Replies: 169
EDITS:
06/20/2016 – Updated with a minor gear change
7/26/2016 – Updated of Shadows of the Hist
9/27/2016 – Updated for Update 12
10/16/2016 – Updated with an amazing NO VMA setup courtesy of @Hans4n6
This DK guide has been updated for Shadows of the Hist.
Race:
Dunmer – with the changes to Dunmer introduced in Shadows of the Hist, it now severely outperforms Altmer, making it a contest for a racial choice.
Attributes:
All in Magicka
Food:
Health and Magicka
Mundus:
Thief and Shadow
Champion Point Distribution:
Blue tree:
100 in Elemental Expert, 44 in Thaumaturge, 42 in Elfborn and 1 in Staff Expert.
Red tree:
Points evenly across Hardy, Thick Skinned and Elemental Defender
Green tree:
100 into reduced cost, the rest into regen.
Gear Choice (No vMA Destro)
5 light/1 Medium/ 1 Heavy
3 Infallible Aether or Moondancer Jewelry – Arcane with Spell Damage Enchants
4 Burning Spellweave Armor Divines with Magicka Enchants
1 Infallible Aether or Moondancer Armor Divines with Magicka Enchants
2 Grothdar Divines Armor with Magicka Enchants
1 Sharpened Infallible Aether or Moondancer Lightning staff
1 Sharpened Burning Spellweave Inferno staff
Gear choice (vMA Destro Staff):
5 light/1 Medium/ 1 Heavy
3 Infallible Aether Jewelry – Arcane with Spell Damage Enchants
5 Burning Spellweave Armor Divines with Magicka Enchants
2 Grothdar Divines Armor with Magicka Enchants
1 Sharpened Infallible Aether Lightning staff Spell damage Enchant
1 Sharpened Maelstrom Inferno staff Spell Damage Enchant
Bar Setup(With vMA):
Main Bar: Inner Light, Burning Embers, Engulfing Flame, Elemental Blockade, Molten Whip. Ultimate – Shooting Star
Offbar: Inner Light, Eruption, Molten Armaments, Rearming Trap, Flames of Oblivion. Ultimate – Standard of Might.
Rotation:
Activate Molten Armaments
Step 1 (Inferno Staff): Fully Charged Heavy Attack>Bar Swap
Step 2: Eruption>Rearming trap>Flames of Oblivion>Standard of Might>Bar Swap
Step 3: Engulfing Flame>Medium Weave>Burning Embers>Medium weave>Elemental Blockade>Medium Weave
Step 3: (Whip>Medium Weave) x 5
Step 4: Engulfing Flame>Medium Weave>Burning Embers>Medium weave>Elemental Blockade>Medium Weave>(Whip+Medium Weave) x 2>Bar Swap
Restart at Step 2.
For AOE, apply Eruption and Elemental Blockade and use fully charged heavy attack on the lightning staff bar. Makes sure that Elemental blockade is down and that Molten Armaments are up.
This setup allows high and free AoE damage and seemingly unlimited sustain.
Reasoning:
1. Why Infallible Aether?
- Infallible is getting buffed in the Dark Brotherhood update. It is an amazing set for 2 reasons. #1 It provides the Vulnerability debuff to the target that is being heavy attacked. #2 It adds damage to each fully charged heavy attack. At first glance, it seems like a lackluster buff, but at closer examination I found that it buffs every tick of a channeled lightning heavy attack thus adding quite a bit of damage to each tick. Oh and don’t forget the 5% Minor Slayer and Increased Crit Chance on top of all these goodies! as of Shadows of the Hist update Minor Slayer buffs applies to trash mobs as well.
2. Whats with the lightning staff on the back bar?
- A few reasons:
A) Each channeled tick is buffed by the vMA lightning staff.
B) DK’s have a 40% buff to staff attacks which synergizes with Lightning staff channel.
C) Each channeled lightning staff heavy attack spreads to nearby targets and hits them for a ton of damage, which scales with Thaumaturge and Elemental expert. The radius is around the same as from elemental ring, except unlike elemental ring, you can do it from range AND it costs 0 magicka. Have you ever run out of magicka while spamming elemental ring in trash pulls or second boss of vMoL? Leave those negative moments in the past. The AoE damage is insane.
D) Lightning Staff is lightning damage, staff damage and DoT damage. This means that it takes advantage of 3 CP stars and thus draws on more sources of DPS buffs. This makes its full DPS potential to be off the charts. The automatic AoE is nice because each additional add automatically doubles your DPS.
3. Why not elegance?
The percentage contribution from weaves to your overall damage does not warrant the use of Elegance.
4. Why Burning Spellweave?
It has been updated in this very last update and is an absolute must for MagDks. High spell damage, and an additional burning effect which synergizes well with elemental blockade make this set truly shine above TBS.
5. Why Grothdar?
Grothdar has the highest single target/AoE damage out of all the sets available to a magDK. Even Skoria stands no match.
6. Why Aether Staff on the back bar?
The vMA enchant carrries over to the back bar as long as the elemental blockade was applied on the vMA staff bar. On the offbar we gain 348 spell damage from the enchant (for 5/10 seconds) and the 129 spell damage from the Infallible Aether 4 piece bonus, which gives us an additional 114 spell damage over a vMA staff back bar.
7. The NO-vMA setup allows you to run two 5 piece bonuses (Aether/Moondancer AND BSW) to get the most out of both. It is absolutely BiS if you dont have a vMA sharpened inferno. It can also be better than the vMA setup 100% of the time if you run moondancer/BSW and situationally if you run Infal, since you provide the group with Minor Vulnerability.
Parses:
Unbuffed Bloodspawn:
————————————————————————
Courtesy of @TheBeard
—————————————————————————
~ Courtesy of @An0malyd
-
This topic was modified 2 hours, 17 minutes ago by
![Profile photo of Nosferatuzod]()
Nosferatuzod.
