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.

A German guild named Nemesis has put together a list of Champion and Assassin talents and root abilities from their time spent at GamesCom this year. They have since been transcribed into the Telarapedia as well. A quick comment on each; the assassin shouldn’t surprise anyone being a poison based class with stealth and positional attacks. The champion seems to be your typical “arms” warrior from Warcraft, a charging, two-handed wielding warrior that’s bent on wrecking havoc.

Telarapedia links: Champion, Assassin

A video from PAX showing us the Bard Soul Tree. Thanks to Autochthon on the Official Forums.

Another video from Rift Nexus, this time partially showing the Nightblade soul tree. The Nightblade is a Rogue calling in Rift: Planes of Telara.

Another video from Rift Nexus from their GamesCom stash. Make sure you check out the ability list at Telarapedia.

Ciovala is a machine isn’t she? More footage from her time at GamesCom and this time it’s the Justicar soul tree. Find out more information at Rift Nexus.

Thank you to Ciovala at Rift Nexus for the video. For a list of the known Ranger abilities check out Telarapedia.

I’m not going to embed them here, but makes sure you follow the link to Rift Nexus and check out two new videos. The first video shows a bit of the Warlock tree and the second shows a Najmok, a player owned mount.

Massively released a developer diary for Rift: Planes of Telara soul and class system. No new information, per-say, was gleaned from this video. It detailed what we knew already and all of it was listed on the official website. We however did get some cool new in game footage and some other scenes that excited me.

Beyond all that however, we were finally able to see some of the abilities in the Nightblade tree that we saw at E3. In all the E3 videos we couldn’t make out the next in the tooltips because of the video quality, but now we are able to take a look at a ton of new Nightblade abilities.

If you haven’t been reading up on Rift: Planes of Telara, then you might not know about the interesting twist on the class system the have in store for us. First things first, classes are called callings and they are divided into four categories; Warrior, Rogue, Cleric and Mage. Each calling can have up to, speculatively, eight different souls. The are the souls of past heroes being reborn into Telara and as you travel through the world you gain access to more diverse and focused souls. Two souls are officially known for the Warrior (Reaver and Champion), two for the Cleric (Inquisitor and Purifier), two for the Mage (Warlock and Elementalist) and three for the Rogue (Ranger, Nightblade and Blade Dancer. You can find out more on the official page to find out more details about each calling.

There have been other details that have been spied out from demonstrations at E3. Three more souls for the Rogue calling have been spotted; those being the Bard, the Assassin and the Riftstalker. Though not seen on a game screen, Scott Hartsman did let the word Pyromancer slip from his lips in one video.