Dragon knight - Leveling spec for a guy returning from launch. Help needed

swoop.romerb16_ESO

Hey, ive just decided to give ESO another go. I played the first month of release and as most know, that was a bit flawed. I have this NB vr 4

Anyways. Id like to try out Dragon knight. I have no idea what to go for and what sucks. Id like to be some kind of sword and board heavy armor tank, but how good is that for solo content and leveling?

Ive been reading that pyromancer DK is the way to go for levelingen, but how is that "executed" properly? Destro staff + full light armor? But what perks to pick, abilities?

I saw this guys T3 (what is that?) build, and he describes how he would lvl in the bottom of the guide, but i dont know how exactly to execute.

http://deltiasgaming.com/2014/11/06/eso-dragonknight-tank-build-t3-reborn/


Care to help a returning newb ? Thx a lot in advance

PhatGrimReaper

First and foremost... Great Class Choice... DKs rock!!!!!

In my opinion your best bet is mixed armor... I levelled my DK with 5 heavy(make sure that Head, chest and legs are all part of the heavy pieces) & 2 light armor.
The heavy gives you the tankyness and the light helps with magicka management(even a DK Tank chews through the magic).
I would start out with sword & shield and then take Destro when you hit level 15.

S&S is a good base weapon for a DK with lots of synergy through your class passives.... DKs are born survivors!
Firestaff as your offhand is a great choice, one again there are a ton of great synegies in the DK passives for fire damage and Standard of Might goes great with fire DPS.

There are a couple of 'Must Haves' for a Tank DK(Class Skills)....
#1 - Green Dragon Blood - Dragconic... Self heal
#2 - Extended Chain - Ardent Flame... Crowd Control/Gap closer
#3 - Talons - Dragconic... Uber Crowd Control
#4 - Magma Shell(ult) - Earthen Heart... 'God Mode'... I have never been killed while this ult is active!

Class skills for DPS should include...
from the Ardent Flame line...
Engulfing Flames
Unstable Flames
Standard of Might(ult)
And from the Earthen Heart tree... Cinder Storm.

All that being said, you need to make choices based what role you want to play at end game, what part of the game you are going to spend most of your time in(PVE or PVP) and what you enjoy... what feels right.

Good Luck with the new toon!

If you spend any time in-game during the evening NZ time hit me up @PhatGrimReaper‌ - AD

swoop.romerb16_ESO

I want to play with sword and board, tank at endgame in PvE. I dont like cyrodil PvP.

But i dont want to be all tanky and no damage while leveling. If i need to play light armor/destro staff up till lvl 50 then i gotta do that.

How about what he says in the link up top? He says resto staff till lvl 15 (where iam supposed to get Green dragon blood) after that go with 2 light armor, 5 heavy armor sword+board after that. How would that work?

PhatGrimReaper

I've never done it that way, but Deltia is the man, so I'm inclined to trust it.

As for being too tanky, don't sweat it... there is a lot of damage in the DK skill lines....
https://youtube.com/watch?v=m9WJhQ7lnuo
This is another of his.
It's way past the leveling stage, but it will give you an idea of what to aim for to get good damage.

Lynx7386

I've been levelling my DK with 7 heavy armor and 1h/shield, and doing fine with it. Even able to solo most world bosses.

It helps if you have another character that can craft gear sets, though. I run seducer/magnus set bonuses on my dragonknight for extra magicka cost reductions and regeneration, and I split points evenly between magicka and health when levelling up.

swoop.romerb16_ESO

PhatGrimReaper it says it cant find your account when i try to add you?

So ive upgraded my dot to Burning Embers, do i have to cast it on each mob or is it an aoe dot?

Also what addon is good so i can see my buffs and the debuffs i apply in seconds?

PhatGrimReaper

I use Foundry Tactical Combat to track Buffs/debuffs

Zulchaka

thought i would bump this have not played since launch looking for a PVE build that is a bit tanky but mostly a fire magic character with emphasis on AOE

Anoteros

Zulchaka wrote: »

thought i would bump this have not played since launch looking for a PVE build that is a bit tanky but mostly a fire magic character with emphasis on AOE

look up Deltia on youtube.

xMovingTarget

Look for xMovingTarget on youtube.. Or check my sig. Better magicka dps builds for dk.. Deltia isnt always the number 1 person to check stuff.

Cogo

If you need help to level in ESO...you need...help.

A growing number of players are trying their "#¤"#"# best to NOT level too fast.

Sharee

Personal experience leveling from level 1 to vr5(atm): An Orc DK built around maxed health and high health regeneration, in full heavy armor and using a 2H sword is able to solo virtually anything. He regenerates health faster than mobs can damage him. If you bring this to perfection through health regen set bonuses and enchants, you will be able to solo group dungeons. Damage is also very good(wrecking blow) and resource management is a breeze (just alternate a heavy attack with wrecking blow).

The only downside is that doing this will make regular PvE downright boring for you after a while(there is zero challenge).

Jules

I always preferred destro/magicka based DK. even in leveling it's pretty strong. I'd wear 5 light, 1 medium 1 heavy, or some other mix of the three so they all level. Level up destro, s&s, and 2h. Maybe even DW. Dk's can be good with any/all of these in end game/pvp.

Couple of key things to pick up:
Talons(best crowd control in lower levels)
Searing Strike- morph to burning embers for magicka, unstable flame for stamina, strong dot
Molten whip strong spammable
Impulse - takes a bit, unlocked at level 38 on destro but this will plow through trash.
Weakness to elements will return mana to you, morph to elemental drain
Force shock strong spammable for ranges attacks. Morph to force pulse
Green dragons blood/coagulating blood strong self heal, unlock when possible

I chose dunmer, very strong. If you're sure you want a tanky feel but want to be still an ideal race, choose imperial. Imperials can do anything well. Not best race for specific things, but they are flexible enough due to their 12% increases to health and stam. Also they have some heal that can proc (I think).

Hope some of this helps!


Edit, spelling

Lithium Flower

Leveling 1-50 and even beyond, your foremost goal should be to level up ALL class, weapon, armour, guild skill lines and abilities at least up to the point where they can be morphed (I personally go further and level up both class morphs as well). Abilities and the associated skill lines level up when they are placed in your action bar slots. So to level up, say Searing Strike and the Ardent Flame skill line, place Searing Strike on your ability bar and gain XP. The more abilities on your bar from Ardent Flame skill line, the faster the skill line will progress.

Magicka has more utility as well as self-healing so I would dump every skill point into magicka while leveling - this will increase your magicka pool as well as your ability damage. If you want to go the stamina route, dump everything into stamina.

Wear a mixture of armour pieces to level up all three armour lines - heavy, light and medium. If you have access to a crafter, get training on most armour pieces (at least 1 on each type) and one or two pieces of exploration to maximize leveling XP. Get training weapons (one of each kind at least). Wear at least 4 or 5 pieces of light for magicka or medium for stamina and one or two pieces of the others.

Now while questing or grinding mobs, you want 1 ability that you can spam easily to kill things, for DKs, it's molten whip but that requires a fair amount of progress in the ardent flame line - you could get Destructive Touch from the Destructive Staff line and with an inferno staff, it is a good gap-maker as well. Cleave, Twin Strikes, Poison Arrow, etc are other options. Searing Strike or Burning breath as useful DoTs that will increase your damage. You also want to have something like Razor Armour or Dragon Blood so keep yourself alive longer (especially with a low health pool). You may want Crowd Control - so Talons.

So at any given time, out of a possible 12 (after you unlock weapon swap at level 15) abilities slotted, you will have 3-4 abilities that you need to clear content and the rest are there to level up and increase your skills.

Always slot 1 ability from each of your class skill lines on each bar. Use your weapon slot to level up weapon skill lines (fun fact: you don't have to use 2H to level it if you like using class skills to kill mobs instead, just having it slotted is enough to level the skill). You can level up Sword and Shield this way since that skill line has no real offensive abilities.

On your off-bar, you can place more abilities you don't find that useful in a leveling up/solo situation, flip to that bar when you go to turn in quests to give those abilities/weapon skills a chunk of xp at quest completion. You can also split up your main use skills between bars, so that while you're fighting, the XP you gain splits across more skill lines and abilities. (If you're using 4 class skills to make progress, put 2 on one bar, 2 on another so 3 slots on each bar are filled with abilities you're not using much, just leveling up). Put one useful ultimate on your main bar, which will be Dragonknight Standard - use the ultimate slot in your off-bar for leveling up other, more situational ultimates.

Passives - For the most part, I would advise NOT to put any skill points in passives WHILE LEVELING. You don't need the buffs, because while they are incredibly useful and essential for end-game, the leveling content is so easy you don't need those benefits yet. The skill points you save can go into opening up more weapon, armour and guild skill lines and abilities to level up.

Some passives however are useful to have from the get-go - these include your racial passives, get them as soon as you are able and armour passives, especially light or medium depending on whether you're going stamina or magicka as your leveling 'build'. Choose one, and ignore the passives from the other. You don't need heavy armour passives for leveling.

Skill points are hard to come by in the beginning, but by the end of Cadwell's you'll be drowning in them. Get the skyshard addon to grab all the shards in every zone to get more skill points.

Don't worry about 'builds', 'rotations' and trinity 'roles' until you're close to veteran rank 10 - until you join group dungeons, none of those matter. Learn the way your skills work and combat mobility and movement. Dodge roll, block, interrupt, stuns - those are indispensable later.

Crafting - If you plan to be a crafter, invest no points in crafting skills at first - but deconstruct all green loot you find, sell the whites and replace your armour with blues and purples you find. If you have a friend or guildmate making you crafted leveling armour, maybe you can pay them with purples and blues you find. They yield useful material to an end-game crafter who deconstructs them but have very little vendor or trade value. What you should focus on if crafting is going to be your thing, is trait research.

In order to craft useful sets like Seducer's, Hunding's Rage, Way of the Arena, Hist Bark that you will need at end-game, you need a certain number of traits learned for every piece you plan to construct in that armour set. This research takes place in real time and gets exponentially harder the more traits you learn. Your first trait takes 6 hours to learn, the next 12 and so forth for up to 2 months for the last one. Trait research is useful because you need to have learned a certain number of traits to make useful sets. For example, most end-game tanks these days use the crafted Hist Bark set. If you wear 2, 3, 4 or 5 pieces of a set armour, you get certain set benefits - for 5 pieces of Hist Bark, you get 18% chance to avoid an enemy attack and incoming damage from that attack. So at end-game you'll want to wear 5 pieces of this set and combine it with some combination of items from another set for added bonuses. For flexibility, you want to be able to make a variety of pieces. If you want to make a Hist Bark sword - you need to know at least 4 sword traits (e.g, precise, sharpened, defending, infused). Then if you want to make a Hist Bark cuirass and a shield, you will need to know at least 4 traits on those items. In addition, you want to know the most useful traits so you can craft the most optimum equipment piece. A crafter would also want to be able to make a useful set in a variety of armour types and also armour styles which you will learn from blue, purple or gold motif books and pages.

Provisioning - learn recipes you find and make food for yourself to level up the skill and to enjoy the benefits of food, including the self-bonus passives. Level 1 and level 5 recipes are vendor trash, learn them if you must or don't. The food you want to be using is level 15+. Level 15 green recipes can be sold to other players or in guild store and can earn you much more money than the 10g if you vendor them. Level 15 blue recipes or better you want to learn yourself and craft food to give yourself 2 or more useful buffs. Drink recipes are less useful and less valuable, vendor most of them except maybe blues and epics. Or learn them if you want to be a completionist. You'll have to invest skill points here to remain useful and to continue leveling.

Alchemy - You want to level up this skill for the self bonus passives like provisioning regardless of whether you want to be a crafter. The key here is you want to level up your alchemy WITHOUT using up your most valuable potion mats at the beginning of the game. For your own use, mobs will drop a ton of single buff potions that should easily see you through most content all the way until the hardest dungeons and trials at end-game. The valuable flowers/herbs you want to SAVE (or to sell in guildstores/to other players for 100-150g/piece) for end game are listed below:

Mountain Flower, Columbine, Bugloss, Lady's Smock, Corn Flower, Namira's Rot - don't use these for anything except veteran 5 potions (the highest level you can make) or to sell to players through chat or guild stores.

For leveling, gather up Emetic Russula, Imp Stool, Stinkhorn, Violet Coprinus, Whitecap, Luminous Russula and Nirnroot to make ravage health and magicka potions to vendor until you are level 50 in Alchemy.

Enchanting - this is quite a pain to level up but you want to deconstruct all the glyphs you find in loot. Use some of the glyphs to enchant your crafted training gear if you like. Don't bother if you're using pre-enchanted drops. Deconstruct all. If you plan to be a crafter someday, save up the runes - if not, put them in your guild's bank for other piece or sell them. You can construct glyphs to level up your crafting and then give them to another player to deconstruct for a inspiration (crafting XP) boost.

Exchanging crafted gear with another player and deconstructing each other's creations is a very efficient way to level up those skills. You don't get a lot of experience deconstructing self-crafted gear but a HUGE amount for experience by deconstructing someone else's. Works for armour/weapon crafting as well. You cannot deconstruct food and potions.

There are two schools of thought about Crafters. Some people like to have their crafting on their main character(s), some split them between various alts that are also combat oriented. I don't like doing this at all because I don't want to waste the precious few skill points you have leveling up into crafting skills. Conceptually, I also hate the idea of one character being able to master everything, from tailoring to tanking Sanctum Ophidia! So I have one dedicated crafter who has learned all the craft skills and is my Quarter Master but has a bare minimum of combat skills (5+1 ultimate, no passives). I needed about 100-120 skill points for all 6 professions. You also need a minimum of level veteran 1 and the Fighter's Guild and Mages Guild quest lines completed to access all crafting stations (required for the various sets). You could also level a character quickly from 1-50 and then respect his skill points into crafting.

There are about 270 skill points you can have after having completed Cadwell's. This is sufficient for all class skills, a couple of weapon skill lines and guild lines in addition to several crafting professions if you want to do everything on one main character.

Jules

Lithium Flower wrote: »

Leveling 1-50 and even beyond, your foremost goal should be to level up ALL class, weapon, armour, guild skill lines and abilities at least up to the point where they can be morphed (I personally go further and level up both class morphs as well). Abilities and the associated skill lines level up when they are placed in your action bar slots. So to level up, say Searing Strike and the Ardent Flame skill line, place Searing Strike on your ability bar and gain XP. The more abilities on your bar from Ardent Flame skill line, the faster the skill line will progress.

Magicka has more utility as well as self-healing so I would dump every skill point into magicka while leveling - this will increase your magicka pool as well as your ability damage. If you want to go the stamina route, dump everything into stamina.

Wear a mixture of armour pieces to level up all three armour lines - heavy, light and medium. If you have access to a crafter, get training on most armour pieces (at least 1 on each type) and one or two pieces of exploration to maximize leveling XP. Get training weapons (one of each kind at least). Wear at least 4 or 5 pieces of light for magicka or medium for stamina and one or two pieces of the others.

Now while questing or grinding mobs, you want 1 ability that you can spam easily to kill things, for DKs, it's molten whip but that requires a fair amount of progress in the ardent flame line - you could get Destructive Touch from the Destructive Staff line and with an inferno staff, it is a good gap-maker as well. Cleave, Twin Strikes, Poison Arrow, etc are other options. Searing Strike or Burning breath as useful DoTs that will increase your damage. You also want to have something like Razor Armour or Dragon Blood so keep yourself alive longer (especially with a low health pool). You may want Crowd Control - so Talons.

So at any given time, out of a possible 12 (after you unlock weapon swap at level 15) abilities slotted, you will have 3-4 abilities that you need to clear content and the rest are there to level up and increase your skills.

Always slot 1 ability from each of your class skill lines on each bar. Use your weapon slot to level up weapon skill lines (fun fact: you don't have to use 2H to level it if you like using class skills to kill mobs instead, just having it slotted is enough to level the skill). You can level up Sword and Shield this way since that skill line has no real offensive abilities.

On your off-bar, you can place more abilities you don't find that useful in a leveling up/solo situation, flip to that bar when you go to turn in quests to give those abilities/weapon skills a chunk of xp at quest completion. You can also split up your main use skills between bars, so that while you're fighting, the XP you gain splits across more skill lines and abilities. (If you're using 4 class skills to make progress, put 2 on one bar, 2 on another so 3 slots on each bar are filled with abilities you're not using much, just leveling up). Put one useful ultimate on your main bar, which will be Dragonknight Standard - use the ultimate slot in your off-bar for leveling up other, more situational ultimates.

Passives - For the most part, I would advise NOT to put any skill points in passives WHILE LEVELING. You don't need the buffs, because while they are incredibly useful and essential for end-game, the leveling content is so easy you don't need those benefits yet. The skill points you save can go into opening up more weapon, armour and guild skill lines and abilities to level up.

Some passives however are useful to have from the get-go - these include your racial passives, get them as soon as you are able and armour passives, especially light or medium depending on whether you're going stamina or magicka as your leveling 'build'. Choose one, and ignore the passives from the other. You don't need heavy armour passives for leveling.

Skill points are hard to come by in the beginning, but by the end of Cadwell's you'll be drowning in them. Get the skyshard addon to grab all the shards in every zone to get more skill points.

Don't worry about 'builds', 'rotations' and trinity 'roles' until you're close to veteran rank 10 - until you join group dungeons, none of those matter. Learn the way your skills work and combat mobility and movement. Dodge roll, block, interrupt, stuns - those are indispensable later.

Crafting - If you plan to be a crafter, invest no points in crafting skills at first - but deconstruct all green loot you find, sell the whites and replace your armour with blues and purples you find. If you have a friend or guildmate making you crafted leveling armour, maybe you can pay them with purples and blues you find. They yield useful material to an end-game crafter who deconstructs them but have very little vendor or trade value. What you should focus on if crafting is going to be your thing, is trait research.

In order to craft useful sets like Seducer's, Hunding's Rage, Way of the Arena, Hist Bark that you will need at end-game, you need a certain number of traits learned for every piece you plan to construct in that armour set. This research takes place in real time and gets exponentially harder the more traits you learn. Your first trait takes 6 hours to learn, the next 12 and so forth for up to 2 months for the last one. Trait research is useful because you need to have learned a certain number of traits to make useful sets. For example, most end-game tanks these days use the crafted Hist Bark set. If you wear 2, 3, 4 or 5 pieces of a set armour, you get certain set benefits - for 5 pieces of Hist Bark, you get 18% chance to avoid an enemy attack and incoming damage from that attack. So at end-game you'll want to wear 5 pieces of this set and combine it with some combination of items from another set for added bonuses. For flexibility, you want to be able to make a variety of pieces. If you want to make a Hist Bark sword - you need to know at least 4 sword traits (e.g, precise, sharpened, defending, infused). Then if you want to make a Hist Bark cuirass and a shield, you will need to know at least 4 traits on those items. In addition, you want to know the most useful traits so you can craft the most optimum equipment piece. A crafter would also want to be able to make a useful set in a variety of armour types and also armour styles which you will learn from blue, purple or gold motif books and pages.

Provisioning - learn recipes you find and make food for yourself to level up the skill and to enjoy the benefits of food, including the self-bonus passives. Level 1 and level 5 recipes are vendor trash, learn them if you must or don't. The food you want to be using is level 15+. Level 15 green recipes can be sold to other players or in guild store and can earn you much more money than the 10g if you vendor them. Level 15 blue recipes or better you want to learn yourself and craft food to give yourself 2 or more useful buffs. Drink recipes are less useful and less valuable, vendor most of them except maybe blues and epics. Or learn them if you want to be a completionist. You'll have to invest skill points here to remain useful and to continue leveling.

Alchemy - You want to level up this skill for the self bonus passives like provisioning regardless of whether you want to be a crafter. The key here is you want to level up your alchemy WITHOUT using up your most valuable potion mats at the beginning of the game. For your own use, mobs will drop a ton of single buff potions that should easily see you through most content all the way until the hardest dungeons and trials at end-game. The valuable flowers/herbs you want to SAVE (or to sell in guildstores/to other players for 100-150g/piece) for end game are listed below:

Mountain Flower, Columbine, Bugloss, Lady's Smock, Corn Flower, Namira's Rot - don't use these for anything except veteran 5 potions (the highest level you can make) or to sell to players through chat or guild stores.

For leveling, gather up Emetic Russula, Imp Stool, Stinkhorn, Violet Coprinus, Whitecap, Luminous Russula and Nirnroot to make ravage health and magicka potions to vendor until you are level 50 in Alchemy.

Enchanting - this is quite a pain to level up but you want to deconstruct all the glyphs you find in loot. Use some of the glyphs to enchant your crafted training gear if you like. Don't bother if you're using pre-enchanted drops. Deconstruct all. If you plan to be a crafter someday, save up the runes - if not, put them in your guild's bank for other piece or sell them. You can construct glyphs to level up your crafting and then give them to another player to deconstruct for a inspiration (crafting XP) boost.

Exchanging crafted gear with another player and deconstructing each other's creations is a very efficient way to level up those skills. You don't get a lot of experience deconstructing self-crafted gear but a HUGE amount for experience by deconstructing someone else's. Works for armour/weapon crafting as well. You cannot deconstruct food and potions.

There are two schools of thought about Crafters. Some people like to have their crafting on their main character(s), some split them between various alts that are also combat oriented. I don't like doing this at all because I don't want to waste the precious few skill points you have leveling up into crafting skills. Conceptually, I also hate the idea of one character being able to master everything, from tailoring to tanking Sanctum Ophidia! So I have one dedicated crafter who has learned all the craft skills and is my Quarter Master but has a bare minimum of combat skills (5+1 ultimate, no passives). I needed about 100-120 skill points for all 6 professions. You also need a minimum of level veteran 1 and the Fighter's Guild and Mages Guild quest lines completed to access all crafting stations (required for the various sets). You could also level a character quickly from 1-50 and then respect his skill points into crafting.

There are about 270 skill points you can have after having completed Cadwell's. This is sufficient for all class skills, a couple of weapon skill lines and guild lines in addition to several crafting professions if you want to do everything on one main character.

That was so incredibly thorough. I feel like you should make this a post of its own for other newbies.

james.resnerb14_ESO

Lithium Flower wrote: »

Passives - For the most part, I would advise NOT to put any skill points in passives WHILE LEVELING. You don't need the buffs, because while they are incredibly useful and essential for end-game, the leveling content is so easy you don't need those benefits yet. The skill points you save can go into opening up more weapon, armour and guild skill lines and abilities to level up.

Some passives however are useful to have from the get-go - these include your racial passives, get them as soon as you are able and armour passives, especially light or medium depending on whether you're going stamina or magicka as your leveling 'build'. Choose one, and ignore the passives from the other. You don't need heavy armour passives for leveling.

I don't understand this completely..

Just hit Level 12 and with one action bar there's only so many abilities I can use. Is there a benefit to unlocking skills if you're not going to use them?