Weekly ESO Set Spotlight: Clever Alchemist, Sanctuary, War Maiden

It’s time for the next version of our ESO Hub Weekly Set Spotlight. In this weekly series we examine three item sets in the Elder Scrolls Online, review if they are any good and what potential uses they have.

This week we will have a look at Clever Alchemist, Sanctuary and War Maiden.

Clever Alchemist is a set in Elder Scrolls Online that can be crafted in Hew's Bane. You need the Thieves Guild DLC or ESO Plus in order to access this location, and you need seven traits researched on any given piece in order to craft a Clever Alchemist set piece. If you don’t meet these requirements then you can get someone else to craft it for you, and it may also be possible to buy the piece you need on Guild Stores, try checking Tamriel Trade Center to see if it’s for sale anywhere.

The set is perfectly suited to burst builds and bomb builds in PvP, offering you some extra max health which helps you to survive between bursts, and a huge buff to your weapon and spell damage when you drink a potion.

It’s possible to have the set’s damage bonus active almost all the time by using potion speed enchantments on your jewelry, however the damage loss from using these instead of weapon or spell damage enchantments would largely negate the set’s damage bonus, so I wouldn’t recommend doing that.

The set does however make for a perfect combination with potions that give you immovability, turning you into a very dangerous damage machine that cannot be stunned for a time.

I have used this set with great success on a Magicka Nightblade that was focused on duels, allowing me to get great single target burst damage from Incapacitating Strike and Grim Focus, and on a 1vX stamina sorcerer where I used Dawnbreaker of Smiting and Whirling Blades to do large amounts of damage to enemy players.

This set is simply one of the best in the game in terms of the damage buffs it can give you, so it’s always a consideration for PvP builds that aren’t support oriented. However I wouldn’t recommend using this in PvE because of its lengthy downtime between potion uses, and because it doesn’t give us any bonuses to our critical damage, something which is much more important in PvE as opposed to PvP.

Sanctuary is a light armor set that you can get from The Banished Cells I and The Banished Cells II. It will increase the healing received for your group by 10%, and will also cause some green orbs to float around your character when you are wearing it. This set will usually be worn by healers.

For PvE this set isn’t that good - sure 10 percent extra healing sounds nice at first, but you could just craft a set like Law of Julianos to increase your spell damage and therefore your healing output. And to be honest in the vast majority of cases you are overhealing anyway even without this set. You can use this as a beginner set if you’re just struggling with your healing output, but if you want to progress as a healer and eventually become good at it then I would recommend dropping this as soon as possible and instead focus on getting some sets that give useful buffs to your group, such as Spell Power Cure and Hollowfang Thirst.

You can also check out some healer builds if you want some general tips on how to build your character to optimize healing output and sustainability.

But what about PvP? PvP is a different ball game when compared to PvE because there aren’t predictable, pre-scripted damage amounts that players in your group will take, so while Sanctuary is often wasted due to overhealing in PvE, there will actually be more situations in PvP where this healing could keep someone alive during a battle with another group.

So if you want to build a PvP healer then I do recommend having this set in your bank - but remember that the buff only applies to people in your group, so don’t wear it if you are just following a zerg - or even if you are in a group that’s disorganized because you won’t get so much out of the set if allies aren’t clumped together in a “ball group”.

In conclusion, this set is pretty much a mediocre crutch set in PvE, and in PvP a niche set that’s good for someone who heals in organized PvP raids.

War Maiden is an Overland set that you can get from Vvardenfell. You need access to the Morrowind chapter in order to farm it yourself, but it’s not bind-on-pickup so you can also buy it from Guild Stores if you don’t have the chapter.

This is a very good set for some damage oriented builds, but it depends on exactly what skills you are using to deal damage. The set gives us some extra critical chance and magicka which is nice, but its main effect is that is gives us a very large damage buff to any magical damage we do.

It's very important to note that this is buffing the magic damage type only, so if you are using stamina skills then this won’t help you even after the recent hybridization changes. Skills like Puncturing Sweep and Swallow Soul will be buffed however. Just watch out for the words “Magic Damage” in the tooltip of abilities - if it says that the skill does magic damage, then War Maiden will buff it. All other magic types will not be buffed.

With this in mind, if you are using mostly magic damage on your character then wearing this set will provide a very viable buff in both PvP and PvE. In PvE the set suffers the same fate as many others, being outpowered by meta sets that drop from newer DLC content, such as Mantle of Siroria, Bahsei's Mania and Kinras's Wrath, however it is still a good beginner set. Don’t be afraid to run War Maiden until you can get those more powerful sets.

In PvP War Maiden is still a viable option if you are using mostly magic damage skills, you can run it in combination either with another offensive set if you are aiming for a glass cannon build, or a defensive set like Buffer of the Swift for a more well-rounded build that can take some punishment while still dishing out good damage.

We hope you enjoyed this article about sets in ESO (Elder Scrolls Online). ESO is a massively multiplayer online game developed by Zenimax Online Studios.