Welcome to pvp! We hope you have a great...irk...nightblade ambush stab in back...arck! [falls over dead, DC player earns 1933 AP]

Ha...anyway. Pvp is fun as a stamblade, I've done 95% of my pvp with my khajit stamblade. There are some things to consider that I think will help you out:

- you probably want to invest in a second armor setup...or at least several pieces of it...for pvp, depending on your play style. There's several reasons. One is that your Night Terror sneak radius buff is awesome in pve...but kinda sucky in pvp. Players will either see you in that two meters or they won't, I don't think that set buff helps much. But most important...

-...impenetrable armor traits are VERY helpful for a stamblade. Right now many of the best pvp-ers are running 5-7 impen pieces. A couple of updates ago, the changes made it so my stamblade was getting hit with 2-3 attacks in a second, each doing 8k damage. You can't survive that. Bringing impen pieces into my rotation dropped these hits to 2k. I can react and fight back/flee with 6k damage...24k was a free trip to the morgue, lol.

- I ran night silence my whole first year of pvp. Others won't have it in their builds. Some day when you're a pvp expert you might swap for something else, but the speed will save your butt many, many, many times until then.

- Alcast and sypher have great builds. Their sites are a good reference point, especially after updates.

- speaking of updates, next week in pvp sets can't proc crit damage, but AOEs will do more. I think this will help stamblades because those sets like vipers sting were adding a TON of crit damage.

- dual wield and bow is quite viable. Because your redguard passive helps you w melee attacks, you should definitely focus on the dual as your attack bar. Surprise attack is a must. Ambush is a must. You have some flexibility with other abilities. Definitely consider the sustain you get from the dual wield abilities like slashes or flurry. These become more powerful in pvp than they are in pve, imo.

- the bow retreat bar works great. I put my cloak here. Grim focus is great. In pvp I kinda have two bow bar setups in my head...one for open terrain, then one for keep defense. If I get into a defense game, I flip out some of my defensive abilities and bring in focused aim, magelight and siege shield. (See their passives for why). I get a lot of AP by being a long range super sniper in keeps. Then when it's over, I flip back to my standard setup.

- you need vigor if you don't have it. It will change your toon's life. If you don't have it, it's about 85,000 total AP to open assault 5. Focus on big keep defenses...do the resource capture and other repeatables (worth more with next weeks update)...repair walls. In 4-5 sessions you'll unlock it and all of a sudden you have a burst heal.

- a big question on this build is where you're going to get major brutality from. You need the 20% extra power. Potion popping? Shrouded daggers?

- will you be mostly pvp-ing with this toon for a while? If you said you were going to spend 70%+ of your play time in pvp, and NOT run much veteran pve content, I might recommend changing your CPs to push 30 or more into resistant to reduce that crit damage. This can help with the squishiness. You'll still be fine for 95% of the pve content...it won't handicap you much to allocate some for this while learning pvp.

- otherwise for CPs, you should make sure these are spent well. What other, better p,auers have thought me is that piling them into the best categories beats spreading them around. As a general rule, a stamblade should focus on:

Reds: other than maybe some in resistance, pile everything else evenly in hardy and elemental defender. This reduces incoming physical and magic damage. There is no better investment for a NB. When I piled my points here I became twice as survivable.

Greens: pile into stam cost reduction and stam recovery. Cost reduction is better...on a stamblade the fight is short, or your dead.

Blues: pile into mighty and the crit damage one next to it. All the way to C600 you're probably going to stay in this tree. Make the toon a killer.

Let me know if you have questions/comments. Use @me and I'll see the post flagged for me. Have fun, kill often, never stop to bury the dead.