Test Discussion EP 38 Artifact: Lernaea's Amulet

The reward is (up to) a 3% increase in base Might per stack, which is a 30% increase at a full stack at rank 200, unless my maths is incorrect. That's the whole point of the artifact - big risk vs big reward. You get a significant increase in damage (in theory at least) and in return you can potentially...well, knock yourself out. As for what you replace, that's entirely down to you and your playstyle. Personally I won't be using it and I'll be sticking with the three I already use because that's what I enjoy.

Yeah i see it, was nothing towards you but more the devs. is this increase worth it and haven't seen any results yet since it can't be tested properly. Would something like this put might single target on par with prec ? And if so why such a strain on healers to achieve a might base artifact just to pace with prec. Lol i love the efforts and ideals but just give us strong buff might artifact. maybe make some changes on this devs know if u do this right it will sale. Might guys have been asking for something like venom wrist.

And same i have 3 main toons i try and keep up with there artifacts some have 5 artifacts and some have 7 and dumped money into all of them. but its fine looks like ill be happy with what i have.

Atm I don’t see this being useful outside of ST. Unfortunately there’s no way of knowing it that’s true since I can’t even test that either. But in theory on AoE you wouldn’t want to be running your finisher (with some exceptions, HL/Rage/nature) since using a purely ST ability will lower your overall output. The reason heat vision is good in aoe is because it has a burst aoe and gives an aoe dot that also gives you a few more opportunities to get ticks from the strat.

In AoE you’d normally use a SC, a pet, and now a finisher. This leaves only 3 slots which for the most part won’t be ideal for most powers. Yes you can get rid of a pet but by doing so you lose out on passive damage.

However on ST most powers do already use finishers as part of their rotations. Yes some powers will be able to get more benefits from this than others, but for the most part since there is already a finisher in the loadout you have a way to reset the damage. And just so that everyone is aware, heat vision stacks the artifact up too. You will get 3 stacks from using heat vision. And since heat vision has a lower power consumption it makes it safer to stack too. Most powers would have a basic ST set up of HV, their finisher, 1 or 2 abilities to use between your channel abilities, a pet, and a sc. In this situations you would get the following:

Heat vision (3 stacks) > ability 1 (4th stack) > ability 2 (5th stack) > finisher.

Using a basic rotation would lead to getting up to 15% increased might for a short time. You could also move your abilities around to get better use of your might stacking. For example:

Ability 1 (3% might) > ability 2 (6% might buff) > HV (9% 12% 15% might) > finisher

Or use an ability before the finisher to use the 15% buff before resetting. I don’t think you will want to get to max stacks on elite bosses since any splash damage could end up killing you before you could reset. While on test heat vision at max stacks was hitting me for ticks of 28k per tick and heat vision has a base power cost of 150 so the self damage scaling revs up pretty quickly.

Now, combo powers like atomic for example will be able to take better advantage of this. For example:

Using HV, finisher, neutron bomb, short cut, rsk, sc you will get the following:

Neutron bomb (3 stacks) > HV (3 stacks) > neutron bomb (3 stacks) > finisher

This will put an atomic dps at 27% might buff pretty quickly. However because of the clipping this means you will rev up faster which also means a smaller window to get healed and in turn a higher chance of dying.

But still. It would be easier to use this on ST compared to AoE. As for what to replace in ST. Solar I think would still be used. You would be using this artifact. And for the final you either use transformation or grimorium. Grim would probably be the artifact that is replaced in this situation. But testing will need to be done which is hard to do right now

Found this online someone testing nature why there are no parser yet , looks like they started with 54,970 base might then with the artifact kicking in it reach up to 61,169 . that's 6.199 might jump. and ive never been nature so not sure what the rotation. looks like aoe tho . still love to see it parser. think ill have to get on test tonight. Maybe its design for battle tanks? Yeah this wouldn't work for dps elite raids.

This artifact is an enigma of sorts. If you consider the sparring target healing you as a simulation of a healer modestly healing you then this artifact seems really good all around. It requires you to reconsider the rotation of your superpowers by making you use faster abilities as a buff for more powerful abilities. It also makes you consider how to manage your health bar and it mostly adds an interesting element to how you DPS. Generally I've found this all around useful for both single target and multi target loadouts for most might powers.

However, the biggest downside is that the artifact increases the damage you take incrementally with each stack. This is problematic because it doesn't let you accurately predict how much damage you can bare on the next ability you hit. This will more than likely lead to you getting knocked out easily especially if there is no healer around. And if you try and play it safe by using your finisher you will kill the rotation causing a huge damage loss. (Yes, a mere missed second or missed ability can make that much of a difference.)

My advice would be to simply remove the incremental damage increase and just make it a higher consistent damage dealt with each stack you gain. This way you can properly manage your health bar and thus have more control over your survivability.

Here's a sample of me trying to test a celestial loadout I came up with on the fly for this amulet. Frost breath is designed to provide a swift damage over time while also giving me a quick stack for more powerful abilities. As you can see my damage is half decent until I run into problems if I can't tell whether I'm going to get healed or not. Which I imagine would be a realistic scenario in a raid. If the damage was consistent and predictable it would make things a lot more functional.

I saw that too. Yes nature is one of the few powers that can get full benefit from this in aoe due to impaling thorn turning to aoe in gorilla. The might buff is completely dependent on how many stack you can get. In the video he had 5 stack at the time of showing stats. The buff will continue to increase. When I was testing I gained 14k might at 10 stacks. However at 10 stacks I pretty much killed myself lol. The biggest issue with this artifact is that you can’t benefit from the high might. By the time you get to 10 stacks you have to reset and lose all the might. So you won’t get much use out of it. Yes your abilities will get slightly stronger as you are building stacks. But the actually buff you want from it is lost very fast. I wish that if you reached to 10 stack that you would keep the 30% buff for at the very least 3-5 seconds. Giving you time to restack. However that’s not the case so you have to accept the buff going up and down constantly. Maybe plan for your weaker moves to hit last which goes against how you normally want to play.

Most maxed out aoe rotations have no room for a finisher to be put in which means you sacrifice optimal build so that you can get a buff that is not always maxed out.

Ok so I hop on the test server and for electric I saw about a 10k avg On 10 second parser. But still waiting until I can see what’s damage is from myself vs the target.

Unfortunately, I can't do the test server because I really would like a blow-by-blow of how this works. Your explanation helps a lot but there's something I'm really questioning. On my current everyday load out, and my older Alert/Raid one, I'd...

Inferno > Stoke Flames > HV

Stoke Flames clips Inferno, gives its own DOT, and hey, also a heal. Last time I checked (1-2 DLCs ago) I was getting +7,000/per cast from it in DPS mode. Which brings the question, how much damage would doing this mitigate from the damage you'd receive from just these three powers being used?

I wonder if this wouldn't provide a little more wiggle room and make the whole process less dangerous.

Adding to many abilities will unfortunately speed up the process to death. The heals from stoke flame will unfortunately not be anywhere near enough to heal back what damage you do to yourself.

For example a power like heat vision which has an initial power cost of 150 which as cr 304ish costs about 5400 power (not online so can’t get exact numbers). That 5k power is translated to 5k damage done. Normally this isn’t a big deal but that 5k damage was quickly scaled up to 28k self damage. And that’s coming from a power that cost 150.

I don’t remember the power cost from inferno and stoke flame of the top of my head but aren’t they 300 each? So at higher levels that would be a self damage of 56k self damage per ability with a total self damage of 112k. And this is just 2 abilities being clipped together. That’s why with this artifact you want to be very careful with over clipping.

Now to put it into actual practice.
Assuming your loadout is:
Heat vision, inferno, stoke flame, finisher, 3rd ability to clip between HV and finisher when inferno and stoke are on cooldown, and a sc.

I’d assume your rotation looks like this:

Inferno/stoke flame (2 stacks) > heat vision (3 stacks) > 3rd ability (1 stack) > finisher (reset)

This means you will have 6 stacks putting your at 18% might buff. You wouldn’t be reaching the self one shot levels as mentioned above but you also don’t get max damage from artifact.

Now you could go with a different loadout rotation:
Inferno, stoke flame, heat vision, finisher, absorb heat, and a sc

Now, I can’t remember if absorb heat has the same power usage mechanic that heat vision has so I’ll leave it at 1 stack until you can varify how many ticks of power it uses for you but I’m pretty sure it only did 1 tick of power usage which means one stack.

So the rotation would look like this:

Absorb heat (1 stack) > inferno/stoke flame (2 stacks) > heat vision (3 stacks) > absorb heat (1 stack) > finisher (reset)

Doing this will lease to 7 stacks one rotation and 4 stack the second rotation. The first rotation will put you at 21% might buff and 12% the second rotation.

We are getting new tech early next week that should fix the combat parser issue. Hopefully we can get some better testing then. I've also adjusted Training dummies to no longer heal the player, but instead provide power back. This should help for future testing on powersets as well as giving more accurate feedback for solo rotations using Lernaea's Amulet.

Awesome Batuba!

Hey... any chance you could let us switch back and forth some how between power and healing? Or have some targets do one and others do the other?

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I'm not able to get that in for EP 38. But I would like to eventually do a small revamp on testing dummies to allow for multiple ways of testing. Until then, I feel this will give a better testing environment.

I know it's off topic, but while you're here and on the subject - in the past (before you joined the team) there were multiple requests for a panel in our bases where we could configure a dummy to do different things like heal us, power us, attack us etc. kind of like how you can do that in fighting games when you're in a training mode. If that's something you would be able to do, from a technical standpoint, in the future that would be fantastic. One of the biggest gripes many people have about the game is that there isn't really any role tutorials. Being able to configure a training dummy in our bases/league halls would help with this a bit.

During that revamp, please consider adding sparring targets that are immune to cc effects, it would make testing easier in for some builds

It’s getting hard to not cc adds. Atm I can only where one piece of OP gear to test without cc’ing adds. At the very least, dummies should always have a dom check that his higher than op items allows users to get. This way tanks can still play around with their pulls.

Any updates the more and more I go on test and try load outs with different powers I can see use for this only issue is still the separation on what damage I’m actually doing . Thanks

They said they were getting The new tech earlier in the coming week. So I doubt a patch won’t be up u til Thursday at the earliest. Maybe not until the following week after

The best way to use this artifact is to stop the stack on 8, hit your strongest power then the finisher. It's designed to add that might bonus per stack so there's no reason to pump it out to 10. I would rather take advantage of a 24% boost of might with my strongest power than go to 30% and use all that up with just a finisher. And unless you're equipping La Mort, the finisher is only doing good damage after the health goes below 35%

The other thing too, you can only use the full 10 stack with the finisher if you're at full health. Anything below 90% won't even get you to the finisher.

The scariest part is once you've established the rotation that works best for you; you have to think in terms of health damage. The result of not paying attention of how your health is at the beginning of your rotation could be killing yourself of unwittingly.

If they don't be nice just stop healing teach them a learn. People don't put a shield on there load maybe this might help. Key word might.

I wnna see someone use the stone with this on light. Also would like to see triage clipped somewhere in there because it's the only troll power with a heal. HC HC HC yank ghand hclp then second rotation the same but during yank hit finisher. I wonder if somehow you can clip triage in it or if lbarrier can reflect it.