Today we are taking another look at the new Arcanist class, this time specifically at the Herald of the Tome skill line.
Herald of the Tome is the skill line that contains the vast majority of the Arcanist's DPS focused skills. The question you probably want to know the answer to is: Is the Arcanist any good at dishing out damage? In this article we'll take a quick look at how the Arcanist is working on the first week of the PTS and attempt to answer this question.
What are the Arcanist's Strengths & Weaknesses as a Damage Dealer?
Here are some of the things that have set the Arcanist apart from other classes for me, so far.
Fairly Easy to Use
The Arcanist has a couple of pretty easy rotations you can use to get decent results as a Damage Dealer.
For example you can use the Writhing Runeblades skill as your main spammable, which will also grant you Crux to empower some of your other skills. When you have accumulated all three Crux points, you can then spend it by casting a skill like Tentacular Dread or Exhausting Fatecarver. Repeat this process once or twice and then it's about time to switch to your back bar and recast any Damage over Time and buff skills that you may be using there.
With a little bit of practise it is really easy to learn these Arcanist rotations, so the class is pretty good for beginner DPS players to jump into, and you can then begin adding other skills to the mix.
One thing to note is that the Tentacular Dread rotation is much more resource intensive to maintain, so if that's something that you don't want to deal with then you'll find the Exhausting Fatecarver rotation much easier, although it's also the weaker of the two options as you cannot cast anything else while channeling that skill, and you miss out on the Abyssal Ink debuff.
Burst Damage versus Sustained DPS
When I was testing out the Herald of the Tome skill line on the PTS, the thing that stood out to me the most was its potential for burst damage, especially with its beam skills such as The Tide King's Gaze and Pragmatic Fatecarver.
The Tide King's Gaze is an ultimate that channels an 8 second beam, dealing high damage that is locked onto to a target. You can instead pick the other morph, The Languid Eye, which requires to to manually target the eye and has its duration reduced to 6 seconds, but you will get a 7% damage bonus to each tick of the ultimate after the first.
The great thing about this skill is that it is not channeled, meaning you can keep casting other skills while this powerful beam is being blased into your enemy. This makes the skill viable for PvE, as well as still being dangerous in PvP.
As for Pragmatic Fatecarver, this is a 4 second channeled beam which can also deal high damage to your enemy. You need to build up all three Crux before casting this skill in order to get the most out of it, as each Crux you have will increase the damage by 33% and reduce the cost.
While the damage from this skill is also pretty high, because it is a channeled skill we cannot do anything else for the duration, which generally makes it not ideal for PvE rotations. The fully empowered version of the skill does really good damage though, so you can make it work in spite of that, it's just not an optimal option.
However this is less of a problem in PvP, where delivering high burst damage to an enemy player is often the way to win (but skilled players will of course find ways to mitigate this damage or frustrate your efforts to apply it in the first place).
With its ability to empower its own abilities and deliver big damage bursts, the Arcanist seems very suited to PvP, especially in 1v1 scenarios. Having two powerful beams on an enemy at once is already nasty, but throw some proc sets into the mix and you could really have a truckload of damage output.
If you want to see all of the new Arcanist skills in action, you can check out Alcast's Arcanist Skill Showcase below:
We hope you liked this article about the Arcanist in ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
