how do you survive as a stamblade?

ReverseVenom

I've played for a couple years now and have been dedicating some serious time to PvP (Both cyro and IC). I don't suck and noticed myself getting better, I can kill in a decent amount of time, manage my resources and I'm confident in my 1v1 abilities but if I have more than one person on me I'm screwed. I know who to avoid and who I can kill easily and I'm not a pure gank build I've tried to find a balance between defense recovery and damage rocking 5/2 medium/heavy. But If I get cc chained or anything that stops me for more than 2 seconds I seem to just blow up depsite my best efforts at healing, roll doging, cloaking, using shuffle, ect.

Basically, what do you use (or find works) for 1vx survival and dealing with cc spammers as a stamblade?

ChunkyCat

Just don’t run out health. That’s the key to winning.

ReverseVenom

ChunkyCat wrote: »

Just don’t run out health. That’s the key to winning.

Of course, how have I been so blind

Lexxypwns

Relative to other stam specs stamblade lacks healing and mitigation. However, the answer to both of these is one ability: Cloak.

When heavily pressured use dodge roll-shade-fear-etc to create space and then use cloak to force critical healing from vigor or your rally burst heal. If you cast vigor before cloaking then you’ll force a few critical heals while you’re stealthed and soft reset the fight.

Cloak is also a very strong defense against projectile builds, allowing you to force multiple ranged projectiles to miss.

Otherwise, on stamblade, positioning and tap-blocking big hitting abilities are both very important when outnumbered. Positioning becomes doubly important in medium where your main defense(dodge roll) has so many counters

Unfadingsilence

L2P your toon put the time into getting the right gear you need understanding you're passives and CP my NB I run ATM

http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/UnfadingSilence/screenshot/8109495

My tool tip for vigor is almost at 20k atm and I'm in and out of fights with the damage I'm putting out right now

KingYogi415

Just get vigor and put more in health

Vapirko

The “blow up” you describe sounds like lag. You think you’re getting hit by a few things but in reality you’ve already been zerged by a million abilities and when the server catches up it looks like an explosion. Happens all the time playing from overseas on NA. You never had a chance. There isn’t any way to heal through that, whatever abilities of yours on yourself happen locally on your computer aren’t in sink with peoples abilities being cast on you or your moves in relation to them. That’s my guess anyway. How’s your latency/isp/router/modem?

ReverseVenom

Lexxypwns wrote: »

Relative to other stam specs stamblade lacks healing and mitigation. However, the answer to both of these is one ability: Cloak.

When heavily pressured use dodge roll-shade-fear-etc to create space and then use cloak to force critical healing from vigor or your rally burst heal. If you cast vigor before cloaking then you’ll force a few critical heals while you’re stealthed and soft reset the fight.

Cloak is also a very strong defense against projectile builds, allowing you to force multiple ranged projectiles to miss.

Otherwise, on stamblade, positioning and tap-blocking big hitting abilities are both very important when outnumbered. Positioning becomes doubly important in medium where your main defense(dodge roll) has so many counters

Never knew you could use the cloak to crit a heal, thanks for the tips

ReverseVenom

Vapirko wrote: »

The “blow up” you describe sounds like lag. You think you’re getting hit by a few things but in reality you’ve already been zerged by a million abilities and when the server catches up it looks like an explosion. Happens all the time playing from overseas on NA. You never had a chance. There isn’t any way to heal through that, whatever abilities of yours on yourself happen locally on your computer aren’t in sink with peoples abilities being cast on you or your moves in relation to them. That’s my guess anyway. How’s your latency/isp/router/modem?

I play on xbox now, my connection is decent on most games, I do notice that there is a bit of a buffer before I die where nothing really happens but I assumed that was because I had already died and the game was just catching up

deepseamk20b14_ESO

Dodge roll, timing, LoS, proper target order, CP placement, build to reach a goal not a number (you’ll have to think about that one), animation canceling the right skills, combos, when to give CC immunity and when you should wait so you can land that burst and execute, for my health I personally use vigor/blood craze/forward momentum HoT/lingering health speed pots, just because you’re an NB without a shield doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be blocking so know when to block and when to dodge, watch resources, know when to cloak and when it will be broken by AoE and change directions often when cloaked, don’t seem cloak use it smartly even if you have the recovery to spam it because there are times you’ll need that o *** button, learn ALL class skills and passives, learn other classes and their skills and passives.

Lexxypwns

ReverseVenom wrote: »

Lexxypwns wrote: »

Relative to other stam specs stamblade lacks healing and mitigation. However, the answer to both of these is one ability: Cloak.

When heavily pressured use dodge roll-shade-fear-etc to create space and then use cloak to force critical healing from vigor or your rally burst heal. If you cast vigor before cloaking then you’ll force a few critical heals while you’re stealthed and soft reset the fight.

Cloak is also a very strong defense against projectile builds, allowing you to force multiple ranged projectiles to miss.

Otherwise, on stamblade, positioning and tap-blocking big hitting abilities are both very important when outnumbered. Positioning becomes doubly important in medium where your main defense(dodge roll) has so many counters

Never knew you could use the cloak to crit a heal, thanks for the tips

That’s why you see stamblades enter cloak with little to no HP and come out of cloak on offense and back up to full health.

Vigor breaks cloak, but if you cast it THEN cloak you end up forcing 2-3 critical healing ticks from vigor.

Sixty5

Stamblade is a class made for kiting.

I can't think of any class with access to a better toolkit for resetting fights over and over until you can force one that favours you, which is good, because Stamblade really doesn't have a lot going for it in terms of defensive utility.

One of your biggest combos for survivability is Fear > Roll cancel Vigor > Cloak. This will create a good deal of space between you and whoever you are fighting, along with preventing most incoming damage and cheesing a bunch of crit heals.

A lot of what makes stamblade strong is what high recovery does for them. Personally I run something like 2k stam recovery with 1.2k mag recovery on mine, and it lets you be so flexible in fights, as it lets you stay cloaked for 20 seconds at a time, along with quickly resetting your health and stam for getting back into the thick of things.

Also Stamblade has super easy access to minor maim and major evasion, meaning that between the two, you are avoiding nearly 30% of incoming damage, which is pretty nasty.

DDuke

OP, here's how you survive as stamblade: slot 2x Troll King, make sure you're using S&B & if you get 5x heavy (a set like Legion or Truth will do) that's just icing on the cake.

Anything else results in getting absolutely erased by undodgeable damage (i.e. mag DKs, magplars, wardens yadda yadda).

Sadly the (viable) build diversity is in the gutters currently.

Lexxypwns wrote: »

ReverseVenom wrote: »

Lexxypwns wrote: »

Relative to other stam specs stamblade lacks healing and mitigation. However, the answer to both of these is one ability: Cloak.

When heavily pressured use dodge roll-shade-fear-etc to create space and then use cloak to force critical healing from vigor or your rally burst heal. If you cast vigor before cloaking then you’ll force a few critical heals while you’re stealthed and soft reset the fight.

Cloak is also a very strong defense against projectile builds, allowing you to force multiple ranged projectiles to miss.

Otherwise, on stamblade, positioning and tap-blocking big hitting abilities are both very important when outnumbered. Positioning becomes doubly important in medium where your main defense(dodge roll) has so many counters

Never knew you could use the cloak to crit a heal, thanks for the tips

That’s why you see stamblades enter cloak with little to no HP and come out of cloak on offense and back up to full health.

Vigor breaks cloak, but if you cast it THEN cloak you end up forcing 2-3 critical healing ticks from vigor.

You should probably mention that only works if you have zero DoTs on target.

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/367271/dot-ticks-ruin-shadowy-disguise

Metemsycosis

A lot of good night blades are running without cloak on PS4. Esp in bgs. They hit hard, they move fast, their crit resist is high, and they dodge necessarily rather than just because. I'd say the best way to survive is by only entering combat when you can ensure a kill. They way you don't end up at the center of a skirmish wearing medium armor. Which is certain death.

Dreth

Cloak is complete trash open world. If you get in serious trouble, its not going to save you. The only purpose it serves is to mess with peoples heads when a fight starts.

Shade is broken.

Roll dodge still works.

Shuffle helps.

Myself I just build tanky as hell. The more I play the more I realize stacking damage is pointless and building tanky and just waiting for your dawnbreaker to crit is how the game is played. Stack 25k resists with TK, keep vigor/rally up all the time, stay near rocks and trees so you can LOS. LOS is a big one. Just keep dots up, run around a tree until ult pops, then turn around all of a sudden and drop that sucker after a fear and reverse slice your way to free AP. Rinse and repeat til they are all dead.

ManDraKE

Dreth wrote: »

Cloak is complete trash open world. If you get in serious trouble, its not going to save you. The only purpose it serves is to mess with peoples heads when a fight starts.

That's why eternal hunt is so important on a stamblade, it helps to keep distance beetwen you and the attackers, which makes cloak a bit more reliable (it still bugged af, but with ethernal hunt you avoid things like bash and meele attacks pulling you out of cloak)

olsborg

Cloak is in the gutter atm, hardly worth a slot in youre in combat, its only good for avoiding a zerg to come to you if youre out of combat.

Shadow image has a 10-15% failrate atm, near certain keeps this % spikes to 90%.

Its hard atm, but not impossible. Still id like to see bugs fixed asap.

JobooAGS

ManDraKE wrote: »

Dreth wrote: »

Cloak is complete trash open world. If you get in serious trouble, its not going to save you. The only purpose it serves is to mess with peoples heads when a fight starts.

That's why eternal hunt is so important on a stamblade, it helps to keep distance beetwen you and the attackers, which makes cloak a bit more reliable (it still bugged af, but with ethernal hunt you avoid things like bash and meele attacks pulling you out of cloak)

so the 7.4% crit loss and potentially 299 weapon damage from hundings is worth it for the proc?

raistin87

You dont. Roll a magblade

deepseamk20b14_ESO

Cloak has issues but it’s not nearly as bad as people think. Forward momentum>rally any day (IMO) and mirage instead of shuffle seems to produce the best results for me. Why? Throw on a speed pot, lingering health and major expedition is what I use, and people are able to get out of any AoE range then pop cloak and it works amazingly. We NB’s complain about it being crap but look how many non NB’s take issue with it? It’s because used properly it’s great. The problem with cloak, besides a bug or two (yes I know they exist, certain skills DoTs even break cloak) is that people don’t posistion themselves prior to using it and they always get taken out of cloak by AoE and a big one here, they are overly dependent on cloak. Especially against a good player, they won’t let you cloak. I suggest using LoS WITH cloak to really make the skill shine. When I’m tower dancing and have 10 people trying to kill me it’s insanely easy to LoS, cloak, literally run directly into them and they have no idea where I went. They just keep going the same direction like “which way did he go George! Which way did he go?” Not to mention it still is awesome to cast vigor and watch the 3k tics (plus forward momentum HoT crits) heal me back to full health. I know there is the thread about DoTs consuming the crit but I’ve tested it a few times with blood craze and that wasn’t the case unless combat cloud is lying to me. I’ll try it again tonight.

davey1107

I have many hundreds of hours in PvP on my stamblade...I solely PvP on him now (working toward that level 50 alliance war...sigh). It’s a pretty difficult play style...maybe more so right now...and you will die a lot. That’s just the cost of the power and stealth. But there are some things that will help improve your kill-to-death ratio.

Snares

There are too many in the game right now...it’s gotten absurd. There are a few things that can help. Shuffle can really help here. And I take the forward momentum morph over rally on my PvP stamblade. Rally is the meta, but I get killed by snares, not a lack of healing. There’s also good ole retreating maneuvers...I don’t slot this regularly, but sometimes for a long trip. If you end up in battle with it slotted, it also provides snare immunity. For potions, I carry a restore stam, restore health, unstoppable pot. This can help when on the attack.

Escaping

Stealth and cloak seem semi-broken right now. I’m not sure if they’re straight up broken or if there’s just so much server lag that things proc weirdly, but it makes stamblading a bit more difficult than it’s been at times in the game.

A few specifics from my PvP experiences. Cloak should in theory cause most incoming attacks to miss. It’s complicated...but there’s a point in the proc for a crystal frag or javelin where my cloak should counter it. Then at some point it’s too late even if I slam on cloak. Right now I have experiences where I’m into my second 4 second cloak and I get hit by abilities that shouldn’t make it through the cloak. I also have times where I hit cloak and the system takes a full two seconds to proc it...which is going to be a problem. And there are abilities breaking cloak that I’m not sure should be, like the Templar ability power of the light...which should break it at the beginning and end, but not the entire time. In all of these cases it’s unclear that things are truly broken...maybe people are using detect pots or maybe I’m allowing a gap in cloak...but they happen too frequently not to be suspect.

Anyway, running from a Zerg right now is tough. One strategy that works for me is to carry invisible plus speed pots (blessed, blue entoloma, Namira rot). I get 16 seconds of invisible plus 45 seconds of major expedition. These have saved my butt more times than I can count, and I go through 50ish a night. Granted I use them in delves and for fun a lot.

This pot takes a bit of practice. First, the proc is a bit broken like I outline above. Second, for it to be effective you have to make sure an attack isn’t incoming. It will NOT stop a frag in mid-air. If you potion and get hit, you’ve wasted the pot. So it’s usually a cloak...waitmto end of cloak...pot if I need to run. And then once invisible you have to learn to avoid all AOEs, magelight, etc.

However, players are somewhat predictable, and if you learn to behave differently than they do this potion can give you massive escape power and battleground mobility. For instance, we all get run down along an outer keep wall from time to time. If you disappear, enemies almost alway continue down the wall. If you can cloak, then pot, then veer off the wall and make your way to the inner keep wall, most times you’ll get away. Or be batcrap crazy like I am and walk your invisible butt across the front porch, complete w npcs and human enemies. You have to avoid aoes, but no one chasing you will suspect that’s where you went.

Hopefully that helps. My tips are not specifically geared to mid-combat snares, but perhaps they’ll help avoid death in some of the other situations, like a keep retreat or surprise encounter or whatever.

ReverseVenom

deepseamk20b14_ESO wrote: »

Cloak has issues but it’s not nearly as bad as people think. Forward momentum>rally any day (IMO) and mirage instead of shuffle seems to produce the best results for me. Why? Throw on a speed pot, lingering health and major expedition is what I use, and people are able to get out of any AoE range then pop cloak and it works amazingly.

I use shuffle for the immovability to conserve magicka for fear and cloaks, if you're using mirage how do you sustain enough to keep it up in a fight and fear/cloak?

JobooAGS

ReverseVenom wrote: »

deepseamk20b14_ESO wrote: »

Cloak has issues but it’s not nearly as bad as people think. Forward momentum>rally any day (IMO) and mirage instead of shuffle seems to produce the best results for me. Why? Throw on a speed pot, lingering health and major expedition is what I use, and people are able to get out of any AoE range then pop cloak and it works amazingly.

I use shuffle for the immovability to conserve magicka for fear and cloaks, if you're using mirage how do you sustain enough to keep it up in a fight and fear/cloak?

What is wrong with using shuffle/rally instead of foward momentem/mirage?

deepseamk20b14_ESO

ReverseVenom wrote: »

deepseamk20b14_ESO wrote: »

Cloak has issues but it’s not nearly as bad as people think. Forward momentum>rally any day (IMO) and mirage instead of shuffle seems to produce the best results for me. Why? Throw on a speed pot, lingering health and major expedition is what I use, and people are able to get out of any AoE range then pop cloak and it works amazingly.

I use shuffle for the immovability to conserve magicka for fear and cloaks, if you're using mirage how do you sustain enough to keep it up in a fight and fear/cloak?

First thing, I simply don’t spam cloak. Even in heavy armor I can roll dodge quite a bit and a 2h heavy attack helps a lot to gain stamina back, so I use forward momentum to remove snares and roll dodge to avoid damage more often than cloak. I also LoS whenever possible which honestly produces superior results to cloak. Cloak is a good “o *** button” and to set up burst combos. Yes the crit heals from shadowy disguise are great but I have decent crit already and enough healing with blood craze, vigor, HoT from forward momentum, and lingering health pot that I don’t need to depend on cloak crit heals.

Mirage is a REALLY long buff so I cast it once in the beginning of a fight and 9/10 times I kill the people before needing to recast it. So it’s not much of an issue.

The majority of my magicka goes towards fear.

I’m a vamp and have around 800 magicka recovery which isn’t much, but with the constitution passive it’s more like 1000 so thats more than enough magicka recovery since I don’t spam cloak.

The only time I do get into trouble is when there are simply to many attackers and I can’t LoS in anyway so I have to spam cloak to avoid them, which is about 4 cloaks back to back for me. I have learned though sometimes it’s better to not run and pick a weak target and start lowering the enemy numbers to a more manageable one so I don’t simply waste all magicka trying to escape. I also try my best to anticipate enemy movements and keep my head on a swivel. If I start to see a lot of enemies showing up I’ll think where I can juke the enemy to where I only need one to two cloaks to evade them and generally go right into hide.

ManDraKE

JobooAGS wrote: »

ManDraKE wrote: »

Dreth wrote: »

Cloak is complete trash open world. If you get in serious trouble, its not going to save you. The only purpose it serves is to mess with peoples heads when a fight starts.

That's why eternal hunt is so important on a stamblade, it helps to keep distance beetwen you and the attackers, which makes cloak a bit more reliable (it still bugged af, but with ethernal hunt you avoid things like bash and meele attacks pulling you out of cloak)

so the 7.4% crit loss and potentially 299 weapon damage from hundings is worth it for the proc?

yes. Also keep in mind you gain sustain with eternal hunt compared to hundings, you can compensate the dmg loss by putting more weapon dmg glyps and using warrior mundus. But yes, is night/day difference between using cloak with or withouth ethernal hunt.