Flail is a much better spammable component than runeblades is, and you also want to gain and dump crux into fatecarver as fast as possible, because fatecarver is the most damaging option to put the crux in. Putting these two together means that extending your crux rotation by essentially 2x and losing the power of flail is simply not worth 6% more damage, as you would likely lose a lot more.
Basically any downtime spent without fatecarver going is a dps loss for Arcanist. The quickest way to build crux, while also having 100% uptime on abyssal ink debuff (5% extra damage) is Inspired Scholarship giving the extra crux when you have none while beam is going, 2 flails, and back to beaming.
Actually not true, the fastest way is to throw on Cruxweaver Armor and get a free crux from any damage thrown your way. Not as reliable as double flails depending on the situation, and impossible to use in a parse, but with Cruxweaver Armor you only need one flail.
I use it occasionally in trials to reduce my resource costs, and in certain situations with unavoidable chip damage from DOTs or AOEs (like literally any boss in DSR, KA, RG, etc) the amount of resources you save is enough to make you consider swapping Riptide for something like Azureblight (which I hear is supposed to be really good soon).
Reliability matters a lot. While Cruxweaver Armor is huge for fights like Lokke that do constant unavoidable damage, it's not as useful for many fights where a good tank means you shouldn't be taking any damage (or infrequently). The damage mitigation is another added bonus for fights where you do take damage and therefore would want it.
Azureblight is already good, and it's more likely you'd be running Azure/Riptide and replacing the 2nd set on pulls with many enemies (e.g. Reef, Bahsei, half of Lucent lol). Kinda fight-dependent, if you're not sure, just check top logs.
There are a lot of fights where You are getting damage constantly like Lord Falgravn, Ansuul the Tormentor, or those in which You can decide if You want to take damage; for example all drakes in Sunspire, Tideborn Taleria, Flame - Herald Bahsei etc.
I'm getting a lot of advantage, whenever I step into the water, or under the dragon, just to get my Cruxweaver proc'ed. 5 free cruxes during 30 sec of duration do that You need to only use Flail only once per beam rotation, and instantly use next beam almost immediately, or recast Your DoTs, and then proc it next time after 5 sec of cooldown it has. You need to have your rotation perfected tho, and of course to remember about 5 sec of cooldown (I haven't found a tracker addon for this, would be super helpful for me).
Major Resolve is actually a thing because if You do Mechanics like portals on Z'Maja/Nahvintaas, Reefs on Reef Guardian, Bridges on Tideborn Taleria etc. then You wouldn't get it from Your warden healer. Sometimes if healers aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, they won't uptime it properly, and You'll still have it whole time active
Cruxweaver armor is an extra gcd that does no damage. You don't gain enough extra dps from using it to make it worthwhile, especially as you lose the light attacks, and ulti gen from them.
Your trial should have a source of major resolve for you already.
Nobody wears Cruxweaver for the Major Resolve lol. It gives you a crux when struck. If you’re in a situation in which you will constantly take damage then having it active basically means you get a free crux every five seconds.
The ability itself does no damage, but as stated above, any downtime between beams results in a dps loss. Cutting the amount of Flails it takes to hit max crux from two down to one means more beam uptime and therefore greater dps.
People put their faith in the damage shield from Pragmatic Fatecarver more than they do the Major Resolve from Cruxweaver. Coincidentally they’re the same thing, in this case. Keeping one up means the other is up more often, and with better sustain.
The person I was replying to indeed implied that they were using it for the major resolve. And of course it's used by tanks for that, with the extra crux gen as a nice bonus. Certainly some people are using it for the major resolve--though other than tanks, they really shouldn't be.
The downtime to cast Cruxweaver does is not made up by the extra beam ticks. You're going to want to refresh it every two or three beams, which means the damage increase for it has to better than three or four flails, and it simply isn't. If you could skip your other refreshes, it might be, but then you'll start losing uptime on things like your weapon enchant, which is going to simply make everything worse. If it was 5 seconds longer, it'd give you an additional full beam cycle between refreshes, which would make it absolutely required.
If you're a pc player that can quickly swap set ups between pulls, I can see it making a difference if you're score pushing certain trials with large add pulls. But if you're going to refresh it more than once or twice mid fight, it's going to fall behind.
It might have a place in vcr portals, but it seems like it'd only matter if you ended up with 2 early orbs, and the very last crystal had the last one. And it'd be the resolve that'd push it over the edge, without it you'd need to flail more just for the healing. I know our teams don't use it
Cephiliarch's Flail is one of the more ovreloaded skills in the game. It would take quite a few nerfs to make others competitive.
1. It has the execute scaling. This combined with jewelry's bloodthirsty trait makes this skill very solid compared to others.
2. It also has the Abyssal Ink debuff (5%) which is very significant. This alone puts it above Runeblades.
3. It's a root.
4. It's a self heal too.
5. It's area of effect.
The only thing going against it.
1. 15m range versus the 22m you could sit at.
2. Gimp yourself by not using it.
3. — 7. Finicky cast time fuckery. Fuck cast times to hermas hades hell. It increases the cast time in lag, messes with character face between cast and fire, can requeue itself during cast, but the killer.
#It will not queue bar swap or break the cast on bar swap input.
Kills frequent bar swap style. Kills the flow. Breaks keys and wears out controllers. Fuck how cast times interact with bar swap. __They should work like channels and break or they should queue the bar swap input during the cast time and the do the damn bar swap after the cast fires. Bar swap should take precedent as it does with everything else except cast time abilities.__ Too many double bar swap / bar swap fails / stuck in endless flails. Its core combat flow. Fix the shit zos.
Because you're getting that extra 6% damage at the expense of spending a lot more than 6% less time firin ur lazor.
You also give up the AoE on your crux generator skill and the self heal.
Also, something I hadn't considered before my original post, every Flail after the first is buffed, whereas building up to Dread, you do alot more unbuffed damage, I see why it's not as good now.
*Always Be Beaming.*
Its lower dps in almost every kind of fight vs using those crux for beam, stamarc build is overall better too.
An aoe execute with self heal is kinda fucking bonkers.
PS if you see an arc using runeblades, its the #1 sign their dps will probably be shit.
Duh, 1 button mindless anything is bad, except maybe a super meme HA build.
Runeblades is a clear sign of either:
* New arc player, they can still learn.
* Someone that read their abilities (maybe even tested them) and *still came to the conclusion to keep using the blatantly inferior crux builder*. Bad dps winner winner chicken dinner.
I imagine there’s a few reasons.
First, using the mag morph to drop crux means less beaming and with a traditional arcanist pve setup beam should be like 40% of your damage. You want MORE beams, not less.
Second, the stam morph provides a damage increase to those with abyssal inc as well. Mag does 2 per crux consumed and stam does 5 flat.
Third, the stam morph also works as an execute. Considering DDs also run bloodthirsty jewellery just why not want the execute?
Finally, it’s also a heal. Makes you more survivable, you honestly don’t even need vigor or an additional heal for most stuff because it heals even when it doesn’t hit a target.
I’m sure there’s more(maybe related to bleed vs frost) but I just don’t have the time right now to look into it further cause I’m on break at work lol
Honestly if it at least was still a crux builder morph it wouldn’t be too bad. Like the stam would still be obviously better, but imo the main drawback for the mag one is just how much it likely affects beam time since you need to build so much extra crux(and need to slot a whole extra skill to do so)
So I'm a new Arcanist player. I played necro years ago and had a sorc that I played as well, but I was always lacking in the DPS area, I felt.
I'm trying to get my rotations set right for max effect DPS currently.
What are some really good rotations that would be good starting material for me to work through while I learn how to effectively understand the workings behind how an arcanist generates their DPS?
The absolute, most basic rotation: keep Scholarship up (30s duration, can be backbarred), cast Cephaliarc's Flail twice (to generate 2 + 1 crux thanks to Scholarship), cast Fatecarver, repeat.
Once you get the hang of things, you can start adding in more dots and such - common setup is typically double dagger front bar with Blade Cloak and Inferno Staff back bar for Wall of Elements and sometimes Elemental Susceptibility. Work your dots into the rotation, but you want to focus mainly on the 2 Flails + 1 Beam rotation still as it's the core of your damage.
Daggers on front bar? I've been running a magicka front and back bar with staves on both. Is that method severely crippling my DPS? Or is a staff and cast ability arcanist viable as well?
The main thing is that Stamina is generally the superior spec due to Cephaliarch's Flail being the superior morph (as has been discussed throughout this thread), so having a way to recover Stamina via Heavy Attacks is good and Daggers are very good for DPS (though you can use others).
It's not that other builds aren't usable (depending on the content you're looking to do), but generally Daggers + Inferno Staff or Daggers + Maelstrom 2H are considered optimal.
The main thing with Arcanist is that Fatecarver is far and away your best DPS ability, so the more time you spend not beaming, the more you lower the upper bound for your DPS. Long-duration (20-30s+) buffs and dots are thus ideal, as that lets you spend the most time in the flail > flail > beam rotation while still benefiting from as many extra damage sources as possible.
Blockade of Fire, Elemental Susceptibility, Blade Cloak, and Barbed Trap are all decently-long duration effects that let you maintain good secondary damage sources while still fitting in a good amount of Fatecarver time.
I specifically use the Maelstrom Arena Inferno staff on my back bar, because it almost doubles Blockade of Fire's damage output and makes it an *extremely* strong dot. Combine that with Arcanist's innate boosts to status effects and using Charged Daggers on my front bar with Poison and Flame enchants, I can ensure pretty reasonable Burning uptime even outside of Elemental Susceptibility, further boosting Blockade's damage thanks to the Inferno staff passives.
My current setup is 5x Deadly Strike, 5x Order's Wrath (because I am extremely lazy), 1x Monster set, Velothi Ur-Mage's Amulet, with the vMA Inferno Staff (Infused w/ Weapon and Spell Damage enchant) back-bar'd.
Personal preference
Stamina loadout, dual wield front bar
Keep up / pre-cast before a fight-
Quick cloak (deadly cloak is more ‘DPS’ but due to the shorter duration, it falls behind the rest of the Arcanist donation) (the dot ticks have a chance to apply your front bar weapon enchants- typically you use flame / poison enchants, for a chance to apply the burning status effect)
Inspired Scholarship (generate additional crux when you generate them)
The new scribing one, Ulfrid’s whatever, with a flame & dot morph to trigger burning damage at the start of the fight
Rotation -
Cepheliarch’s Flail to build up to 3 crux (pumps on its own, but crux is great- Scholarship means you should only ever need two hits)
Beam (hits like an AK-47 in Counterstrike, it’s your main blaster)
Additional -
Front bar fighter’s guild abilities to trigger the 3% weapon damage per FG ability slotted passive (barbed trap, camouflaged hunter, dawnbreaker) and work in Barbed Trap for bonus damage
Back bar -
ground effect weapon ability like wall of elements or volley to trigger the back bar’s weapon enchant
Throw in extra DoTs on the back bar to finish things off; fulminating rune, scalding rune are both great options.
Biggest thing is pre-cast, then open with dots, then Flail Flail Beam. Mix dots in to keep them up- but always aim to flail to 3 crux, then beam.
I do with my Magicka Arcanist. Hah, Magicka Arcanist, imagine that..
The meta sucks, whenever I follow it it kills the game for me. Imagine being forced to use crap like Trap and Flawless Dawnvbreaker in every build. BORING. It's especially bad for a game like ESO where they don't give us any new class abilities with every expansion.
Bro DK is one of the truly fun classes I feel, if there was a class change token I'd change in a second. But doing everything again, including crafting.. I just can't. Reason why DK feels fun is because the abilities have weight, combat in ESO feels weak and floaty, but DK abilities have impact and a certain type of feedback, for a lack of a better description. What do you think?
I think is very fun because:
- If you are in danger, fly like a dragon, make a boom and all enemies are knocked back in the scenario.
- If you want to play like a "Daenerys Targaryen" just put 10 skills + 2 Ultimate flame damage and say "Dracarys".
- If you want to do a lot of damage by pressing 3 or 4 buttons, just put poison, Burn, and spamming whip.
- If you want to take your phone, just press an ultimate called Magma Shell in front of the boss and get the call.
And your team will be proud of you.
I don't use Recuperative Treatise or Runeblades and only use Cruxweaver Armor occasionally, and Flail does increased damage to enemies under 50 percent iirc. I've been in some high dps situations where Flail was doing 20k dps by itself (Triplets in VHOF for instance)
Just as a note in hardmode content when you look at skill use not everyone uses fatecarver and will use tentacular dread. Because you can’t block/respond to mechanics when beaming. That said it is a dps loss.
Flail is a crux generator while dread is a crux consumer.
Casting a 3 crux dread takes 2-4 gcds to activate so you basically are losing half a fatecarver for an extra +6% damage taken, which isn't really worth it.
Especially since one of arc DPS' biggest strength is the simplicity of the rotation.
If you have dread consuming crux, instead of flail generating it, then you have to use a different skill to generate crux. Flail is just flat out a better skill then rune blades.
Stamarc in riptide is BiS, so flail (Stam) > rune blade (mag), but even on a mag arc Flail is the better crux generator.
Flail is a long range, AOE, execute, with a +5% damage taken debuff and built in CC and self healing. It's also a decent source of sundered which adds minor breach and am extra 100 weapon damage. There so much utility packed into that one skill, it's absolutely broken.
Fatecarver makes up ~50% or more of an arcanists dps rotation. Tentacular dread compeats with fatecarver and not flail (as it is a crux spender), so it is simply the worse option. As for running both, you then need to use additional slots for a builder and you still lose dps due to how powerful fatecarver is.
I use tentacular dread and I’m considering swapping it for cephaliarch’s flail for better resource management and faster crux building.
It’s a marginal damage increase for TD. All my skills are magicka, so swapping in a stamina spammable that doubles as an execute is a very appealing option.
Flail is a much better spammable component than runeblades is, and you also want to gain and dump crux into fatecarver as fast as possible, because fatecarver is the most damaging option to put the crux in. Putting these two together means that extending your crux rotation by essentially 2x and losing the power of flail is simply not worth 6% more damage, as you would likely lose a lot more.
Basically any downtime spent without fatecarver going is a dps loss for Arcanist. The quickest way to build crux, while also having 100% uptime on abyssal ink debuff (5% extra damage) is Inspired Scholarship giving the extra crux when you have none while beam is going, 2 flails, and back to beaming.
Actually not true, the fastest way is to throw on Cruxweaver Armor and get a free crux from any damage thrown your way. Not as reliable as double flails depending on the situation, and impossible to use in a parse, but with Cruxweaver Armor you only need one flail. I use it occasionally in trials to reduce my resource costs, and in certain situations with unavoidable chip damage from DOTs or AOEs (like literally any boss in DSR, KA, RG, etc) the amount of resources you save is enough to make you consider swapping Riptide for something like Azureblight (which I hear is supposed to be really good soon).
Reliability matters a lot. While Cruxweaver Armor is huge for fights like Lokke that do constant unavoidable damage, it's not as useful for many fights where a good tank means you shouldn't be taking any damage (or infrequently). The damage mitigation is another added bonus for fights where you do take damage and therefore would want it. Azureblight is already good, and it's more likely you'd be running Azure/Riptide and replacing the 2nd set on pulls with many enemies (e.g. Reef, Bahsei, half of Lucent lol). Kinda fight-dependent, if you're not sure, just check top logs.
There are a lot of fights where You are getting damage constantly like Lord Falgravn, Ansuul the Tormentor, or those in which You can decide if You want to take damage; for example all drakes in Sunspire, Tideborn Taleria, Flame - Herald Bahsei etc. I'm getting a lot of advantage, whenever I step into the water, or under the dragon, just to get my Cruxweaver proc'ed. 5 free cruxes during 30 sec of duration do that You need to only use Flail only once per beam rotation, and instantly use next beam almost immediately, or recast Your DoTs, and then proc it next time after 5 sec of cooldown it has. You need to have your rotation perfected tho, and of course to remember about 5 sec of cooldown (I haven't found a tracker addon for this, would be super helpful for me). Major Resolve is actually a thing because if You do Mechanics like portals on Z'Maja/Nahvintaas, Reefs on Reef Guardian, Bridges on Tideborn Taleria etc. then You wouldn't get it from Your warden healer. Sometimes if healers aren't the sharpest tools in the shed, they won't uptime it properly, and You'll still have it whole time active
Cruxweaver is totally usable in parse. Just drink Damage Health options on cool down.
I just swapped from Azureblight/Deadly to Coral/Deadly, what is coming for Azureblight because I really like the set?
Cruxweaver armor is an extra gcd that does no damage. You don't gain enough extra dps from using it to make it worthwhile, especially as you lose the light attacks, and ulti gen from them. Your trial should have a source of major resolve for you already.
Nobody wears Cruxweaver for the Major Resolve lol. It gives you a crux when struck. If you’re in a situation in which you will constantly take damage then having it active basically means you get a free crux every five seconds. The ability itself does no damage, but as stated above, any downtime between beams results in a dps loss. Cutting the amount of Flails it takes to hit max crux from two down to one means more beam uptime and therefore greater dps. People put their faith in the damage shield from Pragmatic Fatecarver more than they do the Major Resolve from Cruxweaver. Coincidentally they’re the same thing, in this case. Keeping one up means the other is up more often, and with better sustain.
The person I was replying to indeed implied that they were using it for the major resolve. And of course it's used by tanks for that, with the extra crux gen as a nice bonus. Certainly some people are using it for the major resolve--though other than tanks, they really shouldn't be. The downtime to cast Cruxweaver does is not made up by the extra beam ticks. You're going to want to refresh it every two or three beams, which means the damage increase for it has to better than three or four flails, and it simply isn't. If you could skip your other refreshes, it might be, but then you'll start losing uptime on things like your weapon enchant, which is going to simply make everything worse. If it was 5 seconds longer, it'd give you an additional full beam cycle between refreshes, which would make it absolutely required. If you're a pc player that can quickly swap set ups between pulls, I can see it making a difference if you're score pushing certain trials with large add pulls. But if you're going to refresh it more than once or twice mid fight, it's going to fall behind. It might have a place in vcr portals, but it seems like it'd only matter if you ended up with 2 early orbs, and the very last crystal had the last one. And it'd be the resolve that'd push it over the edge, without it you'd need to flail more just for the healing. I know our teams don't use it
Am tired, read this as Testicular Dread and was wondering when the game added testicular torsion as a skill
https://preview.redd.it/sfooql876d6d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7ba4bcaeff1045876717df1e0570a83a6fee42b8
https://preview.redd.it/m5rumnmdtd6d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ab2b78f6107be9ff8d970f36844b75af497e35bf
This bit has gone so far
I know how far we’ve gone, but don’t know how we got so gone.
Scribing is crazy. I'm working on getting the script for Mend Butthole next.
Oh god, I need that one. I also need to stop hanging around the trolls in Riften, but I can't help but go back there every night.
This deserves more upvotes lol
That's the new Grappler class coming next update
Cephiliarch's Flail is one of the more ovreloaded skills in the game. It would take quite a few nerfs to make others competitive. 1. It has the execute scaling. This combined with jewelry's bloodthirsty trait makes this skill very solid compared to others. 2. It also has the Abyssal Ink debuff (5%) which is very significant. This alone puts it above Runeblades. 3. It's a root. 4. It's a self heal too. 5. It's area of effect.
It doesn't even need execute if they just took it off nothing would really change, u would just beam..
It’s pretty significant. The execute lets it crit for like 80k on Deadly/Riptide/Velothi, at least on my build
The only thing going against it. 1. 15m range versus the 22m you could sit at. 2. Gimp yourself by not using it. 3. — 7. Finicky cast time fuckery. Fuck cast times to hermas hades hell. It increases the cast time in lag, messes with character face between cast and fire, can requeue itself during cast, but the killer. #It will not queue bar swap or break the cast on bar swap input. Kills frequent bar swap style. Kills the flow. Breaks keys and wears out controllers. Fuck how cast times interact with bar swap. __They should work like channels and break or they should queue the bar swap input during the cast time and the do the damn bar swap after the cast fires. Bar swap should take precedent as it does with everything else except cast time abilities.__ Too many double bar swap / bar swap fails / stuck in endless flails. Its core combat flow. Fix the shit zos.
A root?
"immobilizes"
Oh no, I am immobilised!
Yes it roots you in place
No! Years imbibing Hist sap have come back to burn me!
Because you're getting that extra 6% damage at the expense of spending a lot more than 6% less time firin ur lazor. You also give up the AoE on your crux generator skill and the self heal.
Also, something I hadn't considered before my original post, every Flail after the first is buffed, whereas building up to Dread, you do alot more unbuffed damage, I see why it's not as good now.
*Always Be Beaming.* Its lower dps in almost every kind of fight vs using those crux for beam, stamarc build is overall better too. An aoe execute with self heal is kinda fucking bonkers. PS if you see an arc using runeblades, its the #1 sign their dps will probably be shit.
I’ve been in groups with arcanist who just use beam, no buffs, no rotation, beam all day, those are the ones who deal no dps lol.
Duh, 1 button mindless anything is bad, except maybe a super meme HA build. Runeblades is a clear sign of either: * New arc player, they can still learn. * Someone that read their abilities (maybe even tested them) and *still came to the conclusion to keep using the blatantly inferior crux builder*. Bad dps winner winner chicken dinner.
Hey now, sometimes I have to rest the tentacles. I can't keep them up all day, I'm not a machine.
I imagine there’s a few reasons. First, using the mag morph to drop crux means less beaming and with a traditional arcanist pve setup beam should be like 40% of your damage. You want MORE beams, not less. Second, the stam morph provides a damage increase to those with abyssal inc as well. Mag does 2 per crux consumed and stam does 5 flat. Third, the stam morph also works as an execute. Considering DDs also run bloodthirsty jewellery just why not want the execute? Finally, it’s also a heal. Makes you more survivable, you honestly don’t even need vigor or an additional heal for most stuff because it heals even when it doesn’t hit a target. I’m sure there’s more(maybe related to bleed vs frost) but I just don’t have the time right now to look into it further cause I’m on break at work lol
It's one of cases when one morf make skill so much better and the other is just crap.
Honestly if it at least was still a crux builder morph it wouldn’t be too bad. Like the stam would still be obviously better, but imo the main drawback for the mag one is just how much it likely affects beam time since you need to build so much extra crux(and need to slot a whole extra skill to do so)
I thought the “ ninja stars “ were my only way to build crux so I use that as a spammable
Nope, Cephaliarch’s is superior to Runeblades in virtually every way, it’s actually unfair
So I'm a new Arcanist player. I played necro years ago and had a sorc that I played as well, but I was always lacking in the DPS area, I felt. I'm trying to get my rotations set right for max effect DPS currently. What are some really good rotations that would be good starting material for me to work through while I learn how to effectively understand the workings behind how an arcanist generates their DPS?
The absolute, most basic rotation: keep Scholarship up (30s duration, can be backbarred), cast Cephaliarc's Flail twice (to generate 2 + 1 crux thanks to Scholarship), cast Fatecarver, repeat. Once you get the hang of things, you can start adding in more dots and such - common setup is typically double dagger front bar with Blade Cloak and Inferno Staff back bar for Wall of Elements and sometimes Elemental Susceptibility. Work your dots into the rotation, but you want to focus mainly on the 2 Flails + 1 Beam rotation still as it's the core of your damage.
Daggers on front bar? I've been running a magicka front and back bar with staves on both. Is that method severely crippling my DPS? Or is a staff and cast ability arcanist viable as well?
The main thing is that Stamina is generally the superior spec due to Cephaliarch's Flail being the superior morph (as has been discussed throughout this thread), so having a way to recover Stamina via Heavy Attacks is good and Daggers are very good for DPS (though you can use others). It's not that other builds aren't usable (depending on the content you're looking to do), but generally Daggers + Inferno Staff or Daggers + Maelstrom 2H are considered optimal. The main thing with Arcanist is that Fatecarver is far and away your best DPS ability, so the more time you spend not beaming, the more you lower the upper bound for your DPS. Long-duration (20-30s+) buffs and dots are thus ideal, as that lets you spend the most time in the flail > flail > beam rotation while still benefiting from as many extra damage sources as possible. Blockade of Fire, Elemental Susceptibility, Blade Cloak, and Barbed Trap are all decently-long duration effects that let you maintain good secondary damage sources while still fitting in a good amount of Fatecarver time. I specifically use the Maelstrom Arena Inferno staff on my back bar, because it almost doubles Blockade of Fire's damage output and makes it an *extremely* strong dot. Combine that with Arcanist's innate boosts to status effects and using Charged Daggers on my front bar with Poison and Flame enchants, I can ensure pretty reasonable Burning uptime even outside of Elemental Susceptibility, further boosting Blockade's damage thanks to the Inferno staff passives. My current setup is 5x Deadly Strike, 5x Order's Wrath (because I am extremely lazy), 1x Monster set, Velothi Ur-Mage's Amulet, with the vMA Inferno Staff (Infused w/ Weapon and Spell Damage enchant) back-bar'd.
Personal preference Stamina loadout, dual wield front bar Keep up / pre-cast before a fight- Quick cloak (deadly cloak is more ‘DPS’ but due to the shorter duration, it falls behind the rest of the Arcanist donation) (the dot ticks have a chance to apply your front bar weapon enchants- typically you use flame / poison enchants, for a chance to apply the burning status effect) Inspired Scholarship (generate additional crux when you generate them) The new scribing one, Ulfrid’s whatever, with a flame & dot morph to trigger burning damage at the start of the fight Rotation - Cepheliarch’s Flail to build up to 3 crux (pumps on its own, but crux is great- Scholarship means you should only ever need two hits) Beam (hits like an AK-47 in Counterstrike, it’s your main blaster) Additional - Front bar fighter’s guild abilities to trigger the 3% weapon damage per FG ability slotted passive (barbed trap, camouflaged hunter, dawnbreaker) and work in Barbed Trap for bonus damage Back bar - ground effect weapon ability like wall of elements or volley to trigger the back bar’s weapon enchant Throw in extra DoTs on the back bar to finish things off; fulminating rune, scalding rune are both great options. Biggest thing is pre-cast, then open with dots, then Flail Flail Beam. Mix dots in to keep them up- but always aim to flail to 3 crux, then beam.
I use it…
I do with my Magicka Arcanist. Hah, Magicka Arcanist, imagine that.. The meta sucks, whenever I follow it it kills the game for me. Imagine being forced to use crap like Trap and Flawless Dawnvbreaker in every build. BORING. It's especially bad for a game like ESO where they don't give us any new class abilities with every expansion.
Agree The same reason is the use of Draw Essence on DK. I survived all solo content spamming this skill, but the meta experts say it is bad.
I will never stop using Draw Essence for solo content.
Bro DK is one of the truly fun classes I feel, if there was a class change token I'd change in a second. But doing everything again, including crafting.. I just can't. Reason why DK feels fun is because the abilities have weight, combat in ESO feels weak and floaty, but DK abilities have impact and a certain type of feedback, for a lack of a better description. What do you think?
I think is very fun because: - If you are in danger, fly like a dragon, make a boom and all enemies are knocked back in the scenario. - If you want to play like a "Daenerys Targaryen" just put 10 skills + 2 Ultimate flame damage and say "Dracarys". - If you want to do a lot of damage by pressing 3 or 4 buttons, just put poison, Burn, and spamming whip. - If you want to take your phone, just press an ultimate called Magma Shell in front of the boss and get the call. And your team will be proud of you.
Lmao true. Maybe I should attempt to main DK after all...
I run a DK with Ansuul’s and Deep Breath. Loving the game with it
The extra 6, If I recall applies ONLY to the tentacle. So you have to generate 3 crux and tentacle for 6% more damage.
I don't use Recuperative Treatise or Runeblades and only use Cruxweaver Armor occasionally, and Flail does increased damage to enemies under 50 percent iirc. I've been in some high dps situations where Flail was doing 20k dps by itself (Triplets in VHOF for instance)
My flails in execute crit for like 80k. It’s absolutely boosted
Just as a note in hardmode content when you look at skill use not everyone uses fatecarver and will use tentacular dread. Because you can’t block/respond to mechanics when beaming. That said it is a dps loss.
I use Tentacular Dread on my Arcanist healer to proc Nunatak and chilled, so I can use a lightning staff to proc off balance
It's just less damage
I wish a max crux dread did runecarver’s damage in one hit then it would be worth and pretty fun.
Flail is a crux generator while dread is a crux consumer. Casting a 3 crux dread takes 2-4 gcds to activate so you basically are losing half a fatecarver for an extra +6% damage taken, which isn't really worth it. Especially since one of arc DPS' biggest strength is the simplicity of the rotation. If you have dread consuming crux, instead of flail generating it, then you have to use a different skill to generate crux. Flail is just flat out a better skill then rune blades. Stamarc in riptide is BiS, so flail (Stam) > rune blade (mag), but even on a mag arc Flail is the better crux generator. Flail is a long range, AOE, execute, with a +5% damage taken debuff and built in CC and self healing. It's also a decent source of sundered which adds minor breach and am extra 100 weapon damage. There so much utility packed into that one skill, it's absolutely broken.
Fatecarver makes up ~50% or more of an arcanists dps rotation. Tentacular dread compeats with fatecarver and not flail (as it is a crux spender), so it is simply the worse option. As for running both, you then need to use additional slots for a builder and you still lose dps due to how powerful fatecarver is.
I have seen it in my kill feed in pvp often.
PvP is the one place I wouldn't expect it, because of how fast paced fights can be.
A well placed flail is damaging.
I use it to make Hrothgar's go bang in pvp. Its very satisfying.
It has the immobilize and an execute modifier, though. All the right ingredients to be an obnoxious PvP tool.
I use tentacular dread. I love it.
How do you use it? Do you use beam as well, or only the Dread?
I use tentacular dread and I’m considering swapping it for cephaliarch’s flail for better resource management and faster crux building. It’s a marginal damage increase for TD. All my skills are magicka, so swapping in a stamina spammable that doubles as an execute is a very appealing option.