Psssttt... yeh you! The experienced magblade.. I am talking to you ...

Metemsycosis · November 2017

Dw-- apprentice

Fire staff -- lover
lightning staff -- apprentice
Frost staff -- mage

Berenhir · November 2017

Depends entirely on the build. I always try to reach certain thresholds I feel comfortable with like 40k Magicka, 1.9k Magicka reg, 1k stamina reg 45% crit and 2.2k spell damage unbuffed.

I build from there. Spell damage is far more beneficial than magica on Destro builds due to weaving scaling 40:1 on spell damage.

NightbladeMechanics · November 2017

Apprentice and atronach have interchangeable stat value. Jewelry glyphs do not, and damage sets tend to have more stat value than sustain sets. Therefore atro can be the right choice in some cases if you would end up switching out two glyphs for sustain with Apprentice, like if you’re running two damage sets. However, I don’t think you need that much sustain if you’re using a set like Amber or Lich.

Apprentice is your go-to for damage if you aren’t using harness or max magicka bonuses from mages guild.

Mage is your choice if you are using harness, especially if you slot inner light, entropy, or meteor. It’s damage is lower than apprentice by only a couple percentage points in that case — negligible in pvp compared to skill difference and the bonus shield size you’ll get. Harder hitting abilities will show a wider damage margin between the two munduses.

Healing ward does scale with spell damage.

Axiom is more base damage than Julianos now, albeit less crit. I haven’t tested axiom, but I have some intuition on its use based on past experience. The crit benefits your healing more than your kill potential when in light armor, and light armor tends to run Witchmother’s with 10k max stam. For those reasons, I’d choose axiom between the two. I would stick with Julianos in heavy armor destro builds, which tend to prefer tristat food. The crit makes such a big difference in heavy, and you already have over 14k stam.

Maiden is still more base damage than both with one line of crit, and spinner remains top dog of base damage against anything which isn’t shielded. The movement away from sharpened has made overpenetrating a nonfactor unless you run bad cp. For these reasons, I’d only run axiom or julianos in a light armor build if I explicitly wanted the 5pc bonus to benefit my healing, which means running it back bar with skills like path or regen. Double barring the set crowds out 5/5/2 on destro builds, though, so there aren’t many cases where you’d do this.