A review of Arcanist class

AngryOldMan

Hi. I want to hear other players view on arcanist so far. What strength and weakness have you experienced so far? How do they perform in PVE and PVP? In what PVE role do you think they can perform well?

For me in PVP they have great damage shields, and with the right sets good sustain. Have seen some high damage arcanist in Cyrodil with good shields and they can be a bit annoying because they can survive a lot of punishment and deal huge amount of damage.
I think it is a unique class to thinker with, trying to find the right set combo for PVP action

Please share your experience of playing it, both in PVE and PVP

ClowdyAllDay

we are waiting for the release of the new chapter and seeing how badly it gets nerfed into the ground once the deliberately overpowered scribing becomes the new shiny and everyone and their brother starts using that instead.

TaSheen

Love my arcanists. Fun to play. I don't do group content so *shrug* - YMMV....

I actually don't care about "nerfs incoming". It's a fun class. For me that's all that counts - and no.... I really don't need to worry about a nerf. I do my thing. Others, can't state anything for them

dinokstrunz

Not a big fan of it tbh, it looks way too cartoonish and over the top in the flashy department.
It's really not fun to play either. In PvE people will find it chill to play but in reality its mind-numbingly boring. In PvP it's a similar story, a lot of its skills are AoE checks so most people will have difficulty hitting targets with their big hitting abilities. It lacks offensive power in its other abilities outside of Fatecarver. Impervious Ward is stupidly overpowered in its current form. Outside of Bashcanist setups Arcanist is pretty meh in PvP overall.

I can imagine Arcanist will probably receive some kind of overhauls somewhere down the line.

RedFireDisco

I was disappointed. The green beam is ill-invoking. There's some really good passive synergy but it's this weird mid-range combat class that misses a lot if you've played for 10 years either up close or at range.

Quite a learning curve. Beam damage is good, but my sorc, warden, dk, and even Templar can out parse it in almost all situations.

The crux is very meh. Would like to have a higher limit on crux.

Apocryphal gate is completely useless for PVP. That was my biggest disappointment. Mist form absolutely blows it out of the water

Stam arcanist is orders of magnitude better than mag.

I'd like more stam morphs and not a fan of the scales with higher max resource as it makes hybridization harder.

The heal is good with the latent dot, post heal.

7/10

Just roll a sorc

MJallday

Mag arcanist needs a buff. It’s at least 20% lower output than stam

Parsing it’s ok for, but dummy batting wise it’s outclassed by pretty much everything.

SerafinaWaterstar

Love mine. Love love love mine.

Took a while to get used to the playstyle (still LA weaving on reflex) but she is fab.

Take her into all content - vet dungeons & trials, overland, solo & pvp.

(Zos, please don’t spoil this.)

Aurielle

AngryOldMan wrote: »

Hi. I want to hear other players view on arcanist so far. What strength and weakness have you experienced so far? How do they perform in PVE and PVP? In what PVE role do you think they can perform well?

For me in PVP they have great damage shields, and with the right sets good sustain. Have seen some high damage arcanist in Cyrodil with good shields and they can be a bit annoying because they can survive a lot of punishment and deal huge amount of damage.
I think it is a unique class to thinker with, trying to find the right set combo for PVP action

Please share your experience of playing it, both in PVE and PVP

My stam Arcanist is my jack of all trades PVE character. I haven't taken him into Cyrodiil much yet, but I will eventually, as he's the only one I haven't gotten up to level 10 in the Alliance skill lines. For PVE, there's honestly no other character I'd rather take for DPS or tanking. I don't use him as a healer, but that's only because my main (Templar) has multiple armory slots purchased and has a PVE healing spec saved.

Clustering trash and obliterating it in a second makes running boring, predictable RND dungeons for the transmutes a tolerable experience. I don't have to worry about fake DPS when I'm tanking normal dungeons on my Arcanist, because I can easily out-DPS them both while not dying and maintaining taunts on the boss. I use my Arcanist to run guildies through nDSA for their weapons, and I also use it to help them level in Skyreach.

It is basically the perfect PVE damage dealer and tank, thanks to its powerful AOEs, its survivability, and its AOE pull skill.

Sarannah

Arcanist was very fun to play, until the recent nerfs to fatecarver. Right now it feels bad to play one.

Have two arcanists which I loved playing. Both have a tank, a dps, and an arena build/set-up(for IA).
These arena builds actually differed quite a bit between those two characters. One was build for full dps and has some defenses to get through the first two/three arcs in the IA fast, the other was specced from tank and has gotten very few damage increases, which makes him more tankier to get to the higher IA arcs. Now after the update both of them do the SAME dps for some reason, while one is fully specced for dps and the other is not(broken??/bugged??).

Due to the damage nerf, the weaknesses of the arcanist became even more clearer. When I now have to build crux twice, where I used to be able to build it once. As enemies die in two beams instead of one, even on the dps arena spec character. So it takes double the time, it takes double the resources, and getting stunned during the fatecarver attack or having to interrupt the fatecarver attack is much more likely to happen. Wasting crux, wasting time, and wasting resources. While the class used to be very fun to play, it now feels much worse to play the arcanist than before. At this point I feel crux should just be removed.

Damage was easy to build, and this was what made the class fun. No stupid rotation or light attack weaving, something which all classes should be able to do in my opinion. No buttonsmashing or stress to play the game.

Arcanist strenghts:
-Easy rotation/easy to learn.
-No weaving.
-Alright sustain, unless you have to rebuild crux all the time.
-Good survivability.
-Good aoe damage(shouldn't have been nerfed).
-Great visuals! (though many players will disagree with me on this)

Arcanist weaknesses:
-Having to build crux: Remove crux! Due to the nerfs this feels bad and like a waste of time.
-Having to choose how to use crux: Offensively or defensively.
-Terrible sustain when the fatecarver gets interrupted a few times in a row, or if you have to interrupt it a few times in a row.

PS: There is also a bug with fatecarver where the beam doesn't hit a player in PvP unless they are standing perfectly still. This made my arcanists useless in Cyrodiil.
PPS: Haven't played a healer or PvP build arcanist.

Varana

I have yet to notice the tiny nerf in any practical sense. I sit a tad lower in the damage list in the logs, but that's about it. Which is basically what is to be expected from what they did. :shrug:

Generally:
You can definitely do the same amount or even slightly more damage with other classes. But with the Arcanist, it's easiest to get to a very high level without too much hassle. The great survivability built into their damaging abilities (beam shields you, tentacles heal you) is almost unfair. Swapping between boss and trash setups becomes almost optional, due to both being multi-target/AoE attacks. As a damage dealer, the Arcanist does a lot with a few key skills.
I've also played mine as a healer for a while. While not as outstanding as on the DD side, it's good as well. More in line with the other classes, in my (not very extensive) experience - it has some unique things you have to play with, like the other classes do as well, so they all play a bit differently.

Anyway, I agree with Aurielle.