The unveiling of our new Storm Legion souls is beginning on August 10th, when Trion has announced they will be revealing the new Mage soul. While RIFT fans wait for the live stream event and the rest of the soul unveils, the official forums are ripe with speculation and ideas. The other day, we went over some of the current Cleric soul ideas and speculations. Today, let’s dive into the Warrior class.
One forum thread in particular has seen a lot of recent speculation. The Warrior class is in an interesting predicament right now because the class only has two possible roles– tank and DPS. Many players are hoping for some sort of true support soul, or a total redo of the Warlord and Beastmaster souls (or both!). Other players would like to see something healing-oriented. Others still are hoping for a true ranged DPS soul. There are a lot of extremely solid options for Trion when it comes to Warriors.
Let’s dig into some thoughts straight from the players, shall we?
“What I would like to see what would make me excited: Healing Soul
Reason: We can’t be expected to be the only class that can ONLY DPS and tank.Another one I can see, for the same reason above, is a super lame Support soul.
How they would work this into the current raid set up tells my gut that they won’t do it.
Most likely? Ranged DPS soul or Healing soul. Healing soul because it would diversify a stale calling. Oh, you’re a warrior? Well, we need healers. We have a tank already and tons of DPS, you’re SOL!!
Why am I against a ranged DPS soul? It doesn’t add anything exciting to the game. It just makes warriors DPS from ranged which rogues and mages do very well already. It would allow us the opportunity to DPS from range, but, lets face it, if we did equal DPS in range as rogues or mages there would never be any warriors running melee. If we didn’t do equal DPS in range we would never go ranged so it’s a catch 22 that Trion will try to avoid like the plague.”
That last part contains an excellent point, one that’s currently visible in the various Rogue specs. Whatever spec does the most DPS will generally be the highest-played spec, and when it comes to Warriors, they are intentionally an up-in-your-face, beefy sort of class. I think many Warrior players would feel uneasy about a ranged DPS spec being preferable to melee 95% of the time. Any pure ranged spec would have to be carefully balanced.
Here’s another thing to consider– back in February of 2012, Daglar said that Warriors will not be getting a healing spec. This information, of course, may have changed, but if that is the case, then a support or ranged soul is looking very likely.
“In my opinion it will be a hybrid dps/support soul like what they originally intended Warlord to be. If you notice at Trion’s official site the Warlord soul was supposed to be this. They even have a gif of a Warlord holding a 2H weapon while the other tanking trees (Paladin, Reaver, VK) are holding shields. Sometime back in patch 1.3?? they configured Warlord to be in line with how our tank trees are built.
I think they will replace some of the Warlord call abilities. Then in this new soul we will see the same buffs except perhaps more enhanced in raids and they could stack with bard buffs. The new soul will also have full dps abilities along with passive damage contributions such as Teaching of the Five Rings and Weapon Specialization.”
This is an interesting idea.
“Healing or support. If Storm Legions releases and Warriors still only have two roles, but now every other calling has three or four roles… I am going to be angry.
Also, I think a Support soul could easily have heals in it.”
I could see a support-ish/DPS hybrid with melee AoE healing abilities working pretty well in many group situations, similar to the Cleric -icar specs, although uniquely different, and uniquely melee. It could be based off life leeches, for example. The spec doesn’t have to necessarily be a full-time healer in order to be uniquely useful. A hybrid soul would also open up some new ideas for solo-friendly specs.
What would you like to see? Any other cool ideas floating around out there?
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