Adam 'Gersh' Gershowitz shares the secrets of Souls in a roundtable discussion with Rift community members. Plus join in our Storm Legion Beta Giveaway!

Do you want raids to pick all support roles, or can you get away with one or two of them?

Gersh: It’s funny you asked that, because Daglar [Lead Game Designer] and Ailion [Rogue Lead] have been spending the past three days going over buff and debuff stacking to help address that exact question. The end result is: we want our support classes to be fairly interchangeable, we want people to have a support class or two. We don’t necessarily want to get into a situation where you must have a Bard, a Beastmaster, an Archon, or a Tactician. It’s a little bit tough, because at the same time you want to give each one of those classes or souls a little bit of a unique flavor of their own, and if everybody can do everything then ‘how am I special?’

It is a really fine line that we are treading right now. We’re trying to get, for the majority of situations, where any of the support classes, or a combination of any two, will get the job done for you. But there are unique and interesting gameplay aspects to taking the individuals. Would it be more beneficial to take four beneficial support classes, so that you can get all the unique benefits, versus two support classes and two DPS, or two support classes, a healer and a DPS? That’s where we’re really trying to tune it out.

What we want to have is a situation where there’ll be different support classes, they each have their own unique flavor, they’re fairly interchangeable, but at the same time there may be a situation where the Bard is better than the Archon, or the Archon is better than the Bard. It’s a very tricky thing to do, because those flavors, those things that make them good, are also sometimes the things that are the fine line between useless and required. You tiptoe on one side, you tiptoe on the other.

Why do Rogue Tanks have so many damage abilities in the soul? Isn’t mitigation more important than DPS?

Gersh: Actually, that goes back to tanks in general. One of the things that you’ll notice with all of our tanks is that their DPS as a whole went up a little. Overall, the Rogue tanks, the Riftstalkers, because they have a lot of DPS souls, they have a few more DPS talents, so they synergize a little bit better. But at the same time, it’s not at the detriment of mitigation.

We’re trying to make sure all of our tanks have similar mitigation and health, and we split thematically once again. Just like with support, there’s an even baseline, but everybody has their own unique flavor. So if you take the case of the Riftstalker, he’s a good solid tank, he brings a little bit more DPS and mobility to the table. Those things aren’t there because we decided we wanted them to be a less good tank. Those are the additional flavor items, or the things that make them a more offensive mobile tank.

Whereas the Reaver has things which make them more a more offensive AoE tank, and the Paladin has additional things which make them more solo tank oriented, with really strong, defensive, soloing abilities. The majority of the soul tree is still oriented toward the soul’s primary role – tanking - but at the same time we want to make sure that they synergize outside of their particular role. So there’s still a reason to take Riftstalker if you’re playing an Assassin, or Bladedancer, or Bard, or Marksman, or vice versa. 

Will there be dummies and areas for players to test their raid DPS, or buy it for their dimensions?

Gersh: That’s a really popular request right now; it’s definitely something we’re considering. In fact, if you’re playing in our closed beta right now, you may have noticed the dummy foundry, which is just an instance loaded up with all sorts of different practice dummies. We’re trying some new testing methodology right now, internally and with players, and if some of that stuff becomes really useful and really fun, you may see it showing up in the game world.

The really tricky thing with things like that is, when we want to do a real raid test dummy, we also want to make sure that all of the players are buffed and the bosses are debuffed and stuff like that, so you can get an idea what your DPS looks like  in a raid situation. Doing those is a little bit tricky, and that’s where dimensions or instances come in, because we can’t necessarily do it in the open world. We don’t want people going up, getting this massive buff, and then heading off. But in a dimension or an instance we get a lot more freedom. Happily, things like dimensions are going to open up all sorts of opportunities to do really unique things with that.

We recently had Pumpkins Smash – the mobile scratchcard app. Will there be more in the future?

Gersh: We’re definitely planning on doing more with scratchers in the future and more with mobile in general. Right now, our focus has been on Storm Legion, but we still do continue to update our mobile app and mobile games, and we definitely want to do some stuff with that in the future. I know we have been talking about doing some more themed scratchers, and updating the existing ones to be compatible with Storm Legion. I really don’t know what the timeline is on that though.

Do you have a favorite thing with classes that you’ve been working on?

Gersh: Well, considering I personally have not been working on classes for the past few months; I’ve personally been spending time helping out the other side of the team working on making sure all the items and stuff are in. But my personal favorite thing that has been put in for classes so far is that I’m having a blast with Tactician. It’s not necessarily the best DPS or the best healing, but it’s just really good fun to play.

I also – because I play all four – I really do like the Harbinger as well, because I do like playing my caster, but sometimes there’s just something really visceral about playing a dude in cloth with a giant reaper scythe. On warriors, the Tempest is a lot of fun, but personally I like some of the combinations I can do with the Warlord, and some of the Beastmaster changes have been a lot of fun.

Mainly, since I am a developer, that doesn’t mean I have as much time to play the game as I’d like. While there are a number of people in the office that are precision raiders, I tend to be, as they put it, ‘The derp raider’. So I tend to fill the Bard role, or the support role, in a lot of our raid situations, because I can’t eke out that extra five or ten DPS, but I sure as heck can hit a buff rotation. Things like the Beastmaster changes actually excite me, because I can play something a little different from the Bard, even though I really enjoy the Bard, or a little different than the Archon.

On the Cleric front, because I do play a lot of healers, the Defiler’s a really interesting class. The way it plays is a different level of complexity compared to some of the other Clerics. I find it really interesting, though I haven’t had enough time to play with it quite a bit. I am really happy with where the Druid and Shaman changes are, because I tend to play a melee Cleric over a ranged, but please don’t take that as ‘they’re going to make melee Clerics better, because Gersh plays one’. I really do play everything, so I’m habitual in that regard. I’ll rotate through the different callings over and over again as I play.

The new 61-point Archon ability, a point-to-point teleport, seems to be breaking a lot of mechanics. Are you going to keep it or dump it?

Gersh: Well, we’re going to have to see. That’s one of those things that are fun, and we’re trying to add fun to the classes, but at the same time we want to keep balance. We are actively raid testing right now, and we’re seeing which are the problem abilities in those circumstances. To be honest with you, I would prefer to figure a good solution for making it work in those situations, than removing something that’s a lot of fun for the majority of players.

So we’re going to continue working on that - it’s one of those challenge abilities. There may be a situation where it goes away, or it gets tuned or adjusted, but we’re going to try and make sure that we keep the integrity of our endgame intact without pulling the fun out of it.

And that’s about as noncommittal an answer as I can give, because honestly, we were just talking about that the other day. It’s one of those situations where ‘Hey, this is breaking some stuff, but man is it fun!’ So we always try to reconcile the fun with balance as best we can.

Have you thought about adding new weapon types to the game?

Gersh: When we made Storm Legion, we did talk about adding new weapon types to the game. We go over that, adding entire new callings, things like that. Ultimately, what we decided to do instead was make unique looking and feeling versions of some of the existing weapons, for a couple of reasons. One, if we were introducing a completely new weapon type to the game, it also means we have to go back and put it through the rest of the game, which actually starts to become a rather large challenge. And two, there already are quite a few weapons in the game, so the only thing that we’d really talk about, would be unarmed combat or crossbows, or something like that.

So ultimately when we looked at it, the decision was: is a new weapon going to be more fun for players, or is it going to be more fun to spend that art and animation time to be making a lot more monsters, cooler abilities for the existing souls, and a greater variety of weapons for the existing weapon types. For Storm Legion, we decided we were reasonably happy with what we had, and we wanted to give players a greater variety of weapons, cooler monsters, more animations for their characters, that type of thing.

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