Welcome back to another hero spotlight.  Today we bring you…

Cyrus, the Gravecaller

Bio: When his wife was slain by bandits 7 years ago, Cyrus turned to foul necromancy to exact bloody revenge.  Though the memory of this trauma has faded, Cyrus’ heart remains hollow, and his anger burns eternal.

Cyrus is a unique damage dealer who can provide a great deal of offense and control through summoning minions.

Raise Dead: The cornerstone of Cyrus’ kit, this allows him to summon a skeletal minion that lasts until it’s destroyed.  These skeletons inherit Cyrus’ stats, and will draw the attention of enemies who they strike, protecting Cyrus and his allies from harm while they last.  Through talents, it becomes possible to store two charges of Raise Dead, increase your minions survivability and damage, and even make their melee attacks strike all enemies in front of them.  You can also talent your own auto-attacks to reduce Raise Dead’s cooldown with each strike, helping you to get more minions out quickly.

Slay Living: This spell strikes your target for moderate damage and sports a relatively short cooldown.  What makes it unique is its chaotic damage output – if this spell deals a critical hit, its base damage is tripled, making the difference between a crit and normal hit enormous.  If you invest in a lot of critical strike chance (through items and talents) then this spell becomes a more consistent source of damage, but it’s never completely predictable.  Talents can add some other functionality to Slay Living, including the ability to summon an additional skeletal minion if you kill an enemy with it (pictured in the above video).  Another useful choice is the option to cut Slay Living’s cooldown in half when it fails to crit, allowing you to roll the dice more often.

Sacrifice: Cyrus’ final skill allows him to instantly destroy all of his active minions, causing them to erupt in a blast of dark magic that deals damage to all nearby enemies.  This provides some useful area effect damage, and gives your skeletons a last bit of usefulness as their health approaches zero.  Talents can increase the damage and radius of the explosion, and cause those struck by the blast to take additional damage from other sources for a few seconds afterwards.  Or, you can choose a talent that heals you for each skeleton consumed as well.

Cya next week!  Until then, back to work…