A comprehensive guide on damage dealing in Elder Scrolls Online

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO

@Masel92 good stuff. thank you. I was thinking more for two handers them dual weild, I understand calculating for the bleed would be hard but at what point would a maul be better the 5% damage increase from the greatsword, in pve. I have tested on a dummy with a stamplar, just spamming jabs but combat metrics seems to think that I have 5510 pen when I should not have any. I would imagine that the break even point between greatsword and mauls would lower amount of people then daggers though.

And on this-

What I'm saying is that since the removal of Unique Penetration Debuffs, the border between thos weapons has been reduced significantly, since you can not obtain that amount of penetration as easily.

I mentioned something to this effect in this thread- https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/5007693/#Comment_5007693 and people slammed me down.

Masel

Lightspeedflashb14_ESO wrote: »

@Masel92 good stuff. thank you. I was thinking more for two handers them dual weild, I understand calculating for the bleed would be hard but at what point would a maul be better the 5% damage increase from the greatsword, in pve. I have tested on a dummy with a stamplar, just spamming jabs but combat metrics seems to think that I have 5510 pen when I should not have any. I would imagine that the break even point between greatsword and mauls would lower amount of people then daggers though.

And on this-

What I'm saying is that since the removal of Unique Penetration Debuffs, the border between thos weapons has been reduced significantly, since you can not obtain that amount of penetration as easily.

I mentioned something to this effect in this thread- https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/5007693/#Comment_5007693 and people slammed me down.

A maul will be better than a greatsword in most situations. All you'd have to change is the value from 10% to 20% and the sword bonus from 2.5% to 5%. I ran a few tests now and the value is very high, often above 10k penetration debuffs (which is very very unralistic to have).

To the second point: Because many people either don't test things or simply have no idea what they are talking about. Statements like the ones that discredited yours are simply wrong. Using alkosh as a flat 3k is simply unrealistic, you wont have a crusher enchant on everything you hit, not even talking about major and minor fracture. There are trials like vAA, alright, there it might be realistic, but in the newer trials it is simply not feasible to use that kind of math at all.

Masel

Added a section about the new functionality of enchantments coming with the Wolfhunter PTS.

Masel

Added a paragraph about weighted average damage values in section three.

Solinur

Masel92 wrote: »

Added a paragraph about weighted average damage values in section three.

Thanks for keeping at it.

Masel

Added a "Bufftable" in section two that shows which amplifiers can be used to empower each respective damage source.

Amdar_Godkiller

A couple questions and comments related to status effects, enchantments, and proc sets.


1. Ice damage issues-

So on my WW, if I'm using a DW setup with an infused offhand weapon damage enchantment and a nirnhoned mainhand weapon with a frost enchantment, how many light attacks on average until I proc the deep freeze status effect? Will this sometimes also immobilize them or is that effect only connected to ice staves using blockade? I've never PVE'd as a mag build, but I've recently got into PVPing with Mag NB and Mag Warden when I'm not on my Redguard WereWarden or Orcplar, and I just don't quite have all the ins and out figured out as well as I typically do with stam builds particularly as it relates to elemental damage and charged traits and their primary and secondary status effects.


2. Maim vs bulk stat reduction-

Is minor maim stronger than either the infused or non-infused glyph of weakening for PVP? I'm thinking the glyph of weakening would be much stronger against stam builds than mag builds due to WD scaling better in general than SD. .I've been running Prismatic onslaught or the Oblivion enchant on my mainhand, after trying and not really liking the results with a poison enchantment, but honestly, I can melt faces in wolf form, and I feel like the prismatic glyph hits for much less than it should against vamps, probably because of penetration/resistance and the execute mitigation they get passively. The oblivion glyph is okay, but it's really just a place holder I feel til I find something more ideal. . .

3. Best proccing tools-

Another thing I wonder about with all the new heavy sets that are being converted into stam dps sets, has anyone tested which skills tend to have the highest proc chances for them? Ravager and Veiled are of particular interest.

For Example, I've personally found that Sloads + the fetcherfly skill that spreads to new hosts + skoria have a mildly hilarious interaction together. I have two dummies and activated it on the Clockwork Precursor, and the damage from the procs that the one magicka attack caused to both the targeted dummy and the trial dummy next to it was 58000 combined. This was on my semi hybrid stam warden werewolf mind you. (Pelinals, sloads, skoria setup instead of my usual Pelinals, prisoners rags, molag kena build).

4. Cost to kill ratio

I'd suggest another metric to guage damage in pvp besides DPS would be CTK or Cost To Kill. How much resource expenditure goes into your damage output essentially. For the fetcherfly attack I was getting 19 damage for every 1 magicka spent, for example. The benefit of sloads is therefore not primarily dps, but rather all the defensive and offensive and sustain related maneuvers that it's proc damage enables a competent user to perform.


I then entered Shor, and immediately stopped a zerg with that sloads setup at fort warden with just 4 other players arriving to help midway through my defense of the inner keep, and I was able to rack up 20+ kills in less than my first 2 minutes of equipping sloads, mostly utilitizing fetcherflies, acid spray, and the occasional Lethal Arrow and Poison injection. Once they finally got to me on the stairs. I kited them while dodge roll animation cancelling gripping shards into their front line, immobilizing them all, then went wolf and killed another 10-15.

Now I don't use sloads anymore, but I think it could be tweaked to be an interesting and non-toxic set to combat zerglings with a few minor changes to how it interacts with other proc sets and other abilities with cancerous compatibility. (Maybe change it to only proc on generic physical and magical damage, and making it so that if it procs a second time on one target, it instead jumps to a different target who has not been affected by sloads in the last 12 seconds..

worsttankever

Thank you for the exhaustive guide! I’m wondering if this might be a good place to document (for forum goers) how bar swapping, AOEs, DOTs etc interact.

From an older forum post I copy/pasted to my notes. Not sure if this is accurate:

How does bar scaling function?

Ground based AOEs: always update stats to the current bar on each new tick

Sticky DOTs: take a snapshot of the resource/damage stats on your impact bar, with the only exception being poison inject (which specifically had its code changed to address the execute scaling bugs after M'wind).

Masel

worsttankever wrote: »

Thank you for the exhaustive guide! I’m wondering if this might be a good place to document (for forum goers) how bad swapping, AOEs, DOTs etc interact.

From an older forum post I copy/pasted to my notes. Not sure if this is accurate:

How does bar scaling function?

Ground based AOEs: always update stats to the current bar on each new tick

Sticky DOTs: take a snapshot of the resource/damage stats on your impact bar, with the only exception being poison inject (which specifically had its code changed to address the execute scaling bugs after M'wind).

Yeah I can add that, sure!

Onefrkncrzypope

Im having an issue with the average damage calculation. You include execute scaling and blood thirsty damage. using the formula would get you your average execute damage. To be more precise about actual average damage you would need to include multiple piecewise functions. A rough equation would be average damage(without execute and bloodthirsty)*time skill used above execute + average damage(with nonfunction based execute damage = bloodthirsty)*time skill used below execute + function based scaling(up to percentages skills like executioner, jesus beam...) *time below execute+ weird based function(jesus beam max mag bonus)*time skill used all of this divided by total time skill use

I understand that this is for a single skill but what I listed above lists more attributes that are need for a total consideration of a skill's dps. Now for a single usage just change time skill is used above or below to just Boolean true false statements(1 or 0) and set total time to 1.

Masel

Onefrkncrzypope wrote: »

Im having an issue with the average damage calculation. You include execute scaling and blood thirsty damage. using the formula would get you your average execute damage. To be more precise about actual average damage you would need to include multiple piecewise functions. A rough equation would be average damage(without execute and bloodthirsty)*time skill used above execute + average damage(with nonfunction based execute damage = bloodthirsty)*time skill used below execute + function based scaling(up to percentages skills like executioner, jesus beam...) *time below execute+ weird based function(jesus beam max mag bonus)*time skill used all of this divided by total time skill use

I understand that this is for a single skill but what I listed above lists more attributes that are need for a total consideration of a skill's dps. Now for a single usage just change time skill is used above or below to just Boolean true false statements(1 or 0) and set total time to 1.

What do you mean by "time skill". You mean a DoT-Skill?

If you want to calculate the average damage an execute will give you, you can simply note the time you ussually start executing with that skill: If a skill does up to 300% more damage against targets below 50%, then you will have an average additional of 225% if you start executing at 25% for example:

at 25% you get 150% additional damage, and at 0% you 300%. so the average is the damage you get at (25%+0%)/2=12.5%. At 12.5% you get 300%-300%*(12.5%/50%)=225%. In the case of radiant oppression, you'd need to find out whether the 20% is multiplicative or additive with the execute bonus. It is basically impossible to estimate the 20% extra, because your magicka level will be different in every fight.

Xerikten

just stumbled on this guide and learned a few things about the cp. let me understand this correctly that if it is a number like for example 12.8 it always gets rounded down to 12?

Masel

Xerikten wrote: »

just stumbled on this guide and learned a few things about the cp. let me understand this correctly that if it is a number like for example 12.8 it always gets rounded down to 12?

Exactly. In many cases, investing into something that gives you 12.7% will most liekly be rounded down to 12%. It is done to simplify the math and improve performance due to lower processing requirements.

Xerikten

Masel92 wrote: »

Xerikten wrote: »

just stumbled on this guide and learned a few things about the cp. let me understand this correctly that if it is a number like for example 12.8 it always gets rounded down to 12?

Exactly. In many cases, investing into something that gives you 12.7% will most liekly be rounded down to 12%. It is done to simplify the math and improve performance due to lower processing requirements.

thank you. so unless you are just above the number you have wasted cp.

also it appears the lover mundus performs better than the others in pve. is that mostly for high end content or any?


right now I am working on my mag sorc dps and am trying to get better especially on single targets.

Masel

Amdar_Godkiller wrote: »

A couple questions and comments related to status effects, enchantments, and proc sets.


1. Ice damage issues-

So on my WW, if I'm using a DW setup with an infused offhand weapon damage enchantment and a nirnhoned mainhand weapon with a frost enchantment, how many light attacks on average until I proc the deep freeze status effect? Will this sometimes also immobilize them or is that effect only connected to ice staves using blockade? I've never PVE'd as a mag build, but I've recently got into PVPing with Mag NB and Mag Warden when I'm not on my Redguard WereWarden or Orcplar, and I just don't quite have all the ins and out figured out as well as I typically do with stam builds particularly as it relates to elemental damage and charged traits and their primary and secondary status effects.


2. Maim vs bulk stat reduction-

Is minor maim stronger than either the infused or non-infused glyph of weakening for PVP? I'm thinking the glyph of weakening would be much stronger against stam builds than mag builds due to WD scaling better in general than SD. .I've been running Prismatic onslaught or the Oblivion enchant on my mainhand, after trying and not really liking the results with a poison enchantment, but honestly, I can melt faces in wolf form, and I feel like the prismatic glyph hits for much less than it should against vamps, probably because of penetration/resistance and the execute mitigation they get passively. The oblivion glyph is okay, but it's really just a place holder I feel til I find something more ideal. . .

3. Best proccing tools-

Another thing I wonder about with all the new heavy sets that are being converted into stam dps sets, has anyone tested which skills tend to have the highest proc chances for them? Ravager and Veiled are of particular interest.

For Example, I've personally found that Sloads + the fetcherfly skill that spreads to new hosts + skoria have a mildly hilarious interaction together. I have two dummies and activated it on the Clockwork Precursor, and the damage from the procs that the one magicka attack caused to both the targeted dummy and the trial dummy next to it was 58000 combined. This was on my semi hybrid stam warden werewolf mind you. (Pelinals, sloads, skoria setup instead of my usual Pelinals, prisoners rags, molag kena build).

4. Cost to kill ratio

I'd suggest another metric to guage damage in pvp besides DPS would be CTK or Cost To Kill. How much resource expenditure goes into your damage output essentially. For the fetcherfly attack I was getting 19 damage for every 1 magicka spent, for example. The benefit of sloads is therefore not primarily dps, but rather all the defensive and offensive and sustain related maneuvers that it's proc damage enables a competent user to perform.


I then entered Shor, and immediately stopped a zerg with that sloads setup at fort warden with just 4 other players arriving to help midway through my defense of the inner keep, and I was able to rack up 20+ kills in less than my first 2 minutes of equipping sloads, mostly utilitizing fetcherflies, acid spray, and the occasional Lethal Arrow and Poison injection. Once they finally got to me on the stairs. I kited them while dodge roll animation cancelling gripping shards into their front line, immobilizing them all, then went wolf and killed another 10-15.

Now I don't use sloads anymore, but I think it could be tweaked to be an interesting and non-toxic set to combat zerglings with a few minor changes to how it interacts with other proc sets and other abilities with cancerous compatibility. (Maybe change it to only proc on generic physical and magical damage, and making it so that if it procs a second time on one target, it instead jumps to a different target who has not been affected by sloads in the last 12 seconds..

Your questions are very very specific and require a detailed examination. As far as the ice enchantments is concerned: i have never touched the deep freeze effect in detail, so I can't tell you how high the proc chance is. As far as i know (or rather eblive in this case), you need to deal ice damage to chilled targets to cause it, but i really don't know the proc chance of it.

For the main/weakening: It depends on the enemy. If the enemy has a whole lot of weapon damage, reducing it by a flat value is going to be less effective (basically vice-versa diminishing returns: reducing from 600 to 540 is 10% damage reduction from WD, but reducing from 300 to 240 is 20% reduction). Maim is a flat 15% reduciton of damage done, but it also depends on the damage done amps you have. In No-CP, minor maim is a lot more effective because you do not have a lot of damage done buffs. On my No-CP Warden, it reduced my damage by 14.6%, while in CP it is only 11.2% due to the CP damage done amps you have there.

WEapon damge however is very similar in both scenarios, becasue you have the same amplifiers to it. So in CP, the weakening enchant leads to 7.8% damage reduction, while in No-CP, it is 8.5%. In all scenarios minor maim is more effective, and it also applies to all damage you deal, including procs. In Solo play, you might want to go for maim. In groups where you might have it already available, you might want to choose the weakening enchant.

Masel

Xerikten wrote: »

Masel92 wrote: »

Xerikten wrote: »

just stumbled on this guide and learned a few things about the cp. let me understand this correctly that if it is a number like for example 12.8 it always gets rounded down to 12?

Exactly. In many cases, investing into something that gives you 12.7% will most liekly be rounded down to 12%. It is done to simplify the math and improve performance due to lower processing requirements.

thank you. so unless you are just above the number you have wasted cp.

also it appears the lover mundus performs better than the others in pve. is that mostly for high end content or any?


right now I am working on my mag sorc dps and am trying to get better especially on single targets.

It is liek that because penetration buffs everything, including enchantments, monster set damage etc. There's a table in there showing what gets buffed by which stat. Penetration buffs everything, critical chance buffs everything other than monster sets for example.

Liofa

As far as I know, secondary status effects were removed in Dragon Bones patch. In order to proc these, you would have to deal damage against target that is weak to a specific type of damage. In this case, Deep Freeze, requires the enemy to be weak against Frost damage, meaning they have to have 0 resistance against Frost.

With the removal of Weaknesses and Immunity against certain types of damage, secondary effects should be removed too.

Feel free to correct me ^^

Masel

Liofa wrote: »

As far as I know, secondary status effects were removed in Dragon Bones patch. In order to proc these, you would have to deal damage against target that is weak to a specific type of damage. In this case, Deep Freeze, requires the enemy to be weak against Frost damage, meaning they have to have 0 resistance against Frost.

With the removal of Weaknesses and Immunity against certain types of damage, secondary effects should be removed too.

Feel free to correct me ^^

Yeah that's true. I haven't seen any vulnerability effects since then.

Daileth

This is excellent. Many thanks for putting this together. Really should be pinned in Combat in Character Mechanics. I was fortunate to have a friend point me at this. Great work.

*edit for spelling

Hixtory

Masel92 wrote: »

Liofa wrote: »

As far as I know, secondary status effects were removed in Dragon Bones patch. In order to proc these, you would have to deal damage against target that is weak to a specific type of damage. In this case, Deep Freeze, requires the enemy to be weak against Frost damage, meaning they have to have 0 resistance against Frost.

With the removal of Weaknesses and Immunity against certain types of damage, secondary effects should be removed too.

Feel free to correct me ^^

Yeah that's true. I haven't seen any vulnerability effects since then.

I saw your post about stamina sets. What amazes me is that hunding come in top of sets like relequen meaning that if I have the normal version of relequen I would be losing dps.

I apologize in advance, but maybe you already did it:

As you mentioned advancing yokeda coming in top, is Levi a loss of more than 3%


Advancing

(2 items) Adds 833 Weapon Critical

(3 items) Adds 129 Weapon Damage

(4 items) Adds 833 Weapon Critical

(5 items) When you deal melee damage, your Critical Strike rating is increased by 400 for 5 seconds, stacking up to 5 times.

3660 weap crit+129 weap damage

Leviathan

(2 items) Adds 1096 Max Stamina

(3 items) Adds 833 Weapon Critical

(4 items) Adds 833 Weapon Critical

(5 items) Adds 1924 Weapon Critical


3590 Weap crit + 1096 Stamina (roughly 110 weap damage if I recall correctly). Also, you can easily get levi daggers that can make up for the crit loss. Although HRC is not hard to run, the farm is insane, I spent about a year to get 2 VO daggers, and that was running AA, SO and HRC

Any thoughts?

Sorrik

I've only recently begun playing ESO perhaps for about two months' time now. I do a lot of reading to "git gud" (particularly in PvE). As I came into ESO wanting to specifically make a Bow/Bow character, I found your "Shadow Thorn" build thread. Now, I have found this thread to try to understand how damage works in this game. You are quickly becoming my favorite official forum poster. I greatly appreciate your works.

Ciovala

I just thought I would bump this thread. Curious how much any of this changed due to Murkmire?

Nolic1

Ciovala wrote: »

I just thought I would bump this thread. Curious how much any of this changed due to Murkmire?

Not that much besides the resistances to shields everything is pretty much the same I wish @Masel Would fix some of the pictures that are not showing so people could see what most of this is about.

But this is an awesome guide and taught me alot about the game.

MilwaukeeScott

This should be like pinned or something.

Lasinagol

My brain hurts and I understand significantly more about ESO then before reading this thread. It should be stuck at the top for anyone who wants to learn what the meaning of 'gitting gud' actually is.

Masel

I'll update this as soon a so have time, but since it is mid-semester at the university where I work it may take until February...

qbit

Divide by 2 in PVP? If ZOS multiplied by 0.5 instead, they will fix performance in PVP.

You're welcome.

Merlin13KAGL

qbit wrote: »

Divide by 2 in PVP? If ZOS multiplied by 0.5 instead, they will fix performance in PVP.

You're welcome.

You're a remarkably poor troll.

Masel

updated with racial changes for wrathstone dlc.

myskyrim26

I've got 2 thoughts now...
1. This is an amazing guide. Thank you ever so much! At last I truly understand a lot of spects!
2. This game is a total crap in terms of combat. Games are made for fun, not for a damn scientific research.