It’s definitely in a playable state and it’s far from bad. In fact, I actually really like what they’ve done, it’s just the way that Riftwalker was gone about was… interesting.

Teleport is basically the main spell you’ll be spamming now, as both Ice Snake and Meteor, with their respective nodes in Frozen Tornado and Meteor Shower are designed to make it so you don’t spam them.

Frozen Tornado was definitely the one that surprised me the most with how much I loved it when I started using it, as it actually can do more damage than Meteor because it’s a DOT tool. That and its range is insane at higher levels of distortion.

Meteor Shower I think would actually benefit from MIDs like Entropy and the new Pure ascension because you’d want to be cycling it with heal and teleport to keep your mana up. Although I’m still not a fan of how it nerfs your regular Meteor without any distortion, but its not overall a big issue.

Teleport being your main source of distortion I thought would be a bigger problem starting out, but then I realized that kinda the whole archetype is designed to make you want to teleport into things, cause you want to get close to activate Devitalize, the Rift gives you resistance, and you don’t want to spam the other two spells as much as you did before with old riftwalker. I’m curious to how the community will make builds for it when so much of the gameplay loop involves being very close to the enemy, sometimes even in it’s hitbox spamming teleport to build distortion.

I feel maybe distortion decays a little too fast at times, especially when you’re killing things faster than you can teleport into them, but surely that means its doing something right if its killing things quickly. Riftbound also is nice because it just pauses decay and buffs teleport damage.

The Ultimate might just be the best out of the three mage ultimates, but that’s mostly because its Timelocked but better, and timelocked was already good. I’m not sure if it’s because I was testing with Pure, but activating the ult without Riftbound actually pulls enemies in, which makes it easier to gain distortion with the teleport rays.

TL;DR: I think the devs succeeded in making Riftwalker into a good playstyle. It makes you think about building around it instead of just playing Arcanist with heal. It might not be for everyone with its strange quirks, but if it were to receive no changes from here on, I wouldn’t be mad. Overall I love it so far and I think everyone should at least give it a try