Maintenance for the week of December 22:
• NA megaservers for maintenance – December 22, 4:00AM EST (9:00 UTC) - 8:00AM EST (13:00 UTC)
• EU megaservers for maintenance – December 22, 4:00AM EST (9:00 UTC) - 8:00AM EST (13:00 UTC)
• NA megaservers for maintenance – December 22, 4:00AM EST (9:00 UTC) - 8:00AM EST (13:00 UTC)
• EU megaservers for maintenance – December 22, 4:00AM EST (9:00 UTC) - 8:00AM EST (13:00 UTC)
My 1 hand and shield / dual wield dragonknight
Stranglehands
✭✭✭✭
The Dragonblade
I was wondering what people thought of this kind of unorthodox DK build. For quite a while I thought it was basically doomed to be a pve-only build, but I recently figured out how to make him really vicious in pvp as well (based around shield charge and buff/debuff tactics). It's generally a quite solo-ish "survivable DPS" build.
The gear is 5 medium armour and 2 heavy armour, 3 swords and one shield, with 5x hunding's rage and 4x ashen grip (because I haven't researched anything better than that yet). He's currently veteran rank 6. Unbuffed stats are: 18k stamina, 15k health, 9k magicka, weapon damage 1896, weapon crit 44%, spell resistance 14k and armour 12k. Mundus stone is the warrior.
Skill bars:
Dual wield:
- Rapid strikes - this is mainly for killing mobs that have a lot of health. It doesn't do that much more damage than just using heavy attacks - I might try swapping it for unstable flame
- Flying blade - two things: a pretty powerful ranged attack that gets more powerful if the enemy has low health due to the dual wield passive (so I use it like an execute a lot), and a 20% weapon damage buff, which I keep up at all times.
- Green dragon blood - bit of a desperation move if I need a self-heal. I'll most likely replace this with vigour when I unlock it.
- Steel tornado - mass murder skill par excellence and good for flushing nightblades out of hiding.
- Dragon fire scale - for dealing with anyone silly enough to point a staff at me
- Ferocious leap - this is a decent opener but I actually use it an awful lot in mid-battle (it has no minimum range), and it's really good for turning the tables on people. You get a stun, a nice wudge of damage, a damage shield, and it triggers the earthen heart battle roar passive which restores health, stamina and magicka, which means i will definitely be able to cast whatever shield or heal i want straight afterwards.
Note that the dual wield passives increase both physical damage and overall damage while this bar is active, so flying blade used as an execute can hit really hard sometimes (I haven't measured how much exactly).
Sword and shield:
- Pierce armour - I get this in early and often to debuff their armour and spell resistance.
- Flame lash - This is a useful sustain move - I can use it after stunning something to set it off balance and the follow-up attack heals me and stuns them again (you have to get the timing right for the second stun to work, because of the cooldown). The damage it does scales off weapon damage or spell damage, whichever is higher, so it isn't rubbish like quite a lot of the other fire attack skills are.
- Hardened armor - This is the other candidate for being replaced with something better. I mainly use it if i want to stack armour buffs or am fighting lots of trash mobs
- Invasion - The most important thing for PVP, this lets you relentlessly run people down and stun them for a pretty long time. Brutal when used against mages because it drains all their stamina
- Immovable brute - Wonderful anti-nightblade device. It protects you from CC (as well as giving you an armour buff)
- Corrosive armour - Contining the theme of turning the tables on people, this gives you a huge shield, gives out a (rubbish) fire damage AOE, and makes your weapon attacks ignore all armour, as well as the aforementioned resource replenishing.
My usual rotation is: throw a knife to buff my damage if necessary, then swap to sword and shield and do the shield charge, pierce armour, then if they try to escape run them down again with shield charge and stab them again, otherwise swap back to dual wield and start throwing out damage with steel tornado and more flying blades. If there are a lot of enemies around I make sure immovable brute is up so they can't drain my stamina with CCs. This also lets you really throw off people's attack strategies (the other night, someone cast ice comet at me while I was doing a dolmen but I clocked him and cast immovable brute before it hit, and it completely protected me from its CC effects and i could freely go and kill him before turning back to my dolmen)
I run the build with crafted potions because it's a bit short on self-heals. Restore stamina + Restore health + Unstoppable is a particularly good combination for pvp.
The thing that's kind of missing here is I don't really have burst damage. I've got CC and buff/debuff in lieu of burst damage, which isn't quite the same. In PVE I tend to be the guy going and killing all the adds because I'm better at exterminating soft targets than pumping damage into a boss, which means I'm often all out of ideas if I find myself alone up against a tank.
That's already too many words anyway. Has anyone else got a build like this?
Edited by Stranglehands on February 9, 2016 8:07AM I was wondering what people thought of this kind of unorthodox DK build. For quite a while I thought it was basically doomed to be a pve-only build, but I recently figured out how to make him really vicious in pvp as well (based around shield charge and buff/debuff tactics). It's generally a quite solo-ish "survivable DPS" build.
The gear is 5 medium armour and 2 heavy armour, 3 swords and one shield, with 5x hunding's rage and 4x ashen grip (because I haven't researched anything better than that yet). He's currently veteran rank 6. Unbuffed stats are: 18k stamina, 15k health, 9k magicka, weapon damage 1896, weapon crit 44%, spell resistance 14k and armour 12k. Mundus stone is the warrior.
Skill bars:
Dual wield:
- Rapid strikes - this is mainly for killing mobs that have a lot of health. It doesn't do that much more damage than just using heavy attacks - I might try swapping it for unstable flame
- Flying blade - two things: a pretty powerful ranged attack that gets more powerful if the enemy has low health due to the dual wield passive (so I use it like an execute a lot), and a 20% weapon damage buff, which I keep up at all times.
- Green dragon blood - bit of a desperation move if I need a self-heal. I'll most likely replace this with vigour when I unlock it.
- Steel tornado - mass murder skill par excellence and good for flushing nightblades out of hiding.
- Dragon fire scale - for dealing with anyone silly enough to point a staff at me
- Ferocious leap - this is a decent opener but I actually use it an awful lot in mid-battle (it has no minimum range), and it's really good for turning the tables on people. You get a stun, a nice wudge of damage, a damage shield, and it triggers the earthen heart battle roar passive which restores health, stamina and magicka, which means i will definitely be able to cast whatever shield or heal i want straight afterwards.
Note that the dual wield passives increase both physical damage and overall damage while this bar is active, so flying blade used as an execute can hit really hard sometimes (I haven't measured how much exactly).
Sword and shield:
- Pierce armour - I get this in early and often to debuff their armour and spell resistance.
- Flame lash - This is a useful sustain move - I can use it after stunning something to set it off balance and the follow-up attack heals me and stuns them again (you have to get the timing right for the second stun to work, because of the cooldown). The damage it does scales off weapon damage or spell damage, whichever is higher, so it isn't rubbish like quite a lot of the other fire attack skills are.
- Hardened armor - This is the other candidate for being replaced with something better. I mainly use it if i want to stack armour buffs or am fighting lots of trash mobs
- Invasion - The most important thing for PVP, this lets you relentlessly run people down and stun them for a pretty long time. Brutal when used against mages because it drains all their stamina
- Immovable brute - Wonderful anti-nightblade device. It protects you from CC (as well as giving you an armour buff)
- Corrosive armour - Contining the theme of turning the tables on people, this gives you a huge shield, gives out a (rubbish) fire damage AOE, and makes your weapon attacks ignore all armour, as well as the aforementioned resource replenishing.
My usual rotation is: throw a knife to buff my damage if necessary, then swap to sword and shield and do the shield charge, pierce armour, then if they try to escape run them down again with shield charge and stab them again, otherwise swap back to dual wield and start throwing out damage with steel tornado and more flying blades. If there are a lot of enemies around I make sure immovable brute is up so they can't drain my stamina with CCs. This also lets you really throw off people's attack strategies (the other night, someone cast ice comet at me while I was doing a dolmen but I clocked him and cast immovable brute before it hit, and it completely protected me from its CC effects and i could freely go and kill him before turning back to my dolmen)
I run the build with crafted potions because it's a bit short on self-heals. Restore stamina + Restore health + Unstoppable is a particularly good combination for pvp.
The thing that's kind of missing here is I don't really have burst damage. I've got CC and buff/debuff in lieu of burst damage, which isn't quite the same. In PVE I tend to be the guy going and killing all the adds because I'm better at exterminating soft targets than pumping damage into a boss, which means I'm often all out of ideas if I find myself alone up against a tank.
That's already too many words anyway. Has anyone else got a build like this?
.kcoR gnillaF si noitadnuoF esohw ETIYREP oT
0
-
Xvorg✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭Some tips:
1- Change rapid strikes for camo/evil hunter in the fighter guilds tree. It will help you a lot with undead and daedra. Rapid strikes could be useful in PVP only if you pair it with a good stunner skill (stone giant for example) and you are fast enough to catch your enemy before he breaks CC (so you can root him with talons) to get the dmg bonus from 2w
2- I was curious about what you mention regarding flame lash. And I found that It does not scale off wpn dmg
http://prntscr.com/9rwrui
That guy was magicka based some weeks ago and he put around 8k (VR11) without a maxed build.
3- Hardened armor AND Inmovable brute are redundant. If you like IB, keep it, but consider that hardened armor uses magicka instead of stamina, last longer and when it is activated, you receive more healing through the burning heart passive.
Your build is not bad at all, it is just that in PVP, people uses a lot CC breakers which make your stuns pretty much useless unless you are running with the zerg ball, but if you gen an 1v1 against any decent player, you will be wiped out
give the build a second look, take out some magicka based skill, learn some mechanics (PA/ransack, bash, block, repeat) and you will do it better.Sarcasm is something too serious to be taken lightly
I was born with the wrong sign
In the wrong house
With the wrong ascendancy
I took the wrong road
That led to the wrong tendencies
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time
For the wrong reason and the wrong rhyme
On the wrong day of the wrong week
Used the wrong method with the wrong technique0 -
Stranglehands✭✭✭✭You're right, dragon armour and immovable do the same armour buff so they don't stack. I might try swapping one of them for elude or something like that.kcoR gnillaF si noitadnuoF esohw ETIYREP oT0