While other classes are capable of healing, the Cleric appears to stand as the best pure healing class. While one of the truly great things that the soul system of Rift offers is a myriad of choices on how to play your character, certain souls seem match well with a play style. Further examining the main healing souls can help with creating the healer you want. The big 3 of the healing souls would be Sentinel, Warden, and Purifier. While the Justicar does offer some melee damage healing that would be a great asset in raid, let’s focus more on the 3 casting healer souls.

Head Start is tomorrow and that means that many gamers around the world a preparing for a gaming marathon of epic proportions. MMORPG release weekends almost always attract hardcore players that play double-digit hour gaming sessions. People take off of work, or skip class, and concentrate on getting their character established in the new game world. We here at Rift Junkies would like to provide a guide for you on what to do and how to do it in the most efficient and most responsible way possible.

You don’t want to be that guy who ends up on reddit who met his untimely demise in front of his computer.

It is the magical technology that is powered by Telara itself. It allowed the races to push back the evil blood storm, and imprison them within Telara. Magitech has been at the center of the greatest cities Telara has ever seen. Those who perfect this technology are rumored to have created small worlds of diamonds, weapons that can wipe out entire bloodlines, and even stop death… This is the power of Magitech!

I would like to continue talking about how Magitech became the central driving force behind the Defiant force. For those of you that know what happened to the ancient Ethian cities, join me after the break to learn about Orphiel Farwind, and how he started a revolution on Telara.

How often does one get a chance to visit a gaming studio, get a personalized tour and also get to eat dinner with Scott Hartsman? If you’re not a member of the press-at-large, then the answer’s got to be something like, “Almost never!” Rift Junkies has been working hard for almost eight months now and Trion invited out to California to show their appreciation for our hard work. It was a unbelievably fun packed day where Rift Junkies got to get into the heart of Rift and see how it was made. We got to meet everyone, from the art and animation teams, the dungeons and raids guys, to the translators, to the wizards of technology (Engineers), who keep the game ticking, the tireless and sleepless Q&A guys, the UI team and the PR and Marketing folks. Erick “Zann” Adams was the fansite liaison that day and you’ll have to tweet him about his scarf.

The whole event could not have been possible though, if not for the efforts of Cindy “Abigale” Bowens and the Community Team for organizing everything.

It’s been well established that Rift will launch with North American and European servers. It’s pretty much a guaranteed standard these days in AAA MMO releases. This makes it really simple to choose your server, organise your guilds and generally expect to be able to log onto and play on servers that are just full of people from your area. For one area of the community however, there is usually no such guarantee, and especially in the Beta Phase of an MMO’s development it is often a time of uncertainty, conjecture and spirited debate on the simplest of matters. What server do you roll on? Will anyone from my country be there? Who are these players? These homeless gypsies who are always seeking a new server to create their own identity on? The Oceanic player-base, loud, opinionated and spirited, you can find them on every MMO released in varying numbers, often filling the forums and servers long after other regions have retired to bed.

Open World PvP

The other major aspect of PvP in Rift aside from Warfronts, is arguably the most important in the long-term. Instanced arenas for a set amount of people to meet head on and fight is one thing, but it is more of a diversion for most players than a reason to play the game. For a large amount of players what they really want to keep the excitement and enjoyment of the game going is open world, unpredictable, ebbing and flowing PvP.

Beta 5 is still humming along quite nicely after a rough start when the servers got smashed by all the eager soon-to-be Telarans. Since Trion is just full of awesome people, they’re giving everyone another day to play so Beta 5 won’t be ending until tomorrow morning. With bated anticipation of a long weekend of personal responsibilities that typically don’t mesh well with gaming in a dark room with a hooded sweatshirt, let talk about why Beta 5 just Feels Good Man.

With Beta 4 but a memory, there has been much back and forth about the state of the game right now. When thinking about Rift as a PvP game, a lot of similarities with other MMOs are often thrown about by players. In any game this is common, but one thing Rift seems to be doing well is learning from other MMOs and improving on both the successful elements and the less so.

When Trion first announce their Beta Event system I was pretty skeptical. As were most people who learned there would not be a typical Beta period where players are selected to test the game for a determined length of time. Normally these tests last a few months and players provide their gameplay feedback as well as report bugs found in the game over those months of playing/testing the game. Instead there would be Beta Events that would run the length of a few days and feedback would be gathered over those few days of testing. There would be two types of beta players for these events, the VIP’s who would get to be in every beta event, and the “per event” invitees who would only be selected for a single event.

Questing, the key  element to most MMOs meant to send  players searching and exploring throughout the games world sometimes can feel a little bit like a treadmill. A lot of the quests we find will require us to run over the same world content several times. Get quest. Do quest. Turn Quest in, then get a new quest that requires us to go back to where we just were only to rinse and repeat several more times.

And while it’s understood by many that all this running back and forth is part of the content (the time sink part). It can also start to get tedious if there aren’t a few twists and turns along that well traveled road to keep those adventures from getting a little too stale.