It is a matter of learning what to do and when to do it. It is heavily mechanic-driven.

Yes, getting that first clear is challenging, but once that first clear happens, the second one is much easier and gets even easier the more you do it. At first, I found the poison, ice, and final round the most challenging. Oddly, the last round ended up becoming one of the easiest after a few clears.

In the ice round, do not focus on the main target/boss. Kill the ads and interrupting the troll are the two priorities. I think the adds spawn based on boss health which can lead to becoming overwhelmed with incoming damage.

Yes, it is frustrating in the beginning. It is more about survival than damage output. When stress builds, take a break. Good luck.

Use sigils. It helps until you get better.
Start on the ice that has the speed boost sigil. Build destro ulti. Dps boss a little and focus adds when they spawn. Then when boss goes red, run to next ice with healing sigil. Take it and do some more dps on boss but focus on adds. When red again then run to last ice. Boss should be like at 40% then. Immediately take the dps boost sigil and the shield one. That's why u leave that ice last. At that point alot of adds spawn who shoot arrows and throw ice at you. The shield sigil reflects them all back to them. Drop destro ulti on boss and watch her melt thanks to damage sigil. Sometimes ulti alone won't quite finish her so during ulti ignore all adds, tab target boss and use spammable. Ezpz

The smashing itself puts a hurt on you, so jump off and head to the next platform a little bit before she actually smashes the one you've been on.

You are experiencing what countless have before you. I dies countless times. Read guides. Keep trying. Take a break and come back. If you have the quest you’ll resume where u were.
At least these days normal drops weapons very nearly as good as vet to use in the mean time.

It's not really. It's "hard" in that things that did 0 damage in normal basically one shot you in vet. I've found the best way to do it is on a sorc without pale order. You can run oaken, but I didn't buy high isle so I don't have it. I run 2 PC maw, 5 PC order's wrath body and then 5 PC shalks on jewelry and front bar lightning staff I ran decisive because it was cheap and synergized with shalks and ulti gain from slotting a fighters guild ability. Your ability bars would look something like 2 pets on both bars then front bar: daedric prey, hardened ward, crystal frags and ult is dawn breaker (you never cast it, it's slotted for extra ult gain and 3% weapon and spell power) alternatively you can slot camo hunter over crystal frags for major prophecy and some minor berserk and you can either leave dawnbreaker for the extra spell damage or swap to meteor for the extra max mag and mag regen, either way you never cast these ults. Back bar: crit surge, wall of elements and a flex spot I typically slot mages wrath here to quickly finish off a boss in execute and your preferred morph of atronach. Thief mundus.

Basically the goal of this build is to abuse what oaken soul healers do in pvp where they essentially treat their ult like a basic ability. You're more or less just going to be dropping atronach as soon as you have enough ult (170) as you gain about 150 or so back by the time he dies. This build let's you focus on mechanics and keeping your defenses up while your pets do the vast majority of your damage on your daedric prey target. If you're using the crystal frags build which you use as a spammable you're (obviously) going to want to have alchemy 50 for medicinal use and extra potions per craft and use spell crit pots made using lady's smock, water hyacinth and bugloss. These mats are fairly cheap and restore health, mag and provides spell crit. This is my preferred build because it's let's me deal with enemies who are mechanics such as the little turret guys in arena 4, trolls in arena 5, the webspinners and poison bugs in arena 6, the plague channelers in arena 7, interrupting/killing the fire channelers and healers in stage 8 as well as being able to kill 2 obelisks at once on the final boss, and the ritualist summoners in arena 9. Edit: I forgot to emphasize this, but absolutely make sure on the stage 4 boss you throw daedric prey on and then shield spam until the boss stops moving which will be right around the damage sigil. After that pop the sigil drop your atronach, make sure you refresh prey asap after it falls off and LA weave with crystal frags or heavy attack with your lightning staff if you're not using frags. In arena 8 it's also very important that when a fire mage spawns you run over to him and if he starts channeling the fire circle above his head you spam your shield while walking over to him and then interrupt him. If you're running frags you can kill him while your pets focus the boss or whatever else. Otherwise you could realistically just ignore him as long as you remember to interrupt his casts. This fire mage and the poison caster on the previous arena are the biggest reason I like running frags because it lets me deal with these guys without causing my pets to target swap even when I don't need them to which basically causes your melee pets to run halfway across the arena then turn around and run back when the add inevitably dies before they even reach it. Wasting time they could of been damaging another target. The reason these mechanics are so important especially specifically to a pet sorc is because they do heavy aoe damage that also targets your pets and will kill them if you don't shield spam.

If you were to use the alternative build with camo hunter your "spammable" would be channeling your heavy attack with your front bar lightning staff. This is my least favorite because heavy attacking makes your pets focus that target so your maw and unstable familiar start running across the arena because of the target swap wasting damage. The upside however is that you can run tri pots or trash pots for health or stam. You won't need mag trash pots because since you're heavy attacking almost constantly your mag is basically never able to run dry.

With an oaken build you'd probably run hardened ward, daedric prey, crit surge with both pets or unslotting one of the pets for crystal frags with atronach ult. And instead of shalks which would be redundant anyways especially next patch you'd run something with nice 2-4 piece like mother's sorrow because you absolutely want to keep maw on since you're using a daedric prey focus build and tri/trash pots. If unslotting one of the pets personally I would unslot familiar and keep tormentor because tormentor is ranged and doesn't suffer from a target swap making it run across the arena.

While it can be done on other classes mag sorc is cut and dry the best one for solo arenas especially in vet difficulties where you need to do mechanics while also having DPS. Magblade specifically has high self healing, but the issue is that the class is fairly involved and absolutely requires you to be very good at doing the mechanics while also making sure you're doing damage. The most important thing on matriarch runa is to understand that she has phases based on her health and bursting her generally isn't an option. First and foremost every time a troll spawns it either has to die or be interrupted every time it attempts to break a platform. If the troll breaks one it's a guaranteed wipe. Other than than her attacks are slow and you just have to make sure to break out her fear. Her phases are 90% hp she will spawn adds you can ignore these and burst her down to 75% if you're using an aoe nuke ult like destro ult or charged atronach if not make sure to kill these adds before she breaks the first stage. Her next set of adds are at 60% hp when these spawn and you're using an aoe nuke ult use it to nuke down the combined wave of adds here. She breaks this second platform at 45% hp so absolutely make sure all adds are dead prior to this. Her last set of adds are at 30%. Figure out where the damage sigil spawns (they're in a set position always) and have this be your last platform. When she starts breaking the second plat form run over here use the damage sigil start dpsing her move over the defense sigil which will opposite the damage one on the same platform and use it and then just burn the down the boss as fast as possible ignoring the last set of adds. Once you realize it's not a DPS race and she only does things at specific health percents you can really slow the boss down, make sure the adds are dead and focus on making sure the trolls can't destroy a platform because if they break even 1 you won't have a final platform to stand on and you'll die to the water.

Realistically though why are you doing vet if you're so frustrated with it? The difference between perfected and non perfected is a crappy line of pen on staves and 2h and some crit on the bow. These stats are active for all of like 3 seconds at a time while you're refreshing dots on your back bar and not active on your front bar because you should only be back barring maelstrom weapons. The only arena sets you would front bar would be like brp or vateshran daggers or brp bow. Brp daggers only give stam regen perfected which isn't really that useful unless you're a stam toon and need sustain and while brp bow and vateshran daggers give good crit while front barred as perfected what's more important is the main set effect that you would get from even the normal version. And adding even further onto that the only one of those that's probably actually probably even worth running on a mag toon is brp daggers which has a borderline useless stat line on perfected for a mag toon.

Edit: Woops long post, my bad. I guess a tl;dr is just farm normal the perfected stat line barely if ever makes a difference especially if you're on a mag toon because the only arena sets that are feasible to run on front bar for mag is one that gives stam recovery for it's perfected bonus which is borderline useless.

I have yet to beat it either and I have soloed a couple of the vet group dungeons. My problem is field if view. I can't see everything that I need to fast enough to keep up with it on a mainly melee character. I get stuck on what should be one of the easier ones the giant dwemer spider.

Casdha wrote: »

I have yet to beat it either and I have soloed a couple of the vet group dungeons. My problem is field if view. I can't see everything that I need to fast enough to keep up with it on a mainly melee character. I get stuck on what should be one of the easier ones the giant dwemer spider.

When you run it on normal, try to remember where the spawn points are for enemies. Will help you set up in vet so you aren't running around each arena burning stamina. EDIT: This is especially true on the last arena with the Narkynaz, a relatively weak add that makes the arena much harder if ignored

The spider is a perfect example. Pay attention to when and where the sentries spawn and focus on those first. The spider always drops in the same location, right near the weapon power sigil. USE IT. The mechanics on the spider are similar to Darkshade 2. You need to stay under or in the spider's aura to kill it until it goes aggro, then get away. Rinse-repeat.

Until you beat VMA, you feel like you have to rush to put out as much damage as possible.. Slow down, don't burn out your resources, and focus on mechanics. Because when you get to Arena 4 and above, mechanics are all that matter

vMA is how you learn to play your char for real.

first runs in VMA are a mix of tears, blood and desperation but trust me, don't give up! In a couple of months you'll beat it easly and in another couple of months you'll face it with the weirdest builds ever to increase the challenge

Thank you all