RIFT Beta post #2

Dated January 27th (copypasta'd from email)

Apparently there was a problem with a boss or monster at one of the higher levels.  The text reads: Gloamwood: Werebeast's Foul Gale ability has been 45% de-huffed and 72% de-puffed.  I dunno, I found it funny.

I'm also going to try rolling Horde - I mean, Defiant, because they have a fucking huge-ass race that looks like a purple Orc.  I'm gonna load him up with three defensive souls - Reaver, Void Knight, and Paladin.  So theoretically I'll be a giant-ass, magic draining, madness-inducing Holy Knight.  Bloody hell, yes.

Also, I found that you allegedly can obtain 'legendary' or 'epic' souls to attune; I'm not sure how many are available, though.

With 8 'souls' per calling, and a single character able to attune three 'souls' at one time, there are 56 possible combinations (or is it permutations?  Never been clear on that) for each calling, for a grand total of 224 different character possibilities.  This doesn't include the 112 possibilities if you choose to only use two 'souls' (I think you have to choose three, but you don't have to actually utilize the third if you don't want), or the 32 possibilities if you decide on only going with one soul - but honestly, who would?  Add to this the different ways you can create your builds (pretty much identical to putting points into the three trees per class in WoW), and you have a very flexible character creation system.  Not to mention the aforementioned legendary souls.  I'm pretty sure they exist, but even if they don't, the character system is probably the best I've seen, most likely to make up for the scant race selection.

Both Guardian and Defiant have a human and elf race - the Defiant humans are darker, as they're from the deserts, and much hotter (in my humble opinion, anyway) than the Guardian humans.  The elves are kind of similar, with the Defiant elves being purple as opposed to the Guardian elves' human skin tones.  The difference lies in the third race.  While the Guardians have Dwarves, the Defiant have the Bahmi, a race of half-breeds that, like I said before, look like purple Orcs.  It may just be my view of it, but they look goddamn huge.

One of the cooler things that I noticed is rather small, but I thought significant - the ability to change the height of your character.  No boob size slider, but height is tremendously important, and allows for a greater variation - unlike WoW, which has uniform (and therefore boring) height restrictions on all races.  Who says a gnome has to be knee height?  I estimate the range of height to be around 2 to 2.5 feet.