Newbie Q on classes, armor type, etc in PvE (leveling & questing)

Kamatsu · April 2015

Hi,

I'm new to the game and have read quite a few threads, but still have some questions that I was hoping I could get some help with. Some notes:

- This is for PvE solo leveling & question, not really interested atm in PvP (solo PvE as that is mainly what I'll be doing, at least for now)
- I do not have imperial race or any-race-any-faction upgrades.

Q1 - How well can non-sorcer's do in light armor?

I'm asking because I was considering doing a magicka based Templar in Light armor, yet it seems everyone push's heavy armor. Sorcer's can get away with light armor as they have a pet that can tank for them I believe, yet other classes don't have that option/luxury... so will have to either kite or be able to face-tank mobs themselves.

Q2 - If you do go light or medium armor, can you do it without having the chest & leg armor as heavy?

I understand that heavy armor obviously has the highest AC (Armor Class) and thus DR (Damage Resistance), but it also has a certain look... and if I want to do a magic char, to me that means a light armor look & not heavy armor look. So I know min/max would say chest & pants as heavy and rest light... but that's not a look I'd like. So with this in mind, wondering how I'd go with light or medium armor in chest & legs and have others elsewhere... so I get the look I like while leveling all armor types as I play.

Q3 - Going as a magicka class based build, do I have to use a staff, or can I use anything?

Was thinking, if I was able to purely rely on class based skills... could always go 1-hander & shield for the extra defense the shield would give. But again, seems everyone goes staff... I'm assuming that's because for endgame staff is the best, but can you do other weapons while leveling as a magicka based build? What would the drawbacks for not using a staff be?

Q4 - Based on the racial's, it seems that each race favors either a magicka or stamina based build. Have I got these right?

Breton - magicka
Redguard - stamina
Orc - stamina

Nord - stamina
Dark Elf - magicka
Argonian - stamina?

High Elf - magicka
Wood Elf - stamina
Khajit - stamina

Q5 - Does ESO have mob tagging or shared mob loot/xp?

Does ESO use an exclusive mob tagging system like WoW does, or a shared xp/loot system like GW2 does? So if I attack a mob someone else is attacking will I get xp/loot from it, or is it locked to the 1st person who hit the mob?

Q6 - Are mounts account-wide or character based?

If I bought the 10K horse (well, when I actually get to 10K gold. lol), would it be available on all the characters on my account, or just the character which bought it? Do you need to train/buy a skill to use horses, or can you use them as soon as you get access to them?

Thanx in advance.

Fleshreaper · April 2015

A1 - Light armor is for Magic users, medium is for stamina, and heavy is for tanking. This is general. Pretty much any class can make good use of the armor. It might not be "the best" but it will be playable. Example DKs, were once super good in light armor, destro staff. So, with the temps healing ability, you should do alright with a temp magic dps build.

A2 - Yes, the way the armor works is you get a bonus for each piece of that type you ware. So if you have a medium chest and say belt, you will be okay. You will get the added defense from medium armor while keeping your magica up.

A3 - IMO, only going class based skills is a bad idea. You will lose too many good options for the weapons tree. As a magic user, you generally want to stick with staffs because melee weapons use stamina and you are not going to be stacking stamina.

A4- Honestly, I don't know.

A5 - Mob sharing.

A6 - Mounts are account wide. Riding skill is character only.

Hope this helps.

Aett_Thorn · April 2015

1-4) Let me see if I can answer the first few questions at once: you are free to choose to use any armor and weapon you like for your build, but your effectiveness will be affected.

For instance, in the instances that you raise above, you can certainly use light armor with any class, and still be very effective. A Templar magic user is perfectly fine, and you'll have lots of options. However, you may not be EXACTLY as effective as a light-armor magic user of another class. But for doing solo PvE, the differences will be trivial.

Similarly, you can wear any armor and be effective in solo PvE. You do not need to use heavy armor chest and legs, but could instead use heavy armor shoulders and belt if you want two pieces of heavy armor on your character. However, you won't have the same amount of armor total as you would had you used the chest and legs. But you should still be fine.

You can also use any weapon you want with a magika-based build. However, this will mean that your weapon attacks will be using one resource, and your class skills another, which means that you'll need to split your attribute points more than if you focused on one type or the other. But a decent number of people use sword-and-shield and a lot of spells, since it allows you to block more effectively. And even if your race choice leans one way or the other doesn't mean that it can't be used for the other side. For instance, I have a high-elf nightblade that focuses on Stamina-based attacks, and does just fine.

5) ESO does not have mob tagging like in other games. Basically, if you hit an enemy for at least a certain percentage of it's health before it dies, then you can receive loot from it. And each player that does this percentage will get it's own loot rolls.

6) If you have a mount unlocked, then all of your characters will have access to it.

starlizard70ub17_ESO · April 2015

All 4 of my vet chars, Socer, Templer, DK, and NB run around in 5 piece med armour and 2 light armours. All are Khajiit and rely on stealth to move through areas, kill targets, etc. You can use a med/light armour combo with a templer with no problem and alittle planning. My templer uses a destruct staff and restoration staff for weapons. I use the med armour passives to increase stamina, and use enchants on the armour to increase magic and health.

Q4: Races only determine your starting point. Depending on the skill lines you invest points into, any race can excel at any profession.

UrQuan · April 2015

@Fleshreaper already gave you some good answers, but here's my take on it:

Light armour is totally viable on a Templar if you're going with a magicka build. Magicka build Templars almost need to be in light armour (or at least partially in light) for the passives. If you're going all (or mostly) light armour as a Templar, then Sun Fire (the first skill you have access to in the Dawn's Wrath skill line), and specifically the Reflective Light morph of it is your best friend. It does good damage with a damage over time component, it has good range, the morph lets it hit up to 3 opponents, and it slows the movement of anyone it hits. This means that with groups of up to 3 mobs, you can usually burn them down before they even get to you, so a lack of solid protection from heavy armour is much less of an issue. If they do survive to get close, then you use Puncturing Strikes (the first skill you have access to in the Aedric Spear skill line) to finish them off - especially the Puncturing Sweep morph of it, as that morph will also work to heal you of any damage that they did manage to cause.
You sure can. To be optimal you'd want to have the chest heavy of course, but I can totally understand making a sacrifice there in order to get the aesthetic you want: half of my equipment choices on my different characters are based on that. I would recommend going with 5 pieces of light armour, and 1 piece each of heavy and medium. That way you're focusing on the type that you really care about, but you'll still be leveling the other 2 skill lines (albeit more slowly), so if you decide to switch at some time in the future it'll be easy. For a minimal effect on your light armour aesthetic, I'd suggest you use the "Hide Helmet" option under the Gameplay settings, and use a heavy helm (which you then won't even see). If you're using a robe for your chest, I'd then use medium armour on your legs, as you won't see those either. If you're using a shirt/jerkin option for your chest (light armour chest pieces can be either a robe or a jerkin) and don't want your pants to look like medium armour, then I'd suggest making your belt medium. The belt gives you the least amount of protection, so it's really sub-optimal to make that one an armour type that's more protective than light, but aesthetically you won't even be able to tell what armour type the belt is.
Well, as you're wanting to go mostly magicka-based, a staff is definitely your best option. Both restoration staff and destruction staff give you good ways to recover magicka in combat, and are good for attacking enemies without having to be in melee (which is important if you're primarily going light armour). I would strongly suggest you go with one of them as your main weapon. When you hit level 15 and unlock a second skill bar, it's not a bad idea to use sword and board on that bar. This way you can use your staff most of the time, but swap to sword and board if you get stuck in melee and need to do a better job of mitigating damage. My magicka build Templar healer uses resto staff as his main, and sword and board as his secondary, and I've found it to work quite well (he wears a mix of heavy and light armour). The other drawback to using non-staff weapons on a magicka build is that their active abilities use stamina rather than magicka. Now this can be useful for resource management if you find you're always running low on magicka, but odds are you won't have a very big stamina pool to draw on, and you're going to need at least some of it for blocking, dodge-rolling, and interrupting.
Yeah, that looks about right to me. Having said that, you definitely don't have to let your choice of race dictate your build. My magicka build Templar that I mentioned above is a Redguard. I find the stamina bonuses are handy on him, because it means that I haven't had to put any attribute points at all into stamina, and yet I still have no trouble with maintaining enough stamina to block, dodge-roll, interrupt, and use the occasional sword & board skill. That means that I was able to focus entirely on health (just enough to keep me from ever getting one-shotted by bosses in group dungeons) and magicka (everything else) for his attribute points, and the enchantments on his armour. So you can look at it a few different ways.
Shared. If you're in a group and anyone in the group contributes to killing the mob, you'll get XP and loot from it. If 3 random non-grouped people contribute to killing it, they'll all get XP and loot (as long as they contributed enough - I think there's a percentage that they have to hit). Optimal XP comes from a group of 2 people, as there is an XP bonus for grouping. If more than 2 people contribute to killing the mobs, though, the XP that each person gets is reduced. I never really worry about this, though, as I find XP is easy to come by through PVE questing and just killing what you come across. I always end up over the level of the mobs by the time I'm done with the first full zone.
Mounts are account wide: once you buy one (either one of the ones bought with gold in-game, or one of the ones bought with Crowns) they are added to your Collections tab (hit U to open collections), and every character that you have can access the mount by selecting it to be active in your collections tab. Riding skill is character-specific though. These are upgrades that you can buy at stables once per 20 hours for 250 gold each, and each increases your mounted speed, or your carrying capacity (bag space), or your mount's stamina by 1 rank, up to a max increase of 60 each. It's worth noting that if you engage in some careful stealing (stealing from containers is the best way to do this, being careful to sneak and avoid getting a bounty), and fence items worth 30 (white items), 100 (green items), or 250 (blue items) gold each to a fence in a city's outlaw refuge, you can make enough gold to buy the 10,000 gold horse in just a few days, spending about an hour doing this each day.

zeitzbachrwb17_ESO · April 2015

1 & 2 ) You wear light armor because you want magicka and magic damage. You wear medium for weapon damage and good looks. You wear heavy for easier tanking.

The armor difference doesn't even matter that much. The calculation is rather annoying and unless you really really stack that much, the difference between a dude in all light armor and a dude in all medium armor is only like... what? 6% damage reduction difference?

You can even wear all light on a healer templar with some health stuffs and be a lot tankier than a random all heavy armor dude with pure damage stat and regen food. I have seen enough shares of these "I AM TANKY CAUSE I WEAR HEAVY ARMORR DURR" die because they have pitiful health and the reduction didn't save them because they didn't block cause they think super high armor number = super tanky.

What really helps you tank in this game is how fast you can heal (health regen/ healing) and block well on all the hard hit while dodging AoE. I forgot what sorc has but DK can shield + health regen to live while Nightblade has to constantly kill with Mark Target and siphon if they want to live. Templar is the easiest char to do PvE with since all you have to do is group them up and spam Puncturing Sweep (Morphed sweep to have 40% Damage vamp heal). You also have a strong quick on-demand heal too. Runic focus gives you a major armor and spell bonus and if you have a lot of self-heal stacking, you outheal the damages anyway.

3) You don't need to but I recommend you do because charge attack with staves recover about 12% of your max mana. Stamina weapon will recover stamina instead. Shield is good for blocking but I haven't found the need for it so far since I rotate between skill sets (1 is for a bunch of buff and debuff, another is for heal and damage at the same time as the main set) and I need a lot of magicka for that if I want to play with shield, high crit and high damage with high heal nonstop.

4) Kinda like that but I will also take in some other factors as well. I like Argonian mending trait a lot since that's a +6% self heal so it does help when I have to heal and work as a secondary tank with that heal + Runic focus + regen + drain + block because my didn't know how to keep aggro. That an Argonian master so unless you aim for 100% min-max, you're just removing the 1 stacking factor out of the list with like 20-30 factors in it.

Kamatsu · April 2015

Wow, thank you all for the wonderful replies and answer's. Really appreciate the help & advice - I admit I was worried about my thoughts on doing a magicka based templar in light armor with LA look based on what I read... glad to see that it's perfectly viable while questing & leveling. Obviously once I hit endgame, and if I decide to get involved in that, things will be different... but for now, just want to focus on playing, getting the story, etc.

Also, good tip/hint regarding the robe part chest piece with light armor - it would make the pants a great place to stick the heavy or medium armor piece to level it up and keep the look I like.

Another Q - does anyone know a site or place which shows all the skill morph's in the games current build?

I ask, because I've looked at a few of the wiki's... and they all seem to show old morph's, as none of them show any of the class stamina based morph's. So as they don't show the stamina based morph's... I don't know how accurate/up-to-date their info is.

Q - can you change an items looks?

Does ESO have a system to change an items looks? Like GW2 you can transform 1 armor's look into something else, or in WoW you can transmorgophy an items look into another look (or well, you could when I last played it years ago. lol). As this obviously could be a way to get around the 'heavy armor' look issue I have... wear heavy armor but have it look like a piece of light armor

related Q - How does the crown store outfits work?

Are they done so if you use 1 you get the whole appearance? Or can you only show\activate certain parts? (ie only have the chest & pants showing while gloves, helm & boots are your armor pieces) Also, does it matter what armor your wearing or not? ie if you use heavy armor you can only use heavy armor based/looking outfits.

Regarding hide helmet: Thanx for pointing that out, as I usually always hide helmet in games that allow me to. I like making my characters look the way I like them and want to see them... not some grubby helmet! lol

Fleshreaper · April 2015

There are several ESO Skill Calculators out there, I personally like the looks of ESOhead's.
There are armor dye shops in most major town. Look on you map for dye stations, generally around mage guilds or enchanting shops. As far a costumes, you just equip it. There is a costume/tabard slot.

Aett_Thorn · April 2015

Can you change how an item looks

Unless you have the Imperial Edition of the game, no. Even if you do have the Imperial Edition, you can only change most gear to the appearance of the Imperial race. It is an often-requested feature, but no word from the Developers on it yet.

How do costumes work?

All costumes (including crown store ones) will override any equipment you have on, and replace it with the costume. The only change that you can make to these costumes is you can turn the head armor visuals on and off, much like you can with your normal armor. You cannot show just part of the costume. It's all or nothing.

Where is a good place to see all the skills and morphs in the game?

I use the following site: http://elderscrollsonline.wiki.fextralife.com/Elder+Scrolls+Online+Wiki

Seems to be mostly updated, though a few things might be off here or there.

UrQuan · April 2015

Kamatsu wrote: »

Wow, thank you all for the wonderful replies and answer's. Really appreciate the help & advice - I admit I was worried about my thoughts on doing a magicka based templar in light armor with LA look based on what I read... glad to see that it's perfectly viable while questing & leveling. Obviously once I hit endgame, and if I decide to get involved in that, things will be different... but for now, just want to focus on playing, getting the story, etc.

Honestly, almost anything is viable in levels 1-50. You may have to switch things up a bit after you've completed the main quest and started the VR zones and doing vet dungeons, but just about all the advice you've received above still holds true even then. My magicka build templar healer that I was talking about above has been tearing through the Cadwell's Silver zones (if you're not familiar with the term, after you complete all of your alliance's zones and finish the main quest you get to move on to a veteran version of the next alliance's zones with increased difficulty - that's Cadwell's Silver, and then the zones of the third alliance are the Cadwell's Gold zones) with the greatest of ease, and has even started doing veteran group dungeons with no problems so far.

Kamatsu wrote: »

Another Q - does anyone know a site or place which shows all the skill morph's in the games current build?

I ask, because I've looked at a few of the wiki's... and they all seem to show old morph's, as none of them show any of the class stamina based morph's. So as they don't show the stamina based morph's... I don't know how accurate/up-to-date their info is.

I'll add a second vote to http://elderscrollsonline.wiki.fextralife.com/Elder+Scrolls+Online+Wiki as a good source for this. That's where I go to check things out, and as far as I can tell it's currently fully up to date.

Kamatsu wrote: »

Regarding hide helmet: Thanx for pointing that out, as I usually always hide helmet in games that allow me to. I like making my characters look the way I like them and want to see them... not some grubby helmet! lol

Personally I use it on some characters, but not on others. In some cases I like the helmet or cowl, and I want it to show (the main reason why I made my first character an Imperial is because I really liked the look of the Imperial heavy helmet - like a cross between a classic Greek helmet and a Roman helmet). In other cases I want my character's head to show.

Nestor · April 2015

Kamatsu wrote: »

Also, good tip/hint regarding the robe part chest piece with light armor - it would make the pants a great place to stick the heavy or medium armor piece to level it up and keep the look I like.

related Q - How does the crown store outfits work?

Regarding hide helmet: Thanx for pointing that out, as I usually always hide helmet in games that allow me to. I like making my characters look the way I like them and want to see them... not some grubby helmet! lol

I have found that most Heavy Armor chest pieces meshes well visually with Light Armor on all the other slots. Especially with the Dye System. I can't stand wearing a Robe myself, so all my Light Armor characters are Heavy Chest, Heavy Helm, Light Pants and everything else. I hide the helm, except on one character, he came out downright fugly, and he is my most experienced one.

Crown Store outfits replace your armor for that slot, so they are not for combat. Unless you want to increase your challenge and not use armor but also not run around naked.

Note, during Leveling, you may want to slot 5 Light, 1 Heavy and 1 Medium. Also, if you can, run the Training Trait on the Medium and Heavy. This way, if they change the game system down the road, you only have to respec points, not grind out another skill line. Medium is 75% the protection of Heavy, so it's almost as good, and you can make the Helm, or even the Chest, the Medium Armor. Although, I would make the Chest Heavy as that offers the most protection.

UrQuan · April 2015

Nestor wrote: »

Crown Store outfits replace your armor for that slot, so they are not for combat. Unless you want to increase your challenge and not use armor but also not run around naked.

I believe you're thinking of the clothes that you can steal in towns as part of the justice system: those take up specific armour slots. The Crown Store costumes don't use up slots: they show up in your Collections tab and can simply be set to active, like the Golden Saint and Dark Seducer costumes. You're still wearing your armour, the costume is purely for aesthetics.

Nestor · April 2015

UrQuan wrote: »

Nestor wrote: »

Crown Store outfits replace your armor for that slot, so they are not for combat. Unless you want to increase your challenge and not use armor but also not run around naked.

I believe you're thinking of the clothes that you can steal in towns as part of the justice system: those take up specific armour slots. The Crown Store costumes don't use up slots: they show up in your Collections tab and can simply be set to active, like the Golden Saint and Dark Seducer costumes. You're still wearing your armour, the costume is purely for aesthetics.

Your right, forgot about that. I have not bought a Crown Shop costume as of yet.