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Hey guys, got through with Templar and Sorc, now onto Nightblades:)
First and foremost I would like to acknowledge that this build borrows heavily from @Mashinate‘s build (thank you for all your hard work), but I do believe that the difference in gear as well as a strict and specific rotation set it apart enough to warrant a separate forum post.
Class:
1. Dunmer – since the only elemental damage we have is fire damage, a dunmer is the best choice for maximizing our DPS.
2. Altmer – a more well rounded choice that gets extra regen, 1 % max magicka but 3% less fire damage.
3. Breton – offers the highest sustain, but the lowest damage boosts.
Attributes:
All in Magicka
Food:
Health and Magicka
Mundus:
Thief if not Twice Born Set
Thief and Shadow if Twice Born Set
Champion Point Distribution:
Blue tree:
My DoT’s account for around 35-40% of my damage, while staff weave is closer to 20%. By inputting these ratios into @Asayre‘s worksheet I got the following spread:
TBS(Not Precise): 100 in Elemental Expert, 9 in Thaumaturge, 1 in Staff Expert, 18 in Elfborn and 39 in Spell Erosion.
TBS (Precise): 100 in Elemental Expert, 9 in Thaumaturge, 1 in Staff Expert, 22 in Elfborn and 35 in Spell Erosion.
Scathing(Not Precise): 100 in Elemental Expert, 8 in Thaumaturge, 1 in Staff expert, 26 in Elfborn and 32 in Spell Erosion.
Scathing (Precise): 100 in Elemental Expert, 8 in Thaumaturge, 1 in Staff expert, 29 in Elfborn and 29 in Spell Erosion.
Red tree:
Points evenly across Hardy, Thick Skinned and Elemental Defender
Green tree:
100 into reduced cost, the rest into regen.
Gear Choice 1:
5 Piece Scathing Mage Armor full divines with Magicka enchants
3 Piece Moondancer Jewelry Arcane with full Spell Damage enchants
2 Piece Moondancer Armor Divines with Magicka enchants
1 Sharpened Maelstrom Inferno Staff
2 Nirnhoned Torug’s Swords
As @Mashinate pointed out Scathing Mage procs on Twisting Path, which allows it’s uptime to be absolutely amazing.
To put it in mathematical terms:
With Scathing as your armor, 1 assassination ability on your bar, precise weapon minor crit buff and the thief mundus you are going to be sitting at 77% crit. With a 20% on attack chance to proc scathing that means that each attack has a 15.4% chance to proc it. Since you should be medium weaving every skill, your attack+medium weave should take up no more than 1.2 seconds, possibly 1.1 seconds. With Twisting Path ticks once per second, we can safely assume that you will have 3 attacks every 1.1-1.2 seconds capable of proccing Scathing mage. 3 attacks every 1.1 with each attack having a 15.4% chance to proc it gives us a total of 42% chance to proc scathing per second. What this means is that it should take an estimated 2.38 seconds on average to get a scathing proc.
Now each proc cannot be re initiated during its duration, meaning you will have to wait an average of 2.38 seconds after the buff runs out to get it back up. again. Each scathing proc lasts 6 seconds, thus it will take an average of 6+2.38 = 8.38 seconds to get the second proc. Thus if we do (6 x 516)/ (8.38) = 369.45 average spell damage.
If we run the same calculation with a sharpened weapon (since the maelstrom staff only comes in sharpened not nirnhoned), we get the average Scathing spell damage to equal 359 average spell damage.
As you can see it is much better to wear a sharpened weapon, because a precise one would only boost your spell damage by an average of 10 points, but the loss of sharpened trait on your weapon will result in a significant DPS loss.
With the setup above you should have around 8617 Ability Power on your staff bar and 9251 Ability Power (Assuming 80% uptime on Moondancer).
Ability Power = (Moondancer+ Dual wield [if applicable]) x (Max Magicka/10.46 + Buffed Spell damage)
Plugging in the formula’s for average damage provided by @Asayre‘s page Sorcerer Arithmagic, we get the total power for this build to equal to 13,112 and 14076 unbuffed (by CP and a particular ability coefficient) and unresisted (penetration is not applied) Ability power.
Gear choice 2:
5 piece Twice Born Star set full divines with Magicka enchants
3 Piece Moondancer Jewelry Arcane with full Spell Damage enchants
2 Piece Moondancer Armor Divines with Magicka enchants
1 Sharpened Maelstrom Inferno Staff
2 Nirnhoned Torug’s Swords
Lets compare how Average Scathing damage measures up versus TBS. We will assume a nirnhoned trait on the weapons for consistency, even though Precise can work better with TBS, when the Roar of Alkosh debuff is applied by a stamina user.
TBS Ability Power – 8146 with staff and 8757 with Dual Wield.
Plugging in the formula’s for average damage provided by @Asayre‘s page Sorcerer Arithmagic, we get the total power for this build to equal to 13,055 and 14034 unbuffed (by CP and a particular ability coefficient) and unresisted (penetration is not applied) Ability power.
These numbers are lower than the scathing setup, but less than by .5%. This goes down even further if the Moondancer buff is kept up for higher % of the time and if you are wielding precise weapons.
Given the above conclusions I would not advise anyone to spend countless hours (RNG sucks) grinding Scathing, when TBS offers such a healthy alternative.
Bar setup:
Main bar (Staff): Inner Light, Cripple, Twisting Path, Funnel Health, Elemental Blockade. Ultimate – Soul Harvest
Execute bar/AoE (Dual Wield): inner Light, Merciless Resolve, Proximity Detonation, Sap Essence, Impale. Ultimate – Shooting Star
Rotation:
Step 1. Potion>Merciless Resolve>Proximity Detonation>Shooting Star>Bar Swap>
Step 2. Twisting Path>Medium Weave>Elemental Blockade>Medium Weave>Cripple>Medium Weave>
Step 3. Funnel Health> Medium Weave ( 6 to 7 times)
Step 4. Reapply Step 2>Soul Harvest>Bar Swap>Proc Assasin’s Will and reapply Merciless Buff>Bar Swap
Step 5. Funnel Health>Medium Weave (2-3 times)> Start the rotation over from Step 2.
When the target reaches 25% re-proc Merciless and proceed to Impale the target till death.
This rotation will allow all of your DoT’s to fully proc on the target, and will give you a constant unchanging rotation to maximize your DPS. The Minor Variation in the build is the fact that Soul Harvest can sometimes proc too soon or too late, so inserting it in your rotation (and weaving it) instead of a Funnel health is ideal. For prolonged fights take off Magicka Detonation and put on Siphoning Attacks. For heavy AoE fights switch your ultimates around, so that your Soul Harvest makes you gain ultimate insanely fast.
Why did I move Merciless to my back bar? While it is great for boosting short fight DPS (sub 10 seconds), I believe it to be significantly worse than Twisting Path.
1. Twisting Path ability coefficient is slightly higher than Assassin’s will proc, it ticks for a longer duration AND only need to be activated once, where as Merciless needs to be hit twice in order to fire off a spectral arrow. This essentially reduces it’s damage, since in place of that second activation we could be casting an funnel health. Twisting Path is a hard hitting AoE DoT , which gives us more time to Funnel/Weave.
2. By placing Merciless on the back bar we are adding an additional assassination ability to our back bar, buffing the critical chance of our impales and thus boosting our damage.
3. By proccing assassin’s will on the Dual Wield Bar we earn the added benefit of the increased spell damage and the Twin Blade and Blunt passive boosting our Assasin’s will damage.
4. Finally, by moving Merciless to the back bar and only proccing it once every 15-18 seconds we are reducing the amount of bar swapping that will be taking place during rotation execution, allowing us more time to weave AND eliminating the necessity to swap bars to reapply merciless during the execute phase.
Still to be determined:
Is it useful to reapply DoT’s at any point during the execute phase which starts at 24% and if so at what percentage does it become a DPS loss to do so…
DPS parses:
I just wrote this up and only had a chance to test the damage on bloodspawn. Since I do not have the required sets for this build, I was only able to test this with my current gear setup – 5 TBS, 3 willpower, 2 Nerieneth, 1 Random Nirnhoned Fire Staff. I obtained a 2k higher parse, by using the new setup I proposed above. Once I obtain the sets I will post some conclusive numbers, meanwhile, this is all theory.
Acknowledgements:
I wanted to thank @rokrdt05 for teaching me the pointers and helping learn how to nightblade. I wanted to thank @Asayre for all of his hard work and write ups that I relied on extensively when theorizing this setup. Finally I wanted to thank @Mashinate for providing a very effective blueprint from which to build something slightly different.
Please let me know if there are any inconsistencies, mistakes or misjudgments on my part. Thank you all.