Saturday, December 31, 2011

Rift: Macros for mages

Rift has amazing macro capabilities. In some ways, not quite as good as WoW, but in other ways, orders of magnitude better. The primary difference is that in Rift, you can place as many spells in a single macro as you like, and the first one that is currently castable will be the one that is activated when you press the button.

This tutorial isn't about cookie-cutter macros. The macros below don't take additional souls into account and are very specific to one configuration and play style. The point of this article is to teach you how to build your own macros and what to look for when reading your spells and abilities. Once you learn this, you won't need cookie-cutters, though they're still useful to look at, as you may have missed something (for example, my Pyro build wasn't using Heat Wave very often because I didn't see the 50% casting speed increase, and was only using it to reset the cooldown of Withering Flames, a real waste of the ability!)

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Rift: Crafting the perfect mage

Mage builds abound on the Web for players of the MMO, Rift, but there's precious little I can find that tells prospective players about the class in detailed and complete terms. I'm going to try to do that, here. Each post will be tagged with "Riftmage" so you can follow that tag to find all of them.

Let me just spend a paragraph on those who don't play Rift yet: mage is one of the four "classes" or "callings" in the game (rogue, warrior and cleric being the other three). The diversity of the game comes from the 10 "souls" that these callings can arrange in any set of 3. If you've played World of Warcraft, then you'll be familiar with the idea of 3 talent trees. That's what your selected 3 souls look like in Rift, but you can select any 3 out of the 10 you like. This means that when I say, "mage", I can mean a necromancer who summons a pet; a pyromancer who throws fireballs around; a chloromancer who heals their party or raid by doing damage to the opponent; or an elementalist who summons an elemental pet among others.