Theoryexpert

Nobody knows if +damage or +power is better right now, except some internal game testers. Most likely they will be pretty balanced. One might be better in PVP, the other in PVE.

What are examples of buffs you lose if you switch from a bar that has it to a bar that doesnt. Will you lose immovable, spiked armor, obsidian shield, haste, dragons blood?

The stamina based CC break gives 8 seconds of immunity not 4. If it was only 4, it would mean that Immovable would be a required skill on almost every PVP characters bar.

We all agree that class skills tend to be the best active skills in the game. We also agree that all class skills use Magicka. Therefore as far as active abilities go, magicka abilities > stamina abilities most of the time. From a PVP perspective, stamina has little value as a resource for abilities. I would not slot more than one, maybe two stamina using abilities. Why? Because you absolutely need most of your stamina to break CC unless you are a hardcore tank. Getting caught in a chain of CC's without enough stamina to break out is certain death, particularly to squishier builds.

One thing about dark exchange I would like to discuss: is that stamina is extremely important in PVP but not in the way most people think. Stamina abilities typically suck compared to their magicka counterparts. The best abilities in the game tend to be class abilities, which all use magicka. So what makes stamina so important? It is your reactionary defense. Its your CC break, your dodge rolls (which might break immobilize and snare), and your blocks. Stamina is essentially your survival. Here is the deal: In PVP the squishier your class is, the more dead you are when your stamina gets too low to break CC. As far as I know, there is no diminishing returns on CC in this game, if you don't have the stamina you can essentially be permanently stun locked until you regenerate enough stamina to break out. A tanky class might be able to afford being CC'd for several seconds, but a squishy class can not afford to be CC'd for even a few seconds, because they will not survive it. Therefore I do not think dark exchange will be very good in PVP, you need your stamina. You also cant afford the time cost to sit there and channel it.

Sounds like a great combo. I really think Dragon Knight and Templar team up well together as do Sorcerror and Nightblade.

Your build could work because of all the defensive abilities you are taking to make up for the light armor, but I believe that if you have a buff on, and switch weapons to something that does not have that same buff on the bar, you lose the buff. I am not sure about that though.

Anything other than mostly heavy armor is not going to work on a dragon knight in high level PVP, I could be wrong due to something unforeseen but thats my opinion right now. Dragon knights do not have any ways to avoid damage besides tanking it or blocking. What are you going to do when a flurry nightblade is on you as a Dragon Knight in light armor? I guess you might be able to make it work with spiked armor, but spiked armor becomes an absolute must if you arent wearing heavy as a dragon knight. Dragon knights just dont have the pvp damage avoidance that other classes do like bolt escape, shadow cloak, blur, etc... If you want to keep your light armor build, you have to use spiked armor or you are toast to any high physical damage class as a dragon knight.

So the two classes I'm interested in most right now, simply due to personal taste, is Dragon Knight and Nightblade. I also enjoy small scale pvp, from 1on1 to 3on3, and made the best builds I could for those two classes in that type of scenario. Here is the showdown of how I'm guessing a fight between the two would go. ESO 1on1 Fighting Championship Dragon Knight vs Nightblade Dragon Knight Build: 30 Magicka 20 Health 0 Stamina Heavy Armor Altmer Destruction Staff Weakness to Elements Fiery Grip Destructive Touch Searing Strike Ash Cloud Highborn 2 Hand Sword Entropy Critical Charge Lava Whip Searing Strike Dragons Blood Magma Armor Nightblade Build: 30 Magicka 20 Stamina 0 Health Medium Armor Redguard Dual Wield Cripple Teleport Strike Veiled Strike Flurry Shadow Cloak Death Strike Bow Cripple Strife Haste Siphoning Strikes Shadow Cloak Consuming Darkness The two square off on the open battlefield. The dragon knight knows he can not out stealth the nightblade, so he stands tall, weapon in hand and prepared for battle. The elusive nightblade makes his move and opens with a Veiled Strike and follows up with a cripple. The Dragon Knight immediately breaks free of the stun and lands a destructive touch to the face of the nightblade followed by weakness to elements. The nightblade immediately reacts and breaks the knockback, and shadow cloaks again to regain intiative. The dragon knight knows the invisbility won't last long and casts Ash Cloud. The nightblade is snared 70% and can not move very far, so he immediately reopens with another veiled strike and then a flurry. The dragon knight, having broken free of the first veiled strike, is still immune to CC. He immediately interrupts the flurry and casts searing strike. The nightblade realizes he is in a bad spot and immediately shadow cloaks for a 3rd time, removing the searing strike DOT but still trapped in the ash cloud. He opens with veiled strike for a third time re-stunning the dragon knight and launches a flurry. The dragon knight, having used no stamina thus far, breaks the CC a second time and interrupts the flurry. The dragon knight then recasts searing strike and recasts ash cloud. The nightblade has done significantly more damage than the dragon knight at this point, but the dragon knight holds his ground and now has a resource advantage, the nightblade is dangerously low on magicka from all of his restealths. The dragon knight now pulls out his 2 handed weapon and prepares to battle the nightblade head on. The nightblade needs to regain magicka/stamina and get the heck out of this ash cloud, so he attemps to dodge roll out. The dragon knight uses critical charge and stops the nightblade dead in his tracks then uses lava whip to knock the nightblade off balance. The dragon knight lands a massive heavy attack to the unbalanced nightblade, and the fight is now even, both clinging to less than 50% of their life. The nightblade knows he is in trouble and pulls out his bow to play a game of attrition and kiting. The Nightblade slowly but surely begins recovering his stamina and magicka but his health is still dwindleing while the dragon knight stays steady from dragons blood, entropy, and the searing strike morph heal. The dragon knight is now in control of the fight. The nightblade now realizes he cannot win this fight. He casts consuming shadow, and waits. He waits until he has recovered enough magicka, then finally shadow cloaks and sprints away, but will be back to fight another day when the dragon knight is not so well prepared... Winner: You decide.

Ok I updated my nightblade build slightly. This should be very strong 1on1 30 Magicka 20 Stamina 0 Health Light Armor Any Race Dual Wield Shadow Cloak Cripple Teleport Strike Flurry or Twin Strikes Veiled Strike Death Strike Resto Staff Cripple Entropy Strife Resto Staff Ability Shadow Cloak Consuming Darkness Typical Playstyle: Open the fight with veiled strike, then cripple. Your opponent will use a CC break to get out of the stun, immediately shadow cloak so that he can't target you and then immediately reopen with another veiled strike into flurry. If he was dumb enough to not break out of the first veiled strike stun then you can flurry right after cripple. At this point you are dictating the pace of the fight but you are now taking return damage and CC. Against a good player your flurry will likely be interrupted, or you will immediately be CC'd after your second veiled strike. Use your CC break now and against a fragile opponent continue assaulting him relentlessly with flurry and basic attacks. You can likely finish the fight here against squishier opponents.

Another question, is does activating siphoning strikes only reduce the damage of white hits, or all of my abilities? Do abilities like flurry work with siphoning and suffer the penalty? My guess is that siphoning only effects white hits. Siphoning might be a great ability but there is one huge problem with it. It forces you to engage in face to face melee with someone, which is a problem playing as a squishy character. As a rogue type character you typically want to hit and run, or attack people only while they are CC'd, then kite and dodgeroll away. Face to face melee combat is more of a strong point of heavy armor wearing classes (although you technically could play a heavy armor health focused nightblade and do the face tanking just fine). In PVP, haste and siphoning strikes is going to work much better on a heavy armor wearing, health focused nightblade running some defenses like evasion or blur than it will on a medium armor wearing nightblade who is built for damage and using mark target making himself even more squishy. Trying to stand face to face with a dragon knight and regen your magicka and stamina with haste and siphoning strikes as the squishy nightblade is not going to end well for you.

Thats perfect, because you can can switch to 2 hander and immediately charge them after the destr touch knockback. I will edit that into my playstyle description. Him using his CC break is awesome, because it uses half his stamina bar. Searing strike isnt your only magicka dps, you also have lava whip which blends perfectly with critical charge morphed for immobilize. Having such low magicka using offensive abilities is awesome because it allows you to use your magicka on defensive abilities like reflects, or switch back to the staff and recast weakness to elements. The real weakness of dragon knights in PVP is that they have no drop target or escapes. If you get focused in a PVP fight, your only option is to tank the damage. This is why dragon knights are a healer dependant class and that's why building a squishy Dragon Knight is out of the question for high level PVP. It also means that you should have Magma Armor on at least one of your ultimate bars.

Fire Dragon Knight PVP Build This is the best PVP build I have come up with for a dragon knight who is damage/bruiser oriented. This is a selfish build with no real group utility, but gives you excellent power in small scale PVP. It should be able to hold its own in 1on1, and is probably one of the strongest builds in the game in a 2vs2 if paired with a healer. 7/7 Heavy Armor High Elf 30 Magicka 20 Health 0 Stamina Destruction Staff Weakness to Elements Fiery Grip Destructive Touch Searing Strike Ash Cloud Highborn 2 Hand Sword Entropy Critical Charge Lava Whip Searing Strike Dragons Blood Magma Armor Typical Playstyle: You open the fight at range with weakness to elements and continue charging towards the target until your fiery grip is in range. You then use fiery grip to pull the enemy close to you, land a searing strike and then immediately use destructive touch (fire) to land a knockback. Once the target is knocked back (he will use his CC break here, and with it lose half his stamina) you cast ash cloud and then switch to your two hander and critical charge (morphed for immobilize) into a lava whip. If he did not use his CC break earlier and does not have immunity he will be knocked down again. From here you maintain searing strike on the enemy while using basic melee attacks that are powered by arcane fighter (a 2h passive that will make you proc fire damage more often). Most people should not be able to stand toe to toe with you since you are a powerful melee character in heavy armor but if it becomes a prolonged fight you can use entropy and dragons blood to self heal.

Are you saying that haste does not effect abilities, like flurry?

I don't want to break the NDA but I can share a few things from the last beta that don't give anything away.-My 1on1 pvp fights in cyrodil lasted about 15 seconds or less on average.-Sneak attacks are way overpowered, if you are caught by a sneaked player you immediately have to blow half of your stamina to break out, and are probably down at least 20% of your HP and do not have the fight initiative either. If both parties are sneaking, its incredibly boring moving around trying to find each other for 10 minutes. Overall the stealth system in PVP is horrible in my opinion, but maybe mage light will improve upon that. I doubt it though, since you can still just open a fight from range while stealthed and still have the initiative. Basically, sneak is kind of broken and everyone can do it. It ruins the game to some extent.-You are totally right about CC breaks and dodging, the stamina cost for both was so high that it made the stamina pool essentially worthless for abilities because you need it for reactive defenses. Dodge rolling was a waste of resources at that cost-I won all fair 1on1 fights by doing exactly what I said, frontloading all my damage and hardly using any white attacks. Maybe 1 power attack while people were stunned. It never even got to the point where I had to use my white attacks because people were dead-Once my magicka/stamina pools were gone, I was basically dead myself because all I had was useless white attacks. This was only a problem when fighting 1vs many though. I won all fair 1on1sSo to sum it up, my experience was that PVP was extremely fast paced (the faster the better IMO), but this could also be because we were level 15s who were artificially boosted to level 50 and did not have most of our abilities.I should probably clarify what I mean on frontloading magicka. I am not trying to say burn all your magicka in an inefficient way. What I am saying is that you want to use your magicka abilities as effectively as possible, but also as fast as possible to gain momentum of the fight. There is no point in managing magicka as a resource because your reactionary defenses dont depend on it, except in particular cases such as if you are a knightblade with shadow cloak or sorcerror with bolt escape. Then you may want to save some magicka for escapes. I watched that video, and I do see that there are two different stats there. That being said, I did not find a single item that had power on it, spell power or weapon power. I really don't think its a bad idea to use both spells and weapon skills considering that class skills are stronger than non class skills typically. The best builds tend to have 3-4 class skills and only 1-2 non class skills, and this is partly because you need to use stamina on reactive defenses and so therefore it is foolish to build a bar with mostly stamina abilities, even if you are a stamina based character. Nusklenagic, you seem to know quite a lot. Were you in the open or closed betas?

I really don't think white damage will mean a whole lot in PVP. The way I see PVP going is this: -People will blow all their magicka as quickly as possible to frontload damage and debuffs. This is why they didnt make any pure damage spammable magicka abilities. Instead, you are likely to do a full magicka rotation of damage/debuffs/utility. You may save a small amount of magicka for defensive abilities like shadow cloak. -They will also use stamina but good players will manage it well enough so that they can break free of CC as needed, and dodge roll as needed -Once your resource pools are blown, only then do you start doing white damage and mixing in abilities as your pools regen. You may have mixed in a white attack or two during your initial assaults, but the majority of white attacks are going to come once your pools are depleted. Many fights will be over before this point. There is no reason NOT to blow all your magicka at the start of the fight, because conserving it accomplishes nothing. You dont want to waste magicka on useless abilities when they are not needed, but there is no reason not to use your magicka efficiently as quickly as possible as soon as a pvp battle begins. Stamina is different, because you need to manage it properly so that you can break free of CC, sprint, and dodge roll as needed. As far as destruction vs resto staff: If you are an elemental damage dealer: the single ability weakness to elements makes the destro staff worth taking over a resto staff, especially if you arent a healer.

I see, is this just your interpretation of the skill description, or do you know for sure? If you are right it looks to be a very mana efficient spell so I'd probably still use it. That is ofcourse unless you are at full health already, then the heal just goes to waste. Tough call Another questionable ability is haste. Going by the description where it describes heavy and light attacks, it almost appears as if haste only affects white hits "left mouse button attacks" and not the speed of animations of your special abilities like flurry. If haste does not make my flurry attack 30% faster, and only effects white hits, then its value is greatly diminished and its really only good for pairing with siphoning strikes to regain health and then forces u take face tank, thus making evasion/blur/blind must haves. So how haste works is important to know.

Great info there nusk, you kind of went all over the place so I will touch on a few points you made. -I don't think medium armor encourages using much more stamina abilities in PVP, as weird as that sounds. It gives you more leeway to use more stamina abilities, but I think the most important use of stamina in PVP is going to be dodge rolls and CC breaks. If I have more stamina, Ill probably just dodge roll more often rather than use more stamina based abilities, which tend to be weaker than class based magicka abilities. -You are right, bow abilities don't seem that good except for the dodge roll speed passive. -Mark Target will be useful as long as you can keep damage off yourself. This means you need to use CC, Dots, and invisibility to avoid damage. You can't face tank while using mark target unless, like you said you equipped blur, evasion, and blind which would be a waste. Mark target will be excellent in groups, and for hit and run style combat. -Sword and shield looks strong in pvp utility wise, but its probably lacking damage. Hard to tell whats good or bad right now, but it looks good on paper. -I don't think kite builds are going to be very impressive, because everyone can equip a ranged weapon and gap closers are spammable. -I don't think sorcs are overpowered but I need to study them more. By the way, what is the reason you say resto staff is better than destro staff? Just because it has better abilities?

I still see no reason not to use both a 2 handed sword and a staff on a dragon knight for example. Weakness to elements is a must have spell for a fire based dragon knight, and not using a destruction staff as your secondary severely gimps you. Even if you only switch weapons to cast that one spell and then go back to your 2 hander, its worth it.

Mark target will be a great pvp spell actually but it makes you squishy as hell just like your target. This means that you need to be on top of dodge rolls and shadow cloaks or youll be dead before your target is. I see this one ability making having at least one nightblade in a group to be important. The nightblade seemingly had no group utility for pvp, but this is actually it. It makes the nightblade the main assist, and the nightblade has the highest pvp survivability due to shadow cloak, so it works out perfectly. In a 1on1 this spell might not be so great, it basically just speeds up the fight but doesnt give you any advantages. Now if you are fighting 1on2 its perfect, because you can quickly kill one guy (hopefully) and then recover enough to fight the second guy. The next ability to question is strife. I think a lot of people think this is a DOT ability that returns some health, but that is not what I think it is as that would make it too similar to Entropy. What I think this ability does is effectively put you into a vampiric lifeleach mode for its duration, where you actually heal 30% of all the damage you do from things like flurry, dots, white hits, etc. Thoughts? If Im wrong and strife really is just a DOT, I may reconsider taking it.

Its the same button as your interrupt. By default thats set to left mouse button + right mouse button.

After quite a bit of theorycrafting, trying to come up with the best possible class/spec for small scale pvp that plays in a way I find fun, I came to a conclusion. Realizing that I like high DPS, high risk, high reward, in your face characters that are fun to play I narrowed myself down to Dragon Knight and Nightblade. I don't really like stealthing around like a nightblade, but at the same time I don't like being dependant on a healer and not having any "outs" of a fight like the Dragon Knight. Dragon Knight is a really cool class, and is incredibly powerful but I decided that its more oriented towards a group PVP bruiser playstyle and is going to be most effective with a healer. Templar is another class that is more group oriented due to their support nature and strong ability to heal. The sorcerror and the nightblade are the two solo powerhouses in this game due to their abilities to dictate the pace of a fight, and also their ability to escape if need be. For now I am leaning towards Nightblade. I have come up with a build which I consider to be a solo powerhouse. The intent of this build is to excel primarily at 1on1 combat but also be a force in other small scale engagements. This class does not rely on a healer to any extent and its best pairing would be with another highly independant damage dealer like a sorcerror. 25 Magicka 0 Health 25 Stamina Bar 1: Bow This is actually not my primary bar, it is my opening bar. I open combat with the bow and frontload all of my magicka as quickly as possible. My goal here is to dictate the pace of the fight by immediately putting the enemy on the defensive with this frontloaded attack from massive range (all abilities at 28 meters). This is a bombardment of cripples, drains, and DOT's. Mark Target or Strife Cripple Entropy Poison Arrow Shadow Cloak Consuming Darkness Bar 2: Dual Wield Swords Once I have frontloaded all of my magical drains, debuffs, and dots from my bow, I will consume a magicka potion and switch to my primary bar. The magicka potion should give me enough magicka to be able to activate haste and teleport strike, and then I can unload with flurry. Stamina is not something you want to fully deplete though, because you need it for reactive defenses. Haste Teleport Strike Flurry Twin Blade or Siphoning Strikes Shadow Cloak or Evasion Death Strike I would likely end the fight here, however if the opponent proves especially resillient, and Im using the siphoning strikes variant, I will switch on siphoning strikes and attempt to recover stam/mana with my incredibly fast attack speed from haste. Once I have recovered enough I can switch back to bar 1 and play an attrition game until I can activate consuming shadows at which point I would be invisible while my drains and DOT's continued to tick. This is the strongest 1on1 build I have come up with so far. The only flaws I really see is that I am opening with entropy and strife at range, but its likely that I will not have taken any damage at this point and so my self healing is basically going to waste. This is why I would consider replacing these skills with something like Mark Target although its not clear what mark target actually does. The dual wield bar looks really solid, I think haste will be necessary for flurry to be viable in pvp, otherwise it will just keep getting interrupted or avoided. Spiked armor may make flurry a death sentence, if which thats the cast I might replace flurry with something else. One issue is that there is no snare on the dual wield bar unless I take the twin strikes morph, or the teleport strike morph. Overall, I really like this build and may do some more refinement. Thoughts? Edit: updated build further in thread

Has anybody noticed that magicka abilities (class skills) tend to be slightly superior to their stamina based counterparts (weapon skills)? Magicka appears to be the stronger of the two stats as far as abilities go, perhaps this justifies why light armor gets the magicka bonuses (weakest armor improves the best stat). Stamina is used for some other things which magicka isnt though, such as CC breaks, blocks, and dodge rolls. This makes both stats important. However, the fact that magicka abilities tend to be better leads me towards designing builds that have only 1 or 2 stamina using abilities, and have 3 or 4 magicka using abilities. This way, magicka becomes your primary resource for abilities and stamina becomes your primary resources for maybe a single ability and all of your reaction based defenses (CC break, dodge roll, blocks). Even for a stamina heavy character, loading up on stamina abilities seems like a bad idea, because you need that stamina for your reactionary defenses. Thoughts?

I have a mechanics question. Does dodge rolling break immobilizes and snares? I heard somewhere that it does. One more mechanics question. I read somewhere that switching weapons removes certain buffs. For example if you buff yourself with obsidian shield, then switch to your other weapon set. It makes sense they would do this, to keep people from using their alternate weapon set as simply a buff bar. But which buffs are removed and which arent, or is this even true? If I have immovable on one weapon set, and switch to another that doesnt have it slotted, is immovable removed? One last thing I'd like to add. I do not think weapon power and spell power are split up aside from on the stats screen. I think there is only one stat you can get, called power, and it adds equally to both weapon power and spell power. Even if Im wrong on this, which I very well might be, class skills are simply better than most stamina skills, and class skills use magicka.

I enjoy all different kinds of pvp, but prefer small scale pvp due to its focus on individual skill, game knowledge, game balance, and the adrenaline rush it can give. Large scale pvp is less about the individual and more about group coordination, which many people enjoy because it is more relaxing and less stressful. Game balance issues also becoming glaringly obvious in small scale pvp.Unfortunately there does not seem to be arenas or any type of organized PVP combat in this game. This means that a good portion of small scale combat is going to be uneven teams: 1on2, 3on6, etc... Regardless, I will do my best to seek out fair fights, probably the best way to do it will be to just roam around the outskirts of larger battles.This thread is about small scale pvp discussions. Feel free to contribute and share ideas, builds, and more!Anyone that has PVP'd for a fair amount of time knows that burst is king in PVP. The reason for this is twofold: In a one on one the person doing more damage first is controlling the momentum of the fight. This makes frontloading damage the ideal way to fight for a DPS class in small scale encounters. Throwing a healer into the mix slightly changes things. Now instead of just frontloading damage, you have to land a burst spike when the healer is distracted or incapacitated in order to get a kill. Slow steady continuous damage is much easier to heal through, and gives players much more time to react than a burst spike.I think that frontloading all of your magicka abilities at the start of an encounter and pacing your stamina (you need to save your stamina for reactionary defenses like CC break and rolls) will prove to be the ideal strategy in small scale pvp and perhaps even larger scale pvp.