Lots of people had pets. I think there's a class in each archtype (except perhaps warrior?)
Warrior has the Beastmaster Class.
Death was nothing. No real loss; just a bit of coin, a little inconvenience. You spawn back up at the nearest shrine, and have to pay the piper (I mean "healer") after a certain number of deaths.
I think it debuffs you 10% per death. Loss of money wasn't a huge amount but I think it increases with level and I was trying to gain money. I could not figure out how to spawn at the shrine I kept having to run back to my body XD (must be another button somewhere?) but then I didn't die enough to figure it out and when I did die I was usually in a rush to get back to a rift fight. A death near a shrine did auto respawn me at that shrine but the rest of the time I had to run.
I played a day in Rift and in general I liked it ok (yay they included an editable UI. All mmorpgs should have one but don't). It's not a WoW killer but perhaps it will be the next Warhammer. It's the polar opposite of DC Online as Rift has you managing bars out the wazoo and if you want to make a good hybrid class expect to be reading web pages. At level 11 I never got to the dungeons or pvp section of the game (pvp is likely to be the major part of the game play) but I can say rifts can go on a bit too long. I expect part of this is so you can start with low amounts of players and ramp it up as players show as they are supposed to spawn dynamically based on players. Problem was the rifts went from having none for a few hours to "we just cleaned the map and now more are popping up 9 times over XD". I can see it going from an interesting element that freshens game play to "are we done with rifts forming yet" if they don't cap the max spawn frequency slightly. I'm feeling like there may be a bit of game play padding going on (yes I know the game's name is "Rift" but yeeash). Also the rift fighting game play in the public group wasn't that engaging. Mostly you try to pull one of two enemies if in the deadly attack group ball or if at the rift spawn players will dog pile on an enemy as soon as they appear. The ball was tough while the dog pile was a massacre where players ruthlessly ripped apart each new spawn to the point I felt sorry for the enemies XD. It's fine for lower levels but I'm hoping higher level rifts require more advanced tactics or perhaps spawn based on player classes in the area. At one point there was so many players piling on one bad guy I could not see my guy and was relying purely on bars and tab targeting to play XD.
Also the dwarf NPCs sound like yoda but whatever

On another subject while the game has a lot of class variety I still managed to chose only two things I wanted my character to do that won't work. It appears my ability to want things that aren't made to work in a game is still undefeated XD. Does anyone have any class ideas to get this to work...
1. I want to use the large warrior sword (which means you need to go Champion)
2. I want to gain hp by fighting (mainly Reaver seems to do this).
The abilities are there but they don't work together as Reaver, the life sucking class, seems to work by using a shield to keep you alive while robbing a little bit of HP off of a lot of little enemies. Without the shield by I get damaged far too much to tank more than one enemy and the hp off of one enemy is poor.
I may try an ability in Riftwalker that gives a 25% of damage heal for crits but it takes 44 points. That doesn't leave enough to get "Proper Timing" crit ability in Champion or even the "Brutal Punishment" Champion crit skill due to the next beta level cap

If you'd like to build a class here is the best class builder I've found so far as it displays the most info (like level needed) http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html .I don't know how current it is though.
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