Maelstrom Clears for Bad players like me on Stam

kylewwefan · January 2018

I was stuck on the last boss there for over a year. Literally. With a max level fully legendary geared out StamBlade and PetSorc. Even when sharpened was king, giving double the penetration it does now.

I mostly focus on stamina so I write from that point of view and on console. Most the guides I see are all about full divines and weapon damage. For whatever reasons, I can’t get it done like this. I run out of resources and for me that means dead.

So I run 3 Stam recovery jewelry glyphs. The weapon damage loss is not even noticeable to me. Crazy right. The mobs in there still die fast, and even boss fights are way easier to manage when running out of resource isn’t the problem.

My CP is not like anything you’ll see typically recommended. Put up to 75 points into piercing. %10 or less Mighty, %15 thermaturge, Master at arms and precise strikes. Stack tumbling high, and consider a few pieces of well fitted. If you don’t have a lot of CP to mess with, I would stack piercing, tumbling, and the Damage over time/ direct damage reduction most.

Have a Heal on both bars. Even if it’s double barring Vigor. 18k to 20k health is good and quite noticeable when a lot of stuff is hitting you at once. 18k buffed resistance is ok, the more the merry.

NMG is better than Hundings I think, because the debuff can also work on your endless hail and the 3 piece gives a little damage. VO is great for the whole place for cost reduction and resource management and should be on all the time. Agility is also great.

Once you can beat it on a character run it again till you get the maelstrom bow. The bow by far makes the biggest difference of any weapon I’ve got from there. I’ve got a few daggers, swords, axes and mace and I think they’re broken or something.

Use your ultimates wisely. Take care of the ranged ads.they suck. Run. Dodge roll. Kite stuff through AOE like running skyreach for someone. Use sigils. Use potions. Use double damage poisons on your bow. I should have mentioned that earlier. All this is for to help you complete maelstrom.

My Stamplar use Mighty Chudan/VO/NMG. StamSorc Veledreth/VO/NMG. StamBlade Veledreth/VO/Agility/Masters. I’ve made it up to the 8th round with 2H, but got stuck and had to go back to DW.

I’ve learned is well fitted and Stam recovery are highly underrated in Maelstrom for beginners and weapon damage and big DPS is big time overrated.

Small guide for harder parts:

The fifth round boss giant Orc Runa is where things get tricky for me. There’s plenty of guides for it, but I like to grab the defense sigil second and health sigil last.

The sixth round spider boss is odd. The mechanics are difficult to get right, but if you kite the ads it can be done with low DPS and ignoring most mechanics. Kill the little mini spider Daedra. Dot the boss, DPS, and run to kite the invincible spiders.

The seventh round argonian behemoth. Well, DPS boss. When bubble minders come, kill one and hide under the others bubble. Dot the boss while your waiting. Then kill it. Kill the poison callers. DPS the boss. Repeat. The sigils aren’t super lifesaver here, the poison is usually practically a one shot. It sucks. Also, hurricane or Veledreth balls sometimes accidentally kill the minder your hiding under. This sucks pretty bad too. You can bash the boss, but he becomes enraged......whatever works for you.

Eight round boss. This One is sometimes easier for people. You really learn how to judge your dot damage on the totems here and let them run through. Start with an arrow barrage, poison inject heavy attack, run to next totem. Poison inject on your way there and barswap to hit with blood craze. You can only have one arrow barrage and one caltrops going at a time. Keep eye out for the flame spinners that like to spawn on the other side of map from you. Remember you can roll into a bash if you need.

Last boss. I’ve had him go straight upstairs and still spawn a cream guard anyways cause he’s a ***. Anyways, grab the health sigil if you have problems burning him down quick enough. If your low on resources, he leaves a wonderful healer you can get a few heavy attacks off before taking portal up.

The dreaded crystal phase. Dot the crystals, dance around the meteors, dodge or block the flaming skull attacks, chase and hide behind circling walls. And constantly heal heal heal as soul churn keeps ramping up constant damage against you for reasons. If it goes more than 3 walls, jump down and grab a sigil and try to take out the daedroth. Eventually you’ll get it.

Third phase. If defense sigil is still there, grab it. If not run to boss and bash instantly. DPS him a little, throw arrow barrage, blood craze, trap bunch of dots and spammable til he ports. I’ve best luck with the bow ulti here. Collect the gold ghosts. They’re majorly important. Like stop whatever your doing and get them important. After he teleports once he’s gonna spawn a deadroth. Use the gold ghost thing here. Kill it quick. Go back to the boss.

Asardes · January 2018

Absolutely no reason to put 75 CP into Piercing, especially for vMA, regardless of class. Mobs there have like 9K and you won't gain more than ~700 penetration from 49 to 75 since the CP are so front weighted; with 49 you are at 4K penetration. Not to mention that stamina NB has Major Fracture (5.3K penetration) into it's spammable skill, so that extra penetration would mostly be lost. Having a lot of recovery as stamina character is needed, primarily to roll dodge, block, break CC, but using Serpent mundus or Ozorga's Triple Trifle Pockets is a much better choice than sacrificing jewelry glyphs for damage; also having VO there is pretty much essential for good sustain. Sacrificing damage is not wise especially on Stamina NB that pretty much has to burst things fast or get its butt kicked hard. For example at the last boss the safest is to burst fast enough he goes straight up before calling crematorial guard and healer. Same goes for the upstairs crystals, since the DoT stacks quite fast and going down is risky due to crematorial guard spawn; the best way is to sacrifice an ult for the 3rd one to be sure you go down fast, since you'll build that right up while grabbing the ghosts and killing the summoner, and use it nuke the boss at the end.

kylewwefan · January 2018

The mobs and bosses resistance are all over the place from what I’ve read. All that extra weapon damage didn’t do me a lot of good.

Being able to spam skills like a noob and roll around and still have resources saved my but a lot more than doing a lot more damage.

I know, it doesn’t seem right. Giving up like 700 buffed weapon damage for some recovery would be a great idea. But it made little difference how fast things were dying compared to my own survivability skyrocketing because having enough resource.

Asardes · January 2018

Heavy and light attacks scale mostly on your weapon damage. If you killed mobs with HA into Surprise Attack and refund most of that with VO would actually gain you resources. I've noticed that in practice you will actually save resources by killing stuff faster by having higher stats. I've sustained just fine with 1.3K recovery and dropped pots in 7/9 rounds, getting major brutality from power extraction.

Only in the 5th and 9th did I really need to use the fully optimized DPS build and weapon power pots to burst those bosses fast. On my 1st clear I had problems with not being able to burst fast enough there with my skill buffed build. I think I gave up at Runa once after about 25-30 minutes and taking the final boss down on 1st completion took me close to 2 hours of trying until I was able to kill the boss. Score was just under 100K and it was a ~3.5h slaughter but I did it. Last time was about 1.5h but I haven't done it in a while.

And I'm really not a top player since I've never put my NB anywhere the leaderboard spots. There's probably a lot of stuff to improve since the scores for the class are second only to sorcerer. But nerfing too much damage for sustain won't help at all. I'd rather go with full damage then reduce the number of deaths trough smarter tactics. Spamming skills with no weaving only leads to fast resource depletion and lackluster damage. Why would someone intentionally build for that?

And Stamina NB wasn't even the hardest class. Magicka Templar was much, much worse and it didn't get better after 10-15 runs until I radically changed the build, incidentally for less recovery and more damage. Also the leaderboards seem to confirm my take - the Templar one doesn't fill, with only 50-60 people listed, while the NB one cuts out at about 470K; Sorcerer is about 530K.

kylewwefan · January 2018

Because I’m bad. And I wrote it for other baddies like me. I double spam Vigor. I fire endless hail in the wrong spot and have to move over dodge roll block, spam Vigor again and then set endless hail and caltrops in the right place. If I spam Vigor while dodgerolling and pop a potion and...you get the point?

I’m making up for higher damage output by adding survival while waiting for everything to die, as it all does. It doesn’t take as long you might think.

This isn’t for leaderboards or even score run at all. Just complete. And I’ve tried. And failed so many times with good players guides and advice. It’s like a “eureka “ moment when I found something g that actually works for me. And you’ll never see anyone recommend it, but it works. Surprisingly good enough.

Asardes · January 2018

Well it's pretty obvious that you have some issues that need solving. Why struggle with them trough hard content, and waste time and money doing it, when you can just practice on dummy for a few hours then go back to vMA with a well practiced rotation and clear it faster? I mean between practicing 2-3h on the dummy then going to vMA next day and clearing in 2h and then in 1.5h is way better than dying there for 4h every day without even ensuring you finish. That's simply efficient and does make you a better player. I mean if you learn to keep your buffs and DoTs up you'll only have to focus on the mechanics. Just like driving the char without thinking which pedals to press instead of the road.

I do from time to time spam skills that work over time, because the game stutters and I'm not sure they fired. Also I do positioning mistakes. But that has to do with practice. But unless you know your skills and rotation and you build right you won't be able to focus on those.

Sarjako · January 2018

kylewwefan wrote: »

Because I’m bad. And I wrote it for other baddies like me. I double spam Vigor. I fire endless hail in the wrong spot and have to move over dodge roll block, spam Vigor again and then set endless hail and caltrops in the right place. If I spam Vigor while dodgerolling and pop a potion and...you get the point?

I’m making up for higher damage output by adding survival while waiting for everything to die, as it all does. It doesn’t take as long you might think.

This isn’t for leaderboards or even score run at all. Just complete. And I’ve tried. And failed so many times with good players guides and advice. It’s like a “eureka “ moment when I found something g that actually works for me. And you’ll never see anyone recommend it, but it works. Surprisingly good enough.

lol lol....lol... this was me... last night and everytime I step in there.

yttoks · January 2018

I think it's pretty darn good advice for people struggling for a first complete.

vMA is where resource management first really comes into play for PvE, and it can be a game stopper if you haven't done anything serious before trying it. Full damage mode strategies are going to lead to a lot more frustration for a lot of first timers who aren't born ninjas.

A big part of beating vMA is just learning the sequence of events and developing muscle memory. Reading about it doesn't do that, playing and failing over and over does. That takes a lot longer if you keep dying right away because your stamina is all gone and that burst strategy you read doesn't work when your skill level/gear only gives you 15k dps.

Staying alive longer increases your lps (learns per second). A person could also try putting on healthy jewelry and see if that works better at first. When that confidence starts building, maybe a robust/arcane piece or two.

Anyway, great guide. My first run was a lot like yours, and I wish I'd been able to read it before I started.

Lukums1 · January 2018

Few secret things:

1. Round 5 ( all of round 5 can be mitigated through 1 Defense sigil 20 seconds - wait 5 seconds - heal sigil ) cleared. " This is true for most rounds "
2. There are (secret spots) on round 7 so you never get poisoned, I've recorded videos of this on my twitch page feel free to inspect ask questions, to prove this I left summoners of the spores up (and in first person LOL) to show how it's done.
3. (Applicable) for mag sorcs only - Suppression field will nullify Crem Guards fire attack which doesn't cast, suppression field also is a massive aoe stun for a period of seconds allowing you to recover kill adds easily.
4. Recovery food for beginners is a must, sure you don't need it but god use it 5000 heath 487 recover stam and mag, you can easily complete vMA with 23-26k STAM/MAG with a solid time.

You'll find doing the last boss like this easier:

1. DPS boss
2. Once he teleports DEF sigil (back up to hit it)
3. Left hand side kill Mag
4. Prepare for CG (don't interrupt boss)
5. 8 Seconds approx left on buff, kill CG (no damage taken)
6. Back on boss
7. Crystal phase
8. Interrupt Boss obtain DPS sigil + haste if the opportunity presents itself
9. Kill summoner towards mid (don't stress plenty of time by doing this )
10. Obtain gold ghosts
11. When boss teleports when the 3rd gold ghosts spawns LOOK for the gold ghost DON'T interrupt boss (as you lose time) you can stun the boss with 3 before he even starts his whirl attack less of a cluster (#$!)

In any case, congrats! and good job!