Asardes wrote: »

Nirnhoned would only buff Poison Injection off the back bar since ST DOTs inherit the initial stats when they were cast. Since it's a very weak skill as of late, it would be a loss to buff only that but decrease DPS overall trough not getting as much up time & increase from your enchant. They also reduced the damage of Volley (base skill) by quite a lot, and hit the Maelstrom bow particularly hard because they also increased the tick timer from 0.5s to 1s so even if they somewhat buffed the bonus, the last ticks are weaker now than they used to be. Nowadays the bow is there mostly to proc your berserker enchant (weapon & spell damage) so infused is pretty much the only trait worth using. Endless Hail is also better for your sustain since it lasts 14s, so you cast it less often, and you will get the most of the Maelstrom bow effect Thunderous Volley since it has more time to stack damage. Whether you wanna keep the bow, and farm for another, or transmute it depends on how fast you can get transmutation stones vs. farming vMA. I suppose the former is easier from what you've written.

Asardes wrote: »

macsmooth wrote: »

Asardes wrote: »

Nirnhoned would only buff Poison Injection off the back bar since ST DOTs inherit the initial stats when they were cast. Since it's a very weak skill as of late, it would be a loss to buff only that but decrease DPS overall trough not getting as much up time & increase from your enchant. They also reduced the damage of Volley (base skill) by quite a lot, and hit the Maelstrom bow particularly hard because they also increased the tick timer from 0.5s to 1s so even if they somewhat buffed the bonus, the last ticks are weaker now than they used to be. Nowadays the bow is there mostly to proc your berserker enchant (weapon & spell damage) so infused is pretty much the only trait worth using. Endless Hail is also better for your sustain since it lasts 14s, so you cast it less often, and you will get the most of the Maelstrom bow effect Thunderous Volley since it has more time to stack damage. Whether you wanna keep the bow, and farm for another, or transmute it depends on how fast you can get transmutation stones vs. farming vMA. I suppose the former is easier from what you've written.

Thank you for your prompt reply it’s very informative, I knew about the changes to the bow from scale patch if I remember right

Funny story I used my last 50 crystals on the flame staff so will have to wait for a week or two for a re-supply of transmutation crystals, so will keep running vma and see if I can pickup some more bows as I wouldn’t mind picking up the lightening staff

I just wasn’t sure what the difference is between infused and weapon vs Nirnhoned and damage glyphs and making up for the weapon glyph front bar was, I tank mostly so dps isn’t my main bag of tricks

Hail for sustain and barrage for the damage is a fair point thank you

My suggestion is to keep all the weapons you get because you don't know when you make a new character, or they become good again due to direct or indirect changes.

For example in Morrowind/Horns of the Reach patch, when I did the bulk of my farming, Lightning staff was the most effective magicka weapon because there was no downtime on off-balance. Every trial group was running 8 sorcerers and all lightning damage to get the most out of it; sorcerer damage was also overtuned to the point where people were jokingly calling the game Elder Sorcs Online. Then they changed that and put a cooldown, so people moved to other classes and Inferno Staff, which is pretty much what we have now.

An even more complicated example is Dual Wield (Cruel Flurry) which was good at the start, when the arena was introduced, because you didn't have any 5p sets with weapons, and only a few 3p sets with jewelry so everyone was running Maelstrom 2W with Agility, Hunding and some of the few monster sets that were available. Then they started introducing 5p sets, and decreased the weapon damage from 3K to 2K so they weren't as viable. After Morrowind they nerfed sustain by scaling back recovery and eliminating cost reduction from CP so this kind of rotation, alternating Flurry and DoTs became very hard. In Scalebreaker they buffed certain DoTs so this set became very good again on pretty much every class even if the bonus was reduced to 1K, but the condition was also changed, so you got a buff to all DoTs for the duration, instead of having to refresh it. In Dragonhold they nerfed the DoTs again, but they buffed the modifiers for class DoTs (DK) and all DoTs (Necromancer) so DW is still pretty good on those classes.

Restoration staff is a very good but often overlooked weapon, because it's mostly used in PvP. I've used it on several classes and the sustain you get from it is hard to overlook, especially now when you hit 3 targets with one cast, so it will proc pretty much every time when it's off cooldown.

1H+S hasn't been that effective but I did use it in one of my builds, a Stamina Warden, to sustain various magicka skills, such as Shimmering Shield.

Asardes wrote: »

Well I have only 10, and will expand to 12, the other 6 will stay as crafters for the foreseeable future. Maelstrom 2H is kinda weak, since the DoT it puts on the target is ~1K in practice (the tool tip is about 1.6K/s but people have resistance) and forces you a skill that's not very useful, after they cut the snare from Critical Charge. If you want a standalone weapon for PvP that's would be the Asylum one. Especially on Templar where you have two cheap ultimates to use - Rememberance and Empowering Sweep - and you don't really rely on DoTs for your damage.