I've been seeing a ton of posts with basic questions regarding skills and game mechanics since the console release, so I figured I'd create a one-stop source for those new players to learn the basics. This is going to seem oversimplified and like common-sense to more experienced players, but I'm sure we all had similar questions at some point in time.



1. Combat Mechanics
Many of the tougher enemies you'll face early on can be defeated rather easily if you know how ESO's combat mechanics (rock-paper-scissors) system works.

Blocking
When you see a glowing yellow kite shield appear in front of an enemy (usually one with a shield equipped, but not always), he's blocking. If you hit a blocking enemy with a heavy weapon attack, it will knock you on your arse for a few seconds. Do not use heavy attacks on blocking enemies; stick to light attacks or spells until they stop blocking.

Heavy Attacks
When an enemy winds their weapon back and is surrounded by yellow rays/sparks, it means they're about to hit you with a heavy attack. Heavy attacks will knock you on your arse for a few seconds and deal massive damage to you.
When you see the tell for a heavy attack, hold block. Blocking a heavy attack will cause the attacker to be disoriented, and you'll take far less damage from the attack and wont be knocked down yourself.

Spellcasts
When you see an enemy surrounded by red rays/sparks, or you see a red cone or circle appear on the ground, it means an enemy is going to either cast a spell or use a channeled attack. In some cases, such as rogue-type enemies using a spellcast to throw a blade at you, you'll take heavy damage. On veteran level enemies, this will kill you in one hit, or close to it.
When you see the tell for an enemy using a spellcast, hold block and attack (left + right triggers) to initiate a bash. Bashing a casting enemy will disorient them and stop the spell from successfully casting, buying you a few seconds of peace.

Roll Dodging
Some spellcasts, most often those that only highlight an area on the ground and are not accompanied by the red sparks/rays, cannot be interrupted with a bash. For these spells, you need to get out of the highlighted area. The quickest way to do so is to roll dodge, which is accomplished by holding block and hitting your jump button (x on playstation) while pressing toward any direction with the left stick. Roll dodging also causes all attacks to miss you for a second or so (the animation length of the roll), so it can be good for getting away from swarms of enemies bent on your demise.

Disoriented enemies
Whenever you block an enemy's heavy attack or bash to interrupt their spellcast, they'll be disoriented for approximately 3 seconds. During this time, if you hit the enemy with a charged attack (A heavy attack or partial heavy attack from your weapon), you'll knock them to the ground, stunning them for a few seconds and dealing extra damage.

Charging enemies
Sometimes you'll encounter an enemy that will put a rectangular red path on the ground, followed after a second or so by a charge down that path. If you are in that path when the enemy gets to you, you'll take heavy damage and be knocked down and stunned.

Using these simple techniques, which rely only on your own skill and attentiveness as a player, you can effectively lock down tougher enemies and deal with them on your own terms.



Magicka, Stamina, and Health // Light, Medium, and Heavy Armor
Despite the game's claim of letting you "use any combination of gear and play how you want", in reality things arent quite that loose. Yes, you can get by with any weapon, armor, stat, or ability combination when you're out doing quests by yourself, but knowing the limitations and using a proper build will make you more efficient, more powerful, and more beneficial to groups.

Light armor is for spellcasters and healers
If you want to throw a lot of magic at your enemies, or efficiently heal your allies, you need to be wearing light armor. Light armor provides bonuses to magicka regeneration, spell critical chance, spell power, and reduces the magicka cost of your spells. These are not minor bonuses, in fact they are significant enough that not wearing at least 5 pieces of light armor as a spell-based character is probably going to cripple you for any group content or pvp. yes, heavy armor looks cooler, but you're better off finding a costume to suit your appearance needs if you cant handle how light armor looks.

Medium armor is for physical damage dealers
In the same manner that light armor greatly improves efficiency and power for spellcasters, medium armor does the same thing for anyone wielding a bow or melee weapon. Medium armor gives you bonus stamina regeneration, reduced stamina costs, extra weapon damage, and extra weapon critical chance. Note that staffs do not count as physical weapons, they use bonuses from light armor, not from medium armor.
If you're playing a rogue, or a damage-oriented warrior, or an archer, or an assassin, medium armor is what you need, and you need every bit of it you can get.

Heavy armor is for tanks
A lot of players seem to want to go straight to heavy armor, thinking it will make them so tough that it doesnt matter that they have lower magicka or stamina and the other bonuses that light/medium armor grant. This is not the right line of thought when picking your armor, and neither is "but heavy looks cooler" (refer to the costume remark above).
Heavy armor's bonuses are almost all directly related to soaking up damage. It has some minor magicka/stamina return when you're hit, but as a damage dealer or healer you dont want to be getting hit in the first place.
The only time you're going to ever get the full benefit out of wearing heavy armor is when you're a tank, and you have a lot of enemies hitting you repeatedly. That said, it is acceptable to add 2 pieces of heavy armor to either 5 light or 5 medium if you expect you'll be taking more damage than you should, or when you're going to do some pvp and need the extra bit of survivability.

Magicka
Every ability that costs magicka to cast, and every light or heavy attack from a destruction or restoration staff, relies on magicka as it's power modifier. Your spell power is increased directly by the amount of magicka you have. A player with 50 points into health is going to do less damage with a spellcast than a player who put those 50 points into magicka.

Stamina
The above applies, inversely, to stamina. Your weapon attacks and any/all abilities that cost stamina to use will be scaled off of your maximum stamina. The more stamina you have, the more damage you'll deal whenever you poke, prod, smash, or bash an enemy.

These benefits are derived not only from the attribute points you place with each level up, but also from enchantments on armor.

Health
Everyone needs to invest at least 25% of their attribute points - that's one out of every four points spent - into health. Doesnt matter if you're a healer, melee damage dealer, archer, or spellcaster, you need to get your health pool high enough to allow you to survive some incoming damage.

Attribute balancing
A good rule of thumb is to focus on two of the three attributes - either health and stamina, or health and magicka. If you're a healer or spellcaster, put 3 points into magicka, 1 into health, and repeat. If you're an archer or melee damage dealer, put 3 points into stamina, 1 into health, and repeat.
Exceptions to that rule are offtanking damage dealers (characters who primarily focus on damage but want to be able to grab the attention of an enemy or two to help keep the group alive), who should invest in a 50%/50% balance (1 into health, 1 into stamina or magicka, repeat), and tanks who should be investing 3 into health and then 1 into either magicka or stamina, based on their build and preferred playstyle.

Ultimates
Take note that ultimate abilities scale to either your stamina/weapon damage or magicka/spell power, whichever is highest, so you never need to worry about your ultimates not being effective with your choice of attributes.



Ability bar layouts
One of the main limiting factors for player builds in ESO is the fact that you've only got 12 ability slots at your disposal - 6 per weapon swap. One of those 6 is also reserved exclusively for ultimate-type abilities, so in essence you've got 10 slots, split between two weapons, to make an effective build.

There are several lines of thought on how a build should make use of this hotkey real estate. Some players like to have a damage bar complimented by a healing bar, some like to have a single-target damage bar complimented by an area-effect damage bar. Some like a tanking bar with a damage bar. Some like a primary bar backed up by a bar used entirely for buff or utility effects.

Your choice of weapons on each slot will greatly determine how you set your ability bars up. If you dont feel comfortable using two different types of weapons, it's perfectly viable (and sometimes even preferrable) to use the same weapon type on both bars (for example two 2h weapons, one per weapon slot) and then sort your abilities out so that each bar has a different application.

The bottom line is that your ability bar(s) is like a hand in a card game. You want to make sure your hand can beat as many possible hands used by the enemy as possible - that goes especially for pvp. This means that, in most cases, it's better to have variety and versatility than to focus entirely on one thing (like, for example, raw damage).

As an example, my damage-dealing characters tend to set up their bars like so (in this example, using a 2handed weapon set)
1. Burst damage ability (e.g. wrecking blow)
2. Damage over time ability (e.g. Searing Strike) OR Mobility ability (e.g. critical rush or fiery grip)
3. Execute/Finisher ability (e.g. Reverse Slice)
4. Survival ability (shield or self buff) (e.g. Fragmented Shield)
5. Offensive/damage buffing ability (e.g. Rally)

With a bar like that, you can tackle a lot of situations with ease. You have your damage abilities on a couple of slots, so you can deal enough damage to the opponent - note that a lot of damage in this game comes from light/heavy attacks mixed in or woven with special abilities and spells. You have your mobility ability to get around quickly or pull in ranged opponents. You have an execute/finisher ability for enemies, particularly bosses, that are low on health and need to die quickly. You've got a shield, armor buff, or healing ability to keep yourself alive when the healer gets overwhelmed, and you've got an offensive damage buff to make your attacks more efficient and deadly.

Ultimately you're going to have to take a look through your available abilities and figure out what each one is good at and whether or not it compliments the other abilities on your bar. Stay away from putting more than two abilities that have the same purpose on one hotbar - as an example I wouldnt typically want wrecking blow and surprise attack on the same bar, because they both accomplish the same thing and use the same resource. Pick the better of the two for your playstyle, and use it.

In the end, you never know what your enemy is going to throw at you, so you need to try and be prepared for as many encounters as possible. Versatility is the key to being effective in this game.



Money and crafting
One of the biggest mistakes new players make is buying gear from NPC armor or weapon vendors. Dont do it, even if those weapons or that armor looks too good to be true (trust me, it is).

Vendor gear is overpriced, it will rob you of your hard earned gold before you know what happened, and it's no better than what you can find out in the world or have crafted. On that note, learn a crafting skill. Crafted gear is some of the best gear in this game, especially while levelling up. Armor and weapons dont come with innate bonuses in ESO like they do in WoW or other MMO's - a crafted rare greatsword will be identical to a looted rare greatsword of the same level, and on the crafted version you can pick what traits and appearance you want the item to have.

That said, crafting does take a great deal of time and skill point investment. If you can, find someone that can make items for you for a reasonable price (many crafters will be happy to make you gear for free as long as you provide them with all of the necessary materials, though tips are always welcome for their time and effort).

While you level, you'll undoubtedly come across a ton of junk weapons and armor that you wont use. In general, you want to sell (to an npc vendor) any items of white or grey quality (junk or common). Items of uncommon (green), rare (blue), epic (purple), or legendary (yellow) quality you want to take to a crafting bench and dismantle. Dismantling these items usually gives you upgrade materials, which can be used to improve the quality of other items. Upgrade materials sell for a great deal of gold to crafters, and are a good commodity to invest in.



Tanking and Dungeon Mechanics
Most MMO's have a clear-cut holy trinity (i.e. "tank", "Healer", "Damage" roles). ESO uses the same trinity system, but on a far more loose basis. Tanking is the most different from other games of the genre.

Tanks in ESO cannot taunt groups of enemies into attacking them. There are only single-target taunts in this game, and those taunts cannot typically be 'spammed' because they're resource intensive. This, combined with the fact that a lot of dungeons involve fighting half a dozen or more enemies at a time while there are only four player slots in the group, means that you're going to have to do things a little differently than you may be accustomed to.

A tank will not be able to keep all of those enemies focused on him, nor should he (because doing so would get him killed). A tank's job is to pick the toughest enemies in each pull, and keep them occupied. Usually this means your tank will only be dealing with 1 or 2 out of potentially 6-10 enemies present, and he'll probably have his hands full with those two or so enemies.

So who tanks the other 4-8 enemies? The rest of the group. Your typical dungeon group consists of one tank, two damage dealers, and one healer. Those two damage dealers should work together to quickly bring down the most dangerous enemies that the tank isnt dealing with. The quicker you kill the enemies, the less likely your group is to get slaughtered by them.

Kill order is important, you always want to take out enemy healers first, then enemy spellcasters, then enemy archers, and move onto enemy melee damage dealers last. Taking out the healers quickly means your damage output will be more effective and efficient. Enemy casters and archers are tough for your healer to avoid and can kill him quickly, so you want to target them next in order to keep your healer alive. A healer can usually kite or avoid melee damage enemies without too much issue, but if you can stun, slow, or root them the healer will thank you.

After those enemies are dealt with, you can move on to whatever the tank was holding (usually large, high-damage, high-health mobs that are the mini-bosses of each pull. Usually these are 2hander-wielding opponents, or things like trolls or bears).

In essence, both of the damage dealers in the group are psuedo-tanks themselves, and the tank of the group is really just a tough damage dealer with more control over enemies. Tanks in this game are far from immune to enemy damage - in fact they'll take almost as much damage as a medium armor wearing rogue will, especially if their stamina gets eaten up and they can no longer block.


As a final note for this section, almost every end-dungeon boss fight in this game comes down to killing 'adds' (the extra little enemies that show up constantly) than bursting down the boss itself. If your damage dealers dont focus on and kill those adds, the group will get overwhelmed. Dont get tunnel vision, let the tank deal with the boss and handle the minions as a damage dealer.



I'll add more to this later if I think of anything else, but that should cover the basics for now.