One of the best things, if not the best thing RIFT has going for it, is its immense soul system. Most of us, myself included, were pretty damn amazed when we heard about the system and how much we could actually experiment with it. It allows freedom like no other MMORPG, especially when you consider the fact that we’re given five roles to play around with.

This immense freedom, of course, comes with challenges. We knew this from the start. Trion knew this from the start. The biggest challenge is that giant beast hulking in the room before, during, and after every single RIFT patch– the beast known as balance. Balance is a beast to control because of the huge variety of souls and class roles that can be placed together, but also because of the different angles balance has to come from. Dozens of questions pop up every time we consider balance, because balance in itself is an extremely broad term.

This week on RiftPodcast they had Trion Developer Adam Gershowitz on to talk about many game elements. They went over the World Events, corrupted soul sources, Tier 2 Dungeon Difficulty and most importantly, class balance. The Gersh touched on each of the four calling in a general sort of way. Keep reading for a quick overview.

• Warriors are near where they want them to be dps wise. There are some issues with threat and taunting that they have fixed and are still working on. There are some “edge” situations where they want to look at as far as dps goes but you won’t see any drastic changes.
• Rogues are being looked at now. With Saboteur’s problems that was all the time they devoted to the class for the previous patch. They are looking at them currently and adjust a few things, though they are in the general area of where they need to be. They are definitely looking at Ranged vs. Melee balances as well. Since Sab’s overshadowed all other changes, they will go back and look at dps overall. (Editor’s note: Please don’t nerf us again, and rehaul the Bard Soul! Most boring soul ever.)
• Clerics will be looked at in terms of tuning Inquisitor and Cabalist dps. Some mention was made of healing, but it doesn’t appear to be any major look. The scewed changes to healing from pre-1.1 prevented them from looking at Cleric healing over all.
• Mages looks good right now as well as far as damage goes but they are well aware of Ground of Strength and what it tends to do in PVP situations.

In regards to the healing changes in 1.1, they felt they had to much passive raid healing, i.e. Chloro and Bard heals. They wanted to make raid healing a more of an active strategy.

On World Events: Adam touches on this briefly, but the team is happy with how things are working and they have plans for more events with more stages and more complicated objectives. Sounds like great things are in store for the future.

For the whole Podcast, follow this link to Rift Podcast.com.

Rift: Planes of Telara, like every other MMORPG, will face many hurdles when it comes down to class balance, or in the case of Rift, soul balance. When most people think of class balance they immediately think about a certain setup’s power level. Is class A better than class B? Is this spec better than the other? If class A does a better job of tanking than class B, what’s the point of class B? Those questions are always difficult to answer, let alone difficult to balance over the lifetime of any game. With such limited information released about Rift, we can’t even begin discussing class mechanics but what I do want to talk about is class balance in regards to social aspects; creating raid and guild rosters.