Rift: Planes of Telara - Hands On

Beyond that, the interface was pretty standard third-person MMO, with a skill bar on the bottom (and an optional three extras), minimap, quest tracker, unit frames, chat frames - everything you'd expect. Graphics were top-notch, the game running on a heavily modified version of the Gamebryo engine. Load times were virtually non-existent, and the intro quests were fairly straightforward. In my what-seemed-like brief playtime with the game (it was actually several hours long, but it flew by), I got to level ten without much trouble. The questline stories were engrossing and enjoyable, there was a good balance between exploration and killing, and I only ran out of inventory space twice (I forgot what it was like to get a new bag and notice that it only has four slots).

Either way, I found my beginning few hours as a newly Ascended Defiant to be thoroughly enjoyable, and before I knew it, it was time to log out of my newly-made character and switch over to a pre-made level 30 character for a dungeon run.

I had become fairly attached to my Pyromancer (or more specifically, how overpowered it was), so I chose a level 30 version from the list of available pre-made characters on my test account. Once we were all swapped over and logged in, standing in front of the instance gate, we grouped up haphazardly and ventured into the instance. Upon grouping up with my fellow Gamer's Day attendees, however, we found that we had no healer. "No problem," I said, checking my Soul Tree sets - I had a set ready to go as a Chloromancer, which at first glance had something to do with healing, so I went with it.

Upon playing, I discovered that it had very few direct heals - one solo direct heal, one AoE direct heal, and one charge-based direct heal. Those alone, coupled with their cooldowns, could not keep the tank up, let alone the whole group. However, a lot of the abilities in the Chloromancer Soul Tree contained healing after-effects. That is to say, while I used abilities to either temporarily debuff or damage my enemies, it would cause a healing return on either those who attacked it or those it was attacking, depending on the ability. By a careful balance of these abilities, I was able to solo heal the group throughout the entire dungeon, dealing damage the whole time.