Strength of runearms

[Fecerak]

So I got me Lucid Dreams (the ML 19 rune arm) from mindsunder yesterday. Before I got that, I felt like rune arms only were good for the damage boost to other attacks, like many other people here. However, after testing that rune arm, I feel like people severely underestimate the amount of damage they can do.

At charge tier 5 at level 20 with the sup potency 6 (the actual reason to why I farmed for it) and maxed force damage enhancements, but no crit ones, at max charge it sends out 5 hits, and if there only is 1 target nearby all of those hits will target the same creature. Each of these hits do around 150-200 (half if saved against), which is fairly high, since that could mean something like 500-1k damage every few seconds in raids, adding maybe 100 dps or so.

This makes me feel that perhaps splashing 2 artificer in 2h builds (getting the force I enhancement), and going with rune arm+1 weapon instead of 2H, getting +7 damage from lucid dreams each attack kinda balances lower base damage and lower PA values, and the high hits every few seconds do quite a lot without really interrupting your attack chain much.

This could also mean that artificers are semiviable dps in raids, since between 100-150 dps from the rune arm, and perhaps 200 dps from bastard sword/daxe/repeater while they not would be as awesome as the best dps, they should still pump out a reasonable amount of dps.

[aerendhil]

So I got me Lucid Dreams (the ML 19 rune arm) from mindsunder yesterday. Before I got that, I felt like rune arms only were good for the damage boost to other attacks, like many other people here. However, after testing that rune arm, I feel like people severely underestimate the amount of damage they can do.

At charge tier 5 at level 20 with the sup potency 6 (the actual reason to why I farmed for it) and maxed force damage enhancements, but no crit ones, at max charge it sends out 5 hits, and if there only is 1 target nearby all of those hits will target the same creature. Each of these hits do around 150-200 (half if saved against), which is fairly high, since that could mean something like 500-1k damage every few seconds in raids, adding maybe 100 dps or so.

This makes me feel that perhaps splashing 2 artificer in 2h builds (getting the force I enhancement), and going with rune arm+1 weapon instead of 2H, getting +7 damage from lucid dreams each attack kinda balances lower base damage and lower PA values, and the high hits every few seconds do quite a lot without really interrupting your attack chain much.

This could also mean that artificers are semiviable dps in raids, since between 100-150 dps from the rune arm, and perhaps 200 dps from bastard sword/daxe/repeater while they not would be as awesome as the best dps, they should still pump out a reasonable amount of dps.

Rune arms are good, but depend on artificer lvl, so no splashing for that.

[Fecerak]

Oh, yeah, totally forgot the fact that the 1d6s won't scale without arti levels =P

[Dirichlet]

I was thinking this just with the ice arm from Co6. Ok so I'm level 17 now, but it's an ML:7 arm and it's putting out some quite big numbers. Three bolts each doing 120ish damage, and this is at charge level 3. I'd say you can fire it every 4 seconds or there abouts, so that's like 90dps added. It can crit on top of that of course.

The only trouble with it (and the trouble I'm having with most of the arms except a couple of obvious exceptions) is that they won't hit anything at point blank. If you're melee specced they'll just fly right through the mobs. You have to take a slight step back to get them to hit.

What's that force arm like to aim? Not as bad as the one from Redemption I take it. I figured already that force would be the most desirable element. We'll likely only have room for one enhancement line, and force boosts our most important spells on top.