Advice for magblade PvP against tankier opponents

JayKwellen · May 2020

So a couple weeks ago I decided I wanted a change - so I rolled a magblade. A cloakblade specifically. It's been a ton of fun and she's by far my favorite, but man it's been a trip. My previous classes were a magsorc, magplar, and then a stamDK, and coming to a magblade I almost feel like I have to relearn the entire game.

My main problem is the "tanky-bursty" built stamina classes. I can handle my own (or at least die after an honorable fight) against most mag classes, and potatoes, but whenever I come across a good stamplar or stamden or stamcro in particular I feel like I'm back at day 1, and it's just insufferable.

My biggest issue seems to be damage/pressure. They either heal right through my burst, or just outright mitigate most of my damage (not counting dodge rolling). Many of these fights end up feeling like I'm just throwing sticks at them while they shrug off my damage until I inevitably slip and move out of my shades range or try to use it a second too late, after which I get caught in CC+Burst combo without any ability to escape, and quickly die.

For my build I went max magicka and I'm running Crafty + Necropotence, arcane jewelry with 2 spell damage and 1 recovery glyph, all impen and tri-glyph on big pieces, usually with 2p Balorg. Staff is sharp and mundus is Mage. I have about 55k mag, 25k health, 18k stam, 3k crit resist, approx 16k pen. 1200 recovery before magickasteal from ele drain.

On the front bar I have: Cloak -- Ele Drain -- Flex Spot (Impale, Fear, Inner Light, Cripple have all been tried here) -- Merciless -- Swallow Soul
On the back bar I have: Lotus Fan -- Regen -- Fear (If not on front bar) -- Siphoning -- Shade

My routine is roughly to put up ele drain, throw down my shade and move in with lotus and then shade back out. I try to keep up constant pressure with light attacks/swallow soul and bow proc if appropriate, fearing to break their own rotations and keep pressure up, and refreshing minor vuln and breech until I can lotus in again and move into the fear, soul harvest, spectral bow combo.

Problem is I just never get them low enough to kill them, they either out heal all my damage, or mitigate so much that I can't move their health bar. When this happens they just move to pressure me instead as they have no need to turtle, and once they start laying the damage on I end up on my back foot, bouncing between my shade and defensively cloaking and unable to put any real counter-pressure on them. Eventually I run out of resources, or lose my shade, or get stunned and shade too late, or cloak doesn't work, and as soon as they're on top of me it's over.

I keep thinking I need to push more damage, but I can't figure out the best approach, or if this is even the right approach. I'm also wondering if I'm simply approaching the fight wrong? Should I be applying damage differently? Should I be trying to wear out their resources before going in for my combo?

I know magblades are in a rough spot, but I'm loathe to blame my failures on the class itself when I feel that this is just a L2P issue on my part. So any of you ESO elders got any advice?

Maulkin · May 2020

This dude's tryna play magblade in Harrowstorm lmao

Maulkin · May 2020

But no seriously, there's dozens of threads complaining of the same problem and the fact there's actually no solution to it this patch. The nightblade theorycrafting thread is into hundreds of pages detailing that very issue. Given two players of equal skill and experience, the "tanky-bursty stamina" build will win that fight at least 90% of the times with the remainder chalked up to the anomaly of human errors. It's just a complete mismatch.

It's just how balance is at the moment. Ignore those stamden/stamcro/stamdk/stamplar bursty tanks and focus on something you have a reasonable chance of killing. Unless you enjoy playing horse simulator.

Tommy_The_Gun · May 2020

Low burst damage is a general problem of a Nightblade class - both stam & mag. On top of that it is very hard to land a burst combo because of stacking cast times and bow proc travel (Grim Focus).

It is all because NB received way to many nerfs last year (to put it simply, they were over-nerfed).

As a result, we have an Assassin class with the weakest single target burst dmg in game...

If I was to suggest something:
Maybe you should increase penetration even more, at the cost of less magicka pool ? You have 16k pen (which is impressive). Try using The Lover mundus instead of Mage. Also, Valkyn Skoria monster set will get Spell Penetration bonus next update on 1 pcs bonus.

JayKwellen · May 2020

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Low burst damage is a general problem of a Nightblade class - both stam & mag. On top of that it is very hard to land a burst combo because of stacking cast times and bow proc travel (Grim Focus).

It is all because NB received way to many nerfs last year (to put it simply, they were over-nerfed).

As a result, we have an Assassin class with the weakest single target burst dmg in game...

If I was to suggest something:
Maybe you should increase penetration even more, at the cost of less magicka pool ? You have 16k pen (which is impressive). Try using The Lover mundus instead of Mage. Also, Valkyn Skoria monster set will get Spell Penetration bonus next update on 1 pcs bonus.

Yeah.

I've played around with using the Lover, it would definitely help somewhat against high resistance tanks, by a couple percent at least.
Maybe when greymoor comes out I'll just pick up Stuhn, use the Lover with 500 ulti Balorg, and just try to tank-gank with 30k pen lol

JayKwellen · May 2020

Maulkin wrote: »

But no seriously, there's dozens of threads complaining of the same problem and the fact there's actually no solution to it this patch. The nightblade theorycrafting thread is into hundreds of pages detailing that very issue. Given two players of equal skill and experience, the "tanky-bursty stamina" build will win that fight at least 90% of the times with the remainder chalked up to the anomaly of human errors. It's just a complete mismatch.

It's just how balance is at the moment. Ignore those stamden/stamcro/stamdk/stamplar bursty tanks and focus on something you have a reasonable chance of killing. Unless you enjoy playing horse simulator.

Yeah, I've read all those threads, including the current theorycrafting one (the whole damn thing even). It's pretty depressing tbh, as this is easily the most fun I've had on a class thus far in my 8 months of playing ESO, and simultaneously the most aneurysm inducing PvP experience imaginable. Even with my thus far limited experience I can seriously feel the difference between this class and the others I've played.

On my sDK especially I felt almost fearless knowing I could wander into any fight and brawl and usually have either a chance at winning, or at least I could usually give them a respectable fight before reuniting with my favorite transitus shrine. On the magblade though most fights start with "Do I know that guy? Is he good? What character is that? Should I try, or should I just leave and try somewhere else?" Technically I suppose that's probably how a cloakblade should be played anyway, but I'd assume it would be out of waiting for a more opportune time to strike rather than admitting defeat before even trying.

But hope springs eternal I suppose, so despite numerous players orders of magnitude better than I echoing the same sentiments I still kinda hoped for, well, something lol

Kaysha · May 2020

You cannot play magblade like a sorc. The damage just is not there. And it gets worse and worse. Do not play in CP cyrodiil. Up your magicka regen. Rely more on cloak even in the middle of the fight, like cloakweaving. And then just get used to die. A lot. Your skills to so little damage that you most likely will have to use proc sets or torugs.

MarzAttakz · May 2020

This makes me sad, point for point recap of how I've been feeling playing my MagBlade too. Woke up Thursday morning with this seed of anger/hatred burning deep in my heart after spending Wednesday evening feeling utterly useless. Nothing more to add.

Kaysha · May 2020

The problem is...once you got used to play magblade and started to like it you either feel bored playing other classes or you get depressed by playing magblade. The best advice would probably to stay away from this class as far as possible.

JayKwellen · May 2020

Kaysha wrote: »

The problem is...once you got used to play magblade and started to like it you either feel bored playing other classes or you get depressed by playing magblade. The best advice would probably to stay away from this class as far as possible.

This is so true.

From the moment I started playing it I was struck with the affliction.

Now I don't want to bring my other classes out to play in Cyrodiil, but then I bring my magblade out and the frustration sets in. I played myself.

fred4 · May 2020

It sounds like you're a good player. I can't help you with damage, I only think it's curious you built for 55K magicka, but aren't using Dampen. Doing so might help you stay in someone's face a little longer, but can also be a recipe for draining your magicka. You must be using the shade really well. If you manage to stay on target while doing that, a shield probably won't be any better.

fred4 · May 2020

I don't play your kind of playstyle, so I don't know what your exact rotations would be, but some people use Elemental Weapon to get more burst. Ele Weapon into either Soul Harvest or Assassin's Will would stack more damage into a single GCD.

Some people swear by Camou Hunter for the Minor Berserk possibility over Inner Light.

A few patches ago, I was assured by another magblade that building all the way into spell damage would yield more damage than building for magicka. From what I've been able to do in the UESP build editor, I think that's marginal, though.

A minor trick I use is having an Infused Restore Health / Magic Damage enchant on my front bar. It allows you to stay on attack a little longer in some situations. At least it's fun when you can face tank and outheal someone like a not quite full CP magplar by combining Swallow Soul, Siphoning Attacks and that enchant

.

Maulkin · May 2020

As soon as @JayKwellen steps out of the keep, all those 5k WD stam tanks go..

Daffen · May 2020

Ive played magblade for a couple months now and went with the more brawler type magblade. Dark cloak and a bit more tanky. So far ive had no problem against tanky opponents as there are multiple ways to counter their playstyle.

I posted this in another thread before for some tips on playing magblade.

A tip for doing 1vx on magblade is to always keep you shade up and fight out of sight from it while still beeing in range (easiest to do in towers) that way if you get bursted down you are able to teleport away and heal up. Another tip is to not use your merciless resolve proc once you have 5 stacks, the reason is that the 10% damage mitigation it gives you is really strong and its better to use it once you have a target in low hp and you are sure to hit.

Theres different combos that work against different players: test their reaction when they get feared, do they break free fast? Do they roll dodge straight away? Are they blocking straight away? If they are slow to break free you are able to soul harvest - fear - merciless and most likely kill them, if they roll dodge straight away they will probably roll dodge after soul harvest therefore i reccomend soul harvest - swallow soul - either fear or merciless after they roll dodge - merciless if u feared them.

Against blocking targets it becomes a little bit harder to finnish them off (the reason i like zaan) it really depends on if they block after soul harvest or not, if they only block when they are low hp you can use this combo soul harvest - merciless - fear - swallow soul, if you are lucky and merciless crits they will be around 20% health and they will block which is why we fear them so you are able to hit the last swallow soul or two. I also reccomend trying different combos and switch up your combo so that the enemy cant predict what you might do next.

Before you start your combo its important to see how tanky they are and bring their hp down to the % health where they dont heal up straight away and they will die from your combo and keep your buffs and debuffs up. Against really tanky targets that deal low damage i reccomend baiting them to overextend and not look at their health. An example of this is to drop your health down to 50% and act like you are going defensive while still damaging them, and right before your combo drop down to as low health without dying (depends on their damage) this method will most likely bring your target down to 40% hp and they will forget about their armor buffs and hots making it much easier for you to secure your kill.

csparks1 · May 2020

OP, and many others - I have the same problems you do.

@Daffen
That was a really good post!

Alucardo · May 2020

Lately I've been using infused Torugs inferno with shock glyph (for the minor vulnerability). It's also buffed with minor berserk, and strangely enough the destro passive buffs it also if you have a destro skill slotted. With those you can get a pretty disgusting tooltip on your glyph. On weaker targets you'll nearly two shot them, and it's absolutely possible to wear a tankier player down. It's gross, and I hate myself for it, but it's the only way I've found to get enough burst to keep people off me, or limit fight duration so I'm not swallowing their soul for 20 minutes.
Works wonders in Battlegrounds too, I must say. People aren't expecting to see half their health drain after a light attack, so they are usually not prepared.

Maulkin · May 2020

Alucardo wrote: »

Lately I've been using infused Torugs inferno with shock glyph (for the minor vulnerability). It's also buffed with minor berserk, and strangely enough the destro passive buffs it also if you have a destro skill slotted. With those you can get a pretty disgusting tooltip on your glyph. On weaker targets you'll nearly two shot them, and it's absolutely possible to wear a tankier player down. It's gross, and I hate myself for it, but it's the only way I've found to get enough burst to keep people off me, or limit fight duration so I'm not swallowing their soul for 20 minutes.
Works wonders in Battlegrounds too, I must say. People aren't expecting to see half their health drain after a light attack, so they are usually not prepared.

What is?

EDIT: Ah you mean the dmg of the shock enchant. You meant buffed by Minor Berserk, gotcha.

Alucardo · May 2020

Maulkin wrote: »

Alucardo wrote: »

Lately I've been using infused Torugs inferno with shock glyph (for the minor vulnerability). It's also buffed with minor berserk, and strangely enough the destro passive buffs it also if you have a destro skill slotted. With those you can get a pretty disgusting tooltip on your glyph. On weaker targets you'll nearly two shot them, and it's absolutely possible to wear a tankier player down. It's gross, and I hate myself for it, but it's the only way I've found to get enough burst to keep people off me, or limit fight duration so I'm not swallowing their soul for 20 minutes.
Works wonders in Battlegrounds too, I must say. People aren't expecting to see half their health drain after a light attack, so they are usually not prepared.

What is?

EDIT: Ah you mean the dmg of the shock enchant. You meant buffed by Minor Berserk, gotcha.

Yeah, and Ancient Knowledge (Destruction Staff passive) buffs the glyph tooltip too. I'm not sure why as it's not really an ability.

Ancient Knowledge
Flame Staff increases your damage done with single target abilities by 8%

Iskiab · May 2020

As a NB instead of playing to your strengths you have to cover your weaknesses.

Lack of burst damage and weak self healing.

What I do is use caluurion and speed. My two favourite combos:
- lay a trap down, kite over the trap once they’ve chased you for a bit, go in and cal proc + meteor + merciless. They’ll usually have their buffs down because they’re expecting an easy NB kill
- more simple but ganking with a flame clench combo plus Caluurion

People will always complain about proc sets, but people use them for a reason. If you’re playing a class with good burst you don’t need them, and on others you do. On my other classes I don’t use caluurion because it’d make me weaker.

Half the fun of magblade is knowing if you do well you’re outplaying people too.

JayKwellen · May 2020

fred4 wrote: »

It sounds like you're a good player. I can't help you with damage, I only think it's curious you built for 55K magicka, but aren't using Dampen. Doing so might help you stay in someone's face a little longer, but can also be a recipe for draining your magicka. You must be using the shade really well. If you manage to stay on target while doing that, a shield probably won't be any better.

@fred4 Wow. Coming from you that's quite a compliment! I still wouldn't call myself "good" though, I'm still definitely a youngling to ESO and have a lot more to learn. I try though lol.

As for dampen, I have actually tried it. Honestly I've tried a bit of everything, but if I ran through my entire history it would have filled a novel so I truncated parts of it. My only issue with dampen was simply finding a place to put it. If I replaced regen I felt my healing was way too low. If I replaced siphon I felt my healing and sustain were too low. Move it into the flex spot and I worry my damage takes too much of a hit. I did also try healing ward in place of regen to give me a bit of both shielding and heals, but as I normally play twosome with my husband who is a damage sponge DK, I found it too often went to him when I was the one who truly needed it, so I ended up sticking with the safe dependable option. That's not to say I couldn't have made it work though, I honestly just ended up moving on as it never really "felt" right anywhere. I'd still be willing to try again though if I could find a place for it.

And that's hilarious about the front bar heal enchant, because I literally just started doing that the other day haha. I was wracking my brain for ways to increase my passive healing, especially with Greymoor coming, and that was one of the ideas I had. With consistent light attack weaving it's not too terrible even. It's not gonna let you facetank a zerg obviously, but it's a neat way to sneak in just a bit more healing with only a very small damage loss.

zDan · May 2020

Unfortunately that's just how magblade is. What a 1-2 minute fight is on a stam class will be a 5-6 minute fight on a magblade. The damage output is lackluster and you have to be so precise when hitting your combo. Fighting someone that dodges a lot can be painful and the fact that it's near impossible to hit a bow or soul harvest after a cc makes the class bottom tier. Still one of my favs though!

JayKwellen · May 2020

@zDan Yeah man, I'm definitely picking up that that seems to be a norm (longer fights that is). The cat and mouse, "testing" you opponents before going all in, restarting your combos over because you missed something/they dodged/etc., having to maintain 100% precision, it's quite a bit of required input. I still love it though and it's still the most fun I've had by far, and as a somewhat perfectionist if anything the struggles make me love it even more and dive way off the deep end into theory crafting, because in my head I'm like "I knooooow I can do better than this!"

Not gonna lie either, the lack of a comforting and reliable "crutch" type mechanic (probably bad word choice but you get the idea, you know the type of thing that can just be leaned on instead of having to figure out better counter-play or improving your mechanics) to get me out of hot water like what I had on my Templar or Sorc or DK has also pushed me to do better and correct my own weaknesses and lazy corner cutting, some of which I didn't even know I had.

At the very least this thread, along with just watching footage of good magblades play (including a bunch of your own videos too) has also driven home how important sustain really ends up being on this class, particularly if you're planning to do more than just gank. I've already got a bunch of build tweaks and changes in my head that I'm excited to try out!

Kaysha · May 2020

Time to change your signature!

SHOW · May 2020

Crazy. I thought I was living this exact struggle in isolation. What an eerie (yet painful) shared experience lol

Magblade has been my main since launch, know it inside and out, with my eyes closed, by far the most enjoyable for me. Nothing better than juking a zerg with shade, or blasting someone with a bow they didn't see coming. Don't get me wrong, got all of the FOTMs, while much more effective, I just always find myself coming back to my magblade.

But ive theory crafted literally every playstyle and set combination, everything is painfully sub par. Have to be 5 steps ahead (e.g. bow lol) (6 with shade

in order to even compete.

Other classes can just hit 1 button and get more reliable burst than the assassin class.

wtf lol ...but don't get me started.

btw, as an assassin, why do I have to lightly tap my target on the shoulder 5 times before (missing) my burst lol who designed this mechanic for this class?!? (I said not to get me started lol)

My other classes, I can just slap anything on and perform better than the class I've mained since launch. Something's not right.

Painful.

ZOS why are u torturing us lol it's obvious from all of these posts, we need some love!

Crash427 · May 2020

Just wait for Greymoor. Stuhn's + Calurrion's is nasty. I can already see the threads calling for more NB nerfs coming.

SHOW · May 2020

Even at full pen, caluurion would only be 9k, once every 10 secs... Then further reduced by % mitigations... it's a shame we even have to consider proc sets to compete (I have that set golded already lol)

JayKwellen · May 2020

@Crash427 the interesting thing about stuhns, and just the design teams "philosophy" in general is that it seems, to me at least, like all the continued changes and the new sets being introduced are literally just pushing NBs into being gankers.

The more they take away the ability for NBs to stand up and fight someone, the more they're going to turn towards ganking as it's left as the only way they can secure kills.

The community hates ganking though, so in the end they're going to just complain about it which will probably lead to even more nerfs. It's a completely self-made issue that the devs could completely avoid if they just gave us more viable playstyles.

raistin87 · May 2020

Alucardo wrote: »

Lately I've been using infused Torugs inferno with shock glyph (for the minor vulnerability). It's also buffed with minor berserk, and strangely enough the destro passive buffs it also if you have a destro skill slotted. With those you can get a pretty disgusting tooltip on your glyph. On weaker targets you'll nearly two shot them, and it's absolutely possible to wear a tankier player down. It's gross, and I hate myself for it, but it's the only way I've found to get enough burst to keep people off me, or limit fight duration so I'm not swallowing their soul for 20 minutes.
Works wonders in Battlegrounds too, I must say. People aren't expecting to see half their health drain after a light attack, so they are usually not prepared.

This and Caluurion for the for the remaining 5 slots. Sadly the only way to play magblade and be able to something nowadays.

Tommy_The_Gun · May 2020

Crash427 wrote: »

Just wait for Greymoor. Stuhn's + Calurrion's is nasty. I can already see the threads calling for more NB nerfs coming.

That would actually be quite an accomplishment if they would find anything left to nerf...

Crash427 · May 2020

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Crash427 wrote: »

Just wait for Greymoor. Stuhn's + Calurrion's is nasty. I can already see the threads calling for more NB nerfs coming.

That would actually be quite an accomplishment if they would find anything left to nerf...

When I read this at first I laughed, and then I was sad

fred4 · May 2020

JayKwellen wrote: »

@Crash427 the interesting thing about stuhns, and just the design teams "philosophy" in general is that it seems, to me at least, like all the continued changes and the new sets being introduced are literally just pushing NBs into being gankers.

The more they take away the ability for NBs to stand up and fight someone, the more they're going to turn towards ganking as it's left as the only way they can secure kills.

The community hates ganking though, so in the end they're going to just complain about it which will probably lead to even more nerfs. It's a completely self-made issue that the devs could completely avoid if they just gave us more viable playstyles.

Does anyone have any idea what that playstyle would actually look like?

The problem has to do with the binary nature of Cloak, does it not? As long as you can surprise people and burst them from cloak, that's just so effective. If they have enough burst, NBs are OP. If they don't, NBs are suddenly bottom tier, because of their reliance on damage avoidance. I don't think the main problem is even the many ways Cloak can be countered, but how you lean rather heavily on that skill and the expensive shade, even when your name is not fred4. As in any class, defense is costly, but magblade seems to feel that cost more. I guess this may just be a function of a weak attack. The less pressure you have, the more your game falls apart for lack of sustain.

Magblade didn't use to be this way. When I started, Kena made a video arguing that magblade was the best class for staying on attack. This was when Funnel healed allies, could double crit, would get 100% crit in cloak and when Siphoning Attacks returned a ton of resources. There was a sustain reward for coming out of cloak. These days you just have to build for it, weakening your damage and healing. Today's Siphoning Attacks don't come close, not least because they don't give you stamina. Stamina management seems so much less needed on other magicka classes, with sorc taking the cake for outshielding damage, streaking instead of dodge rolling and some sorcs having stamina left over for Dark Conversions. I don't know whether such sorcs run Amber Plasm, but dark converting any excess into magicka at a net gain (more mag than stam spent) must be a plus for their sustain.

It's not like ZOS aren't trying. Magblade was never the ganking class to begin with. It has historically relied more on ulti (Tether) + Assassin's Will combos than it's stamina counterpart. Of course Tether no longer stuns through block and too many things (cast times) seem to have gone wrong to keep that playstyle viable for many people, but arguably the mitigation buildup from Merciless was an attempt to push magblades into a standup playstyle. Of course there was an outcry when it was 15% and it was discovered that it was additive, making it rather strong. I've never really played that playstyle, but suspect it wasn't even strong enough. I feel squishy whatever I do. I haven't tried 1H+S. With having to rely on resto for a self-heal, it's really out of the question. A decent self-heal plus Shadowy Disguise might actually make a big difference on account of being able to ditch the resto for something else (ice or 1H+S).

It's curious how Caluurion has fared in all of this. The set was arguably made for magblades and buffed with the addition of Minor Vulnerability to Lotus Fan. It seems to be ZOS' answer to some of magblade's problems. While it's a viable ganking set, the fact that procs can't crit limits it. I find it plays well, but is not super strong. I would be worried about incoming nerfs, if Stuhn markedly improved it's viability.