loveeso wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

loveeso wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

p00tx wrote: »

endgamesmug wrote: »

I just thought it'd be good to figure out what was going wrong for people struggling with this concept. For me I feel blessed that after utterly failing my first class which was mag sorc, i became better with my 2nd character a khajit stamblade which with that class it was part of activating skills and building ulti etc as an nb. So when i had to use that habit on other classes later down the track it wasnt a big deal, im very far from the na server so skills not going off and swaps not happening that goes on but i just keep on with it what else is there to do really but carry on as usual. With practice and repetition it just gets easier for me for everything, familiarity and deeper experience with understanding. Thats my 2 cents anyway 😁

Some people can and some people can't or won't. Everyone has their reasons and they're all fine and valid. There are heavy attack sorcs and now Arcanists with the Velothi mythic as an option, and they both do more than enough damage to complete all content in the game, aside from maybe the Swashbuckler Supreme title for heavy attack sorcs. I don't think this is even a discussion worth having anymore now that so much more of the community has access to so much more of the game's content. The devs heard the need and delivered with this new class.

Ok, something here to note about arcanists that is pretty misunderstood. You DO actually need to be able to weave to play it at a high level. You want to hit 100k? 110k? Guess what, you will run out of sustain very quickly if you dont weave. Use a high stam restoration food and your stam will be too high and coral will hit poor numbers. Lower skill player have a hard time with the resource management mini game pretty much across the board. For those just wanting 80k, sure its a good option if you replace coral. In content hitting good numbers can also be challenging for some players if mechanics are not well understood. Beam must be timed so you aren't constantly interrupted by block or knock back mechanics. HA single bar builds however are constantly a good option for folks in that position.

Light attacks restoring resources without using a special skill like, for example, Nightblade’s Leeching Strikes? According to my knowledge they do not restore resources - never noticed it and never saw anything like that mentioned in any of the reliable sources I used (e.g. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Combat#Light_Attack ). Do you have a source for this?

I vaguely remember ZOS tested the idea that LAs would restore resources on the PTS long time ago but quickly gave up on it because it would unbalance the game.

I did not say light attacks DIRECTLY restore resources if you look at my post. I said it is necessary for sustain its not the same thing although there are skills and procs that do this.

Let me clarify what im talking about here when i say light attacks are important for sustain:

They function as a restore indirectly in the sense that they require no resources to perform there by giving you time when not using skills which actually have associated costs in which to recover. If you spam skills you will simply run out otherwise it is essentially dead space in your rotation.

They are also essential for building ultimate. Now while heavy attacks do restore resources and ultimate directly with classes that require high aps you will simply not hit the same numbers that way. you are directly sacrificing damage for sustain and only in the case where you have empower will heavy attacks really be viable to make up any of that but it will never reach the same numbers.

Thanks, that's exactly what I suspected to be the source of your confusion about the association between light-attack weaving and sustain but I preferred to ask first in order to confirm and ask about your source instead of jumping to conclusions.

Yes, indeed, it's true that if one's build (and that includes rotation ofc) is not optimised, one can run into sustain problems, and this optimisation depends on one's weaving. Most of us, veterans, have seen it many times but for anyone who hasn't, it's really easy to see with a simple test:

1. Create a build which can be sustained on the trial dummy with the weaving average of, let's say, around 200ms.
2. Keep the same build and do another parse but this time increase your speed to reach a weaving average of, let's say, 50ms.

You will run into sustain problems.

That means that as you get better at weaving, your build needs to be tuned to your new weaving average for you to be able to sustain. We've all been there and had to adapt our builds.

Now, because of GCD you cannot cast more than one skill per second, but since nobody is perfect, even the best of us will waste some time (i.e. cast skills less frequently than once per second) while weaving so when you skip light attacks, you may run into sustain problems the same way you did when you improved your weaving average from 200ms to 50ms. The solution stays the same - one must modify one's build.

Now returning to the context of what you wrote earlier, I hope you can see that wether one performs light attacks or not while using an Arcanist does not matter as far as sustain is concerned. What matters is using the right build or not speeding up one's rotation too much. If you skip light attacks but maintain exactly the same speed, your DPS stays the same (sans the negligible 1% of LA damage (the amulet) and the lower ultimate generation) and you will have no sustain problems. If you are not able to control your speed, it's best to attune your build so that you can sustain. Most people will not skip all light attacks of course. They will only miss some.

All in all, this makes an Arcanist with the amulet a relatively easy build to play (huge cleave & DPS of well above 110k even with very sloppy light attack weaving) and practically a direct replacement for a now nerfed lighting HA sorcerer as I've explained in some of my other posts on this forum.

I have nothing against the Arcanist being so easy, mind you. It's not my favourite but I do have one Arcanist, too.

Mm there are are some major caveats here:

1) as i said in a prior post, when it comes to actual content the dps of an inexperienced player on an arc vs an experienced player vs a ha sorc is wildly different. Sorcs had simple straight cleave damage, no stacking required meaning if they had to block their damage would be the same before and after without additional steps, they were more mobile, and had better mitigation and healing. They also have easier access to mitigation, should you have to run cruxweaver and runeward to get close to the protection ha had on one bar you will be forced into a two bar setup or sacrifice a lot of damage. Experienced player rarely need to do this. Damage on the dummy for ha was about as close of a translation to what you would get in a semi organized group as you could get which is why so many end game folks used it. To the point that entire raid teams of dps were comprised of them which you cant on an arc as they dont have the same flexibility.

2)A big part of my argument was kind of skimmed over. Stustain does not just apply to the dummy. I have seen even more experienced players run out of sustain in content for the reasons i mentioned above. Again wildly different from ha that are almost incapable of dealing with that issue. Changing your gear significantly for content is going to impact your dps a lot. The folks hitting 110-130k use coral, something i can successfully run in content but newer players in many if not most cases can't.

There really are quite a few issues that are simply not comparable. Telling people it is a 1 and done option is just not the truth here. I disagree that the goal was to allow new players to hit the same numbers as experienced dps in any way except on paper.

I think it was created to get new players a base level of decent content damage that scales up the more experienced you are which is why i like it but lets not play here. Newbies on the dummy will never get close to that damage in content like they could on the sorc, experienced players can. Any class has the ability to put out the damage to complete any content with the right skill. You cant do it just by virtue of using a specific class. You absolutely could do ss with a competant arc dps but you can also do that with any other class. Your average player on any class will get whomed in that situation. I dout they could complete vkahm just by virtue of the block and interrupt mechanics required to time beam correctly. Ha sorcs could actually ignore many mechanics, a prime example being the olms jump in vas2. He could land on your head if you had ageis and blocked, you lost very little damage by having this. Arcs just cant do that.

MudcrabAttack wrote: »

loveeso wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

loveeso wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

p00tx wrote: »

endgamesmug wrote: »

I just thought it'd be good to figure out what was going wrong for people struggling with this concept. For me I feel blessed that after utterly failing my first class which was mag sorc, i became better with my 2nd character a khajit stamblade which with that class it was part of activating skills and building ulti etc as an nb. So when i had to use that habit on other classes later down the track it wasnt a big deal, im very far from the na server so skills not going off and swaps not happening that goes on but i just keep on with it what else is there to do really but carry on as usual. With practice and repetition it just gets easier for me for everything, familiarity and deeper experience with understanding. Thats my 2 cents anyway 😁

Some people can and some people can't or won't. Everyone has their reasons and they're all fine and valid. There are heavy attack sorcs and now Arcanists with the Velothi mythic as an option, and they both do more than enough damage to complete all content in the game, aside from maybe the Swashbuckler Supreme title for heavy attack sorcs. I don't think this is even a discussion worth having anymore now that so much more of the community has access to so much more of the game's content. The devs heard the need and delivered with this new class.

Ok, something here to note about arcanists that is pretty misunderstood. You DO actually need to be able to weave to play it at a high level. You want to hit 100k? 110k? Guess what, you will run out of sustain very quickly if you dont weave. Use a high stam restoration food and your stam will be too high and coral will hit poor numbers. Lower skill player have a hard time with the resource management mini game pretty much across the board. For those just wanting 80k, sure its a good option if you replace coral. In content hitting good numbers can also be challenging for some players if mechanics are not well understood. Beam must be timed so you aren't constantly interrupted by block or knock back mechanics. HA single bar builds however are constantly a good option for folks in that position.

Light attacks restoring resources without using a special skill like, for example, Nightblade’s Leeching Strikes? According to my knowledge they do not restore resources - never noticed it and never saw anything like that mentioned in any of the reliable sources I used (e.g. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Combat#Light_Attack ). Do you have a source for this?

I vaguely remember ZOS tested the idea that LAs would restore resources on the PTS long time ago but quickly gave up on it because it would unbalance the game.

I did not say light attacks DIRECTLY restore resources if you look at my post. I said it is necessary for sustain its not the same thing although there are skills and procs that do this.

Let me clarify what im talking about here when i say light attacks are important for sustain:

They function as a restore indirectly in the sense that they require no resources to perform there by giving you time when not using skills which actually have associated costs in which to recover. If you spam skills you will simply run out otherwise it is essentially dead space in your rotation.

They are also essential for building ultimate. Now while heavy attacks do restore resources and ultimate directly with classes that require high aps you will simply not hit the same numbers that way. you are directly sacrificing damage for sustain and only in the case where you have empower will heavy attacks really be viable to make up any of that but it will never reach the same numbers.

Thanks, that's exactly what I suspected to be the source of your confusion about the association between light-attack weaving and sustain but I preferred to ask first in order to confirm and ask about your source instead of jumping to conclusions.

Yes, indeed, it's true that if one's build (and that includes rotation ofc) is not optimised, one can run into sustain problems, and this optimisation depends on one's weaving. Most of us, veterans, have seen it many times but for anyone who hasn't, it's really easy to see with a simple test:

1. Create a build which can be sustained on the trial dummy with the weaving average of, let's say, around 200ms.
2. Keep the same build and do another parse but this time increase your speed to reach a weaving average of, let's say, 50ms.

You will run into sustain problems.

That means that as you get better at weaving, your build needs to be tuned to your new weaving average for you to be able to sustain. We've all been there and had to adapt our builds.

Now, because of GCD you cannot cast more than one skill per second, but since nobody is perfect, even the best of us will waste some time (i.e. cast skills less frequently than once per second) while weaving so when you skip light attacks, you may run into sustain problems the same way you did when you improved your weaving average from 200ms to 50ms. The solution stays the same - one must modify one's build.

Now returning to the context of what you wrote earlier, I hope you can see that wether one performs light attacks or not while using an Arcanist does not matter as far as sustain is concerned. What matters is using the right build or not speeding up one's rotation too much. If you skip light attacks but maintain exactly the same speed, your DPS stays the same (sans the negligible 1% of LA damage (the amulet) and the lower ultimate generation) and you will have no sustain problems. If you are not able to control your speed, it's best to attune your build so that you can sustain. Most people will not skip all light attacks of course. They will only miss some.

All in all, this makes an Arcanist with the amulet a relatively easy build to play (huge cleave & DPS of well above 110k even with very sloppy light attack weaving) and practically a direct replacement for a now nerfed lighting HA sorcerer as I've explained in some of my other posts on this forum.

I have nothing against the Arcanist being so easy, mind you. It's not my favourite but I do have one Arcanist, too.

This sounds accurate, I noticed light attack weaving adds an extra time gap between skills, due in part to my own skill limitations.

On my archer nightblade with perfect weaving it’s 1.09 seconds between each skill landing. Without any light attacks it’s 1.03 seconds between skills, it’s a wood elf character with no sustain issues, so I’m always trying to push the skill speed high as possible without missing light attacks. Even though ~ 6% less time is wasted with no light attacks, light attacks would make up around 10% of the damage, hawk eye adds 25% to bow skills, assassin’s will deals a huge chunk of damage, so velothi amulet is completely off the table for my nightblade

On my Arcanist I’ll only light attack once before casting each beam. The beam is cast every 9-10 seconds so there’s really no problem with ultimate regen, and any extra light attacks will translate to dps loss by adding another sliver of time between skills. Again there aren’t any sustain issues when I play in a group setting with orbs. Since choral riptide is equipped I keep stamina low as possible, and that makes me the target of symphony of blades all the time. So whenever I’m not beaming I often have to hold block while casting the other skills, and so I’ll slot bracing anchor CP because of it, why not be as tanky as a tank while dpsing…

Bracing anchor? On a low mobility class? What content are you playing that you can manage that effectively? Any mobity fights you are not necessarily going to always get that, portals are an excellent example. Also beam should be cast a lot more frequenty then that. It should be about 6 secs every 2nd rotation since all but one dot should be up already from your first rotation prior to beam meaning dot, la, flail, la, flail, la, beam. What is your dps because i can absolutely guarantee you are losing ulti which should be combined with beam to get the highest damage. Its simply impossible.

MudcrabAttack wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

MudcrabAttack wrote: »

loveeso wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

loveeso wrote: »

boi_anachronism_ wrote: »

p00tx wrote: »

endgamesmug wrote: »

I just thought it'd be good to figure out what was going wrong for people struggling with this concept. For me I feel blessed that after utterly failing my first class which was mag sorc, i became better with my 2nd character a khajit stamblade which with that class it was part of activating skills and building ulti etc as an nb. So when i had to use that habit on other classes later down the track it wasnt a big deal, im very far from the na server so skills not going off and swaps not happening that goes on but i just keep on with it what else is there to do really but carry on as usual. With practice and repetition it just gets easier for me for everything, familiarity and deeper experience with understanding. Thats my 2 cents anyway 😁

Some people can and some people can't or won't. Everyone has their reasons and they're all fine and valid. There are heavy attack sorcs and now Arcanists with the Velothi mythic as an option, and they both do more than enough damage to complete all content in the game, aside from maybe the Swashbuckler Supreme title for heavy attack sorcs. I don't think this is even a discussion worth having anymore now that so much more of the community has access to so much more of the game's content. The devs heard the need and delivered with this new class.

Ok, something here to note about arcanists that is pretty misunderstood. You DO actually need to be able to weave to play it at a high level. You want to hit 100k? 110k? Guess what, you will run out of sustain very quickly if you dont weave. Use a high stam restoration food and your stam will be too high and coral will hit poor numbers. Lower skill player have a hard time with the resource management mini game pretty much across the board. For those just wanting 80k, sure its a good option if you replace coral. In content hitting good numbers can also be challenging for some players if mechanics are not well understood. Beam must be timed so you aren't constantly interrupted by block or knock back mechanics. HA single bar builds however are constantly a good option for folks in that position.

Light attacks restoring resources without using a special skill like, for example, Nightblade’s Leeching Strikes? According to my knowledge they do not restore resources - never noticed it and never saw anything like that mentioned in any of the reliable sources I used (e.g. https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Combat#Light_Attack ). Do you have a source for this?

I vaguely remember ZOS tested the idea that LAs would restore resources on the PTS long time ago but quickly gave up on it because it would unbalance the game.

I did not say light attacks DIRECTLY restore resources if you look at my post. I said it is necessary for sustain its not the same thing although there are skills and procs that do this.

Let me clarify what im talking about here when i say light attacks are important for sustain:

They function as a restore indirectly in the sense that they require no resources to perform there by giving you time when not using skills which actually have associated costs in which to recover. If you spam skills you will simply run out otherwise it is essentially dead space in your rotation.

They are also essential for building ultimate. Now while heavy attacks do restore resources and ultimate directly with classes that require high aps you will simply not hit the same numbers that way. you are directly sacrificing damage for sustain and only in the case where you have empower will heavy attacks really be viable to make up any of that but it will never reach the same numbers.

Thanks, that's exactly what I suspected to be the source of your confusion about the association between light-attack weaving and sustain but I preferred to ask first in order to confirm and ask about your source instead of jumping to conclusions.

Yes, indeed, it's true that if one's build (and that includes rotation ofc) is not optimised, one can run into sustain problems, and this optimisation depends on one's weaving. Most of us, veterans, have seen it many times but for anyone who hasn't, it's really easy to see with a simple test:

1. Create a build which can be sustained on the trial dummy with the weaving average of, let's say, around 200ms.
2. Keep the same build and do another parse but this time increase your speed to reach a weaving average of, let's say, 50ms.

You will run into sustain problems.

That means that as you get better at weaving, your build needs to be tuned to your new weaving average for you to be able to sustain. We've all been there and had to adapt our builds.

Now, because of GCD you cannot cast more than one skill per second, but since nobody is perfect, even the best of us will waste some time (i.e. cast skills less frequently than once per second) while weaving so when you skip light attacks, you may run into sustain problems the same way you did when you improved your weaving average from 200ms to 50ms. The solution stays the same - one must modify one's build.

Now returning to the context of what you wrote earlier, I hope you can see that wether one performs light attacks or not while using an Arcanist does not matter as far as sustain is concerned. What matters is using the right build or not speeding up one's rotation too much. If you skip light attacks but maintain exactly the same speed, your DPS stays the same (sans the negligible 1% of LA damage (the amulet) and the lower ultimate generation) and you will have no sustain problems. If you are not able to control your speed, it's best to attune your build so that you can sustain. Most people will not skip all light attacks of course. They will only miss some.

All in all, this makes an Arcanist with the amulet a relatively easy build to play (huge cleave & DPS of well above 110k even with very sloppy light attack weaving) and practically a direct replacement for a now nerfed lighting HA sorcerer as I've explained in some of my other posts on this forum.

I have nothing against the Arcanist being so easy, mind you. It's not my favourite but I do have one Arcanist, too.

This sounds accurate, I noticed light attack weaving adds an extra time gap between skills, due in part to my own skill limitations.

On my archer nightblade with perfect weaving it’s 1.09 seconds between each skill landing. Without any light attacks it’s 1.03 seconds between skills, it’s a wood elf character with no sustain issues, so I’m always trying to push the skill speed high as possible without missing light attacks. Even though ~ 6% less time is wasted with no light attacks, light attacks would make up around 10% of the damage, hawk eye adds 25% to bow skills, assassin’s will deals a huge chunk of damage, so velothi amulet is completely off the table for my nightblade

On my Arcanist I’ll only light attack once before casting each beam. The beam is cast every 9-10 seconds so there’s really no problem with ultimate regen, and any extra light attacks will translate to dps loss by adding another sliver of time between skills. Again there aren’t any sustain issues when I play in a group setting with orbs. Since choral riptide is equipped I keep stamina low as possible, and that makes me the target of symphony of blades all the time. So whenever I’m not beaming I often have to hold block while casting the other skills, and so I’ll slot bracing anchor CP because of it, why not be as tanky as a tank while dpsing…

Bracing anchor? On a low mobility class? What content are you playing that you can manage that effectively? Any mobity fights you are not necessarily going to always get that, portals are an excellent example. Also beam should be cast a lot more frequenty then that. It should be about 6 secs every 2nd rotation since all but one dot should be up already from your first rotation prior to beam meaning dot, la, flail, la, flail, la, beam. What is your dps because i can absolutely guarantee you are losing ulti which should be combined with beam to get the highest damage. Its simply impossible.

Lately my group is working on vKA dawnbreaker, so the only time I’m not just standing around dpsing is when we’re all moving into a position for the lightning chain with Falgravn, or dodge rolling the poison on Yandir. When I need to be mobile and my stamina is growing out of hand I’ll roll dodge my way wherever I’m going.

I’m using 2 bars. So an example rotation from last night would be

Flail, (rotation switch between zenas empowering disk / quick cloak), inspired scholarship, elemental blockade, Flail, Light Attack, pragmatic fatecarver, Flail, quick cloak (every 30 seconds or so), Rune of colorless pool, flail, Light Attack pragmatic

Its around 9 seconds between each light attack. , and there’s a lot of magic skills in the mix. I got 95k last night on falgravn, and I was using 2 non-damaging skills to add minor brittle and minor courage since the tank wasn’t adding those.

As far as ultimate generation goes it’s gaining pretty consistently through the fight

Yeah so there you go. Vka is one of the very few spots where you would use bracing and that makes perfect sense, a lot of leads require it although my group runs bastion which allows us to run a single shield and our arc healer provides zenas to keep damage higher. It being vka is a detail to not leave out. You very much are just supposed to stand and dps, as you are aware movement for vrol for example is in stages and happens with your entire group. It is a trial that is literally designed for low mobilty classes, it also proves that you are very mechanically aware if you are working db. Something newer arc player arent, you know how to time skills. So to say a newer player would be able to accomplish this just by virtue of the class is not true. Additionally of course you get good sustain because you will pretty much always be in range of a healer. This is not the case in many trials. You provide your own. For reference my current progs are vsehm, a trial I very much do have to self sustain at points and cloudrest triple skip/gh. I hit over 100k on my arc and the other arc dps in my group is north of 115k. No heroism pots. You are losing ulti.

Sorry for bit of a necro...

What stands in the way of me doing weaving?

Arthritis. After having played games for over 30 years, and been a programmer, IT, and more... my knuckles despise me. But, I have short and stubby fingers, too, so KB/M isn't a great fit. I need a controller. Well, my thumb knuckles are pretty well off, none of those things really required them to any extent.

My fingers, though... ACK!

So, using triggers and bumpers every few seconds? Fine. Every second... not fine. I say second, because the GCD is 1 second, and you want to weave a light attack in between each ability, so... hit an ability, then hit a LA, then an ability, then a LA, etc.

For a few moments, ok. But, a lot of fights are multiple minutes, and those fights are only 1 of several in a dungeon or trial. By end of a single dungeon, I need to rest and/or ice my knuckles for an hour or so? There's no reason games should do that to their players. Players should never have to cause themselves severe pain just to beat end-game content, not even top tier stuff, but basic end-game.

If there are players who want that level of complexity, activity, etc? Go play BDO, it requires all kinds of complicated 'Street Fighter'/'Mortal Kombat' level combos and button presses. This is an active game, yeah, but no reason this game should require that of players.

My opinion, YMMV.

It's not an intuitive way to fight given the genre norms.

That's it.

When I play a single player TES game and don't have to worry about client-side vs server-side timing issues and errors, it's fine.

When I play an MMO, I expect an auto attack while I manage skills.

Probably because I am old.