Front bar enchantment question

DUTCH_REAPER · September 2022

On a magic user who uses a staff on the front bar I normally have fire enchant but is that the best enchant for yielding highest dps? I was reading on the oblivion damage enchant and was curious if that would out perform the fire enchant? Or even poison? I feel like I have just “always” used fire and was just curious. Thanks.

Nestor · September 2022

Depends on your Flame Damage Passives. Another way to go is Increased Magic Damage on an Infused Staff.

You can go over to the UESP Build Editor and try out the different combos.

Vevvev · September 2022

Depends on your class. If a Dragonknight definitely fire or poison damage, unless you really need minor vulnerability then go shock.

As for the Oblivion Enchantment... It's not that good.

Oblivion damage is a special case where the damage is based upon the target's max health. The damage tooltip you see is how much damage it'll do to a target with 100,000 health and up.

This means if a target has 30k HP it'll only deal 30% of the tooltip you see.

The good news is this damage 100% ignores all sources of damage mitigation. Armor, major and minor protection, CP, vampire stage 3, Mistform.... It ignores everything and deals raw damage to the target.

Only use Oblivion damage against high HP and high mitigation targets, which rules out most, if not all, PvE content.

WrathOfInnos · September 2022

Depending on your build, it's usually Fire or Poison. Infused does not make a good front bar weapon trait, so this enchant will not deal much damage or proc often, but it will still trigger status effects. Burning and Poisoned are the status effects with the highest damage. If you are using Wall of Flames then you should try to keep good burning uptime, and go with Fire enchant. If you have other sources of Burning (such as Elemental Weapon) and that uptime is already good then go with Poison. Both of these can also be boosted by debuffs like Encratis, Engulfing Flames and Morag Tong.

Shock also has some use for solo builds, because it gives Minor Vulnerability from the Concussion status effect. In groups this is redundant with several class skills and does nothing.

Berserker is also great, but should go back bar on an infused weapon for close to 100% uptime.