1.4.1 update (2011/09/07): I haven’t had time to update this Guide as we re-rolled to another server and faction, so I leveled a new class (Cleric), but here is the 32 Riftblade / 18 Champion / 16 Paladin spec I recommend if you want an all-around good DPS, good mobility, good survivability spec. For the macros for this spec, see Section 8C. If you have strong pocket healing, replace Pally with another tree and go 2H.
This guide discusses the Riftblade-spec’d Warrior class for PVP in the new MMORPG Rift, Patch 1.2. This guide provides comprehensive written material and narrated PVP videos.
Please post your feedback, tips, and questions!
Revision History
The first version of this Guide was posted on March 20, 2011. Here is the change log for recent revisions:
- 2011 September 7: added update note at top of Guide
- 2011 June 8: minor updates to Section 8
- 2011 May 18: minor updates to 8C macros, runes
- 2011 May 15: Added new RB/Champ/Pally section 8C
- 2011 May 13: updated for 1.2. Added new RB/VK/Pally section 8B
Table of Contents
- Mechanics Overview
- Resource Mechanics
- Damage Mechanics
- Crowd Control Mechanics
- Mitigation, Avoidance, CC-Counter Mechanics
- Blade and Avatar Mechanics
- Riftblade Tree Recommendations
- Spec Combinations
- Stats / Runes Recommendations
- Myths / Misconceptions
- Tips and Tactics
- Macro Mechanics
- Strafing / Movement / Keybindings
- Narrated PVP Videos
- Recent / Upcoming Patch Changes
- About the Author
1. Mechanics Overview
Riftblade is 1 of the 9 talent trees (“Souls”) for the Warrior class (“Calling”). For this Guide, I am assuming that Riftblade is your primary tree for investing your talent points. Telarapedia has a great writeup on the lore of Riftblade.
Strengths of Riftblade talent tree:
- Deals non-Physical damage for many abilities, so the Armor of your target isn’t a factor. This helps all targets regardless of Armor class to feel equally squishy – only their Resistances come into play (in particular Fire and Air damage Resistance)
- Delivers good ranged DPS capability, thanks primarily to the 3 Spear abilities, Fiery Burst, and Rift Surge
- Provides solid damage mitigation from Avatar of Water (10% reduction, talented)
- Has excellent mobility and counters to some CC – Riftwalk provides a gap closer and removes mobility-impairing effects and some CC effects (stun, mez, incapacitates)
- Possesses multiple CC abilities (chain ranged snare, melee AOE snare, ranged root, ranged silence) – it is important to note that this particular strength is less important in 1.2 given the CC immunities
Weaknesses of the Riftblade talent tree:
- Lacks debuff for healing received or healing output
- Lacks purge (offensive dispel) capability
- Doesn’t provide oh-crap emergency buttons for meaningfully boosting survivability
- For damage abilities that do not have a weapon contribution component, does not scale effectively with weapon or gear
Many Riftblades play their Warrior primarily as a RDPS (Ranged DPS). While there are situations (e.g. mass PVP, outnumbered heavily, etc) that encourage fighting from ranged, if you only engage from range you will
- Miss out on key Riftblade abilities (e.g. Rift Strike, Frost Strike, Thunder Strike, etc) that are only usable from melee range and whatever melee-oriented abilities/procs/buffs/debuffs you get from your 2nd and 3rd talent trees
- Be unable to circle-strafe your target to take advantage of LoS
More on that in the Myths / Misconceptions section.
2. Resource Mechanics
We have two resources to manage:
- Power
- Attack Points (AtPts)
All Warriors use a “Power” mechanic, which is functionally equivalent to a WoW Rogue’s/Feral’s energy bar or WAR’s Action Points. Power starts at full @ 100, depletes as you use abilities, and regenerates at a (mostly) constant rate.
You can instantly regenerate 10 Power via crits with the Planar Blade ability.
All Warriors also share an AtPts mechanic. Some abilities generate 1 AtPt per use, up to 3 AtPts max. You can spend AtPts on various special abilities which consume all AtPts and scale based on the number of AtPts consumed.
Typically you want to build up to 3 AtPts, consume then with a special, then build back up to 3 AtPts again. In some cases, if you know you are close to finishing an opponent or need an effect proc’d (e.g. Earth Burst for the AOE snare) it’s fine to cast a special with 1-2 AtPts.
3. Damage Mechanics
As noted in the Mechanics Overview, a plus for Riftblade is the elemental-based damage for the Riftblade abilities.
Elemental Burst Abilities
All Riftblade AtPts-consuming Burst abilities can be used from range – after being cast they trigger on the next ability use. Here are the key AtPts-consuming Burst abilities
- Fiery Burst: our bread-and-butter DoT, applyable from range
- Earth Burst: AOE snare and interrupt for 3 targets. Sometimes worth using at 1 AtPts for the CC effects. Note that the AOE is centered around your target, so the implication is you can snare multiple targets from range
- Storm Burst: AOE damage for up to 7 targets. The AOE is centered around your target
I find that I use Fiery Burst much more than the other two Burst abilities, primarily because it does good damage and is effective for burning single targets down. Also, when talented Freeze Armor applies a debuff that increases Fire damage taken by 20%, so Fiery Burst ticks for 20% more when the target has Freeze Armor on them.
The Enhanced Burst talent increases Elemental damage by up to 30% for 6 seconds after using a Burst ability, which is very helpful when applying pressure on a target.
Procs
Riftblade delivers a significant portion of its sustained damage from the Elemental Touch proc, which adds a flat amount of damage per ability use. For Fiery Burst, Elemental Touch applies on the 1st tick.
Single-Target Damage
Rift Surge is currently one of the spec-defining burst-damage abilities. It applies a debuff on the target that procs for damage whenever the target uses an ability. The duration of the debuff is fairly long, 15 seconds, so what you can do versus Healers and Mages is apply a 3-AtPts Rift Surge, silence the target with Windspear (or vice versa), continue to DPS to create a heal deficit, then when the target tries to cast spells after the silence wears off they self-inflict damage. Rift Surge has been nerfed in 1.1 – notably the cooldown has been increased to 30 seconds, it’s Cleansable, and it doesn’t scale as well – but it’s still worth a single talent point investment.
In many situations, you will want to apply Rift Surge first, then apply Fiery Burst while Rift Surge is on cooldown. Rift Surge has a “faster” tick rate if you cast it on classes that use instant-cast abilities.
Here’s the priority for Riftblade AtPts generating abilities:
- Rift Strike: hits hard, buffs Crit % by 5%, and scales with weapon damage
- Frost Strike: hits fairly hard, scales with weapon damage, and applies a debuff that increases the next Thunder Strike or Searing Strike to hit the target
- Flamespear or Searing Strike: Flamespear tends to outdamage Searing Strike during the leveling process, except right after a Frost Strike. With the introduction of a 4-sec cooldown to Flamespear in 1.1, you will likely want to put Searing Strike as part of your rotation or in macros ahead of Flamespear. Searing Strike benefits from the Frost Strike debuff as well, so those melee abilities synergize with each other
AOE Capabilities
As discussed above, both Storm Burst and Earth Burst provide AOE capability. Riftblade also has a spammable 3-hitter in Thunder Strike, but it has a high Power cost (25).
The 31-point Riftblade talent Rift Storm is a PBAOE (Point Blank AOE) that damages on up to 10 targets every second for 10 seconds. The ability has a 3-min cooldown and is useful for preventing opposing players who lack a bubble from capping a node or picking up a flag.
4. Crowd Control Mechanics
Riftblade has a lot of excellent CC tools to work with, including:
- Freeze Armor: ranged snare
- Stonespear: ranged 3-sec root
- Windspear: ranged 5-sec silence
- Earth Burst: AOE snare and interrupt
- Riftwalk: 2-sec root
Both Spear abilities have a base 30-sec cooldown that can be reduced to 15 seconds with talents. Spears have a travel time, so they will not CC the target until they land.
Fork can be used to increase the number of targets affected by your Spears. The main issue with using Fork is simply the Power cost, as Riftblade is a Power-intensive spec.
I find that I use Earth Burst mainly for the snare effect at 1 AtPts and not for the silence, especially as you can’t see the cast bar for opponents other than your target.
Note for 1.2: with the introduction of the two categories (movement and control) for CC immunity, if you need to limit the movement of your target you should try to apply Freeze Armor first before Riftwalk’ing or Stonespear’ing.
5. Mitigation, Avoidance, CC-Counter Mechanics
With talents, Avatar of Water provides a flat 10% damage mitigation, and I use it 99% of the time in PVP over Avatar of Wind, which mainly provides a 10% speed benefit.
In terms of avoidance (i.e. not getting hit), there are only 2 Riftblade abilities:
- Stoneshield: causes next opponent attack to miss, 30-sec cooldown. Useful for capping flags
- Elemental Deflection: increases Parry up to 6%
The most important CC counter and gap closer that Riftblade has is Riftwalk. This awesome ability has multiple functions:
- Closes gaps to opponents
- Breaks the following CC effects: roots, stuns, snares, mez’s, and incapacitates. If you get CC’d and the only button which is still lit up for use is Riftwalk, hit it :). Note that you will only be able to Riftwalk to targets that you have LoS on
- Breaks LoS temporarily (similar to WoW Rogue Shadowstep) by moving us to our target’s back
6. Blade and Avatar Mechanics
TLDR: use Storm Blade until you get Planar Blade, and use Avatar of Wind until you get Avatar of Water. From that point on, stick with Planar Blade and Avatar of Water.
All Riftblades get Storm Blade, which is a very underwhelming blade buff that adds weapon damage as a DoT on Crit.
With 26 points in Riftblade tree, you can obtain the talent ability Planar Blade, which provides 10 Power on Crit and refreshes the cooldown of Riftwalk (and VK Rift Summon). As we are often Power-starved, Planar Blade provides much-needed Power when we are bursting.
With 44 points in Riftblade tree, you get the base ability Blade of Elemental Affinity, which generates 35% of Crit damage as healing. The extent to which it is valuable has to do with how much Crit you have. My main concern with taking this ability is the addition 6-point tree investment needed over the 38 points required to get Rift Strike – those 38 are well-spent but the next 6 seem very lackluster. I’d probably take Improved Fork and Elemental Flux, which would provide a 15% chance for normal non-Crit attacks to proc the 35% heal, but remember that 35% of a non-Crit won’t be a large number. Based on my experience in warfronts, Blade of Elemental Affinity is not worth taking.
With 10 points in Riftblade tree, you get Avatar of Wind, which provides a 10% speed increase and 3% Dodge increase.
With 20 points in Riftblade tree, you get Avatar of Water, which provides 5% damage mitigation (10% talented). This is an excellent all-around mitigation ability in PVP.
With 51 points in Riftblade tree, you get Avatar of the Rift, which provides a 65% increase to the Burst abilities, swaps the overall mitigation of Avatar of Water for Physical-only mitigation, provides a static damage reflect when hit by melee, and provides limited AP scaling. To get Avatar of the Rift, you have to max every talent in the tree, forcing you to take a 2-point PVE thread reduction talent (Elemental Caress) and the underwhelming 5-pointer Static Shock.
7. Riftblade Tree Recommendations
For PVP, if Riftblade is your main tree your minimum points investment is 32, to get the ranged silence Windspear. Here is what a sample 32-point Riftblade looks like:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0cL__.ehs0bsMMtz
Notice that the 32-point tree:
- Does not include Surging Energy, because if you do not have Rift Strike, your Crit rate against Clerics/Mages/Warriors with the PVP tree talent Resilient will likely be low single digit % so the proc rate for Surging Energy would be negligible. For the same reason, it’s the a good idea to put some points in Elemental Flux to proc Planar Blade
- Skips the talent ability Elemental Burst, as it may not be wise to trigger an AOE snare due to the CC immunity mechanic introduced in 1.2
Depending on your other trees, it may be worthwhile to spend 6 more points to get the 38-point ability Rift Strike. For 1.2, is the base 38-point investment I recommend:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0cL__.gGs0bsMGtd
What’s excellent about the 38-point spec is that there are no craptastic talents that you are forced to take to get there – every talent provides value. There are several optional talents in this spec:
- Burning Blood: do not take this if you have spec’d 5/5 into Resilient in Vindicator
- Elemental Burst: provides some nice burst AOE damage and an AOE snare, although in 1.2 this will also trigger CC DR
- Improved Fork: I personally do not take this talent, because Fork has a high Power cost. But some folks swear by it
- Improved Riftwalk: while Crits with Planar Blade will refresh the cooldown of Riftwalk, I’ve found having the cooldown reduction to be useful, in case you end combat with Riftwalk on cooldown
- Rift Storm: I used to spec for this but I find its usage limited by the overly-long 3-min cooldown. Useful for preventing flag pickups by the opposing team
Whatever you do, do not take Elemental Caress (PVE threat reduction) or Static Shock for a PVP spec, they’re a waste of talent points.
There is some debate about going to a 44-point investment in Riftblade to get Blade of Elemental Affinity, which provides self-healing for 35% of the damage when you Crit. The main tradeoffs for getting Blade of Elemental Affinity:
- You give up Planar Blade, which restores 10 Power on Crit and also refreshes the cooldown on Riftwalk
- The 6 additional points over the 38-point spec limit your options in going deeper in secondary and tertiary trees
Here’s is the 44-point investment spec I would recommend:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0cL__.EGszdsMGtdz
There is a lot of debate regarding whether Avatar of the Rift, the 51-point talent, is worth spending 51 points to get for PVP. To get to it, you have to waste 2 talent points in the threat reduction talent Elemental Caress and on the underwhelming 5-point talent Static Shock. In addition, you lose the Spell mitigation from Avatar of Water. Avatar of the Rift does certainly provide excellent burst for Burst abilities (see what I did there?).
Tips
- Do not put any points in Elemental Flux until you have Planar Blade or Blade of Elemental Affinity. Elemental Flux is a horrid talent at lower levels, because the damage from Storm Blade is very low, and buffing the proc rate for a low-damage ability doesn’t make sense
8. Spec Combinations
I will build out this section of the Guide over time, as I am able to try different specs.
As of Patch 1.2 and later, please see Section 8C for my current spec.
A. 1H Riftblade / Paladin
As noted in the Mechanics Overview section, Riftblade damage does not really scale much with weapon or gear. Given that, there isn’t much DPS lost when running a 1H, but there is a lot of upside when using a shield as a Pally.
In a nutshell, the Pally tree offsets some of the deficiencies with the Riftblade tree, in particular by boosting survivability and by providing an emergency oh-crap button in Touch of Life. The Riftblade/Pally combo possesses excellent CC capabilities, good damage, and good survivability.
Please note that this is also a very solid spec for PVE questing and rifting (but not instance runs). This is a very solid spec to run from levels 10-49 in warfronts. At level 50, I recommend the Riftblade / Champ / Pally spec documented below in Section 8C.
Consider what you get for your first 17 points in Pally:
- +10% passive Block (not dispellable)
- +5% Hit and +5% Block buff
- +10% passive damage increase (not dispellable)
- Ranged 3-sec stun (1-min CD)
- 9% passive spell damage mitigation (not dispellable)
- 25% passive chance on block to generate an AtPt (not dispellable)
- A CC breaker, Paladin’s Devotion
- Aggressive Block, which boosts Block by 10% for 15-sec, so you can chain the buff to keep it up
- Block reactive ability Retaliation, which is a low-Power cost melee ability that is off the GCD and therefore provides burst
- Castable HP buff on any friendly player
- Passive HP self-buff
- Melee interrupt Face Slam (6-sec CD) which is off the GCD
- Full self-heal Touch of Life (10-min CD)
- Ranged ability Shield Throw
- Melee AOE ability Sweeping Strike which packs very good single-target damage
That is an excellent return on investment, and unlike some trees, many of the Pally abilities (e.g. Retaliation, Face Slam) complement not compete with the Riftblade base abilities for your GCD.
Up through level 40, here is the build I recommend: 38 Riftblade / 15 Pally / 0 VK:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0cLhg.eGo0dsMGtdz.xrozo
You can move 3 points from Elemental Flux to Boiling Blood, depending on whether you want Power regen or the on-Melee-Crit reflect. VK is an excellent 0-pt 3rd tree, because it offers a 5% spell mitigation self-buff.
At level 41, once you are able to get the Paladin talent Paladin’s Devotion, you can re-invest the points in Steely Resolve in Small Arms Specialization.
There are many 1H different specs that are viable at 50, including the following specs. Please note that there are some minor differences in how the 38 points are allocated – either I recommend 3/5 Elemental Flux or 3/3 Boiling Blood:
- 38 Riftblade / 17 Pally / 11 VK: the VK tree provides an 11-pt talent called Spell Sunder, which removes 3 buffs from an opponent. This purge ability has a range of 35m and its cooldown is 15 seconds. In extended fighting against groups, Spell Sunder and Devouring Blow provide tools for debuffing and draining mana-based classes
- 38 Riftblade / 21 Pally / 7 Vind: the Vindicator tree provides reduction in chance to be Crit by players by 15%, 2% raid Crit increase when you block a player, a CC breaker, and the Guard ability to redirect damage from friendlies to you. The 21-pt Pally talent ability Reverent Protection is an excellent tool for capping flags and nodes under fire
- 38 Riftblade / 20 Pally / 8 Para: the Paragon tree offers Strike Like Iron for the controlled burst, an inexpensive but effective “follow up” attack in Rising Waterfall, 3% Crit self buff, 40 Str self buff, a block/parry reactive, and Predictable Movements to reflect melee attacks
Spammable Single-Target Attack Macro (builds AtPts)
#show Flamespear suppressmacrofailures cast Retaliation cast Disarming Counterblow (remove this line for < 20 points in Pally cast Rift Strike) cast Aggressive Block cast Sweeping Strike cast Frost Strike cast Searing Strike cast Discharge (remove this line for < 4 points in VK) cast Flamespear cast Shield Throw
I have Sweeping Strike (a Pally melee AOE ability) and Frost Strike ahead of Flamespear, as both abilities deal higher damage. Flamespear is listed after the melee abilities, for situations where I am either at range or none of the previous reactive or cooldown abilities are usable. Note that at range this macro would cast Flamespear, then Shield Throw, then Flamespear. I put Shield Throw at the end as a filler for when Flamespear is on cooldown.
The macro shows Flamespear, so that I can tell when my target is at <= 20m range (contributed by: haimeiw).
Melee AOE Macro (builds AtPts)
#show Sweeping Strike suppressmacrofailures cast Sweeping Strike cast Thunder Strike
Note that I do not include Rift Storm or Earth Burst in this macro, as this is the macro I spam for AOE to build AtPts.
Gap Closer
#show Riftwalk suppressmacrofailures cast Riftwalk cast Shield Charge
Note that I have Riftwalk ahead of Shield Charge, because I have found that Riftwalk is more reliable for closing gaps to opponents on a different vertical level (e.g. up on a rock). Sometimes Shield Charge won’t bring you all the way to your target because you will hit an intervening terrain.
CC Breaker
#show Break Free suppressmacrofailures cast Paladin's Devotion cast Break Free
Note that Paladin’s Devotion is intentionally placed above Break Free. Break Free removes any CC, but it’s also on a 2-min cooldown, so if you have a CC effect that Paladin’s Devotion can remove, you’re better off using Paladint’s Devotion to remove it and save Break Free for when you really need it.
B. 1H Riftblade / Void Knight / Paladin
This is a variation of the 1H Riftblade / Paladin spec, with Void Knight replacing the Paladin tree as the secondary tree. VK has become a much more attractive tree in 1.2 with the changes to VK.
Consider what you get for your first 18 points in Void Knight:
- A stacking buff that can provide up to +50% Strength
- Spell Sunder, a powerful purge (offensive dispel) that removes 3 buffs from your target and has a 15-second cooldown
- A stacking buff that can provide up to +50% Armor
- +5% spell damage mitigation buff
- An AtPts-consuming ability (Devouring Blow) that deals damage and drains mana
- Hard-hitting Air-damage ranged ability Discharge
- Passive HP buff
- Air-damage ranged ability Spark
- PBAOE ability Ragestorm that can hit very hard
- A ranged mana drain Soul Pillage
Please note that all Warrior interrupts have a shared cooldown, so you can not use Face Slam and then Furious Rage. Same goes with taunts such as Shield Throw and Spark.
In 1.2 here are the specs I recommend:
- 32 Riftblade / 18 VK / 16 Pally: you get most of the key Pally abilities and talents including the key CC breaker Paladin’s Devotion and the passive (non-dispellable) 9% Spell damage mitigation. The physical damage mitigation provided by this build is stellar with Ravenous Defense; at 10 Pacts you will easily crack 10k armor. Melee abilities scale well with the stacking Str buff. Ragestorm hits like a truck at 10 Pacts. The main issue with this spec is Power starvation; without Rift Strike’s Crit buff, you will find that Planar Blade does not proc as often
I have experimented with going up to 25-28 points (or more) in VK, here are my comments:
- Catalyze is an excellent 20-point root ability which provides ranged mana drain capability, and its Power cost is one-third of Soul Pillage (granted Catalyze is an AtPts-consuming ability so there is that resource cost)
- You can increase Void’s Spell mitigation by an additional 15%. However, if Pally is your 3rd tree you may have to give up the passive 9% Spell mitigation talent Hardened Will, so you are netting a gain of +6% Spell mitigation, and keep in mind Void buff is dispellable
- Replenish is not worth the investment in PVP – even fully talented, at 6k HP each Pact heals for a meager 18 HP
- I was excited to try Rift Summon, but given the CC immunity sometimes this ability provides no effect
Spammable Single-Target Attack Macro (builds AtPts)
#show Flamespear suppressmacrofailures cast Retaliation cast Aggressive Block cast Sweeping Strike cast Frost Strike cast Searing Strike cast Discharge cast Flamespear cast Spark
Note that Discharge is listed above Flamespear, as Discharge has a longer cooldown and more importantly hits harder. Spark is used instead of Shield Throw because Spark’s elemental damage type synergizes better with Riftblade.
The macro shows Flamespear, so that I can tell when my target is at <= 20m range (contributed by: haimeiw).
Melee AOE Macro (builds AtPts)
#show Ragestorm suppressmacrofailures cast Ragestorm cast Airburst cast Judgment cast Sweeping Strike cast Thunder Strike
Purge / Drain
#show Spell Sunder suppressmacrofailures cast Spell Sunder cast Devouring Blow
C. 1H Riftblade / Champion / Paladin
Thanks to Vexxen on the Rift Warrior forum for proposing the 38 Riftblade / 17 Champion spec.
As of Patch 1.2, 38 Riftblade / 17 Champion / 11 Paladin spec has proven to be the most effective Riftblade-based spec (1H or 2H) for me in warfronts and in 1v1s against specs with self-healing, based on testing with various specs. Why? Lingering Wounds is the #1 asset that a Warriors brings to PVP at level 50.
While I was skeptical of pairing Champ with any spec that uses 1H or deals non-Physical damage, in actual gameplay 17-point Champion is a solid complement to Riftblade, because it addresses one of the key weaknesses: the lack of a healable debuff.
Given that this is a 1H spec, the point allocation in Champion looks different compared to typical 2H Physical damage builds, but you get a solid return on investment for your first 17 points:
- +10% damage for AtPt-consuming abilities (“finishers”)
- +10% Strength – a modest benefit that increases damage from melee attacks (and as a side benefit block % and block amount)
- Increased Power regen on Crit
- PBAOE fear bomb ability Battlefield Intimidation
- In-combat charge ability
- -50% healing received debuff (Lingering Wounds)
- A reactive to counter your target’s Dodge/Parry
- +15% increase to Crit damage (i.e. Crits deal 165% instead of 150% damage)
Spammable Single-Target Attack Macro (builds AtPts)
#show Flamespear suppressmacrofailures cast Inescapable Fury cast Retaliation cast Rift Strike cast Aggressive Block cast Frost Strike cast Searing Strike cast Flamespear cast Shield Throw
I have Frost Strike ahead of Flamespear as it deals higher damage and buffs the next Searing Strike. Flamespear is listed after the melee abilities, for situations where I am either at range or none of the previous reactive or cooldown abilities are usable. Note that at range this macro would cast Flamespear, then Shield Throw, then Flamespear. I put Shield Throw at the end as a filler for when Flamespear is on cooldown.
The macro shows Flamespear, so that I can tell when my target is at <= 20m range (contributed by: haimeiw).
Gap Closer
#show Riftwalk suppressmacrofailures cast [ctrl] Riftwalk cast Bull Rush cast Riftwalk
Note that I have Bull Rush ahead of Riftwalk, because Riftwalk is the only CC breaker that this spec has. For situations where Bull Rush may not work (e.g. enemy is on a cliff at Codex and I am on the ground, I press Ctrl when hitting this macro to trigger Riftwalk).
9. Stats / Runes Recommendations
Dexterity = Physical Crit = Endurance > Strength > Attack Power
As stated in the Mechanics Overview, relative to other trees, many Riftblade abilities do not scale much with stats (e.g. Str, Attack Power). That is, even if you stack stats, you will see only a very modest increase to the damage of abilities such as Flamespear, Fiery Burst, and Rift Surge. Therefore you should consider stats aside from the pure damage-scaling stats Strength and Attack Power.
Keep in mind that Riftblade has nice mechanics synergy with Dexterity / Physical Crit, because Planar Blade generates 10 Power per Crit and refreshes the cooldown of Riftwalk.
If you are pairing Riftblade with a tank tree, keep in mind that your Endurance will be buffed by the tank tree’s HP passive.
You may have heard that some Riftblades are using Leather armor instead of Plate for the higher Dexterity, which provides Crit. I do not think that makes sense, given that many specs of the 3 non-Mage classes deal Physical damage. YMMV.
Recommended Runes
- Helm: Strength +10 (Radiant Potent)
- Shoulders: Dexterity +7/Crit +5 (Radiant Vengeful), Dexterity +10 (Radiant Deft)
- Chest: Valor +50 (Blazing Valorous), Valor +25 (Radiant Valorous), Dexterity +10 (Radiant Deft), or Endurance +8 (Radiant Resolute)
- Gloves: Physical Crit +11 (Radiant Steadfast)
- Legs: Strength +10 (Radiant Potent)
- Boots: Endurance +8 (Radiant Resolute)
- 1H Weapon: Physical Crit +16 (Radiant Destructive) or Dexterity +10 (Blazing Dexterity)
- 2H Weapon: Physical Crit +30 (Radiant Devastating) or Dexterity +19 (Blazing Dexterity)
- Shield: Endurance +11 (Brilliant Enduring)
- Ranged: Physical Crit +16 (Radiant Destructive) or Dexterity +10 (Blazing Dexterity)
Recommended Greater Planar Essences
- Any spec:
- Crystallized Stonesource: chance for damaging ability (including auto-attack) to proc an absorption bubble
- For 1H + shield specs:
- Corrupting Faesource: chance for heal on block
- Do not use for Riftblade main specs:
- Torched Flamesource: the Melee Crit proc only procs on Physical damage abilities
- Waning Shadesource: the damage/heal proc only procs on Physical damage abilities
10. Myths / Misconceptions
“Riftblade is an RDPS Spec so you should avoid engaging in melee combat“
This oft-used argument is very short-sighted. While Riftblade has very good ranged capability, there are many good reasons for engaging in melee combat:
- You can LoS your target (e.g. circle strafe or run through them), which prevents your target from being able to use abilities on you / finish casting spells
- You can use melee abilities that offer: high damage, CC, buffs, debuffs, procs, or some combination of the above
- It prevents your target from using terrain to LoS you
- You can interrupt multiple people trying to pick up a flag with our spammable melee AOE
- You can pressure people in their face, which often makes them panic or unable to focus
- You deal additional damage from auto-attacks (yes I know this is a minor benefit for Riftblade, but every little bit counts)
I don’t play my Riftblade as a RDPS with melee capability; I play my Riftblade as a MDPS with ranged capability. I have found that as I have leveled up and gained potent melee abilities (e.g. Rift Strike), I am further encouraged to engage in melee combat.
11. Tips and Tactics
- Make sure when traveling through Contested zones to have 2-3 AtPts at all times. This will give you options in case you engage in World PVP
- Because Spear abilities have a travel time, you can cast a Spear and while it is in-flight you can cast Fiery Blast, and when the Spear lands it will proc the Fiery Burst DoT
- You want to use Windspear (WS) against Casters/Healers aggressively, because the cooldown with talents is relatively short
- Stonespear (SS) is an excellent tool for rooting kiters, gapping melees, stopping flag carriers, etc. Use it to your positional advantage
- Even if you can’t close to melee range on a target, stay busy and use Flamespear to build up AtPts – remember AtPts is your fuel for your key DPS abilities
- To break a Rogue out of stealth, you can use the 1 Riftblade AOE that does not require a target: Rift Storm
- Not specific to Riftblade: buffs are dispelled in the order that you put them up, so apply your weaker buffs first, save the best ones for last (e.g. Planar Blade)
12. Macro Mechanics
Macros in Rift work very differently from what you may be used to from WoW. Here are the key differences:
- There is no WoW castsequence equivalent in Rift
- In Rift, you can put as many cast statements in a macro as you want, and Rift will cast the 1st ability that is usable (i.e. not on cooldown, conditions met, etc)
That second point has huge implications and allows you to write a “spam” macro like this:
Reactive Ability A Reactive Ability B Cooldown Ability C Cooldown Ability D Spammable Ability E
Some people have criticized Rift as being “too easy to macro” but in my opinion that is a simplistic and inaccurate point-of-view. Why? Each spec combination has a plethora of abilities to work with, combining special abilities that consume AtPts would limit control, and you generally want to carefully macro your CC and CC-counter abilities. I personally do not macro CC abilities as I believe they should be on separate keybinds for control. So while you can macro multiple abilities into one macro, you will still need to set up many macros to support all the abilities and still retain control of key cooldown and situational abilities.
Please note that if there are abilities in a macro that you do not yet have, you will see an error message when using the macro. Some folks have simply cut-and-pasted my macros without looking at what they actually do, but in my opinion you should try to understand how they work, then tweak according to your needs.
13. Strafing / Movement / Keybindings
Please see the article that provides a video Guide, screenshots, and descriptive text on how my character control is setup. That is a very complex topic unto itself.
14. Narrated PVP Videos
Below are my narrated PVP videos, in reverse chronological order (most recent first). There are points I make in each video which are timeless.
Taugrim’s Rift Warrior PVP: Volume 11: Riftblade / Paladin / Vindicator @ 50, Rank 3
Taugrim’s Rift Warrior PVP: Volume 10: Riftblade / Paladin / Vindicator @ 50, Rank 1
Taugrim’s Rift PVP: Warrior Volume 8: Riftblade / Paladin @ 42, Patch 1.1. Update
Taugrim’s Rift PVP: Warrior Volume 7: Riftblade / Paladin @ 38, Nice Try Gankers
Taugrim’s Rift PVP: Warrior Volume 6: Riftblade / Paladin @ 35
Taugrim’s Rift PVP: Warrior Volume 5: World PVP @ 29
Taugrim’s Rift PVP: Warrior Volume 4: Riftblade / Paladin @ 27
Taugrim’s Rift PVP: Warrior Volume 3: Riftblade / Paladin @ 24
Taugrim’s Rift PVP: Warrior Volume 2: Riftblade / Paladin @ 21
Taugrim’s Rift PVP: Warrior Volume 1: Riftblade / Paladin @ 15
15. Recent / Upcoming Patch Changes
Trion continues to adjust classes / trees for game balance reasons. Below is a summary of changes (documented and undocumented) for recent patches and their impacts.
Current Live Version: 1.2
My comments for changes are in italics.
Patch 1.1/1.11 Changes (1.11 Notes 4/1, Official 1.1 Notes 3/29, Update 3/25 , Alpha Notes 3/23 ):
-
Earth Burst: Now properly interrupts elites and other high level mobs. Bug fix for PVE, no impact to PVP.
-
Avatar of Wind: Fixed a bug causing the tooltip of this ability to report improper values. No impact to PVP.
-
Rift Surge: Can now be removed with abilities that remove Curses. Now has a 30 second cooldown instead of 10 seconds and is adjusted by Attack Power at a slightly lower rate. This is a significant nerf for PVP. I can understand nerfing Rift Surge by either making it a 30-sec cooldown *or* making it Cleanse-able, but making it both have a 30-sec cooldown and Cleanse-able will make Rift Surge largely irrelevant if there is a skilled enemy Healer. Update #1: OK, that being said, I have found that my DPS in PVP has not dropped off as much as I was expecting. After thinking about it, I think the loss in DPS from the pre-1.1 Rift Surge is partially offset by the fact that I am using Fiery Burst instead, and as a Burst ability this procs the Enhanced Burst 30% Elemental damage increase for 6 seconds on our target.
-
Flamespear: Now has a cooldown of 6 seconds and has its damage slightly increased to reflect the longer cooldown. There was an update: Flamespear, Path of the Wind and Path of the Raptor are having their cooldown times reduced from the 6 seconds that they are on Test right now to 4 seconds. We’re satisfied for now that these changes still give Warriors ranged attack options across a few different specs. While this is a nerf, I think the introduction of a 4-sec cooldown to Flamespear seems like a reasonable change. What it means for Riftblades when fighting from range is that we’ll have to work in other ranged abilities (e.g. Spears, etc) while waiting for FS to come off cooldown. Update #1: the Trion employee Sweet acknowledged my thread that Flamespear went live with 6-sec cooldown. Update #2: per 1.11, the cooldown has been fixed to be 4 seconds, and I confirmed it’s working
-
Burning Blood: Now deals damage based on 10-30% of the character’s Strength. Moderate nerf. Having it based on the amount of damage inflicted probably created scaling issues.
- Improved Freeze Armor: Now only affects Riftblade attacks. Bug fix, it sounds like Improved Freeze Armor was buffing non-Riftblade Fire attacks?
16. About the Author
I’ve written Guides across multiple MMORPGs, including:
- The stickied Protection Paladin Cataclysm PVP Guide on the WoW Pally forum. During my time in Cataclysm, I was the only Prot Pally rated 2k+ in the 2v2 and 3v3 Arena brackets in my battlegroup
- Warhammer Swordmaster and Bright Wizard Guides and videos
- LOTRO Captain and Orc Reaver Guides and videos
I enjoying dialoguing with and helping other players – my hope is that this Guide provides value to you and enables you to improve your gameplay :)
Taugrim's MMO Blog 
best thing I learned so far “suppressmacrofailures”. Awesome, i was being annoyed to all hell with those messages. Thanks.
This looks like its going to be another amazing guide! I was one of your WoW Prot Pally followers and now that I have Rift I will definitely be giving Warrior a try.
Could You please , post Your keybinds .
Thanks.
Sithu
After I fill in the main sections of the Guide, I will do that.
EDIT: here’s the link to the video where I discuss keybindings:
https://taugrim.com/2011/04/07/rift-warrior-pvp-video-volume-9-strafing-movement-keybindings/
[…] If you are looking for my macros, check out the skeleton draft version of the Riftblade Warrior Guide on my blog: https://taugrim.com/2011/03/20/guide-riftblade-warrior-mechanics-and-pvp/ […]
Great info! Could you post a link to your soul spec we would love to see where you put your points. Thanks!
How could I forget :)
I posted my level 36 build so far.
love build man working really well for me i would also like to know your keybindings ^^
First of thanks so much for the riftblade videos and guide; I have been working with this on my own (not as successful in choosing souls) and there isn’t much help as they all say do something else. I play on Deepstrike (all characters have Van as the first part of the name; warrior vandar) and can’t wait to get to world pvp level.
You mentioned your friend named Kaz; did he happen to play a resto shaman in wow? And if so was he in a guild named carnage?
Just curious as I ran a guild with a great guy named Kaz and lost touch with him.
Regards
You mentioned your friend named Kaz; did he happen to play a resto shaman in wow? And if so was he in a guild named carnage?
Not, I don’t think this is the same player. Cas a guy from the UK I’ve know from blogging.
In your last pvp video you discuss the damage not stacking with gear. I don’t really fully understand what that means. I am a 32 rb/pally and basically I am trying to decide if I need to be more focused on str or end for my gear. Thanks for all your helpfulness!
Riftblade damage doesn’t scale much with stats. I.e you can stack a lot of Str but it won’t raise the damage that much.
since you run paladin as a secondary skill set, i assume you use sword/board for pvp? or do you 2hander it?
Yes, from the Guide:
As noted in the Mechanics Overview section, RB damage does not really scale much with weapon or gear. Given that, there isn’t much DPS lost when running a 1H, but there is a lot of upside when using a shield as a Pally.
Hey, thank you so much for all of your information and resources. Rift is my first MMO in a long time and I learned so much from what you’ve given.
I have one question, as a Riftblade, do the magical attacks count as spells? I remember you mentioning in one of the vids that equipment didn’t help the RB that much but if I were to find a +spell power piece of equipment would it would increase the overall damage output?
I have one question, as a Riftblade, do the magical attacks count as spells? I remember you mentioning in one of the vids that equipment didn’t help the RB that much but if I were to find a +spell power piece of equipment would it would increase the overall damage output?
My understanding is that the damage from Riftblade abilities can be considered Spell damage, since they deal Elemental damage types (Air, Earth, Fire, Water) instead of Physical damage.
That being said, AFAIK the damage is still based off Warrior stats not Caster stats.
[…] If you are looking for my macros, check out the skeleton draft version of the Riftblade Warrior Guide. […]
Taugrim, I left WOW to come on here because of you. I am annoyed with the Prot Pally rift and watch your blog carefully. It seemed the right time since you had moved here. I don’t regret it. Needless to say I have a rift warrior though I am on the other team:) Thanks for doing the mechanics for this its really appreciated. The game although similar to WOW is still a bit confusing at first and at least this lets me have some idea of what to pick and learn about the class.
My question for you is should I try to get up the Riftblade talent table as fast as possible or spend some skills in the Palidan skill set initially?
My question for you is should I try to get up the Riftblade talent table as fast as possible or spend some skills in the Palidan skill set initially?
Good question.
What you want to do is keep the number of points in Riftblade equal to your level, up to 38. Put excess points into Pally.
I am going to put at least 20 points in Pally to get Disarming Counterblow, but I have not decided beyond that whether to spend points in Pally or Vind tree.
PS – I stand corrected. I am on the same side as you. I thought you were Guardian for some strange reason.
I would like to suggest Paragon as your 3rd soul. I have switched to using it in combination with my RB/Pally build. I havn’t yet decided how many points are worth putting into the tree so I may stick with 11 in pally and put the rest in Para or find a stopping point in Para and put the rest in pally. Plus I only put 33 pts in to RB.
I use Paragon for a couple reasons. Given the up coming patch notes, I’ve decided to start using Path of the Wind in conjunction with FS. However I have discovered a few other great mechanics with this combination.
First: Strike like Iron is a must for PvP IMO. Second: Not only can you macro you reactive abilities but you can also add the follow up attacks provided by paragon.
Third: Turn the Blade (another off GCD reactive) Forth: Weapon Master Talent that allows for multiple AtP’s to build per attack (20% chance I believe)
Fifth: Combining physical attacks with elemental finishers/attacks
I believe I found something pretty special here. Good burst and good survivability. All types of attacks from elemental to physical. I can’t wait to fine tune this at 50!
I would like to suggest Paragon as your 3rd soul
How do you spend your points in the tree?
In the 1st tier:
– Duality of Mind (5% parry buff) makes sense
– Combat Precision (armor ignore) does not synergize with RB, given that much of RB damage is not Physical
In the 2nd tier
– Teaching of the Five Rings is for DW, therefore not applicable with Pally
– Double Jeopardy doesn’t make sense unless you go much further in Paragon tree
So I don’t see a good investment for the first 10 points for Paragon as a secondary or tertiary tree with RB. Maybe I’m missing something here. Let me know.
This is very true. At least 4 points need to go into Combat Precision but I would argue that all your reactives/follow up attacks would gain some benefit from this. That is not the true point behind this though.
Getting 5/5 into Weapon Master is the main reason I’ve gone this far into Para. As energy starved as RB are I believe the 20% chance to add another AP trumps most any other ability available, Serenity helps this as well. Plus it keeps you on your toes and elicits “skill” as opposed to mashing one button. Not to mention all the extra mitigation you get from Duality of Mind and Predictable Movements. This could be extended even further if you choose to go as far to get Bend like the Reed. Fleet of foot is also a nice plus to any pvp build. Flowing strikes might be a good option with RB as well but I believe I ran out of points before I could max that. I know it seems to go against what the RB brings but I’ve had great success at level 44 with this build.
This is what I’m looking to have by level 50
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0cuLh.v0t0hMk.ihozdszGtb.xro0o
This is by no means my final build. I need to get to 50 before I start playing around with any of this.
This is my Melee macro:
#show Frost Strike
cast Retaliation
cast Turn the Blade
cast Rising Waterfall
cast Frost Strike
cast Searing Strike
This is pretty close to what I have but I’m at work and can’t double check it. The reactives/follow ups have a surprisingly good uptime and is a good bit of burst coming from a 1 hander. I call it my mini champ/para build. Same mechanic just less damage but with loads more survivability!
With respect to Paragon/Riftblade/Pally, I think part of the issue with your spec is you have points spread pretty thin. You have multiple abilities that are competing for your GCDs, and they have different damage mechanics (Phys/Follow-up vs Elemental).
There are a few suggestions I can make for your Riftblade points:
1. get Planar Blade, it rocks
2. max out Improved Avatar for the extra 3% mitigation
3. you get #1 and #2 above (2 points) by moving points out of Elemental Flux. EF is useless anyway without at least Planar Blade
I saw that you used Frost Strike in your macro below. The only reason to use this ability is if you put Searing Strike into the macro right over Flamespear, as “Frost Strike” does less damage with the same 20 power usage, than Flamespear. And Frost Strike increases Searing Strikes next attack by 20%.
As Frost Strike only effects the next and not all following Searing Strikes, I really can not see this ability and Searing Strike being of any use in this macro at all.
I might be wrong here and have overseen something. If that is the case, please enlighten me and give me a reason to use Frost Strike in my macro.
Spammable Single-Target Attack Macro (builds AtPts)
#show Flamespear
suppressmacrofailures
cast Retaliation
cast Rift Strike
cast Aggressive Block
cast Sweeping Strike
cast Frost Strike
cast Flamespear
Well the 8 second CD on Frost Strike means that as i mash the button and if all my reactives are down I will be casting Frost strike. This macro accomplishes what I wanted in that it will cast frost strike before searing strike everytime the CD on frost strike is up. If its down I cast searing and still get my AP. The rest before that are all reactives/follow ups.
And thank you so much I don’t know why I havn’t put Aggressive Block in this macro! yay more bar space!!
sry not my macro, taugrims, got it!
“Frost Strike” does less damage with the same 20 power usage, than Flamespear.
Frost Strike outdamages Flamespear for me.
And Frost Strike increases Searing Strikes next attack by 20%.
Correct.
Right now since Flamespear is spammable and outdamage Searing Strike, there is no reason to use SS.
Once 1.1 hits, I will add Searing Strike to my spam macro.
Thanks for your effort, your guide is great, hands down great.
I was wondering if you plan to include shield throw at the bottom of your spam macro for a ranged attack if nothing else is available?
Keep up the good work.
Exactly.
I’ll update the macros now for 1.1.
Hey, just wanted to provide some insight here. Using your current macro:
#show Flamespear
suppressmacrofailures
cast Retaliation
cast Rift Strike
cast Aggressive Block
cast Sweeping Strike
cast Frost Strike
cast Searing Strike
cast Flamespear
cast Shield Throw
I’m having issues with Shield Throw. I don’t know if it’s a bug with how macros fire off, or some weird range issue, but I’m having ST fire in normal melee range instead of SS (note: this is controlled PvE situations, not PvP where lag might make it seem like I’m in melee range). I’m level 40 right now, and SS is hitting for easily 2x+ what ST can do, so considering how often it bugs out like this it’s a major DPS drain for me.
Personally, I dropped it from the macro. I already had it bound on another key for PvE purposes anyway. Otherwise, loving the macro… and the spec. I think the flamespear “nerf” is going to turn a lot of players away from this kind of build, not knowing what we know: playing smart MDPS with it means no one stands a chance :)
P.S. — I just counter-ganked a 50 Cleric. Yes, I went through like 2.5 health bars, but I think they felt pretty dumb for trying :P
but I’m having ST fire in normal melee range instead of SS (note: this is controlled PvE situations, not PvP where lag might make it seem like I’m in melee range).
I have no idea why that’s happening. Haven’t noticed that happening to me when reviewing footage.
P.S. — I just counter-ganked a 50 Cleric. Yes, I went through like 2.5 health bars, but I think they felt pretty dumb for trying
As a level 40? That’s hilarious.
The reason ST would fire in melee is because you don’t have enough energy to use any of the other melee abilities in the macro.
Can you post an update on your soul points distribution? I am level 41 and don’t know if I should start heading up the pally tree for that lvl 20 skill or continue putting it into rift blade. Thanks.
Here is my RB/Pally spec @ 43:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0cLhg.xGs0dsMGtdz.xxouoR
The most important change from earlier specs is that I ditched the 2 points in Steely Resolve as I have the on-use CC breaker in the Pally tree. SR is a good talent but once you get Paladin’s Devotion, SR is not as valuable.
I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to put together such an outstanding and comprehensive guide. I am finding it to be an invaluable help.
I also followed your prot pally WoW guide. Another fantasic job you did there. It’s a shame what PvP in that game has become.
Keep up the great work.
[…] Per Patch 1.1, I have updated my Riftblade PVP Guide. […]
Excellent Guide! Just reading through this, I have gained more knowledge about my class. I am currently a noobie lvl 36 warrior with champ/para/rift. Don’t know much about pvp, but it’s nice to know this build works for pvp and for solo as you mentioned above. =) I will be referring to this a lot for my pvp build! Gonna start my second soul with this and try to get use to it!
Thanks again for taking the time to put this together!
Can’t wait for the key binds/macro video/guide. I’m just use to clicking and hitting buttons XD
Nice work, I remember you from PT in WAR I played s/b Ironbreaker think we even dueled a few times. I have tried to make s/b melee warrior using pally/champ/para but just isn’t going to work so giving RB/Pal a shot and the guide is a great help. Thanks.
Just one question 2 points into para gives you SLI bonus now upto 48% for attacks think just going 2 points in is worth it?
Just one question 2 points into para gives you SLI bonus now upto 48% for attacks think just going 2 points in is worth it?
Yes, Strike Like Iron is a good ability, to set up finishing burst damage.
The only issue is that you have to spend the 3 AtPts to get the max buff up, and the damage bonus is not guaranteed – you may for example get CC’d for a significant chunk of time that the buff is up.
That’s part of the reason I like DoT finishers such as Fiery Burst – once I get FB proc’d, even if I’m CC’d the damage still ticks.
The other thing to consider is that when you use any Burst ability, you proc Enhanced Burst, which increases Elemental damage on the target by 30% for 6 seconds. So in a way abilities such as FB already have a built-in SLI-like effect, given that most of the meaningful damage for a Riftblade spec is in fact Elemental damage.
That being said, I can also see the value of dropping a 3-AtPts SLI on the target, building up to 3-AtPts again, then using Rift Surge or FB to get a lot of burst damage, assuming that Enhanced Burst and FB stack.
Anyway, this is one of the key things I love about Rift – the spec customization possibilities are vast, and we can debate til the cows come home how to spec and why.
Yea you spend your Atpts with no guarantee, nice surprise was that it worked on RS which I hadn’t even considered.
Great guide and information! I was wondering if you had any idea on how you soul skills points will look at level 50 for your RB/Pally Build?
I have some ideas but I don’t want to post specific specs until I’ve had some first-hand experience with them.
What I want to try out are Blade of Elemental Affinity, Tip the Balance, and Karmic Resolution, to see if any of them are worth taking. If not, I’ll look at investing more heavily in the Vindicator tree for premades.
Sounds good. Thanks again for the time you have put into this.
Great guide Taugrim! I switched to this build yesterday and thouroughly enjoyed it… I am only level 20 & I know this is a PVP thread, but I thought I would ask…
What has been your experience with questing/leveling with this build? That’s what I was doing last night and I liked it.
Also – at lower levels(sub 30), do you think I could tank some instances with this build? Or would I need to go a more typical tank build?
Thanks!
This build works great for soloing/questing/rifting. I would not recommend for dungeon PVE tanking or PVE DPS.
Thanks :)
I am level 44 and used this spec in Droughtlands to close a major rift solo. The boss had 18.5k health. This spec works fine for solo PVE DPS I think.
Yup! I am lvl 35 and soloed a stage 5 fire rift that was lvl 37. Works great! Could you let us know of your current soul skill points?
Understood.
And I have solo’d even-level rifts as well.
I simply mean it isn’t a recommended spec for PVE DPS because the spec requires blocking which requires aggro.
For world questing and rifting, it works great :)
I just updated my previous comment to be more clear in what I meant.
Dude as always great job. I always pay close attention to all ur post because i feel like u are always well informed. I am loving my RB/pally spec, i have a blast playing it. Ive been playing it from day 1 a started. 2 lvls from 50 woot woot. U seem well informed on ur macros also, i have tried to do a few macros but i never seem to get the right order of them. I was wandering if u could help me out with that? I dont use the rb/pally in dungeons in parties beccause i seem to pull aggro all the time, even with pulling my threat abilities out of my macro. So i was going to make me a dungeon char and was wandering if u had time to help me on macro?
If you have macro questions, ask specifically what the issue is and I can try to help.
As I have said above, RB/Pally is not a dungeon spec. It’s not designed for tanking, and as you have seen, as a DPS you may pull aggro from the tank because a lot of the Pally abilities have built-in threat.
I just got Disarming Blow. Would I just out that into the Spammable Single-Target Attack Macro ahead of retaliation so since they both are reactive to blocks? Thanks.
i.e.
#show Flamespear
suppressmacrofailures
cast Disarming Blow
cast Retaliation
cast Rift Strike
cast Aggressive Block
cast Sweeping Strike
cast Frost Strike
cast Searing Strike
cast Flamespear
cast Shield Throw
Yes, that is what I did for now. I may move Disarm to a separate key for control later.
I tried it in this order at first, but didn’t like that fact that Disarming Counterblow hit for so much less than Retaliation does. I was also finding that NOT having Disarm in that macro meant that I didn’t have any control over it, since Ret was still in there and often getting fired off by my trigger happy finger anyway :D
So in my macro it’s right after Ret so as to keep DPS up and still have it on the same handy button for the 6-sec window when Ret is on CD and I’ve triggered the block reactive again. Just my insight, not everyone has to do it my way :P
I may swap them back when I experiment in PVP more. Seems the only class you wouldn’t want Disarm>Ret is a Mage, who you wouldn’t be blocking directly anyway. I suppose chances are pretty good you’ll block enough to have both of these on CD most of the time, rendering my point moot :O
Also, I pointed it out above so you can get the details there, but I dropped ST from my macro altogether since I was having problems with it firing off over SS and killing my DPS. Just a little insight.
Also, I just found a ninja smiley in the bottom-left of your blog page… creepy.
I tried it in this order at first, but didn’t like that fact that Disarming Counterblow hit for so much less than Retaliation does.
So in my macro it’s right after Ret so as to keep DPS up and still have it on the same handy button for the 6-sec window when Ret is on CD and I’ve triggered the block reactive again.
You raise some good points. I haven’t yet sorted out what works best in terms of where to put Disarming Counterblow, but I just hit 44 and have been out all day @ WonderCon.
Just a little more of my insight, for what it’s worth.
I hit 44 and experimented with BoEA. Personally, I was unimpressed with the amount of healing–especially considering the trade-off at 44 when you consider I had to drop 6 well-spent points from the paladin tree to get it. Much more looking forward to the 2 healing talents in the Paladin tree, but I may give BoEA another shot @50.
What I *have* found, on the other hand, is that by dropping the 5 points in Improved Riftwalk and Unrelenting and placing them in Elemental Flux (and sticking with Planar Blade), I’m feeling *much less* power-starved than I was before. I find that in PVP my first choice is to close a gap via Riftwalk/Shield Charge anyway, and with EF I have Riftwalk off CD pretty much whenever I need it–and Shield Charge when it isn’t.
That gap closing capability means the 30-sec CD on Stonespear/Windspear aren’t as big of a loss for my playstyle, as I would always prefer to be in melee range applying pressure (or using Face Slam for interrupts, or any of our snares/stuns for CC).
IMHO: cutting the CD for the 2 spears down would be a lot more worthwhile if they were longer range than our gap-closers, but considering we’re dealing with a 20m range either way–I’d rather just close the gap.
Just my two cents. As always, love what you’re doing. Can’t wait for 50 and some Prestige ranks to really start mixing this stuff up :D
I hit 44 and experimented with BoEA. Personally, I was unimpressed with the amount of healing–especially considering the trade-off at 44 when you consider I had to drop 6 well-spent points from the paladin tree to get it.
I am going to give BoEA a go over the next few days and will let you folks know what I think of it.
What I *have* found, on the other hand, is that by dropping the 5 points in Improved Riftwalk and Unrelenting and placing them in Elemental Flux (and sticking with Planar Blade), I’m feeling *much less* power-starved than I was before
I can see EF being helpful once you have PB for the extra Power regen. And your point that you don’t need Imp RW as much because of the EF extra procs and Shield Charge.
That being said, for PVP there’s no way I’m giving up Unrelenting – the silence and root every 15 sec instead of 30 sec provides a ton of control in PVP, which is critical IMO.
Thanks for sharing your insights, I appreciate it and I’m sure other players will get value out of reading your comments as well.
Yep, that’s what I figured for your playstyle (and probably something I should adapt into my own), but I know myself well enough to know that I let those spear abilities sit off CD long enough to justify shifting the points out of it. That part, combined with the fact that EF only seems worthwhile with 5/5 points in it and not wanting to pull points out of anything else — it all added up for me.
I just tried BoEA. It was underwhelming. Or at least the points lost from Pally seemed to outweigh the benefit, at least at level 44.
I also tried Elemental Flux, by moving the points out of Improved RW and Burning Blood and into EF. It does seem to help with Power. I’ll have to run more warfronts and see if it’s worth keeping.
“DOH!” moment there… I dropped Burning Blood and took Unrelenting again… much happier with that! Now that I have the 15 sec CD on those spears I’m using them constantly. I much prefer the control over the small splash-back on a crit.
I actually just came back here to revise my thoughts on this… starting to think that the utility/damage mitigation of Disarm trumps the DPS worries of hitting it before Ret.
I’ve swapped it back for now. Guess I’m just coming here to think out loud :P
^^^ … sorry, didn’t realize I was breaking the flow with the quote button. Leaving before I make more of a mess of your blog :(
No problem. The commenting look-and-feel is a bit different with this new Inove template.
I appreciate your feedback and takes on the mechanics. We’re all figuring this out :)
Could you let us know what type of runebreaks you are going for?
Chest/shoulders = Dex
Gloves = Physical Crit
Feet = Endurance
Legs = Str?? There isn’t any other stat…
Helm = Str again??
Thanks!
Forgot about main hand stat.
Shield = Block I guess?
Thanks for reminding me I need to include this in the Guide ^^
Helm: Strength
Chest: Endurance or Dexterity (I favor End but I’m also a Pally so I get End boost)
Shoulders: Dexterity
Legs: Strength
Feet: Endurance
Gloves: Physical Crit
Weapon: AP
Shield: Endurance, AP
Ranged: AP
There are some runes made from recipes from crafting tokens that I haven’t really looked into yet
So… I just found an interesting — well — “exploit”, for lack of a better word. I already submitted an in-game bug report because it seems that broken to me, but we’ll see if they ever change/fix it. That said, use at your discretion if you can get the hang of it.
Simply put, you can time applying a Burst ability to the AP-adding ability you just used — essentially skipping a GCD. The way I discovered it is probably the easiest way to practice it. Starting with 2 AP, I use Shield Charge on an NPC and the moment I see the 3rd AP applied I pop a Burst ability. Viola — 3 AP are consumed, and upon impact the Burst ability is used as if it were 3 AP strength.
With a little bit of testing I found that I could do the same thing with almost anything in my spammable macro, it just takes getting used to the timing. Any ability with a “travel time” to it is easiest to do, i.e. the Spears or Shield Charge.
My suspicion is that Elemental Touch is actually triggering the Bursts (at least with the melee-range abilities), but I haven’t tried it without being spec’d in ET to know for sure. It’s like using the ability and the ET tick have separate “Burst checks”, and I’m sneaking a Burst in after gaining the AP — but before the ET ticks. Wild speculation, but it’s a weird thing to time so it got me thinking.
Anyway, thought I’d share it here rather than on the official boards. Not sure what kind of reaction it would get, and frankly I haven’t checked there to see if someone else is already pointing it out. It’s weird, and kind of situational, but 3 AP is always better than 2 (or 2>1, or 1>0, obviously :P )and there are plenty of PVP situations where I’ve made it work already.
Sorry for rambling… it was harder to explain than I thought it would be :D
Do you mean essentially this, which I mentioned in the “Tips and Tactics” section?
If this is what you are talking about, I do not believe it is an exploit. Riftblade abilities generate an AtPt at the time the ability is cast, however the effects of the ability (e.g. damage, silence, etc) do not apply until the Spear lands.
Therefore, if you have sufficient distance from a target you can:
1. cast Flamespear
2. while FS is in flight, use Fiery Burst, which as the tooltip states is not on the GCD – and this is the key point
3. when FS lands, it procs FB DoT to start ticking
I don’t believe that is an exploit. If you hear from the Devs, let us know.
Anyone who has followed me through the various games knows that I detest cheating and exploiting, things that people use to unfair advantage against other players.
See, the tip you’re quoting is the mechanic that lead me to what is actually broken. What should be “1, 2, 3, Burst, 4(Burst applied)” leaving you at 1 AP again, can be executed as “1, 2, 3>Burst(applied to 3)” leaving you at 0 AP, but a 3 AP Burst executed. Essentially skipping a GCD. On the spears, as you describe, it feels natural, but the way it can be executed on melee abilities doesn’t.
I would never advocate the use of an exploit, I simply didn’t have a better word for it. But it felt broken to me, so the second I nailed it down I bug-reported it.
I’ve never stumbled on to something like this in a game, as most bugs are either glaringly obvious or rarely encountered — nor am I the type to seek them out. Rather than decide for myself if it was intended or not, though, I simply reported the problem.
Ultimately I do think it’s broken, at least the way I found to execute it. Again, I’m not condoning exploits, if that’s even what it is. I don’t even like “FotM” specs because I feel dirty being the OP clone of everyone else — I didn’t even like Riftblade at first, as Flamespear was being widely misused and it felt cheap to me. Needless to say, I’m more than happy with the added CD there.
Posting here was as much for gauging others’ opinions and solidifying the issue, one way or the other. Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way Taugrim ;)
FYI I made a video of what I described and started a thread on the official forums:
http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?151882-ATTN-Devs-and-fellow-Riftblades
I’m 99% sure this is broken and wanted to draw attention to it quicker for a fix.
hey dude… just posted a thought on the forums:
http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?151882-ATTN-Devs-and-fellow-Riftblades&p=1994683&viewfull=1#post1994683
did you check your combat log?
There is a belt rune as well. The Runguard quartermaster in Reclaimer’s hold sells it. Its +8 End but requires Revered. If you do all the runeguard quests, you’ll end up 10k away so you’ll need to run the Runguard dailys and runic descent to get it.
Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way Taugrim
Not at all! You’ve already contributed some great insight on Riftblade, so thank you for sharing your thoughts :)
[…] if you play Riftblade, check out my Riftblade PVP Guide, which has been updated fully for Patch […]
Hey, I really like your guide, I’ve really wanted to make a decent pally build for a while, and this has given me the interest to start a new warrior. I’m only level 17 now though and I was wondering if you could perhaps post on how your build/macros looked at lower levels, maybe 20 and 30 I think it would help a lot. Also, is there any way you would tweak this build to be strictly a leveling pve build?
He has already posted his early builds starting at level 17 I believe. Read his older blog posts and you will see them.
Great guide, thanks for all your insight. After seeing your discussion with Tailen about the paragon, I decided that this is the build I’m going to shoot for at 50
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=1cLhu.EGo0dsMGtzz.xxouso.g0z
I had thought about grabbing the meager pally heals, but until warrior healing gets buffed, killing your opponent fast is more important. 2 points are “wasted” in the armor pen ability, but at least some pally abilities and the paragon abilities will get use out of it. The 3% crit buff, reactive abilities and burst from Strikes like iron are all great for the RB tree. Also adds a nice defensive cooldown against rogues and warriors, although I’ll have to test whether its useful since I usually try to kite melee classes.
Some feedback on your spec:
– in the RB tree, it’s worth moving 2 points from EF to Imp RW, just to make sure the cooldown resets automatically before the next fight starts
– in the Pally tree, GUP is overkill in PVP. The 5% Hit from SotH seems to be enough. Move those points into VW
– you spent your 8 points in Para the same way I would. The 2 points in CP are a bit of a waste as so much of our damage as RB is Elemental, but there isn’t a better choice
Hi taug, I have been following your videos since LOTRO. I love the site and advice and your playstyle.
I am a 50 who has mainly been doing PVE. But just switched to RB and consider myself an above average PvPer. I am having trouble with deciding how to flesh out the rest of the tree for PvP and what 3rd soul to pick up. Since RB doesn’t Scale well with DPS gear would you recommend a minimum 2 point investment in paragon for SLI? (I went all the way up to 15 to test for improved AP generation. The problem with this is that you miss out on the vindicator tree which provdies -15% crit rate and pvp trinket for improved damage output. For the record SLI does improve the damage of rift surge as long as you cast surge WHILE SLI is active making it hit for 400-500 base damage for me per proc (non crit).
Have you toyed around with a 50 spec yet?
Would love your insight on this.
I have not yet decided on whether to take Vind or Para for my 3rd tree. I definitely will not be keeping VK as the 3rd tree as it does not provide as much value for a low non-zero point investment.
For 50 PVP, I’m leaning towards putting 7 points in the Vind tree, so that I can get Break Free and Guard, which have awesome utility. The Crit redux is also huge IMO, it should significant increase time-to-live:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0cLht.eGo0dsMGtdz.xxouos0o.i
Funny, I was just headed here to share my experiences with a very similar build. I went out in a WF @47 with this:
http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0chLt.xrodo.EGo0dsMGtzz.E
WF queue times are bad, so this doesn’t come from a ton of experience, but is slightly more than knee-jerk too ;)
Biggest complaint I had was not having Shield Charge or Paladin’s Devotion, but that won’t be a problem at 50 anyway.
Threw together this video (below) for fun. The crit buff was up a lot of the time and I seemed to be getting crit less — as I should with 15% reduction. Also, Thunderous Leap is underwhelming — esp with a 45 sec CD (and I hate clicking the ground). As a 3rd option with RW/SC being first choices, though, it wouldn’t be all bad. Your build with 7 pts in vind certainly isn’t missing out on anything by not having it.
Strange Note: TL is acting weird for me. I noticed in my video that I used FB and then TL somewhat unintentionally and it proc’d the FB on someone’s pet next to the target I had selected. The target died right after and I didn’t hit any other abilities to confuse what proc’d the FB. I went back to test it further (partly to see how TL picks which target to apply FB to) and I can’t even always get TL to do damage, but the combat log shows people are getting hit with the stun effect (which I hear all 1 second of it effects diminishing returns on other stuns FYI). The only other time I’ve seen it proc FB was on another pet. Final verdict: TL seems REALLY buggy :(
I also queued solo and didn’t bother to put Guard on anyone, as it seems generally more useful when, say, a healer knows you’re splitting their damage and can watch your HP closer. Also, a quick test and I find it has a 15 sec CD not listed in the description.
So overall, gut feeling is definitely putting a minimum of 5 pts into this tree @50.
Disclaimer: not my finest ~5 min of PVP and certainly isn’t a “showoff” video at all. I make plenty of mistakes and spend plenty of time stuck in a fear or standing around wishing I had Shield Charge :P
That said, I still ended up 2nd in damage done (to a pyro mage, so that’s fine) with 15 KBs, and overall it worked well enough for showing this spec (which, incidentally, was my intention)… so here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVgYYoxdTjM
(sorry this post ended up so long, kept testing more things and thinking of other stuff while I waited on renders/uploads)
I am testing it out right now, since im 50. I think that the trade of paragon for the small investment in vindi is worth it for the tanking playstyle definitely.
1 small thing to note. If we are sinking 38 points into RB. The tier 1 talent Rift fury only needs an investment of 4 points to gain the full 50%. A small change but a min max one.
If I may, the math certainly supports that:
4 (in talent) @1.33/ea x 38 (in tree) = 50.54
5 (in talent) @1.7/ea x 38 (in tree) = 64.6
..but that’s ignoring the 2nd part of the tooltip: the bonus is capped @40% with 4 and then 50% with 5. So it’s kind of the other way around.
4 (in talent) @1.33/ea maxes bonus with 30-31 (in tree), or 39.9%-41.23%.
5 (in talent) @1.7/ea maxes bonus with 29-30 (in tree), or 49.3%-51%.
Anyway, personally very glad to hear you’re liking vindi over paragon. I’m on the “expect an SLI nerf soon” boat anyway, so I don’t like the idea of getting used to having it in my rotation just to take it out later.
I keep trying to come up with other angles on this spec to give a different perspective on things, and every time I’m just like, “Taugrim’s got the winner and 500 reasons to support it”…
oops never noticed that. crap. yeah my survivability is junk (wearing all pve t1 dps gear)
so the vindi soul + pally really makes this spec shine for me as im not 100% squishy. The control and utility still makes this spec great at 50, i’m really just worried about the scalability of the damage.
1 small thing to note. If we are sinking 38 points into RB. The tier 1 talent Rift fury only needs an investment of 4 points to gain the full 50%. A small change but a min max one.
I was very excited when I read that.
Unfortunately, the max bonus for Rift Fury scales with the number of points invested.
I.e. the cap at 4/5 RF is 40%, 5/5 RF is 50%.
So we still have to max it out.
Hey Taugrim, I really like what you’ve done with this guide and appreciate the thoughtfulness that you’ve given it.
I’ve been playing around with a 2hander riftblade and was interested in what you thought of the build/concept. I’m lvl 39 right now and my build is: http://rift.zam.com/en/stc.html?t=0cuLt.E.EMobdsMGtdz.c
I went 10 into para for path of the wind, giving me a second ranged point builder now that FS has a CD. Turn the blade adds additional burst potential since it’s off the global CD, and the crit+str buffs along the way are just icing. With SLI active, a 3pt storm burst is hitting around 550 non crit putting the total dmg of that attack well into the 900-1100 range when you factor in the 2 ET procs and the attack itself. With a few crits you can really push a lot of dmg out fast. I may even put 2 more pts into para for flinching strike which not only adds a 3rd interrupt to my arsenal but can also be used to enhance burst dmg since itsa 200-300dmg attack off the GCD.
anyway, just thought i’d share this and hope to get your perspective on it.
Hey Taugrim, I really like what you’ve done with this guide and appreciate the thoughtfulness that you’ve given it.
Thanks!
anyway, just thought i’d share this and hope to get your perspective on it.
Some feedback for you:
– in the RB tree, move the points in Static Shock somewhere else (e.g. to ED)
– in the Para tree, it’s worth getting the 11-pt Disarm. Also Predictable Movements in the 2nd tier is an excellent damage reflect
K Im on board. I love the way this Paladin spec is used for PvP. Its like playing as one of the Knight Templar(a HOLYshit bad-ass Warrior) In a battle of during a crusade.
Just some thought on Freeze Armor. I put Freeze Armor at the top of your spam macro and feel that keeping it up on an enemy at all times helps me keep control of the fight. Why is it you don’t?.. Is the 30 points of energy just to much to manage to keep up every time its up from CD every 8 seconds and losing out on 7 seconds (almost 1/2) of the duration of the debuff?
I put Freeze Armor at the top of your spam macro and feel that keeping it up on an enemy at all times helps me keep control of the fight. Why is it you don’t?.. Is the 30 points of energy just to much to manage to keep up every time its up from CD every 8 seconds and losing out on 7 seconds (almost 1/2) of the duration of the debuff?
FA is a snare, and I want to control who I snare and when, especially if I want to snare someone other than the target I want to kill.
I’ll talk about this when I’ve finished editing and narrating my next video, which will cover keybinds.
I would recommend against putting FA on macro. #1 the recast time is SOONER than the duration of the debuff. Meaning you will be wasting energy. #2 not all targets need snare. (already debuffed etc).
Exactly.
First off, thank you very much. My first in warrior was RB and I just could’nt figure something that made me happy with it for pvp. You literally made what I was imagining but could not for some reason come up with. Also, for when 50 would,nt some points into VK be viable as well? Mainly for the mana drain skills for mages/clerics.
A fight against a Mage is going to short one. Therefore in most cases a gradual mana drain won’t help.
Mana drain would help against Clerics in an outlast fight, but I believe the points for a 3rd tree are better spent elsewhere.
I could see how it is’nt the best in general when it comes to mages because as you said most go down fast. I say most because I have been running into Necro/Warlocks and its hit or miss on them whether i can burn then down or not. I was also hinting at the Ability Rift Tap. Its a low cd AP based ability that seem like it would be an added bonus to DPS. With the mana drain as more of a bonus.
Great guide! :) Thanks for doing this work.
In section 7, you might want to specify which of the 3 choices is best and worst. You picked #3 for both. I assume from the rest of the section that you use #1?
Also, your acronyms for the different Riftblade abilities is quite confusing at some places. May I suggest that you use Fs for Flamespear and FS for Frost Strike? Unfortunately, many of the Riftblade abilities share the same initial letters, for example Rift Surge and Rift Storm and Rift Strike also cause problems.
In section 7, you might want to specify which of the 3 choices is best and worst. You picked #3 for both. I assume from the rest of the section that you use #1?
Woops, that’s been fixed.
Also, your acronyms for the different Riftblade abilities is quite confusing at some places. May I suggest that you use Fs for Flamespear and FS for Frost Strike?
I may go through and get rid of all the acronyms, for clarity. Thanks for the feedback!
Hey Taugrim brilliant blog enjoying reading it. What professions did you take? I did hear you say it in one of your vids but cannot find it anymore. What ones would you recommend for this style of warrior?
Armorsmithing, Mining, Runecrafting.
I usually take the “enchanting” profession in games, but I do not typically take the “armor” or “weapon” crafting profs.
However, for Rift I found the above 3 have excellent synergy.
Mine ore -> craft armor -> disenchant (runebreak) -> craft runes
IMO you get better “mats” from runebreaking as opposed to salvaging.
Reset my 4th role last night and went with RB/Pally/Paragon and I must say it is a blast so far. I am loving the versatility. Last night I went out and just wandered around killing stuff to get a feel for the skills. Ended up doing several Rifts without need to change roles. I could attack from range if the mob was too far away, Riftwalk up to the mob and go melee, then pull back to range if it got hairy.
I had played a Riftblade back around level 25 or so and did not care for it. Lack of points for one hindered me but I think the main issue was playstyle. I played him like a ranged melee character. But after reading the guide and changing my mindset to a melee character with range I am finding he plays a lot better. Plus adding pally to the mix with sword and shield gives him a lot more options and survivability. I think he has just become one of my fav roles.
My main is and will remain a Beastmaster build of some sort. Champ/BM/RB atm. But Pally/RB is a close second.
But after reading the guide and changing my mindset to a melee character with range I am finding he plays a lot better. Plus adding pally to the mix with sword and shield gives him a lot more options and survivability. I think he has just become one of my fav roles.
Yep, you just summarized the whole philosophy behind my build in 3 sentences :)
My main is and will remain a Beastmaster build of some sort. Champ/BM/RB atm. But Pally/RB is a close second.
One of these days I will try Champ, but not until I get to 50 and have better gear.
Thanks for the blog. After the 1.1 changes my original spec lost most of its viability and I was left feeling pretty hopeless. Luckily, I found this blog and have followed your spec since. It took me a while to get it dialed in, but now I’m super psyched on warriors again.
In the past 2 weeks I’ve been jumped dozens of times while out questing and almost every single time, I came out on top. Plus, I’m doing great in WFs. Who would have thought an S+B build could be such a killer? Keep up the good work!
[…] advice on how to play this Soul Build then I would highly recommend you check out Taugrim’s Riftblade PVP Guide.  His writing style is much more comprehensive and informative than […]
One of the nice things about PvP in Rift is that survivablity does count for something, defense does count for something. Being able to mitigate damage is nearly as important as dealing it. It allows your sides healers to keep you up through burst damage, as well as keepign you in the fight putting pressure on your opponents.
I’ve been following your Rift pvp videos lately, through them you encouraged me to get involved in PvP and thus far I love it!
Riftblade has been my soul of choice for the warrior and thus seeing your take on a RB with survivability through Pally was something that had to be tried. So far it is a beast in PvP, especially if played as an up close and personal melee, with the tools to make you regret trying to get away.
One thing I have to comment on is the proliferation of Pyros in the upper levels (45+) that use Ground of Strength. You might not know that Thunderous Kick from champion handily takes them out of that buff zone and back into our territory. With that in mind, I’ve started on a new build of Riftblade/Champion/Paladin (38/16/12).
You will lose Disarming Counterblow, 9% resist magic dmg and a Fear and Confuse removal. You’ll gain Inescapable Fury a reactive, AOE fear, Thunderous Kick, Deathblow etc. Personally, the ability to take out a Pyro and the buffs to our RB abilities through Slayer’s Bearing and Take no Prisoners as well as the burst from Deathblow seem worth it.
Take a look and let me know your thoughts:
Paladin (12) / Riftblade (38) / Champion (16)
One thing I have to comment on is the proliferation of Pyros in the upper levels (45+) that use Ground of Strength. You might not know that Thunderous Kick from champion handily takes them out of that buff zone and back into our territory.
That’s an interesting idea. I’ve thought of the punt being fun for knocking RDPS / Healers off rocks but you mentioned another very good use for the punt.
That being said, I have difficulty imagining that GoS will remain in its current state indefinitely. A Pyro Mage standing in GoS is un-CCable but can still CC and DPS opponents effectively. For game balance GoS will likely need to be changed.
Just to add to these ideas, my understanding (though unconfirmed first-hand) is that the Warlord’s “Sergeant’s Order” act’s much like a WoW DK’s Death Grip, pulling a target to you — with a 20m range. Requires 10 pts into Warlord, whereas TK only requires 6 pts into Champ.
Food for thought.
Does SO work against a Mage in GoS?
EDIT: netheir Sergeant’s Order (Warlord pull) nor Thunderous Kick (Champ’s punt) work on Mage in GoS. LOL.
First of all, great guide and amazing blog, lucky i ran into your videos on youtube :)
Do you know if the VK’s ability to bring a player to the VK works on mages in GoS ?
Well I’m sure someone somewhere has already discussed/started using this, but as I didn’t notice it anywhere in your guide I thought I’d share here.
If you add the command “@mouseover” in a macro, between “cast” and “[ability name]” then the ability bypasses your target and will hit — well — whatever your mouse is over. When I learned about this, I immediately pictured using it with Stonespear, Windspear, Frozen Armor and Light’s Hammer — even Riftwalk!
Now this is a double-edged sword, as especially in WFs it can get pretty chaotic and you may end up hitting the wrong target when you may not have if you’d taken the time to click or tab-target them. I’m debating trying some of these on their own hotkeys or even getting daring and outright macroing this into the ones already on my bars. I personally spend a lot of time mouse-looking anyway, so I think I’m already conditioned to have some control over this.
IMO there’s huge potential here, depending on a person’s playstyle. Like I said, I’m kind of iffy… but I find the tab-targeting in this game tedious enough that this idea is pretty exciting to me in general.
My simple example macro that I used to test it in-game:
#show Light’s Hammer
cast @mouseover Light’s Hammer
And one more macro tip I just remembered — another take-it-or-leave-it sort of thing. Hotfix #13 made it viable to put abilities such as Paladin’s Devotion or Break Free into, say, a spammable macro and they will only be used when you’re under one of the effects. Exact notes (Break Free may not have needed the fix):
* Warriors: Tempered Will, Paladin’s Devotion, and Ruthless Pursuit can now only be used when the Warrior is under one of the effects these abilities remove.
I never noticed before, but I’m assuming it was possible to waste these abilities before this fix?
Anyway, I just ran a WF doing exactly that: I had those two abilities at the bottom of my spam macro. Break free was on CD the second I got snared, so that was a bad idea for sure. PD obviously covers less effects, but a minute or so later someone used one of them on me and I was out of it without even knowing (caught it happening reviewing video). I’m on the fence again… controllability, or never let it sit off CD? Break free seems like the bigger issue, as snares are very frequent and I don’t mind using Shield Charge or Riftwalk in the least.
At the very minimum I will end up macroing them together on their own key I suppose.
For the reasons you mentioned, I have Paladin’s Devotion above Break Free.
That being said, I keep my CC breaking abilities separate from my attacking macros, so I can choose when to use those CC breakers, given the somewhat long cooldowns.
Just an update to this idea. I experimented with the @mouseover trick in several WFs today, and my initial impression was nothing but love. I spend almost all of my time with right-click held in for character turning, so just being able to let off for a moment and mouse-over (for example) a mage/cleric to toss a Windspear and still keep your initial target selected — I loved it.
That is until I found the bug. Even with your mouse cursor hidden, for the purposes of mousing over something it still pays attention to the cursor’s position (and I’ve confirmed the problem on practice dummies). This was causing my abilities to hit other targets even when I had my mouse button held in and intended for it to hit my selected target.
@mouseover is an incredible feature. If nothing else, healers seem to be loving it (as I’m fairly sure it works mousing over raid frames). Unfortunately, I won’t be using it offensively until this bug is fixed. The only workaround I’ve thought of is having a few specific abilities with @mouseover enabled on a 2nd keybind, but I don’t have the real estate for that atm :P
Thank you for making my gaming time much more enjoyable. How much ‘hit’ does a warrior need at level 50 in order to be able to do any instances/dungeons/PVP etc? I currently have Void Knight as my third soul but thinking about switching to Paragon if that makes any difference.
I don’t know, I haven’t PVE’d at endgame yet.
I was told ingame you need 50 hit for entry level dungeons, 100 hit for high level dungeons and 200 hit for raids. No idea if it is correct but thought I would mention it.
I am loving your site and all the helpful information. I am now going to try out new hotkeys according to your recommendation. I am having a very hard time understanding kite strafing with this layout. How do you kite away from a mob with no reverse or back key mapped? I just don’t get it. I use back all the time and wonder if that is something I can really do without.
How do you kite away from a mob with no reverse or back key mapped? I just don’t get it. I use back all the time and wonder if that is something I can really do without.
The whole point of proper strafing is to not use the backward movement key. Why? Because in most MMORPGs including Rift, backward moving is much slower than movement in other directions, and good players will strafe behind you and hit you at your back.