Nirn Ice vs Nirn Fire staves

pala_the4th

Which one is better? I like the ice staff because it freezes one enemy while you deal with the other. In pvp, the guy has to roll and such, giving him a distraction. Someone just told me everyone wants fire or restro staff because they offer the best dps with 8% bonus in the passives. What do you think?

Lucky28

personally i like frost.

1. because i just like ice in general.
2. fire is such a common element in cyrodiil (in the game) i'd wager there are a good deal of players with higher resistance to fire than frost.... granted that did hold more weight in 1.6 than now, but still.
3. and it gives me a little damage shield for a time whenever i do a fully charged heavy attack.

i just like frost staffs.

moonsbreath

I suppose it depends largely on the type of content you'll be doing. With the recent changes in destro passives, every element deals equal amount of damage, but has different effects.

If you're mainly a PVE'er, fire and ice is much easier to medium weave than a lightning staff; though if you're going to be doing a constant kena proc weave, it won't make /too/ much of a difference even though you'll still want the fully charged heavy attack opportunity from fire and ice at the beginning of a single target rotation. Lightning staff could prove an issue in that sense because the element's heavy attack is a channel.

If you are a magicka DK, fire is also going to be your element of choice because of your increased fire damage. If you're a sorc, you're definitely going to want to go lightning to increase your chances of proc'ing disintegration. Fire staff isn't the meta anymore like it used to be.

In PVP ice does seem like the more defensive answer, but the other two are also pretty good. Having a channeled heavy attack from lightning staff could prove pretty useful at keeping an enemy from going out of stealth. I tend to run mainly with a resto staff in PVP on my back bar, though -- mostly so I can have an emergency healing ward at my disposal.

RAGUNAnoOne

Ice is in a better place especially with winterborn. Also in 1v1 in PvP the root can really mess people up for raw damage and great trap synergy fire is better.

pala_the4th

I checked the passives again (I am an altmer sorcerer) and fire does 12 percent extra damage with the heavy attack and the ice gives you a 1700 damage absorbing shield.
Combined with the 10 percent attack of nirnhoned, that makes hell of a damage.
On the other hand, bastion champion point increases damage absorbing shields 5-10 percent, so thats that.
Any ideas?