Roles galore!

[Calmethar]

Aye, another push for more roles!

Rift was always about giving the players endless possibilities by mixing the various souls. But the more aspects of the game the players take on, the less versatility they can have.

An example could be a more hardcore guild vs. a more casual guild. The hardcore guild mostly have higher raid attendance thus more often having the same players at the raids, meaning that there's often the possibility of having the same players on the same tasks from time to time.

That essentially leaves for the possibility to often have the same person say archon, bard or tank within a raid, and in that sense that one player often has a better chance of carrying more versions of more or less the same role, e.g. 3-4 different specific chloro or archon specs.

The more casual guilds don't always have the same opportunities. The same player often has to switch between DPS'ing, chloro'ing or archon'ing (the mage classes being the main examples as I'm a mage myself, forgive me for that ;)).

That being said, with the different fights within ID and PF (current raid content), there's often a need to carry both at least 2 DPS specs, 2 Chloro specs and 1 Archon spec, not leaving much room for anything else. Even the DPS specs will benefit from being different a lot of the time, so players having either more time or higher likelihood of most often playing the same role will also often have the possibility to focus more on one area and therefore carry additional specs.

That's in itself all well and only fair, but it does punish the more casual players to an extend, and definitely the players enjoying more aspects of the game. At least that's the point I'm trying to make here ;) - Especially since it takes a good deal of time to change specs again and again, and you get punished FPS-wise for having more than the necessary amount of hotkeys on your hotbars, so there's really no "saving and loading" anything.

Atm. while trying to fulfil only the most needed tasks/roles for my guild, I'm still carrying 3 DPS specs, 2 archon and 1 Chloro. I could certainly easily use another few Chloro and Archon specs, not to mention more versions of the DPS ones (at least in the time periods where it's still tough to meet the DPS requirements).



All this said I'm really missing my specific solo, duo, PvP, 5-man, 10-man and just pure fun specs. It's possible to make specific specs for every occasion, but it's just too much work changing back and forth all the time, so if you're both a decently serious raider and a PvP'er you more or less gets punished for enjoying too many or all the aspects of the game. Furthermore the raid specs are as we know it often more or less set in stone, to an extend at least - whereas PvP specs and all other kinds of solo, duo and fun builds can varry as much as you want them to, and modelling of such specs are really a rather fun and entertaining part of the game for many. Which I think Trion should support much more than work against, as it's really just the original goal of the game, being able to play exactly as you want ;)

From a 'pros and cons' point of view it doesn't seem like there's a lot speaking against this at least. And it would certainly open up for some fun aspects of the game. Constructive criticism more than welcome

[Ailene]

I used to be against having too many roles back in time, cause of the risk running into "noobs" with 10 copy/pasted specs in PUGs with no clue what they're doing. But I now indeed feel the need for more roles. I really wish they had that as a thing to spend PAs on. Or that you could buy roles with GMoAs or Favor. Wish they could give people that "need" it the option to have more, but still maybe limit it a bit so that fresh lvl 50s still might have to do some study to see what they want to fill their roles with, and learn to know what they're doing.

As my main job in raid is Bard, I run with 2 Bard specs. Beside that I enjoy PvP, why I have 2 PvP specs (one for conquest and one for WFs). I have a tank spec as well. Which leaves me with 1 role left for dps, cause eventually I need to dps some times too.

Yes, I'd love to have another dps spec as well, maybe a solo spec (atm I use one of my PvP specs) and last but not least, a role free to play with, to test out new things without having to delete one of my set roles.

[Calmethar]

Couldn't agree more, Ailene.

Well put

[Adelea]

The addition of a new soul takes us from 504 combinations to 720 (viability and points per soul aside) - more roles needed!

[Calmethar]

The addition of a new soul takes us from 504 combinations to 720 (viability and points per soul aside) - more roles needed!

Which actually goes along with macro slots etc. as well. But that could be rough on the FPS part of the game, as we've seen before with macros, hotkeys, open UI windows in general and so on.

Mostly though, more roles, pwetty please! ;)

[TheGrinnz]

I really wish they had that as a thing to spend PAs on.

This...would actually be an awesome bonus to get from PA, as opposed to more stat inflation.

[Ailene]

The addition of a new soul takes us from 504 combinations to 720 (viability and points per soul aside) - more roles needed!

Lol Adela, love your math!

Which actually goes along with macro slots etc. as well. But that could be rough on the FPS part of the game, as we've seen before with macros, hotkeys, open UI windows in general and so on.

Mostly though, more roles, pwetty please! ;)

Well for myself a few roles would share macros, so wouldn't need to have that many more macros. Still would like to see more macro slots anyway, without issues... (or at least the option to move macros around and clean up my list a bit)