yasueh
OG
See also http://f2p-rift.wikispaces.com/
Realms
For F2P there is no difference between a PVP or a PVE realm, because you can't get access to any contested areas, while the starting areas are effectively the same for both types of servers, as players need to flag themselves to engage in PvP. Add to that the fact that you can't access the other faction's starting area on F2P, and you won't be seeing any world PVP.
The best servers to pick are the recommended ones, because unlike Blizzard, Trion restrict the servers you can transfer to. If you roll on a high population server, other people may be unable to transfer there to join you (transfers are both free and available to trials).
Suggested realms to roll on are:
EU - Steampike - Defiants
US - Shatterbone - Defiants
Factions and Races
Each faction has 3 races, which have pretty much even stats, so the choice is going to be purely cosmetic. They do have different racial abilities between the factions, but they are disabled in PvP. All classes are available to all races, and everyone in a faction has the same starting area.
Classes and Roles
There are 4 classes, Warrior, Cleric, Rogue and Mage. While on the trial you are limited to making just 2 characters per realm though. Unlike in WoW where there are pure DPS classes, each class in RIFT can at least either tank or heal, and they can also fill a 4th role, support, where the character can provide buffs to their group, and debuff multiple enemys.
Talents and Abilities
At level 20 in WoW we get a measly 6 talent points to spend, all of which have to be in one of the class's 3 trees (and we'll have even less in MoP).
In RIFT you have 26 talent points to spend at level 20, and you also have a very different talent system that lets you customise your character further still (although some of the individual talent trees are very close to what you'll see in WoW).
With each class you can put your points into any 3 out of 8 possible talent trees (and you don't need to fill one to access the others). That gives a huge number of combinations, and is what allows each role to have a tree for either healing or tanking, or for some classes both. In addition, the abilities you are given are dependant on the number of points you put into a specific trees, instead of just your level.
On top of all this, you can buy access to 2 further specs for your character (6 at level 50, endgame), and can switch between them about twice as fast as you can with WoW's dual spec, without any loss of energy or mana.
If, for example, you're playing a rogue, then it's perfectly possible to have 2 specs that give you something like a WoW hunter, and a WoW rogue, that you can switch between, even in a Warfront, and then you can build a 3rd that plays very differently from the other 2. This mean that for gearing and levelling one class, you get far more out of it than you would in WoW.
Here's the 'Soul builder' tool, equivalent to the wowhead talent calculator.
Gear and enchants
Each class has an armor specialisation, so warriors will use plate, clerics mail, rogues leather, and mages cloth. It means any quest with a gear reward will have something you can use. You can make use of any talent build for your class with just one set of gear, although you can vary it a little for tanking/healing, and you can also go for health over damage for PvP.
There are a couple of crated items you might need (mostly runes, RIFT's equivalent to enchants), or items from dungeons, but most of your gear is bought using currency you get from completing rifts. Next to nothing is a rare drop, and if an BiS item is a rare drop, then it'll only be a very small improvement over the next best item.
Trials are restricted to only being able to equip rare (blue) items, not epics, but the difference in stats between blue and purple gear isn't anywhere near as huge as in WoW, and most people PvPing won't be in epics.
The few 29 twinks you might meet will be restricted to the same level of enchants as you (assuming you have level 20 items), as higher levelled enchants are unavailable available until you get level 30 gear, which requires you to be at level 30. In RIFT there is no equivalent to iLevel until you reach 50. A gear's level is the level needed to equip it.
As an F2P twink in the best gear you can get your hands on, you won't be facing anything like the imbalance you'll face in WoW against level 24s, who have access to much better enchants than you.
Auction house and Mail.
In RIFT you can use these on a trial, but you are limited to only buying on the AH, or receiving mail, not sending it. When you have a paid account you can even send mail cross faction to any character (not just your alts).
Chat, guilds and inviting
You can chat in the 1-29 channel and the channel for your current zone, join guilds but not be promoted, and you can invite other players to groups.
Trade skills
You can learn up to 3 trade skills at once, but crafting will be of little use to you, as you can't sell anything on the AH. The best bet is to get all 3 gathering professions (butchering, foraging and mining), and vendor everything you gather, so you'll have more gold to spend (so you can get your mount earlier).
Zones
On a trial you are restricted to the single 6-20 zone for your faction, which contains the faction's capital city (1-6 is instanced, so you can't return to it once you leave). This means you'll have to do the same quests to level each character you make, but that's not too bad with just 4 classes available. While this is a major restriction when compared to WoW, the rifts give the zone quite a bit of replay value, and the diversity of viable class/talent combinations in PvP makes up for this restriction.
Dungeons
At level 20 there are only 2 dungeons available, and the number of BiS items from them is very low, so you won't be spending much time in them.
PvP
World PvP simply doesn't exist before level 20, as even on a PvP realm, due to not beaing able to leave your starting zone to access any contested areas, you won't be able to get to players of the other faction at your own level.
Warfronts are the equivalent to WoW's battlegrounds, and at level 20 we have access to 3 of them. One is similar to AB, except one of the flags gives bonus points if held. The other 2 are for a game type called 'Martyrdom', where there is one mobile 'flag' like for WSG, and holding it gives your team points, but it also does an increasing amo8unt of damages to you the longer you hold it.
The graveyards cannot be camped in any way, because they are raised above the rest of the zone, and run round the edge, so you can drop down at several points.
We are in a 20-29 bracket, but in this game your stats are scaled up to match the highest level for the bracket, so really the only difference is the number of abilities you have, and the small stat bonus people would get from having epics over rares if they're an xp locked twink (except they'd still be in 20 epics, as that's the highest available to the bracket). XP locked players are in the same BGs as those who haven't locked their XP, so trial twinks will have better gear than most levellers anyway, meaning we're not massively overgeared as trials.
You can queue with as big a group as you're make (but I don't know how that would affect queue times).
Queues are fast, around 1 minute in the evening. Faction won't make any difference to your queues, as you can sometimes end up playing for the other faction if they don't have the numbers. The combat in the few games I've played has been intense, with a lot less burst than in WoW (both healing and damage). Also, the classes seem to be a lot more balanced, probably because they all have access to things like slows, charges and knockbacks, and you buy levels of a skill, so they can be balanced more effectively at lower levels.
There are no arenas, but you can duel anywhere.
Rifts
These are probably what you will spend most of your time doing outside of warfronts (if you aren't farming other things).
Rifts randomly spawn in the world, starting off as a tear. If left for a while they'll open up into a rift, which is an event with several waves of mobs to defeat, in order to close the rift. While a rift is left open it can spawn additional mobs that will move around the world, attacking towns, or setting up footholds that can spawn yet more mobs, so if the rifts aren't closed, the entire zone can end up being overrun, leaving it without any NPCs for quests, training or trading.
The difficulty of rifts is such that they can't easily be soloed at their level, unless you're able to kite or tank the mobs, or if you're well geared. In addition the rifts may have bonus waves, that increase the reward for closing the rift, that only become available if the previous waves are completed within a time limit, something you'll find hard to achieve soloing them.
Occasionally zone invasions will happen, when lots of rifts open at the same time, and everyone in the zone will have to both close the rifts, and defend the towns from all the mobs that they're spawning.
Mounts, Travel, and the Map
You can buy a mount as soon as you can afford it. There is no riding skill, just the high (for low levels) cost of each mount. You can mount up in combat, so long as you don't get interrupted. There is no flying, and no flight masters. There are Porticulums that can be used to fast travel, but they are very widely spaced (and you have to discover them), so you'll be relying on your mount for most travelling.
The map will show the location of all the rifts and footholds, as well as the movements of mobs that come out of them, and if you're in a party each member can set waypoints that can been seen by everyone else, making it very easy to form up a group at random as you meet up at a rift, and then let everyone else know which one you'll be heading to once you've completed the current one.
Downgrading your account and XP lock
Unilke WoW, you can upgrade your account to payed, and then go back to the free trial at any time. It's a good idea to get at least one month, just so you can access the other zones in the game, and pick up some items from vendors that would otherwise be unavailable to you. You can also buy some things that are over the trial currency caps, or as the AH isn't too good for low level enchants, you may want to level runecrafting on an alt, to post to any twinks you have.
You can only lock your XP on a payed account, and you must make sure this is the first thing you do when you log in after paying, as you cap at 1 XP short of dinging 21 when you're on the trial.
Server transfers
In RIFT you are able, at any time, to transfer your characters, free of charge, to another server that is available for transfers (unlike in WoW they actually restrict where you can transfer to, to keep faction imbalance from breaking servers).
I'm not sure how this affects trial accounts though, and whether you can roll 4 characters, with pairs on 2 different servers, then move them all together.
Addons and support websites
There are very few addons for RIFT, and they're limited in what they can do, as the addon system for the game is in beta testing and doesn't have all the functions that WoW's addon API does. There are a few to track buffs and cooldowns, some attempts at healing frames, and a rather good equivalent to Recount, but for the most part there isn't anywhere near as much diversity as with WoW, and the available addons aren't quite as developed (I'm writing my own buff tracker, as I couldn't get on with any of the ones available).
There is a site that's roughly equivalent to Wowhead at rift.zam.com, but there's a lot less information available for items, as without advanced addons, there's no way to log exactly where things drop, and pass the information onto the website so they can make a comprehensive database. There's also a wiki at the same site that's similar to wowpedia.
'Mogging'
RIFT doesn't have mogging like WoW. Instead, in addition to your character sheet having slots for your gear, it has another set of slots called 'Wardrobe'. Whatever you equip in those slots is what's displayed on your character. This means that you always have the same outfit, no matter how many times you upgrade your gear. It's also compltely free (except for the costume items you might want to buy, of which there are many). You can buy extra wardrobe slots for additional outfits, just not on a trial.
Pet collecting
Farming endlessly for rare drops isn't a major part of getting items in RIFT. Instead you buy pets with the currencies from completing rifts (including all of the ones from past holiday events), and you also get some from completing artifact collections. These are a little like archaeology from WoW, except artifacts are just sitting there in the world to find, and you don't have to mess around trying to pinpoint them, you just look for a small glowing and sparkling item. They can involve a fair bit of farming, except it's less tedious than farming mobs or fishing. It's more like an Easter-egg hunt that covers the entire zone.
The artifacts drop completely at random, and you need to collect sets of them to get a reward. Luckily you can buy artifacts on the AH if you need to complete a set (although some of them will cost more than your currency cap). Some of the sets reward pets, or you can buy a pet if you complete enough collections (but you're only likely to get one pet this way, as there aren't that many collections we can complete as trials).
You can download the trial from http://www.riftgame.com/en/lite/
Realms
For F2P there is no difference between a PVP or a PVE realm, because you can't get access to any contested areas, while the starting areas are effectively the same for both types of servers, as players need to flag themselves to engage in PvP. Add to that the fact that you can't access the other faction's starting area on F2P, and you won't be seeing any world PVP.
The best servers to pick are the recommended ones, because unlike Blizzard, Trion restrict the servers you can transfer to. If you roll on a high population server, other people may be unable to transfer there to join you (transfers are both free and available to trials).
Suggested realms to roll on are:
EU - Steampike - Defiants
US - Shatterbone - Defiants
Factions and Races
Each faction has 3 races, which have pretty much even stats, so the choice is going to be purely cosmetic. They do have different racial abilities between the factions, but they are disabled in PvP. All classes are available to all races, and everyone in a faction has the same starting area.
Classes and Roles
There are 4 classes, Warrior, Cleric, Rogue and Mage. While on the trial you are limited to making just 2 characters per realm though. Unlike in WoW where there are pure DPS classes, each class in RIFT can at least either tank or heal, and they can also fill a 4th role, support, where the character can provide buffs to their group, and debuff multiple enemys.
Talents and Abilities
At level 20 in WoW we get a measly 6 talent points to spend, all of which have to be in one of the class's 3 trees (and we'll have even less in MoP).
In RIFT you have 26 talent points to spend at level 20, and you also have a very different talent system that lets you customise your character further still (although some of the individual talent trees are very close to what you'll see in WoW).
With each class you can put your points into any 3 out of 8 possible talent trees (and you don't need to fill one to access the others). That gives a huge number of combinations, and is what allows each role to have a tree for either healing or tanking, or for some classes both. In addition, the abilities you are given are dependant on the number of points you put into a specific trees, instead of just your level.
On top of all this, you can buy access to 2 further specs for your character (6 at level 50, endgame), and can switch between them about twice as fast as you can with WoW's dual spec, without any loss of energy or mana.
If, for example, you're playing a rogue, then it's perfectly possible to have 2 specs that give you something like a WoW hunter, and a WoW rogue, that you can switch between, even in a Warfront, and then you can build a 3rd that plays very differently from the other 2. This mean that for gearing and levelling one class, you get far more out of it than you would in WoW.
Here's the 'Soul builder' tool, equivalent to the wowhead talent calculator.
Gear and enchants
Each class has an armor specialisation, so warriors will use plate, clerics mail, rogues leather, and mages cloth. It means any quest with a gear reward will have something you can use. You can make use of any talent build for your class with just one set of gear, although you can vary it a little for tanking/healing, and you can also go for health over damage for PvP.
There are a couple of crated items you might need (mostly runes, RIFT's equivalent to enchants), or items from dungeons, but most of your gear is bought using currency you get from completing rifts. Next to nothing is a rare drop, and if an BiS item is a rare drop, then it'll only be a very small improvement over the next best item.
Trials are restricted to only being able to equip rare (blue) items, not epics, but the difference in stats between blue and purple gear isn't anywhere near as huge as in WoW, and most people PvPing won't be in epics.
The few 29 twinks you might meet will be restricted to the same level of enchants as you (assuming you have level 20 items), as higher levelled enchants are unavailable available until you get level 30 gear, which requires you to be at level 30. In RIFT there is no equivalent to iLevel until you reach 50. A gear's level is the level needed to equip it.
As an F2P twink in the best gear you can get your hands on, you won't be facing anything like the imbalance you'll face in WoW against level 24s, who have access to much better enchants than you.
Auction house and Mail.
In RIFT you can use these on a trial, but you are limited to only buying on the AH, or receiving mail, not sending it. When you have a paid account you can even send mail cross faction to any character (not just your alts).
Chat, guilds and inviting
You can chat in the 1-29 channel and the channel for your current zone, join guilds but not be promoted, and you can invite other players to groups.
Trade skills
You can learn up to 3 trade skills at once, but crafting will be of little use to you, as you can't sell anything on the AH. The best bet is to get all 3 gathering professions (butchering, foraging and mining), and vendor everything you gather, so you'll have more gold to spend (so you can get your mount earlier).
Zones
On a trial you are restricted to the single 6-20 zone for your faction, which contains the faction's capital city (1-6 is instanced, so you can't return to it once you leave). This means you'll have to do the same quests to level each character you make, but that's not too bad with just 4 classes available. While this is a major restriction when compared to WoW, the rifts give the zone quite a bit of replay value, and the diversity of viable class/talent combinations in PvP makes up for this restriction.
Dungeons
At level 20 there are only 2 dungeons available, and the number of BiS items from them is very low, so you won't be spending much time in them.
PvP
World PvP simply doesn't exist before level 20, as even on a PvP realm, due to not beaing able to leave your starting zone to access any contested areas, you won't be able to get to players of the other faction at your own level.
Warfronts are the equivalent to WoW's battlegrounds, and at level 20 we have access to 3 of them. One is similar to AB, except one of the flags gives bonus points if held. The other 2 are for a game type called 'Martyrdom', where there is one mobile 'flag' like for WSG, and holding it gives your team points, but it also does an increasing amo8unt of damages to you the longer you hold it.
The graveyards cannot be camped in any way, because they are raised above the rest of the zone, and run round the edge, so you can drop down at several points.
We are in a 20-29 bracket, but in this game your stats are scaled up to match the highest level for the bracket, so really the only difference is the number of abilities you have, and the small stat bonus people would get from having epics over rares if they're an xp locked twink (except they'd still be in 20 epics, as that's the highest available to the bracket). XP locked players are in the same BGs as those who haven't locked their XP, so trial twinks will have better gear than most levellers anyway, meaning we're not massively overgeared as trials.
You can queue with as big a group as you're make (but I don't know how that would affect queue times).
Queues are fast, around 1 minute in the evening. Faction won't make any difference to your queues, as you can sometimes end up playing for the other faction if they don't have the numbers. The combat in the few games I've played has been intense, with a lot less burst than in WoW (both healing and damage). Also, the classes seem to be a lot more balanced, probably because they all have access to things like slows, charges and knockbacks, and you buy levels of a skill, so they can be balanced more effectively at lower levels.
There are no arenas, but you can duel anywhere.
Rifts
These are probably what you will spend most of your time doing outside of warfronts (if you aren't farming other things).
Rifts randomly spawn in the world, starting off as a tear. If left for a while they'll open up into a rift, which is an event with several waves of mobs to defeat, in order to close the rift. While a rift is left open it can spawn additional mobs that will move around the world, attacking towns, or setting up footholds that can spawn yet more mobs, so if the rifts aren't closed, the entire zone can end up being overrun, leaving it without any NPCs for quests, training or trading.
The difficulty of rifts is such that they can't easily be soloed at their level, unless you're able to kite or tank the mobs, or if you're well geared. In addition the rifts may have bonus waves, that increase the reward for closing the rift, that only become available if the previous waves are completed within a time limit, something you'll find hard to achieve soloing them.
Occasionally zone invasions will happen, when lots of rifts open at the same time, and everyone in the zone will have to both close the rifts, and defend the towns from all the mobs that they're spawning.
Mounts, Travel, and the Map
You can buy a mount as soon as you can afford it. There is no riding skill, just the high (for low levels) cost of each mount. You can mount up in combat, so long as you don't get interrupted. There is no flying, and no flight masters. There are Porticulums that can be used to fast travel, but they are very widely spaced (and you have to discover them), so you'll be relying on your mount for most travelling.
The map will show the location of all the rifts and footholds, as well as the movements of mobs that come out of them, and if you're in a party each member can set waypoints that can been seen by everyone else, making it very easy to form up a group at random as you meet up at a rift, and then let everyone else know which one you'll be heading to once you've completed the current one.
Downgrading your account and XP lock
Unilke WoW, you can upgrade your account to payed, and then go back to the free trial at any time. It's a good idea to get at least one month, just so you can access the other zones in the game, and pick up some items from vendors that would otherwise be unavailable to you. You can also buy some things that are over the trial currency caps, or as the AH isn't too good for low level enchants, you may want to level runecrafting on an alt, to post to any twinks you have.
You can only lock your XP on a payed account, and you must make sure this is the first thing you do when you log in after paying, as you cap at 1 XP short of dinging 21 when you're on the trial.
Server transfers
In RIFT you are able, at any time, to transfer your characters, free of charge, to another server that is available for transfers (unlike in WoW they actually restrict where you can transfer to, to keep faction imbalance from breaking servers).
I'm not sure how this affects trial accounts though, and whether you can roll 4 characters, with pairs on 2 different servers, then move them all together.
Addons and support websites
There are very few addons for RIFT, and they're limited in what they can do, as the addon system for the game is in beta testing and doesn't have all the functions that WoW's addon API does. There are a few to track buffs and cooldowns, some attempts at healing frames, and a rather good equivalent to Recount, but for the most part there isn't anywhere near as much diversity as with WoW, and the available addons aren't quite as developed (I'm writing my own buff tracker, as I couldn't get on with any of the ones available).
There is a site that's roughly equivalent to Wowhead at rift.zam.com, but there's a lot less information available for items, as without advanced addons, there's no way to log exactly where things drop, and pass the information onto the website so they can make a comprehensive database. There's also a wiki at the same site that's similar to wowpedia.
'Mogging'
RIFT doesn't have mogging like WoW. Instead, in addition to your character sheet having slots for your gear, it has another set of slots called 'Wardrobe'. Whatever you equip in those slots is what's displayed on your character. This means that you always have the same outfit, no matter how many times you upgrade your gear. It's also compltely free (except for the costume items you might want to buy, of which there are many). You can buy extra wardrobe slots for additional outfits, just not on a trial.
Pet collecting
Farming endlessly for rare drops isn't a major part of getting items in RIFT. Instead you buy pets with the currencies from completing rifts (including all of the ones from past holiday events), and you also get some from completing artifact collections. These are a little like archaeology from WoW, except artifacts are just sitting there in the world to find, and you don't have to mess around trying to pinpoint them, you just look for a small glowing and sparkling item. They can involve a fair bit of farming, except it's less tedious than farming mobs or fishing. It's more like an Easter-egg hunt that covers the entire zone.
The artifacts drop completely at random, and you need to collect sets of them to get a reward. Luckily you can buy artifacts on the AH if you need to complete a set (although some of them will cost more than your currency cap). Some of the sets reward pets, or you can buy a pet if you complete enough collections (but you're only likely to get one pet this way, as there aren't that many collections we can complete as trials).
You can download the trial from http://www.riftgame.com/en/lite/
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by far the funnest class imo.