The Soul System
When you were playing Warcraft, did you ever get tired of having your Paladin only using the light, or your mage not being able to use darker magics? In Rift, players use a modified version of the talent trees that existed in Warcraft from vanilla through the end of Wrath of the Lich King. This talent system is called the soul system. When you're in-game hit the "N" button on your keyboard to pull up your talent trees.
Next, you're going to see a very familiar site if you played in Wrath or earlier and a metric ton of icons. Also, if you're fresh out of the class selection screen, the other thing you're going to notice is a small arrow telling you to click an ability, it's a trap. Instead click another talent next to it. You'll get a prompt saying that you're going to invalidate your purpose selection. Don't stress what this message is saying. Just click "ok". It will then put your one point into that talent you just clicked. Now, right click that same ability you clicked earlier. It'll return that point to you. Remember, no soul choice or talent choice is permanent in Rift, you can always undo these choices. Don't be afraid to experiment!
Now that you've rid yourself of distractions, it's time to really take a look at the talent system. You'll notice that each tree starts in the middle with a top and a bottom to the tree. Whenever you spend points in a tree, you unlock additional abilities in the bottom half of the tree. There are 76 points available to anyone level 60+. Note, however, that you cannot put more points in a tree than your current level. That means if you are level eight, you cannot put more than eight points into any one tree.
Whenever you hover over the icon for your souls you'll see a pop up box, and in it the title of your spec, it's role (defensive, offensive, healing, or support), a brief description of the spec, and "Each point in (insert spec): *Increases (insert bonus and bonus amount). If you are a new player I would suggest you take time to read each of these descriptors and even take a look at abilities in both sides of the trees to help you get an image of how that soul works.
Now that you've had a chance to read the three specs you have available to you, you might be unhappy with one or all of the specs. Fortunately, you can change that in Rift! Click the icon for the soul you want to get rid of, and you will see a list of other souls currently not selected. You can have any combination of three souls you want. So experiment and play with them as you level to find a build that you enjoy!
In order to access your abilities window hit the "P" key. In it, you'll see five tabs. The first one being the "General" tab. Below the "General" tab you'll have tabs for the three souls you've chosen, each holding abilities granted by that soul.
The last tab is going to be labeled "Ascended Powers". You're going to see two very important abilities there: "Ascended Resurrection" and "Break Free." They are a rez and an Every Man for Himself ability. Everyone gets these two abilities by default at level one regardless of race, Calling, or Souls selected. You no longer need to be in a guild if you are a Rogue that wants to throw someone a rez.
Now what if you didn't enjoy the talent tree's in Warcraft and you don't enjoy them here? That's okay! You don't have to go through and read all of the abilities and nitpick the finer details of the souls. You can instead just pick a combination of three souls you want to try and use the green arrow "Fill Soul" button to the left of the soul icons.
Pure builds aka 61 point builds (61 points are the maximum amount of points you can put into any one soul) are very viable in leveling and endgame content and are regularly used. You do not have to use the soul system if you do not want to. There are always cookie cutter builds on the forums as well that you can use as well.
Trion has done a great job with the soul system and keeping it friendly to those who enjoy being able to tweak and control the finer details of their builds while not scaring off those who do not enjoy that much control of their class. Don't let this system intimidate you!
