advice on arcane blade

[Dlightfull]

So i rolled a skeleton arcane blade and am still early in the game, at the point where i can still decide on the playstyle i want to choose. So my question is: what is better for a skele AB, dual wield or weapon/shield?

Also, is stone that much better, or is fire a good catgory for this?

Please do give any other advices, like where to put cat points and when, what prodigies, weapon, skills from escorts, or anything else i forgot.

Thanks in advance.

[Theyleon]

The problem with fire is that a lot of flame's damage is a Dot (and I'm not sure it stacks with itself), whereas earth is mostly frontloaded, with a lowish stacking dot. Fire does get you the very handy flameshock however.

[Furey]

I'm sure dual wield can work, but I went sword and shield and it was very powerful. Remember that your extra damage procs off of hits, so shield pummel and onslaught, which are already awesome, become ridiculously so.

Play your first bunch of levels as a mage, with 3 points in flame and 3 points in lightning. You can keep your 3 points in flame as your last three, and swap them out late game so that you don't actually have flame anymore. I did this on one winner, and didn't on a different winner, so it doesn't really matter...the thing is that the proc won't fire a bolt you don't have trained, so if you don't have flame trained, your odds of earthen missiles goes up.

Earth is really really good. I had a winner without, who went stone alchemy, and a winner with. The winner who had earth was much more powerful. (This is on nightmare)

Prodigies: Flexible combat (you want as many attacks as possible) and steamroller are just ridiculous.

Such an OP class, I love it.

Good luck.

[grobblewobble]

Play your first bunch of levels as a mage, with 3 points in flame and 3 points in lightning. You can keep your 3 points in flame as your last three, and swap them out late game so that you don't actually have flame anymore. I did this on one winner, and didn't on a different winner, so it doesn't really matter...the thing is that the proc won't fire a bolt you don't have trained, so if you don't have flame trained, your odds of earthen missiles goes up.

Just 4 points in either lightning or flame can roll you through the early game easily. Then you can take them out later and shoot earth missiles every time later on.

[Dlightfull]

well, i got past the early game easily. Level 26 now, got to dreadfel 7, although i've died 4 times on the way due to my recklesness:(

My problem is now that i went dual wield but it seems that arcane combat procs very rarely, although it says it's at 70% chance. And i can't figure out if it's because of bad luck or high monster defense, since the most problems i had was with dreadmasters.

It's a very fun class though, but i surely need more mobility. Just one rush is not enogh in dreadfell, when i rush to kill a mage and some skele archer kites and shoots me. being a glass cannon doesn't help either.

The epicness of oneshooting almost any boss though is just amazing. The tempest, which gave me a lot of troubles with other chars, killing a couple of them died to just one rush, it's pretty cool .

[Boozermonkey]

I am running a Cornac AB now with all three elements trained up and it is probably even better, mainly cuz both the Lightning and the Fire Flash proc are both beams (Fire Flash beams at 5). I could clear entire rooms full of high level undead in DF by simply backing them all up into a hallway and then just bumb attacking beam procs, clearing them all out in just a few procs. There is no more GWF so no worries about those points, and I just kept the 2-hander on and trained up stun only in that tree. I was not able to get Inner Power trained until the 30s though because of the way I spent the points, but it didn't really seem to matter a whole lot. I still one shotted The Master. Twice. Easiest Dreadfell run ever with that guy. In fact, I have not run into any troubles until I went east and did Vors Armory. Those Multi-Hued lvl88 Wyrms are rough. First time I have ever been one shotted.

I went with Flexible Combat. While going 2-hander may not be optimal for an AB, I still hit for obscene damage. I probably lucked out in Bearscape with a 100+ power weapon with a truckload of resists on it. The bears coughed up a damned nice set of Stralite Plate for me too. Such good sports, those bears. I trained Armor up to 5 and lucked out with several escorts that gave me decent Vitality and Unfliching Resolve, which helps A TON. Then of course later I picked up a couple of +100% Blindness immunity items, which helps a lot in late game where every encounter throws blindness at you like candy.

For Flexible Combat, when you get it, all gloves after that show a second set of stats, just like shields do when you train those. The effects the gloves proc vary, but they are not the same as the Arcane Combat. I again lucked out and picked up those Brawler gloves which hit for lots of acid damage and hit for a lot, and they proc Acid Wave. Quite often.

For Arcane Combat, the recent changes to it make it so it procs at face value when you use 2-handers. They proc a lot less if you duel wield or use a shield. I can tell you that using a 2-hander, it proc'd pretty much every swing. My previous attempt at a Skelly AB was S/B and it proc'd a fair amount there as well, but not at 70%.

[ZyZ]

So i rolled a skeleton arcane blade and am still early in the game, at the point where i can still decide on the playstyle i want to choose. So my question is: what is better for a skele AB, dual wield or weapon/shield?

Also, is stone that much better, or is fire a good catgory for this?

Please do give any other advices, like where to put cat points and when, what prodigies, weapon, skills from escorts, or anything else i forgot.

Thanks in advance.

Short staff + shield (look for one with 'deal bonus physical damage equal to your armor' on hit and / or timeshield) is still best choice, even after nerf to staff/shield accuracy bonus. Staff/shield acc bonus to arcane combat flame / arcane combat lightning / arcane destruction improves dmg by about 100-200%.

Basically even without staff training you will do more damage than 2h build. Cunning and spellpower is your top priority, phys crit chance and crit multiplier is also very important.

Cat points: shield offense , light and chants (both from escort)

Prodigies: flexible combat

[Boozermonkey]

Has anyone run tests on the various builds on the training dummies? I sure would love to see how the numbers pan out. I ran some a couple days ago when my AB was like level 23 or 24 and the dps averaged around 400 for 11 swings with no resists/armor on the dummy. I then put the dummy at 50% resists and ran 11 swings, and then 50/50 armor and ran 11 swings. I did this because I had three weapons that I was debating over all offering various benefits and ended up going with the Beascape drop because it averaged the best overall. One of um was Drakes Bane, which I figured would come out on top, but sadly such was not the case. Anyway, here are my findings:

Code: Select all

dummy target with no resists and low armor
arcing voratun 2-hander (50-110 power, 25% arcing)
dps=295
physical=3121

try 2
dps=402
physical=3452
total=4423

try 3
dps=343
physical=2720
total=3779

50% resists
dps=188
physical=1676
total=2073

50/50 armor
dps=230
physical=1808
total=2532

red sword (45-100 power, lots of resists, 10% chance of procing 10% speed booster, and mana siphon)
dps=430
physical=3001

try 2
dps=339
physical=2422
total=3739

try 3
dps=329
physical=2310
total=3628

50% resists
dps=251
physical=2154
total=2762

50/50 armor
dps=309
physical=2262
total=3407

drakes bane
dps=323
physical=2704
total=3561

try 2
dps=267
physical=2216
total=2947

try 3
dps=289
physical=2313
total=3182

50% resists
dps=237
physical=2138
total=2610

50/50 armor
dps=263
physical=2030
total=2900

For this test, I let my mana run to zero and then kept it there, because I really was not interested in the procs. I just wanted the dps from the weapon itself combined with just bump attacks. [EDIT: I suppose I could just have turned off Arcane Combat ]

[cctobias]

I was able to get Stone to hit for 1200 per arcane missile on my Madness Adventurer build. This involved 100% crit, 309% crit mult and something like 100% phys damage and had 100% phys penetration. This involved almost a full suit of specific randarts. And you don't get as many randarts on difficulties below Insane, so this is less likely to happen on without twinking but should provided a useful upper bound for an idea of damage. The 100% crit is doable no matter what, but even with 200% crit mult and like 50% phys (which is certainly obtainable, and almost certainly better can be gotten on Normal) you are still gonna do something like 1500 per proc, which is enough to devasate most of Normal or NM.

This means each proc did 3600 damage (counting the bleed). On madness things have a whole whole lot of HP (uniques and bosses with well over 200k in late stages). The bleed portion should not be discounted. At the end battle I had argoniel bleeding for, I think, something like 25k damage per turn. He has 650k hp on Madness making that much stacking possible. But the point is you can stack major bleeds with Stone.

From a purely doing damage with procs perspective, and no other consideration, Stone is (not counting Earth) very much superior. Earthen missiles does three crits, each crit is its own crit. Therefore +mana on spell crit works very nicely and you only need about 4 mana per spell crit at 100% crit to not use any mana from procs. EM simply does more damage than the other two. And the real seller is that Stone has the 10%dam/50% res penetration and AB do not get wildfire to get same for fire. Finally Stone is self contained, you get both EM and CFocus in one line.

Early on fire and lightning are very tempting, but once you have 5 in EM Stone is very much superior damage IMO, especially since with only a few rounds (and since there are 3 missiles) you actually stack a rather good DOT on things. The beam part really is not as much of an issue as it seems, AB do enough damage to not need beams and the beams themselves are not targetable well enough in such a way to be that useful.

In an ideal world where you simply started at level 50 and allocated points, Stone is very efficient pointwise, does more raw damage, and has a really good enhancing final talent that the other don't have. Additionally Stones enhancements affects weapons which helps a lot for AB.

How you handle the issue of AB just having a lot of other things you would like to get, well that is tricky and takes some planning and discipline but in isolation Stone, specifically for AB, is just really good and really efficient. When built with the right crit equipment it is vastly more mana efficient. This crit effects also bleeds into the AB AOE procs on crit making Stone having even more synergy.

The other damage types are doable, but Stone is super in multiple ways and even more they synergize together to multiply the effect.

[cctobias]

Has anyone run tests on the various builds on the training dummies? I sure would love to see how the numbers pan out. I ran some a couple days ago when my AB was like level 23 or 24 and the dps averaged around 400 for 11 swings with no resists/armor on the dummy. I then put the dummy at 50% resists and ran 11 swings, and then 50/50 armor and ran 11 swings. I did this because I had three weapons that I was debating over all offering various benefits and ended up going with the Beascape drop because it averaged the best overall. One of um was Drakes Bane, which I figured would come out on top, but sadly such was not the case. Anyway, here are my findings:

Code: Select all

dummy target with no resists and low armor
arcing voratun 2-hander (50-110 power, 25% arcing)
dps=295
physical=3121

try 2
dps=402
physical=3452
total=4423

try 3
dps=343
physical=2720
total=3779

50% resists
dps=188
physical=1676
total=2073

50/50 armor
dps=230
physical=1808
total=2532

red sword (45-100 power, lots of resists, 10% chance of procing 10% speed booster, and mana siphon)
dps=430
physical=3001

try 2
dps=339
physical=2422
total=3739

try 3
dps=329
physical=2310
total=3628

50% resists
dps=251
physical=2154
total=2762

50/50 armor
dps=309
physical=2262
total=3407

drakes bane
dps=323
physical=2704
total=3561

try 2
dps=267
physical=2216
total=2947

try 3
dps=289
physical=2313
total=3182

50% resists
dps=237
physical=2138
total=2610

50/50 armor
dps=263
physical=2030
total=2900

For this test, I let my mana run to zero and then kept it there, because I really was not interested in the procs. I just wanted the dps from the weapon itself combined with just bump attacks. [EDIT: I suppose I could just have turned off Arcane Combat ]

I will post a build of my madness adventurer with some damage examples to give you some idea of max bounds for AB.

This build uses brawling/magic combat/Stone. Therefore it is taking advantage of some things AB does not have. namely brawling has two things going for it: no proc % reduction on unarmed and a couple talents with multiple hits. Additionally its natively fast.

So this build, in total with all things considered, will do considerably more damage than a pure AB. It also uses Greater Two Weapon focus. So it has some other things adding considerable damage. However the damage numbers are useful in that you can simply adjust for speed/number of attacks to get an idea of things.

Some examples are I comboed kicked linalil for 50k damage with this build and flurry of fists for 34k damage. A dual wield AB would be considerably less damage, but would still do, at a guess, something like 10k damage with flurry with similar damage stats. Possibly more, I am not sure on the dagger damage versus the fists. All the extra procs makes the damage highly variable.

[Boozermonkey]

Appreciate the feedback. I would really like to see the differences between short staff vs. plain duel wield vs. S/B vs. 2-hander vs. 2h staff even.

This becomes really important as you level up. Short staves are difficult to find, and so much of where I typically put my points depends on early drops and generally how things pan out as I dungeon hop. I usually try to run with S/B because it is so much more defensive while still packing a really good punch with Assault, but I am starting to think that with the AB in particular, the best defense is to one shot everything.

[Chris Aldren]

skeleton arcane blade is what i have right now...just new bloom gamer dude! Wanna learn for more.

[Effigy]

Appreciate the feedback. I would really like to see the differences between short staff vs. plain duel wield vs. S/B vs. 2-hander vs. 2h staff even.

This becomes really important as you level up. Short staves are difficult to find, and so much of where I typically put my points depends on early drops and generally how things pan out as I dungeon hop. I usually try to run with S/B because it is so much more defensive while still packing a really good punch with Assault, but I am starting to think that with the AB in particular, the best defense is to one shot everything.

It's true that short staves are tricky to find, but keep in mind that you don't have to use the same type of weapon from level 1 to level 50. You can do just fine with sword + shield or even a 2-handed during the early levels and switch to staff +shield later when you find the items and unlock Staff Combat. Just make sure you juggle any points in Weapons Mastery so you can respec them when you switch to staff.

Two-handed would be decent if it had talents that hit multiple times like dual-wield and shield do. You really need multi-hit capability to take full advantage of Magical Combat, so dual-wield and shield are still superior to 2-handers even with the proc-chance penalty. I think staff + shield is the best overall, but dual-wield and sword + shield are also good.

[comrade raoul]

I've said it before and I'll say it again. AFAIK there is no circumstance in ToME in which the staff proc damage bonus is not either (a) worthless or (b) game-breaking. Why it exists is beyond me.

[Effigy]

The staff proc bonus is not that important. The main reason for going staff is so you can focus on Magic + Cunning and just raise Strength high enough for requirements. If you use conventional weapons, you need to max Strength to increase your weapon damage. Also, using a staff will give you 30+% increased damage of your chosen damage type and can easily roll lots of good mods like spellpower, melee/spell crit chance, and crit multiplier.