Spriggan's and Spinner's Problem?

GrumpyDuckling · May 2017

If weapon and spell penetration are so important in this game, then why are there so few sets that grant penetration? Two sets in particular seem to be highly sought after by players:

- Spriggan's Thorns
- Spinner's Garment's

I see many people farming these two sets, and it makes sense. Why wouldn't players want sets that cut down enemy defenses and allow them to do more damage? But isn't there a problem, Zenimax, when a player base heavily leans on two sets to get weapon and spell penetration? Why not add more options? Why doesn't weapon and spell penetration appear more in other sets?

Izaki · May 2017

Yeah 1pc penetration boni.

code65536 · May 2017

For stamina, you have Twice-Fanged Serpent (which is better than Spriggan) and Night Mother's Gaze as other sets that grant penetration. NMG is craftable, too and provides penetration for your allies as well. (Edit: Also, Sunderflame, which like NMG helps your allies too.)

For magicka, Spinner is useful only in PvP--it's totally worthless for PvE. The light armor passive gives almost 5K penetration. Couple that with a sharp weapon and Major Breach, and you're already at around 15K penetration with just the low-hanging fruit. In a good group, you'll also have Alkosh, Minor Breach, and Crusher, which means you'll be overpenetrating, even without Spinner. But in PvP, the usefulness of Spinner is limited. Great against heavy armor targets, but wasted against medium and light armor enemies and enemies that rely on shields for defense.

Both sets are overrated.

Nemesis7884 · May 2017

the best would be to tone down the importannce to make other sets more viable and not to throw similar penetration sets on top of the pile imo

GrumpyDuckling · May 2017

code65536 wrote: »

For stamina, you have Twice-Fanged Serpent (which is better than Spriggan) and Night Mother's Gaze as other sets that grant penetration. NMG is craftable, too and provides penetration for your allies as well. (Edit: Also, Sunderflame, which like NMG helps your allies too.)

For magicka, Spinner is useful only in PvP--it's totally worthless for PvE. The light armor passive gives almost 5K penetration. Couple that with a sharp weapon and Major Breach, and you're already at around 15K penetration with just the low-hanging fruit. In a good group, you'll also have Alkosh, Minor Breach, and Crusher, which means you'll be overpenetrating, even without Spinner. But in PvP, the usefulness of Spinner is limited. Great against heavy armor targets, but wasted against medium and light armor enemies and enemies that rely on shields for defense.

Both sets are overrated.

It sounds like Sharpened is overrated, then. If a set like Spinner's isn't necessary, then a player would be wise to run Sharpened, right?

Ep1kMalware · May 2017

GrumpyDuckling wrote: »

If weapon and spell penetration are so important in this game, then why are there so few sets that grant penetration? Two sets in particular seem to be highly sought after by players:

- Spriggan's Thorns
- Spinner's Garment's

I see many people farming these two sets, and it makes sense. Why wouldn't players want sets that cut down enemy defenses and allow them to do more damage? But isn't there a problem, Zenimax, when a player base heavily leans on two sets to get weapon and spell penetration? Why not add more options? Why doesn't weapon and spell penetration appear more in other sets?

zenimax is the problem, here is why. Zenimax sees something is popular, and instead of offering diversity they remove it as a viable option cimpletely. This happened in homestead with huge nerfs to crit damage. Likely instead of offering another viable choice they will end up nerfing pen somehow amd instead of leaning on 2 sets we'll be forced to grind for 1.

Before thy nerfed crit bis was craftable. Not our fault zenimax forces us into a tighter and tighter meta, it's just how things are. Will be worse next month.

Code2501 · May 2017

code65536 wrote: »

For magicka, Spinner is useful only in PvP--it's totally worthless for PvE.

Thats a bit of an overstatement. Spinner is fine if you're conciously choosing a non-sharpened trait on your weapon and/or you want your cp somewhere other than pen. But you are right that it is easier to over penetrate in pve.

zaria · May 2017

GrumpyDuckling wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

For stamina, you have Twice-Fanged Serpent (which is better than Spriggan) and Night Mother's Gaze as other sets that grant penetration. NMG is craftable, too and provides penetration for your allies as well. (Edit: Also, Sunderflame, which like NMG helps your allies too.)

For magicka, Spinner is useful only in PvP--it's totally worthless for PvE. The light armor passive gives almost 5K penetration. Couple that with a sharp weapon and Major Breach, and you're already at around 15K penetration with just the low-hanging fruit. In a good group, you'll also have Alkosh, Minor Breach, and Crusher, which means you'll be overpenetrating, even without Spinner. But in PvP, the usefulness of Spinner is limited. Great against heavy armor targets, but wasted against medium and light armor enemies and enemies that rely on shields for defense.

Both sets are overrated.

It sounds like Sharpened is overrated, then. If a set like Spinner's isn't necessary, then a player would be wise to run Sharpened, right?

How would spinner work with an non sharpened maelstrom weapon?

code65536 · May 2017

GrumpyDuckling wrote: »

It sounds like Sharpened is overrated, then. If a set like Spinner's isn't necessary, then a player would be wise to run Sharpened, right?

You still want that penetration. The question you need to ask is, "What am I sacrificing to get that penetration?"

If you're getting that penetration from a weapon trait, you sacrifice either 7% crit chance (vs. Precise) or 147 base spell damage (vs. Nirnhoned) to gain 5160 penetration. That is a very good tradeoff.

If you're getting that penetration from a 5p set bonus, you're losing whatever 5p bonus you could've otherwise had (and shoehorning yourself into one particular set) to gain just 4000 penetration. That's not as good of a tradeoff.

If you're getting that penetration from CP, then that's even more inefficient as you're taking away from Thaumaturge/Exploiter and Elemental Expert (in response to @Code2501's reply in this thread). You shouldn't have any points in CP penetration for endgame PvE, and as I outlined in my post earlier in this thread, you can hit overpenetration even with zero points in CP penetration. (However, with the CP overhaul next patch, this will likely change. For now, this statement holds true on the Live server.)

Long story short, if you decide to get your penetration via Spinners instead of via a Sharpened trait, you'll lose 1160 penetration, you'll lose whatever other 5p bonus you could've otherwise had, all so that you could gain 7% crit chance (the next best trait). So I stand by my assessment: Spinners makes zero sense in PvE and it is overrated.

GrumpyDuckling · May 2017

code65536 wrote: »

GrumpyDuckling wrote: »

It sounds like Sharpened is overrated, then. If a set like Spinner's isn't necessary, then a player would be wise to run Sharpened, right?

You still want that penetration. The question you need to ask is, "What am I sacrificing to get that penetration?"

If you're getting that penetration from a weapon trait, you sacrifice either 7% crit chance (vs. Precise) or 147 base spell damage (vs. Nirnhoned) to gain 5160 penetration. That is a very good tradeoff.

If you're getting that penetration from a 5p set bonus, you're losing whatever 5p bonus you could've otherwise had (and shoehorning yourself into one particular set) to gain just 4000 penetration. That's not as good of a tradeoff.

If you're getting that penetration from CP, then that's even more inefficient as you're taking away from Thaumaturge/Exploiter and Elemental Expert (in response to @Code2501's reply in this thread). You shouldn't have any points in CP penetration for endgame PvE, and as I outlined in my post earlier in this thread, you can hit overpenetration even with zero points in CP penetration. (However, with the CP overhaul next patch, this will likely change. For now, this statement holds true on the Live server.)

Long story short, if you decide to get your penetration via Spinners instead of via a Sharpened trait, you'll lose 1160 penetration, you'll lose whatever other 5p bonus you could've otherwise had, all so that you could gain 7% crit chance (the next best trait). So I stand by my assessment: Spinners makes zero sense in PvE and it is overrated.

Hmm interesting - thanks for the reply. So for now the best thing for players to do might be to wait until Morrowind drops to see how/if CP changes affect penetration, like you mentioned, and assess from there.

Qbiken · May 2017

Nemesis7884 wrote: »

the best would be to tone down the importannce to make other sets more viable and not to throw similar penetration sets on top of the pile imo

Nerfing *** ain´t the solution.......when will people get it. And as someone said, Spinner and Spriggan are way overrated.

ADarklore · May 2017

I love how people always talk about PvE in terms of meaning 'end game only' content... when PvE also refers to open world, delves, public and group dungeons. For those of us who don't run 'end game' content, there aren't as many options for sets, and until they start offering the ability to craft jewelry, most of these sets require jewelry to gain the five-piece set. So right now for the PvE content that I run, I use Julianos/Spinners with Precise weapons. Now, if someone has a better suggestion for open world dropped sets that would improve on this I'd like to hear it. But don't start talking about BOP sets dropped only in end game or group content because those don't apply to players who only do solo PvE content.

Duiwel · May 2017

GrumpyDuckling wrote: »

It sounds like Sharpened is overrated, then. If a set like Spinner's isn't necessary, then a player would be wise to run Sharpened, right?

I am sorry OP but do we play the same game if you only realised this today?

Royaji · May 2017

ADarklore wrote: »

I love how people always talk about PvE in terms of meaning 'end game only' content... when PvE also refers to open world, delves, public and group dungeons. For those of us who don't run 'end game' content, there aren't as many options for sets, and until they start offering the ability to craft jewelry, most of these sets require jewelry to gain the five-piece set. So right now for the PvE content that I run, I use Julianos/Spinners with Precise weapons. Now, if someone has a better suggestion for open world dropped sets that would improve on this I'd like to hear it. But don't start talking about BOP sets dropped only in end game or group content because those don't apply to players who only do solo PvE content.

Open world, delves and public dungeons can be completed with just white non-set gear and one skill on your bar. Same goes for most normal group dungeons. There is no reason to discuss gearing for such content because it is completely irrelevant what kind of gear one decides to use.

Nyladreas · May 2017

A guild mate just sold sharpened spinner inferno staff yesterday for 450k i believe. And that was about 100k less than cheapest on the market. It's crazy.

Code2501 · May 2017

code65536 wrote: »

GrumpyDuckling wrote: »

It sounds like Sharpened is overrated, then. If a set like Spinner's isn't necessary, then a player would be wise to run Sharpened, right?

You still want that penetration. The question you need to ask is, "What am I sacrificing to get that penetration?"

If you're getting that penetration from a weapon trait, you sacrifice either 7% crit chance (vs. Precise) or 147 base spell damage (vs. Nirnhoned) to gain 5160 penetration. That is a very good tradeoff.

If you're getting that penetration from a 5p set bonus, you're losing whatever 5p bonus you could've otherwise had (and shoehorning yourself into one particular set) to gain just 4000 penetration. That's not as good of a tradeoff.

If you're getting that penetration from CP, then that's even more inefficient as you're taking away from Thaumaturge/Exploiter and Elemental Expert (in response to @Code2501's reply in this thread). You shouldn't have any points in CP penetration for endgame PvE, and as I outlined in my post earlier in this thread, you can hit overpenetration even with zero points in CP penetration. (However, with the CP overhaul next patch, this will likely change. For now, this statement holds true on the Live server.)

Long story short, if you decide to get your penetration via Spinners instead of via a Sharpened trait, you'll lose 1160 penetration, you'll lose whatever other 5p bonus you could've otherwise had, all so that you could gain 7% crit chance (the next best trait). So I stand by my assessment: Spinners makes zero sense in PvE and it is overrated.

I still think there is a place for spinners in PvE with a destro focused build and charged trait to consistently proc status effects (42% chance on a DD destro spell), especially since the destro passive makes up the lost pen from sharpened. You can have 1 party member spamming force pulse for effectively 100% up time on Minor Maim, Minor Vulnerability and Burning. Whether that is of benefit or not vs a 5 piece depends on your party composition.
The CP situation will invariably change with Morrowind, which is why I mentioned it.

Junipus · May 2017

zaria wrote: »

GrumpyDuckling wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

For stamina, you have Twice-Fanged Serpent (which is better than Spriggan) and Night Mother's Gaze as other sets that grant penetration. NMG is craftable, too and provides penetration for your allies as well. (Edit: Also, Sunderflame, which like NMG helps your allies too.)

For magicka, Spinner is useful only in PvP--it's totally worthless for PvE. The light armor passive gives almost 5K penetration. Couple that with a sharp weapon and Major Breach, and you're already at around 15K penetration with just the low-hanging fruit. In a good group, you'll also have Alkosh, Minor Breach, and Crusher, which means you'll be overpenetrating, even without Spinner. But in PvP, the usefulness of Spinner is limited. Great against heavy armor targets, but wasted against medium and light armor enemies and enemies that rely on shields for defense.

Both sets are overrated.

It sounds like Sharpened is overrated, then. If a set like Spinner's isn't necessary, then a player would be wise to run Sharpened, right?

How would spinner work with an non sharpened maelstrom weapon?

You'd lose about 20% of the penetration between Sharpened and Spinner, along with whatever set you'd be giving up for using Spinner, but if you had a vMA staff that you wanted to use and a good group to run with it'd possibly be worth it. I'm leaving it to the math genii to give a quantifiable answer.

Tommy_The_Gun · May 2017

Penetration is only really important in PvP. For PvE if you need penetration you only need like 800 - 2000 (but even that will be an over kill).
As for PvP - 99% of players run full heavy impen armours...

code65536 · May 2017

ADarklore wrote: »

I love how people always talk about PvE in terms of meaning 'end game only' content... when PvE also refers to open world, delves, public and group dungeons. For those of us who don't run 'end game' content, there aren't as many options for sets, and until they start offering the ability to craft jewelry, most of these sets require jewelry to gain the five-piece set. So right now for the PvE content that I run, I use Julianos/Spinners with Precise weapons. Now, if someone has a better suggestion for open world dropped sets that would improve on this I'd like to hear it. But don't start talking about BOP sets dropped only in end game or group content because those don't apply to players who only do solo PvE content.

You definitely don't want to use Spinner's for non-endgame PvE. Enemies in group dungeons and trials have 18.2K resistance, which gives you plenty resistance to work on penetrating (and yet the penetration from just the low-hanging fruit covers 15K of that). Other PvE enemies--in overworld, delves, etc.--have half of that resistance. If Spinners doesn't make sense in group dungeons and trials, it makes even less sense in the overworld.

For open-world PvE, it doesn't really matter what you wear. But there are plenty of beginner-friendly options, like this setup for a beginner low-CP build that involves 5p crafted gear (including crafted weapons, so you will always have sharp), 5p BoE gear that you can find cheaply in guild stores, and a single monster piece to fill it out.

SodanTok · May 2017

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Penetration is only really important in PvP. For PvE if you need penetration you only need like 800 - 2000 (but even that will be an over kill).
As for PvP - 99% of players run full heavy impen armours...

Yeah... no. Penetration is definitely very important in PVE and you need far more than 800-2000.
For PVP, it is obvously far less than 99% and it has no impact vs shields so stacking it too high is not really great either. Anything above 12k pen is probably (on average) damage loss, because more than 50% of players have less than that.

GrumpyDuckling · May 2017

Duiwel wrote: »

GrumpyDuckling wrote: »

It sounds like Sharpened is overrated, then. If a set like Spinner's isn't necessary, then a player would be wise to run Sharpened, right?

I am sorry OP but do we play the same game if you only realised this today?

Haha take a look at my inventory and you'll see about 80% Sharpened weapons - don't worry, we're playing the same game. I like to state the obvious in a clear way in case ZOS looks at this thread.

For whatever reason, they seem to think weapon traits are balanced.

ADarklore · May 2017

code65536 wrote: »

ADarklore wrote: »

I love how people always talk about PvE in terms of meaning 'end game only' content... when PvE also refers to open world, delves, public and group dungeons. For those of us who don't run 'end game' content, there aren't as many options for sets, and until they start offering the ability to craft jewelry, most of these sets require jewelry to gain the five-piece set. So right now for the PvE content that I run, I use Julianos/Spinners with Precise weapons. Now, if someone has a better suggestion for open world dropped sets that would improve on this I'd like to hear it. But don't start talking about BOP sets dropped only in end game or group content because those don't apply to players who only do solo PvE content.

You definitely don't want to use Spinner's for non-endgame PvE. Enemies in group dungeons and trials have 18.2K resistance, which gives you plenty resistance to work on penetrating (and yet the penetration from just the low-hanging fruit covers 15K of that). Other PvE enemies--in overworld, delves, etc.--have half of that resistance. If Spinners doesn't make sense in group dungeons and trials, it makes even less sense in the overworld.

For open-world PvE, it doesn't really matter what you wear. But there are plenty of beginner-friendly options, like this setup for a beginner low-CP build that involves 5p crafted gear (including crafted weapons, so you will always have sharp), 5p BoE gear that you can find cheaply in guild stores, and a single monster piece to fill it out.

I disagree with your assessment. I found open-world content to become MUCH easier running Julianos/Spinners... and Spinner's isn't JUST about the Penetration, as it also gives Max Magicka x2 AND increase Spell Damage. It always bugs me when people say, "In open world content you can run anything" because that's absolutely NOT TRUE. That may be true for a person with high skills, but I still see CP160+ players being killed in delves and even open world quest content... clearly NO, not all players are created equal. So yes, players need to wear the best gear they can in open world situations, let alone the fact that you can happen across World Bosses at any time, and Public Dungeons can also be a challenge without excellent gear.

Further, you never answered my question about what is BETTER than Julianos/Spinners? You simply referred me to a setup for beginners, but stated nothing about what is better than the combination I offered. To simply say, "You don't need that" is not offering a better suggestion... especially since it definitely IS better than the former Julianos/Magnus sets I used to wear. Also, you mentioned "Monster piece" but as far as I recall, that is a BOP piece and can ONLY be achieved through running group or end game content... which again I remind you I do NOT do.

Leandor · May 2017

With the upcoming changes to BSW, I am curious if my 5 Scathing/5 Spinner with precise weapons over sharpened will bloom...

But of course, I am an idiot for choosing something that is not built around BSW on my magicka nightblade...

code65536 · May 2017

ADarklore wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

ADarklore wrote: »

I love how people always talk about PvE in terms of meaning 'end game only' content... when PvE also refers to open world, delves, public and group dungeons. For those of us who don't run 'end game' content, there aren't as many options for sets, and until they start offering the ability to craft jewelry, most of these sets require jewelry to gain the five-piece set. So right now for the PvE content that I run, I use Julianos/Spinners with Precise weapons. Now, if someone has a better suggestion for open world dropped sets that would improve on this I'd like to hear it. But don't start talking about BOP sets dropped only in end game or group content because those don't apply to players who only do solo PvE content.

You definitely don't want to use Spinner's for non-endgame PvE. Enemies in group dungeons and trials have 18.2K resistance, which gives you plenty resistance to work on penetrating (and yet the penetration from just the low-hanging fruit covers 15K of that). Other PvE enemies--in overworld, delves, etc.--have half of that resistance. If Spinners doesn't make sense in group dungeons and trials, it makes even less sense in the overworld.

For open-world PvE, it doesn't really matter what you wear. But there are plenty of beginner-friendly options, like this setup for a beginner low-CP build that involves 5p crafted gear (including crafted weapons, so you will always have sharp), 5p BoE gear that you can find cheaply in guild stores, and a single monster piece to fill it out.

I disagree with your assessment. I found open-world content to become MUCH easier running Julianos/Spinners... and Spinner's isn't JUST about the Penetration, as it also gives Max Magicka x2 AND increase Spell Damage. It always bugs me when people say, "In open world content you can run anything" because that's absolutely NOT TRUE. That may be true for a person with high skills, but I still see CP160+ players being killed in delves and even open world quest content... clearly NO, not all players are created equal. So yes, players need to wear the best gear they can in open world situations, let alone the fact that you can happen across World Bosses at any time, and Public Dungeons can also be a challenge without excellent gear.

Further, you never answered my question about what is BETTER than Julianos/Spinners? You simply referred me to a setup for beginners, but stated nothing about what is better than the combination I offered. To simply say, "You don't need that" is not offering a better suggestion... especially since it definitely IS better than the former Julianos/Magnus sets I used to wear. Also, you mentioned "Monster piece" but as far as I recall, that is a BOP piece and can ONLY be achieved through running group or end game content... which again I remind you I do NOT do.

I suggested Kagrenac+Mastery for beginners. It's a trivial exercise to extrapolate that Julianos+Mastery would be good for higher-CP character who don't need the health and recovery from Kagrenac. But since you want it spelled out, here I go: You'll do better than Julianos and Destruction Mastery than you would Julianos and Spinners.
The 2-4pc bonuses on Spinner aren't that remarkable. There are many sets that offer comparable 2-4pc bonuses. The 5pc is what sets things apart.
You complain about my suggestion having a 1pc BoP monster piece, yet you are suggesting Julianos+Spinner. Two 5pc sets, when you have 11 slots to work with. So, tell me, what do you fill that extra 11th slot with? You can either fill it with a non-set item, or you could fill it with something that has a 1pc bonus. And it just so happens that everything in this game with a 1pc bonus is BoP. Julianos+Spinner is subject to the exact same constraint, and if you want to fill the extra slot with a non-set item, you're free to do so. Not that it's particularly hard to get a single monster helm or monster shoulder, esp. if you don't care about the trait (just having a 1pc bonus is many times more valuable than whatever a single armor trait could offer).
If you want to optimize for open-world content and have the best setup for that, that's fine. What I'm telling you is that Julianos+Spinner is not a good way to do it and there are other set combinations that will do better because they don't involve a 5pc bonus that is essentially wasted on most overworld content.

IcyDeadPeople · May 2017

Would be nice if light and medium passives got a slight buff to bring them in line with heavy armor, for example add physical penetration to med passives and spell damage to light, also require equipping full 5pc med or light to use shuffle or harness magicka.

code65536 · May 2017

Leandor wrote: »

With the upcoming changes to BSW, I am curious if my 5 Scathing/5 Spinner with precise weapons over sharpened will bloom...

But of course, I am an idiot for choosing something that is not built around BSW on my magicka nightblade...

If you're looking for 5/5, then 5 Scathing with 5 Julianos would be far more interesting than Scathing with Spinner. Keep in mind that Julianos has two crit chance bonuses. Or that new trial set, since magblades have such good ult generation.