Yesterday it was revealed that a new class, called the Arcanist, will finally be coming to ESO in this year's Necrom Chapter, due to release on June 5th for PC/Mac and June 20th for consoles.
In this article we will present you with all of the information that's been revealed about the Arcanist thus far.
What is the Arcanist Class in ESO?
The Arcanist will be the seventh class in ESO, the first new class added since the Necromancer in 2019's Elsweyr Chapter.
Playing as an Arcanist, you will be able to cast powerful new abilities, drawing your powers from Apocrypha, Hermaeus Mora's realm of Oblivion.
The Necromancer added a new class-unique mechanic to the game, with the ability to create or consume corpses with some abilities, and the Arcanist will also add a unique mechanic for players of the class to get to grips with. This new mechanic is known as Crux.
Cruxes are essentially points, or charges, that empower some of your abilities when consumed. Some abilities in the Arcanist class will generate Crux, and others will spend them (if available) to empower the skill. You can store up to three Crux at a time.
It is therefore likely that managing Crux will be important to getting the most out of the Arcanist class, however Zenimax have said that the system is designed to be fairly easy to learn and make use of.
What Arcanist Skills do we know about?
At the moment, most of the skills of the Arcanist class are still unknown, however there are some exceptions.
We already know what the three skill lines will be. The Arcanist will have the following three skill lines:
- Herald of the Tome: Manipulate arcane energies to bombard your foes with damaging blasts, beams, and more. This will be the main offensive skill line for the Arcanist and you'll probably be using it a lot if you're playing as a DPS role.
- Curative Runeforms: Make use of healing runes to keep yourself and your group healthy and shield your allies from damage. This skill line is primarily focused on support and healing, so it will probably see the most use by healers and tanks.
- Apocryphal Soldier: This skill line helps you to play defensively and protect your allies, and also allows you to dominate your foes' attentions and buff yourself and your group's defensive capabilities. It is likely that this skill will contain a taunt ability and be used mostly by tanks.
Those are the three skill lines, but what about specific skills? At the moment, we know about four skills for the Arcanist class. We don't have any tooltip info such as spell cost or base damage or duration values, at this stage we only know the basic purpose of the skills:
- Runeblades: This is a skill from the Herald of the Tome skill line. It will launch lethal projectiles at your foes, and will generate Crux.
- Apocryphal Gate: This is from the Curative Runeforms skill line, and will allow you to summon a gateway to a nearby location (within line of sight). This gateway then allows you or an ally to teleport to the other side.
- Runespite Ward: This is from the Apocryphal Soldier skill line. Runespite Ward conjures a damage shield which will explode after some time, damaging nearby enemies. This skill can be empowered by consuming Crux.
- Abyssal Impact: Infuses your armour with unstable magic, transforming it into a tentacular weapon which can then be used to attack enemies. We don't yet know which skill line this skill belongs to.
What else is known about the Arcanist?
According to the Global Reveal for Necrom published by Zenimax yesterday, the Arcanist will wield their own tome, containing arcane knowledge that you have learned from Hermaeus Mora.
It remains to be seen if this means that the skills and skill lines of the Arcanist class will be leveled up in a different way to the previous classes (i.e. collecting bits of information from Apocrypha as opposed to earning XP) or if this is simply a cosmetic and flavorful lore addition to the class in terms of how the abilities look.
There were some other Arcanist skills briefly shown during the Global Reveal besides those mentioned above, but we don't know what they are called or have any information about them at all just yet.
That's pretty much all we know about the Arcanist class for now, but we'll be posting more news about it as soon as we learn more!
We hope you enjoyed this article about the Arcanist class in ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
