Leveling with a friend.Follow

I'm not too familiar with warrior souls, but I'll try to provide what help I can.

When leveling in a duo, most of the monsters you fight are going to scaled for soloers, so you don't need to be tanky with paladin when killing normal quest mobs. For duo questing the most efficient leveling is with damage focused characters, and preferably frontloaded damage.

I believe Champion has the best frontloaded damage from the warrior souls, although I could be wrong about that. Certainly riftblade, paragon, and beastmaster are all highly viable.

As for killing elites and any grouping for dungeons you guys do, in rift you can have a separate set of builds called "roles," which you can change into any time you are out of combat. It is quite easy to have at least 2 roles. I'd recommend having a build that is focused on dps for duo questing and generally slaying weak mobs with your friend. Then have a second role be a tanky build that can allow you to take on elites or tank for dungeon groups.

You should know that inqusitor and justicar are cleric souls--not warrior--and while you can switch between the 8 souls of your calling freely due to roles, you have to use those in your calling. So if you had your heart set on playing a warrior, you can't be a inquis/justicar, you'd have to be a cleric to do that.

Inqusitor/justicar is a good solo spec, but I think it loses some in duo. A lot of your damage comes from your two primary dots, which probably won't tick for full duration with a rogue friend helping you kill stuff. It can also be made fairly durable, but that again matters less in a duo. It's not that it's a bad spec to bring to a duo, just that a lot of the things that make it good are found in soloing.

It is possible to get all 8 souls unlocked. You can have a total of 5 roles (a fifth slot was recently added). These are your preset builds. It costs money to buy roles beyond the first, with each one becoming more expensive. You'll get your second role very early in the game, probably before you hit 10. The third is easy, the fourth is feasible. The fifth role costs 100 platinum, and it will be quite a while before you are able to buy it.

I just want to reiterate that you can only use the souls from your calling (think class) in your builds and roles. A warrior can only be a combination of warrior souls and so on.

Cleric/Mage combos have worked well for hubby and me. We have two combos. One in which he is a healing cleric with a little DPS, and my Mage is straight DPS--Storm/Element/Archon with my Earth Elemental acting as our "tank." The other combo was him as a straight tank, and me with Chloro/Storm/Dominator for heals and support. The thing I like the best about RIFT is that by creating a leveling duo, you have so many options using the different soul trees. I like to play casters, and I like to do a little bit of everything and feel "useful." Hubby likes to focus on a specific role: straight tank, straight heal, straight DPS. When you make you duo with your friend, figure out what your playstyle is and then make toons that complement your styles. Have fun! :)

Ranger/MM and RB/pally can both solo elites without a problem with a bit of kiting - I always found warrior to be the easiest class with which to solo anything - so a combination of the 2 can only make for good things