Which belt for the Arcanist?

[Guest]

Thanks to my really really intelligent blunder on trials I have now decided after a slight extensive research that it would be easiest for me to gain more and likely better medals on mage than the other classes.

Following from my arcanist run on the last gold AnB, I've decided I'm going to run a fire lily and beef up the the staff ripple dmg which happens to be arcane dmg. Then what belt is it I should be taking? The skills I personally like to run would be blink, sing and time warp, I don't particularly like paradox since I'm not great at using it and I find it has a bit too long of a cd for me. Of course I'm running arc for fun since I'd probably lose my will to keep playing otherwise, variety is the spice of life they say and it's something different.

I see the illusionists sash but since I don't actually have this unlocked I don't know how good the damage actually is. However, since I play on mobile and I'm not taking CoQ, I was perhaps thinking that if the burn didn't particularly do much, then it might be a wise idea to take the versatile belt so I don't have to manually use AL every 18 secs.

As part of a further discussion on the build I'm making for the other trinket would VotWS be a good idea or should i just stick with ToP since I should probably stick Power, AR, Vit and Haste on pushing equipment?

[Guest]

Well Gold AnB has come round and it has been time to test whether anyone answered here or not.

For science I unlocked the versatile belt and I hoped that it would work like I imagined it would with just an extra attack coming out every 5 attacks. Of course I was wrong, this belt suffers the exact same type of problem as when using CoQ. It turns your regular automatic fire of basic attacks into a slower burst fire pattern.

So that's 10 glory gone and it seems that for the arcanist the only belt you can take is the Illusionists sash, otherwise you take no special effect instead.

It appears that I must practise and git gud at using my secondary attack every 18 seconds or so on mobile.

Also the VotWS seems to be on crit builds since you'd have a choice of lily, CoQ, BotS, BoV, VotWS and BoPF which unfortunately are not really great options to go with ToS, so aside any unoptimal brooch choices, VotWS is the one which will do the best job of implicitly providing a bit more AR.

[Tin Man]

Look at this video. Not really a build guide but Heikki is a strong SCR and Arcanist player and was a strong force in SCR taking off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNbHUmDLr6I

Arcanist is massively out of favor and is really only used for the niche of XP farming when you plan to push with SCR. Even then, many, if not most, players farm with either a warrior or ELR mage.

What a blunder, I thought I had to farm with the classic ELR since I didn't remember that ripple does the work for arcanist. Now I'm stuck farming 75 in about 1.5-2 minutes with only 4 hours to go, can I even farm enough materials lol.

I'll try and at least get top 25 in this gold AnB, not a high barrier for sure but should be manageable with my goof up.

In terms of the video, I see them make a versatile belt around the 33:26 mark and in fact the whole boss fight from 35:37 to 36:03, the exact strange pattern of attacking in burst fire is there, you gotta look closely because the haste is faster if not I can personally record a video myself just like how I did with CoQ. I don't understand why this phenomenon even exists when you equip CoQ or the Versatile belt but what it does do is cripple your hits/second. That hurts what tiny dps you're getting from AB but also your alacrity procs which in turn hits your AR which is basically what arcanist lives on. I don't know whether having the AL buffs with a cripples hits/second is better or having to delve deep into the pile and use AL once every 18s myself.

[Tin Man]

Classic ELR is a faster farmer. The advantage of farming with an Arcanist is that you are only leveling up abilities, for the most part, that are used for SCR. ELR as the farmer will win all other things being equal.

You being stuck with farming TL 75 in 1,5-2m is not so much a limitation of ELR but something that you are doing or gear that you do not have. Do you have a Fire Lily? A beam BoM if using Frost Beam or appropriate BoM of DfA build? Appropriate belt? Appropriate trinkets?

Does not take much to farm TL 90+ with ELR. A Fire Lily ELR can successfully farm XP with just Epic gear for everything but weapons and trinkets. TL 75 quickly becomes a snoozefest.

Hold up a second. I thought those mad speedy clears in like 30s were done using shatter not thermal shock? If it's thermal shock then I can go equip FBeam but I don't have BoM unlocks for anyone yet it's the last thing to do actually.

The build I have for farming is full purple ELR with power and xp on everything with 2 AR 1 Haste 1 Vit on that with the same style on the weapons also being purple with power, xp and AR on them both.
The bracer just a normal one has power xp and fire dmg, using sash with the same attributes as the bracer.
My fire lily now has AR power vit and arcane since I dumped the lvl 4 orange one I made earlier and of course the last trinket is the old lvl 51 haste+xp one, just a regular one.
The skills were immolate nova and dfa with AL and FBolt.

Maybe I just suck? I don't know, I was maximizing shatter here since I though dfa was a bit of fun to play around with. Also btw after getting the sash it pushed me up to 80 with the usual 1-1.5m clear times.

[Guest]

Also I take back what I said in the second post. I didn't understand how the blink clones attack. It turns out, that from my laser eyes burning a hole through my phone screen, that the clones appear to alternate attacks that are in your primary and secondary slots. So since I equipped AB and AL the pattern is AB-->AL-->AB-->AL..... until the clone disappears. So the versatile belt is in fact not needed and neither is the CoQ. In which case you take the Illusionists sash.