Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

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⚠️ What's New in U46 ⚠️
As one might expect, there's A LOT of changes this update with subclassing.

Arcanist's "Herald of the Tome" and Nightblade's "Assassination" skill lines are basically the core of every full DPS, ideally with Arcanist as the base class for crux banner.

Herald and Assassination together have most of the best damage skills and passives. For Beamers specifically, the 3rd line is ideally Templar's "Aedric Spear" as it performs the best in Single Target (mainly via Burning Light passive), but Dawn's Wrath is also very competitive.

Other notable DPS skill lines are Storm Calling, Ardent Flame, Animal Companions, and Grave Lord.

Also, VMA 2H is almost 10K better than Inferno now for Beamers (read #4 below as to why) but Inferno still has its place. As always, adapt to the situation.

For the majority of players/groups, I would recommend Herald + Assassination + Aedric as your 3 skill lines, especially for the following reason:

The neat thing about Aedric is you can slot an Aedric skill for another 12% Crit Damage (CD). This is redundant on the Trial Dummy, but in trials it can trivialize CD optimization as it allows your team to drop Major Force (e.g. Sax) for Lucent Echoes. Thus, you basically have 100% uptime on 23% CD, rather than relying on War Horns and Sax for Major Force's 20% CD.

However, slotting an Aedric skill means you need to drop either Blade Cloak or Camo Hunter. I believe the best option is replacing Camo and putting Savagery/Prophecy on the banner, but this means you'll need a tank in Yoln or someone in Zenas' for Minor Courage. Minor Berserk can be supplied by the healer(s).

Alternatively, instead of slotting an Aedric skill for the CD, you can slot Fighting Finesse (Blue CP), but you'll need to drop either Wrathful Strikes or Exploiter.

There are many different combos and methods, but what I mentioned above should be satisfactory for most groups. Trial teams can even drop Alkosh, but Beamers still need to source ~2300 pen (probably the best way for most groups is Ansuul + 1 Light).

For high-end teams, the answer is more complicated, and they'll need to think a bit more carefully about how to min/max. Regardless, there is a huge power creep this patch, so content is going to be noticeably easier as long as you (or your team) use subclassing.

Thanks to Luna Cairu, Zeebs, Skinny Cheeks, Evael, Alduin, MGSnakes, GoAvs and Kortekk for the many discussions and tests in the DPS Nerds discord server.

I encourage y'all to read thru the patch notes if you want to know all the changes, but I'll leave a simplified overview of some of the most notable combat changes below.

1.) Subclassing
- You get to pick one or two skill lines from other classes, but you must always keep AT LEAST one skill line from your base class. These subclassed skill lines must be leveled but the progression is shared among all your characters.

2.) Big Azureblight Nerf
- "This set now requires 20 additional stacks of Blight Seed for each group member wearing this set"
- It's still a very strong set in AoE scenarios but it's essentially back to a one-person-only set

3.) Arcanist's Fatecarver Changes
- "Increased the cost of this ability and its morphs by 40%. Increased the damage of this ability and its morphs by ~8%. These abilities can now hit a max of 6 targets, rather than having no target cap"
- VERY noticeable sustain nerf for beam arcs. I recommend Pragmatic Fatecarver instead for content, even for most high-end trial groups.

4.) "Beam" ability changes
- Week 4 changed "beam" abilities to be considered "Direct Damage" rather than "Damage Over Time". These include Radiant Destruction, Fatecarver, Soul Strike, Vampiric Drain and all of their morphs.
- This means that Fatecarver can no longer contribute to Azureblight or Runecarver
- Grave Lord's DoT boosts no longer affect Fatecarver
- These beam abilities can now be buffed by Maelstrom 2H's 12% direct damage boost

5.) Null Arca Buff
- "Increased the damage of this set by ~8%. Reduced the cooldown after it activates to 4 seconds, down from 5"
- This is roughly a 30% effective damage increase for Null, making it the best ST trial set

6.) Nightblade's Assassination Changes
- Master Assassin: This passive now increases your Critical Chance by 6.6% against enemies you flank, rather than 2974 penetration
- Grim Focus: This ability and its morphs can now stack up to 10 times, rather than 5. Merciless Resolve gives 30 Weapon/Spell Damage per stack. Relentless Focus gives 40 per stack

7.) Pillager's Profit Nerf
- "Reduced the amount of Ultimate this set grants per tick to 2%, down from 5% of the Ultimate spent"

Other Info:
🧬Race - Dark Elf
🧃Potion - Ult pots
✨️Mundus - Thief
🍲Food: Lava Foot Soup

Music:
Kareful, Rogue VHS, pale fortress - Fantasy (slowed & reverb)