Best 1h weapons for maximizing vanishing strike ? (dual wield sc assassin)

[Exanos]

*Playing with the community patch which change backstab mechanic (raw damage on first hit, making 1h weapon viable)

Hello !

As title say, i'm wondering which weapon can i pick to get the best out of vanishing strike (+gambit). I'm already planning to max vanishing strike duration (max int, ooblit pet, food, +10% duration equipements...).

My though are :

• Main hand : Rust's poignard -> Prone ennemy + 35%damage on them.
• Off hand : Stalker's Patience -> Mercy strike (20% chance recovery on crit) & Mortal wound. 

I wonder if Scordeo's Edge will be better for blade cascade, seems not very reliable to proc it without aoe strike.

Biggest issue i see for this setup is its all pierce damage...

What will you advice me for a "main" weapon setup and for a "fallback" weapon setup (will have 3 weapon sets, 2 melee, 1 ranged).

Also, does dualwielding a 1h melee and a 1h ranged (let's say an aoe Blunderbuss) will be viable for full attacks ? (wondering about recovery, and if so, in which hand do you need to put the blunderbuss?)

 

Ty very much for your feedback !

 

 

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by Exanos

[Boeroer]

Mortars:
If you are a Streetfighter then dual Mortars will be great. They are also great with an Assassin but the way to Vanishing Strikes is more fun with a Streetfigher since he can use mortars/blunderbusses to great effect even before he gets to Power Level 9. The AoEs get backstab bonus dmg as long as the targets are not further away than 2m. Since CP Backstab is not related to the base dmg of the weapon but is an additional fixed raw dmg per attack roll, you can stand in the midst of enemies and AoE-Backstab a lot of them with the mortar shots. Powder Burns makes shure you also trigger "Heating Up" in order to get higher Sneak Attack and very short reloading times for the mortars. If you use Vanishing Strike as soon as you are bloodied you'll get even more out of it (because then you'll also have a lot higher crit damage). Since your INT is already very high the mortar's AoE size will also be very big which is a good synergy.
Here's what it looks like if you don't even use Gambit (which would be even better) but only Vanishing Strikes with dual mortars + Backstab + Community Patch as an Assassin:



Melee:
Sun & Moon: it's dual heads should grant two Backstabs per swing I reckon. It's also fast like all flails. It's great with Gambit because you'll have two chances to crit with only one swing (because dual head). 
Sungrazer can be used with an Assassin + Vanishing Strikes to great effect. Extinction Event can trigger often because the Assassin gets +25 ACC for all his attacks under Vanishing Strike which leads to a lot of crits which naturally will kill some enemies. This will trigger Extinction Event which will profit from all the dmg bonuses like Sneak Attack, Assassinante and Deathblows, Legendary etc., too. It does enormous AoE damage then. 
A setup with Sun & Moon + Sungrazer can work nicely with Full Attacks: Sun & Moon brings the enemy down and Sungrazer can already crit-kill. Also very good with Finishing Blow (it takes som time to get to Gambit after all). 

Stalker's Patience will be good, Rust's Poignard is also good since both are accurate weapons and come Legendary. Stalker's Patience should be worn in the offhand because the recovery-skipping enchantment is of no use if you do Full Attacks like Gambit as long as the spear in in the main hand. Because the main hand's recovery get skipped anyway with Full Attacks like Gambit. This is a bit counterintuitive though because normally you would want the faster weapon (here: Poignard) in the offhand.

Like the flails both would not be my only pick though - because they only have one damage type (pierce). Actually a setup of Sun & Moon + Sungrazer in one weapon slot and Poignard + Stalker's Patience in the other would be good. 

Scordeo's Edge is absolutely great because of Adaptive (ACC for gambit) and Blade Cascade (high benefical effect duration is also great here). You can't guarantee Blade Cascade though and often I find it to micromanagement-intense to look at my guy all the time if Blade Cascade already triggered or not and how long it's gonna last and so on. But of course it's supergood when under the effect of Vanishing Strikes. I would combine it with a Battle Axe + Bleeding Cuts because that's just top of the pops if you can skip recovery altogether.

Then you would have a good crushing setup (2 flails), piercing setup (stiletto + spear) and slashing setup (sabre + battle axe). 

You can also do something like 1. setup with Scordeo's Edge + Sun & Moon, 2. setup with Scordeo's Edge + Rust's or so.

Other good weapon setups when using Vanishing Strike (+ Gambit) with CP Backstab:

• Pukestabber: fast weapon, accurate, higher dmg, 20% higher action speed with all dagger attacks + Marux Amanth: fast weapon, accurate, +2 PEN at the start of combat for 20 sec base, chance of AoE attack. Use with Blackblade's Hood.
• Rust's + Azure Blade: fast, good enchantments, Mob Rule grants +15 ACC with Azure Blade which is great and leads to more crits - but you have to be quite near to 3 allies! But summons/animal companions count afair. Also use Blackblade's Hood.
• Keeper of the Flame + Xoti's Sickle with maxed Religion: the dmg bonus of the sickle can climb up to +60% iirc with high Religion - the speed bonus when standing near killed enemies is also great with high Religion. Keeper of the Flame does neat AoE damage with maxed Religion and you can get a small ACC boost - so why not?

There is no "best" weapon setup in general because it often depends on the enemies you are facing. For example gainst risen undead, skeletal warriors or flame blights Rust's would be useless while Sun & Moon would be great. Having all three damage types at your disposal is a good way to use the optimal tool against any given enemy. In some instances it may be even best to use Animancer's Blade or Eccea's Arcane Blaster (since raw damage). Underpenetration is such a severe malus to your dps that it's nearly always batter to switch ot another dmg type that can penetrate instead of clinging to on weapon with a supposedly op enchantment.
Against vessels you should use Grave Calling with Chilling Grave since it's the best against them. The Chillfogs it produces are foe-only and will get all the damage bonuses, too. THey will produce furhter Chillfogs on kill and get Backstabs.

And so on. You see there's no clear "best" in general.

Full Attacks with a ranged/melee mixed setup tend to be rather bad with Full Attacks because only the appropriate weapon for the current range will be used and not both weapons. Better have one melee and one ranged setup and switch if need be. 

By the way: If you want to be even faster than naked you should wear an armor like Miscreant's Leather + a pet like Abraham or Cutthroat Cosmo. That combo of recovery reduction and armor penalty reduction leads to a net attack speed gain compared to being naked. Which means you get more attacks out in a given time. 

Also make sure to wear Ajamuut's Stalking Cloak because Vanishing Strike allows to stun all enemies then with every attack which reduces deflection by 10 (more crits) and is great anyway. I believe that the Helm of the White Void will also give your attacks +10 ACC in this case because a stun effect is attached. It's a great headpiece to have as a rogue anyway (if you're not using it for a dedicated CC guy already). 

 

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by Boeroer

[Exanos]

Hi Boeroer and ty for this complete answer !

I reckon a streetfighter with mortars is a lot of fun from start to end, but i'm roleplaying an assassin (solo potd)

Havn't though of flails, good idea (that's why i asked, gathering good idea :P) . Gonna give it a try. 

I'm totaly with you on the "their is no best weapon", and that it's very situationnal.

Shame that dualwielding 1h melee and ranged don't work on full attacks, pirates feels bad

[NotDumbEnough]

IMO Boeroer's suggestion only works out well if you shoot a crowd of enemies. In reality, enemies don't just stand there and bunch up like that. Blunderbusses have a relatively long reloading time and a fairly hefty Blunted Criticals penalty so I would probably only use them against spirits.

 

What I personally did on my SC assassin was wear the Devil of Caroc Breastplate, rest at the bathhouse for +1 Guile, and spam Gambit. With 100% Hit to Crit and +200% Crit damage you hit much harder than simply using Vanishing Strikes. Vanishing Strikes is mostly there as a defensive measure when under fire, or when you need the extra accuracy to hit a target with high deflection. Also, you can't engage while invisible, so you can't just use Persistent Distraction to trigger Deathblows.

 

For this purpose one of the best weapons is the Ball and Chain which you can find on Crookspur Island. It's a flail that can be upgraded to prone on crit, and since you crit on pretty much every single attack, you can prone-lock enemy targets similar to Concelhaut's Crushing Doom. Use it in your offhand because flails are fast weapons and for full attacks only the offhand recovery is relevant. Your main hand weapon can be anything else, iirc there's Sungrazer which stuns on crit, which is useful if you're not invisible and triggering Ajamuut's Stalking Cloak. Don't use Rust's Poignard, Gambit is shoddily implemented and simply applies hit to crit/crit damage bonus to the first attack roll after you initiate the ability (which means that disengagement attacks, and weapon side effects, can eat up the hit to crit chance and make your actual attack whiff), and something about the weapon makes Gambit fail to crit quite frequently.

[Boeroer]

Of course the dual mortars are best against groups of enemies. But even as solo Assassin you can group together enemies by simply using a lure from stealth (Sparkcrackers, setting a trap etc.). Then jump into the group with Bounding Boots (cancel the jump before landing, doesn't use the per-rest resource and won't hit enemies and works out of combat) and use Vanishing Strike right away, followed by Gambit until invisibility runs out. Enemies will be standing tight enough together and will be stunned all the time. It's a great setup against all kinds of encounters with lots of pesky mobs. You can't get rid of them faster than with this setup. And you don't even need any optimization for it so it's good as "alternative" weapon setup. Obviously it's not that good against single tough targets. I guess against single tough targets I would always use Scordeo's Edge + Battle Axe (+modal once Blade Cascade kicks in) as long as the enemies are not resistant to slash. 

With dual mortars you don't need Persistent Distraction - because Blinding Smoke from Hand Mortar distracts (in a cone) on crit. It usually triggers multiple times with every hand mortar shot against several enemies (because every of the initial AoE attack roll will trigger the cone if it crits). Usually all enemies are distracted then (if not immune of course). Also with Gambit they used to be extremely nice because the bonus dmg and crit conversion of Gambit (more dmg and conversion the more remaining Guile) got calculated with "internal" Guile during the execution. So if you did crit a lot with the AoEs during gambit's execution the bonus dmg climbed with every crit roll because internally it seems Guile climbed extremely high before it was cut back to +4. Don't know if that's still the case. But when I did that video I had Gambit rolls with +200% and more bonus dmg attached to them (on top of the other dmg bonuses).

As you can see in the animated gif above you can kill a lot of cre_dummies with just three full attacks (and those were only Vanishing Strikes for demonstration, obviously you don't want to spam VS but use Gambit in between). Those dummies have a ton of HP (but low defenses).

That's mostly because Backstabs with CP don't care about the base damage but simply add galt raw dmg (based on PL) to every tiny weapon hit that is <=2m away. 

While Ball and Chain is a great weapon it hasn't very good enchantments for the use under extended invisibility - as OP requested. No need to prone if enemies are stunned anyway. It's very nice if you are not invisible and/or if enemies are resistant/immune to might afflictions though. 100% crit conversion because you have 10 Guile is nice and all - but I don't think it's what the OP wanted since you can't use Vanishing Strike at all then. And I also don't think it's significantly better than having constant Backstabs and +25 ACC, +4 PEN as well as +50% crit dmg and auto-stun on crit. Because with lower Guile you won't have 100% conversion - but you won't fall flat to 0% either (and you also have other sources of conversion like Dirty Fighting and Uncanny Luck which is better with Cap installed) and get the additional PEN and ACC. BUT: in longer fights, when you would run out of Guile eventually with Vanishing Strikes, the almost guaranteed refunding via 100% conversion + Gambit is very good. Unless you just skip out of it with Smoke Veil or with the last Vanishing Strike and reset combat.

I also forgot one won't want to wear Miscreant's Leathers because the Cabalist's Gambeson will give you longer beneficial durations and I guess that's what OP's would want to use then. 

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by Boeroer

[thelee]

8 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Scordeo's Edge is absolutely great because of Adaptive (ACC for gambit) and Blade Cascade (high benefical effect duration is also great here). You can't guarantee Blade Cascade though and often I find it to micromanagement-intense to look at my guy all the time if Blade Cascade already triggered or not and how long it's gonna last and so on. But of course it's supergood when under the effect of Vanishing Strikes. I would combine it with a Battle Axe + Bleeding Cuts because that's just top of the pops if you can skip recovery altogether.

as a side note - if you go the scordeo's edge route, because it gets rid of recovery and the main reason to dual-wield is to reduce your recovery, you're best off single-wielding scordeo's edge or dual-wielding scordeo's edge with a ranged weapon until you proc blade cascade, then switch over to a different weapon set where you only have the one weapon you want to land as either single-weapon style or two-handed style. (in other words, it's not great to have scordeo's edge and the weapon you want to use in one weapon set, it'll dilute both your proc chances on scordeo's edge and also make blade cascade a bit weaker)

[Boeroer]

Ah, but if you keep Scordeo's Edge there's the chance that Blade Cascade will proc again while you have 0 recovery, isn't it?

[thelee]

1 hour ago, Boeroer said:

Ah, but if you keep Scordeo's Edge there's the chance that Blade Cascade will proc again while you have 0 recovery, isn't it?

ah you're right. i assume 2x salvation of time, which is long enough to end most fights without needing to worry about a re-proc.

[Boeroer]

Salvation of Time spoiled you.

[Bosmer]

Ha, I just asked myself the same question about blade cascade and similar weapon-based effects while theorycrafting for my upcoming holiday deadfire session

Maybe someone can help me out here: Do hostile/beneficial weapon effects stack (infinitely) if not explicitly stated in the description? E.g. the enchantment of karaboru (bloody mometum) that lowers enemy deflection; bring low from rusts poignard or blood gift from sanguine great sword?

Scordeos Trophy for example does apply the effect with each hit again and again.

And I see that for some weapons (e.g. Blade of the endless paths) the stacking is explicitly mentioned (with a cap obviously). 

Is there some general rule for these things?

 

[Boeroer]

Unfortunately there's no rule that is obvious to the player (maybe to the devs though).

Usually an effect that comes from items does stack with everything (except active abilities/spells that an item adds to the action bar). But sometimes it does not. For example the +50 deflection bonus of Veiled Hood (Mask of the Weyc) does not stack with the +50 bonus of Escape but with several other deflection buffs iirc. Maybe because it's the same underlying effect - I don't know.

Wheter an effect stacks with itself or not is also often a mystery until you test it. For example while Bleeding Cuts (Battle Axes' modal) DoT stacks (so that you get a lot of parallel instances) the DoTs of Stalker's Patience, Effort and Boar Tusks do not stack (only the duration gets prolonged with each renewed appliance).

Iirc Bloody Momentum has no stacking limit (because it has a rel. short base duration this shouldn't make it incredibly exploitable). Edit: this was false, see below.
Bring Low does not stack afair. Edit: correct, see post below.
Blood Gift's healing should stack with other healing but I didn't use that weapon in a really long time. Edit: Stacking with other healing: yes, with itself it only prolongs, see post below.
If you meant any deflection debuff that's Prepare the Offering - but it's per rest so maybe not. Edit: it's 1 per rest so you can't stack it with itself anyway, see post below.
Scordeo's Trophy does indeed stack its recovery bonuses without limit. If you use Wall of Draining you can reach an absurd number of stacks but at some point it's not working anymore because there's some hard cap because of the reloading animation I think. 

I will just fire up Deadfire and test Karabörü, Rust's P. and Sanguine Sword, then we'll know for sure.   

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by Boeroer

[Boeroer]

Okay, checked those

• Karabörü's Bloody Momentum:
  • self-stacking: no - it only prolngs the effect if you reapply it. That is very hard to do anyway because it only triggers on 33% of crits. So I wouldn't bother with that.
  • stacking with Rust's Bring Low: yes - total deflection buff then -15.
• Rust's Poignard's Bring Low:
  • self-stacking: nope (same as above)
• Sanguine Sword: 
  • Prepare the Offering: stacks with Bring Low and Bloody Momentum (-30 total)
  • Blood Gift's self-stacking: only prolongs, no parallel stacks 

 

Edited December 9, 2020 by Boeroer
typos

[Bosmer]

Wow, thank you so much Boeroer! I guess there is some weird beauty in not really knowing what the items do before "using them".

So, my initial idea was to maximize the gain from blade cascade by (fast) switching through several weapon sets, that in the best case offer debuffs/effects that other weapons could also profit from. However, since blade cascade itself can be reapplied during blade cascade I guess sticking to scordeos edge (one handed) should be the best strategy in most cases.

[Boeroer]

I also think so. As long as you are not using stuff like Wall of Draining or Salvation of Time I would keep Scordeo's Edge in hand (unless slash immune/very resistant enemies that can't even be penetrated with the sabre modal).

By the way Blade Cascade doesn't remove the recovery from switching - that would need a Black Jacket + Quick Switch. It only removes "real" recovery.

[Bosmer]

Ah I see, then the "opportunity costs" of switching weapon sets are even higher!

So the probably optimal setting would be to dual wield scordeos edge with a ranged weapon unless you use many full attacks.

[Boeroer]

Preferably with Scordeo's Trophy (Strategic Blitz) maybe so you can stack some melee recovery bonus before closing in with Scordeo's Edge. Every once in while you could even fire a shot at distant enemies if Blade Cascade won't proc soon enough or so. 

By the way the recovery bonus from Strategic Blitz doesn't stack additively: you can't reach 100% with it. When I tried during the tests above I had more than 10 stacks of -10% recovery (maybe 11) but combined that resulted in "only" -68% time ((0.9^11-1)*100 I assume) . 

[Bosmer]

Yes, that's definitely a cool setup that I want to check out (the char is gonna be soulblade/rogue btw). The thing is, once you gather so many strategic blitz stacks, swinging a two-handed  weapon (e.g. Voidwheel or Chromoprismatic Staff) might become even better than attacking with Scordeo's Edge and hoping for the proc. Although a Cipher can obviously also profit from blade cascade with his spells (especially fast ones), so that's another pro!