With Build 31 I decided to start fresh, this time focusing on an Arcanist. What I’m thinking of is gearing for +Elemental damage, and skilling up large cooldown-based abilities. Devastation, Sky Shards, Flash Freeze, with the occasional materia support ability. It’s a blast so far in Veteran, but I know that’s largely due to the strength of Flash Freeze at low levels.
Thing is, it’s a nice change from focusing on a single spammable ability.
I’m curious to hear from the community:
Am I dooming myself to fail in Elite/Ultimate with this strategy?
Without a teleport (Blitz and Shadow Strike put you into melee rather than escape it), what’s your recommendation for surviving? I’m sure the optimal answer comes from . . .
What supporting class would you recommend?
Here’s what I’m toying with in general for each combo. I’m using Greater Fireblast on LMB, but I’m not married to it:
My most successful Ultimate character so far is a Druid. 79 at Smuggler’s Pass. Nothing real dangerous though clear speed is probably lowish. I haven’t played B31 but was doing good in B30. I’m not sure about the viability of +Elemental gear and incorporating Devastation. I’m wearing Eastern set (cold/lightning) and have 219% Elemental damage across the rest of gear. Gives me 336% Fire, 937% Cold, 1012% Lightning, 176% Aether sheet stats when buffed. I could probably get more Fire but I would lose +skills to do so. I’m focusing more on TSS so it works for me.
Wind Devil has a slow and TSS has a freeze which helps survivability. Sky Shards also crit for 10k+ so kiting is fairly short except versus heroes/bosses. And other times kiting is prolonged if my Shards don’t hit anything.
Sorcerer for Flame Touched might be the best route to keep Fire damage high. You could then de-emphasize Cold damage and make TSS more Lightning based than my character. And now I want to try that.
I’m currently trying something similar and having a lot of issues. E.g. when I look at your build it hurts so much to see subclass taken for a single skill line, which is not even maxed, and a hp aura. I see a strong synergy between these two classes, but the amount of skill points is just too small to make it work.
I’m in the same boat as OP, I leveled an Arcanist to L75 in B30 but i restarted my account for B31/1.0. I used OFF, TSS, Devastation. It was great up until Ultimate L80+ where the damage started to trail off. Survivability was fine though, I didn’t have the greatest gear. i was around 21/26 TSS and +3 arcanist skills. Lots of room for improvement.
I didn’t pick a 2nd mastery as all the choices were a difficult, had decent pros/cons. Not many spare points to go around maxing both Devastation and Star Pact, whichever choice can’t do much with it.
You have time in this build to grab another skill, things like Flash bang, CoF or Wind Devil could easily be cast in between cooldowns and not lose any DPS. You need resist reduction from somewhere, I used Rhowans Crown for that, but a source of % resist reduction would be great.
I think that’s more an issue of TSS than the masteries directly. I could drop Frozen Core to free up some points for Storm Totem, but beyond that there isn’t much left. I don’t want an LMB (Savagery/Primal Strike), Wendigo/Swarm don’t match my damage types, and Stormcaller’s Pact is inferior to Star Pact.
My character is focused specifically for the Trozan’s armor set (if I can acquire it). As spfun mentioned there just wasn’t a whole lot from another mastery to pair with TSS. A thought does occur to me now that if one has a Warpfire the Sorcerer route looks even better. Plus it opens access to Flashbang, Canister Bomb, and Vindictive Flame. Still suffers from a lack of overall skill points though. :undecided:
EDIT: Re-read your post and I think we’re saying the same thing. Not sure how I missed that earlier.
I kinda feel like if you want to max OFF/TSS and star pact with devastation its probably fair enough that you have to stay pure arcanist.
If anything I’m imagining a build where you totally drop the sky shards, but keep the OFF for -fire res to help devastation. With the freed up points you can look into another mastery to further scale fire damage somehow and find a good skill to spam in between devestations.
OFF and dev provide pretty damn good aoe and trash clearing so something to help burn down tanky single targets would be ideal.
Thanks for the responses so far! Great to hear I’m not the only one struggling with this.
Right now I’m leaning toward either Spellbreaker or Warlock. Combined with the CDR I’m planning to stack, the heals those classes provide seem very strong.
The question then is: Curse of Frailty for kiting, or Blade Barrier for an extra Mirror effect?
That’s a good point. The right choice there is probably Aether Ray, but at that point we should probably be using Reckless Power over Star Pact, and I was hoping to abuse stacked CDR with powerful cooldown abilities.
That said, maybe the 10% CDR from Star Pact isn’t the game changer I’m hoping for! I’ll have to dig around for mechanic details on how stacking CDR actually works.
OFF only kills low HP trash in Ultimate, Devastation CD is to long to constantly use it on trash unless you’ve stacked some CDR.
TSS could do with a damage buff in a patch. Frozen core should do more to increase the base skills damage, maybe reduce the freeze duration somewhat, currently its just a 1 point wonder currently. Shattered core is to luck based for my liking, not a fan of 15% chance to do damage like it is currently. Both should increase base skill damage in a substantial way to reward heavy investment.
This build is meant to be a kite build, i wouldn’t take a LMB skill as there’s way better builds for that.
Yes, probably we mean the same.
My initial intention was to create cold+lightning caster, and Looking through the skills I would like to have OFF, TSS, wind devil and Storm Totem lines maxed, Plus one of the exclusives. But then I Also need hp aura, maivens, inner focus, arcanist aura, and those are already around 250 skill points. So I end up Having to choose between cold and lightning. This sucks so much, and I was mentioning in my feedback topic that the game is designed to play with single damage type.
