As the holidays come to a close, Trion’s team is getting back in action on the RIFT forums. Yesterday we saw a few updates to some Cleric fixes that are in progress, which were posted by Kervik:

Originally posted by Kervik (Source)

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Couple updates for you on some fixes and such:

• Changing Liberty of Thought to be castable while Silenced. (meaning it will now allow you to break out of silence)
• Fixed an issue with Gesture of Goodwill. It should now correctly affect all instances of Burnout from your absorbs.
• Empowering Light wasn’t being affected by silences, this is being fixed (sorry!).

Kervik also mentioned that an issue regarding the Druid talent, Celerity, is currently a bit bugged and is being investigated further.

The Druid class seems to be a little lost and confused, these days. Originally designed as a melee pet class, Druid melee DPS falls consistently behind Shaman DPS, and while the Druid’s Satyr can pump out some decent AoE damage, the faerie pet, even the greater faerie, doesn’t put out enough healing to warrant it a spot as anything except a vanity pet in a weird-looking costume.

Adding to the crisis, Druids have a mixed bag of attacks and abilities that may have originally sounded good on paper, but in reality, aren’t that useful. Balm of the Woods is extremely lackluster for a self-heal with a cooldown. Shield of Oak, like Glacial Shield, is essentially useless except while leveling. Bombard deals decent ranged damage, but deals earth damage, which means it doesn’t have synergy with many other Druid abilities, Shaman abilities, Inquisitor abilities, or Justicar abilities. And most RIFT builds revolve around synergy.

Welcome to the second part of the cleric calling overview! In this article, I will go over clerics as DPS. We will be covering our four DPS souls in more detail with a focus on PvE. This analysis includes mechanics, play style, build suggestions, and suggestions on DPS rotations or priorities. In addition to analyzing clerics, I will delve into general PvE/PvP DPS practices for beginners. I don’t claim to be the highest authority when it comes to maximizing DPS performance, but I’m not entirely bad myself. I will at least try to start you on the path to being a respectable DPS.

Massively reports on their time at PAX playing Rift: Planes of Telara. This time the reporter sits down and plays in a group to take on the instance with four other people. Here he is playing a Druid:

I hardly heard him as I frantically tried to memorize the full array of skills in front of me, rearranging my hotbar to put my heals up front and center. “Ohh, you’re a druid,” another Trion Worlds developer said over my shoulder. “They’re fun — they get a faerie pet that heals your team as well.” I followed his pointing finger and clicked on the skill to summon what appeared to be a cross-breed between Tinkerbell and a Troll doll. Fun times.

Ok so Druids get a pet; and it’s a faerie. Fun times indeed.

The rest of the article covers the basics of the game. The author admits the games was very low on his radar and new almost nothing about the game. So take this article makes for a good read from a perspective of a new player with no existing bias (we hope). Also, Massively has put together a collection of new screenshots as well.

<img src="http://rift.junkiesnation.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/08/Rogue-Callings.png"

Straight from Kalbuir’s camera, we see some of the new souls for the Cleric calling. These include the Warden, Justicar, Shaman and Druid. We also can see the list of Rogue callings, the newest being the Marksman.