Questions: Hot Bars and Arcane Pulse

[Sophie The Cat Burglar]

Hey, hey. I have two unrelated questions.

Question one requires some explanation: My most important skills always go on Hot Bar 1. In combat, I mostly button mash 2 through 7 with occasional use of 1, 8, 9, and 10. Fairly often, when hitting skills as they come off cool down, all skills stop working. I press the buttons but nothing happens. Sometimes, my character starts drinking a whole lot of potions. As best I can tell, the active Hot Bar spontaneously switches at random. To fix this, I need to reboot the client. Eventually, I discovered that saving and reloading the User Interface also fixes it. Is there any way to prevent the active Hot Bar from spontaneously changing?

Question two: Does Arcane Pulse actually do anything? When I use Arcane Tempest, damage is immediate and fairly big. Arcane Pules is supposed to do about twice as much damage to a single target but in my experience, it does little or no damage.

Thanks. I regularly have questions but forget to come here and ask.

 

[rabidfox]

Question one requires some explanation: My most important skills always go on Hot Bar 1. In combat, I mostly button mash 2 through 7 with occasional use of 1, 8, 9, and 10. Fairly often, when hitting skills as they come off cool down, all skills stop working. I press the buttons but nothing happens. Sometimes, my character starts drinking a whole lot of potions. As best I can tell, the active Hot Bar spontaneously switches at random. To fix this, I need to reboot the client. Eventually, I discovered that saving and reloading the User Interface also fixes it. Is there any way to prevent the active Hot Bar from spontaneously changing?

These two binding keybinding setup change which hotbar is the active one. By default there's info in there for keypresses that swap around between your active hotbar; you can see mine are blank because I removed those bindings ages ago to prevent accidently changing bars in the heat of battle.

 

[Sophie The Cat Burglar]

These two binding keybinding setup change which hotbar is the active one. By default there's info in there for keypresses that swap around between your active hotbar; you can see mine are blank because I removed those bindings ages ago to prevent accidently changing bars in the heat of battle.

Thank you very, very much, RabidFox. You are a star and I hope you get some medicine to cure your rabies very soon. I loaded my User Interface, cleared all those keys exactly as shown in the pictures you made, then saved the User Interface. No more random potion chugging. Yay!

 

[Matuse]

I occasionally get the game randomly deciding to change my active hotbar. It's super annoying. I set ctrl-alt-1 to switch to hotbar 1 so I can fix it quickly when it happens.

 

[Lazuli]

Question two: Does Arcane Pulse actually do anything? When I use Arcane Tempest, damage is immediate and fairly big. Arcane Pules is supposed to do about twice as much damage to a single target but in my experience, it does little or no damage.

Thanks. I regularly have questions but forget to come here and ask.

Rabidfox has answered your first question perfectly, so I will answer this. Yes, arcane pulse works very well, but it is not a direct damage spell. It is a dot, and stack with itself. It is to be used on bosses with many hps, refresh the stacks as soon as you can and you will see how the numbers grow.

If you use it just once on a mob you won't see big numbers, although if you run a little and let the dot act, it will probably die on its own shortly after, since trash doesn't have that much life. But the spell is more for bosses.

......
I laughed a lot about the medicine... it's true, poor rabidfox.

 

[Sophie The Cat Burglar]

Rabidfox has answered your first question perfectly, so I will answer this. Yes, arcane pulse works very well, but it is not a direct damage spell. It is a dot, and stack with itself. It is to be used on bosses with many hps, refresh the stacks as soon as you can and you will see how the numbers grow.

If you use it just once on a mob you won't see big numbers, although if you run a little and let the dot act, it will probably die on its own shortly after, since trash doesn't have that much life. But the spell is more for bosses.

......
I laughed a lot about the medicine... it's true, poor rabidfox.

Thank you, Lazuli. I've been testing it in the Saltmarsh wilderness on rare monsters. For whatever reason, Arcane Tempest, which is also a damage over time, wipes them out pretty quick. Arcane Pulse does not do much. Many times I fired it, then jumped around to see what it did, and it did almost nothing. Weird. Maybe I am aiming wrong or using the wrong spell power or something.

 

[GrayJedi AntiProPaladin]

Also, (but perhaps u already know it heheheh....

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rabid

"Originally it means something that has rabies; such as a dog or animal. Can be highly contagious when in contact.

[...]

adjective: used as a description of an event or action that is impressive or extreme

can be used interchangeably with radical or wicked.

-when something is crazy
-when something is awesome
-when something is extreme

It can take a deep tone to a situation or act.
Scenario: Skater does a crazy trick.

"Dude, that was rabid."

"Yeah man! You gotta teach us how you did that!"

Scenario: Kid fouls a player who goes flying in the air.

"Man, when you went flying I was just hoping you'd make it out alive!"
"Yeah, I know man! It was freaken rabid!"
"Totally!"

Scenario: Kid shows drawing to friends

"Holy Skizzles! That's rabid, man!"
"How'd you learn to draw like that?"
"Yeah man, I agree that's totally rabid."

Rabid​

The most op'est kid in town.

 

[Matuse]

Thank you, Lazuli. I've been testing it in the Saltmarsh wilderness on rare monsters. For whatever reason, Arcane Tempest, which is also a damage over time, wipes them out pretty quick. Arcane Pulse does not do much. Many times I fired it, then jumped around to see what it did, and it did almost nothing. Weird. Maybe I am aiming wrong or using the wrong spell power or something.

Tempest and Pulse are very different damage over time abilities. Tempest is a rain spell that affects the area it is cast on over a short duration. If the monster moves out of that area, it won't take full damage. Pulse sticks to the specific monster, so the DoT can't be out-run. And yes, it works a lot better when you stack it up a few times. It's good for HP sponge bosses, and also if you're a little over your head and are playing dodge-em around a pillar, you can throw on Pulse, get behind the pillar to avoid being killed, and the Pulse keeps working.

Tempest also has a save (on the first tic of damage), which makes is moderately ineffective against enemies with evasion unless your DCs are good - Pulse has no save at all.

 

[Sophie The Cat Burglar]

Tempest and Pulse are very different damage over time abilities. Tempest is a rain spell that affects the area it is cast on over a short duration. If the monster moves out of that area, it won't take full damage. Pulse sticks to the specific monster, so the DoT can't be out-run. And yes, it works a lot better when you stack it up a few times. It's good for HP sponge bosses, and also if you're a little over your head and are playing dodge-em around a pillar, you can throw on Pulse, get behind the pillar to avoid being killed, and the Pulse keeps working.

Tempest also has a save (on the first tic of damage), which makes is moderately ineffective against enemies with evasion unless your DCs are good - Pulse has no save at all.

Thanks for the information, Matuse. It makes no sense to me. I just spent another hour with it, hunting Saltmarsh rares. Arcane Tempest kills those bosses pretty quick. Arcane pulse is super slow, I need to keep throwing it, I need to face the right direction or miss, I need to hard target or miss, and I get beat up pretty good by other stuff while jumping around. It does work. Eventually. I must have something messed up, as usual.

 

[Matuse]

Pulse is not a good spell against wilderness rares, who are typed as normal difficulty and have very little health.

When you are chopping down a redname on Elite/Reaper with 350,000 health, 5 stacks of Pulse adds up quite a bit. Also, each of those damage tics from Pulse will trigger other things like Dinosaur Bone/Legendary Greensteel effects, or Colors of the Queen if you have some epic past lives.

 

[Lazuli]

Thanks for the information, Matuse. It makes no sense to me. I just spent another hour with it, hunting Saltmarsh rares. Arcane Tempest kills those bosses pretty quick. Arcane pulse is super slow, I need to keep throwing it, I need to face the right direction or miss, I need to hard target or miss, and I get beat up pretty good by other stuff while jumping around. It does work. Eventually. I must have something messed up, as usual.

A imagen. All damages are from arcane pulse (force) and draconic mantle triggered for arcane pulse (cold):

It is not too bad. You could increase the effectiveness by adding vulnerability to the mix, I haven't bothered to equip anything special.

Of course, it's light years away from the damage a melee could do, but you see the glabrezu is at half health and I haven't bothered to do a rotation of spells that would have finished him off quickly. The only thing I have used is arcane pulse, so you can get an idea of the damage. Yes, it is used by looking at the target, and since this is normally a boss with a zillion hps, you use a normal rotation of spells, not only arcane pulse.

Keep arcane pulse with max stacks, refreshing the spell frequently.

 

[Lazuli]

In case it's not clear, if you're attacking something that dies quickly with other spells, arcane pulse is going to do little for you. This is for bosses with a lot of life.

 

[Fisto Mk I]

And best part of Arcane Pulse - mana preserving! If you have 2 Arcane Pulse on your shortcut bar - one without any metamagic, and second with full metamagic - if you create first 4 stacks with first and last with second, and all 5 stacks will be with full metamagic too. 8)

 

[Scrag]

RE hotbar, I highly recommend getting 1-5 action, with shift+1-5. Maybe just 1-3, no idea what works best for you.

But getting shift in there lets me do a few different things. If I have short duration buffs, like trances and things, putting it on a shift makes it easy to pop it regularly, even in the middle of combat, and keep doing my thing. Or if I have a lot of attacks or slas, shift works well also. But I always like to keep my trances and things on the shift 1-3s because they get used all the time and I never want to forget them or take a pause to push a higher number to activate. All my other numbers are relegated to long duration buffs and things, or break-glass abilities that are so outsized in their effect I only use them rarely, and when it is super important.

 

[Oliphant]

Thank you very, very much, RabidFox. You are a star and I hope you get some medicine to cure your rabies very soon.

If symptomatic, it's almost certainly too late.