Theory-crafted Thirsty Argonian Magplar (or any class)

fred4 · January 2022

TL;DR: Potion cooldown reduction gives you almost 100% uptime on Clever Alchemist and Iron Flask. Combine with a Willpower front bar and fully activated Markyn ring (3 sets), the offensive stats look much better than I thought. I'm not sure UESP is calclating Iron Flask correctly. Has anyone tried this? Is it any good?

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=415797

EF321 · January 2022

Almost 100% uptime on alchemist sounds good until you realize you are giving up 276x3 constant damage for that, and your 5 piece could be something else backbarable too. But as you described, it is more like Trickery that you can control by juggling different potions.

By the way, since hybridization Fury and Voidcaller can be stacked in similar fashion.

Jim_Pipp · January 2022

Clever alchemist is fun as a backbar set, but there are easier and better ways to get lots of +damage........ BUT....

THIRSTY is seriously overpowered with the right combo of potions. Reduction to potion cool down could give 9x 45 second major buffs, OR get 100% uptime on the briefer potions, in particular immovable triggers some really interesting CP that are normally balanced by being rarely available.

Obviously on argonion it also trivializes sustain. Totally underated.

fred4 · January 2022

EF321 wrote: »

Almost 100% uptime on alchemist sounds good until you realize you are giving up 276x3 constant damage for that.

That's what I would have said, but the numbers speak for themselves. They are about the same as a conventional build, but make me a light armor build that has the same level of health and tankiness coming from Markyn and Iron Flask. UESP figures didn't change when I enabled / disabled the latter. One of my questions is exactly how much resistance this has in game, cause UESP seems bugged.

The real attraction is that you can play around with overlapping potions. Tri-pots one time. Maybe a resistance potion to add another 5K physical or spell resistance 21 seconds later. Or an Immovability / Detection potion. You could use the build to simply have 70% uptime on detection potions.

fred4 · January 2022

Jim_Pipp wrote: »

Clever alchemist is fun as a backbar set, but there are easier and better ways to get lots of +damage........ BUT....

THIRSTY is seriously overpowered with the right combo of potions. Reduction to potion cool down could give 9x 45 second major buffs, OR get 100% uptime on the briefer potions, in particular immovable triggers some really interesting CP that are normally balanced by being rarely available.

Obviously on argonion it also trivializes sustain. Totally underated.

Oh, I hadn't even thought about CP. That is a good idea. 50% controlled uptime of immovable. Could slot a root / immovable poison as well. Now that you said that, I'm wondering whether I shouldn't simply wear Assassin's Guile with 8.4s immovable poisons instead. That could proc some interesting effects.

milllaurie · January 2022

I tried it 3 y ago on argo dk. Yeah, 3x infused is more dmg you don't have to proc with potions (which u burn a MASSIVE amount of).
Dmg was terrible. Does not work nearly as well as you are expecting.

Dorkener · January 2022

I'm running a variation of this on a mag necro support build (mostly heavy armor, mael/master resto frontbar, 1 pc moster set, 1HS backbar + markyn as per original build), the only offensive skill slotted is blastbones for corpse generation and (very) light AoE pressure. Still tinkering with enchants/traits/monster 1pc, with necro passives / slotted skills it's super tanky with great healing output. Sustain a total non issue. Main caveat I guess is bar slot and potion effect flexibility as mentioned above. For what its worth, its niche and fun, I'm not experienced enough as a pvp healer to comment on how it compares to meta setups.

divnyi · January 2022

fred4 wrote: »

Jim_Pipp wrote: »

Clever alchemist is fun as a backbar set, but there are easier and better ways to get lots of +damage........ BUT....

THIRSTY is seriously overpowered with the right combo of potions. Reduction to potion cool down could give 9x 45 second major buffs, OR get 100% uptime on the briefer potions, in particular immovable triggers some really interesting CP that are normally balanced by being rarely available.

Obviously on argonion it also trivializes sustain. Totally underated.

Oh, I hadn't even thought about CP. That is a good idea. 50% controlled uptime of immovable. Could slot a root / immovable poison as well. Now that you said that, I'm wondering whether I shouldn't simply wear Assassin's Guile with 8.4s immovable poisons instead. That could proc some interesting effects.

I tried that. It's very, very bad. You still have that 20% per LA to trigger poison. Also there was visual glitch showing that once opponent get off root, your poison buff disappears too. But immovable part is actually still there.

Tommy_The_Gun · January 2022

One could make a point that potion cooldown builds were decent back in the day, at least on Argonians, when they had 4600 resources restored or maybe even after 1st nerf when they had 4000 resources restored. The problem is that nowadays, after most recent racial rebalance they only have 3125 resources restored.

Assuming that you will go for the lowest potion cooldown possible (3x infused jewellery, so 7 sec x3 = 21, so 45 - 21 = 24). So this tranlates to something around 260 tri-stat recovery... which is not that impressive, especially if you consider that it has a permanent gold cost (chugging potion every 24 seconds) and all your jewellery glyphs are occupied.

And yes, it is lowered in PvP, so it goes "in pair" with lower health recovery, as argonian potion passive health restored is affected by Battle Spirit (reduced by half). So in PvP it is even more useless.

For sustain on an Argonian it is actually better to run 3x infused tri-stat recovery glyphs + Argonian potion passive vs potion speed glyphs + Argonian potion passive. It is just more recovery.

Also, I think if you PvP-ed, then you will probably know that the biggest weakness of Argonians is that "drink potion" button almost always does not work when you need it.