How do Souls work?

"Souls are one of the things that make each character unique in RIFT. Each class has the choice of eight different Souls to choose from. Players can have up to three Souls active at a time. Souls determine the skills and abilities of the character. The first quest you will receive at level 1 will be your first Soul choice. These Souls can be switched out as you acquire new Souls."

Source: Rift Support Center: Souls

The above quote sums up the Soul tree (talent trees for other MMO gamers) pretty well. But exactly how do you use them?

Soul Tree

First lets look at the Soul Tree. Press N on your keyboard.

• Talent Points: These determine how your character will play (DPS - Tank - Healer).
• Abilities Earned: These are the abilities you can use in your action bars to cast spells, hit, buff, defend with.
• Talent Points Spent / Remaining: An overall look at how many points you have spent. Also how many points you have not spent.
• Points Spent in this Tree: Shows the total of points spent in that particular tree only.
• Roles / Builds: These show your saved Roles (Builds) which allow you to change depending on your role in a group of solo play.. example.. a Tank build, a DPS build or a Healer build. (You can also have PVP and Hybrid builds). 4 Roles Max!
• Actual Soul: This is the Soul you have elected to use for this build 3 Souls per build max.

You will receive your first 3 choices of Souls as you do the quests in the starting area. The next 5 Souls will be available through Quests you obtain from your capital city ( Meridian / Sanctum ) when you get there at about13+

After you gain a level, you will receive Soul Point(s). You can place these points in any of the available talent slots if they are open to you and not full. It takes 5 points spent in a soul to open up the second teir, 10 for the 3rd and so on.

In the abilities earned area (See Image above), you can see the abilities that you have already received. The ones with the red numbers in them,  tell you how many points you need to spend in that Soul in order to make them available.

Roles

In the Roles /Builds area (See image above) you can select which Role you want to use or edit. You must make the Role you want to edit active first.. simply click on the Role and select the Activate Button. 

You can purchase Roles from your class trainer for the following:

2nd role is 30g
3rd role is 3p 95g
4th role is 21p 95g

When you purchase that new Role, select it as described above. Then click in the empty slot and a smaller pane opens up with a list of your souls.

When you select one of the souls from that window, it will be slotted into your Soul Tree.

If your changing an existing Soul Tree and the Soul you wish to change had points spent in that soul, you will have to visit your trainer and unlearn your talents before you can change them. If the Soul you wanted to change has no points spent in its tree, then it will swap over without a problem.

Switching Roles

In order to switch Roles, you first need to have 2 Roles to switch between (See above on how to purchase a new role). The easiest way is to select the P button to bring up the Abilities Screen, then simply drag a Role button that is not your current roll onto your action bar. You will have to activate each Role in order to do this.

When you Purchase a 3rd role, do exactly the same so that your other 2 roles are on each action bar. EG: if your current Role is Healer, drag a DPS and a Tank Role onto the action bar.. If your current Role is DPS, then drag the Healer and Tank Roles onto your action bars.. etc...

Another alternative is to use a Self made macro. Eg: If later in game you use the Healer and Tanks roles and you have saved a set of equipment for each Role  (use /saveequip # in the chat window for each role)  you can do this..

• Type /macro in the chat window to bring up the macro window
• Click on an empty slot on the left.
• Select an icon for your macro and name it.
• Enter the below macro  

Role 1
loadequip 1

• Save it and drag it into your action bars as described above.

Note: Ensure you change the numbers to the appropriate numbers of the role and the numbers you saved your equipment set to.. could be 2, 3, 4, or 20 etc.. Also in the macro window you do not need to use the / command

Obtaining New Roles

In Order to Obtain your last 5 Roles, you will need to visit various NPC's that have the title of the Soul you want to obtain and do a quest in your capital city (Meridian for Defiant, Sanctum for Guardians).

Visit here to find your Soul Quest givers

First thing to remember you can only do one of these quests to obtain Souls at a time.

So once you have selected your first Soul that you want to obtain, you'll need to head back out into Telara and find a Rift that you need to close. Join in on one of the closer ones (or solo it if you think you can).

When you close a Rift you will receive a Planar Shard, then simply click on the Soul Net you received when you took the quest to summon the particular NPC you need to fight. They really aren't that hard if your level 15+ and if you close a Rift with a group, more often than not they will help you kill him to complete the quest.

Simply return to the quest giver and collect your new Soul. Repeat this for all your Souls so you don't have to do more of them later on. Sometimes the hardest part is just getting to a Rift before someone closes it if its not close to your capital city. So it can be time consuming.

So there you have it. Hope this has been of help to you, feel free to comment if anything is amiss or if this helped you. :)