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I think this is the right forum. My last attempt failed because too many concepts in the pot, so I’m breaking it down mechanically. This is a hybrid Magicka generation exploit, that allowed me to power Destruction/Stormcalling without Light Armor.
Race: For this, Altmer recovers some of the Spell Penetration (and levels Destruction faster) while Breton gets some of the Spell Resistance, and Cost discounts out of Light Armor. (And helps level it.) Playtested with Orcs, which can do neither. Dunmer also fortify Fire damage (Inferno staff) and Magicka, just not as much as the other two.
Carve<Energy Overload<Inferno Staff. This is the Magicka production schematic, and also the basic level of priority. The idea is you have 3 Active bars, but they can feed eachother, and having different attacks, be used for different things. I’ll start (Again) with the odd one out, because it’s the most counter-intuitive.
Greatsword: Without investing in Stamina at all, it’s fairly weak (Or can be a powerhouse with a Stamina build) but all you Really need from this is Carve, and a lot of weak enemies. For Farming Ultimate, there’s gobs of them all over the place for farming Rawhide Scraps. (And up.) That’s pretty much all it’s there for, which leaves most of the other Active slots open for other things while you level it.
Overload: Specifically Energy Overload, but if you focus on Storm Calling, you can get it as early as level 6, which is long before Weapon Swap unlocks at level 15. When that happens you have a 3rd set of 5 Actives. In this build, Overload is the secondary set, and Carve the third. The upshot is with the morph tapattacks, and channeling lightning (Like Palpatine) also generate Magicka, which you can switch back to power your primary weapon.
Inferno Staff: It’s the most damage, if you build around it. Which means basically investing Nothing in 2H after Carve until you have spare skill points. Then, you can a little, but only after you have spent everything you can into dealing Fire, and Lightning damage. I’m talking about Passives, mostly, but the trick to a working hybrid is not sacrificing enough to make them useless in their primary role. You aren’t half anything, you’re a Staff. Pretty much everything else is to support that. Including the Greatsword, I just use it for Carve, and all the utility spells you don’t want to crowd your DPS sets with.
Weaving: This is important in a DPS, because it’s how you pack in the most damage you can. I’m just going to cover the parts that are integral to this resource management, but there’s a lot of articles on it pretty much wherever they write articles about DPS. When it comes to skills, your Rotation is slowed by how many timed effects you can stack up. A DoT keeps dealing damage, but if you recast it, it just lasts longer but doesn’t do any more DPS.
For example, I use Velocitus Curse, Consuming (Soul) Trap, and Entropy on the same target at the same time. The Curse goes off, you know the Entropy is going to wear off next… (Consuming morph so whatever kills them pays off.) But you don’t want to recast the Curse before it goes off, or it won’t. Also, all of these cost Magicka, and if you just cast them as fast as you can, you’ll burn (Burst) out, and run out of Magicka. The standard way to do this is Power Attacks with a Destruction Staff to recover Magicka and space out the timing. With Overload, you can burn Ultimate to tap-attacks, between castings on your rotation.
This is basically my Overload bar, but that’s 3/5 slots, and I want Endless Fury to switch to when they start getting low enough on Health. (I also have Unstable Clanfear on the [1] hotkey as a “Health Mule” for soloing.) Which basically means doing nothing else, or switching to something else to do anything else. However, you have 2 Magicka based sets of Abilities. I split between multi-target groups on the Destruction Staff to stack Unstable Wall of Elements on Lightning Flood. So, I can burn Ultimate for Bosses (And save it for that, or replenishing Magicka when I occasionally run out) and switch back to Destruction when it’s back to a pile of medium tough mobs.
However, there’s a 3rd kind of fight, or actually 2, where you don’t have to be so Optimized. 1 is the Straggler, or [16 … Archer] wandering back, and forth. You can gank, and burst him down before he poses a threat. The weave I use for this is mostly Carve, and tapattacks. It doesn’t last long, but neither do they If you can take them. And finally there’s weenie whacking, the example most people will recognize is 2 Wolves, then 1 howls producing 2 more 1 hitter Quitters, and it’s basically a waste of time for everyone involved.
Unless you get Ultimate for each one, lasting a second and a half after the end of the fight. Then it’s a Farm, not a waste of time. You also get a Bleed DoT, which you step all over bursting so fast, and run down your Stamina, but this isn’t the kind of “Fight” where you have to worry about Efficiency. It’s a ROFLstomp. You want to get it over with, in about 2-3 swings, and it doesn’t hurt that it pays off in Ultimate.
Utility: Finally, you can load the rest of the bar up with whatever you couldn’t fit in with 2 DPS bars to stack timed effects. Put whatever you want here, I weave Boundless Storm with Bolt Escape to make all the running around shorter, but there’s other things you can do with it.
Stealth: Gotta say not great for this, but better than Inferno Staff and Storm Calling for anything other than getting in a good position before everyone goes Agro. I usually sneak up on the lone straggler, and swipe him with Carve at maximum range so he starts with a momentary stun, then step in to finish him off. Barely have to slow down, more ultimate to deal damage and make Magicka later.
Get Silver Shards: It has range, you can pick 2 to Stun, and hit 2 more, always a nice way to start the fight. Carve away until Spamina is gone, but then you can immediately switch to Destruction Staff, and burn the whole house down. The nice thing is you have a full Magicka bar when you switch.
Kill the Healer: These guys tend to be low Health, low Armor, and like to run away healing. Critical Charge, Carveburst, and Executioner tends to finish them off, so it’s not your DPS vs their HPS, it also works on spiders, werewolves, or anything else that feeds on a corpse to regenerate. The faster you kill them, the less they can heal, and the easier it’ll be to burn down the Tanks when you turn around. (This also really messes up their Positions in a Trinity set-up, designed to contain you over by the Tank.) Unfortunately, this leaves 2 slots (3 with another Ultimate like Flawless Dawnbreaker) which I allocate to Bolt Escape, and Boundless Storm. (I like to combo Critical Charge with Streak. Not Critical Surge, the health mule works better because you don’t have to stop to set it up if you don’t let it die.)
AGAIN, this is Very weak. It’s not for damage, it can burst weak enemies, 3-4 at a time, but that’s it. It’s for farming Ultimate.
Mop-up: The least often used one is when I just barely run out before Mages’ Fury finishes the boss. So, I have a full Stamina bar, I can Charge in and spam Executioner. I try not to need to do that, but I’m glad I can when it happens, because Overload can be slow enough to let them recover, or flee. Seems to happen more for me in PvP than PvE Boss fights, and almost never against large groups of mobs. (But you still have Carve with the Executioner passive when it does.)
The Next Fight: What I really like is not waiting to recover. Particularly in dense dungeons where there’s another group in Line of Sight, on speedruns (Just here for the Skyshard, and Boss in torch delves) I can just switch weapons (And resource) then charge or pull the next. No waiting. You just have to know what to switch to, because if more bodies pile in, or you overestimate that one you just ran up to, you can get killed, and have to repair your armor. However, if you can handle it with Carve, and Lightning Form (I also Streak around to Stun, but don’t spam it) then while you run down your Spamina, your Magicka recovers for the next fight… So, just switch back to Destruction. The more you Carve, the more Ultimate you have when you need it.