Skyrim Character Building » Discussions


Character Build: The Arcane Archer

Tags: #Character Build Archer  #Character Build Elementalist  #Character Build Enchanter  #Rank:Legendary 
  • May 8, 2016

    It's not a typo, but I went with Reaper in my own playthrough.

  • July 21, 2020

    I know this build has been put for a long time, and everytime I visit this site, it kinda feels like a ghost town, but I just wanted to say, this particular build has been my favorate that I've tried. I've tried diferent variants based on the mods I have, but this one is near and dear to me. 

  • February 6, 2022

    I'm finally coming back to playing this again without mods, and boy howdy is that Speech training a tall order! 11,850 septims for Bretons and Nords, minus any savings from the skill leveling naturally through buying and selling items to earn that mark. I'm thinking I'll set up a highly lucrative wheat business out at Windstad Manor...

     

    And looking through all the older comments, or at least the ones that survived the Ningpocalypse/account deletions over time, I now remember how and why I started liking Marcurio so much. :) Probably gonna hire Vorstag this time around, since he can use enchanted gear better. Also because I love that voice.

  • Member
    January 16

    So what exactly is the playthrough style for both builds (for anyone that's tried these).  That seems to be missing from the build...very rare for one of his.  I'm not sure if there is any casting with the second option using conjuration

    (edit: going through the pages of comments and found this from Mason himself so figured I'd add it here since it was buried:

    The Nightstalker is for a vampire playthrough I did of this build some time back, I dropped fire and kept shock so that you can still bind two elements to a bow (check out a Supple Ancient Nord Bow, it works/looks great for this character), I also included perks for the bound bow for huge stopping power at early levels and to capture souls so no need to run fiery soul trap.

    Vampire Arcane Archers have the Champion of the Night 25% illusion bonus, which makes Fear/Frost bows absolutely deadly (scare a mammoth away with one shot).

    Nightstalker doesn't run cloaks for damage (no disintegrate/deep freeze) she uses minions instead, the perks are only taken for additional bow damage. If you run a dark elf like I did you can probably consider skipping the speech perks as well as dunmer start with 25 destruction.

    Get a bound bow and a frost atronach up and the world pretty much crumbles around you...)

  • Member
    January 16

    I've loved basically every build Mason has done.  There's a reason he's the best.  But...I really find the clarity of explanation on this build seriously lacking (maybe due to the port over?)  I've played both builds to Level 20 to test them out.  For the Chaos Ranger we are not putting points into magicka nor are we taking Adept in the Destro tree...so if we don't put points into Magicka and we are not taking anything above Novice how do we cast the cloak spells? Speaking of that...there is NO mention of cloak spells being used until I saw it like on Page 16 of the comments (somewhere around there).  I was under the impression that with the Augmented Frost spell that hitting them with your Nexus Reaver (frost bow) would use the Aug perk to freeze them (same for fire bow and shock bow)...but I haven't seen that effect happen at all which led me back to the comments to find that we are using cloaks?  But can't cast them due to magicka limits....very confusing.  As noted...not really clear in the build.