Rift – New Souls in 2.7

When last I was playing Rift a lot, somewhere around 2.3 I guess (just before and after the F2P transition), I was super excited to hear they were going to (evenutally) add new souls so that every class could play every role. The idea of a tanking mage was too awesome for words. Even from the very beginning of Rift 1.0, I thought it would be really cool if you could tank dungeons with an Elementalist pet.

Now it looks like the tank mage will finally become a reality in Rift 2.7 with the addition of the Arbiter mage soul. Mage has always been my favorite soul in Rift. It was the class I picked first to level from 50 to 60 in Storm Legion, and remains my go-to character to play. The Harbinger is one of my favorite souls and usually what I roam around in.

Of course, it’s not likely that I’m going to jump into Storm Legion Expert dungeons and start tanking. I haven’t even seen a SLED in ages. Perhaps I’ll start a new Mage character and tank low-level dungeons. (I find tanking low-level dungeons much more fun, possibly because I actually know how to tank them.)

I’m also curious to see what they do with the Oracle, the Cleric’s support soul. Other support souls are largely worthless in group situations, so I’ll be interested to see if they do something different with the Oracle, or do anything to re-tune the other support souls.

The other two new souls will be Liberator, a healing soul for warrior, and Physician, a healing soul for Rogue.

Dreamweaving in 2.6 was not enough to get me back into Rift, but perhaps these new souls will. Because this is a fundamental change to the core gameplay, and that makes it like a brand new game. I hope it doesn’t come out at the same time as ESO though. I keep accumulating reasons not to play ESO at launch.