Can I Do Viable DPS Without Stacking An Obscenely Large Amount Of Buffs, Debuffs, and DOTs?

Ebonslayer21

(Keep in mind I go nowhere near trials, Vet DLC dungeons, and PVP of any kind so I don't need to be completely meta)

Basically what I asked in the title. I've tried builds that have various buffs and debuffs that I rotate around and attempt to keep up all the time but I find it just distracts me from the fight, all this weapon switching to cast or 3 abilities then switching again, casting 2 more then going through a skill rotation just really gets on my nerves and often actually just gets me killed. Can I play viably at all if I avoid trying to keep 8 different debuffs, buffs, and DOTs up all the time? I can probably deal with 1 or 2 and I find I have no trouble keeping the 2 buffs (one offensive, the other defensive) on my main bar up most of the time but its annoying to switch between weapons every 10 seconds just to cast more ***.

Can I just go without having all these abilities I need to sustain 100% of the time and just stick to 1 or 2 and remain effective?

Waffennacht

You can easily, I use mag sorc for my primary PvE ing and don't really bother with a perfect rotation. (Or even close) and I can solo vet dungeons (non dlc) with it.

Very very do able.

Lynx7386

Petsorc

DocFrost72

If you only do vet non dlc, normal dungeons, and normal trials, shoot for 10-15k on a 3 million target dummy. Just endless hail and poison inject, plus a spammable will net you over that in purple hundings/nmg.

For magic, go elemental blockade with a class dot (every class has at least one) and a spammable.

What you're asking for is entirely doable. If you give me a class, I'll even build you something (make sure to specify mag, stam, or hybrid).

Oreyn_Bearclaw

Viable is a relative term. If you only want to cast 1 or 2 skills and never swap bars, the answer is that your DPS is going to stink to the point where people dont want you in their group. Can you clear normal content, sure, but that's a pretty low bar.

What you need is a good clean and simple damage rotation. 8 different buffs borders on the absurd, even for really good players. Obviously, the more you can manage the more damage you will do. Rather than get overwhelmed by all the different buff durations, look for a simplified version of a meta rotation that you can manage comfortable. A good rotation in this case will be short and circular. You basically cast the same short sequence on repeat.

As others have said, magic pet sorc is far and away the easiest way to accomplish this. You basically have for DOTs (Liquid Lighting, Elemental Blockade, Volatile Familier, and daedric prey) to manage, and you can simply heavy attack when they are running. You dont need buff timers or really any means of tracking them. You simply cast them in order, cast a few heavy attacks, and repeat. This wont break DPS records, but it will get you through just about any piece of content in the game. Its not an ideal way to do it, but you can even build a rotation like this to keep all your skills on one bar.

firedrgn

You can do 20k easy with a pet sorc and simple button smashing with a good rotstion it goes up from there.
Just lay down two dots and heavy attack.
For overland you will never get a full rotation in before eveeything dies.p Even public dungeons is a piece of cake.
World boss you just need to use hardened ward and crit surge and u can solo half of them.

So ya lightning mag sorc pet .
Normal 4 man dungeons are super easy and half the vet dungeons. All u have to do is keep shield up and stay in heals.

I went off heals on same build and running normals as healer. Easy . The vet no. Dlc are easy to healed on some of those.

Ebonslayer21

I'm NB.

Runefang

Easy to do, Stamsorc with a bow.

Skills are:
Focused aim, poison arrow, evil hunter, crit surge, bound armaments, flawless dawnbreaker.

Use crit surge and poison arrow on cool down. Use focused aim all other times. Heavy attack if resources are low.

Evil hunter, armaments and dawnbreaker are just there for buffs. No expensive pots required since you get both major buffs already. Crit surge provides your self healing.

Ill test it later but with the right gear it should net around 20k.

Silver_Strider

If you're looking for a single button rotation, that doesn't exist. You HAVE to use and maintain DoTs to do anywhere near acceptable damage.

You can get away with a single bar rotation easy enough, depending on whether you're a Stamblade or Magblade but there is going to be DoTs to maintain.

DW Stamblade - Flurry, Twin Slashes, Caltrops, Evil Hunter, Killer's Blade, Dawnbreaker.

You'll need to maintain uptime on Twin Slashes and Caltrops as DoTs but you can get away with spamming Flurry while they go on their duration, rinse and repeat. You won't break DPS charts but you'll at least deal enough damage to get by with most normal content. Evil Hunter and Dawnbreaker are there as passive damage buffs since you won't be maintaining Major Brutality and need them to help lessen the blow, plus Dawnbreaker is just a great damaging ultimate regardless.

Magblade - Force Pulse, Wall of Elements, Crippling Blast, Inner Light, Impale, Meteor/Elemental Storm

Again, maintain Wall + Cripple and spam Force Pulse. Use Meteor/E.Storm for more damage here and there and you should be fine.

Runefang

Ebonslayer21 wrote: »

I'm NB.

What race are you?

cjhhickman39

A simple way to keep track of your buff debuff times to start is to use a very visible one with the longest duration (DW,blade cloak, mirage if you don’t use DW) there on you and easy to see. When it drops hit them with the rotation again

commdt

If you are mana NB, than it is not your class, cause it has dynamic rotation (you have to change rotation constantly to upkeep buffs). Probably, the most complex rotation out there. You can choose some static rotation but it will be 25k (dummy) DPS at best (which is still enough for non-DLS vets)
If you want the easiest rotations it would be mag sorc for mana and stam DK for stamina, stam DK is absolutely easiest in this regard. With your NB you can choose stamina, which has more or less static rotation not counting Assassins will. I guess you can do 35-40k (dummy) without it

VaranisArano

I can hit 10-15k DPS with multiple characters with comfortable, non meta rotations. That's viable for normal and easy vet dungeons. For me, hitting 20k+ DPS took using a meta rotation with the buffs, debuffs, and DOTs, which is overkill for all overland content, but needed for harder vet content.

FakeFox

In order to understand why DOTs (and buffs) are mandatory to doing good DPS, you need to understand how DOTs work as a concept. Because DOTs, in contrast to a spamable skill, only need to be recasted every ~10 seconds they give you a window in which you do damage, but not use global cooldowns, which allows you to use other damage sources in the meantime. This means that the damage of the stacked DOTs in a rotation is multiple times more then a spamable can do. The nature of this systems makes it impossible to hit good DPS numbers without a "complex" rotation.
However, for the content you are aiming for, this doesn't really matter. You can pull 10-15k with a single skill, add in the 2-3 other skill you a willing to use and you can get maybe 20k, which is more then enough for the easier vet-dungeons.
In conclusion, I would like to encourage you to not give up too quick. Becoming good can be quite a long way in ESO, but I think it's more then worth it. Playing complex builds and mastering them can be one of the most fun things in the game.

MakeMeUhSamich

No-pet-MagSorc-tanky-easy 25k+ build with no VMA or Trial Gear:

http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/MakeMeUhSamich/video/45884155

Anotherone773

If you cant do a 10 button rotation and hit 40k on a dummy, you should reroll IRL. Just kidding.

I have a Bosmer stamblade. 250CP Uses one bar. Has pos inj,snipe, draining shot, caltrops, endless hail on a bar. Its the only bar i use. He is wearing gold hundings with hundings bow, purple velidreth shoulders with the wrong trait, 2 purple red mountain, purple agility jewels. His penetration is a whopping 1500. Using trash pots, no buffs other than hawk's eye and minor fracture and no poison, i can sustain 10k on a dummy with him using only injection and snipe with LA and HA.

If i add more stuff to a dummy, my dps drops. Add poison, dps drops, add caltrops dps drops, add endless hail dps drops. Why does it drop? because the abilities may be instant but casting them is not. So the time i spend fooling around with a bunch of garbage, i could be firing snipes and replenishing my stam. If i cast caltrops that ability does about 1900 dps but it takes a second to target and fire. It takes a second to use snipe so i drop from 12k damage that second to 1900 dps. Do the same with endless, 1500 dps and takes a second or two to cast. so i lost out on 24k damage to gain 5300 damage. Now i have to recast injection, and then i have to do HA to regain all the stam i lost with Dots. Back to snipe, i get to snipe once and its time to start over recasting all of my DoTs again.

Now add a second bar to that so you do all that swap bars, do a second bar full of stuff, swap bars. Oh wait got to add the good pots in there. So now we have to keep uptime on our pots. Wait not done yet. got synergies to hit, lets add those in there.

In a combat setting we have to mix all this in with running, dodging, and blocking. Well now im just trying to maintain uptime on stuff while trying to stay alive. That completely tosses my uber elite rotations out the window.

While you try to keep up with your elite rotation you spent 6 hours practicing on a dummy, ill use inject and snipe and if we are fighting trash my aoes. I bet i do as much damage as you if not more.

Do the same thing on my level 35 magsorc with 150 allocated cp and crappy blue gear. I LL and shard everything and im doing more dps than the other dps who is CP 300 plus and doing a long rotation. Do it all the time in dungeons. I dont even have most of my passives...like at all, not even a single point in most of them.

The only use for a dummy is for comparison purposes and to enlarge your epeen after you do 200 parses to get that one where everything went perfect, procs fired a lot, you was criting like crazy, and you hit every button perfectly on time with zero distractions, zero lag, zero fps drops, and zero bugs.

Unfortunately we dont play in a perfect world. It doesnt matter how much dps you can do if you cant apply it consistently in a combat setting without dying. Ill take someone that does consistently lower dps without needing a bunch of buffs and debuffs and can do the mechanics and not die over someone that hit like freight train on a dummy but that is their one trick pony.

And as someone that heals a lot in dungeons, i see a lot of that. I dread getting high levels in my groups because of that perfect rotation meta that is utter garbage in a useful setting. So i spend all my time trying to keep their gimpy asses alive. Meanwhile the level 20s and 30s newbs are rocking it out. Sure it takes them a little longer, but they arent almost dead every 10 seconds either and i dont have to spam heals on them to keep them alive.

Many people in this game are absolutely certifiably insane.

Oreyn_Bearclaw

Ebonslayer21 wrote: »

I'm NB.

Honestly, you should at least consider a class change. Playing Nightblade as a damage dealer has both the highest ceiling and the lowest floor of any DPS class I can think of. In the right hands, they are gods among men, but those hands are doing exactly what you have stated you dont want to do. There isnt a more complex rotation in the game than nightblade, and if you cant make a reasonable pass at it, the damage is going to be really bad.

That said, you could play it really simple. Keep up 2 long buffs (Siphoning Strikes and Merciless resolve), maybe one ground dot (blockade or path, or maybe both) and then use your 2 spam skills. Funnel for single target, sap essence for AOE. Your damage wont be good, but it will get you through normal dungeons.

If you are looking for the best ratio of DPS/Effort, there is no better class than magic sorc. Second place is probably magic templar actually.

Integral1900

My magic based warden healer/dps doesn’t have a rotation at all, more like a tool kit with diffrent defensive, buffing and offensive skills. She does plenty to solo normal dungeons and no one ever gave me a boot from trials, vet or otherwise. Experiment, watch a lot of videos and most of all just play a lot, you will reach a point where you will find what works for you


Oh yes, and like all good content creators will say, don’t ever just copy a build, what works for one player almost certainly won’t work for another

Oreyn_Bearclaw

Anotherone773 wrote: »

If you cant do a 10 button rotation and hit 40k on a dummy, you should reroll IRL. Just kidding.

I have a Bosmer stamblade. 250CP Uses one bar. Has pos inj,snipe, draining shot, caltrops, endless hail on a bar. Its the only bar i use. He is wearing gold hundings with hundings bow, purple velidreth shoulders with the wrong trait, 2 purple red mountain, purple agility jewels. His penetration is a whopping 1500. Using trash pots, no buffs other than hawk's eye and minor fracture and no poison, i can sustain 10k on a dummy with him using only injection and snipe with LA and HA.

If i add more stuff to a dummy, my dps drops. Add poison, dps drops, add caltrops dps drops, add endless hail dps drops. Why does it drop? because the abilities may be instant but casting them is not. So the time i spend fooling around with a bunch of garbage, i could be firing snipes and replenishing my stam. If i cast caltrops that ability does about 1900 dps but it takes a second to target and fire. It takes a second to use snipe so i drop from 12k damage that second to 1900 dps. Do the same with endless, 1500 dps and takes a second or two to cast. so i lost out on 24k damage to gain 5300 damage. Now i have to recast injection, and then i have to do HA to regain all the stam i lost with Dots. Back to snipe, i get to snipe once and its time to start over recasting all of my DoTs again.

Now add a second bar to that so you do all that swap bars, do a second bar full of stuff, swap bars. Oh wait got to add the good pots in there. So now we have to keep uptime on our pots. Wait not done yet. got synergies to hit, lets add those in there.

In a combat setting we have to mix all this in with running, dodging, and blocking. Well now im just trying to maintain uptime on stuff while trying to stay alive. That completely tosses my uber elite rotations out the window.

While you try to keep up with your elite rotation you spent 6 hours practicing on a dummy, ill use inject and snipe and if we are fighting trash my aoes. I bet i do as much damage as you if not more.

Do the same thing on my level 35 magsorc with 150 allocated cp and crappy blue gear. I LL and shard everything and im doing more dps than the other dps who is CP 300 plus and doing a long rotation. Do it all the time in dungeons. I dont even have most of my passives...like at all, not even a single point in most of them.

The only use for a dummy is for comparison purposes and to enlarge your epeen after you do 200 parses to get that one where everything went perfect, procs fired a lot, you was criting like crazy, and you hit every button perfectly on time with zero distractions, zero lag, zero fps drops, and zero bugs.

Unfortunately we dont play in a perfect world. It doesnt matter how much dps you can do if you cant apply it consistently in a combat setting without dying. Ill take someone that does consistently lower dps without needing a bunch of buffs and debuffs and can do the mechanics and not die over someone that hit like freight train on a dummy but that is their one trick pony.

And as someone that heals a lot in dungeons, i see a lot of that. I dread getting high levels in my groups because of that perfect rotation meta that is utter garbage in a useful setting. So i spend all my time trying to keep their gimpy asses alive. Meanwhile the level 20s and 30s newbs are rocking it out. Sure it takes them a little longer, but they arent almost dead every 10 seconds either and i dont have to spam heals on them to keep them alive.

Many people in this game are absolutely certifiably insane.

This might be the dumbest thing I have ever read. It's one thing to suggest that the meta rotation is not for everyone, because it's certainly not. It's quite another to actually suggest that combining DOTS and buffs will actually cause you to do less DPS.

I dont think you have the faintest idea of how a damage rotation works in this game. 95% of skills can be cast on a 1 second global cooldown. Snipe might hit for more than caltrops in that instant, but one caltrops does more total damage than one snipe if you let it run its course. That is the whole point of a damage rotation. You can only cast one thing a second. Every second, you should cast the skill that will give you the most benefit. The only time the answer is a spam skill, is when all your other buffs or DOTs are ticking. Snipe is actually an exception to this rule because it actually takes longer than 1 second to cast. So actually, not only does something like caltrops do more damage, it can be cast faster than snipe, which makes a snipe spam one of the worst type of spam rotations.

I am 100% not surprised you cap out at 10k DPS, which is certainly not enough for the vast majority of vet content. Now you can clear most normal content with just about any build you can think of, but please dont preach about how that is a good thing and people that try to actually complete real content are certifiably insane.

Ebonslayer21

I've come up with an idea that, if it works, may not require much of a rotation if at all. I'm thinking a Stamblade build based around proccing as many crits as possible and doing high damage with them. I'll throw together some information below:

Weapons: Dual daggers on both bars with the Precise trait on all of them and some random enchantment (doesn't matter).

Armor/Sets: 7/7 Medium. 5 pieces Leviathan (likely 3 on the jewelry) and 5 Hunding's Rage or Night's Silence (leaning towards Hunding's Rage). All pieces have Divine Trait.

Main Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Killer's Blade, Grim Focus, Bloodthirst, Ambush (this last one doesn't really matter but an assassination ability is preferred).

Backup Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Shadowy Disguise, Surprise Attack. (Two other abilities but those don't matter)

Passives: Pressure Points, Hemorrhage, Controlled Flurry, Twin Blade And Blunt, Dexterity (with 7/7 Medium Armor), and Slayer.

Mundus Stone: Shadow.

Basically, here's how combat would normally go solo: I'd start in the second bar and attack an enemy with Surprise Attack after activating Shadowy Disguise. This grants an automatic critical hit which procs Hemorrhage which grants me Minor Savagery, on top of that if I do it from crouch Camouflaged Hunter will proc Minor Brutality. After that (or if I can't do it because I'm in a group) I'd return to my main bar and set up Relentless Focus and start spamming Bloodthirst while weaving, activating Assassin's Scourge whenever it pops up. I say Bloodthirst because from what I understand each hit has a chance to proc a crit and the more we proc the better.

The way this is set up limits my normal damage but if I crit it should be quite effective. The Shadow Stone alongside a full set of Divines gear will increase my crit damage quite a bit.

If anyone with better insight knows this idea will never work just tell me, if it could work but would require more fine tuning also tell me. I'm open to suggestions.

FakeFox

Ebonslayer21 wrote: »

I've come up with an idea that, if it works, may not require much of a rotation if at all. I'm thinking a Stamblade build based around proccing as many crits as possible and doing high damage with them. I'll throw together some information below:

Weapons: Dual daggers on both bars with the Precise trait on all of them and some random enchantment (doesn't matter).

Armor/Sets: 7/7 Medium. 5 pieces Leviathan (likely 3 on the jewelry) and 5 Hunding's Rage or Night's Silence (leaning towards Hunding's Rage). All pieces have Divine Trait.

Main Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Killer's Blade, Grim Focus, Bloodthirst, Ambush (this last one doesn't really matter but an assassination ability is preferred).

Backup Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Shadowy Disguise, Surprise Attack. (Two other abilities but those don't matter)

Passives: Pressure Points, Hemorrhage, Controlled Flurry, Twin Blade And Blunt, Dexterity (with 7/7 Medium Armor), and Slayer.

Mundus Stone: Shadow.

Basically, here's how combat would normally go solo: I'd start in the second bar and attack an enemy with Surprise Attack after activating Shadowy Disguise. This grants an automatic critical hit which procs Hemorrhage which grants me Minor Savagery, on top of that if I do it from crouch Camouflaged Hunter will proc Minor Brutality. After that (or if I can't do it because I'm in a group) I'd return to my main bar and set up Relentless Focus and start spamming Bloodthirst while weaving, activating Assassin's Scourge whenever it pops up. I say Bloodthirst because from what I understand each hit has a chance to proc a crit and the more we proc the better.

The way this is set up limits my normal damage but if I crit it should be quite effective. The Shadow Stone alongside a full set of Divines gear will increase my crit damage quite a bit.

If anyone with better insight knows this idea will never work just tell me, if it could work but would require more fine tuning also tell me. I'm open to suggestions.

Many meta builds have 70-80% and you can't really get more while maintaining a functional build and not having a crit chance higher then your effective crit. Stacking crit damage apart from minor/major force isn't really a thing either.
The point is that crit on it's own is worth nothing. It is a percent multiplier, so you need a strong base value for it to scale high.
If your normal hits do no damage your crits also wont't do damage. You need proper base values from your spell-/weapondamage and penetration.

VaranisArano

Anotherone773 wrote: »

If i add more stuff to a dummy, my dps drops. Add poison, dps drops, add caltrops dps drops, add endless hail dps drops. Why does it drop? because the abilities may be instant but casting them is not. So the time i spend fooling around with a bunch of garbage, i could be firing snipes and replenishing my stam. If i cast caltrops that ability does about 1900 dps but it takes a second to target and fire. It takes a second to use snipe so i drop from 12k damage that second to 1900 dps. Do the same with endless, 1500 dps and takes a second or two to cast. so i lost out on 24k damage to gain 5300 damage. Now i have to recast injection, and then i have to do HA to regain all the stam i lost with Dots. Back to snipe, i get to snipe once and its time to start over recasting all of my DoTs again.

Now add a second bar to that so you do all that swap bars, do a second bar full of stuff, swap bars. Oh wait got to add the good pots in there. So now we have to keep uptime on our pots. Wait not done yet. got synergies to hit, lets add those in there.

The whole point of using DOTs in a rotation isn't to keep up a single-target skill that does 12K damage. Its that by the time I've hit my Endless Hail, Poison Injection, Rearming Trap, Caltrops and Rending Slashes I've worked up to 8-10K+ DPS just on DOTs alone. Now I swap to my spammables like Shrouded Daggers and weaving Heavy attacks, adding that damage on top of my DOTs, then swap back to recast my DOTs. On a boss fight, I can usually get in 2-3 heavy attacks woven with shouded daggers before I have to swap bars for DOTs.

Your constant DPS comes from your DOTs. Your spammables and woven heavy attacks and ultimates add layers of DPS on top of that.

Now, does this all go out the window in the heat of combat? Sort of yes, sort of no. I can do my rotation pretty easily in dungeons, because the boss mechanics are well-known and predictable at this point. Rolling dodging or blocking and picking up where I left off isn't that hard. The better you know the content, the better you can hold a steady, practiced rotation. However I'm also running VMA for the first time, and LOL my rotation is not clean at all! My strategy for VMA is totally "whatever gets me through this round" and rotation takes a back seat to survival.

I can only speak from my own experience I mentioned above. I had managed to get myself up to 16K DPS with a comfortable rotation that used some, but not all of the DOTs. Then I tried a different rotation, a meta rotation from one of the popular build sites, and I...I sort of hate to admit it, you know, but it worked. With that rotation, I was hitting 22K DPS regularly on 3 and 6 mil health dummies, far better than I'd been doing before and with even less practice. Like, I'd basically sat down and tried out the rotation and was already crushing my previous numbers. Humble pie for me, can I say?

Ultimately, you can play how you want and use the rotation that's most comfortable for you. You can even Snipe your way to victory, confident that Sniping for 12k DPS will get you through most normal dungeons and a few easy Vet ones, which it will. Most Normal and easy vets can be easily accomplished with 10K+ DPS. You can use, as I did, a comfortable rotation and get a level of DPS you are happy with.

But the theorycrafters design their rotations with lots of DOTs the way they do for a reason. Properly done and applied over long fights like dungeon bosses, training dummies, and trials, the DOT-based rotations perform under pressure.

FakeFox

Anotherone773 wrote: »

If you cant do a 10 button rotation and hit 40k on a dummy, you should reroll IRL. Just kidding.

I have a Bosmer stamblade. 250CP Uses one bar. Has pos inj,snipe, draining shot, caltrops, endless hail on a bar. Its the only bar i use. He is wearing gold hundings with hundings bow, purple velidreth shoulders with the wrong trait, 2 purple red mountain, purple agility jewels. His penetration is a whopping 1500. Using trash pots, no buffs other than hawk's eye and minor fracture and no poison, i can sustain 10k on a dummy with him using only injection and snipe with LA and HA.

If i add more stuff to a dummy, my dps drops. Add poison, dps drops, add caltrops dps drops, add endless hail dps drops. Why does it drop? because the abilities may be instant but casting them is not. So the time i spend fooling around with a bunch of garbage, i could be firing snipes and replenishing my stam. If i cast caltrops that ability does about 1900 dps but it takes a second to target and fire. It takes a second to use snipe so i drop from 12k damage that second to 1900 dps. Do the same with endless, 1500 dps and takes a second or two to cast. so i lost out on 24k damage to gain 5300 damage. Now i have to recast injection, and then i have to do HA to regain all the stam i lost with Dots. Back to snipe, i get to snipe once and its time to start over recasting all of my DoTs again.

Now add a second bar to that so you do all that swap bars, do a second bar full of stuff, swap bars. Oh wait got to add the good pots in there. So now we have to keep uptime on our pots. Wait not done yet. got synergies to hit, lets add those in there.

In a combat setting we have to mix all this in with running, dodging, and blocking. Well now im just trying to maintain uptime on stuff while trying to stay alive. That completely tosses my uber elite rotations out the window.

While you try to keep up with your elite rotation you spent 6 hours practicing on a dummy, ill use inject and snipe and if we are fighting trash my aoes. I bet i do as much damage as you if not more.

Do the same thing on my level 35 magsorc with 150 allocated cp and crappy blue gear. I LL and shard everything and im doing more dps than the other dps who is CP 300 plus and doing a long rotation. Do it all the time in dungeons. I dont even have most of my passives...like at all, not even a single point in most of them.

The only use for a dummy is for comparison purposes and to enlarge your epeen after you do 200 parses to get that one where everything went perfect, procs fired a lot, you was criting like crazy, and you hit every button perfectly on time with zero distractions, zero lag, zero fps drops, and zero bugs.

Unfortunately we dont play in a perfect world. It doesnt matter how much dps you can do if you cant apply it consistently in a combat setting without dying. Ill take someone that does consistently lower dps without needing a bunch of buffs and debuffs and can do the mechanics and not die over someone that hit like freight train on a dummy but that is their one trick pony.

And as someone that heals a lot in dungeons, i see a lot of that. I dread getting high levels in my groups because of that perfect rotation meta that is utter garbage in a useful setting. So i spend all my time trying to keep their gimpy asses alive. Meanwhile the level 20s and 30s newbs are rocking it out. Sure it takes them a little longer, but they arent almost dead every 10 seconds either and i dont have to spam heals on them to keep them alive.

Many people in this game are absolutely certifiably insane.

You are very much off with your math here.
1. If you spend one second on snipe you do 12k damage. If you spend one second on caltrops you do 13x 1.9k, so 24.7k damage. Therefore you effectively do twice the damage for this second. If a DOT does more damage over it's duration then you spamable, it is more effective.
2. Synergies do not use a global cooldown, therefore they are independent from your rotation.

You are right, that doing a rotation in actual fight is harder then on a dummy, however this is what you train for. To be able to use your rotation while playing all those mechanics. And no you don't pull more then players with proper rotations. I think you completely lack a sense of scale here. While you do 10k DPS, good players do 40k on a dummy and even more in actual fights. Those rotations you are talking about are made for actual dungeons and trails and pulling them off is no problem what so ever.
If this playstyle is as ineffective as you say, why is everyone on top of the leaderboards using it then? Don't you think those players would have changed it if it would be ineffective?

Ebonslayer21

FakeFox wrote: »

Ebonslayer21 wrote: »

I've come up with an idea that, if it works, may not require much of a rotation if at all. I'm thinking a Stamblade build based around proccing as many crits as possible and doing high damage with them. I'll throw together some information below:

Weapons: Dual daggers on both bars with the Precise trait on all of them and some random enchantment (doesn't matter).

Armor/Sets: 7/7 Medium. 5 pieces Leviathan (likely 3 on the jewelry) and 5 Hunding's Rage or Night's Silence (leaning towards Hunding's Rage). All pieces have Divine Trait.

Main Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Killer's Blade, Grim Focus, Bloodthirst, Ambush (this last one doesn't really matter but an assassination ability is preferred).

Backup Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Shadowy Disguise, Surprise Attack. (Two other abilities but those don't matter)

Passives: Pressure Points, Hemorrhage, Controlled Flurry, Twin Blade And Blunt, Dexterity (with 7/7 Medium Armor), and Slayer.

Mundus Stone: Shadow.

Basically, here's how combat would normally go solo: I'd start in the second bar and attack an enemy with Surprise Attack after activating Shadowy Disguise. This grants an automatic critical hit which procs Hemorrhage which grants me Minor Savagery, on top of that if I do it from crouch Camouflaged Hunter will proc Minor Brutality. After that (or if I can't do it because I'm in a group) I'd return to my main bar and set up Relentless Focus and start spamming Bloodthirst while weaving, activating Assassin's Scourge whenever it pops up. I say Bloodthirst because from what I understand each hit has a chance to proc a crit and the more we proc the better.

The way this is set up limits my normal damage but if I crit it should be quite effective. The Shadow Stone alongside a full set of Divines gear will increase my crit damage quite a bit.

If anyone with better insight knows this idea will never work just tell me, if it could work but would require more fine tuning also tell me. I'm open to suggestions.

Many meta builds have 70-80% and you can't really get more while maintaining a functional build and not having a crit chance higher then your effective crit. Stacking crit damage apart from minor/major force isn't really a thing either.
The point is that crit on it's own is worth nothing. It is a percent multiplier, so you need a strong base value for it to scale high.
If your normal hits do no damage your crits also wont't do damage. You need proper base values from your spell-/weapondamage and penetration.

So I'll need to increase my base damage, basically? Hmmmm, maybe Hunding's Rage should be the second set. I can also switch the primary weapon on both bars to a sword instead of a dagger and give the swords Nirnhoned or Sharpened with a Weapon Damage enchantment and the dagger can switch to Infused with a Crusher Enchantment. How does that sound?

FakeFox

Ebonslayer21 wrote: »

FakeFox wrote: »

Ebonslayer21 wrote: »

I've come up with an idea that, if it works, may not require much of a rotation if at all. I'm thinking a Stamblade build based around proccing as many crits as possible and doing high damage with them. I'll throw together some information below:

Weapons: Dual daggers on both bars with the Precise trait on all of them and some random enchantment (doesn't matter).

Armor/Sets: 7/7 Medium. 5 pieces Leviathan (likely 3 on the jewelry) and 5 Hunding's Rage or Night's Silence (leaning towards Hunding's Rage). All pieces have Divine Trait.

Main Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Killer's Blade, Grim Focus, Bloodthirst, Ambush (this last one doesn't really matter but an assassination ability is preferred).

Backup Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Shadowy Disguise, Surprise Attack. (Two other abilities but those don't matter)

Passives: Pressure Points, Hemorrhage, Controlled Flurry, Twin Blade And Blunt, Dexterity (with 7/7 Medium Armor), and Slayer.

Mundus Stone: Shadow.

Basically, here's how combat would normally go solo: I'd start in the second bar and attack an enemy with Surprise Attack after activating Shadowy Disguise. This grants an automatic critical hit which procs Hemorrhage which grants me Minor Savagery, on top of that if I do it from crouch Camouflaged Hunter will proc Minor Brutality. After that (or if I can't do it because I'm in a group) I'd return to my main bar and set up Relentless Focus and start spamming Bloodthirst while weaving, activating Assassin's Scourge whenever it pops up. I say Bloodthirst because from what I understand each hit has a chance to proc a crit and the more we proc the better.

The way this is set up limits my normal damage but if I crit it should be quite effective. The Shadow Stone alongside a full set of Divines gear will increase my crit damage quite a bit.

If anyone with better insight knows this idea will never work just tell me, if it could work but would require more fine tuning also tell me. I'm open to suggestions.

Many meta builds have 70-80% and you can't really get more while maintaining a functional build and not having a crit chance higher then your effective crit. Stacking crit damage apart from minor/major force isn't really a thing either.
The point is that crit on it's own is worth nothing. It is a percent multiplier, so you need a strong base value for it to scale high.
If your normal hits do no damage your crits also wont't do damage. You need proper base values from your spell-/weapondamage and penetration.

So I'll need to increase my base damage, basically? Hmmmm, maybe Hunding's Rage should be the second set. I can also switch the primary weapon on both bars to a sword instead of a dagger and give the swords Nirnhoned or Sharpened with a Weapon Damage enchantment and the dagger can switch to Infused with a Crusher Enchantment. How does that sound?

You need a generally good balance of stats with a build that includes sets, traits, etc. that are generally strong.
I wouldn't take swords in PvE, their fixed percent value scales rather weak. Daggers are fine, or one axe and one dagger.
Hundings is a good set, however I think something with high penetration could be better suited for the contend you want to do. I'm thinking about Spriggan's Thorns or Twice Fanged Serpent here. For the mundus you could take either Warrior or Lover, depending on how much penetration you have.

WuffyCerulei

Magicka sorcs are pretty easy. Pet sorcs only have 4 abilities that need constant uptime, while non-pet sorcs have 3.

Note: When I'm saying what the rotation is, LA is Light Attack and HA is Heavy Attack.

Pet sorcs use liquid lightning, elemental blockade, familiar pulse, and daedric curse. They mainly rely on a heavy attack every rotation to keep sustain. Their rotation generally is: liquid lightning>LA>elemental blockade>LA>Familiar>Barswap>Daedric Curse>LA>Destructive Clench>HA>Repeat. Also use the ulti when you have it available.

Non-pet sorcs have liquid lightning, elemental blockade, and haunting curse. You can use a fire or lighting staff for your front bar, but lightning is better if you have sustain issues. Their rotation is: liquid lightning>LA>elemental blockade>barswap>Haunting curse>Weave LAs with 4-5 force pulse>cast crystal frags when procced>barswap>liquid lightning>LA>blockade>6 force pulses with LA weaving>crystal frags whenever procced>repeat. Replace 2 force pulses with a lightning HA when needed.

You can use Witchmother's brew for that sustain boost.

Ebonslayer21

FakeFox wrote: »

Ebonslayer21 wrote: »

FakeFox wrote: »

Ebonslayer21 wrote: »

I've come up with an idea that, if it works, may not require much of a rotation if at all. I'm thinking a Stamblade build based around proccing as many crits as possible and doing high damage with them. I'll throw together some information below:

Weapons: Dual daggers on both bars with the Precise trait on all of them and some random enchantment (doesn't matter).

Armor/Sets: 7/7 Medium. 5 pieces Leviathan (likely 3 on the jewelry) and 5 Hunding's Rage or Night's Silence (leaning towards Hunding's Rage). All pieces have Divine Trait.

Main Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Killer's Blade, Grim Focus, Bloodthirst, Ambush (this last one doesn't really matter but an assassination ability is preferred).

Backup Bar Abilities: Camouflaged Hunter, Shadowy Disguise, Surprise Attack. (Two other abilities but those don't matter)

Passives: Pressure Points, Hemorrhage, Controlled Flurry, Twin Blade And Blunt, Dexterity (with 7/7 Medium Armor), and Slayer.

Mundus Stone: Shadow.

Basically, here's how combat would normally go solo: I'd start in the second bar and attack an enemy with Surprise Attack after activating Shadowy Disguise. This grants an automatic critical hit which procs Hemorrhage which grants me Minor Savagery, on top of that if I do it from crouch Camouflaged Hunter will proc Minor Brutality. After that (or if I can't do it because I'm in a group) I'd return to my main bar and set up Relentless Focus and start spamming Bloodthirst while weaving, activating Assassin's Scourge whenever it pops up. I say Bloodthirst because from what I understand each hit has a chance to proc a crit and the more we proc the better.

The way this is set up limits my normal damage but if I crit it should be quite effective. The Shadow Stone alongside a full set of Divines gear will increase my crit damage quite a bit.

If anyone with better insight knows this idea will never work just tell me, if it could work but would require more fine tuning also tell me. I'm open to suggestions.

Many meta builds have 70-80% and you can't really get more while maintaining a functional build and not having a crit chance higher then your effective crit. Stacking crit damage apart from minor/major force isn't really a thing either.
The point is that crit on it's own is worth nothing. It is a percent multiplier, so you need a strong base value for it to scale high.
If your normal hits do no damage your crits also wont't do damage. You need proper base values from your spell-/weapondamage and penetration.

So I'll need to increase my base damage, basically? Hmmmm, maybe Hunding's Rage should be the second set. I can also switch the primary weapon on both bars to a sword instead of a dagger and give the swords Nirnhoned or Sharpened with a Weapon Damage enchantment and the dagger can switch to Infused with a Crusher Enchantment. How does that sound?

You need a generally good balance of stats with a build that includes sets, traits, etc. that are generally strong.
I wouldn't take swords in PvE, their fixed percent value scales rather weak. Daggers are fine, or one axe and one dagger.
Hundings is a good set, however I think something with high penetration could be better suited for the contend you want to do. I'm thinking about Spriggan's Thorns or Twice Fanged Serpent here. For the mundus you could take either Warrior or Lover, depending on how much penetration you have.

I'm looking at my build in a build calculator and with the setup I made I barely hit 2k damage, 2185 specifically. I think losing Hunding's would really hurt my already barely passing damage. I'll throw those sets in and switch back to daggers and give you the results. Also, I sorta need the Shadow Mundus stone for this character because roleplay-wise he's a Shadowscale.

Narvuntien

For my MagDk

I put wall of elements on my front bar so I don't have to weapon swap as much.. now I only have to do it every 15 secs instead of 8. my dps seems to go up despite the Nirnhorned back bar just because I get less weapon swap lag messing with my skeleton parse.

You can get a whole bunch of the buffs using potions and poisons and don't have have skills for it. you can also get an ally to apply elemental drain or puncture on the dummy for you (as a good group will have these things)

Anotherone773

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Anotherone773 wrote: »

If you cant do a 10 button rotation and hit 40k on a dummy, you should reroll IRL. Just kidding.

I have a Bosmer stamblade. 250CP Uses one bar. Has pos inj,snipe, draining shot, caltrops, endless hail on a bar. Its the only bar i use. He is wearing gold hundings with hundings bow, purple velidreth shoulders with the wrong trait, 2 purple red mountain, purple agility jewels. His penetration is a whopping 1500. Using trash pots, no buffs other than hawk's eye and minor fracture and no poison, i can sustain 10k on a dummy with him using only injection and snipe with LA and HA.

If i add more stuff to a dummy, my dps drops. Add poison, dps drops, add caltrops dps drops, add endless hail dps drops. Why does it drop? because the abilities may be instant but casting them is not. So the time i spend fooling around with a bunch of garbage, i could be firing snipes and replenishing my stam. If i cast caltrops that ability does about 1900 dps but it takes a second to target and fire. It takes a second to use snipe so i drop from 12k damage that second to 1900 dps. Do the same with endless, 1500 dps and takes a second or two to cast. so i lost out on 24k damage to gain 5300 damage. Now i have to recast injection, and then i have to do HA to regain all the stam i lost with Dots. Back to snipe, i get to snipe once and its time to start over recasting all of my DoTs again.

Now add a second bar to that so you do all that swap bars, do a second bar full of stuff, swap bars. Oh wait got to add the good pots in there. So now we have to keep uptime on our pots. Wait not done yet. got synergies to hit, lets add those in there.

In a combat setting we have to mix all this in with running, dodging, and blocking. Well now im just trying to maintain uptime on stuff while trying to stay alive. That completely tosses my uber elite rotations out the window.

While you try to keep up with your elite rotation you spent 6 hours practicing on a dummy, ill use inject and snipe and if we are fighting trash my aoes. I bet i do as much damage as you if not more.

Do the same thing on my level 35 magsorc with 150 allocated cp and crappy blue gear. I LL and shard everything and im doing more dps than the other dps who is CP 300 plus and doing a long rotation. Do it all the time in dungeons. I dont even have most of my passives...like at all, not even a single point in most of them.

The only use for a dummy is for comparison purposes and to enlarge your epeen after you do 200 parses to get that one where everything went perfect, procs fired a lot, you was criting like crazy, and you hit every button perfectly on time with zero distractions, zero lag, zero fps drops, and zero bugs.

Unfortunately we dont play in a perfect world. It doesnt matter how much dps you can do if you cant apply it consistently in a combat setting without dying. Ill take someone that does consistently lower dps without needing a bunch of buffs and debuffs and can do the mechanics and not die over someone that hit like freight train on a dummy but that is their one trick pony.

And as someone that heals a lot in dungeons, i see a lot of that. I dread getting high levels in my groups because of that perfect rotation meta that is utter garbage in a useful setting. So i spend all my time trying to keep their gimpy asses alive. Meanwhile the level 20s and 30s newbs are rocking it out. Sure it takes them a little longer, but they arent almost dead every 10 seconds either and i dont have to spam heals on them to keep them alive.

Many people in this game are absolutely certifiably insane.

This might be the dumbest thing I have ever read. It's one thing to suggest that the meta rotation is not for everyone, because it's certainly not. It's quite another to actually suggest that combining DOTS and buffs will actually cause you to do less DPS.

I dont think you have the faintest idea of how a damage rotation works in this game. 95% of skills can be cast on a 1 second global cooldown. Snipe might hit for more than caltrops in that instant, but one caltrops does more total damage than one snipe if you let it run its course. That is the whole point of a damage rotation. You can only cast one thing a second. Every second, you should cast the skill that will give you the most benefit. The only time the answer is a spam skill, is when all your other buffs or DOTs are ticking. Snipe is actually an exception to this rule because it actually takes longer than 1 second to cast. So actually, not only does something like caltrops do more damage, it can be cast faster than snipe, which makes a snipe spam one of the worst type of spam rotations.

I am 100% not surprised you cap out at 10k DPS, which is certainly not enough for the vast majority of vet content. Now you can clear most normal content with just about any build you can think of, but please dont preach about how that is a good thing and people that try to actually complete real content are certifiably insane.

Actually you missed most of my points and then cherry picked your arguments, so..... strawman? In relation to the topic, no you dont need all of that to do viable DPS. I used a trash toon( the one that you pulled the 10k number from) that isnt complete, only uses a bow, with bad racials, has less than 300 CP, has horrible penetration( and his crit isnt good either), using only trash pots( you know the ones that drop as loot) no poisons( disease enchant) and only use two abilities and i can still do 10k on a dummy.<<THAT was the point. Imagine if i actually built him for combat. And in dungeons he can pull 15-25k single target depending on the boss, group makeup etc. On top of that i have a magsorc im working on who is still low level who can, ALSO using two abilities( three if you count a pet) can hit 8-9k on a dummy ( im not writing it all again).

So in conclusion it is possible to do viable DPS without a lot of effort. Will you win ESO? no probably not. But the OP didnt ask to be on top of leaderboards, or even in the top 10%. The OP asked for viable DPS. Now to an elitist meta player that might mean 30-35k dps. But to normal folks. 15k-25k is just fine.

FakeFox wrote: »

Anotherone773 wrote: »

If you cant do a 10 button rotation and hit 40k on a dummy, you should reroll IRL. Just kidding.

I have a Bosmer stamblade. 250CP Uses one bar. Has pos inj,snipe, draining shot, caltrops, endless hail on a bar. Its the only bar i use. He is wearing gold hundings with hundings bow, purple velidreth shoulders with the wrong trait, 2 purple red mountain, purple agility jewels. His penetration is a whopping 1500. Using trash pots, no buffs other than hawk's eye and minor fracture and no poison, i can sustain 10k on a dummy with him using only injection and snipe with LA and HA.

If i add more stuff to a dummy, my dps drops. Add poison, dps drops, add caltrops dps drops, add endless hail dps drops. Why does it drop? because the abilities may be instant but casting them is not. So the time i spend fooling around with a bunch of garbage, i could be firing snipes and replenishing my stam. If i cast caltrops that ability does about 1900 dps but it takes a second to target and fire. It takes a second to use snipe so i drop from 12k damage that second to 1900 dps. Do the same with endless, 1500 dps and takes a second or two to cast. so i lost out on 24k damage to gain 5300 damage. Now i have to recast injection, and then i have to do HA to regain all the stam i lost with Dots. Back to snipe, i get to snipe once and its time to start over recasting all of my DoTs again.

Now add a second bar to that so you do all that swap bars, do a second bar full of stuff, swap bars. Oh wait got to add the good pots in there. So now we have to keep uptime on our pots. Wait not done yet. got synergies to hit, lets add those in there.

In a combat setting we have to mix all this in with running, dodging, and blocking. Well now im just trying to maintain uptime on stuff while trying to stay alive. That completely tosses my uber elite rotations out the window.

While you try to keep up with your elite rotation you spent 6 hours practicing on a dummy, ill use inject and snipe and if we are fighting trash my aoes. I bet i do as much damage as you if not more.

Do the same thing on my level 35 magsorc with 150 allocated cp and crappy blue gear. I LL and shard everything and im doing more dps than the other dps who is CP 300 plus and doing a long rotation. Do it all the time in dungeons. I dont even have most of my passives...like at all, not even a single point in most of them.

The only use for a dummy is for comparison purposes and to enlarge your epeen after you do 200 parses to get that one where everything went perfect, procs fired a lot, you was criting like crazy, and you hit every button perfectly on time with zero distractions, zero lag, zero fps drops, and zero bugs.

Unfortunately we dont play in a perfect world. It doesnt matter how much dps you can do if you cant apply it consistently in a combat setting without dying. Ill take someone that does consistently lower dps without needing a bunch of buffs and debuffs and can do the mechanics and not die over someone that hit like freight train on a dummy but that is their one trick pony.

And as someone that heals a lot in dungeons, i see a lot of that. I dread getting high levels in my groups because of that perfect rotation meta that is utter garbage in a useful setting. So i spend all my time trying to keep their gimpy asses alive. Meanwhile the level 20s and 30s newbs are rocking it out. Sure it takes them a little longer, but they arent almost dead every 10 seconds either and i dont have to spam heals on them to keep them alive.

Many people in this game are absolutely certifiably insane.

You are very much off with your math here.
1. If you spend one second on snipe you do 12k damage. If you spend one second on caltrops you do 13x 1.9k, so 24.7k damage. Therefore you effectively do twice the damage for this second. If a DOT does more damage over it's duration then you spamable, it is more effective.
2. Synergies do not use a global cooldown, therefore they are independent from your rotation.

You are right, that doing a rotation in actual fight is harder then on a dummy, however this is what you train for. To be able to use your rotation while playing all those mechanics. And no you don't pull more then players with proper rotations. I think you completely lack a sense of scale here. While you do 10k DPS, good players do 40k on a dummy and even more in actual fights. Those rotations you are talking about are made for actual dungeons and trails and pulling them off is no problem what so ever.
If this playstyle is as ineffective as you say, why is everyone on top of the leaderboards using it then? Don't you think those players would have changed it if it would be ineffective?

I know in theory it works that way, but it doesnt work that way when put to practice. Im not going to go into it because we arent going to agree. Ive been playing MMOs a long time and ive done end game in every one of them. And peoples obsession with dps here is just ridiculous. I guess thats what happens when your endgame never moves and your gear never progresses, people have to find something new to obsess about.

Anyway i thought i would humor you, so i only use one bar and only a bow on the character in question. So i spent about an hour parsing a dummy. I did my simple two ability usual, and then i did multiple parses using a slightly more complex rotation that consisted of caltrops, endless hail, injection, snipe( to keep minor fracture active as much as possible but it was the lowest priority of the abilities) with LA woven in and HA when i could to help with stam. I also burned a lot of trash pots in the more complex rotation( which i dont in a simple rotation). I did 3 simple rotations and maybe about 15 or so of the more complex ones.

In all of my parses with the more complex rotation i had 85%-100% uptime on injection, hail, and caltrops and 50%-75% on minor fracture. In my simple parses i had 90% plus uptime on inject and fracture. Using my worst simple parse and my best complex parse the difference is about 900 dps in favor of the simple parse. Best parse to best parse is a bit over 2k dps.

So while in theory, all looks great and awesome with complex rotations, in tested scenarios complex rotations fall short every time. I also have far better sustain with two ability parses. Sustain on the complex rotation is much harder and requires a lot more heavy attacks to keep everything running.

So as far as i am concerned, simpler is better. I already knew this as its been that way in every game ive played and ive done end game content just fine and consistently been in the top quarter of raid group dps in the games ive raided in. More complex may work for some people but it never has worked for me nor have i ever needed complex rotations. Furthermore, ive played with many many many people like me that could conquer content just fine without meta builds, and complex rotations.

Its just not necessary AFAIC. Some people need that complexity in their life, im not one of them.

FrancisCrawford

firedrgn wrote: »

You can do 20k easy with a pet sorc and simple button smashing with a good rotstion it goes up from there.
Just lay down two dots and heavy attack.
For overland you will never get a full rotation in before eveeything dies.p Even public dungeons is a piece of cake.
World boss you just need to use hardened ward and crit surge and u can solo half of them.

So ya lightning mag sorc pet .
Normal 4 man dungeons are super easy and half the vet dungeons. All u have to do is keep shield up and stay in heals.

I went off heals on same build and running normals as healer. Easy . The vet no. Dlc are easy to healed on some of those.

Perhaps you meant Power Surge?

Runefang

Anotherone773 wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Anotherone773 wrote: »

If you cant do a 10 button rotation and hit 40k on a dummy, you should reroll IRL. Just kidding.

I have a Bosmer stamblade. 250CP Uses one bar. Has pos inj,snipe, draining shot, caltrops, endless hail on a bar. Its the only bar i use. He is wearing gold hundings with hundings bow, purple velidreth shoulders with the wrong trait, 2 purple red mountain, purple agility jewels. His penetration is a whopping 1500. Using trash pots, no buffs other than hawk's eye and minor fracture and no poison, i can sustain 10k on a dummy with him using only injection and snipe with LA and HA.

If i add more stuff to a dummy, my dps drops. Add poison, dps drops, add caltrops dps drops, add endless hail dps drops. Why does it drop? because the abilities may be instant but casting them is not. So the time i spend fooling around with a bunch of garbage, i could be firing snipes and replenishing my stam. If i cast caltrops that ability does about 1900 dps but it takes a second to target and fire. It takes a second to use snipe so i drop from 12k damage that second to 1900 dps. Do the same with endless, 1500 dps and takes a second or two to cast. so i lost out on 24k damage to gain 5300 damage. Now i have to recast injection, and then i have to do HA to regain all the stam i lost with Dots. Back to snipe, i get to snipe once and its time to start over recasting all of my DoTs again.

Now add a second bar to that so you do all that swap bars, do a second bar full of stuff, swap bars. Oh wait got to add the good pots in there. So now we have to keep uptime on our pots. Wait not done yet. got synergies to hit, lets add those in there.

In a combat setting we have to mix all this in with running, dodging, and blocking. Well now im just trying to maintain uptime on stuff while trying to stay alive. That completely tosses my uber elite rotations out the window.

While you try to keep up with your elite rotation you spent 6 hours practicing on a dummy, ill use inject and snipe and if we are fighting trash my aoes. I bet i do as much damage as you if not more.

Do the same thing on my level 35 magsorc with 150 allocated cp and crappy blue gear. I LL and shard everything and im doing more dps than the other dps who is CP 300 plus and doing a long rotation. Do it all the time in dungeons. I dont even have most of my passives...like at all, not even a single point in most of them.

The only use for a dummy is for comparison purposes and to enlarge your epeen after you do 200 parses to get that one where everything went perfect, procs fired a lot, you was criting like crazy, and you hit every button perfectly on time with zero distractions, zero lag, zero fps drops, and zero bugs.

Unfortunately we dont play in a perfect world. It doesnt matter how much dps you can do if you cant apply it consistently in a combat setting without dying. Ill take someone that does consistently lower dps without needing a bunch of buffs and debuffs and can do the mechanics and not die over someone that hit like freight train on a dummy but that is their one trick pony.

And as someone that heals a lot in dungeons, i see a lot of that. I dread getting high levels in my groups because of that perfect rotation meta that is utter garbage in a useful setting. So i spend all my time trying to keep their gimpy asses alive. Meanwhile the level 20s and 30s newbs are rocking it out. Sure it takes them a little longer, but they arent almost dead every 10 seconds either and i dont have to spam heals on them to keep them alive.

Many people in this game are absolutely certifiably insane.

This might be the dumbest thing I have ever read. It's one thing to suggest that the meta rotation is not for everyone, because it's certainly not. It's quite another to actually suggest that combining DOTS and buffs will actually cause you to do less DPS.

I dont think you have the faintest idea of how a damage rotation works in this game. 95% of skills can be cast on a 1 second global cooldown. Snipe might hit for more than caltrops in that instant, but one caltrops does more total damage than one snipe if you let it run its course. That is the whole point of a damage rotation. You can only cast one thing a second. Every second, you should cast the skill that will give you the most benefit. The only time the answer is a spam skill, is when all your other buffs or DOTs are ticking. Snipe is actually an exception to this rule because it actually takes longer than 1 second to cast. So actually, not only does something like caltrops do more damage, it can be cast faster than snipe, which makes a snipe spam one of the worst type of spam rotations.

I am 100% not surprised you cap out at 10k DPS, which is certainly not enough for the vast majority of vet content. Now you can clear most normal content with just about any build you can think of, but please dont preach about how that is a good thing and people that try to actually complete real content are certifiably insane.

Actually you missed most of my points and then cherry picked your arguments, so..... strawman? In relation to the topic, no you dont need all of that to do viable DPS. I used a trash toon( the one that you pulled the 10k number from) that isnt complete, only uses a bow, with bad racials, has less than 300 CP, has horrible penetration( and his crit isnt good either), using only trash pots( you know the ones that drop as loot) no poisons( disease enchant) and only use two abilities and i can still do 10k on a dummy.<<THAT was the point. Imagine if i actually built him for combat. And in dungeons he can pull 15-25k single target depending on the boss, group makeup etc. On top of that i have a magsorc im working on who is still low level who can, ALSO using two abilities( three if you count a pet) can hit 8-9k on a dummy ( im not writing it all again).

So in conclusion it is possible to do viable DPS without a lot of effort. Will you win ESO? no probably not. But the OP didnt ask to be on top of leaderboards, or even in the top 10%. The OP asked for viable DPS. Now to an elitist meta player that might mean 30-35k dps. But to normal folks. 15k-25k is just fine.

FakeFox wrote: »

Anotherone773 wrote: »

If you cant do a 10 button rotation and hit 40k on a dummy, you should reroll IRL. Just kidding.

I have a Bosmer stamblade. 250CP Uses one bar. Has pos inj,snipe, draining shot, caltrops, endless hail on a bar. Its the only bar i use. He is wearing gold hundings with hundings bow, purple velidreth shoulders with the wrong trait, 2 purple red mountain, purple agility jewels. His penetration is a whopping 1500. Using trash pots, no buffs other than hawk's eye and minor fracture and no poison, i can sustain 10k on a dummy with him using only injection and snipe with LA and HA.

If i add more stuff to a dummy, my dps drops. Add poison, dps drops, add caltrops dps drops, add endless hail dps drops. Why does it drop? because the abilities may be instant but casting them is not. So the time i spend fooling around with a bunch of garbage, i could be firing snipes and replenishing my stam. If i cast caltrops that ability does about 1900 dps but it takes a second to target and fire. It takes a second to use snipe so i drop from 12k damage that second to 1900 dps. Do the same with endless, 1500 dps and takes a second or two to cast. so i lost out on 24k damage to gain 5300 damage. Now i have to recast injection, and then i have to do HA to regain all the stam i lost with Dots. Back to snipe, i get to snipe once and its time to start over recasting all of my DoTs again.

Now add a second bar to that so you do all that swap bars, do a second bar full of stuff, swap bars. Oh wait got to add the good pots in there. So now we have to keep uptime on our pots. Wait not done yet. got synergies to hit, lets add those in there.

In a combat setting we have to mix all this in with running, dodging, and blocking. Well now im just trying to maintain uptime on stuff while trying to stay alive. That completely tosses my uber elite rotations out the window.

While you try to keep up with your elite rotation you spent 6 hours practicing on a dummy, ill use inject and snipe and if we are fighting trash my aoes. I bet i do as much damage as you if not more.

Do the same thing on my level 35 magsorc with 150 allocated cp and crappy blue gear. I LL and shard everything and im doing more dps than the other dps who is CP 300 plus and doing a long rotation. Do it all the time in dungeons. I dont even have most of my passives...like at all, not even a single point in most of them.

The only use for a dummy is for comparison purposes and to enlarge your epeen after you do 200 parses to get that one where everything went perfect, procs fired a lot, you was criting like crazy, and you hit every button perfectly on time with zero distractions, zero lag, zero fps drops, and zero bugs.

Unfortunately we dont play in a perfect world. It doesnt matter how much dps you can do if you cant apply it consistently in a combat setting without dying. Ill take someone that does consistently lower dps without needing a bunch of buffs and debuffs and can do the mechanics and not die over someone that hit like freight train on a dummy but that is their one trick pony.

And as someone that heals a lot in dungeons, i see a lot of that. I dread getting high levels in my groups because of that perfect rotation meta that is utter garbage in a useful setting. So i spend all my time trying to keep their gimpy asses alive. Meanwhile the level 20s and 30s newbs are rocking it out. Sure it takes them a little longer, but they arent almost dead every 10 seconds either and i dont have to spam heals on them to keep them alive.

Many people in this game are absolutely certifiably insane.

You are very much off with your math here.
1. If you spend one second on snipe you do 12k damage. If you spend one second on caltrops you do 13x 1.9k, so 24.7k damage. Therefore you effectively do twice the damage for this second. If a DOT does more damage over it's duration then you spamable, it is more effective.
2. Synergies do not use a global cooldown, therefore they are independent from your rotation.

You are right, that doing a rotation in actual fight is harder then on a dummy, however this is what you train for. To be able to use your rotation while playing all those mechanics. And no you don't pull more then players with proper rotations. I think you completely lack a sense of scale here. While you do 10k DPS, good players do 40k on a dummy and even more in actual fights. Those rotations you are talking about are made for actual dungeons and trails and pulling them off is no problem what so ever.
If this playstyle is as ineffective as you say, why is everyone on top of the leaderboards using it then? Don't you think those players would have changed it if it would be ineffective?

I know in theory it works that way, but it doesnt work that way when put to practice. Im not going to go into it because we arent going to agree. Ive been playing MMOs a long time and ive done end game in every one of them. And peoples obsession with dps here is just ridiculous. I guess thats what happens when your endgame never moves and your gear never progresses, people have to find something new to obsess about.

Anyway i thought i would humor you, so i only use one bar and only a bow on the character in question. So i spent about an hour parsing a dummy. I did my simple two ability usual, and then i did multiple parses using a slightly more complex rotation that consisted of caltrops, endless hail, injection, snipe( to keep minor fracture active as much as possible but it was the lowest priority of the abilities) with LA woven in and HA when i could to help with stam. I also burned a lot of trash pots in the more complex rotation( which i dont in a simple rotation). I did 3 simple rotations and maybe about 15 or so of the more complex ones.

In all of my parses with the more complex rotation i had 85%-100% uptime on injection, hail, and caltrops and 50%-75% on minor fracture. In my simple parses i had 90% plus uptime on inject and fracture. Using my worst simple parse and my best complex parse the difference is about 900 dps in favor of the simple parse. Best parse to best parse is a bit over 2k dps.

So while in theory, all looks great and awesome with complex rotations, in tested scenarios complex rotations fall short every time. I also have far better sustain with two ability parses. Sustain on the complex rotation is much harder and requires a lot more heavy attacks to keep everything running.

So as far as i am concerned, simpler is better. I already knew this as its been that way in every game ive played and ive done end game content just fine and consistently been in the top quarter of raid group dps in the games ive raided in. More complex may work for some people but it never has worked for me nor have i ever needed complex rotations. Furthermore, ive played with many many many people like me that could conquer content just fine without meta builds, and complex rotations.

Its just not necessary AFAIC. Some people need that complexity in their life, im not one of them.

..... Are you serious? Look on YouTube for trial dps examples. Nobody pulling 70k on the twins is using 2 abilities lol.

Your tests might say one thing but there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary.