What is a build that you thought would be bad, but ended up being a pretty good.

Casul

I love theory crafting PvP builds but always hate the idea of putting so much time and effort to all be in vain.

But every so often you strike gold with an underrated build that ends up being great.

What are some of your favorite underrated builds that performed better then you anticipated?

Iskiab

2h with onslaught on a magblade using pelinals and all weapon damage glyphs.

I tried pelinals when I first started playing and thought it was terrible. They’re tricky to make by hybrids can be good.

Another thing that’s overlooked is crit builds in pvp.

mague

Warden DW stamina healer.

Not exactly great but works.

Iskiab

mague wrote: »

Warden DW stamina healer.

Not exactly great but works.

Oh that’s a good one. If Symbiosis heavy attacks worked a little better they’d be much improved. As is I found its best played doing damage while keeping vigor up and being a back-up healer. It’s still a lot of fun.

mague

Iskiab wrote: »

mague wrote: »

Warden DW stamina healer.

Not exactly great but works.

Oh that’s a good one. If Symbiosis heavy attacks worked a little better they’d be much improved. As is I found its best played doing damage while keeping vigor up and being a back-up healer. It’s still a lot of fun.

Well, some magicka is needed. Synergy of Buddling Seeds scales from largest resource. Bone Surge can be handy but situational.

kylewwefan

There was a pug healer I had the other day using lunar bastion and sanctuary and bogdan the Nightflame. Ok, so it’s not great, but lunar Bastion has some of the coolest visuals of any set in the game imo. That’s gotta count for something

Iskiab

mague wrote: »

Iskiab wrote: »

mague wrote: »

Warden DW stamina healer.

Not exactly great but works.

Oh that’s a good one. If Symbiosis heavy attacks worked a little better they’d be much improved. As is I found its best played doing damage while keeping vigor up and being a back-up healer. It’s still a lot of fun.

Well, some magicka is needed. Synergy of Buddling Seeds scales from largest resource. Bone Surge can be handy but situational.

Yea I just mean Lotus Blossom works with Symbiosis. When I figured that out I tried using it and symbiosis as a means of getting magicka back so I could use efficient purge.

That part didn’t work too well. The Symbiosis heavy attack only returns magicka if you actually heal someone, so I found it too inconsistent as a means to get magicka back for expensive magicka abilities.

Symbiosis with DW or 2H still worked with lotus blossom for light attack weaving while healing for high tooltips, it just wasn’t as good as I hoped it’d be. DW daggers gave me a nice stam crit numbers (MH nirn, OH powered or the Ult gen trait) with 1H, 6m but 2H gave me forward momentum. I couldn’t decide which was better.

The build was good but I typically fill a full healer role so went back to playing my main.

Major_Lag

On my Sorc, for a few months I used a cheap, quick-n-dirty largescale healer build (in CP PvP).
For how "bad" it was, it was actually surprisingly decent.

I don't remember the details now, but it was Transmutation+Julianos. 5H 1M 1L, all Impen. SnB backbar.
No monster set, because I didn't feel like farming more keys at that time; all I had was a bunch of mismatched shoulder and head pieces.

Sustain was rather poor - I had only about 1.5k mag regen, and no Engine Guardian to help with that.
So I was burning through a lot of the free daily reward crown tripots; BTW that was back at a time when they were considerably inferior to crafted pots.

In retrospect, I probably should have used an extra mag regen glyph, IIRC it was 3x spell damage or 2x SD + 1x mag regen. But that was at a time when Mutagen lasted 20s, so it didn't strain the magicka pool as much as it does today.

Also Shalk would be a much better choice than Julianos for this, but I was dumb and didn't even consider that as an option back then

Iskiab

I usually prefer the combination of the ritual mundus and 3x mag recovery glyphs. I like mag glyphs because if you feel like you want more sustain you can put one or two support skill on your front bar for hefty mag regen modifiers, but you need a good mag regen base to multiply from.

People talk up the psijiic channel for mag recovery but I’ve found it terrible. You’ll be moving around too much for it to be effective. Same with the Templar channel heal, people talk like it’s a great heal but it isn’t. There are lots of better options you can use and stay mobile. Especially in regards to the Templar heal Ult I think people say it’s good because they assume it will be because is a templar healing ultimate, they’re talking out their butt.

For pvp always start with heavy while learning, but I think light is better. Crit is one of the best healing stats.

Oops, wrong thread. Still good tips for creating your own healing builds so whatever.

jaws343

A while ago I had a crazy Pet Sorc build that made soloing world bosses lazy as possible.
5x Defiler, 5x Necro, 2x Maw, with Storm Atro, and both pets. You could have 5 pets out at once if everything procced. It was crazy.

Casul

jaws343 wrote: »

A while ago I had a crazy Pet Sorc build that made soloing world bosses lazy as possible.
5x Defiler, 5x Necro, 2x Maw, with Storm Atro, and both pets. You could have 5 pets out at once if everything procced. It was crazy.

I had a guy in BG using everything you mention but had morkuldin instead of defiled. It was honestly annoying having so many pets in my face. I couldn't see anything, let alone with 3-7 other people attacking lol. I can't imagine how many kills he snagged between the pets and mages wrath.

Xvorg

BuildMan wrote: »

I love theory crafting PvP builds but always hate the idea of putting so much time and effort to all be in vain.

But every so often you strike gold with an underrated build that ends up being great.

What are some of your favorite underrated builds that performed better then you anticipated?

Arcane warrior

Hybrid sorc using S/B (pelinals + necropotence+slimecraw)

Elemental weapon as main spammable, frags hard casted before shield assault. Shattering prison for extra dmg and stam burning, and off course matriarch

Waffennacht

I'll be finding out soon. It's level 46 atm. Too hard to tell with world scaling etc pre 50 to know exactly if it's viable.

So far so good.

A new health tank build

Iskiab

It’s crazy tough to call a build sub-50. I would routinely go 20+ and 2-0 sub 50 only to get destroyed at 50.

Burst jumps up a ridiculous amount.

Casul

Monster sets are a huge part of that @Iskiab , I don't think you can get them before 50 can you?

Udrath

On my bosmer stamblade....

Selene/blood spawn
Eternal Hunt
Hide of Morihaus with weapon damage glyphs and infused jewerly.
2h/bow

Ran nothing but no-cp. Had like 15k magicka/25khp/27k stamina and 3.8k weapon damage/2.5kish stam recovery buffed with werewolf on backbar.

The best part of about the combo was being able to counter someone quickly who had the jump on me by rolling through them. Pretty much guaranteed they eat the eternal hunt proc, and selene proc'd off morihaus. You become a bowling ball and everyone else are bowling pins. It's a very unpredictable playstyle if you put the time into it. I'd normally snipe someone until they ran at me, then roll through them and finish them off. Or start off with a stun from stealth and not use the roll stun until merciless resolve was up. If selene proc'd I would roll through them to ensure they get hit with it. I'll probably go back to it if I get bored playing magblade again.

TL:DR
Turned out I felt gimped playing with any other sets...

Iskiab

BuildMan wrote: »

Monster sets are a huge part of that @Iskiab , I don't think you can get them before 50 can you?

You could get a monster set technically but not practically. I think it’s mostly because of proc sets and penetration. Stats are lower at 50 but refining traits and sets gives people a much larger punch.

Hexquisite

For this patch on my DPS/Support healer in small man groups, I use Wyrd Tree /Curse Eating and Bloodspawn if I run Nova, or Shadowrend -my faction goes against a ton of NB. I was getting tired of having to cast cleanse all the time- both because of the higher cost this patch, and because I had to often time interrupt my rotation to "frist aid" someone.

I thought it would suck, but I still have decent dps, and it works surprisingly well, well enough that when I put my DPS set up back on I really feel the lack of the set cleanses on myself even, which surprised me. I could actually up my spellpower more, but am running regen since I often use Hasty Prayer instead of BOL/HTD if my group that stays tight.

EtTuBrutus

Btb/bp on a dk hybrid

Royalthought

A winterborn magden. Didn't play the class when it was first released. I try to avoid being similar to the crowd. Heard how bad the magden was and eventually picked it up.

After hearing all the bad magden talk, I was absolutely destroying with it. lol. In BG's I actually felt dirty. Aoe, damage and crowd control. If The enemy teams didn't head hunt me, the randoms on my team had the advantage.

Of course the new patches are killing Dots of all types so..... Rip. lol

NuarBlack

No longer viable and a bit dirty but DW melee magsorc that utilized torugs + spell strat or Overwhelming surge. No spammable other than maybe wrath and streak on CD while LA as fast as I could . Other than that it abused dw enchants back then so maybe it wasn't too surprising other than people just didn't expect a magsorc to be intentionally trying to get in your face.

Still trying to evolve it into something viable again.

Casul

Love all the builds everyone, here's my contribution. This is a build I am currently using. It's has been pretty effective in BG so far.

2 engine guardian
5 plague doctor
5 spriggan (sword and shield front bar)
2 endurance (sword and shield back bar)

Tri stat food with 7 heavy and all HP glyphs.

Engine guardian can always be used as you have a magicka heal and a stamina heal. On front bar I am using reverberating bash as my stun with sub assault and cutting dive as my other damage abilities.
With major fracture, sharpened weapon, CP, and lover mundus I'm at nearly 18k penetration making quick work of squishy light armor enemies.

Some values I have seen in BG (non crit)

Cutting dive (2.5k-3k)
Sub assault (4-6k)
Reverberating (2k-3k)
Dawnbreaker (4k-6k)

Pretty good numbers considering I have 35k+ health. Nearly 40k on back bar.