When (Day 181)

Eventually I will start playing some other games aside from Rift, but until I get to level 60, it is my current fixation. The game's not perfect by any means, but I really enjoy a lot of the mechanics and gameplay. Combining different souls together adds a lot of depth to the game even if each soul isn't perfectly balanced against the others. As a level 27 rogue, I've already respecced my soul trees three or four times in an effort to experiment with what I like best. I'm currently trying a Bladedancer/Riftstalker combo with just enough points in the latter to get three of the soul's blinks as well as passives that increase my crit chance and damage by 15% for 10 seconds after teleporting.

I'm almost positive I won't stick with it for long. In the long run, the number of points I have in Riftstalker will make it impossible to get Binary Strike, a powerful Bladedancer ability that serves as a replacement for Keen Strike, one of the soul's main damage abilities. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to get Double Strike either, a strong finisher that would replace Deadly Strike or Guarded Steel, depending on what I'm using at the time. Both of those finishers deal the same damage, but Guarded Steel has the added benefit of increasing my armor based on the number of combo points I've used. It's not relevant to my DPS, but it does help while soloing.

I currently have Marksman as my third soul, although I don't have a single point in it--and I don't really plan on investing in it at all. What I find interesting is the fact that you can seamlessly switch between ranged and melee combat, something that WoW can no longer boast. When Mists of Pandaria came out, the ability to simultaneously equip ranged and melee weapons was removed for reasons I cannot fathom. Many classes chose to equip a ranged weapon only for the boost to stats it imparted--but it was a nice bit of variety to pull out a ranged weapon in certain occasions. This is what you can do in Rift, except you can combine abilities that required a ranged weapon to be equipped with abilities that require a melee weapon. You can seamlessly chain Hasted Shot into something like Keen Strike as long as you closed the distance in that span of time.

One complaint I have with Rift is that abilities typically don't have flashy or distinctive animations. Abilities like Keen Strike and Quick Strike look functionally identical in that they just interrupt your normal flow of auto attacks with an instant cast strike--but WoW had this exact same problem. I'm more familiar with the catalog of abilities available in World of Warcraft currently, but as I amass more knowledge about Rift, I'll be able to make a fairer comparison. Despite this issue, I still find combat to be fairly entertaining, at least on the Rogue. Combat was less exciting on my Cleric, but only because I was going with a healing spec. Healing in dungeons was actually quite fun and a lot more engaging than low-level healing in World of Warcraft, where you might have access to four different heals at most.

I can't say I'll invest as much time into Rift as I have on World of Warcraft (and let's be honest, I hope I don't) but I do enjoy it quite a bit and I'm going to be playing it pretty regularly for the next few weeks. It's entirely possible I'll be disappointed with the endgame content, but for now I like it a lot--and I still have ambitions of raising enough platinum to buy REX so I can unlock more content, particularly character slots and the other souls.