Theoryexpert

I think dragon knight is an excellent pvp class. It has high damage, high survivability, and will work best paired with a healer. The class has no get out of jail free card like sorcerror (bolt escape) or nightblade (shadow cloak, consuming shadows). This means that if you build a squishy dragon knight, be prepared to die fighting if you get overwhelmed. This makes having a healer even more important, DK's are built to take damage in the face rather than avoid it, its a tank class. This is further evidenced by skills like spiked armor and obsidian shield. I think the class will work best in pvp as a tanky damage dealer, also called a bruiser. Pure tanks are always bad in PVP because they just get ignored and contribute very little to the fight, but a bruiser contributes a lot of damage and causes a lot of disruption with AOE CC abilities. The strongest pvp abilities look to be fiery grip (pulling enemies to bad locations), and searing strike (massive damage for very little mana cost). Ash cloud and dark talons are excellent AOE CC abilities that will greatly impact group fights as well. This will probably be one of the strongest classes to combo with a healer and contribute greatly to group fights.

I want to discuss shadow cloak, and why I think it is the single most powerful ability in the game in PVP for survival. I have a lot of very high level experience in MMO PVP, and one thing I've learned is that invisibility mechanics are almost always overpowered. Think of it this way, no amount of armor, health, or mitigation aside from near invulnerability will save you when a group focus fires you down, but invisibility makes everyone drop target and do something else until the invis wears off. Absolutely nothing compares to invisibility mechanics for survival. The nightblade is ofcourse counter-balanced by bringing very poor group utility in large scale battles besides just focus firing a single target. Therefore the nightblade is the least valuable class in large scale pvp. but also the hardest to kill. This means the nightblade is best doing "spec ops" type missions in smaller groups from solo to four or five people. A large zerg would probably be best served having very few nightblades (but at least a few) in the group. But back to shadow cloak. I think playing a PVP nightblade without this ability is extremely foolish. It is easily the best PVP ability in the entire arsenal of the nightblade, because it allows you to control the momentum and pace of a fight. On top of this, the passives allowing for stamina regen, and increased armor after coming out of invisibility seal the deal and make shadow cloak a must have ability on any nightblade PVP bar.

I want to discuss immovable. This is a controversial ability, because on paper it seems like it is an absolute requirement for pvp and a top notch skill that everyone should use. That is of-course until you learn that everybody has a CC break that accomplishes the same thing as immovable, CC break with 8 seconds of CC immunity, but this free CC break can be used on demand and has an unknown but potentially very high stamina cost. Immovable has a hidden cost too, it eats up 20% of your ability bar for a little bit of extra armor and spell resistance. That is a HUGE issue, considering that the free CC break allows you to slot 1 more ability. If you are a player with quick reactions, there is no reason to not just use the standard CC break which also gives 8 seconds of immunity, UNLESS ofcourse the stamina cost for it is absurdly high compared to spamming immovable. My guess is that immovable might be worth slotting if you are a heavy armor tanky pvp character, but for all other classes it is just smarter to use the standard CC break and have the use of an entire extra ability. Thoughts?

I see a lot of misinformation with this thread. Why are some people saying that pairing magicka abilities with stamina abilities is inefficient? For example using a 2 handed sword, and a destruction staff as your alternate. As far as damage goes, your power determines that and its the same for both spells and physical attacks. The only thing determining the size of your pools is your stat allocations and passives. There is no reason you can't pair any two weapons together effectively. What will make your build useable or not has more to do with the abilities you selected on your hotbar and if they meld well with the type of build you created. Can anyone provide sufficient evidence otherwise?