Whats the catch behind all the flexibility ? :)

vpy

Newcomer to ESO here (<10 days)
I created a nightblade recently.

With my prior MMO experience, rogues/stealthies wear medium armour.
But looks like there is no such restriction in ESO
So what i did.
My NB wears fully heavy armor now.

Also with my prior experience rogues/stealthies cannot do much range attack. They are supposed to be in melee.
But I equipped him destro staff and he is pretty good with range also.

Based upon feedback from player base I dumped all of my points in magicka.

So i now have dark elf magicka nb with heavy armor and destro staff.

With all this flexibility whats the catch ???

wolfdoggie_ESO

The catch is META buildz.

LMar

Check the passives for the armour. They each have passives which support a playstyle. Eg heavy for tanking (mostly) medium for stamona dps and light for magicka dps

Wearing all heavy means you don't get all the light armour passives which will lower your dps considerably

Gandrhulf_Harbard

The catch is the flexibility comes at a price.

Heavy Armour and Magicka can work together, but you are significantly harming Magicka potential by not wearing Light Armour. You want 5 pieces of Light Armour to use the passives to boost your Magicka. At later levels ideally you'll be using 5/1/1 in armour, to access the Undaunted passives. You can wear a Hvy Chest, Medium Legs and the rest Light to do that, and benefit from the Hvy amd Medium armour's increased protection over Light.

Magicka NB can be awesome though, so stick with it and find what works for you while leveling.

All The Best

smacx250

"Play as you want" (but that doesn't mean that you'll be as effective as you want)

One of the core philosophies of The Elder Scrolls Online is to allow you to play the way you want. You’ve probably heard us say it or experienced it for yourself: equip any weapon, wear any armor, choose from a myriad of skills, pick your role, make choices in quests, ignore certain quests and just explore, etc

http://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-gb/news/post/2014/03/26/esos-veteran-content

Kram8ion

I've just put my nightblade into heavy finally caving in and I can get the same dps as my medium armour did something isn't right

hmsdragonfly

It's the core philosophy of the Elder Scrolls series. You can play however you want. The catch is the some combinations are stronger than the others.

Example, magicka nightblade wielding two-handed doesn't work well. Using destro/restro works well, using dual wield and 1H/S might work, depending on certain types of content.

For questing and normal dungeons, anything will work.

For vet dungeons and normal trials, you should wear light armour as a DPS/healer (yes you can be a nightblade healer), and heavy as a tank (yes you can be a nightblade tank). If you are good enough, you can make light armour tank works sometimes, but it's not a guarantee.

For vet trials, well, don't care about vet trials if you just started playing.

For PvP, this is where the flexibility shines. You can theorycraft your own build, using either light or heavy, (not recommended medium, it works fine with a few builds, but generally medium magicka nightblade doesn't work well), and using destro, restro, dual wield, 1H/S, whatever you like, but you will have to know a lot about the game if you want to start theorycrafting PvP builds.

golfer.dub17_ESO

Flexibility is an illusion in this game, unlike in a standard Elder Scrolls game.

You could wear full medium armor, put all your points into health, and wield a destruction staff. BUT:
-Medium Armor only provides boosts to stamina abilities. You would be achieving nothing by wearing it, while missing out on several critical light armor passives for magic dps.
-Spell damage scales off of your Magicka pool. But you dumped everything into health meaning you put out poor damage.
-Dumping into health is for tanking damage. Destruction staves are for DPS and do not aid in tanking damage. Neither is medium armor. So even with that much health you'd still succumb to enemy blows.

You have the freedom to make that character, but the character would be utterly useless at everything.

Saying "it doesn't work well" or "it's not min-max" would be the understatements of the century.

You can mix and match, but it has to be done intelligently. Wearing full heavy means you're not getting bonus spell penetration, you're not getting any benefits from light armor at all, and you're getting tons of unnecessary tanking benefits while not helping out your DPS in the slightest.

You could instead wear Heavy Chest and Heavy Helmet (the most armor-granting parts), then wear five pieces of Light Armor. This would give you all the Light Armor passives, some at slightly reduced power, but you'd gain the benefit of being slightly tankier and benefitting from a few Heavy passives. Or you could go 7 pieces of Light Armor for a pure DPS build at the cost of a tiny bit of survivability.

STEVIL

OP - its trade offs.

Light armor gives cost reduction, damagae increasing effects etc but has less damage mitigation so you have to figure out how you stay up (using combo powers like swallow soul and sap essense or reapers mark for healing.)

Heavy armor gives you more mitigation and offsetting somewhat sustain options but if you look at those passives its really kicking in when you are being swarmed.

Both can work depending on what you want to do. I run characters with primary 5pc in the appropriate offensive damage armors (light for mag and med for stam) and others with primary 5pc heavy as well.

The key is to realize what you are doing and work it all together.

this is from a solo perspective where keeping yourself standing and doing damage are both tasks you have to do.

you can get into trouble when you go different directions - offensive armor choices and aggressive non-defensive/healing attacks is one likely to die choice solo. Another problem would be to run shields spells and heavy armor and healing attacks where you have so cut down your offense and have too many defenses that dont work together.

the word cohesive is what you should be working towards - have your various choices work together - whole greater than sum of parts - etc.

NB mag staff heavy armor works just fine and even helps a passive or two from the shadow line as i recall - the one that gives barrier.

enjoy

Gilvoth

vpy wrote: »

Newcomer to ESO here (<10 days)
I created a nightblade recently.

With my prior MMO experience, rogues/stealthies wear medium armour.
But looks like there is no such restriction in ESO
So what i did.
My NB wears fully heavy armor now.

Also with my prior experience rogues/stealthies cannot do much range attack. They are supposed to be in melee.
But I equipped him destro staff and he is pretty good with range also.

Based upon feedback from player base I dumped all of my points in magicka.

So i now have dark elf magicka nb with heavy armor and destro staff.

With all this flexibility whats the catch ???

[for PvP] that theory, is what ruined eso right from the start right at beta and even unto today.
the idea that you could do anything with a build and focus it against the norm completely ruined stealth play in eso.

zyk

vpy wrote: »

With all this flexibility whats the catch ???

The catch is 99% of PVE is super ezmode so players can play how they want without consequence.

This changes a little in vet dungeons and therefore most players seem to struggle because they did not previously need to learn mechanics or how to build characters effectively.

There are rules. It's better to learn them early. I recommend checking out the forums of tamrielfoundry.com once you are comfortable with the basics and want to learn more.

malicia

@vpy

ESO's "do whatever you want" means simply that. You can equip your character any way you want to, and I'd advise you to do exactly that. Play around, put a sword and shield on your main bar and a staff on your back bar (I think you unlock the back bar at about lvl 15), or ...

You get the idea, do whatever you want, experiment and have fun.

Catch:
In the beginning of the game, the game scales you up to be able to kill most monsters around you. You've got training wheels which makes the game much easier. As you progress, those training wheels will slowly be removed, and when you get to lvl 50, you'll be essentially on your own, and you'll find some mobs and bosses that could previously kill, to suddenly be much more difficult. That is where you'll start noticing the shortcomings in your build, and that will be a good time to visit the forums to get advice on how to make your build better.

My personal feeling is that you can have your own mixed build and do well enough with it to do most open-world content, and most normal dungeons (some of the DLCs will be interesting, though). For veteran dungeons and trials, you'll want to start specializing your build a bit more, though, in order to fulfill your part in your group. That's where the meta builds are nice - they give good ideas as to how to tailor your build into something aimed specifically at DPS, healing, tanking, ganking, sneaking, ...

To put it this way - I know that nightblades aren't currently the most sought after class for competitive vet trials. But I'm not doing competitive vet trials, so I don't really care all that much. For what I do, and for what I'm trying to do, my nightblade is more than sufficient.

KochDerDamonen

Well, I'll tell you what the catch is right here. Heavy armor makes you BEEFier, Light armor is good for Magicka builds, and Medium armor for Stamina builds. If you include PvP and PvE, Stamina uses; Twohanded, Dualwield, Bow, OneHand&Shield. Meanwhile Magicka uses; Destruction Staves, Restoration Staves, and OneHand&Shield, some Dualwield but it's for stats not to use any of the actives.

The flexibility is higher but using anything with anything isn't going to fly very well. You can tweak some funky things to work out with good selection of sets, and mostly in PvP or as a tank in PvE. As a Damage Dealer in endgame group PvE situations you're considerably more restricted, Medium Armor(Maybe one piece heavy) and Dualwield+Bow for Stamina, Light Armor + Destruction Staves (Maybe a Restoration Staff or Dualwield on one bar, depending on class and needs). In either case you end up putting all of your points into the relevant resource pool.

For non-endgame PvE working backwards, more and more things work. Vet Dungeons have a lot more flex room than Vet trials, Vet Maelstrom (single unique solo "trial") is more flexible too but requires a build be able to support itself with defensive and healing capabilities, Normal Dungeons and the overworld are pretty much free-for-alls and you can do whatever you want and still complete most anything as long as you play the game (ie dodge attacks, apply damage, use heals or whatever, just pay attention)

In PvP using heavy armor is more viable for either resource type, maybe it's not as free-for-all as Normal Dungeons and the overworld but you can do a lot here and have degrees of success if you run with a group or not.

hmsdragonfly

golfer.dub17_ESO wrote: »

Flexibility is an illusion in this game, unlike in a standard Elder Scrolls game.

You could wear full medium armor, put all your points into health, and wield a destruction staff. BUT:
-Medium Armor only provides boosts to stamina abilities. You would be achieving nothing by wearing it, while missing out on several critical light armor passives for magic dps.
-Spell damage scales off of your Magicka pool. But you dumped everything into health meaning you put out poor damage.
-Dumping into health is for tanking damage. Destruction staves are for DPS and do not aid in tanking damage. Neither is medium armor. So even with that much health you'd still succumb to enemy blows.

You have the freedom to make that character, but the character would be utterly useless at everything.

Saying "it doesn't work well" or "it's not min-max" would be the understatements of the century.

You can mix and match, but it has to be done intelligently. Wearing full heavy means you're not getting bonus spell penetration, you're not getting any benefits from light armor at all, and you're getting tons of unnecessary tanking benefits while not helping out your DPS in the slightest.

You could instead wear Heavy Chest and Heavy Helmet (the most armor-granting parts), then wear five pieces of Light Armor. This would give you all the Light Armor passives, some at slightly reduced power, but you'd gain the benefit of being slightly tankier and benefitting from a few Heavy passives. Or you could go 7 pieces of Light Armor for a pure DPS build at the cost of a tiny bit of survivability.

This is so wrong. Of course there are combinations that are stronger than the others, it's just the way things work, if you do dumb things of course you are getting terrible results. Do you really think that combat in TES 3, 4, 5 are balanced? No they aren't. There are builds which are broken af (looking at you, "stealth archer"), and builds that are utterly useless. It doesn't matter because people can lower their difficulty, but here it's an MMO you cannot tell the other player in Cyrodiil "hey dude can you lower your damage a little bit i am a mag-based character using 2-handed". Stupid builds stand out more as you can notice the different between a stupid build and an effective build, as in single player TES games you can just play on easy mode with a stupid build.

Heavy armour is what a lot of magblades wear in Cyrodiil. It depends on the content that which combination is stronger. Good luck using double destro and wearing ilambris in PvP.