I promised a little while back to get some information on the talent tree, and role leveling. Since then, I’ve been extremely busy doing a LOT of research. Two toons have been leveled to the max level of 50, and am working on a couple more. The only toons I really have no interest in wear plate, so I’m going to completely profess ignorance to the warrior classes, but definitely there’s a huge amount of content to mine on the other three souls. Why my aversion to plate? Simple enough, I don’t like the huge amount of stress that comes with tanking, and melee dps is a bother. Chasing stuff around all the time because the tank’s kiting it around just isn’t a lot of fun for me either.
When your toon begins it’s journey in Telara, on the ‘birth page’ you choose a role. Warrior, Cleric, Rogue, or Mage. I list them in descending order of armor value, not in the way I prefer to play them. (obviously). Every soul has multiple dps specs, every soul except Warrior has a healing/offhealing spec. The rogue’s bard spec is not, and was never intended to be more than a support healing role, although I understand when the game was first released bards were capable of healing regular dungeons this is no longer the case.
As you progress through the starting area, you pick up another two souls for a total of three. There are 51 points available in each tree, and by the time you reach level 50 you have 66 points to spend, so the choices you can make are endless. In addition to this, the game gives you an opportunity to pick up the souls you didn’t choose later on, and you can switch these out anytime a soul has no points in it. At level 50 it costs about 8 platinum to totally respec a toon plus the 50g to wipe the slate clean as it were, so if you don’t want to buy additional roles, you certainly can continue to explore with the single set.
Zam has been kind enough to put up a talent tree calculator, and you can access it at http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html
Here’s a video of the cabalist Cleric soul leveling I think you might enjoy. This guy is NOT me, hehe, although I think he puts out a pretty good video.
It’s a bit long, but I think that you will really get an idea of how the leveling in this game works by watching.
[tube]V_gDj1l0eGA[/tube]
The intricacies of MMO skill trees have always gone over my head for some reason. You seem to have an uncanny grasp of them. 🙂