I am almost tempted to go check out the beta.

Do it. I'm impressed. It is a lot like a lot of other MMO's but the whole thing is very polished.

I'm used to WoW and very comfortable there, but the presence of tanking Rogues and bards has sold me on Rift. Once people theorycraft everything into the ground I'm not sure how I'll take it, but it should be fun for awhile.

I have a tanking rogue thing. It's a bit slow on the killing, but it is the next most awesome thing since DK tanking in WoW. Bards sound fun as well, might get an alternative build this time around and do some testing with that.

One of the things that sold me on it is how much stuff you can customize even in just the classes is. I mean Tanking Rogues, yeah, tanking Clerics, yeah, Tanking Warriors, yeah -- all of these very doable and within them a buuuuuunch of nuances that probably haven't even been discovered yet. A friend of mine and I sat over MSN and just talked about all the stuff you could do for a few hours and I have a feeling that we didn't even scratch the surface on it. I feel like, just because the players have so much ability to use this shard or use that shard there's always room for you to play how you want. And that's ultimately, what all the MMOs should be going for is that complete customization.

Woot, downloading the client now! I actually already found a bug - their signup form doesn't allow certain special characters in your password, but it lets you use them anyway, then when you try to login you can't. I filed a bug report.

I don't really know anything about this game, so I'm reading through the website right now. I'm probably going to roll an Eth rogue on the server Furien mentioned.

So I broke down and played through the first 6 levels last night. The way souls works is actually really cool, huh. o_o

Had read nothing about this game before hand, so I went with mage, and Stormcaller at random. Was having fun with the first spells and then, oh god I get to pick 2 more? Had no clue what to do, picked Elementalist and Dominator at random.

I got caught up with getting demigod last night so I didn't get to play - going to tonight though!

I did mess around with the character creator this morning...it's really great. Not only do the characters look good, but its easy to make them look good. I love the triangle based slider for adjusting facial proportions.

Quit making me want to play this game, you guys. I can't afford it.

It's in open beta right now, which is free. I'm probably not going to play past the beta, since I'm still into WoW and want to hit the level cap and do stuff there.

But it will be nice to know how good this game is for when it inevitably goes on sale on Steam.

I'm trying it out, patching at the moment. Looks and sounds interesting, and I need to waste some time.

From playing with soul calculators, it seems like you'll want to pick a primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary gets most of your points and your active abilities you want, secondary you put some points in for passive buffs, and tertiary is something that will get you cool things with little or no points. Dominator is cool because you get Transmogrify without investing any points. There's probably other ways to build your character, but that's what I've been going with and it works well.

When it's a Mage in PvE (solo), you always want to pick up either Elementalist or Necromancer, as they're the two pet souls. You won't need to upgrade them or anything if you don't want to.

If you're PvEing you can forgo elementalist to pick something else up, but your DPS won't suffer either way. YOu generally want a primary soul, a secondary soul (like Sylphas said - investing 3 points in Dominator gives you a 0-cooldown transmogrify, great for both PvP and PvE). As you level up you'll generally only specialize into one soul so that you can get as high in it as possible, which happens around level 26. From there, you can split your points 50/50 if you want - reaching the top of all your trees - or just mixing it up from there.

PvP is ... another case entirely and depends largely on what souls you're picking.

Unrelatedly, this game is so gorgeous even on minimal settings, I can't wait for our tax return so I get a non-crappy graphics card.

I personally hate pets usually, but yeah, what Furien said. People are picking up Ranger or Elementalist/Necromancer on almost every Rogue or Mage because of the pets for soloing. And it's totally viable to have a build solely for soloing, since you get four roles, I believe. I'm planning on Bard (support), Marksman (DPS), Riftstalker (Tank), and Bladedancer (Solo), although that's subject to change. I'm going to try Nightblade sometime this beta, and Bard currently solos better than anything else I have at this point (lvl 15), so I'm sticking with it for now.

Anyone else unable to connect?

I made an Eth saboteur named Andim on Faeblight. Probably going to combine that with rift walker and ranger.

Servers are or were taken down for maintenace for about 30 minutes or so.

I'd play on Faeblight, but it's a PvE server, so I can't.

I'm playing on Shatterbone atm. Got a lvl 11 Eth Storm/Pyro/Ele and a Ranger/marks/sab high elf.

So far rift is pretty fun, I just wish there were more hair styles. Yes, hairstyles are important to me. >.> However, that said the game's fun but I won't be leaving wow for it.

I'm not sure how else to put this, but all the hairstyles for Eth looked really... ghetto... to me.

While I adore Camouflage (just for the cosmetics, really), it makes you wonder why Dwarves and Kelari get unique things and the rest were balanced by virtue of being the exact same things.