A few weeks ago we began a project to create a group of forums for those who would like to jump into a serious discussion of class mechanics. We are calling this area the “Think Tank“. Now you might be asking, “Why bother?” Well, these forums are a bit different. They are heavily moderated to filter out all the trolling, spam, and unrelated questions. If you are trying to find a spec to level with, you’re looking in the wrong spot (we have other forums for that!).

We would like to encourage everyone to join and get active with the serious, and sometimes math heavy, discussion for each of the callings. Currently, if you are not a registered user you will not have access to these forums. In order to view them, you’ll have to be logged in with a normal forum account.

So welcome to the Rift Junkies Think Tank, I hope you enjoy your stay!

Top Secret Rogues | Top Secret Clerics | Top Secret Mages | Top Secret Warriors

Every week we try to bring you the latest hot topics and driving conversations from the RIFT community. Let’s get started.

Support and CC Roles, PVP and PVE
This week we find that there are a few sore spots players have with support roles and their effects on PVP and PVE. In this thread on the official forums we find this argument:

As I leveled my Mage from 1-50, I played a Dom/SC build. I liked the control that I got from Ice Based spells to contribute to the great CC that Dom posessed. However, on the way from 1-50, as I LFG’ed for dungs, CC was looked at as a waste of time, just prolonging runs. … Trion creates all these interesting Souls that can fill utility roles, then nerfs the encounters to make cc/utility completly useless.

What do you think? Should CC and control have a more prominent role in PVE gameplay?

Who ever thought that any game would have a Rogue capable of main tanking any major content? Well RIFT has brought that to us. This build is made for end-gaming tanking of expert dungeons and raids. If you are interested in a build for lower level dungeons, you can use any combination of this build. You also might want to supplement some Blade Dancer at for some of the low level dungeons as well, however low level tanking is not the main point of this article.

The Riftstalker is a pretty hearty build. It might not have as many multi-target aggro controls as a Warrior, or the versatility of a Void Knight, but the Riftstalker can tank any content as long as the user knows what they are doing. The Riftstalker is also less gear dependent that a warrior. You can tank a few of the T1 Experts with just minimal gear levels. The main focus of the Riftstalker is hitpoints and absorption.

For the full spec layout, please keep reading, or join in the discussion on our forums.

We all like charts right? We’ve been tracking the forum population for the Official RIFT Forums and we have watched our small little community grow from 3000 people from all the way up to nearly 200,000 people. With the Head Start nearly over and the Official Launch nearly here, we at Rift Junkies would like to thank everyone who has not only joined our community, but has join the RIFT Community as a whole.

RIFT is an addiction. Tell your friends. Show the kids.

You might have realized that there have almost been no guides on souls or how to level them. This was because we observed that the souls have been going through an ongoing process where they have been changing quite a bit from patch notes to patch notes. Now that release is around the corner, Rift Junkies is going to try to build a library of builds created and maintained by you the community. Here is how it works.

Each portion of the Soul Theory and Build Guides will be under strict moderation. New threads will have to adhere to new forum rules and guidelines. We hope players who love coming up with new builds will participate. After release arrives, players will be able to post their builds and the community will be able to rate them via the thread rating tool on the forums. Over time we hope to create many 5 star rated builds scored by everyone reading and testing them. Eventually what we’d like to do is elevate those builds that have been around for a while to our Official Library (yet to be implemented). Essentially Rift Junkies will spotlight those builds that are time tested and community approved.

In the end we hope that each subsection, one for each calling, will be able to host a collection of the best builds on the internet where players will be able to sort through them based on their rating.

If you are interested in this idea, please step forward and submit your own builds. You can find the forums rules here. Our Builds and Guides subforum is open for business.

Here is the first build I’ve put up for this project: Leveling Rogue Build

You may or may not have realized this, but we do have our own forums. As the game grows in popularity the official forums get more and more crowded and the signal to noise ratio will decrease. I want to invite everyone who wants to focus their discussion on game related topics, specifically speculation on theorycrafting for all the callings, to our forums. We hope that everyone will be eager to share their own ideas and help others with their own speculation. Even though we know it’s extremely early to start doing this, who wouldn’t want to be prepared?

With that being said, I started the forums off with my own speculative build of a 30 Warden, 17 Purifier, 4 Sentinel. All of this is based off of the abilities listed on Telarapedia from GamesCom footage.

In a months time, the player with the most popular build, will win an Official Rift T-shirt.

Abigale, the Community manager for Rift: Planes of Telara, posted today on the forums that there will be a new class announcement coming soon with the next Rift Newsletter.

We are putting the final touches on our next newsletter. It should be ready to go out in the next couple of days.

So make sure you are signed up to get it! You are definitely not going to want to miss all the things we have planned for these newsletters. In fact, this one will be revealing our next class!

You can sign up for the newsletter from the front page of the official website.

Speculation is rampant however, if we had to speculate, we would probably guess one of the two Rogue souls we saw at E3; either the Assassin or Rift Stalker. We wouldn’t argue if we got another calling though! We’re looking forward to it, we get a new class drop soon and a new race drop at GameCom. Stay tuned.