Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Rift Mage: Archon

Archon is one of Rift’s mage souls. It's a versatile soul that brings great benefit to any mage that incorporates it into their build, but it's also a raiding powerhouse when used as the primary soul. In fact, the 51-point Archon is so powerful that in addition to Bard, it's one of the only two souls that are pretty much required in any 20-man raid.

This article is all about the uses of Archon from folding in a zero-point Archon tree to taking advantage of Archon talents in other builds to full 51-point Archon support.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Rift Raiding: Just the Buffs

Bluedot has a great buff/debuff list up on his site, but it's lacking some crucial information that I constantly find myself needing in order to resolve who should cast what in raids. This is his list of buffs with all of that extra detail. I'll be doing a debuff equivalent article soon.

It should be noted that I've been playing Mage for the most part, with some Rogue. I'm almost certain to have gotten some details wrong with respect to Warrior and Cleric, so please double-check my work and send me some feedback if you find a problem.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Rift Mage: 1.7 Update

Update: Props to T Karlsson who pointed out that I'd had a run-away search and replace turn all my Flame Bolts into Fire Bolts... fixed.

Since I first published my How To Do It All Wrong and Win article about pyrolock mage dps, I've done a fair amount of raiding, dungeons, solo and PvP. I have some new info to share with you, and some updates to that article.

First off, the build has changed slightly, as have the macros. I no longer blend in Archon except as a zero-point tree (my fellow guildie, Calvnan, suggested this, and while I still think there's value in the infinite mana of Archon, the flexibility of a zero-point soul combined with the dps increase of this build makes it a great raiding build). This leaves me mana-starved in many situations, so Sacrifice Life: Mana becomes an important part of my rotation, and I have to cast it about every minute in order to maintain a boss fight. This sacrifices one 1-second global cooldown (thanks to the global cooldown reduction from Pyromancer) while giving me a substantial DPS boost from the Warlock tree (remember that both Warlock and Pyro give extra dps based on how many points you spend, so taking additional dps points in those trees gives extra bang-for-the-buck).