What Bow Weapon Trait is BiS for Solo/Small Group Play

kylewwefan

I was told by numerous players that Nirnhoned was BiS so I’d been rolling with that for awhile now. I just got a Precise bow and had a Sharpened one lying around so figured I’d test them out on Khajit StamBlade.

Testing Endless Hail

The Precise one is fairly consistently 1200 more DPS per cast. 5 TFS/ 3 VO on Bow Bar/ 1 Kraghs/ 1 Chudan 67CP piercing Lover. I might actually be over penetrating a bit here.

I Know it’s an unconventional setup, but it’s been working for me. Also, I’m not fully nuking down the Dummy, just trying to figure out how much damage each cast.

So theoretically that 10 second cast gets average 12k more damage using Precise.

The Sharpened one was quite a bit behind, that was kind of surprising to me because I setup to be fully penetrated with it.

Every now and then Nirnhoned would be about on par but more consistently 1k or so behind.

Sharpened 8500DPS
Nirnhoned 9500DPS
Precise 10500DPS

So, with a certain weapon, an oddball setup and one skill, can get 10500DPS. I really thaught Sharpened would be better, and it might with a different setup.

I use Chudan and Bone pirate on this toon. Kraghs was only on to fully penetrate. Veledreth is better Damage sure, but survival is King IMO.

This was also done with 2 recovery Enchants and one Weapon Damage.

Asardes

Endless Hail scales off much like the other skills, by "weapon power", meaning it will be a constant multiplied by "weapon power" which is maximum stamina/10.5 + weapon damage. The thing is that the bow trait doesn't matter much, since it's an AoE DoT and each tick will scale off your current stats. Since it lasts for 10s, most of the ticks will actually be on the front bar, so the weapon traits of your daggers will matter more than your bow one for this skill. The effect is even stronger for Maelstrom bow, since ticks also get multiplied by the bow unique effect, and the last ones will always be on your front bar.

Nirnhoned gives you 200 weapon damage on a gold CP160 1H weapon, if it's main hand, and much less if it's off-hand, probably ~40, so it's not worth using it there. Those values are multiplied by various things: Major Brutality adds 20%, slotting Flawless Dawnbreaker is 8% and wearing 5 pieces of Medium Armor unlocks Agility passive that gives another 12%. So a 40% bonus. That 200 becomes 280 in practice. Your buffed weapon damage with 5 TFS 5 VO should be ~3.5K w/o nirnhoned main hand so that will boost it to ~3.8K. Your stamina should be around 34K with blue food. So your weapon power will be 6.75K w/o nirnhoned main hand and 7.05 with it. This mean that Endless Hail front bar ticks will be ~4.5% stronger because of it.

Precise gives you 3.5% more critical chance per 1H weapon equipped. Depending on your critical multiplier the amount that adds will vary. Your critical attacks will do 1.5x normal damage by default. 56 CP in Precise Strikes add 20%, Hemorrhage passive adds another 10%, and Minor Force (Rearming Trap) adds another 10%. So your critical multiplier will be 1.9x. This means that over a longer fight Precise will add ~3% to your DPS with the said CP distribution.

Sharpened is more complicated, and you should actually know how much mitigation the target has to do your calculation. Since you already mentioned 67 CP that is 4.7K penetration already and you have 0.1K by default so 4.8K on character. Lover mondus adds another 4.2K with 7 divines, TFS adds 4.3K and Kra'gh another 1.5K. Major Fracture from Surprise Attack another 5.3K. You have a total penetration of 20.1K. Since all enemies in dungeons and trials have 18.2K the last 1.9K are wasted even when running solo. So I recommend putting much less CP in Piercing and putting more in Thaumaturge and Master at Arms instead. I typically put 35 there for 3K penetration. Just like any CP it has fast diminishing returns. So if you are already using Lover mundus you'll overpenetrate by a lot more, since the bow adds 2.7K and 1H weapons add 1.35K.

So I would go nirnhoned main hand, precise off-hand in order to optimize the damage done by Endless hail for the last ticks of the bow. Also for the first ticks that occur on the back bar Precise will be probably better by Nirnhoned, but that depends a bit on your stats, since your overall weapon damage will a lot lower on the back bar so, proportionally, a Nirhoned weapon will boost them more, since it's a fixed amount.

Also testing Endless Hail alone is misleading since in a normal rotation you would also add stacks of Hawk Eye from LA weaving, and also you would apply Major Fracture from Surprise Attack. So testing a skill by itself is mostly irrelevant. I recommend using either a parsing addon, or looking at actual parse breakdown in build videos to see how it actually performs.

Danksta

If you're casting endless hail and just staying on that bar that isn't an accurate representation of what your damage would be if doing a full rotation. Your crit chance doesn't carry over and that's why precise preforms pretty poorly compared to nirnhoned back bar. That's my understanding of it anyways.

kylewwefan

We don’t get all that cool stuff on console. Heck it doesn’t even tell you how much penetration you have.

What you can see is mobs life bar disappearing seemingly much faster with more penetration than more weapon power.

I think that sharpened may be better on my StamSorc and Stamplar, but everyone’s rocking Nirnhoned because somebody told me it was best.

I’m not sure what to think about skills changing their damage by what bar you’re on. I’m swapping around so much it’s impossible to tell. Maybe that’s also a console thing.

I don’t normally use Kraghs. I put it on there for the extra pen. I used Veledreth for a long time. Now I’ve really been liking Chudan/pirate to get resistance up. It makes this guy a lot stronger and Damage is still pretty good.

Asardes

You can use sharpened off-hand for classes that lack access to Major Fracture, and even on classes that have access to it if you want to go with Warrior against enemies with less resistance. Ex. trash mobs in vMA only have 9K resistance and with Major Fracture and about 25 CP in Piercing you are at 7.7K so a Sharp off-hand will allow you to go Warrior and still have full penetration on your front bar. Stats are quite easy to calculate if you use this website: http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildEditor