How Strong are the Arcanist Ultimates in ESO Necrom?

Today we'll show the three new Ultimate abilities coming with the Arcanist class in ESO Necrom.

Like all classes, the Arcanist has three skill lines, each one including an Ultimate ability that has a basic version and two morphs.

The Unblinking Eye Ultimate

The Unblinking Eye is the ultimate ability in the Herald of the Tome skill line, the DPS focused skill line of the Arcanist Class. This ultimate summons a Watcher above your head that will deal heavy damage in a small AOE with its beam attack. Its two morphs are The Languid Eye and The Tide King's Gaze.

The Languid Eye is the strongest morph in terms of its damage output - while it has a shorter duration than the other morph, this is more than made up for because its damage value increases 7% each tick (it ticks every 0.5 seconds for 6 seconds).

The total damage output from this skill is quite similar to Elemental Storm, a commonly used ultimate for DPS characters. It also costs less ultimate to cast, 200 instead of 250, however the radius is smaller. So using this as your main DPS ultimate is definitely viable.

On the other hand, The Tide King's Gaze deals less damage but lasts for 8 seconds instead of 6, and it also automatically follows your target wherever they go, rather than needing to be manually retargeted. This makes it more suited to PvP situations as it prevents your opponent from avoiding the damage.

Gibbering Shield

Gibbering Shield is the Apocryphal Soldier ultimate, and like the entire skill line it is focused on mitigating damage, making it ideal for a tank. This skill gives you a strong health-scaled damage shield for 10 seconds, which will reflect all absorbed damage to nearby enemies as an AOE DoT when it expires or is broken. This damage reflection is spread out over another 10 seconds.

The first morph of this ultimate is Gibbering Shelter, which removes the damage reflection but instead grants up to six allies a fairly strong damage shield whenever your shield absorbs damage. This is definitely the best option if you're tanking a dungeon or trial with a group, the shields you give to your allies will help to keep them alive during tough parts of the fight. However you honestly might be better off just using Barrier if you want a good shield ultimate for your team.

The other morph is Sanctum of the Abyssal Sea which just gives you a somewhat stronger shield compared to the unmorphed version, which also has the side-effect of slightly increasing the amount of damage you can reflect. While this damage reflection might sound good on paper, it's generally not that helpful in PvE

, and in PvP opponents can pretty easily move away from you to avoid the damage.

This skill is a nice idea on paper but in most situations it really doesn't feel strong enough to compete with existing skills.

Vitalizing Glyphic

Vitalizing Glyphic is the ultimate from the Curative Runeforms skill line, focused on healing and buffing yourself and allies. It's a pretty unusual skill in terms of how it works - it summons a glyphic which pulses every second, healing nearby friends and increasing their weapon & spell damage. Healing the Glyphic increases the effect.

Glyphic of the Tides is the first morph of this skill, which just causes the Glyphic to spawn at a higher health percentage than the original. Healing the glyphic isn't that hard so this is only a minor buff. The skill's effect in general though is pretty interesting - having an Arcanist in your group drop this into the group gives us another new way to buff the damage output of DPS players, which basically gives us another skill to use in optimized raids besides Aggressive Horn and Frozen Colossus. Arcanist healers definitely have something new to bring to the table thanks to this ultimate, and that's great.

The other morph, Resonating Glyphic, has the same effect but instead gets stronger the lower its health is. This might be preferred if you don't have a healer in your group or if you're playing solo - you can pretty easily get the Glyphic down to 0% health with some AOE effects, which will maximise the effect of the buff and heal.

This ultimate is definitely going to bring something new to the table for optimised groups in PvE, and probably PvP too. It will be interesting to see if this finds a place in the meta or if it will just be an interesting off-meta option.

May-16-2023

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