Of Bladedancers and Space-Time Tears
I think that one of the biggest pitfalls for RIFT players is getting into the mindset that souls = classes. Souls are merely pieces of a class that is envisioned solely by you (or a min/max build forum thread), and I’m finding it important to rethink how I approach class building in the game.
The default approach is to simply pick one soul and pump as many soul points in it as possible until you hit both of the capstones (the skill and talent tree capstone abilities), throwing your leftover points into a supporting soul and calling it a day. And sure, that’s one way to go, but not necessarily the most fun — or even the most efficient for what you may be wanting to do.
The different approach that the developers encourage is for you to imagine a class in your mind and then use the in-game tools to create it as best as you can. It helps to do this after you’ve messed around with a bunch of souls and roles and have a good feel for what does what.
For example, my primary soul on my Rogue is a Bladedancer. I don’t know why, exactly, but I absolutely love it. It’s very visceral, fast-paced, and her survival is decent. So for the longest time I was just pushing my way to the capstones without giving it a second thought. However, after a while I noticed that I had a health issue (as in, after two or three fights I’d have to stop to drink) and I started to wonder if I could be getting more out of the build.
So I reset my points and looked hard at the three trees (I think I was Blade/Assassin/Bard) and decided that I didn’t necessarily want the 51-point capstone ability. Sure, it looked nice, but it would require me to dump a lot more points into the soul than I wanted, points that could be put to better use elsewhere.
Therefore I put just enough points to get the 31-point talent capstone (dancing steel, which is an amazingly fun AOE channeled attack) and then branched out elsewhere. I knew I wanted to solve my health problem and up my survivability, since my DPS was just fine.
Bard seemed like an obvious choice for health, although I needed a heal on demand instead of relying on combo-abilities. The soul’s single healing DOT was too high up into the skill tree to justify spending points on the build, so I nixed the Bard and replaced it with the Riftstalker instead.
The Riftstalker complements the Bladedancer’s survival aspects greatly, adding a lot more in terms of shielding, health and armor to my already-high dodge and parry. On top of that, I was able to buy the ability that refunds unused combo points into a heal when you kill an enemy, which helped to shore up my accumulating injury problem. So now when I kill a bad guy with combo points left on him, I get both energy (Bladedancer) and health (Riftstalker) back.
The Assassin soul got a few points to increase my base DPS and crit, the latter of which is highly important for many Bladedancer abilities.
So I came away from this rebuilding session feeling much more in tune with my character’s “class” than I did before. I’m holding off on seeing the builds others have come up with on the forums because I know once I do that, it’s hard to spec anything different — and it’s so much fun just coming up with builds on my own!
- Posted in: RIFT
That’s the biggest appeal of RIFT for me. It’s still not enough to get me into the game, but I love that it allows that sort of customization. I wish more games would pick up that design ethos.
This is the main reason I love Rift. The scope of what you can do with your toon’s abilities is mind-boggling.
It makes me sad to see threads in fora starting to state “THIS IS THE SPEC… yadda-yadda.” For me that defeats the whole purpose behind the multitude of souls and roles.
As a veteran City of Heroes player the multi-soul approach in Rift feels like the natural approach, since you always pick two powersets when you create your character in CoH. Or as in Guild Wars or FFXI where you also could have a secondary class – in FFXI you would gimp yourself if you did not do that.
It never even entered my mind that I might pick just a single soul until I saw references that some other players were doing just that. In my mindset the souls are just different powersets.
I do not quite like the talent tree approach in combination with these though, I would prefer a slightly more free skill pool choice.
When I first read the title of your post, I wasn’t sure if this was going to be space-time tears (as in rips) or space-time tears (as in crying)
The class/build system is by far my favorite feature of Rift. I had 3 builds on my rogue, and only didn’t have more because I couldn’t be bothered to spend the money to unlock more slots.
My main build was Nightblade/Riftstalker/Bladedancer. It’s hard to describe the fun of being able to stealth teleport behind a target, get a damage bonus for recently teleporting, unload a high damage stealth attack that gives another damage bonus, land a few quick hits, drop a fire damage finisher, land a few quick one-two hits with the bladedancer basic attacks, and heal back to full with unused combo points.
It was a pretty good PvP build, but mostly a solo PvE build. I also had a full Bard support build (always fun for rift raids/events) and a full Riftstalker/Bard build for tanking, but my hybrid build was by far the most fun.
I ended up with the very same build as described in the post, still using it most of the time. It’s a good solid PvE build, both for solo and into groups.
Still, i found it a bit lacking in situations where elite casters needed to be fought. The extra dodge doesn’t really help against those.
For these situations i created another flavor, this time a combination of Assassin, Nightblade and Bladedancer. It ended up with 4 skills able to interrupt spellcasting, mostly through some sort of crowd control. The permanent stealth and 2 out-of-combat incapacitating skills are also nice when one just needs to get through an area in no mood to fight, or, for the option of mezzing two opponents, killing the third and slipping back to stealth.
ps: great illustration!
This one hopes to see Syrio Forel again…
I find the soul system a bit irritating. Fiddling about with builds can be as much a chore as a pleasure, so as soon as I find a build that works I generally stick with it.
What’s most irritated me about Rift since launch is probably the several obligatory re-specs I’ve had to do when Trion changed some little detail that I’d never even noticed and decided it had such earth-shattering implications that they’d better give us all our soul points back before we went looking for the pitchforks and burning torches. I always end up with a slightly different build than I had before, which I just find annoying.
While the Rift soul system has its moments, on balance I’d prefer a traditional class-based system.
You should look at putting assasin in too. It pairs very well with Riftstalker since you get several abilities to port in behind your target. I’m using Assassin/Bladedancer/Riftstalker at the moment.
I prefer to fight at range most of the time, so I usually run around as Ranger/Nightblade/Assassin, even though “everyone says” that for range you want to be Ranger for the pet, Marksman for actual dps, and “whatever” for the final soul. to which I say “Meh! I love my build!”
That said, I also like my Nightblade/Assassin/Bladedancer for when I feel like melee.
I also have a full bard spec for support, and a Riftstalker tanking build as well. Fun times all around.
Someday I’ll get past level 29 on my rogue too
For now, I’m enjoying my cleric at 50, and yes, I have 4 builds there as well, and only 1 of them is “cookie-cutter.” The rest have my own take on them.
Bladedancer is very good fun indeed. It seems to me to be built as a duellist – it’s a melee damage dealer that buffs up its dodge and parry chance, and gets some nice reactions when it dodges or parries. This blows the minds of people who are looking for a pure PvE DPS character that isn’t supposed to ever HAVE to dodge or parry – but it’s pretty good for PvP, as part of a tank build with riftstalker, or just if you want a jack-of-all-trades character who can handle any trash mobs he puills off the tank with his AoE.
Personally, I usually run with 31 bladedancer, 21 assassin (for unlimited stealth, leeching poison and plenty of melee boosting talents) and 14 riftstalker for some extra survivability. I’ve played the same but substituted bard for riftstalker in the past too, and that gives a DPS who can bring some buffs to a party without a dedicated bard.
dead……dead… verrrrry dead.
Bladedancer/Riftstalker/Nightblade for my general runnin’ around spec.
Bladedancer is just a solid damage dealer base.
Riftstalker for the same reason you’ve started using it. Live longer and heal self.
Nightblade for the short stealth and fiery throwing daggers. Might not be the best use of the soul, but I like it.