Dated February 5 (my friend, who couldn't play the beta, asked me to play a rogue, and do rogue-y things for her)
Well, starting out as a Bladedancer, you're given two skills at the beginning - your basic stabby move, and then a super stabby move that you can use when you get enough combo points. It appears that rogues in RIFT are similar to rogues in WoW, in that they use energy, and rack up combo points. This is probably something that was used in a previous MMO, but as my experience is limited, I'll mostly just make WoW parallels. In any case, the global cooldown on these techniques is rather quick, so you can stab the living shit out of things quite easily. In the beginning levels, I was killing mobs very, very fast, and moving on to the next before the body even hit the ground.
Next, I picked up the Bard soul. The Bard class gave me a Cadence, which was a 2 second channeling damage spell, and a Motif, which was a buff. It only boosted my stats for 15 seconds, though, and since my fingers were full using the Bladedancer moves, I just set that one aside. Trying to use the Bard's Cadence to kill enemies was not too bad, as it would generate a total of three combo points (out of a maximum five: one point on casting, one in the middle, and one at the end of the cast); but ultimately, I found myself getting killed a few times, as I was trying to balance out the music with the stabbing.
Gaining a few levels gave me access to a few points to spend in my soul tree. Putting several points in the Bladedancer tree - into a skill that increases my evade chance - unlocked a few new skills for me to try. Allow me to clarify this. Skill trees contain two separate portions - the 'branches' and the 'roots'. Skill point allocation is performed in the branches of the skill tree. When a certain number of points in the branches is allocated, part of the roots will activate (eg. putting two points in unlocked one root, another two unlocked another one, etc). The root skills have a number overlayed on them, to show you how many skill points total must be allocated to said tree for it to be unlocked.
In any case, I had gained two new shiny skills, both for stabbing. One skill, Deadly Strike, built onto my original stabby skill, Keen Strike - after using the first one, the opportunity to use the second one opened up. After using Deadly Strike, I can not use it again until I have attacked with Keen Strike once more. This makes sense, because the effect and damage of Deadly Strike is near identical to Keen Strike, with one significant change - a full 25% of your attack power is tacked onto Deadly Strike's base damage, making it quite strong. The other skill I received was very slightly weaker than Keen Strike, but had the added bonus of striking one additional enemy with an off-hand dagger. So for a slight hit in damage, you get to hit two enemies. The downside of it is that it will not unlock Deadly Strike.
The enemies being a bit stronger, I was still able to dispatch them fairly easily once I shelved my Bard skills, though my downtime had increased a touch; they did quite a bit of damage, so I had to wait for either natural HP regen, or drink to regain health. However, that all changed when I finally got the third soul, Ranger. As this was a dagger kind of character, the majority of the skills - relating to bows - were useless, but this was offset by the simple fact that you got a pet. You get a badass looking razorback (I named him Orobas) who is essentially a tank-type pet. He has a skill to increase threat. So I could pull or engage an enemy, they could start attacking, and Orobas would come, taunt the mob, and they would continue to attack him while I hacked and stabbed. Even with me attacking constantly, he was still able to hold the aggro.
Granted, the same tactic might not work later in the game, but I can only assume that as a pet class, there should be something to reduce the Ranger's aggro, or to increase the pet's threat. I accidentally pressed 'Exit' when in the middle of checking the skill tree (I keep the game in fullscreen windowed mode so that I can easily switch back and forth, so I mix up the close button with the actual ingame close buttons), so I'm going to call it a night.
It was truly interesting to play a Rogue.
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