Esper DPS Guide [Drop 6]

[CK Jester]

Here is Lui Aura for Haunt. shows haunt icon when < 1 sec is left. LMK if you need anymore auras!

[daruka]

Okay I got everything working now, Updated to the newest version of LUI Aura, Haunt is now up and running and matched up to the old aura, Also updated the Psi Point tracker aura. So everything should be good to go.

[Awsumpossum]

Hi there, great guide, I appreciated it.

I'm a relatively new player, though experienced in the genre and one thing I haven't found is an optimal "opener". In other games, how you open is extremely important and I cannot imagine it is any less so in Wildstar.

Right now, I've sort of defaulted to "haunt/SS > Spectral Form/Gadget > Reap > Consumer > Standard Priority". It seems to work pretty well and feels pretty fluid, but I'd like to know if there is a more standard/more optimal opener.

Any tips?

[daruka]

[babeta]

Hey Daruka, thanks for a great guide, just I have a quick question about melee espers, I dunno why but I felt in love with it, sitting down and making ultimate makro with help of razer naga made everything possible and easy with that build even thou people seems scared of it. Anyway I am at the stage where I downed first 3 bosses of GA, and I need help with stat priority, is melee same with range like in your guide ? crit sever > vigor > multi ? or you only focus it after you reach certain point of cap at multi hit ? because it seems that crit strike + crit strike severity is more for spellslinger thing. Because everybody saying in our guild multihit + other stats on light gear goes to espers and crit with crit severity goes to slingers or you only rune your mentioned stat priority ? Also what runes you recommend until you can reach class set runes. Really hope you will answer me , thanks in advance

[daruka]

Both Multi-hit and crit sev are very close almost even in terms of stat weights for Espers, from the stat work I have done crit sev is just slightly ahead of multi-hit. The stats on the gear itself is not super important whether it is multi-hit or crit sev they are both good stats for Esper. What is important is the gear ilvl which affects which runes you can put in the gear and making sure you are properly runed.

Only two pieces of gear will have your class sets, usually shoulders and legs. You rune the GA set in one, DS set in the other. The rest of the runesets would be Devestation 6/6 and onslaught 2/6.

[babeta]

Thanks so much on a replay, could you also comment how does armor pierce work ? how is it important for espers ? because we have blade dance that pierces threw armor does it stack with amp armor pierce ? and is it worth it? Also does bosses have fixed armor that you need to pierce like strikethrew or is it certain amount that we reduce ? Does it mean 2 % armor pierce will give us 2% dmg and it is important ? Because I saw you recommend putting true strike rather then shreder, on gloves I guess it is because of strikethrew cap. Currently strugling a lit with strikethrew....

[daruka]

Armor pierce is roughly 1% damage per 2% armor pierce if i remember correctly. But i think it varies depending on the mobs armor level. its good to have but I wouldn't say it is the most important thing in the world. You put in true strike to help with ST cap, but also because shredder is for multi-hit builds.

[aggressiveturtle]

Hey daruka, you said in the guide we should go for 22% crit chance. With the crit buff in raid this takes us up to about 35% crit chance, which is over the 30% soft cap. Is this intentional or would it be more efficient to aim for the 30% soft cap and then crit sev if you have reliable medics?

[daruka]

Not really go for 22% but up to a max of 22%. you don't want to go beyond that point. With buffs that will put us right around 35 ish % of in combat critical hit which is fine. You don't start to see really hard DR until you pass 35%. If you are far over that you can make adjustments from there as you set fit.

[Equa1ity]

Hi,

I'm loving your guide, it's been very helpful.

I have a couple question about your LUI codes. First, Concentrated Blade doesn't seem to show anything on screen when I import the information. I deleted it and tried again just to make sure I wasn't missing anything but it still doesn't show on screen. Second, is there a way to add another trigger to Reap that would make an effect once the 3 psi point trigger is reached? I know I could just count the psi point's but I tend to forget to do that.

Thank you again for the hard work you have put into your guide. It has been my 'go to' for information while leveling my Esper.

[panpianka]

Hello Daruka,

What do you think about this DPS Optimal Runing Guilde?
They are advising to use striker as 2nd rune Set and also use Untouchable together with Full Strenght.
Also I wa thinking aobut "Direct damage", Because some things are triggered only after direct damage, what exactly is direct damage? I was thinking maybe all things for direct damage are triggered more often with melee build than with Ranged TK Storm build?

[daruka]

Fixed the Concentrated Blade Aura, Apparently any time this guy updates this addon he breaks one of my aura's. But it should be working now. The reap aura you want is a bit wonky in that it turns off even if the ability is not on cooldown and you get an effect where the aura can go off and on without you casting just based on Psi points. Personally I think that aura would be counter productive. The whole point if the aura is to let you know when its off cooldown, but if you want it ill list it here.


The Rune guide is a bit off, although I can see what the thought process was for it. They set it up for strictly a ranged type build. Are the runes optimal? No. Are they viable? Yes. Onslaught is still the better secondary set over Striker. If you absolutely refuse to run the melee build and only want to play the ranged build then Untouchable and Full Strength is fine to put in your gear as they are very close to flurry and deadly blows since its hard to keep good uptime on them. However for the ranged build I still think that flurry and deadly blows is still slightly better even with the uptime issues. If you are running the melee build either BD/IB/PF or Storm/Haunt/PF hands down flurry and deadly blows are better.

Any hit that is not a dot counts as direct damage. so PF, TKstrike, CB, Haunt, Reap, BD and the first tick of storm count as direct hits. The melee build interacts much better with the on hit stuff since it has higher attacks per second. The slow attack rate of TK strike is the reason for the uptime issues for flurry and deadly blows with the ranged build since it has a much slower attack speed.

[Chronn]

Is running IB in melee build still valid? Is it still supposed to be top dps for espers, or is it situational. Im currently getting towards the end of DS gear, and am curious how to go with gear/build. Currently still running Untouchable and Full Strength for the vigor, are you saying (as per above) that you still think flurry/deadly blows is better because of the 'on hit' that comes with melee build ?

[daruka]

The melee build still uses IB and should always be used with the BD build. The melee build is still top dps with full class sets but ranged is much closer now. If you are going to be using the melee build then I would use Flurry/Deadly Blows for your fusions.

[Jeffro]

I've been using slightly different aura's because I think it's important to see when something is going to come up (took a lot of work to get this to work for Reap as well since you need 3 PP to cast Reap).





Here's a video of my aura's in action.


The Psi Points + Mental Overflow are from ForgeUI

The only thing people might want to change is to turn off the "Text" option on some of them, I've put in the key that I use in there and some aura's make a little sound but aside from that I think my aura's are pretty clean.

I currently play Ranged Esper but I also included my aura for IB.

[PsychoDriveBy]

A few of my guildmates were discussing what may or may not be BIS for Esper DPS. Any chance you could post all 12 pieces of BIS gear?

[krazyito]

I have a question about how wildstar mechanics work. I come from a raiding history in WoW and I have basic understanding of how some systems work.

My question is are stats for dot damage snapshotted in Wildstar (such as pre-WoD WoW) or are they dynamically updated per tick? Mainly im thinking about spells such as Storm and how assault power buffs and gadgets actually affect the dots.

[CK Jester]

No snapshots. Maybe there is a special case spell but to my knowledge no. Dmg evaluated each hit/tick

[krazyito]

[daruka]

[krazyito]

[daruka]

Breaking the Esper Meta: Multi-Hit Melee Esper

For the past few months I have been spending a lot of time testing and working with various stat combinations. One of the things I consistently found was both critical hit severity and multi-hit were very very close to each other in terms of value. Esper stats really seem to be on this fine line that either stat could be the better stat. However during the PTR for free to play I saw a trend and found crit/crit sev to be slightly better with the tested builds. Have things changed since free to play launch? Well yes and no.

There were many unknowns during the beta which made some theory crafting and testing difficult. Learning a revamped rune and stat system. Not having access to or knowing what gear was available. The Mordechai Redmoon (Detonation) weapon fusions existence wasn't really known until after free to play (at least by me). It also took me quite a while to finally get my hands on one for testing. Blade Dance was broken and not properly activating our amps which made it much weaker of an ability. (this is a big one) The addition of the energy shields patched in after the launch was also a factor.


Melee vs. Ranged differences:

The two main DPS build choices for Esper are Melee or Ranged. The melee build uses multiple attacks that hit very quickly, the ranged build uses very front loaded damage on two slow hitting attacks. The main difference between them being the amount of direct hits within a certain time span. The Melee build has many more direct hits than the ranged build. Multi-Hit works well with lots of fast hitting attacks and the melee build seemed to mesh with Multi-hit. The Slower attacks of the ranged build work well critical hit severity.


Gear and amps:

Gear and Raid buffs provide an excess of critical hit. Esper gets 8% from the Reckful amp, 6% from critical priority (medic buff). The Energized destruction energy shield provides another 2%(GA) 3%(DS). These three things alone provide an additional 17% critical hit. Then if you get one of the crit gadgets nature's Veil (4000 crit rating) or mega charge (1800 crit rating) it is very easy to DR your Critical hit into oblivion. The next step would be to drop critical hit runes for vigor runes however we lose a lot critical hit severity in the process which further diminishes our returns on crit/crit sev. With no real way to reliably reduce our excessive critical hit and keep crit severity high to stack vigor, you have to keep all the extra crit at the expense of vigor. Another thing to take into account is the only other amp that effects our stats is The Power! Which increases your Multi-Hit and Multi-Hit Severity by 5%. The excessive critical hit on gear combined with the Multi-Hit amp made me take a second look in the direction of Multi-hit being a possible avenue to rune especially for melee.


Fusions:

Detonation (weapon), Barrage (helm), Shredder (gloves), Flurry (chest)
All of these listed fusions proc off of direct damage attacks and fits perfectly with the fast hitting melee build. Which means keeping good up time on these is very easy. In particular the Detonation rune sees the largest increase in DPS with the melee build.


Runes:

Runes and Rune sets are what push things in favor of Multi-Hit. In particular the Ruthless rune set is really what caught my attention. For those not familiar with this particular rune set, it drops from the boss in a box hard mode Initialization Core Y-83 (aka Hardmentors)

Ruthless:
(2) +0.35% Mulit-Hit Chance
(3) +0.40% Multi-Hit Severity
(4) Follow Through: Landing a direct Multi-Hit applies sore spots for 3 seconds. Landing a direct Multi-Hit on a target affected by your sore spots triggers follow through, dealing additional physical damage

(5) +0.30% Strikethrough
(6) +0.55% Multi-Hit Chance
(7) +0.60% Multi-Hit Severity
(8) Showoff: triggering follow through increases Multi-Hit rating for you and 4 allies for 5 seconds.

This rune set gives me an average 2-3% of my total damage from the Tier 4 bonus and the Tier 8 bonus gives you another runes worth of Multi-Hit.

Striker:
The striker rune set is also helpful in that it has Strikethrough runes to get 6/6 on each set allowing me to use vigor in all of my onslaught runes.

One other thing you may have noticed if you have already looked at the gear setup is that I have completely dropped the GA (Mental Prowess) rune set. The main reason to drop the set is that it doesn't really work very well with the melee spec. You can almost never take advantage of the Tier 4 empower since the buff is rarely up during a Blade dance and rolling over Psi points doesn't really work with the melee spec the same way it does with ranged. The tier 8 also does negligible damage at best after the rune set nerfs. Add on top of that the set uses crit/crit sev runes so you lose a lot of Multi-Hit. In my testing using Striker/Onslaught over the GA set gave me much more of my needed stats with near identical DPS results.


So what do you chose? Do you need to rerune?

No the sky is not falling and no you do not have to rerune your gear if you already have Crit/Crit sev. I am just showing that another path is available for exploration.

From my testing I would say that in terms of damage using a Multi-Hit build or a Crit/Crit sev build are pretty close in output, close enough that most won't really notice a significant difference. I personally favor Multi-Hit on the Melee build because it seems to work better with the style. I also like Crit/Crit sev for the ranged build because of the slower attack speeds. Also of note the GA rune set works well with the ranged build as it easier to keep the buff active with rollovers .

The main deciding factors are do you want to play the melee build and do you have access to the harder to obtain gear and rune sets.
Multi-Hit works very well with the melee build and its very fast attacks. The biggest tipping point in what I believe gives Multi-Hit the edge in damage is the 8/8 Ruthless set.

Right now in full BiS I believe that the Melee build using Multi-Hit to be the strongest. However there are certain requirements to be able to hit these stat numbers and staying Crit/Crit sev is just as viable. You can choose whichever you like.


To give you a better idea of my setup here is my gear and stats.
This gear is what I believe is full BiS for the Multi-Hit Melee build. (on a side note: Experimental Adrenaline Injector may be the stronger gadget, but have yet to get one to test)
for a larger picture.



For those interested in the stat comparisons between Crit/Crit Severity and Multi-Hit.

Original Column is with Critical hit severity build, New column is Multi-Hit build


I would also like to say take the stats with a grain of salt as it is more of a base and doesn't necessarily mean better in practice.

[Kazak]

Hi!
I wanted to ask if you've got any tips on melee build's rotation during Spectral Form. While I've seemed to do ok with rotation before GA class set change, now I'm just overwhelmed with all the cooldowns coming off during SF (especially when I'm 7PP and my skills are ready already). Also, why are you using T8 Haunt now instead of T8 Psychic Frenzy?

[daruka]

All I can say is you just need to spam reap and spectral swam. You can que up haunt while you blade dance so it fires right as your blade dance ends then fire off a cb as your haunt goes off. At that point you should be back up to 5 psi points ready for your next blade dance. rinse and repeat for 10 seconds. As far as haunt T8 goes, it does more damage when combined with the GA runeset.