Soldier + Arcanist

It wont work without tons of dedicated gear, that doesnt exist. And it doesnt solve the main issue - lack of physical RR. That’s why Spellscourge set has ~10 min clear time, while other builds can have ~7min.

@duminant: You also need an offhand for AAR.

Well in general you also need off-hand for devastation, isn’t it? :wink:

I think it says somewhere in item description that the shield is special? I’ve always just assumed that devastation makes a special exception for spellscourge, but I could be wrong!

Yes, this shield is unique - it works like off-hand for devastation and in theory can work in the same way for AAR.

1 Like

Yup, that’s totally normal shield :smile:

Btw do you think 1h blade arc can carry BM with just 1 point in Devastation, cause that’s what I will try?

I have doubts regarding this - in campaign it could be Ok but too slow. Even now the fight with Fabius feels long,

Base skill of blade-arc has no flat damage. This means that laceration is your only source of flat phys, and @ 22/12, laceration only gives 178 phys damage.

This means that for bladearc to shine, you need to stack huge amounts of flat damage (i.e. 2H’s)

Note: No skill nodes in BA also has +% phys damage - another limitation.

Still better damage compared to dual physical cadence battle mage with Nex & Ortus. :rofl:

I really wish Crate put it on the Myth Decree of Circle of Five, since i think its weird that the weapon have aether damage and no elemental damage yet offering elemental to physical conversion, unlike many other weapon.

Касательно [Decree of the Circle of Five] (https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/12555) , может ему подошла бы активируемая аура (как у перекованного Бероната) для конверсии 100% эфира в физический урон ?
Аура позволит контролировать и использовать орудие для разных сборок.

updated my old spirit battlememe forcewave BM a bit… lost a bit of punch from losing the generalist iskandra stuff, but gained from better augment/components/arcanists buffs/spirit hp buff…+ better devotion route than the original post from forever ago.
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/O2G47bnV

1 Like

I think an obliteration/inferno/devastation mix could be interesting . Something like: Obliteration Battlemage

With the changes in obliteration and the reduced freeze to OFF on the conduit, it might be fun.

Not gonna work. ~350 damage vs enemy armor…you might as well try and use a feather to tickle the balls of nemeses.

Damage isn’t the issue there (in fact it should be quite high tbh), it’s the lack of energy regen (another commonality with Soldiers) and the fact that it won’t benefit at all from the -35% Cost Reduction the build sports.

Want BMage to work? Give it a set with one of two things:

  • OFF support (-% Freeze Res)
  • A 20%+ stackable RR proc or manual cast.

If either weapon slot is taken in such a set, you also want conversion to relevant damage types.


That or go the Cadence route. As Zantai once said for me to paraphrase now, sometimes an underperforming thing just needs a massive numbers amp to be good. Sadly the little tweaks we’ve seen to Spellscourge are far from massive.

Right off the bat - Mate, I’m gonna disagree with you, but I don’t mean to be confrontational/offensive. You know I love you ceno. :stuck_out_tongue:

Regarding the battlemage: Really??? I think high sheet DPS can be very misleading if my tests with warborn EoR is anything to go by. But wtf do I know? (Not being sarcastic here…genuine admission of uncertainty).

And wouldn’t the arcanist fix loads of energy issues with mental alacrity?

Regarding cadence: Can definitely be done. I did up a theoratical warborn battlemage above.

Again, -% Energy Cost reduction does nothing for the build (except make Devastation marginally cheaper, I suppose). The stat does not apply to item skills. That build, by my math, will drain its reserves dry in about 6 seconds of casting at 200% CS.

As to its theoretical damage, it’s nothing to scoff at. 350 raw Physical (and 300 raw IT) with a 2k Phys stat (1900 IT) equates to ~7.4k flat Obliteration ticks before RR/crit, and it’ll tick 8 times a second for ~60k base dps. With procs/RR, should have around 150k-200k applied dps on a giant piercing beam.

Keep in mind, because all of the Physical is coming from one source, it doesn’t suffer from the Armor “bug” and will actually out-scale most Physical Weapon Damage builds, given theoretically-high volumes of % Damage.


My point wasn’t really about Cadence, more how Cadence was made good after a long history of being shit. :wink:

^Could you educate me further, please?

When you have a bunch of individual sources of flat Physical Damage, (e.g., your weapon, your rings, your belt, etc.) they do not sum up before being evaluated against an enemy’s armor. Instead, Armor additively absorbs each source first, and then the results are summed together.

This wasn’t intentional and makes Physical much weaker than it looks on paper, but it’s how the game was balanced around so it’s not being fixed.

THAT’S WHY %DAMAGE IS SO MUCH BETTER ON WB EOR.

Now I get it. Holy shit. Thanks Ceno. You learn something new everyday.

To go offtangent a little because I’d like to know more about this…let’s use EoR as an example

x% WD + y flat phys on the base skill.

Do those 2 things count as “individual sources” too?

I believe so. I’m not 100% sure on whether buffs (Mog Pact) are treated as individual sources, though.