The build with the most survivability I've found is(note it's not a bursty build) is dual resto staff wearing 7/7 light.

Skill Bar is Swallow Soul, Impale, Crippling Grasp, Mass Hysteria, Leeching Strikes.

Secondary bar is Dark Cloak, Concealed Weapon, Mutagen, Healing Ward, (5th can be whatever you want).

Basic is I sneak around in the Secondary bar for the sneak speed and swap to main bar to attack. I sometimes have Ambush on my Secondary bar so I open with that, swap to bar 1 and start on the enemy. Mass Hysteria is very good in solo or small group PvP and excellent on packs of 3 and cc-able world bosses.

When I'm on my main bar, I keep crappling Grasp up (use it if they try to run), alternate Swallow Soul and Light attack with Leeching Strikes toggled on. Between Mutagen, Leeching Strikes and Swallow Soul, my self HoT is usually around 250-300 per sec depending on crits and DPS is somewhere around 350-400 sans Ultimate. I'm able to take on 2v1's in some cases (did last night a few times). I'm VR7, both my enemies were VR12.

Veil of Blades and the Soul Assault are my Ults. Again, it's not a bursty build but a very nice sustain build and I'm able to 1v1 with it 85-90% of the time. I did meet a Fire wielding mage who spammed Impulse on me that I had a hard time with (being a vampire and all). Cant win them all. Hope this is helpfull.

hasselhoffman wrote: »

Dark Shades do not work like they did pre-patch. They were very useful because they held aggro and you could get behind mobs and mow them down one at a time. My bow bar I have agony, funnel health, magnum shot, piercing mark, and aspect of terror, and soul assault. My dual wield bar I have killers blade, ambush, concealed weapon, rapid strikes, dark cloak, and death stroke. Agony and aspect of terror are my new bread and butter since dark shades are broke now and don't hold aggro. I can take on a mob of 3 in VR8 Zone with VR5 gear. I'm undecided about the agony morph. The AOE sounds nice, but I normally kite the mobs around, so when it does explode the other NPCs aren't going to be near it. Personally I think the single target damage morph is a better option.

Pretty interesting, do you actually use agony? I mentioned the AoE morph as opposed to the dot because it lets you vanish while mantaining the CC on someone! Also I had taken the execute off of my dual wield bar because of the awesome execute range buffs DW gets seemed to make a specialised execute rather redundant, (I could be wrong) btw....

Just noticed one big thing... your DW bar doesn't have a siphoning ability... You know that means your not benefitting from the 8% magicka boost siphoning provides?

Also how do you find piercing mark? When I first tried mark I wasn't using ambush which meant well... I would get one shotted by mages using magelight. However last night I tried it and it was pretty awesome for the heal+sneak attack. Critting VR12 ppl for 1/2 their hp is fun xD