This is long so please bear with me

kylerjalen

First though, two questions:
1. For VampBlades: Can Evasion, Mist form, and Dark Cloak be used in combination with one another?

2. How does one get their critical percentage numbers? And what are considered "good" numbers? Are they on a scale from 1-100%? (I'm sorry if that question wasn't clear enough. Its kind of hard to explain but I hope it can be answered)

Now...
I have need of some input on this build.
I'm already at VR 6 with this Nightblade and want to make sure I'm on track for endgame play. What I can do so far is survive Cyrodiil encounters as well as some of the delves (barely).
PvP? Hah. No. All I do is provide AP for the other factions that gank me. Lets not even talk about Vet pledges. I learned that I am definitely not ready at all.
Otherwise, I can handle PvE at my level as well as two levels above me okay. I can solo zone dolmens two levels below me with moderate difficulty (but not impossible). World bosses are a hit and miss.
What I'd eventually like to do is solo roam Craglorn without getting eaten, stabbed, burned, blown apart, ripped, chopped, or in any way magickad to death.

Any insight would be welcome.

My skill bars look like this:

Primary - Dual Wield
1. Reapers Mark
2. Teleport Strike
3. Sap Essence
4. Flurry
5. Mass Hysteria
ULTIMATE - Flawless Dawnbreaker

Secondary - Restoration
1. Mutagen
2. Healing Springs
3. Healing Ward
4. Crippling Grasp
5. Dark Cloak
ULTIMATE - Veil of Blades

I also rotate out some skills depending on what I'm doing. For Area of Attack/Grinding instances I use:

1. Siphoning Strikes
2. Teleport Strike
3. Sap essence
4. Steel Tornado
5. Evil Hunter

ULTIMATE - Soul Tether

I have all passives in Dual Wield, Restoration Staff, Breton Racials, as well as most of Light and Medium Armor. I'm currently also trying to level up Heavy Armor because I'm also working on eventually leveling the Undaunted skill line. I also have all Vampire passives unlocked but have no active abilities because I do not care for either of the two offered.

My armor is a mixture of Night Mothers Gaze (5)
Two light
Two medium
One heavy

Three pieces with Infused (one magicka and two stamina enchants) and the other two with Divines (both with magicka)

Armor of the Seducer (2)
One medium and one heavy both with Divines, one with stamina the other with magicka enchants

All three pieces of jewelry have purple fire resist glyphs. The necklace is Healthy, the rings are Robust and Arcane

Weapons are twin Seducer daggers, one with Precise, the other Sharpened and enchanted with Crushing and Decrease Health respectively
Restoration staff is also Seducer with Infused trait and enchanted with Life Drain-Restore Magicka

The Champion Tree is as follows:
The Warrior - Lady - All points into Elemental Defender
The Mage - Apprentice - All points into Elfborn
The Thief - Magician - Split between Arcanis and Mooncalf

Thats it... input please?

Cuyler

1. Get rid of vampire. seriously, really think about this. What is it doing for you and is it worth the increase to fire damage? There is a lot of fire. To answer your question I'm not sure.

2. Crit isn't as important as it once was. The new meta is more like Weapon Damage>Max Stam>Weapon crit. or Spell damage>max magicka>spell crit. Anyways if your at ~50% crit without PvP buffs your doing ok.

3. Your build seems to be very divided between stamina vs. magicka AND damage vs. heals. Not that it can't be done, but it's much more difficult on yourself.

4. I'd suggest using bow on your second bar instead of resto staff. It allows you to knock back and engage targets from range, reducing the amount of healing you may need. This also jives much better with a stamina build.

5. You may want to think about switching gears to a 5pc Hundings and 3/4pc. Ashen grip for a focused stam build. Forget light armor at this point (until your closer to v11-12) and go with 5 medium and 2 heavy. Make the heavy your chest and legs for maximum armor. Chest, legs and head with infused. Divines on the rest. Your daggers appear to have good trait.enchants but again, might want to get rid of seducers.

6. Again really think about if being a vampire is really helping you, I'd get rid of it and the fire resist enchants as well. Go with max stamina enchants on all armor. Your jewelry should be either weapon damage or skill/feat cost reduction.

7. In terms of skills, whirlwind is your single most useful DW skill, it should be on your primary DW bar. I prefer whirling blades to steel tornado.

Sap essence is awesome for magicka builds. The other morph, Power extraction will be better for stam build.

Assassins blade is the NB execute to low health enemies. Impale is the easiest to use but killers blade provides arguably useful utility.

Summoning shades, evasion from medium armor and blur are all great ways to mitigate direct damage if your in a heavy hitting fight as well.

Let me know what ya think and happy hunting!

kylerjalen

1. Get rid of vampire. seriously, really think about this. What is it doing for you and is it worth the increase to fire damage? There is a lot of fire. To answer your question I'm not sure.

You're not the only one who has said that. I was thinking about it after I typed all this up last night and it glared at me, I only use Vampire for the passives, nothing more. So yeah. Will drop for sure.

2. Crit isn't as important as it once was. The new meta is more like Weapon Damage>Max Stam>Weapon crit. or Spell damage>max magicka>spell crit. Anyways if your at ~50% crit without PvP buffs your doing ok.

Thats shown in the character screen right? Does it go over 100% Its showing at 280% for spell and 360% for weapon

3. Your build seems to be very divided between stamina vs. magicka AND damage vs. heals. Not that it can't be done, but it's much more difficult on yourself.

If I read this correctly, its choose either stamina and damage OR magicka and heals?

5. You may want to think about switching gears to a 5pc Hundings and 3/4pc. Ashen grip for a focused stam build. Forget light armor at this point (until your closer to v11-12) and go with 5 medium and 2 heavy. Make the heavy your chest and legs for maximum armor. Chest, legs and head with infused. Divines on the rest. Your daggers appear to have good trait.enchants but again, might want to get rid of seducers.

Done.

6. Again really think about if being a vampire is really helping you, I'd get rid of it and the fire resist enchants as well. Go with max stamina enchants on all armor. Your jewelry should be either weapon damage or skill/feat cost reduction.

The only thing I like about Vampire is the Dark Stalker skill. Instead of Hunding's, would Night's Silence be an alright substitute? I really, really, really, like to sneak.

Thank you for your input! I really appreciate it a lot!

Cuyler

kylerjalen wrote: »

Thats shown in the character screen right? Does it go over 100% Its showing at 280% for spell and 360% for weapon

So it looks like you might still have the outdated "softcapinfo" addon enabled. It's not used in 1.6 due to the removal of softcaps and returns bugged numbers 100%+. Remove it and you should see what your actual crit values are.

To go farther into your question here, there are the champion passives "spell precision" and "perfect strike" which increase your spell and weapon crit rating by 12% respectively (30 point passives). The boost comes from the CPs and skills now (plus a 10% base for everyone) and not so much from the armor.

kylerjalen wrote: »

If I read this correctly, its choose either stamina and damage OR magicka and heals?

That's correct. Generally speaking of course. Even the best builds aren't great without a skilled player and vice versa, a skilled player can make a non-optimal build work too.

With that said you can do magicka damage as well but stamina healers, to my knowledge, don't exist.

kylerjalen wrote: »

6. Again really think about if being a vampire is really helping you, I'd get rid of it and the fire resist enchants as well. Go with max stamina enchants on all armor. Your jewelry should be either weapon damage or skill/feat cost reduction.

The only thing I like about Vampire is the Dark Stalker skill. Instead of Hunding's, would Night's Silence be an alright substitute? I really, really, really, like to sneak.

Thank you for your input! I really appreciate it a lot!

Unfortunately sneaking has little place in endgame PvE. When leveling however, if you like to sneak past mobs it has its place. Mostly it's used for PvP where sneaking can give you the advantage. In PvE, it's reduced to providing additional damage on a first strike from stealth and that's it. That's not going to help in a 300s boss fight.

Because the easiest way to increase dps is by increasing weapon damage/max stam or spell damage/max mag, I would always recommend the 5pc. bonus from hundings for a stam build with the ashens grip. The weapon crit and stam recovery from Night Silence aren't as helpful and can be made up in other places than on your gear. Ultimately though don't take my word for it, try them out and see which you like best! That's the positive to crafted sets.

As with everything in this game there are trade offs, if you want to be sneaky, you almost have to go all in. Then you'll be trading off something for that ability to sneak, most likely sustained dps.

kylerjalen

Cuyler wrote: »

kylerjalen wrote: »

Thats shown in the character screen right? Does it go over 100% Its showing at 280% for spell and 360% for weapon

So it looks like you might still have the outdated "softcapinfo" addon enabled. It's not used in 1.6 due to the removal of softcaps and returns bugged numbers 100%+. Remove it and you should see what your actual crit values are.

Oh good grief. I didn't think about that. Geezuz. It was disabled for my other alts but not this one. Thank you for pointing that out.

To go farther into your question here, there are the champion passives "spell precision" and "perfect strike" which increase your spell and weapon crit rating by 12% respectively (30 point passives). The boost comes from the CPs and skills now (plus a 10% base for everyone) and not so much from the armor.

kylerjalen wrote: »

6. Again really think about if being a vampire is really helping you, I'd get rid of it and the fire resist enchants as well. Go with max stamina enchants on all armor. Your jewelry should be either weapon damage or skill/feat cost reduction.

Oh yeah Im getting rid of it as soon as I get a new set of armor/weapons/jewelry. Thank you for the input as to how to enchant them!

The only thing I like about Vampire is the Dark Stalker skill. Instead of Hunding's, would Night's Silence be an alright substitute? I really, really, really, like to sneak.

Thank you for your input! I really appreciate it a lot!

Unfortunately sneaking has little place in endgame PvE. When leveling however, if you like to sneak past mobs it has its place. Mostly it's used for PvP where sneaking can give you the advantage. In PvE, it's reduced to providing additional damage on a first strike from stealth and that's it. That's not going to help in a 300s boss fight.

Because the easiest way to increase dps is by increasing weapon damage/max stam or spell damage/max mag, I would always recommend the 5pc. bonus from hundings for a stam build with the ashens grip. The weapon crit and stam recovery from Night Silence aren't as helpful and can be made up in other places than on your gear. Ultimately though don't take my word for it, try them out and see which you like best! That's the positive to crafted sets.

As with everything in this game there are trade offs, if you want to be sneaky, you almost have to go all in. Then you'll be trading off something for that ability to sneak, most likely sustained dps.

That last line says it all.
Ok, thank you so much for your input br0! You have helped me IMMENSELY and made things a whole ton clearer. More so than the people on Reddit I've asked hahah!

likewow777

Guildmates can be helpful too

kylerjalen

likewow777 wrote: »

Guildmates can be helpful too

So true Likewow777 but the thing is... not everyone is as helpful as you.
I wish they were hehehehe

kylerjalen

Actually, the only problem now was the suggestion that I ditch my Restoration staff and focus on Bow, which in reality would be more in tune with an assassin type build.
The headache really now is starting a new skill from scratch and leveling everything Bow related up.

Cuyler

kylerjalen wrote: »

Actually, the only problem now was the suggestion that I ditch my Restoration staff and focus on Bow, which in reality would be more in tune with an assassin type build.
The headache really now is starting a new skill from scratch and leveling everything Bow related up.

Just think of all the CPs you'll get doing it Happy I could help.

kylerjalen

Cuyler wrote: »

kylerjalen wrote: »

Actually, the only problem now was the suggestion that I ditch my Restoration staff and focus on Bow, which in reality would be more in tune with an assassin type build.
The headache really now is starting a new skill from scratch and leveling everything Bow related up.

Just think of all the CPs you'll get doing it Happy I could help.

Just did it and bro... life is so much easier. Survivability went through the roof.
Thank you again!

Cuyler

Nice! np if you have other questions just holler.

GlassHalfFull

"Sap essence is awesome for magicka builds. The other morph, Power extraction will be better for stam build."

There is a lot of good info here, I compared to my gear and I see this change I should have made when I switched form desto/resto staff to DW/bow.