i believe for normal difficulty dungeons/trials the enemies have only about 12800 resistance, so you would need 12800 combined between resistance debuffs and penetration

in vet content you would need 18200 to ignore armor

im not sure about overland, but i dont think they have much if any

now for pvp, players can have upwards 40k armor if they want to be able to still be capped while being debuffed with major/minor breach

usually for pvp more pen is better, if you can make it to like 15-20k pen you will ignore most or all armor on the average targets to heavy burst someone down, obviously you dont want to sacrifice too much raw dmg into pen

AcadianPaladin wrote: »

I'm confused on who has how much resist in PvE as well. I run solo group dungeons and solo WBs so I need to provide all my own pen. I'm currently built to cut through 18.2k but. . . if @Necrotech_Master is correct, I could tweak down to 12.8 and place that 'oomph' elsewhere' like crit or spell damage.

Would love to know for sure the resists for the following categories of foes:
Normal group dungeon bosses.
Normal group dungeon trash.
Overland WBs.
Overland trash.

normal group dungeon bosses and trash mobs i believe have the same resistances, the trash mobs just have way less health and appear to die faster

overland WB might have some resistances, but im not sure if its the same amount as group dungeon mobs (its likely is the same as normal dungeon enemies)

i dont know about overland trash mobs, they die so easily anyway i dont know if i would worry about it

but if you arent really doing, or planning to do any veteran content, you probably dont need more than 12-13k penetration + debuffs

if you are applying weakness to elements for example, that is already -6000 resist, so you would only need about 6000 pen to ignore armor on normal dungeon mobs

in terms of pen most everything is counted in values of 3000 (the debuffs or buffs are usually not exactly this and may be slightly higher or lower)

major breach is -6000 resist (roughly)
minor breach is -3000 resist (roughly)
sharpened trait on 2h weapon is 3000 pen (roughly)
2 maces or a 2h mace is another 3000 pen (roughly)

if your light armor your probably already sitting at around 9000 penetration from armor bonuses, so its fairly trivial to hit the 18k needed for veteran content (the effective max you need for any pve content)

using a 2h mace with sharpened is a good way for a stam user to get to about equivalent pen as a light armor user

im just going to assume you were running it on normal

also for that ultimate, it doesnt transfer ALL of the resistances, but resistances equal to the amount that you ignored

so if you did 10k dmg with the ult on an 18k armor thing, it would give you 10k resistances

since its an ultimate, i assume you were hitting over 20k dmg with it to be granted that amount of buff

to be fair the numbers i know were from a long time ago, and they could have changed or rebalanced stuff, but because ive also gotten better with time, over land and normal non-dlc dungeons feel about the same (dlc dungeon enemies tend to have more health/tankier)

i mean it sounds right to me, i havent used the 2h ult very much (i briefly tried to use it in pvp, but felt like i missed too much with it, and it not doing cc/dot like dawnbreaker make it just a tad less useful i think)

on my characters that have less than 18k penetration + debuffs, they still feel like they do a lot more dmg in vet dungeons than normal dungeons, but because enemies in normal tend to have way less hp than vet, the fight might feel faster because im only fighting like 1/3 to 1/2 of the hp lol, since i do pay attention to my dps numbers those do seem to be consistent between normal and vet

but based on your numbers, if your not doing dungeon content you dont need 18k penetration + debuffs, and even then based on my experience i would say you dont even need more than 9-12k for normal dungeons as the enemies still seem to die quite fast and it might be better to utilize more dmg (crit or weapon/spell dmg)

Castagere wrote: »

I get confused as to its use in ESO. Some say it's just good for PVP and others say it's just good for group bosses and useless in overland regular questing. So which is it please?

I'm not sure about PVP but I do know that Physical Penetration makes a huge difference in normal overland, dungeons and world boss fights. It's almost my main focus on builds. 10k or over seems to be the sweet spot. Don't forget Lover mundus.

depends on what you are killing.

As an exercise in torture and to see how useful pen is, fight Cilrenas the Shepard in FGII with and without pen abilities