I think I’ve been using this ability wrong all expac. Since expac was released I thought the first 4 spells cast after radiant spark get a flat damage increase (modified by the conduit). But tonight I was looking at the debuts and realized that the damage increase debuff doesn’t start until the first spel cast after you cast Spark…I got curious and moused over the debug and it said my damage was increased by 54% while it was at 4 stacks…
So let me get this straight just to confirm:
Cast radiant Spark>Dot starts
arcane blast>+dmg debuff is applied, no damage increase for this AB
arcane blast>gets damage increased from 1 stack, adds a stack
Arcane blast>dmg increased with 2 stacks, adds a stack
Arcane blast>dmg increased with 3 stacks, adds a stack
Arcane blast>huge damage increase with 4 stacks
Also sometimes the 4th stack only lasts like half a second what causes this?
Say you cast Spark, then:
- Arcane Blast (+0% increased damage)
- Arcane Blast (+10% increased damage)
- Arcane Blast (+20% increased damage)
- Arcane Blast (+30% increased damage)
- Arcane Blast (+40% increased damage)
- Arcane Barrage (+40% increased damage)
If Arcane Barrage is spell queued after the 5th Arcane Blast both will fire at the same time and both will gain the benefit of the final charge of the Spark.
This happens when you apply the Spark debuff too quickly and you’re too far and/or don’t have enough Haste to land all your spells into the debuff. You can counter this by going Spark > Frostbolt > ToTM > the regular combo, so your first spell to activate the debuff is the Frostbolt. You basically exploit the slow travel time of Frostbolt to apply the debuff as late as possible to land everything else into the target.
There’s also a WA that warns you if your range from the target is too far to use the proper burst into your Spark.
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It works exactly like Leimon explained but I am not surprised you were confused because the way the spell behaves in practice does not comport at all with the tooltip description which in itself is worded very poorly.
Taking advantage of that interaction (we have to assume it was intended since it hasn’t been changed this entire time) is one of the biggest factors that make the Kyrian Harmony Arcane build perform so well by allowing you to synchronize it almost perfectly with TotM and your other cooldowns for the ultimate CD stacking build.
That said, it’s pretty clunky to use in practice if you want to take full advantage of it and takes quite a bit of getting used to. So take that into account if you decide to go that route or you will be in for a lot of disappointment, especially if you had to covenant swap.
I still don’t understand this train of thought or agree with it.
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What’s not to understand? You have to line up half a dozen cooldowns perfectly and literally have a split second at the end to get that slow moving Barrage to hit at just the right time. And you can’t even launch into that sequence until after you’ve spent a good chunk of time generating the 16-18 Harmony stacks. If that’s not the definition of clunky I don’t know what is.
It’s so clunky in fact I can’t imagine this was the intended play style but Blizzard can’t be bothered to address it, if they even know about it at all, because they’re too busy fending off the state of California in court rn…
I am not disputing the results you get if you pull it off correctly but it’s just not worth the hassle to me. Also I really hate to put all my eggs in the same basket when the success of the entire build is contingent on this one flawed interaction and one nerf to the lego or the covenant ability and the whole thing comes crushing down like a house of cards.
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I understand your point, but it’s not THAT bad. Also, the main soulbind was already nerfed so there’s that. But even if pelagos gets nerfed it’s still not going to slow down Arcane since Kleia is very good for it as well. Maybe equally as good.
Oh I don’t think the soulbinds would make much of a difference, I agree with you there. But they don’t just fiddle with the soulbinds they also actively go after the covenant class abilities as well when they do tuning and if they mess with RS it’s bye bye birdie.
There’s nothing special about Kyrian that makes it so good for the Harmony build it’s just that RS provides that additional damage multiplier for those empowered Barrages and if you take that away you might as well play any other covenant.
And again I just don’t like such a huge chunk of my DPS coming from a single hit that got boosted by several stacking damage multipliers. There’s just too much that can go wrong and also when you rely on just one gigacharged hit like that and there’s a huge fluctuation in output depending on whether or not the hit crits. Whereas if your damage is more evenly spread out the reliance on crits and the rng isn’t as much of a factor.
Now if I don’t do all that crazy set up and instead just drop a 16 stack Barrage when I naturally get it from consuming your CC procs as they come along and play the normal Arcane rotation (which I strongly believe to be the intended play style with that lego) I am having a lot more fun even though the damage isn’t as high and I get the play the covenant I want to plus I can focus more on boss mechanics instead of being hyper focused on the Harmony shuffle. It’s not ideal but then nothing in this expansion has been either.
Oh yeah, the crit needing to land definitely gets me tilted when it doesn’t happen.
Out of my guilds progression through all of this there was one fight where, for my item lvl I was able to parse in orange because I was able to get the right crits… also, something changed with my cast bar addon that extended the spell queue window for the barrage that helped. It went back to normal during my last cd window. I’m still not sure what happened there, but it was fine with me.
If you look at my parses you can completely see how much I screwed up hitting the mark so many times, but that Pansmith Ranzel fight just happen to be the one fight where it went near perfectly.
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