Choosing Your Race and Faction
Race and Faction are always important choices and can be frustrating to deal with. If you're just starting into a new game, chances are you don't know all of the lore assossiated with each faction. For those of us that were in Warcraft for any amount of time, we ran into the question, "Am I a part of the faction I want to be with?" Whether it was because our guild switched factions, the servers were imbalanced, auction house prices, or one was better than the other at Arathi Basin, we all ran into situations where we felt as if we chose the wrong faction for that activity.
With patch 1.10 Calm Before the Storm, Trion revisted how factions were viewed and decided that the red versus blue mentallity was not for Rift. They then decided that Defiants and Guardians were going to mix better. So they introduced the "Faction as Fiction" concept. You can read the official notes on the link above, the general idea though is you can group up, be in guilds with, trade, and even marry members of any faction. Allowing the players to enjoy their race and faction choices without being penelized because the Guardians are terrible at PvP. Furthermore, you can be a mercenary in PvP maps for the opposing faction's team.
The two factions in Rift are the Guardians, who believe in and worship the Gods of the Vigil, and the Defiant, who are a collective of races that have rejected the Gods in favor of developing their scientific understanding and their machinery.
The Guardians tend to have less interfaction tension and they do rely on the Gods (and the Defiant) for miracles. The Defiant have more interfaction tension and have a problem with not understanding their own devices, which leads to some dangerous situations.
Within the two factions you have six races. The Mathosian, High Elves, and Dwarves belonging to the Guardians. With the Eth, Kelari, and the Bahmi belonging to the Defiants. Each of the six races have one active ability and one passive resistance.
The six active racial abilities are:
Mathosian - 30% movement speed bonus for 10 seconds to nearby party members (your character included).
Eth - 50% movement speed bonus for 15 seconds (your character only).
Bahmi and High Elves - 30 meter leap on a 15 second cooldown.
Kelari - Shapeshift into a fox with reduced aggro radius for 30 seconds.
Dwarves - Recover 8% health and mana every second for 13 seconds (stationary ability with a 10 minute cooldown)
These active and passive racial abilities are not game breaking or game changing like Every Man for Himself. They are flavor bonuses more than anything and easily dismissable. I would suggest choosing a race based on whether you actually enjoy them and their lore, instead of, "I'm a Rogue with a need for crit so I'm choosing a Worgen."
As nice as a sprint might seem, or a reduced aggro radius might sound handy, there are a ton of environments where those abilities are either disabled or just impractical (yes, people do see the fox, and they figure out what the fox says when it's lit on fire).
Resistances are something that newer Warcraft players are probably not very familiar with, or older players haven't heard of in a long time. Back in the day when we had to walk through piles of molten rock, uphill both ways, to get to big bad Raggy, resistances were very important; every bit helped reduce damage you took from that school of magic. However, in Telara you are going to encounter all six types of elemental damage very randomly throughout your travels. Not to mention that you will have a wide variety of bonus resistances thanks to your gear. You will not need to pass a resistances check in order to do group content.
One minute that bonus to fire resist is helping you mitigate some damage, and then within five minutes you've encountered some hostile mob or player using water based damage which your fire resistance is doing jack diddly to defend against. Don't let passive resistances influence your racial choice, play what you enjoy. You will not hear, "You rolled a Bahmi Mage, you're a moron."
So, what if you decide you want to be a race that isn't in line with your desired faction? The game does offer faction changes without changing your character race for credits, or alternatively you can go to the barber in your capital city and get a race change for the same credit costs. Changing your race does not change your faction, you can only change your faction through the faction changing scroll.
When you are creating your character, you are going to run into a screen that asks you to "choose your purpose." This is asking you to pick a build to level with. The problem is that these builds are out of date. Just pick the one with the coolest title; this decision will not effect you in any way.
