Reaver DoTs and Weapon Damage

Long time no talk! How many years, how many winters!

I’ve been enjoying myself leveling my Riftstalker, slowly, through Storm Legion content. I have a job now, with a ridiculous commute, so I don’t get a whole lot of time per day. I’ve spent some time on Riftstalker theorycraft, but here’s the problem: it’s all really obvious.

See, Rift has this mechanic called Gifts, which are stat bonuses that you get per point you invest in a talent tree (“soul”). If you invest in a DPS soul you get bonus damage, if you invest in a healing soul you get bonus healing, if you invest in a tank soul you get bonus damage reduction/health, and so on.

One of the unintended consequences of this system is that creating talent builds for non-warrior tanks – the cleric Justicar and, yes, the rogue Riftstalker – is really boring. Because of the passive survivability you receive from investing in each class’s one tanking soul, even the most useless talent in that soul is better than your alternatives in other souls, simply due to the passive survivability it gains from the Gift. That leaves only 15 talent points to play with between two subsouls. In the case of the Riftstalker, Gifts even predetermine one of your two subsouls, the Bard; and the last subsoul is in contention only because of a major survivability cooldown belonging to the only DPS soul in the running, the Bladedancer. And it’s still a toss-up, because its rival, the Tactician, has more reliable damage reduction paired with a Gifted increase in self-healing!

tl;dr: Riftstalker talent trees are boring. The playstyle is engaging, with a 1 second GCD and a good half dozen short-duration (30 s or less) survivability buffs/debuffs to keep track of; but aside from “Remember, you don’t need a full set of combo points to use a survival finisher!”, there’s not much to say about them.

Remember, Riftstalkers, you don’t need a full set of combo points to use a survival finisher!

OK, let’s talk about warriors.