RIFT Standard Specs
I’ve heard some talk recently regarding standard/cookie cutter specs in Rift. Honestly, I don’t give much merit to the discussion at this stage given such a small percentage of the playerbase has hit cap. I decided to crosspost some of the discussion happening on our guild forums.
rakeleer said:
The nice thing about Rift, though, is that there are a LOT of variables to be tested and theorycrafted, and tested again. It’s going to be a long while before the “cookie cutters” are known - and if Trion keeps these numbers a moving target, that will extend things.
Agree 100%. Most people haven’t REALLY realized what a huge undertaking theorycrafting is for a game like this. Even when the game is years in maturity, I believe the ‘standard’ specs will be very situational (possibly even unique to certain boss fights, given the number of options). Three different trees (times 4 classes times 9 souls) with all different abilities, buffs, cooldowns and talents make optimizing DPS for situation X an enormous task (not to mention PVP/Tanking/Healing).
Take DPS for example: If you were limited to one talent tree, it would still be a lot of work to select the appropriate talents, generate an optimal rotation given a particular gearset for a particular situation. Throwing two more talents into the mix (granted, all available options aren’t all strictly DPS) adds 3 times the number of skills, buffs and abilities you have to account for, in addition to how synergistic certain skillsets are/are not. You then have situational priorities like physical vs. magic damage, ranged vs. melee, armor mitigation vs. stun resistance vs. crowd crontrol, burst vs. bleed, etc. for a given fight or scenario which will determine which talents you select.
The number of variables involved are massive.
