Are balanced characters practical?

Clanbrassil

In all the stuff I have read on class builds, it seems to be a recurrent idea that either you put all your points into magicka or all into stamina. So you have "magblades" and "stamblades" etc., but no-one ever talks about "balblades". Is it a practical option to split resources in a balanced way between magicka and stamina, with equal pools of each, and build a rotation flipping between spells and blows?

I am getting the feeling from some guides that different classes tend to be rather the same. Go the stamina route, and you have medium armour, dual wield and a bow, whatever class (except for tanks). Your skills will be weapon based and your class spells won't get much use. Go for magicka, and you have light armour and a staff, and you might as well be a sorcerer, as that's the way it will play. My recollection of classes in the original Daggerfall game is that there was a spellblade class, that was equally adept at casting spells and using melee weapons. It doesn't seem to be "a thing" in ESO, but it would be nice to be equally proficient in magic and melee.

FWIW I am think in terms of PvE levelling, which is as far as I've got.

Wuuffyy

Balblades sounds gross. So I stopped reading. Possible stagblade or smagblade?

zvavi

Hybrid builds are possible but are just much worse. You can still do better on a hybrid build than on 50% of the community, If you research dealing damage enough

VaranisArano

With the current design, stamina using weapons/skills/light attacks have their damage scale up with your max stamina. The same is true of magicka using weapons. There are a few skills who scale off health, but for the vast majority of builds its more beneficial to stack either magicka or stamina simply because you'll do more damage.

So while you can do a hybrid if you want, neither your stamina nor magicka skills will hit as hard as they would if you went for one or the other.

The usual hybrid method is to stack weapon damage and wear Pelinal's Apitude to increase your spell damage in tandem.

A hybrid will be viable for PVE overland questing. Whether or not you are viable for PVE group content depends entirely on what DPS you can reach or how good you are at healing or tanking you are with your hybrid build.

StarOfElyon

I think the better question is "is a non-meta build viable".

I think my build is non-meta. I think it's also balanced and SHOULD be enough to get by in any situation. I wear Innate Axiom and Shacklebreaker. I think this does OK in 1v1 but not so good in 1vX situations.

With food and other buffs, I have (rounding to the nearest thousand) about:

30,000 magicka
17000 health
17000 stamina

Magicka recovery is almost 1900

My spell and weapon damage is hard to know because I get additional damage added only to my class abilities. I estimate the spell damage is just around 2000 and the weapon damage is around 1700. Critical is at 32.7%.

My spell resistance is around 32000 and physical is around 27000. Crit resistance almost 1300.

I feel like this is a balanced build and should be enough or "viable". But the reality is that I can be two-shotted by a mage even with my defensive buffs up. So I could argue that my build is balanced but not viable because it's not meta. It doesn't have crazy damage, tankiness, or healing procs to fall back on. I think once you find a build that provide such things for you, it's not going to be balanced. And if it is, it's broken. You're not supposed to be able to eat your cake and still have it too.

AcadianPaladin

If you focus on big magicka pool and high spell damage, you will do big magic/staff damage.

If you focus on big stamina pool and high weapon damage, you will do big stamina/weapon damage.

You only have so much 'mojo' you can build for - more of one thing means less of something else. If you balance mag/stam and weapon/spell damage you will deliver mediocre damage.

There are some sets and techniques such as mentioned above to boost balanced damage to better than mediocre but not to the levels that a full stam or full mag character can deliver. Simply the facts of ESO. This was not always the case in Elder Scrolls. I love mystic archers (bow backed up with magic instead of blade) which worked fine in Oblvion but is frustrating in ESO.

Iskiab

The short answer is no. To do good dps you need to specialize.

Usually each class has three or four abilities that do most of the damage. You then buff those abilities as much as possible with passives and whatnot. Using more abilities is typically a dps loss - you want stronger abilities and not more of them.

eso_nya

For the pve side of things, your observation is true.

Aslong as u play on your own, explore the zones, do quests, stories and normal dungeons, u r basically free to do whatever u like. nothing really helps u to oneshot mobs faster.

If u want to participate in the content that has a leaderboard attached to it, u either roll as pts looks now e.g. a khajiit magblade in spell strategist and mothers sorrow with the shadow mundus and copy paste alcasts or lokis/larkys? (that new guy some ppl r talking about; im really bad with names, sry) rotation or well u dont go there. the actual build ppl tell u to use might differ by preference of the raidleader.

u can actually be very far from the "meta", before u get to a measurable difference in combat power, but ppl r extremely elitist and biased here. u dont bring meta == u dont get a spot in the raidteam. u need to be extremely lucky, to find a team/clan that does progressive raiding _and_ accepts non-meta players and is successful.

for pvp it is different. the good builds r rarely made public. the things u find in the internet r most likely outdated before ppl shared.
if u make your own builds, and they turn out to be great u will roflstomp if they dont, u will be roflstomped.
u spec very different from pve tho, investing a bit in HP, defense, sustain and stamina pool for block/dodge/breakfree is important. using cc matters. "proc sets" r great, cause among other things they do dmg for u when u r stunned. the statbalance is more of a 'nessessary evil' tho.

Zacuel

It's 'play how you want only if you solo' unfortunately.

Clanbrassil

Thanks for the above very clear answers. I wonder, though, if this is not a bad design decision? An arrow in the chest should do the same damage regardless of who fires it, assuming an equal level of archery skill. Having a huge pool of stamina shouldn't logically make a difference.

CMDR_Un1k0rn

I was trying to do hybrid. Didn't work.

Grinded PvP and my self heal is much better on my stamina templar with vigor, rather than rushed ceremony.

jcm2606

Clanbrassil wrote: »

Thanks for the above very clear answers. I wonder, though, if this is not a bad design decision? An arrow in the chest should do the same damage regardless of who fires it, assuming an equal level of archery skill. Having a huge pool of stamina shouldn't logically make a difference.

Yeah, it is poor design to scale damage based on your resource pools, but unfortunately if they were to address it now, they'd have to rebalance weapon & spell damage to compensate for the loss of damage from resource pools. Just isn't something I think Zenimax is interested in.

StarOfElyon

Another example of how ZOS destroys hybrids before you can make them is under the Solar Flare morphs for Templar. It's probably the hardest hitting skill they have available but you have to choose between a ranged version and a melee-ranged AOE version. I need both. When I'm forced to choose, it's pushes me further away from the middle ground where I'm trying to build my character.

Zordrage

For TANKING and some offhealing
Hybrid is Freaking great !!!

but for Pure healing
or Pure DPS
or DPS off healing

HELL NO...

i tested it ALLOT my Templar is a Hybrid tank and it was a headache to make it work in harder content but it ended up AWESOME as a hybrid... i barely need any healing lol and still doing okayish dmg..

but as i said for anything else going hybrid your nerfing yourself...