I can probably do 1/5th of their damage before getting absolutely destroyed. The only heal I have access to is the Vulpera Racial. Am I just bad or is this insanely hard?
The biggest complaint I probably have is how unpredictable the thrown axes are. Not only do they NOT fly in a straight path, they straight up randomly change directions. So one second you could be safe, then the next the ax is coming right at you.
I think the only good thing in my situation is that I’m probably not even gonna use the arcane set. It doesn’t look that good and it doesn’t fit with any other set design that I have.
I actually found Arcane to be a pretty easy challenge. Now that the survival cheese has been nerfed, it’s probably the easiest challenge I’ve done in this version of the tower. So take what I’m saying with the knowledge that I pulled it a total of 2-3 times and didn’t really have to optimize:
In case you weren’t aware (I forgot this the first time I did sigryn this go around), the orbs that spawn in the center of the room are a large heal. If you see a valkyr fly down and land in the center, you can go pick up an orb (they despawn fairly quickly, so don’t try to save them too much). The sustained damage in the fight is very low and barrier should cover most of it, but the stupid axes always end up piling up damage.
Most of my DPS outside of CDs was just explosion for charges->barrage spam. They have very low HP compared to some others who have to do this challenge, so they should die reasonably quickly.
Melee guy’s enrage is handled with nova+barrage slow spam. Side bonus of DPSing with explosion+barrage is that he’s basically perma slowed.
Remember that if sigryn’s cast finishes, she needs to be CC’d until her buff wears off. Try and get the poly off fast enough so you can keep AoEing. The encounter gets harder as it goes so finishing it fast is a priority.
Although honestly, having redone it, you can probably just leave her CC’d if you want, the DPS check is light enough.
Also mirror images for the fixate work.
I am starting to believe that gear has more to do with this than people are letting on. The only ones I have seen complete the Arcane mage challenge are running at a minimum of 240 ilvl. I would love to see someone who’s been able to complete it with less (Video proof, please). I can even do what the videos show step by step and still not deal even remotely the same damage they do.
My current item level is 215.
It gets scaled down to ilvl 50, so no. Only way gear matters is if you tryhard and farm a timewalking set with sockets, but that’s really not necessary for this challenge.
A cheap option that might matter though is throwing the fortified leech enchant on your cloak. Given the low amount of healing available, leech healing will add up (I got about 7.5k leech healing in the fight, and 11/20 of the leech rating came from the enchant).
Every video you have or will see is completed at ilvl 50. The reason the success you know of are 240 or higher is because, generally speaking, good players will be doing higher M+ and/or mythic raiding. The gear isn’t helping them finish the Mage tower. Their experience in the game helping them kill the Mage tower, and that experience also raises their ilvl.
Ilvl has literally nothing to do with it (unless you put on gear below ilvl 50) everyone is scaled down to 50