[PvE] A Magicka Nightblade DPS budget build for mainstream players (One Tamriel ready!)

code65536 · November 2016

Who is this build for? What this guide is... and what it isn't

First, a little background: I recently started playing with a second account, and it's been a lot of fun to re-experience the game without my main account's capped CP and armory of hard-to-get bound gear. This is the build that I've been using on that account ever since I hit CP160.

Who is this build for? This is a build optimized for people with intermediate CP, between 160 and somewhere in the 400's. It's a budget build, designed not only for efficacy, but also for simplicity and ease of acquisition.

This is not a min/max build for competitive content. There are a plethora of endgame builds out there already, and I have no intention of reinventing the wheel. The problem with those builds is that most of them assume that you have capped CP, access to difficult-to-acquire gear, and are tailored for things like competitive vet trials.

In contrast, this build assumes you have at least 160 champion points (prior to that point, you gain levels and CP so quickly that whatever gear you use today would be outleveled and obsolete within a week or two; hitting 160 is the first time that you actually get to enjoy gear stability), that you don't have the time to grind out bind-on-pickup gear, and that you just want a simple-yet-effective build for vet dungeons. And even Veteran Maelstrom Arena: with the recent Orsinium anniversary discount, I bought the DLC for my alt account and used this build to clear vMA at CP288 (started at 288, finished at 290).

In short, this build is for the more mainstream and casual ESO player: It's easy to get, it's cheap, but it's also very effective--it's a lot of bang-for-the-buck.

Gear

5 pieces of Kagrenac's Hope: 4 divines armor pieces (any slot), 1 sharpened inferno staff and 1 sharpened lightning staff. This is a craftable set. Unfortunately, being 8-trait, it is likely out of reach for most new players, but it's very easy to find a crafter in guild chat or zone chat who can help you with crafting this set. If you supply the mats, most crafters will charge only a modest fee or just ask for a tip.
5 pieces of Destruction Mastery: 2 divines armor pieces (any slot) and 3 jewelry pieces. This set can be found in Dragonstar Arena. Since it is bind-on-equip, you can also just buy it from the guild traders. I recently found and purchased 5 pieces of this set for someone, all in purple quality, for under 12K total, after shopping around the guild traders for a little bit. If you prefer to earn the gear yourself, normal DSA is pretty easy and will drop blue-quality items. Although I use purple jewelry in my build, the difference between blue and purple jewelry is negligible.
1 piece of Shadowrend or Chokethorn: 1 piece (any slot, any weight). This is the one and only bind-on-pickup piece in this build. It doesn't matter which of the two sets you use, since all we want is the 1-piece magicka recovery bonus. It doesn't matter whether you get a head piece (by running either vet Banished Cells I or vet Elden Hollow I) or a shoulder piece (from Maj's Undaunted chest) or whether you get light, medium, or heavy. Divines is the ideal trait, but don't worry if you get some other trait--you can always replace it whenever you get a divines piece later.
You should wear 5 light, 1 medium, and 1 heavy: This is because of the Undaunted Mettle passive. Even if you haven't reached Undaunted 7, you should still wear 5/1/1, since you'll eventually get it later on. If your Shadowrend/Chokethorn piece is light, then craft two of your Kagrenac pieces as medium and heavy. If your monster piece is medium, then craft one of your Kagrenac pieces as heavy. Similarly, if your monster piece is heavy, then craft one of the Kagrenac pieces as medium. There is a lot of flexibility in how you put together the build. (Personally, I think the Altmer style of Destruction Mastery looks ugly, so I prefer to use the legs and feet pieces because then I can hide them underneath my crafted robe piece--so there is even a good amount of cosmetic wiggle room with this build.)
Enchantments: Use max magicka enchantments for all armor pieces, spell damage enchantments for all jewelry pieces, and spell/weapon damage enchantments for your staves.
Gear color: Purple quality is just fine for everything except the weapons. There is a very substantial jump in stats between purple and gold for CR160 weapons, so the weapons should be gold. The difference between purple and gold for armor is too low to be worth it for most players.

Skills

Front bar, inferno staff: Funnel Health, Crippling Grasp, Elemental Blockade, Merciless Resolve, Inner Light, Shooting Star
Back bar, lightning staff: Impale, [Flex Spot], Sap Essence, Siphoning Attacks, Inner Light, Soul Harvest
Flex Spot: I typically use Path, Blur, Shades, or Harness Magicka in this slot, depending on what the situation calls for.

There are plenty of videos and guides on how to play the magicka nightblade, so I will be brief here because you would not play this build any differently than any other typical magicka nightblade build.

Single target: Cast Merciless, Blockade, and Grasp (weaving them if you can, but don't stress too much if you're having trouble), weave Funnel until Merciless procs, fire off the proc, recast Merciless and repeat. Switch to weaving Impale when target reaches 25% health. Cast Siphoning Attacks if you need sustain.
AoE: Make sure Blockade, Path, and Siphoning Attacks are up, and Sap. If you run out of magicka, use heavy attacks with your lightning staff.

Other minutiae

Attribute Points: Everything in magicka.
Mundus Stone: Use the Thief stone. Crit is very important in PvE and is a much better choice for DPS than either Mage or Apprentice. Your gear has two magicka recovery bonuses (from the 1p monster set and from Kagrenac's Hope), so you should be fine without the Atronach stone.
Food: Use the standard blue max health and max magicka food. It is the best food for PvE DPS, since your outgoing damage scales off of the size of your max magicka pool.
Champion Points: My spending of points isn't really that optimized. I was more concerned about reaching certain passives (like Synergizer or Inspiration Boost). I spent most of my blue points in Elemental Expert, throwing a few points into Thaumaturge and Elfborn now and then. I split my green points between magicka recovery and cost reduction. I divided my red points mostly between Hardy and Elemental Defender (a bit more in the former than the latter because light armor has extra spell resistance) with a few points in Quick Recovery. As long as you're not spending points in bad stars, it doesn't really matter that much how exactly you distribute points at this stage of the game.

Build philosophy

Why two destro staves instead of destro/dual-wield? And why a lightning staff?
- It means that you can weave your Impales. Destro-weaved Impales do more DPS than dual-wield unweaved Impales. Weaving also means that you can better sustain long execute phases with Siphoning Attacks.
- Most of the time when you run out of magicka, it will be when using Sap in AoE pulls. If you run out of magicka, you can simply do a fully-charged heavy attack with your lightning staff. This not only restores your magicka, but heavy attacks with a lightning staff do substantial amounts of AoE damage (thanks for the Tri-Focus passive), so you will still be doing AoE DPS while recharging your magicka.
- Cost: 16 Rosin is a lot cheaper than 8 Rosin and 16 Tempering Alloys.
- You need dual-destro for Destruction Mastery.
- In short, dual-destro is just better. The extra stat bonus from dual-wield is simply not worth the loss of utility, versatility, and weaving that you get from dual-destro.
Why Kagrenac's Hope instead of Julianos?
- The biggest thing I noticed on my low-CP account compared to my capped-CP main account is the lack of sustain from the green trees. This is why I sought to have two magicka recovery bonuses in my gear, and one of those two recovery bonuses comes from Kag.
- Your health pool is much lower at lower CP levels. This is because your max health, max stamina, and max magicka are all increased whenever you spend red, green, and blue points, respectively. While a CP-capped build can get away without any health bonuses in the gear, you really must have a gear health bonus for a low-CP player. Kag offers a much-needed health bonus.
- You cannot afford many points to spend in Elfborn, which slightly lowers the importance of crit. Crit is still king in PvE, but it's not quite as important for low-CP players as it is for a CP-capped player.
Why a 1-piece Shadowrend/Chokethorn?
- As I mentioned above, sustain is a major issue for low-CP players. Equipping just one piece of this set will grant you a much-welcome bonus of magicka recovery.
- As you gain more CP and get more sustain from the green CP trees, you can replace this item with another 1-piece monster item for more DPS: either Iceheart for Spell Crit, Kena for Spell Damage, or Illambris/Grothdarr/Infernal for Max Magicka.
Other sets to consider instead of Destruction Mastery, using 2p armor + 3p jewelry:
- Spinner's Garments: This is a good set, but the main downside is that you will be slightly overpenetrating in group dungeons (light armor passive + sharp weapons + Pierce Armor + Spinner comes out to around 19K), partially overpenetrating in Maelstrom (where resistances range from 9K to 18K) and completely overpenetrating in open world content (the 5p bonus is basically useless in open world content). On the whole, I prefer the wider applicability of Destruction Mastery (also, I had started planning this build prior to One Tamriel and had a number of DM pieces in my inventory already).
- Necropotence:
  - Since your max magicka pool is amped by the number of blue CP you spend, Necropotence loses a lot of punch at low CP. It's still a very good set, though. Just not as powerful as it would be for a capped-CP player.
  - It's a bit of a hassle to use, as you must make sure that you keep your Shades up at all times, and it also limits your choice of skills--instead of a flex spot that you can tailor for whatever situation you're in, you've gotta have Shades on your back bar for Necropotence.
  Necropotence is a good set and a viable alternative to Destruction Mastery. It just doesn't fit my style of play very well.
- Spell Power Cure: This is a harder-to-get BoP set that's locked behind a DLC, but if you can get it, it's a very good set for a magicka nightblade, and now that it is available with jewelry, it can be used as a drop-in replacement for Destruction Mastery. In solo content, you can self-proc this set with your Funnel and Sap self-heals, so there's pretty high uptime on the buff. In group content, it gets even better because you can give your group members the SPC buff with your Funnel and Sap. The main downside is that if you are in a group with a healer running SPC, then this set becomes redundant and wasted. So you'll still want to have Destruction Mastery around if you find yourself in a group that has a SPC healer.

altemriel · November 2016

how much is your average dps with this setup?

Destruent · November 2016

Wow, great build for starters.

code65536 · November 2016

altemriel wrote: »

how much is your average dps with this setup?

I haven't done any controlled testing with this build because this was not intended to be a competitive build and because this build targets a wide range of CPs.

In pledge boss fights, I've seen anywhere from 17-33K in recent runs (so that's around 310 CP). It's a very wide range because real-world DPS varies quite a lot depending on boss mechanics, the group's composition/buffs, positioning, etc.

And finally, your DPS will depend a lot on player skill and practice--there are players who could do more DPS than I with this exact setup, and there are players who would do less.

I wouldn't worry that much about hitting certain DPS numbers. A build like this is meant to provide a good foundation for someone as they get practice and experience playing the class.

fioskal · November 2016

Very nice, Code. Looks like a good, solid foundation.

AzuraKin · November 2016

personally i say dual wield 5 5 2 is much better but what do i know, i only been running dual wield mageblade only for since the days of early access. gear choice is fairly flexible but for pve: i would say kagrenac a good choice but no the only choice, other options are tbs and julianos. second set i would use 5p spc with grothdar 2p set. while you work on getting that spc you can run 3p willpower and 2p torug.

for pvp you can use the spc still and couple it with transmutation or vicious death or scrap spc and run both transmutation and vicious death. personally i would say best bet would be to run vicious death in place of crafted set for pvp and swap between spc and transmutation depending on what other healers in group are using should have at least 2 spc and 2 transmutation healers in the group if possible in pvp.

code65536 · November 2016

AzuraKin wrote: »

personally i say dual wield 5 5 2 is much better

I've been running dual-wield on my back bar on my main account magblade for a very long time. I changed to destro/destro fairly recently (within the past couple of months), and I like it much more than dual-wield. Weaving and better versatility over raw stats.

AzuraKin wrote: »

gear choice is fairly flexible but for pve: i would say kagrenac a good choice but no the only choice, other options are tbs and julianos. second set i would use 5p spc with grothdar 2p set. while you work on getting that spc you can run 3p willpower and 2p torug.

Julianos is a great set, but not as good for lower-CP builds for the reasons I outlined in my original post. And 3p Willpower with 2p Torug won't perform as well as 5p Destruction Mastery and is also more expensive to acquire than 5p Destruction Mastery.

clv · November 2016

Youmee · December 2016

Great build, I will reccomend it to starters.

I am also a magicka NB and I have exshanged my 2 blades for destro and I am quite happy with it. Swaping and weaving is just great.

Jorotarr · April 2017

Are there any potions recommended with this build?

code65536 · April 2017

Joromarr wrote: »

Are there any potions recommended with this build?

The standard "trash" magicka pots that drop from various sources in the world should be sufficient. I've done all the 4-man content with just trash pots, and all my vMA runs are done with trash pots. Of course, spell power potions are nice, but they are also very expensive so I don't use them outside of vet trials.