For the Beginner

Are you clueless about how to work as a team to complete a dungeon? Do you not know the difference between a dungeon and a raid? Are you new to MMOs? If so, then you've come to the right place. This guide takes you from the ground up, step by step. You'll learn the individual roles, encounter mechanics, how to run dungeons, and hopefully you'll get into raiding.

Roles
A role is a specific play-style based on the souls you chose. The most common is DPS. Other roles are Healer, Tank, and Support. These roles can be further divided into even more specific styles such as AoE or ST, burst or steady, melee or ranged, pure or hybrid.

Major Roles

 * DPS - the damage role
 * Healer - heals allies
 * Tank - built to survive
 * Support - helps by buffs and debuffs

Specific Types

 * Area of Effect (AoE) or Single Target (ST) - how many targets the role handles.
 * Burst or Steady - if the role does short quick high amounts of damage, or does it stay fairly constant.
 * Melee or Ranged - melee is up close with swords, ranged is further away with a bow or spells.
 * Pure or Hybrid - A pure role stays true to one of the four major roles, a hybrid is a mixture of two or more.

As a beginner, the first and most important role to learn is a DPS because the game progresses by killing things. The other roles are more intended for groups. Unfortunately you can't heal things to death, or outlive them to death. Well you can but it's going to be a really long leveling process. So go and click that DPS link. Check out the other roles too. Come back here when you're done.

Mechanics
Mobs and bosses have attack patterns as diverse as the players. AoEs, Bursts, you will need to figure out what does what or your group could easily wipe. At times these can be confusing and hard to spot. When this happens, here are questions you should always be asking yourself:
 * Where is this damage coming from?
 * What went wrong?
 * What could be done differently?

Make use of your UI. The combat log, tool tips, and dialogue all can help you can solve those questions through simple reasoning. It is reccomeded that you pick-up a Meter with a deathlog. They do the same thing as the combat log, but in a more readable format.


 * Combat log
 * Shows all the skills casted by what and how much damage it did.


 * Tooltips
 * Appear when you hover your mouse over a buff or debuff, however for debuffs you will have to do this in the middle of combat when they appear.


 * Dialogue
 * Provides clues on what to do. Sometimes it's obvious and will explicitly tell you to hide or run.

Mechanic Types
These are the majority of the different types of mechanics you will encounter. As a rule of thumb always use common sense.


 * Don't stand in it.
 * This is the most common of all the mechanics and is normally easy to spot. A fire, poison gas, or webbing will be casted at your feet. Most of the time these are red or yellow circles, but they can also be cones and other things.


 * Interrupt
 * Blue cast bars can be interrupted and normally should. Take note on what their names are and understand what it does.


 * Don't attack
 * "Reflecting Torrent", "Mirror Shield" Certain shield abilities reflect damage back at you. These can sometimes be purged.


 * Cleanse
 * Healers! Is your team taking big amounts of damage while a debuff is active? Cleanse it. You can use the combat log to identify these.


 * Stand in it
 * Here is where it gets confusing. This contradicts with the "Don't stand in it" rule. Certain AoEs you have to be inside. Sometimes these are blue, green, yellow, purple, but rarely ever red. A lot of this is learned through trial and error.


 * Hide
 * This is the least obvious mechanic. Fortunately Rift decided to make this one easy. Always when this one appears a dialogue message will come up telling you to take cover or break line-of-sight.

Dungeons
This is where the knife of buttery goodness meets the bread of Rift. Dungeons are an exciting experience where a team of five work together to engage challenging bosses and gain rare loot. The team is composed of a tank, healer, support, and two DPS. Before you begin, there are several requirements:
 * You should understand how to play your role to some degree. Now is not the time to learn new rotations.
 * Know basic mechanics. If you're having trouble you can check out a dungeon guide here.
 * Work together with others. When the tank says you jump, you should jump. Otherwise not listening and going about doing your own thing will result in a very unhappy group and possibly get you kicked. If you're rusty on your group skills you should try the adventure que for a bit.

Working Together
Unlike in the open world, mobs in dungeons are scaled up in difficulty where five people are needed to take them down. Running in alone and attacking a mob will result in your utter demise. You will have to approach this differently.


 * 1) Buff up.
 * 2) *Chose the right role for the job.
 * 3) *Get all your buffs on yourself.
 * 4) *Tank should equip his tank gear.
 * 5) *Make sure you are near max mana and health.
 * 6) *Get in front of any barriers. These are marked by dots on the ground.
 * 7) The tank engages the mobs. This ensures that the tank keeps the damage on him and off group members.
 * 8) Now the DPS and support attack the mobs on the tank, and only those mobs. If any mobs focus on them, they should bring them to the tank.
 * 9) Healer keeps tank alive through cleanses and heals.
 * 10) Don't stand in fires. Even though the healer is there to keep the group alive, you should try to avoid putting yourself in danger and know general mechanics.
 * 11) Set the pace. As the mobs start to die, the tank should already be moving onto the next group. This keeps the group active and with less downtime. However it is up to the tank to decide how much to pull and how long to wait between.
 * 12) *Is the healer having trouble?
 * 13) *Are the DPS killing groups too slow or too fast?
 * 14) *Is that an elite or a boss up ahead?

Summary
This concludes the For the Beginner guide. You should now know what the roles are, how they work together, and not to stand in fires. I award you with this golden star. Print it out and pin it to your shirt to show the world your accomplishments!



Next up you'll learn about Raids - similar to dungeons but with a much larger group and harder mechanics.