Depends? Parsing or content. Parsing I run velothi, siroria, slimcraw and rele. Content im currently in ansuul, velothi, deadly, slimcraw

My Templar main wears 5 light, 1 medium and 1 heavy to maximise the Undaunted passive.

I have no issues with her being too squishy and she's great for solo-ing stuff, add in a tanky companion and four man dungeons are fun to solo too, although she was solo-ing dungeons way before companions appeared!!

As a rule of thumb you want to use heavy armor for a tank, medium armor for a stamina DD or stamina solo player, and light armor for a magicka DD, healer, or magicka solo player. In other words for magicka templar, go light light armor. Templar does well with higher crit % that light armor gives you, due to passives, and the penetration you get from light is useful for boss encounters. The main reason to go for light on a magicka character, though, is the sustain for magicka-based skills.

When I say light, that doesn't mean all light. I'd mix in at least a medium chest for the higher resistances and Undaunted passive. Templar also has Minor Sorcery, which synergises with medium armor, but for sustain reasons you'll probably want to stick with at least 4x light armor, if not 5 or 6. Depends on your race and set choices.

I think Overwhelming Surge from Tempest Island is a good and relatively easy to get set for solo play, being a damage and sustain set. Other sets to consider include Iceheart - shield, crit and damage all really good. Nerieneth or Zaan are further monster sets that work well. I would pair those sets with Deadly Strike for raw damage, Hexos Ward for soloing some harder or unknown content where you are not totally familiar with mechanics, or maybe Pillar of Nirn (which is due to be nerfed though). Simply Order's Wrath (crafted) should work as well.

If you have trial sets, such as Whorl of Depths or False God's Devotion, those can replace Overwhelming Surge, especially on a Breton that doesn't really need the sustain, but that all depends on content. Wearing a set that offers some sustain as well as damage, such as Surge or False God, can certainly help in solo play.

If you want to solo world bosses or (veteran) dungeons, Hexos Ward will enable some of that and is certainly good enough to help if you struggle to survive in vMA or vVateshran. Ultimately those arenas are best steamrolled with pure DPS, if you know all the mechanics in your sleep and you have a good rotation, but the extra tankiness from Hexos Ward helps when that's not the case.

I personally have two even tankier solo options in my inventory, because different setups thrive in different content. I like sticking with light armor for the sustain, but use Aetherial Ascension (crafted) + False God in one of my setups. Together with Markyn (mythic) I'm close to the resistance cap as far as I recall. This is good for some of the harder world bosses where the shield from Hexos Ward doesn't feel consistent enough.

Finally I have a setup with the Tormentor set and Explosive Charge on the backbar. This is more of a lightweight group tank than a solo setup, e.g. for normal dungeons with a group, but Tormentor is not a bad back bar buff set also simply for the resistances, which carry over to the front bar.

Pale Order probably deserves a mention for solo play, but I have to say that magplar doesn't especially need it, so I'm not currently using it on that class.

Finally having an Infused back bar weapon and using a ground AOE backbar skill is standard for a DD, if not wearing Oakensoul. If you have a Maelstrom Inferno staff, I would recommend that on the backbar.

Thanks for the input so far.

What I meant with Solo PVe is mostly questing, helping with WBs, sometimes normal dungeons and all that stuff, no crazy veteran or high end stuff.
Currently my gear is:

Deadly Strike set with 5x pieces (med), Iceheart Set (head light, shoulder med) and Order's Wrath set. (weapon, neck and rings)
But I'm still unsure about it, because one half says I should go med and light gear, the other side says I should go full light.

@anima1122 I'd dump Iceheart. If you're looking to be tankier, Mighty Chudan is a good choice. If you want more damage, any of the traditional damage sets (Zaan, Ilambris, Selene, etc.) would work. Iceheart used to be a really good choice that bridged the two, but now it ends up being lacking in both aspects.

But, as you're just doing overland it doesn't matter. Your other gear is fine. You could easily do vet base group dungeons and normal Craglorn trials in those 2 sets, so overland should be easy. Well, easier than it already is.

@boi_anachronism_ agreed. I just kept it to the Crag 3 to be conservative. Iceheart aside, the sets are strong.

For SOLO PvE it's always best to have a 5-2 ratio leaning towards your chosen attribute.
So for a Magicka Templar 5 pieces of light and two pieces of medium is the most balanced choice.
Heavy Armor is just in the way, unless you attempt to SOLO vet DLC Dungeons.

I run dual maces (Nirnhoned, Precise or Sharpened), with Order's Wrath and Deadly Strike. You will have around 9k pen, and than you can use a major breach ability on WBs. That is the most practical approach.
For SOLO that covers all bases, pen, crit and sustain.
Abilities are more important. Take reference here, too:
https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=452592

anima1122 wrote: »

Now I've heard multiple people telling me to drop Iceheart, I'll give it a try and will farm Mighty Chudan, Zaan, Ilambris, Selene, other people told me Slimecraw is good as well for DMG, what you thinkin?

This is maybe a stupid question, but isn't deadly strike an exclusive medium set?
I legit can't find any light pieces, because here I read, I should use more light armor instead of medium, but that would mean, giving deadly strike up?

You can do 3 Deadly jewelry and wear 2 pieces of medium armor. Technically you could do Deadly weapons front bar and avoid any medium armor, but IMO Deadly on front bar is a bad idea since you want it to buff all your DoTs while on back bar.

If you’d prefer to keep your 5 medium Deadly there is nothing wrong with that either. It will perform better in group content when a tank removes most of the enemy’s armor. Just make sure you have at least 1-2 pieces of light armor wherever you can fit them.

El_Borracho wrote: »

@anima1122 Deadly is a medium set, but as @WrathOfInnos said, weapons and jewelry work to make up the 5 pieces. I will disagree with what he said about Deadly on the front bar. Most Magplars use Blazing Spear and Radiant Oppression as the primary sources of damage on their front bar, along with Meteor, and all 3 are buffed by Deadly. With that said, you could double bar it with 3 jewelry and 2 medium armor pieces especially if you plan on running a VMA Inferno on the back bar.

If you front bar Deadly, then your Blazing Spear and Meteor ticks will drop 15% while you are on the back bar, along with Deadly Cloak, Barbed Trap, Solar Barrage, Ritual of Retribution, Endless Hail, Blockade, and/or Poison Injection. DoT ticks are all you have while on back bar, there’s no reason to give up all that damage when you could use one of the many good single bar sets on front bar and keep Deadly on both bars. This is assuming an arena weapon is being used back bar, otherwise it is fine to keep both 5-piece sets active on both bars.

anima1122 wrote: »

Now I've heard multiple people telling me to drop Iceheart, I'll give it a try and will farm Mighty Chudan, Zaan, Ilambris, Selene, other people told me Slimecraw is good as well for DMG, what you thinkin?

I'm afraid you're going to get different opinions and different quality of advice in the forums. The only solution I see is that you study the ESO buff system and build-crafting yourself, that you test on target dummies (get Combat Metrics addon on PC), then make up your own mind. For example it's painful to see Chudan recommended without there being a mention that Chudan's buff is already covered by Channeled (or Restoring) Focus, a skill you may very well already be running as a solo player for the sustain, or that the buff would already be covered by Oakensoul, if you were wearing that. In other words a full 2-piece Chudan is worthless in those cases. The extra health alone is not worth it from a monster set. Coming from a PvP background, my recommendation is to run Channeled Focus and not wear Chudan, because almost every (solo) PvPer runs their class armor skill on a two bar build, it's that much of a no brainer. I find that harder solo PvE content bears a passing resemblence to solo PvP in that you are responsible for your own sustain and you may choose to build for a "balanced" level of tankiness. Chudan, however, is IMO not the way to accomplish that.

A friend of an in-game friend, also a magplar, is pretty much in the same boat as you. He has been dithering between different armor and monster set options. I have 8 years of continuous play time of ESO under my belt, much of it spent in PvP, but the past two years more and more in veteran PvE, e.g. veteran arenas, dungeons, and trials. I'm not at the level that I've done (or want to do) every hard mode, but I've completed veteran Blackrose Prison (known for it's difficulty) and all but one vet trial, including mechanic-heavy ones, such as Cloudrest and Dreadsail Reef, both as a DD and as a tank. I have farmed all of the stickerbook, except I'm still working on completing perfected trial sets. Basically, however, this means I can reconstruct every set item at a cost of 25 transmutes, try it, and get those 25 transmutes back out if it doesn't work.

That said, let me assure you that armor sets in this game are almost nothing but a big distraction. They are fun to play around with, but on the whole the game is balanced well enough. Competitive players like to establish a meta based on razor-thin margins. Nothing among the ideas typically bandied about in a thread like this is far off from one another. Everything is decent, everything is somewhat meta, nothing is likely to be outright bad or it wouldn't be mentioned at all.

This does not absolve you from making a "proper" build. As a DD, solo or not, you generally want the Thief mundus, you want Divines body pieces, you want Bloodthirsty jewelry, you wand a Precise or maybe Sharpened front bar weapon in gold quality, and an Infused back bar one. You need to lay down a ground AOE back bar weapon skill, such as Unstable Wall, and you should have a weapon / spell damage aka "berserker" enchant on the Infused back bar weapon. And so on. All these common and widely known (to experienced players) build ideas add up.

Consider, for the sake of the argument, Infused jewelry alone. As a rule of thumb Bloodthirsty is considered the better trait, but for the sake of the argument consider that 3x gold Infused jewelry pieces combine to give you 834 weapon and spell damage. That's not from any set, that is from having access to crafting or the transmute system and making Infused (or Bloodthirsty) jewelry and using the right enchants. Now compare this to the 5-piece bonus of a baseline set, such as Julianos, which gets an "honorable mention" as a meta set to this day. 300 weapon and spell damage. See the problem there? How about an actual meta set, Coral Riptide. That set's 5-piece bonus gives you up to 740 weapon and spell damage with a difficult to maintain proc condition. Still less than 834. The game is balanced in more ways than one. Armor sets are only one piece of the puzzle; their 5-piece doesn't even do as much as your jewelry enchants.

As a 12-person group DD, all out damage is very relevant, because healers heal you, they provide you with sustain synergies, and tanks take all the aggro so your blocking and dodge rolling is kept to a minimum. That means trial DDs typically arm themselves to the teeth at the expense of tankiness, healing, and sustain. Wearing the absolute best DD sets is relevant to them. It's a very min-max approach. Now let's take a complete 180 to the beginner, overland quester. Well that player doesn't need to care about anything, because overland mobs wilt when you so much as sneeze. However I assume that's not what you are. You say you are a solo player, I assume doing ever more difficult content. Well, depending on your skill and experience, you're going to need a little bit of everything. Damage. Sustain. Tankiness. Healing. Suddenly the game opens up and gives you a bewildering amount of options. Here's a secret: There's no single right way to build at this level. There's more than one way to skin a cat, while yielding much the same result. It's impossible to recommend, let's say, Zaan + Deadly Strike + Order's Wrath to you. Those are all damage sets. At the very least you will need sustain, because in harder content you'll want to spam Puncturing Sweeps to do damage and to heal. You won't have time for heavy attacks. So let's say you wear those sets. Are you a Breton - a sustain race. Are you using sustain food, let's say Ghastly Eye Bowl without feeling too squishy. Well OK, that might work, but as soon as you move from the Thief to the Atronach mundus or you put a sustain enchant on your jewelry, all that set advice, the one that told you to wear Zaan + Deadly Strike + Order's Wrath, is for nought. Your mundus and your jewelry enchants have an equally large influence on your damage as your sets, if not larger. Instead of touching them, you should consider whether there isn't an armor set that gives you the right proportions of sustain and tankiness you're looking for. At least if you're min-maxing, it's noteworthy that some sustain and shielding sets provide better overall value than DD sets, e.g. if sustain and shielding, or another form of tankiness, is what you're looking for.

There is one valuable thing as a DD you can't get as easily as other things, and that is crit %. You can't get it from food. You can't get it from your race. You can't get it from CP. Any set you look at, as a DD, you want to provide crit %. You find a set that has, let's say, a juicy 5-piece bonus of 500 unconditional weapon and spell damage, but has health / magicka / stamina as the 2/3/4 piece bonus. Well that's just the worst. You want to see crit %, followed by weapon / spell damage on the 2/3/4 piece bonus of your sets. Then, as discussed, the 5-piece, while it is what the set is about, is barely as powerful as your mundus stone or your jewelry enchants, if that. Always bear that in mind.

In short, you're looking for sets that don't have waste. Overwhelming Surge is a hybrid damage and sustain set these days. Hexos Ward is a hybrid damage and defense set, since it has the right 2/3/4 bonuses. I recommend those sets, because they're easily obtainable and they fill in just enough sustain and tankiness, while also providing damage.

With all of that said, the elephant in the room is your experience and your rotation. If you feel you're struggling to survive, you're forced into defense, or you're not doing enough damage, that comes from lack of experience, from lack of knowledge of game mechanics (of the particular dungeon / content you are playing), from not using the right combination of skills, or from not executing a rotation with your skills well enough. It can come from not being used to the game's 1 second skill timing, from bad weaving, from bad ping, from bar-swapping issues, from bashing with the two mouse buttons rather than assigning bash/interrupt to a separate key. Skill and experience makes the biggest difference of all. You can parse 20K on the trial dummy with a bad / non-existent rotation or you can parse ~120K as a top player with the same build. Maybe not as a templar or (sorc) heavy attack build or Arcanist. With those and full CP and meta gear, you should get at least ~60K from a minimal rotation (spamming Sweeps).

That said, let's move on to a concrete example, veteran Maelstrom arena. Maelstrom is interesting, because the best players complete it in maybe 20 to 25 minutes. It usually takes me at least 45, yet it feels as though I'm mowing everything down as fast as I can and everything is nice and "melty". The difference, I believe, comes from knowing the content so well, the top scorers lay down ground AOE between mob spawns, using what is otherwise downtime, they switch armor sets for boss fights, they cut out entire fight phases in some cases. This isn't just about their parse dummy rotation. It's about adopting the optimal strategy for each individual fight and it makes a huge difference. This is what I mean by "experience". Would you want that as a beginning player? God, no. Studying these approaches to the game would be entirely too much like work. However bear in mind, when you see someone completely steamrolling content, this is what they're doing. Strategy plays a huge part. Strategy and skill rotation, and only then buildcrafting and armor sets. The latter only occupy the bottom rung of what this game has to offer. ESO is, in (DLC) veteran content, a much more skill-based game than, perhaps, given credit for. In other words it's best to stop fretting about sets unless you also spend time on a parse dummy, if not in content, and develop your rotation and set choices together.

As I've mentioned, a friend of a friend has been asking for advice on his magplar. I recommended Iceheart + Overwhelming Surge + Hexos Ward. I then went to test that setup in vMA, because this friend was underwhelmed by his results. Please find a link to the resulting video below. Take it as a reference point as to what to expect from a CP800 build with easily obtainable, slightly tanky / sustainy gear. If you do the same damage, but have a hankering for more, great. Maybe switch to Zaan, farm Whorl of Depths, or whatever. However, if you don't, then I would recommend you work on your skill rotation and game mechanics, because more likely that's what's holding you back.

Now before we get to the video, here's my opinion on the above-mentioned monster sets for what it's worth:

Iceheart - it does a shield, it deals damage, it has the all-important 1-piece crit bonus. In my last parse it was neck and neck with Nerieneth, if not slightly better.

Nerieneth - works well on templar, easy to use.

Selene - was slightly better than Nerieneth in a dummy test I ran some time ago. However look at the proc condition. Martial melee attacks. You might think that includes Sweeps, but to the best of my recollection it does not. In other words, you need to run dual-wield and rely on the light attacks hitting the target. It won't proc while you're beaming. It won't proc if you are badly positioned, because Sweeps as a slightly longer range than your dual-wield light attacks. This is why I don't play dual-wield on magplar. The fact that Sweeps (8m range) can hit the target, but your dual-wield light attacks (7m range) may not, is deceptive. This is why I prefer lightning staff. A lightning staff's heavy attacks are also easier to land and restore magicka with than the heavy attacks from the meta vMA fire staff you'll eventually have, one day, on the other bar.

Zaan - more damage than Selene, but only 2K more in about an 85K parse.

Chudan - that's a "no" from me, as discussed.

Ilambris - I am not up to date on this set. It was meta a long time ago. The last I heard Skinny Cheeks talk about this - a YouTuber I trust on these matters - it's not very good these days. It's a very small stationary AOE that has a somewhat prolonged duration. Not ideal considering the damage it does is apparently not that high.

Slimecraw - Is meta when you want a 1-piece (monster) set that gives crit, due to offering a slightly higher (3.5% vs 3%) bonus over every other set of it's kind. As a 2-piece set it is doubtful, certainly when you put Camouflaged Hunter on your front bar anyway, which will proc the Minor Berserk from time to time anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QWFNzazpD0