DW NB Skill Suggestions

elephunky · July 2015

Hi guys and gals,

I have only been playing ESOTU for a few weeks now and I have hit Level 17 with my Dual Wielding NightBlade (with bow as replacement) and I am having some difficulty figuring out which skills ot stick with morphing and whether I should get replacement skills. I have not yet worked out how to tackle enemy groups of 3.

I currently have the following skills

- Death Stroke
- Impale (Assassins Blade)
- Teleport Strike
- Shadow Disguise (Shadow Cloak)
- Surpise Attack (Veiled Attack)
- Swallow Soul (Strife)
- Agony
- Poison Arrow

All suggestions welcome...

ontheleftcoast · July 2015

I was playing with DW until I switched to 2H. For groups of three (or more) I did the following

Start with Reaper's Mark (or the unmorphed version) on a couple of the monsters. The beauty of this spell is it doesn't alert them to your presence so you stay hidden.
Then Ambush one of the monsters and heavy attack it. This usually takes out one but if it doesn't don't worry...
Now, spam your Whirling Blades. This is a pretty decent AoE attack for DW. And if you're a stamina build NB you'll have enough to spam it until everything is dead. Oh, and those Reaper's Marks you cast earlier will have fully healed you.

Loot the corpses and head to the next mob. ;D

Bloodgharm · July 2015

Well, first you need to decide on if you're going to be speccing into stamina or magicka as your skills are a mix of both at the moment. Since you'll be focusing on bow and dual wield i.e. weapon damage that scale off of stamina for both; I would suggest stamina.

Here's what I started with on my nb:

Soul Harvest (Death Stroke)
Killer's Blade (Assassin's Blade)
Ambush (Teleport Strike)
Shadowy Disguise (Shadow Cloak)
Surprise Attack (Veiled Strike)
Agony/Strife

As you'll see, most of my skills are the stamina morphs which will give you more damage when you spec for stamina. I left a siphoning skill on this bar to level that skill line, because I wanted to eventually get siphoning strikes, but I hardly ever used those skills. Of course, you'll have to probably spend some gold to respec some of your skills to make this work. For your bow bar, you can pick what works best for you. Here's what I run:

Veil of Blades
Poison injection (Poison Arrow)
Bombard (Arrow Spray)
Magnum Shot (Scatter shot)
Snipe
Reaper's Mark (Mark Target)

These skills got me through level 30 when I decided to go with 2h on my first bar for added survivability. I simply replaced agony with brawler (cleave) for the damage shield and I'll switch out shadowy disguise for Rally (Momentum) for the self heal and damage buff. Ultimately, I liked the survivability because I solo alot, but you can replace some of those skills with those in the dw line for more dps if you like grouping more.

elephunky · July 2015

I can never tell if skills are going to be stamina or magicka based which makes it a bit difficult. Would you say that magicka skills do less damage than the stamina ones or are they about even?

Bloodgharm · July 2015

elephunky wrote: »

I can never tell if skills are going to be stamina or magicka based which makes it a bit difficult. Would you say that magicka skills do less damage than the stamina ones or are they about even?

You can easily check out skills and their morphs ahead of time at elderscrollswiki.fextralife. Any morphs that say they scale off of stamina and weapon damage are what you're after.

As far as damage goes, it all depends on what attributes you choose as you'll pretty much want to stick with 2 out of the health/stamina/magicka options. You don't want to spread yourself too thin so go with stamina if you plan to use a lot of weapon skills or class skills that scale off of stamina and weapon damage. Also, the more max stamina you have, the more damage your skills will do. The same can be said of speccing into magicka for your staff skills and also any class skills that use magicka.

elephunky · July 2015

Bloodgharm wrote: »

You can easily check out skills and their morphs ahead of time at elderscrollswiki.fextralife. Any morphs that say they scale off of stamina and weapon damage are what you're after.

As far as damage goes, it all depends on what attributes you choose as you'll pretty much want to stick with 2 out of the health/stamina/magicka options. You don't want to spread yourself too thin so go with stamina if you plan to use a lot of weapon skills or class skills that scale off of stamina and weapon damage. Also, the more max stamina you have, the more damage your skills will do. The same can be said of speccing into magicka for your staff skills and also any class skills that use magicka.

It is going to be a really tough decision between stamina and magicka. There are some really useful skills in both. Would it be useful going with stamina since I am a sneaky type anyway and then stack magicka on my armor so I can use a few magicka based ones or not really?

Bloodgharm · July 2015

elephunky wrote: »

It is going to be a really tough decision between stamina and magicka. There are some really useful skills in both. Would it be useful going with stamina since I am a sneaky type anyway and then stack magicka on my armor so I can use a few magicka based ones or not really?

You most certainly can. I'm just saying from a min/max perspective, you'd want as much of your main attribute as you can get. Use those magicka skills to your heart's content, though. Personally I'd stick to just a couple utility skills that use magicka like shadow cloak and mark target. That way I won't be gimping my damage dealing skills.

elephunky · July 2015

Bloodgharm wrote: »

You most certainly can. I'm just saying from a min/max perspective, you'd want as much of your main attribute as you can get. Use those magicka skills to your heart's content, though. Personally I'd stick to just a couple utility skills that use magicka like shadow cloak and mark target. That way I won't be gimping my damage dealing skills.

Thanks for the advice! I find my 1 main stamina skill does more damage than my others so I may go heavy on that end.

I appreciate the help! So many skill options.

Bloodgharm · July 2015

@elephunky Yes, there are so many. That's the beauty and the downfall of this system though. You can create a unique build that works for you and your playstyle, but usually there's only a few "best" builds that are above and beyond all the rest. I prefer to solo play so I don't worry about it too much and just pick what works for me.

JSylvan · July 2015

Bloodgharm wrote: »

elephunky wrote: »

I can never tell if skills are going to be stamina or magicka based which makes it a bit difficult. Would you say that magicka skills do less damage than the stamina ones or are they about even?

You can easily check out skills and their morphs ahead of time at elderscrollswiki.fextralife. Any morphs that say they scale off of stamina and weapon damage are what you're after.

As far as damage goes, it all depends on what attributes you choose as you'll pretty much want to stick with 2 out of the health/stamina/magicka options. You don't want to spread yourself too thin so go with stamina if you plan to use a lot of weapon skills or class skills that scale off of stamina and weapon damage. Also, the more max stamina you have, the more damage your skills will do. The same can be said of speccing into magicka for your staff skills and also any class skills that use magicka.

Thanks for this heads up. I'm still very low level and at this level without any morphs, all class abilities scale off of magicka. I didn't realize that some morphs change so that those abilities scale off of stamina after morphing them.

HeardsTheWord · July 2015

ontheleftcoast wrote: »

Start with Reaper's Mark (or the unmorphed version) on a couple of the monsters.

You can only have one active at a time. Casting it only removes it from the previous mob and places it on the new one.

Hardicon · July 2015

As a dual wield/bow nightblade you have limited aoe options. Dual wield has whirling blades that morphs into steel tornado, quick cloak or deadly cloak adds some aoe damage but not much. Bow has bombard or acid spray. The main advantage of a nightblade is its high single target damage. Sneak up on a mob, use surprise attack which generally takes it out. Ambush the next mob use killers blade for execute which will return some health when the mob dies. blood craze puts a dot on the mobs so hit each mob with that plus it heals you over time. Mobs of three are pretty easy as a nightblade. Larger mobs you will need some aoe skills to deal with them. One trick is to get bombard and on large groups reapers mark as many as possible and just keep on using bombard, melee cant get to you so just watch out for casters, focus them if possible with poison arrow so you can interrupt them. One huge drawback to the nightblade is lack of survivability on bosses which is why a lot of people have went to 2hand, plus 2hand is so much easier just spam wrecking blow is all you have to do which works great if you are not a khajit but the kittys lack the stamina regen to really spam wrecking blow more than a few times.

Xvorg · July 2015

Hardicon wrote: »

As a dual wield/bow nightblade you have limited aoe options. Dual wield has whirling blades that morphs into steel tornado, quick cloak or deadly cloak adds some aoe damage but not much. Bow has bombard or acid spray. The main advantage of a nightblade is its high single target damage. Sneak up on a mob, use surprise attack which generally takes it out. Ambush the next mob use killers blade for execute which will return some health when the mob dies. blood craze puts a dot on the mobs so hit each mob with that plus it heals you over time. Mobs of three are pretty easy as a nightblade. Larger mobs you will need some aoe skills to deal with them. One trick is to get bombard and on large groups reapers mark as many as possible and just keep on using bombard, melee cant get to you so just watch out for casters, focus them if possible with poison arrow so you can interrupt them. One huge drawback to the nightblade is lack of survivability on bosses which is why a lot of people have went to 2hand, plus 2hand is so much easier just spam wrecking blow is all you have to do which works great if you are not a khajit but the kittys lack the stamina regen to really spam wrecking blow more than a few times.

According to what I know, you can have only one mark per target at time. The marked target should die before you mark a second one.

Now that you mention spamming WB, I'm planning to do something similar with my bow magnum shot:

Ambush -> Soul harvest -> magnum -> light attacks -> ambush -> killer's blade

I did something similar with my Magicka NB, but using Lotus fan, destro clench and Impale, the problem was that the bosses with knock back immunity gave me a hard time. I thing that Magnum is going to work OK, because both (the boss and me) get the knock back, so you can put yourself away from danger and at the same time doing some nice dmg.

By the way, siphoning strikes IMHO is a must if you lack stam/magicka regen, you just need to include light/heavy attacks in your playing style.