Dragon Age Inquisition Rift Mage Guide

Dragon Age Inquisition Rift Mage Guide by KineticGTR

Check out the video and the quick written guide below!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrL6lDezoyo

Weakening attacks, pulling and pushing, knocking down and stunning, buffing party’s attacks, and laying waste to groups of enemies. That’s what the Rift Mage brings to a fight!

This guide focuses on how to build your class using a combination of standard skills from the Inferno, Storm and Winter skill trees, and new active and passives from the Rift Mage specialization.

This build has been put together from a fresh respec. With about 15-20 points to place, you can put together a very powerful Rift Mage that has everything it needs to dominate on the battlefield.

Storm

Chain Lightning / Stormbringer / Gathering Storm / Static Cage / Lightning Cage (Skill upgrade)

Note About Storm Skills: A few people in the comments have praised Energy Barrage as a great skill to have, particularly strong against single targets. Since it’s right there at the top, it’s an easy skill to pick up, and I support that! So take Chain Lightning or Energy Barrage on your adventures :)

Inferno

Immolate or Flashfire (unused either way) / Flashpoint / Pyromancer / Clean Burn (optional) / Chaotic Focus (optional) / Fire Mine / Searing Glyph (Skill upgrade)

Winter

Winter’s Grasp / Winter Stillness

Rift Mage (Specialization)

Take everything! All the active skills, their upgrades, passives, and of course, Firestorm!

Gameplay Tips

As mentioned in the video, the core feature of playing a Rift Mage is weakening your enemies. All three skills, when upgraded, weaken enemies for 10 seconds. All four passive abilities in the Rift Mage specialization benefit you and your party from this debuff, so keep this active as often as possible!

Benefits of weakened enemies include: Less damage from them, increased mana regeneration, increased negative status effect duration, and our attack damage is increased! Not to mention the other awesome effects of the skills themselves that combo with other abilities!

This build has a lot of fun combos you can pull. Including the barrier bonus damage with Chaotic focus. Either by getting the Barrier skill ourselves, or better yet, have another mage in the party that casts Barrier for us. Then nuke ’em with a Fire Mine!

Pull of the Abyss and…just about anything is great! I like to combo Static Cage with it while me and the other party members are in a frenzy of attacks!

Winter’s Grasp combined with Stonefist for a shatter combo!

Static Cage and Chain Lightning. Even more damage if you upgraded Chain Lightning!

Combine this and Firestorm, and even the biggest group fights will end in a very short time!

You should be constantly casting, even basic spells. Thanks to our passives like Gathering Storm, we have increased cooldown reduction. But try not to move around too much though, otherwise you negate the bonus effect of Winter Stillness, that reduces skill cooldown and mana generation bonus.

Keep an eye on your screen for when you critical hit an enemy. Your next skill will have no cooldown! This is especially great if you can make back-to-back Fire Mines!

This is just an example, and by no means an “Optimal build”. Far from it probably. But thanks to the skill choice freedom, and fantastic balance in all of the basic skill trees, just about any combination of skills with Rift Mage abilities is going to make a fun build to play. I highly recommend taking the Rift Mage abilities, and then create your own combination of active and passive skills. :)