) which you can move and scale at whim. In fact, you could spend quite some time setting up everything; and you can copy your settings to other/new toons! even across shards if you 'export' it!

Even with fluff, and putting every ability on your bars including companions/mounts ... I still can't fill up the 6 bars, and have a lot of empty space, and haven't messed with macros yet.

Just be sure to experiment with different builds as you level, especially if you aren't feeling 'wowed' by the one you are playing. I leveled a mage as pyro before to about 40 and wasn't feeling it; while the warlock I enjoyed much more. My first toon I was a healer cleric, but when I tried out some of the melee specs, I didn't care for it; so when I play her again, I'll be trying the ranged spec.

There are a lot of options, but to me that is a good thing. Just use a bit of logic and you'll have a build you like in no time. Also, take your time and go through all the settings, adjust your UI just right ... this time spent is well worth it. Make sure you save it (possibly restart? WoW's UI wouldn't save changes unless you restarted the client - crash = wasted time, not sure about rift, never had it crash after I adjusted UI).

[Underscore]

You can narrow down your choices a lot and more important you can reset your souls in a trainer whenever you want, in case you want a change or need to clean some bad choices.

Check the forums and search for something that fits your playtyle. For example i was hearing a lot of people in Cleric forums saying druid was awesome but after i played it i wasn't likiing it much. So i respeced to ranged caster with heal and tank souls to check it out and havent changed since.

Probably im gonna get rid of the tank soul but that's where the fun is for me... Some games went for narrowing the choices but that just makes your char boring and repetitive.