A True Endless Archive Build

fred4 · November 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBBd36LSsPo

fred4 · November 2023

With the greaves and Alessia's Bulwark, the latter in place of Bahraha's / Dragon's Appetite, I was able to face tank Gothmaku on arc 3 without blocking and without any favorable visions to speed up the fight. Doing so with lots of adds in a confined space would still be an issue. Even in a larger space you still want to manage the adds and not trigger unnecessary ones, but that all felt doable. From a templar's perspective not having to kite is a game changer. I only fear that, at higher arcs, you will be back to exactly that, except you might switch to an Infused weapon with a Weakening enchant, if that turned out the key thing here and not just the slightly increased resistances from Alessia's. Focused Efforts would mitigate the kiting issue too - you would DOT the marauder up by gap closing and backing off. That said, I can't imagine templar will ever be outright meta for the archive. Anyway, I'm basically done with it (the archive), so this will likely be the last update to the build. If I had to recommend a single gear setup, it would be:

Vengeance Leech front bar, precise lightning staff for early arcs, possibly infused flame staff with a weakening enchant for later ones.
Unleashed back bar, dual wield.
Alessia's Bulwark (light armor).
Esoteric Greaves.

gariondavey · November 2023

@fred4 what is the reasoning for using unleashed terror back bar vs master 2h with carve? Hemmoraheging tick each second?

Joy_Division · November 2023

There is a great reason to be a Redguard Magplar. Because Redguards are awesome.

I've used Alessia's Bulwark and found it one of the better tank sets for the archive. I think you can do better for a 3 piece than Vengeance Leash. Vengeance Leash is probably the best set in the game for something like Skyreach, but I don;t think there are enough trash mobs to for it to shine. I imagine for boss fights you have something different?

Magplar has two very effective tools for this content (Explosive Charge for AoE interrupt, Jesus Beam). But having a channeled spammable starts to get dicey by Arc 4 and Crescent Sweep almost becomes unusable by then (agree with your ulti choices). The one skill I;d recommend changing is swapping Retribution morph instead of Purifying.

Kartalin · November 2023

Vengeance leech probably shines versus trash in the specific situation of using the esoteric greaves. Probably not worth it during boss stages without enough adds to keep it replenishing stats.

Edit: I do want to add that Unleashed Terror synergizes really well with Explosive charge, specifically the 10 second cooldown of the proc and the 10 second cooldown of major protection. I don't know that I would use it either but I like when cooldowns line up lol

fred4 · November 2023

gariondavey wrote: »

@fred4 what is the reasoning for using unleashed terror back bar vs master 2h with carve? Hemmoraheging tick each second?

No reason. I simply didn't think of it, but basically yes. Exactly that. Carve applies Bleeding. Unleashed applies Hemorraghing directly. According to the tooltip, it reapplies it every tick of the Unleashed proc over the 10s duration. That means 100% uptime on every target. The normal duration of Hemorraghing is 4s. Furthemore a Carve DOT tick only has a 1% or 3% chance to apply the status effect at base. Charged weapons and Heartland Conqueror would significantly boost that, but I don't see the uptime coming anywhere close to 100%. Nice that it's also AOE though.

In addition, Quick Cloak is currently my only stamina drain. All remaining stamina is dedicated to maintaining the Esoteric Greaves and for the occasional dodge rolls.

fred4 · November 2023

Joy_Division wrote: »

I think you can do better for a 3 piece than Vengeance Leash.

Make a suggestion. I would need a front barrable set, which is certainly doable, but I started out with Bahraha and settled on Alessia's. Vengeance Leech allows for a double-barred set. Certainly Alessia's is the kind of set you want to double bar and I've been looking over monster sets. None of them cries out to me.

I imagine for boss fights you have something different?

No, I'm not there yet. I'm not that kind of player in general, e.g. one who swaps gear for every fight. I'm also struggling to think what I would wear once I have some good visions under my belt, e.g. Focused Efforts. They do all the damage. More crit would be nice, I guess, but the Tho'at and boss fights become the easy ones by the end of arc 4 anyway.

The one skill I;d recommend changing is swapping Retribution morph instead of Purifying.

That would certainly be an option. I think I even had Ritual in the rotation at one point. Retribution is a bit cheaper, but it's an expensive skill all the same. I decided to just use it as a cleanse and additional heal, when needed. Class / build damage isn't what kills in the archive. That 200K+ DPS on the dragon by the end wasn't my skills. I don't think it was even mainly Focused Efforts, because I only have about 80K DPS earlier thoughout the fight. I think it must have been the combination of Swift Gale, Scorching Support, which the dragon was sitting in, and Focused Efforts. Swift Gale has 3 ground projectiles, right? The dragon's hitbox is probably so large he took damage from all of them.

Joy_Division · November 2023

fred4 wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

I think you can do better for a 3 piece than Vengeance Leash.

Make a suggestion. I would need a front barrable set, which is certainly doable, but I started out with Bahraha and settled on Alessia's. Vengeance Leech allows for a double-barred set. Certainly Alessia's is the kind of set you want to double bar and I've been looking over monster sets. None of them cries out to me.

What I do is slot one of the PvE trial sets for the 5% damage. False Gods offers crit for the two piece. I generally do not need the incoming resources potentially from Leech, but YMMV.

I imagine for boss fights you have something different?

No, I'm not there yet. I'm not that kind of player in general, e.g. one who swaps gear for every fight. I'm also struggling to think what I would wear once I have some good visions under my belt, e.g. Focused Efforts. They do all the damage. More crit would be nice, I guess, but the Tho'at and boss fights become the easy ones by the end of arc 4 anyway.

I hear you. Swapping a weapon and one piece of jewelry would reach my tolerance for such things. Luckily, that is all it would entail.

The one skill I;d recommend changing is swapping Retribution morph instead of Purifying.

That would certainly be an option. I think I even had Ritual in the rotation at one point. Retribution is a bit cheaper, but it's an expensive skill all the same. I decided to just use it as a cleanse and additional heal, when needed. Class / build damage isn't what kills in the archive. That 200K+ DPS on the dragon by the end wasn't my skills. I don't think it was even mainly Focused Efforts, because I only have about 80K DPS earlier thoughout the fight. I think it must have been the combination of Swift Gale, Scorching Support, which the dragon was sitting in, and Focused Efforts. Swift Gale has 3 ground projectiles, right? The dragon's hitbox is probably so large he took damage from all of them.

Ultimately, it's not going to make or break the build. ESO has become a game where a piddling of health incoming or outgoing doesn't matter because generally we die either to one shots or 40K incoming damage from multiple sources in a single GCD. With such mechanics, I would err on "moar damage" being preferable as the low health green blob dying to residual damage will prevent a death whereas residual healing probably won't.

Lexalious · November 2023

my oakensoul warden gotto arc8, i have never though of using esoteric greaves even tho i basically lost all my threads to marauders cuz their light attacks through block deals like 25k damage at that point. anyways good idea thank you

MidniteOwl1913 · November 2023

I don't remember who suggested Elf's Bane, but I love that on my DK with magma shield. :-)

gariondavey · November 2023

fred4 wrote: »

gariondavey wrote: »

@fred4 what is the reasoning for using unleashed terror back bar vs master 2h with carve? Hemmoraheging tick each second?

No reason. I simply didn't think of it, but basically yes. Exactly that. Carve applies Bleeding. Unleashed applies Hemorraghing directly. According to the tooltip, it reapplies it every tick of the Unleashed proc over the 10s duration. That means 100% uptime on every target. The normal duration of Hemorraghing is 4s. Furthemore a Carve DOT tick only has a 1% or 3% chance to apply the status effect at base. Charged weapons and Heartland Conqueror would significantly boost that, but I don't see the uptime coming anywhere close to 100%. Nice that it's also AOE though.

In addition, Quick Cloak is currently my only stamina drain. All remaining stamina is dedicated to maintaining the Esoteric Greaves and for the occasional dodge rolls.

I thought there were passive things you can get in the ea that give you increased chance to apply status debuffs. But yeah maybe even with charged and cp and the ea stuff it would only be 25 or 50 or something percent. The stam drain is definitely understandable though

Theignson · November 2023

Joy_Division wrote: »

There is a great reason to be a Redguard Magplar. Because Redguards are awesome.

I've used Alessia's Bulwark and found it one of the better tank sets for the archive. I think you can do better for a 3 piece than Vengeance Leash. Vengeance Leash is probably the best set in the game for something like Skyreach, but I don;t think there are enough trash mobs to for it to shine. I imagine for boss fights you have something different?

Magplar has two very effective tools for this content (Explosive Charge for AoE interrupt, Jesus Beam). But having a channeled spammable starts to get dicey by Arc 4 and Crescent Sweep almost becomes unusable by then (agree with your ulti choices). The one skill I;d recommend changing is swapping Retribution morph instead of Purifying.

Hello Joy,
Nice to see you back. Back in the day, your guide to Maelstrom (before there was a "normal" and "vet" !) got me through it.
My question: how can Alessia Bulwark be good? If a Boss, eg had 5000 weapon damage, it would reduce it less than 10%. Why is that so strong?

Theignson · November 2023

Using an ice furnace +Heartlands Conqueror build, we got to Arc 6 stage 2 last night and still had 3 threads-- just had to quit due to being tired. When you play after work, you can't go on forever.

But my disappointment increased further-- I got 4 Focused efforts. It is basically god mode. IMO this is poor design.I see now why the fights were such a slog without the right visions. The trash gets like 500k HP and still hit like trucks, and there are 25 of them. Without focused efforts/god mode, it is hard to get through with "normal" gear if you have lousy visions.

katorga · November 2023

Theignson wrote: »

Using an ice furnace +Heartlands Conqueror build, we got to Arc 6 stage 2 last night and still had 3 threads-- just had to quit due to being tired. When you play after work, you can't go on forever.

But my disappointment increased further-- I got 4 Focused efforts. It is basically god mode. IMO this is poor design.I see now why the fights were such a slog without the right visions. The trash gets like 500k HP and still hit like trucks, and there are 25 of them. Without focused efforts/god mode, it is hard to get through with "normal" gear if you have lousy visions.

I'm sure ZOS will nerf Focused Efforts hard.

It is amazing how much damage a tiny little status effect can do when you get 1000% damage boost.

I didn't think Alessia's Bulwark had any PVE impact, so news to me that dropping an NPC's weapon damage by 300 is even noticeable. What am I missing here?

Good thread, Thanks for all the ideas!

NoSoup · November 2023

So after reading through this I decided to give swapping my infused weapon/spell power glyph with a gold weakening glyph. You can definitely notice the difference, probably still need more than the 13k resistences I went in with but its something to build around.

One thing I did notice, in pure ESO RNG gold, I got 3x of the increase your enchantment effects by 60% visions on the one run. The cumulative effect of the first 2 pushed it to around 1200 weapon/spell damage reduction. Oddly, the 3rd time I used it, it had no effect on the enchantment's tooltip value at all. So don't know if there is a cap on how much you can boost the weakening glyph, if its a UI error or you just can't use more than 2x of the enchantment visions.

robpr · November 2023

katorga wrote: »

I didn't think Alessia's Bulwark had any PVE impact, so news to me that dropping an NPC's weapon damage by 300 is even noticeable. What am I missing here?

Each mob in PvE has a hidden weapon/spell damage stat that affects its normal attack damage, if I remember correctly trash mobs should have around 1000-1500, so reducing it by 300 + armor + maim + protection will be VERY noticeable. In some circumstances, like stacking Enchantment power Vision and using Weakening Glyph, you can reduce enemy weapon and spell damage to zero, making them do no damage at all. Bosses stats vary, but even then, just 300 should translate to something about 10-15% reduction alone. Nightblade has access to Major Cowardice that stacks with this reduction, reducing damage taken even further. Be mind that if enemy has some damage based on your hp (like Serpent's explosion) or Oblivion damage like Z'Maja orbs, reducing their stats won't do anything, but Maim debuff and Protection or Aegis buff will still work.

With one Enchantment power Vision and Weakening Glyph, 31k armor, minor maim, minor and major protection, it reduces Gothmau's Slice attack damage from 21k to 7k.

Lexalious · November 2023

focused efforts does seem to be an oversight by the devs right now. feels like they forgot charged or hlc existed. in any case, i 100% don't think they should nerf it, i think they should buff other underwhelming visions like 3% increased damage on direct hits. even if you managed to get all 5 of them until arc8, mobs will have scaled their hp pool by 10000% and you increased "a part" of your damage by 15%. its just not great.

Lexalious · November 2023

i think all visions need to be wanted by some build or the other. you could be super excited to see focused efforts, or a nightblade should be super excited to see direct damage vision. but right now it is not the case. i would take coin gains over any 3% buff to anything

IZZEFlameLash · November 2023

katorga wrote: »

Theignson wrote: »

Using an ice furnace +Heartlands Conqueror build, we got to Arc 6 stage 2 last night and still had 3 threads-- just had to quit due to being tired. When you play after work, you can't go on forever.

But my disappointment increased further-- I got 4 Focused efforts. It is basically god mode. IMO this is poor design.I see now why the fights were such a slog without the right visions. The trash gets like 500k HP and still hit like trucks, and there are 25 of them. Without focused efforts/god mode, it is hard to get through with "normal" gear if you have lousy visions.

I'm sure ZOS will nerf Focused Efforts hard.

It is amazing how much damage a tiny little status effect can do when you get 1000% damage boost.

I didn't think Alessia's Bulwark had any PVE impact, so news to me that dropping an NPC's weapon damage by 300 is even noticeable. What am I missing here?

Good thread, Thanks for all the ideas!

If ZOS nerfs any of the visions, it shows that they do not play their own game and content they made. If visions and verses were acquired from players choosing out of a skill tree-esque UI with 0 RNG, I can see it being reduced. But as is, you can go do EA and never once get those strong visions and verses because all of them are RNGs and there are far more trash verses and visions.

katorga · November 2023

IZZEFlameLash wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

Theignson wrote: »

Using an ice furnace +Heartlands Conqueror build, we got to Arc 6 stage 2 last night and still had 3 threads-- just had to quit due to being tired. When you play after work, you can't go on forever.

But my disappointment increased further-- I got 4 Focused efforts. It is basically god mode. IMO this is poor design.I see now why the fights were such a slog without the right visions. The trash gets like 500k HP and still hit like trucks, and there are 25 of them. Without focused efforts/god mode, it is hard to get through with "normal" gear if you have lousy visions.

I'm sure ZOS will nerf Focused Efforts hard.

It is amazing how much damage a tiny little status effect can do when you get 1000% damage boost.

I didn't think Alessia's Bulwark had any PVE impact, so news to me that dropping an NPC's weapon damage by 300 is even noticeable. What am I missing here?

Good thread, Thanks for all the ideas!

If ZOS nerfs any of the visions, it shows that they do not play their own game and content they made. If visions and verses were acquired from players choosing out of a skill tree-esque UI with 0 RNG, I can see it being reduced. But as is, you can go do EA and never once get those strong visions and verses because all of them are RNGs and there are far more trash verses and visions.

Dunno. There is a huge gap between Focused Efforts and other visions.

Lexalious wrote: »

focused efforts does seem to be an oversight by the devs right now. feels like they forgot charged or hlc existed. in any case, i 100% don't think they should nerf it, i think they should buff other underwhelming visions like 3% increased damage on direct hits. even if you managed to get all 5 of them until arc8, mobs will have scaled their hp pool by 10000% and you increased "a part" of your damage by 15%. its just not great.

Exactly, the delta between NPC scaling and many of the visions just doesn't add up.

jaws343 · November 2023

NoSoup wrote: »

So after reading through this I decided to give swapping my infused weapon/spell power glyph with a gold weakening glyph. You can definitely notice the difference, probably still need more than the 13k resistences I went in with but its something to build around.

One thing I did notice, in pure ESO RNG gold, I got 3x of the increase your enchantment effects by 60% visions on the one run. The cumulative effect of the first 2 pushed it to around 1200 weapon/spell damage reduction. Oddly, the 3rd time I used it, it had no effect on the enchantment's tooltip value at all. So don't know if there is a cap on how much you can boost the weakening glyph, if its a UI error or you just can't use more than 2x of the enchantment visions.

I had a run the other day that had zero focussed efforts and like 4 or 5 of the increase enchant ones.

Had my infused fire enchant at a nearly 20k tooltip, and was also just melting things with force pulse.

jaws343 · November 2023

Lexalious wrote: »

focused efforts does seem to be an oversight by the devs right now. feels like they forgot charged or hlc existed. in any case, i 100% don't think they should nerf it, i think they should buff other underwhelming visions like 3% increased damage on direct hits. even if you managed to get all 5 of them until arc8, mobs will have scaled their hp pool by 10000% and you increased "a part" of your damage by 15%. its just not great.

You don't even need charged or hlc. Ele sus costs zero to cast and applies status effects on cast. So you can just spam it on everything, repeatedly. Had 4 focused efforts and like 4-5 casts of ele sus woven in with heavy attacks was melting bosses.

Paired with the bleed on direct damage verse, it just wrecks everything spamming ele sus.

Lexalious · November 2023

today i again got to arc8 with warden solo. this time only with 2x focused efforts 2x attuned echants. it didn't feel like god mode at all. so i should say its doable without pure rng as well. died to stupid in arc8 due to being tired and careless at that point. next time fingers crossed

fred4 · November 2023

jaws343 wrote: »

NoSoup wrote: »

So after reading through this I decided to give swapping my infused weapon/spell power glyph with a gold weakening glyph. You can definitely notice the difference, probably still need more than the 13k resistences I went in with but its something to build around.

One thing I did notice, in pure ESO RNG gold, I got 3x of the increase your enchantment effects by 60% visions on the one run. The cumulative effect of the first 2 pushed it to around 1200 weapon/spell damage reduction. Oddly, the 3rd time I used it, it had no effect on the enchantment's tooltip value at all. So don't know if there is a cap on how much you can boost the weakening glyph, if its a UI error or you just can't use more than 2x of the enchantment visions.

I had a run the other day that had zero focussed efforts and like 4 or 5 of the increase enchant ones.

Had my infused fire enchant at a nearly 20k tooltip, and was also just melting things with force pulse.

I would have to go over footage leading up to the video that I posted, but as far as I remember I had quite a few good visions on top of 3x stacked Focused Efforts, such as increased enchant and poison damage. I also had the Swift Gales verse, which is very strong, probably especially against the dragon. That said, one should never underestimate strong sticky DOTs in particular, e.g. those that are created by Focused Efforts in this instance. It isn't the first time the game has had such. There was a DOT patch in the past and, further back, two weeks of what became known as "glyphgate", which had a similar effect. Consistent high damage that ticks away in the background, while you are busy with defense or adds, plays very nicely.

Honestly, I'm not complaining. The idea behind the archive seems to be precisely to allow for large variations in runs and stages. I get the disappointment that comes from knowing your skill may not be responsible for a good run, but now the cat is out of the bag and we have leaderboards, I don't exactly want the bar to be reset either. Every time that happens, it's a different kind of reminder of how transient and meaningless the game really is.

Lexalious · November 2023

fred4 wrote: »

... I also had the Swift Gales verse, which is very strong, probably especially against the dragon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fFDABd7Aos

swift gale does that to dragons yeah

IZZEFlameLash · November 2023

katorga wrote: »

IZZEFlameLash wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

Theignson wrote: »

Using an ice furnace +Heartlands Conqueror build, we got to Arc 6 stage 2 last night and still had 3 threads-- just had to quit due to being tired. When you play after work, you can't go on forever.

But my disappointment increased further-- I got 4 Focused efforts. It is basically god mode. IMO this is poor design.I see now why the fights were such a slog without the right visions. The trash gets like 500k HP and still hit like trucks, and there are 25 of them. Without focused efforts/god mode, it is hard to get through with "normal" gear if you have lousy visions.

I'm sure ZOS will nerf Focused Efforts hard.

It is amazing how much damage a tiny little status effect can do when you get 1000% damage boost.

I didn't think Alessia's Bulwark had any PVE impact, so news to me that dropping an NPC's weapon damage by 300 is even noticeable. What am I missing here?

Good thread, Thanks for all the ideas!

If ZOS nerfs any of the visions, it shows that they do not play their own game and content they made. If visions and verses were acquired from players choosing out of a skill tree-esque UI with 0 RNG, I can see it being reduced. But as is, you can go do EA and never once get those strong visions and verses because all of them are RNGs and there are far more trash verses and visions.

Dunno. There is a huge gap between Focused Efforts and other visions.

Lexalious wrote: »

focused efforts does seem to be an oversight by the devs right now. feels like they forgot charged or hlc existed. in any case, i 100% don't think they should nerf it, i think they should buff other underwhelming visions like 3% increased damage on direct hits. even if you managed to get all 5 of them until arc8, mobs will have scaled their hp pool by 10000% and you increased "a part" of your damage by 15%. its just not great.

Exactly, the delta between NPC scaling and many of the visions just doesn't add up.

Again, if people can get guaranteed Focused Efforts, nerf might be justified. But it isn't. It is heavily RNG based and you could entirely get worst visions and verses that do not help your builds at all for your run. That is why if it ever gets nerfed, it shows ZOS never played their own game.

Joy_Division · November 2023

Theignson wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

There is a great reason to be a Redguard Magplar. Because Redguards are awesome.

I've used Alessia's Bulwark and found it one of the better tank sets for the archive. I think you can do better for a 3 piece than Vengeance Leash. Vengeance Leash is probably the best set in the game for something like Skyreach, but I don;t think there are enough trash mobs to for it to shine. I imagine for boss fights you have something different?

Magplar has two very effective tools for this content (Explosive Charge for AoE interrupt, Jesus Beam). But having a channeled spammable starts to get dicey by Arc 4 and Crescent Sweep almost becomes unusable by then (agree with your ulti choices). The one skill I;d recommend changing is swapping Retribution morph instead of Purifying.

Hello Joy,
Nice to see you back. Back in the day, your guide to Maelstrom (before there was a "normal" and "vet" !) got me through it.
My question: how can Alessia Bulwark be good? If a Boss, eg had 5000 weapon damage, it would reduce it less than 10%. Why is that so strong?

Alessia's has two armor bonuses and I do recall Monsters having spell damage values (oddly, not weapon damage, though that may have changed with hybridization). The idea is you want different sources to reduce your incoming damage because straight percentage decreases are subject to diminishing returns. Raise your armor, reduce their % damage, get a % mitigation buff, reduced their spell damage, etc. My success with it is purely anecdotal. But by the time you get to end of Arc 3, traditional DPS builds begin to get constantly smacked around and adjustments have to be made.

The best success I've had in the archive is to find gear sets that basically do the work for you rather than trying to build for the best stats. This is because combat creep / balance solutions via gear has been ESO's philosophy for a long time and when dealing with trash mobs that have millions of health, even the best traditional DPS builds become slogs. An AOE proc set is eventually going to become more efficient, especially one that synergizes with the focused efforts vision which is disproportionally too good not to build for. Poison is a very strong contender, especially on a dragonknight, because so many sets are built for it and another vision specifically amps poison. Same with Warden and frost, although not as much frost oriented gear. I am not a very good warden player, but I've gone the furthest, by quite a bit, on my warden.