I have 2 lvl 50s (one cleric and one rogue) in Rift and have raided Greenscale though, my guild has not finish it yet. I also played enough pvp to get to rank 4.
Here is what is good about Rift:
PVE lvl 1-49 is a lot of fun. Some people don't like this and just try to lvl as fast as they can. I actually like to take my time and see everything. The quests from 1-49 are very well written and are very fun.
PVE lving rift > wow
Now for rifts. Rifts are a great idea. As for someone saying Rifts rewards are the same as pvp, they have no idea what they are talking about. At lvl 50 and after doing Expert instances to aquire certain items you will be able to open Raid Rifts. These are very challenging rifts that give you stones that you can trade in with vendors for shard items. These items greatly boost your stats and not are not armor. Rift items are completely different from PVP gear. PVP gear is this game has a stat called valor which reduces damage from other players. Its useless in PVE. In PVE you need hit. There are very few runes that can increase hit. So basically you will need to have mostly PVE gear to do Raids and Raid Rifts.
Now if you asking what if my class bought CC to the group instead of top DPS. I would let you know now that CC is practically useless in this game. You will only need it if your group is mostly in blues and doing t1s for the first time. Maybe a day or two. After that once the group gets a bit of gear CC is only useful in maybe one or 2 fights. DPS is much more important as some bosses will be need to be beaten in certain amount of time. Casting classes basically never run out of mana in this game so there is little down time.
Wow has no rifts so Rift wins again.
Now for the bad. Their first major patch that came out recently has caused a lot more problems than it fixed with class balancing.
Rift allows you to have 6 souls to customize your character to make it just about anyway you want. Now this seems like a good idea at first but, there are major problems with this design. First you will find at lvl 50 only about 3-4 builds out of all the possible combinations are actually viable. Some of your souls will also be completely useless at end game.
Most will not notice this as lvling from 1-50. This is because lvling is extremely easy and simply requires you rolling your face across the keyboard with any class. When you start doing expert instances and later raids, you will see how badly some of the souls are designed. Rogue class took a heavy nerf from the first patch. After getting parses back from the top guilds running Raids certain classes such as rogue are at the very bottom of the DPS chart even though 4 out of their 6 souls are supposely DPS souls. They get beaten by warriors in melee and very very badly by mages in range. Markman is probably the worst DPS class for PVE. Problem is most people just don't know. They never parse their class. This leads to groups failing in expert instances and rogues getting a bad name if didn't build their souls right to be able to do ok amounts of DPS.
Warriors are best at melee but, the game's end bosses right now are very hard for a melee class. If you make one wrong move you will get one shoted by the boss (This is not aggro related). Also many bosses throw out AOEs requiring the melee class to run out of range unable to do dps. What happens is at end game most people just want Mages for DPS because they do good damage and are range. I see it on my server all the time. People calling out for groups saying, "Looking for one more DPS (mage preferred no rogues).
PVP balancing.
Before the recent major patch the balancing had problems. Certain classes could do extreme amounts of burst such as the saboteur soul in the rogue class and champion warrior class. They could hit for around 3k-4k damage at once when most classes had less than 5K hps as a fresh lvl 50 in blues. Making it very hard to heal. So the patch comes out and both the warrior and rogue souls get nerf. This is all fine except the sab class was the rogue's best dps soul in PVE. Though even then it wasn't at the very top of the DPS chart it was still decent. After the nerf, rogues fell to the very bottom. Warriors also took a hit but, they had other souls buff so that they are still viable in PVE and PVP.
Now after all the complaints by people in the forums about the rogue and warrior classes doing too much burst pre patch in pvp you would think that the devs are smart enough not to make the same mistake. Well, in the very same patch a pyro mage has been buff to be able to hit someone for around 3k-4k damage. But, that's not all, they also get a buff where they can't be stun while standing on a circle that has no cooldown. They also had all their armor buff as well as having a spell that reduces 40% of incoming damage. So yeah... things like that makes you kind of loose hope for the devs with balancing. Same group that did balacing in Warhammer which was absolutely terrible.
PVP balancing in an MMO like this is probably next to impossible but, you can at least have a rock, paper, scissor system where every class will at least have a counter to it. Rift soul system almost makes that impossible as every class has many souls that give them mutliple roles such as healing, dps and tanking. This makes pvp balacing in this game much harder. I just don't see how they can do it without always having one spec that will beat all the other classes.
So in short if you have played wow and have gotten tired of it go ahead and get Rift. From 1-50 Rift is a lot of fun. You can also pick one of the stronger classes to dominiate PVP, at least till it gets nerf.
If you haven't played either then I would suggest you get wow. It's just been out longer and has much more content. The balancing is also better though I wouldn't exactly call wow a balance game with it's classes either.
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