Introduction
I’ve always loved playing god-like roles with immense power of healing and destruction, the ability to take life as well as grant it is very appealing to play so I present my DPS Support build for The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited. This build has it all for the perfect Paladin, single target and area of effect magic attacks, burst heals and long duration support abilities.
Paladin of Stendarr - DPS Support Build
Updated for The Thieves Guild DLC
Character
This build is about an Breton knight who serves under the name of Stendarr protecting the many temples spread throughout High Rock and Hammerfell. Life was fairly peaceful and quiet till the year of 2E 582 where the Daedric prince Molag Bal initiated the Planemeld to merge the worlds of Nirn and Oblivion. While visiting the Temple of Stendarr in Chorrol, Molag Bal’s forces broke through and stole his soul, whisked away to the prisons of Coldharbour. It was time to fight back the evil forces, return to Cyrodiil to rescue the lands surrounding Chorrol and take the fight right to the heart of the Imperial City!
After defeating Molag Bal and his minions a message was delivered by a scrupulous individual who claims they need help restoring The Thieves Guild to its former glory, a long journey to Hew’s Bane was ahead.
Class
Our class of choice for this build is the Templar. The Templar is the perfect fit for the DPS Support role mainly due to the wide range of skills in dealing damage, battle aids and restoration. The Templar is the only class to be able to pull this style of build off.
Race
I won’t dive into racial choice to much as most will work with this build but if you follow Stendarr, the God of Mercy then preferably choose Breton for the magicka passives, Altmer for the spell passives or Imperial to assist with health and stamina so you don’t have to worry about them.
Attributes
Ultimately you need a minimal of 18k health for most areas but I recommend 20k health so you’re not too squishy. Once you get loads of champion points you could go everything into magicka here but try and keep close to the health requirement first. It’s best to setup everything else (including food buff) and adjust these values last once you know where you need it as they are the easiest and cheapest to move around.
Morph
The Knights of Stendarr don’t take keenly to demonic races like Vampires and Werewolf’s so ensure you get yourself a cure before embarking on their grand mission to rid the world of evil, they won’t be required in this build.
Mundus
The Mage is great for the extra magicka as is The Apprentice for the extra spell damage or The Thief for the critical damage bonus but choose based on what you think you need more in. This Paladin prefers the effects of The Thief over all others.
Food
Melon-Baked Parmesan Pork VR15 Health and Magicka is all you need for the long fight against the forces of evil but you could also use The Skald-King’s Patty Melt VR10 if you thought you needed the additional fat content in your health diet on a lower budget otherwise The Emperor’s Venison Fricassee at VR10 is quite a balanced tasty meal too that also doesn’t hurt the purse.
Potions
This build depends on the usage of potions during fights so I prefer the tri-pot Panacea of Spell Power that grants major sorcery, major prophecy, major intellect and regenerates Magicka. Preferably look out for VR15 versions otherwise the cheaper VR5 version will also suffice. This ensures you can keep up the major sorcery buff 100% of the time during combat however any potions will enable you to use this style of build.
Items
These sets are based on VR16 but most of the pieces can be crafted so its workable for lower levels and achievable for even the average/casual player which is how I prefer to write most of my guides, keeping them within reach of the majority of players. This setup is not meant to be the ultimate DPS setup (it’s close thou) but with what you are provided it does enable you to do all solo PvE content, grouped PvP content, swap roles from DPS to Healer which makes you versatile in dungeon raids and arena challenges. This build is not setup for single PvP and besides, achieving a Templar lone wolf build for PvP are things of legend.
Weapons
Our first choice for destructive damage are dual swords for a boost to our spell damage, with a choice of either precise or nirnhoned for traits on both weapons. An Restoration Staff is our second choice for the art of healing with nirnhoned for the trait and the rare prismatic onslaught or the cheaper absorb magicka being the best choice for glyph.
Armour
We are going with 5 light to get the passives and running all magicka glyphs. We’re also going with one heavy chest and one medium legs for the Undaunted passive bonus, if you don’t have the undaunted passive you can go with two heavy for the most mitigation and we’re using divines on all pieces.
Jewellery
If you have enough magicka recovery then use spell damage for glyph choices with arcane being the best choice for the trait because more magicka means more damage and healing done.
SetsKagrenac’s Hope: Crafted from deep within ‘The Earth Forge’ this magical set provides lots of buffs to your magicka, magicka recovery, health and spell damage. It also provides assistance in resurrecting your fallen knights plus with the passives Battle Resurrection and Master Ritualist you get a 50% boost to resurrection speed which is massive! The Templar also has other resurrection passives which makes them the perfect class for raising the dead.
Willpower: Only drops from Imperial City content but will provide magicka and spell damage at the VR16 rate. To be optimal ensure you hunt for these from within the Imperial City Vaults of Bone Shard & Ethereal or wait for the stupidly high prices to drop from Guild stores.
Clever Alchemist: If your ‘clever’ enough this set can be crafted from No Shira Workshop in Hew’s Bane and will provide a tasty amount of health as well as a mouth-watering amount of spell damage while chugging your favourite potions back which is how we roll in Australia.
Skills
The below skill bars are what I’ve found to be a great combination to complement each other, they help the tank roles and they help the DPS roles as well as an entire group plus they give you defensive and offensive abilities for playing solo if you choose to however there are lots of other great skills to use so adjust where you need.
If you wanted to focus mainly on DPS you would chose dual wield on both bars for maximum spell damage with skills to compliment lots of damage on both bars. The healing bar enables you to heal yourself and others against most encounters and recover resources very quickly while helping groups so you can get back in the fight quicker with your damage bar.
Damage Bar (Dual Wield)Puncturing Sweep: This is your number one damage making machine because with huge amounts of spell damage and magicka this can hit like a truck per hit, four times over 1 second… with the burning light passive and critical bonus it will destroy your opponents very quickly! That’s not all because you also restore health on every hit based on the damage you do!!
Dark Flare: Long range destruction from above which is super deadly in almost any environment. This skill works great in PvP especially when coupled with Aurora Javelin.
Radiant Oppression: Your terminator skill! This is strictly to be used as your fatality move so only use when enemies health is below 35% also usable when you need to reach those trash mobs from a distance like healers and archers. Due to this build having high spell damage and magicka your execute will be doing insane damage!
Proximity Detonation: The nuclear bomb of the Elder Scrolls Online world. It’s now a much shorter grind to acquire in PvP but it produces a massive amount of area damage so will be a worthy addition to your skill set. Simply cast before diving into a mob with your puncturing sweep!
Inner Light: This skill is amazing and can be a key to your burst DPS. It provides you 10% Spell Critical and 5% Max Magicka as well as the mages guild passives. It also now provides a small area to uncover sneaky individuals once cast.
Ice Comet: I prefer running with Ice Comet for the massive amount of damage with reduced movement speed especially while playing solo but check out other options below you may wish to swap in for different scenarios. Ice Comet also provides an extra 2% with the Magicka Controller passive.
Additional Ultimate OptionsCrescent Sweep: Crescent Sweep does massive area of effect damage you can keep up most of the time, great for solo content.
Solar Prison: Solar Prison produces huge damage against players and bosses alike plus it has a synergy effect which is great when running with groups. They both do magic damage so pick your super weapon based on solo or group play!
Healing Bar (Restoration Staff)Rapid Regeneration: This skill is great because it provides a heal without having to target your comrades. If your group is on the move (and they will be during PvP or Dungeon runs) then Rapid Regeneration is much better then Healing Springs. You can cast it a few times to apply a heal to everyone for 16 seconds, use your damage skills and then return to Rapid Regeneration to apply the tick again.
Blazing Spear: This ranged AOE is great to stun enemies and to use the damage over time tick to assist with the DPS. The tanks and stamina players in your groups will also love you for this support so drop it on top of them, friend or foe.
Purifying Light: This skill I call ‘The Punisher’ because it can push your DPS way above 20k when you unleash a number of these for yourself, your tank and your other group members and when it goes pop it provides a heal for yourself when in melee range plus everyone else that’s close enough to one, even if you don’t reach the maximum magic damage so it’s always healing your group. It’s also a great tool to use to let your other team mates know which mobs you are going after or which mobs they are going after, paint the target gold!
Radiant Aura: Provides 10% regeneration to all attributes when slotted and grants additional 20% regeneration to all attributes to yourself and allies within your healing home plus it gets a bonus from focused healing and benefits from the mending passive.
Channeled Focus: Provides a rune of celestial protection while recovering magicka, just keep close to provide longer protection & restoration.
Aggressive War Horn: This provides 10% magicka, health and stamina for 30 seconds to you and your group so is great to start off a fight. It also provides 30% increase to critical damage which is great to finish a fight and when paired with Proximity Detonation from your damage bar watch your enemies melt into each other!
Champion System
The average player according to Zenimax Online appears to have 300 Champion Points so the following will be based on that. This guide gives you an idea of where to spend them so as you get more just keep adding them on or feel free to tweak where you wish.
The Warrior
Start with The Lady and put 45 points each into Elemental Defender and Hardy which gives you three great passives Spell Absorption, Resilient and Critical Leech. Finally put 10 points into Expert Defender which can be found on The Lord tree.
The Lady
Hardy: 45
Elemental Defender: 45
The Lord
Expert Defender: 10
The Thief
Not much here for a magicka based character but head to The Lover tree and put 60 points in Arcanist to increase magicka regeneration and then put 40 points into the magican which sits under The Tower tree.
The Lover
Arcanist: 60
The Tower
Magician: 40
The Mage
The recent changes to the Champion System with The Thieves Guild has made The Mage really easy for Magicka users. You want to spend all your points in The Apprentice tree and you can start off by putting 27 points into Elfborn and the rest of the 73 points into Elemental Expert. This provides you the Spell Precision passive which increases your spell critical rating by 12% and another really important passive called Foresight. Foresight reduces your next skill cost by 80% after you chug a potion and as you know this build contains lots of drinking so they work hand in hand! As you level up more you can start to put more points in Spell Erosion but focus on Elfborn and Elemental Expert in the first instance.
The Apprentice
Elfborn: 27
Elemental Expert: 73
Character and Skill Tooltip Stats
Here are my in-game stats for resources and skills, remember these are base stats and don't take into account things like crit damage but as you can see DPS and Healing amounts are pretty slick. The In-Combat buff for Spell Damage includes Minor and Major Sorcery plus activation of the Clever Alchemist 5 piece bonus without Clever Alchemist spell damage buff is around 3200k which is more then enough for non-boss related content and healing. The current setup of skills with CP provides no issues for sustain, you can see Sweeps and Blazing only cost me 23 Magicka each (I thought it was a bug or the tooltip display but every time I buff it does that) so yeah sustain is definitely not a issue with this build. In regards to healing you can see the Purifying Light heals for 3500k per every 2 second for 6 seconds so that's a 10k heal for everyone standing in it plus you can launch multiple of these on a stack of mobs unleashing heaps of heals for everyone so just with this skill up healing is also no problem with this build.
Conclusion
This is the end of the build outline for my DPS Support, Paladin of Stendarr! If you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comments below. I should have a video with the build outline up soon but in the meantime thanks for reading, go holy burn some daedra sending them back to Oblivion for the Knights of Stendarr!
@James-WayneNOTE: This build will be kept up to date as changes happen.