The easiest veteran Maelstrom/solo content Build in the Harrowstorm Patch [Updated]

OlumoGarbag

For everyone still struggling with Maelstrom Arena or wanting a very easy way to do fast runs:

UPDATED:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/550953/easiest-veteran-vateshraan-solo-content-build-for-every-stam-and-mag-class/p1

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See above




Since Iceheart got slightly but noticably nerfed, there are better options for monster sets now. Espacially for beginners you want a no Brainer one that is also very easy to get. Same with the gear.
Everyone should by now know about the Plague doctor + Necropotence 1 bar build. Which is still a very good option for people that cant find key space for a bar swap button (which i would always recommend on the mouse).

To make Maelstrom arena even more of an easy mode i present to you the 2bar and 1bar Torug's + Necro + Infernal Guardian easy mode build:

2bar Version (very much recommended):
https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=212882

1bar Version (still very good but not really much better then the plague version):
https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=216787

Skills:
Critical surge: for heals (everyone who want to waste absurd amounts of money on spellpower pots can also just run bound aegis front)

• allows you run the cheaper spellcrit, mag, health pots (Bugloss/columbine+Ladys Smock+ Water Hyacinth)
• no Brain heal

Blockade of storm:

• sets enemy off balance and buffs your heavy attack dmg by alot
• Procs your 6k shield enchant every 3 seconds (doesent proc if the shield isent used up yet, will have an almost 100% uptime)
• no Brainer shield that even protects you when you arent paying attention

harness magicka/ hardend ward: your ol reliable shields whilst hardend ward is the better one to use. Both shields stack giving you an effective 60k healthpool!

Volatile familiar: Keep up at all time deals decend dmg and also stuns the mobs

Twilight Matriarch: besides your shields this is your insanely helpfull heal button, if you actually ever drop low health

Crushing shock: This is one of the best skills for beginners, making every run so much easier. Normaly you would have to run all over the map to interupt mechanics, not anymore. You will never ever have to remember where the spawnpoints are, just interrupt from all over the map.

Crystal frag: can be switched for Bound aegis, but it will buff your burst dmg alot (espacially usefull for poison stage)

Atronach for longer fights and destro Ult for big mob groups or stages where you need to burn a Boss (ice boss, Spider Boss, endboss)

Sets:
Why torugs instead of Plague?

• Torugs buffs your dmg alot
• combined with the backbar shield glyph gives you an 6k shield every 3 seconds
• the shield glyph procs Infernal guardian almost always on cooldown and hardend ward will always proc it as well (150% chance)
• helps your off balance uptime alot
• Gives resistence and max health
• you can just craft it in any trait you want (plague infused lightning is 40k gold atm) so its widely available for everyone

Necro (buyable from guildstores):

• boosts your dmg and your shields by alot with a great magicka pool
• blue jewlery and non-divine body pieces will also work very well

infernal guardian (drops in City of Ash 1, one of the easiest dungeons in the game):

• insane amounts of AoE damage
• literall nobrainer with ward and shield glyph
• will kill of any mobs on the other side of the map that you forget spawned there
• will boost any boss fight
• if you really cant find the set pieces you can run valkyn skoria, Ice heart or Grothdarr

All in all this setup is very very easy to get and extremly cheap. with blue jewlery, infused necro big pieces and a friendly crafter of your choice you will get it all for under 30k gold.

a written guide on the arena itself you will find here:
https://alcasthq.com/eso-maelstrom-guide/

Have fun!

ericshug

1.good guide,whats weapom and aromr quality,purple or gold?
2.works for vMA?

Hotdog_23

Great guide for those that have not done it yet.

ReachHalo

Very helpful and intuitive, I'm sure many players will appreciate this.

I'm trying to keep this to myself, but my only Flawless Conqueror run was achieved using the Necro Plague Doc sorc build - and I'm definitely not the level of player that should run around in craglorn flaunting his flawless conqueror title!!

This build definitely seems like a build many players will need so thankyou for sharing!!

MrBrownstone

ericshug wrote: »

1.good guide,whats weapom and aromr quality,purple or gold?
2.works for vMA?

What kind of a question is that? You're asking if a vMA build works for vMA?

Gold weapon is always much better of course but you can do it with purple. Just remember that gold weapons have 18% better stats

OlumoGarbag

ericshug wrote: »

1.good guide,whats weapom and aromr quality,purple or gold?
2.works for vMA?

The bare minimum I would recommend would be 1 gold torugs staff front and 2 golden glyphs on the weapons. If you use purple gear and blue jewelry with purple glyphs (no Tri stat), your only some minutes slower but can perfectly well finish the arena with no death and a score above 550k. You would spend only 30k gold on the entire gear.
If you like the setup you can always upgrade the other weapon to gold and the glyphs to gold as well. The difference in difficulty and speed is minimal tho. Since alot of your dmg and defensive comes from you 2 golden weapon glyphs and those won't increase in potency if you gold torugs since it is from white to gold always the same dmg value

OlumoGarbag

ericshug wrote: »

1.good guide,whats weapom and aromr quality,purple or gold?
2.works for vMA?

Yes this build is meant for the veteran version of maelstrom arena but can very very easily used for any solo content in the game. It still has around 25-30k dps without buffs from other players. You could solo any worldboss and even most vet dungeons with it.

ReachHalo wrote: »

I'm trying to keep this to myself, but my only Flawless Conqueror run was achieved using the Necro Plague Doc sorc build - and I'm definitely not the level of player that should run around in craglorn flaunting his flawless conqueror title!!

I don't think that's something you have to hide
But I'm just a PvP main, I like theorycrafting way more then pve. So I just wanted to share this build. Which allows me to make pve so much more easy and faster.
Seriously I'm watching Netflix while doing maelstrom on this build. I don't know any of the spawn points but you just don't need to. The build carrys me

gatekeeper13

Just did vMA with your build (few small changes) and it works way better than the 1bar build. My congratulations sir! Very good damage mitigation and pretty decent dps that indeed almost carries you. Much better build than the famous 1 bar pet sorc.

Changes I did

1) Dropped Crystal Fragments for Haunting Curse because of CF low uptime. (very useful at Ring of Blood, to take out trolls fast)

2) Used Empowered Ward instead of Hardened for the Minor Intellect.

3) Replaced Harness Magicka with Channeled Acceleration for Minor Force.

4) Chose Lord mundus instead of Mage cause I used Witchmothers Brew instead of Artaeum. (for extra magicka recovery) to keep my max health to 24k. Magicka was still kept at 40k.

All stages looked like a joke and Infernal Guardian wiped trash mobs and bosses fast. Only problem was the Umbrage stage. Monster set was damaging the mages and I had to be very careful when to use shields, which caused some confussion leading to wipes. But passed after 2-3 tries.

9/10 rating from me.

OlumoGarbag

gatekeeper13 wrote: »

Just did vMA with your build (few small changes) and it works way better than the 1bar build. My congratulations sir! Very good damage mitigation and pretty decent dps that indeed almost carries you. Much better build than the famous 1 bar pet sorc.

2) Used Empowered Ward instead of Hardened for the Minor Intellect.

3) Replaced Harness Magicka with Channeled Acceleration for Minor Force.


All stages looked like a joke and Infernal Guardian wiped trash mobs and bosses fast. Only problem was the Umbrage stage. Monster set was damaging the mages and I had to be very careful when to use shields, which caused some confussion leading to wipes.

I dont really think you need the extra recovery but its probably nice to have

Yes for expirienced players i would definetly throw out harness for channeled but not everyone has psijic.
If your lucky to have infused maelstrom shock staff i would also use that instead of torugs, since you are on you frontbar in 90% of the cases. But once again its meant to be for everyone and easy available.

For the poison stage and the spider stage you can switch in ice heart if you dont want any accidental kills on mages or those insects.

gatekeeper13

OlumoGarbag wrote: »

I dont really think you need the extra recovery but its probably nice to have

Yes for expirienced players i would definetly throw out harness for channeled but not everyone has psijic.
If your lucky to have infused maelstrom shock staff i would also use that instead of torugs, since you are on you frontbar in 90% of the cases. But once again its meant to be for everyone and easy available.

For the poison stage and the spider stage you can switch in ice heart if you dont want any accidental kills on mages or those insects.

Yes, I do have the Maelstrom Lightning staff but I got it only for dungeons and trials with weapon enchant and dont want to switch enchants every time. But yes, it would perform even better.

blacksghost

Meh I only play one Templar really I want to do it on her. Nothing else will count for me.

Major_Lag

OlumoGarbag wrote: »

Since Iceheart got slightly but noticably nerfed, there are better options for monster sets now.

OlumoGarbag wrote: »

infernal guardian (drops in City of Ash 1, one of the easiest dungeons in the game):

• insane amounts of AoE damage
• literall nobrainer with ward and shield glyph
• will kill of any mobs on the other side of the map that you forget spawned there
• will boost any boss fight
• if you really cant find the set pieces you can run valkyn skoria, Ice heart or Grothdarr

Awesome... now Infernal Guardian is next in line to be nerfed next update
Too bad, because I really liked that set for soloing some of the harder PvE content. Oh well.

Runefang

blacksghost wrote: »

Meh I only play one Templar really I want to do it on her. Nothing else will count for me.

Not hard to adjust the build for Templar to be honest.

thadjarvis

@OlumoGarbag nice creative build.

@blacksghost Recall anything other than Jabby-Jab-Jab-Jab on a magplar is gravy. So, the idea behind this build is to leverage the TP and the shield enchant using the wall to proc it

for 1-bar I'd give the following a shot:
Sweeps
Wall (either morph)
flex choice
flex choice
flex choice

Your choice skills: Light Armor Shield, Solar Barrage, Purifying Light, Inner Light, or anything from the Restoring Light tree

OlumoGarbag

blacksghost wrote: »

Meh I only play one Templar really I want to do it on her. Nothing else will count for me.

You can definetly run that build on any class. Just swap in crafty alfiq and change some skills.
With the 3 secs on shield glyph and 5 second light armor shield duration you should still be able to proc infernal on cooldown.

Templar would look something like this https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=217163

blacksghost

Cheers guys 😊

YandereGirlfriend

Hey, this looks like a really fantastic build, OP! And a valuable resource for newer players to try Maelstrom. Awesome work!

ericshug

why Lightning staff ont flame staff?

OlumoGarbag

ericshug wrote: »

why Lightning staff ont flame staff?

Shock staff blockade sets enemys of balance, which then increases your heavy attack dmg by a whooping 80% for 7 seconds.
So you dont need to do anything else but keep blockade up and heavy attack on the frontbar.

ericshug

I'm newbie,how to perform of balance to enemy?
and why heavy chest not heavy monster hat?

OlumoGarbag

ericshug wrote: »

I'm newbie,how to perform of balance to enemy?
and why heavy chest not heavy monster hat?

It just does automatically when you hit something that is concussed (by shock attacks). Read tooltips. https://alcasthq.com/eso-status-effects/
This will explain you every status effect in the game.

Heavy chest is way better then any other piece in heavy, gives more armor.

SidraWillowsky

This is awesome and super creative... I've never actually paid attention to Torug's or Infernal Guardian before, but they look like interesting sets for vMA. I play a magden- is there anything you'd tweak if someone is going to try this build on something other than a sorc? Mostly I'm wondering if you'd recommend an inferno (or maybe frost for magden) staff over lightning in this case.

SidraWillowsky

OH and just something in case people don't realize- Crushing Shock is an excellent skill BUT do NOT use it on the final boss in stage 7 during his scream phase- if you interrupt it, he'll enrage or something and will start randomly doing the scream when there are no minders around. I tried it once and he just ran over and one-shotted me.

FrancisCrawford

nm

ericshug

what's spell ability+light attack+heavy attack rotation ?
please describe like 1->light attack->2->heavy attack->second bar-> ,thanks

OlumoGarbag

ericshug wrote: »

what's spell ability+light attack+heavy attack rotation ?
please describe like 1->light attack->2->heavy attack->second bar-> ,thanks

Just keep your buffs up then set a blockade on your enemies, switch frontbar and heavy attack. There is no rotation.
Only heavy attack.

OlumoGarbag

SidraWillowsky wrote: »

This is awesome and super creative... I've never actually paid attention to Torug's or Infernal Guardian before, but they look like interesting sets for vMA. I play a magden- is there anything you'd tweak if someone is going to try this build on something other than a sorc? Mostly I'm wondering if you'd recommend an inferno (or maybe frost for magden) staff over lightning in this case.

If you wanna go for a heavy attack build always go shock staff, on magden as well. It just lacks a burst heal. I did the arena on magden on a similar build as well.

HappyLittleTree

Are people still struggling with vma in 2020?

Valykc

Nice build, you get an insightful!

Asardes

2 pet magicka sorcerer, heavy attack build. Infinite sustain and you don't even need Iceheart.
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=52316
You have off-balance, minor vulnerability, heavy attacks hit really hard

*You can run a Willpower staff back bar till you drop Melstrom Inferno or Lightning.

Buff with Critical Surge every 3rd rotation, apply Elemental Drain every 2nd rotation:

Rotation is dead simple. 10s, static:
LA>Unstable Wall>bar swap>HA>Daedric Prey>HA>Familiar>HA>Tormentor>HA>Daedric Prey [repeat]
You end up overcasting Tormentor but that's not an issue since you have infinite sustain.

Vildebill

HappyLittleTree wrote: »

Are people still struggling with vma in 2020?

Are people still not able to comprehend that others are different from yourself in 2020?