A big part of what I did in the first day of the Beta 5 event was trying to understand how souls and roles work in Rift.  By the time you get out of the starter instance you have your first 2 souls and you get your 3rd shortly after that.  However, what if you want to try something else or realize you made a mistake for your play-style, how do you change your mind?  Well it took some searching and finally a conversation in Skype for me to figure this all out, and since I’ve seen some posts on the forums on the subject I figured I’d write up the process.

First of all, lets get a couple of definitions squared away.  In Rift, there are 4 Callings (mage, warrior, rogue, and cleric) each of which has 8 souls as well as 1 PvP soul.  A combination of 3 such souls is called a Role, and you start with one with the ability to purchase more as you progress.  Until you hit level 13, there’s no reason to worry about this as you can’t change it, but once you hit 13 the fun begins.

At this time I would suggest making your way to the Capitol city of your race.  Most likely you’ve been given some vector there along the lines, but if not head to Sanctum for Guardians and Meridian for Defiants.  I will admit these are a little overwhelming as they’re HUGE, but you’re looking for the cluster of various class trainers.  There will be a representative for each soul, and the ones of your calling will each have a quest for you, but you can only have one of these quests active at a time.  The quest itself is pretty easy, go out and clear a rift, use an item to spawn a corrupted version of the soul, defeat it, and capture said soul.

Once you’ve done a couple of these (or how ever many you want) you can now start to play around with your options.  As long as you don’t spend any points in a soul tree, you can swap it in/out as much as you want.  But, once you spend points you’ll need to pay your Calling Trainer to reset your souls for you at a nominal fee.

More advanced then this, you’ll notice your Calling Trainer also has an option to Purchase a new Role, the first of which costing 30 gold.  These roles are like user defined combinations that store not only the soul trees and how many points you’ve spent in them but even cooler it keeps all your toolbars!  So you can essentially on the fly swap roles (I’m not sure about the combat ramifications) and not have to worry about re-doing all your toolbars!  You can have up to 4 roles (currently) although I’m not sure I can see a reason for it, unless you have lots of spare money floating around

I’m incredibly excited by this system now that I’ve figured it out as it really allows me to have multiple characters with much less of a grind.  I don’t need to level a tank AND a DPS class AND a support class, I can just work on one and swap around as needed for what I’m doing.  There still will be some equipment grinding I’m sure, but no where near the amount of grinding to level separate classes.

Hopefully this coupled with the video below helps explain this, as for me this could be the single reason I continue to play this game!

Keep an  eye here and on our Rift YouTube channel for more on Rift as we get it.