One of the most enticing aspects of Rift: Planes of Telara, is the cool new Soul system used to help players determine their abilities in their class. Here’s basically how the system works. You begin the game by choosing a Calling – immediately after you start playing, you will receive your first Soul, a specialization within the Calling that provides you with certain types of abilities.
As an example, if you choose the Mage Calling, you will be able to choose from options such as Warlock, Pyromancer and Necromancer. Each type of Soul provides different bonuses to your character, allowing you to deal different types of damage and, in some cases, provide healing or support abilities.
The Callings
There are 4 callings in Rift – Warrior, Mage, Cleric, and Rogue. Each fits a specific generalized role including tanking, DPS, healing and support. The majority of the roles are related to damage dealing in one style or another, but there are a lot of different combination’s that allows characters to heal themselves or to heal others, and also allows them to perform crowd control.
Choosing Your Souls
Throughout the game you’ll gain the ability to unlock various souls, each of them linking directly with 2 other souls. At any given time, you can have 3 souls active on your character. Each soul will link up with specific abilities that then unlock abilities in your Soul’s tree and root system. Those abilities will compliment each other across all souls, allowing you to perform a variety of actions depending on what you want to do in the game.
In addition, Rift allows you to purchase extra Soul tree slots. By doing this, you can create up to 4 different layouts for soul trees. This means, if you unlock all the souls for your Calling (of which there are more than a dozen), you can create 4 different combinations of souls, allowing you to adapt your game play, depending on the end-game content you are playing – PvP, raiding, or solo questing.
Make Your Decisions Count
The thing about the soul system is that you will almost never be able to choose just right. With thousands of potential combination’s, plus hundreds of hybrids you can create, and many more styles of play that will vary depending on the decisions you make, it’s impossible to get it just right. But, with practice and a keen eye, you can start tweaking your character to play as you need them to in the style you enjoy.