Plan your perfect character with the RIFT soul calculator

@gildhur

This. There are far more polished Rift soul builders; the ZAM one, sadly, is pretty poor at the moment.

http://riftbuilder.lotd.org/
http://rift-planner.com/?archetype=3&soul1=3&soul1_talants=0&soul2=3&soul2_talants=0&soul3=2&soul3_talants=0&lang=eng

Are the others, if the ZAM one bugs out. Personally, I use the first one, but both are good.

@Dril - Have you tried using it recently? We just fixed a few bugs this morning that should help with things displaying incorrectly. There's still a known bug for high latency users, but otherwise it should be more responsive to normal latency folks.

@Dril I don't see what's so hot about those. The zam one gives you a list of all your powers and seems to work just as goo.

@toychristopher I think it is assuming you are max level. While leveling up, of course, you will hit points where you can't spend more in a tree until you increase your level.

@toychristopher

Yes and no. It does not force you to spend in other trees, but it has a cap. There is a slight difference (you can save up unspent points if you want to).

@codybye Yes that does make sense. Thanks for explaining that to me!

@toychristopher No problem!

@codybye
While it makes sense, it pushes me away from using a soul calculator like this. I'll just use it for the raw percentages or to get a rough idea of the direction to head.

@Scarecrowe

Why would it scare you away? What would make you want to use it?

@meanieme

ZAM is no longer owned by IGE, they're owned by a new company, that now owns IGE that also owns ZAM...rofl

@aurickle
I've been playing with rift-planner.com, since I'm going to be beta testing tomorrow, and while there certainly appears to be more flexibility than WoW, the viable choices seem like they're going to be somewhat limited based on skill synergy. It makes sense--why would I not take talents from another bow-weilding soul if they improve my main bow-wielding soul?--but I would find it really hard to justify speccing into, say, Bard as a secondary instead of Ranger if I were playing a Marksman except in very specific situations. Similar to FFXI, in which sure, you -can- use any job you like as a subjob, but with very few exceptions subs that do not directly enhance your main job's primary stats or abilities end up fairly useless.

@Irem
In my own playing and testing I've found the following strategy works really well (for me, anyway):

1) Choose your primary soul
2) Look at the talents within the primary soul. Choose a second soul with talents that have synergy with the primary. For example, does your primary have a lot of abilities that make crits more deadly? If so, look for a second soul with talents that increase your crit chance. Don't look at the second soul so much for abilities.
3) Does your primary soul have a weakness? Look for a third soul that offsets those weaknesses. For example, almost all mages are kind of squishy and could benefit from healing, making Chlormancer a wonderful choice for many builds.

You might want to swap 2 and 3, depending on your particular souls.

Yes, there are certainly some souls that do NOT go well together. For example, a soul that's all about dual wielding doesn't make sense paired up with a soul that focuses on two-handed weapons or sword-and-board. But in general, it seems that there are far more combos that go well together than not. :)

@aurickle
Great tips, thanks.

@aurickle
I appreciate the advice, thanks. :D I'm just learning about Rift's gameplay after having paid not-very-close attention to it over the past few months, and I'm sort of crashing around trying to absorb what I can in the next day-ish.