I agonized over it for all of two minutes and decided that the three buckets I’ll be splitting mages up into and decided to go with support/healing, the more durable summoner/melee archetypes, and glass cannons. Today’s set of mages nuke hard and fast and depend on their damage output more than anything else to last through fights. That’s right. We’re talking about squishies. Actually, we’re not, but I’m going to pretend we are because it makes the math easier. In all honesty, there’s no good way to split up the 6 core dps mage souls. I could do 2 summoners vs 4 non-summoner… but I am liking the 3v3v3 thing. So 🙂
Pyromancer
Each point spent in Pyromancer increases damage by 1%.
Pyromancers are the most iconic “mage” archetype that Rift has to offer. They throw fireballs and fireblasts and fire bursts and other fire things that start with b. And they light the ground on fire and generally kill things with fire. This is not the most subtle class. Originally, they had some mechanics that encouraged the glass cannon schtick even further – making them more effective if they stood still. That’s all gone and now they’re easier and more fun to play in my opinion.
At zero points, pyromancer gives you Flame Bolt, which is an instant cast, high damage nuke with an 8 second cooldown.
In the current skill trees, mages all have one or more spammable nukes that “count as a Primary Bolt”. These abilities are usually earned at zero points. There are numerous talents across the various skill trees that augment primary bolts somehow. The pyromancer’s primary bolt, Fireball, comes at zero points and has a 2.5s casting time with a 40% chance to light the target on fire for 8 seconds.
Continue reading rift soul breakdown – mage – tier 1, squishy