Weapon / spell damage

jessica_1403 · September 2021

So all those different types of damage are so confusing for me. I always doubt to put on a set where it says plus weapon damage or weapon critical. I ame sorc Magicka. So the weapon (and critical) damage, does that only apply for stamina weapons? Or can I do weapon (critical) damage with a lightning staff too? Do I benefit from a set with weapon damage or only with spell damage? Is a light or heavy attack from staff considered weapon damage or spell damage? Man this is confusing. And then I haven't even talked about crowd control (what the heck is that? I saw something about that in the cp system)

vsrs_au · September 2021

@jessica_1403 , there are no simple answers to your question, unfortunately

However, here are some useful sources of information on what the different damage-related player attributes actually mean:

http://esoacademy.com/faq/what-are-types-of-damage/
https://alcasthq.com/eso-dps-damage-dealer-beginner-guide/

There are many others, and numerous discussion threads about it on the ESO forum, Reddit, etc.

I'm still a newbie compared to most ESO players, I've only been playing about 5 months, and I'm still learning about how combat damage works, so hopefully some more experienced players will reply to this thread

I hope this helps a bit!

jessica_1403 · September 2021

I've been looking at sites and videos but I can't get a straight answer about the weapon damage anywhere lol.
I just want to know if I can do weapon damage with my staff too or not? So I can choose better what kinds of sets to put on. But nobody seems to know lol. So so sooooo confusing. But I'll definitely look at those links you've provided me. Thx

ixthUA · September 2021

As magicka sorcerer you need to stack spell damage, magicka, spell critical and spell penetration. They will boost magic and elemental skills and basic weapon attacks.

LadyHeloise · September 2021

There's a lot of info about combat here that should help https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Combat
Basically weapon damage is related to weapons or abilities that cost stamina to use, like swords or bows, whereas you as a magsorc should focus on spell damage as you use staves.

Magdalina · September 2021

It is pretty straightforward these days in terms of weapon/spell damage. At the dawn of ESO it used to be that weapons (any weapons, including staves) light/heavy attacks indeed scaled off weapon damage, and skills scaling was just randomly all over the place, but that is no longer the case. Basically everything that costs magicka will scale with max magicka, spell damage and spell crit. There're some exceptions to these such as skills scaling off max health (those are few and usually have it in their description) or skills scaling off max magicka only (magic shields such as sorc Daedric Ward or light armor Annulment), but generally it's the combo of these 3. Weapon damage and crit are useless for you as a mag build (stam will come in handy for blocking, dodging and bashing, but base stam pool should do for that).

Ultimates scale with the highest of your resources currently I think, but they still favor certain builds due to the type of damage they deal - like Fighter's Guild Dawnbreaker deals physical damage which makes it that much less powerful for magicka builds, etc.

The champion points, when you get there, are a bit complicated as there are those that boost AoE (area of effect), DoTs (damage over time skills), direct damage and it can be confusing which of those is more useful or which skills are even AoE/DoT (there're some pretty unintuitive questions there, like is templar jabs single target or aoe? I don't templar currently so I don't even remember that lol), you may want to check some guides for that, they tend to have optimized layouts for different CP levels.

Upd: Oh, I see you also asked about CC. Crowd control is, well, the skills that let you 'control' an enemy or several. 'Control' implying disabling them in some way - stun, fear, knock back, snare, root, silence (? I'm actually unsure if ESO currently considers silence a form of crowd control or not, I think it should) etc.

BejaProphet · September 2021

Staves use spell damage, but you can use a staff and STILL slot an ability that uses weapon damage.

With a staff:

Light and heavy attacks use spell.

Any magicka abilities you use will use spell.

Any stamina abilities will use weapon

BUT there are some abilities that specifically say that they scale on the highest of the two stats.

jessica_1403 · November 2021

Thanks guys for those answers. I understand it a lot more now!!!