How badly have I messed up my character?

Mahthran · January 2016

Hello All!

I've been playing ESO for a little over a week now, and I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I've screwed the pooch when it comes to my character. Having spent most of my MMO time previously in WoW, I jumped into ESO without really reading too much, and figured a Heavy Armor wearing Dragonknight wielding a Two Handed Weapon would be pretty fun. I also figured I should mainly focus on just one of the class skill trees, like it was a specialization.

I'm now to the point that I've just completed the zone quest-line for Deshaan, and I'm feeling a bit gimped. I realized partway through I should be wearing some Medium Armor and have tried to pick some up, and I've very recently tried to branch out into the other class skill trees, but it's slow going.

Have I massively messed up? Should I spend some gold now to reset my points? Should I ditch Heavy Armor entirely for all Medium? Should I be tossing out the Two Handed Weapon? Any advice would be appreciated. I've provided a link below to my characters current.... eclectic setup.

My Character

Thanks in advance for your advice!

Totalitarian · January 2016

You'll be perfectly fine. You'll eventually have a ton of skill points, so you can spend them on whatever you want.

Heavy armor is usually seen as a tank armor, and Medium is used as a stamina DPS armor. So whichever you want to use.

Either way though, Two-handed is good for damage, and not terrible for tanking, so you can keep that. But once you max out that weapon, I would recommend you switch to another one to train that one.

QuebraRegra · January 2016

the only thing perma screwed (for the moment they say) is your appearance.

Respec yer character at the shrine, test out different builds.

AverageJo3Gam3r · January 2016

Don't worry about it. Wait until you hit level 50 then respec. You'll mess up a few more times as you're leveling. 2H is one of the strongest weapons, just make sure to split your attributes between health and stamina.

For leveling, you'll want one skill from each class line on your bar (ardent flame, dragonic power, and earthen heart). Also, wear at least one piece of heavy, medium, and light armor. Why? So you have options! This will ensure that all your skills level up equally and give you a chance to experience all your class abilities.

Other than that, just make sure you read all the tooltips and passives so you understand what each thing does and how everything fits together.

ListerJMC · January 2016

My Dragonknight was also a heavily-armored 2H weapon user for a while there, and I ran into the same problem. I came to the conclusion that I had two options on the matter:

If I wanted to keep my armor, I was going to have to make her into a tank and switch 2H to sword and board.
-OR-
If I wanted to keep the weapon, I was going to have to change to medium armor and ditch the heavy.

In the end I decided to make her a tank and keep the armor, so I re-specced her. At a low level, it's not that expensive to do. It will be slow going because your new weapon/armor skills will be behind everyone else for a while, but it's do-able and you're only up to Deshaan anyway it's not so bad a catch-up (when I did it, my DK was up to the last zone in her faction!).

Since then I've respecced her completely three times over and am now running a magicka-based tank

. So I'd go for a re-spec, don't write your character off it's easy to switch things around. You'll have plenty of skill points to spend in the end anyway

.

Also, I'd work on getting all your class skill trees to 50. You may find out later that the build you want to run requires something from a skill line you neglected, and levelling it at higher levels when people expect you to know what you're doing is not fun (it's happened to me twice!).

Johngo0036 · January 2016

so you are currently around level 26...

Yes you did kinda screw up a bit.. However it is not a train smash,
In the next 25 levels you can level all the skill lines you havent levelled and may need,

My advice is as follows...

Put skills from the 2 lines you didn't level onto your back bar and when handing in quests swap to that bar..

UrQuan · January 2016

Lots of good advice for you in this thread. If you decide to stick with mostly heavy armour and go the tank route, I suggest you put sword & shield on one of your bars so you can level that skill line, as it's essential to tanking in this game (it's got one of only 2 taunts in the game, and it's the taunt you'll want to use the most often by far). You can stick with your two-handed weapon on your other bar for doing better damage.

You earn XP in (most) skill lines based on what skills you have on your skill bar while earning XP, or based on what gear you have equipped while learning XP. That's why @Johngo0036 has suggested you put skills from the lines you're leveling on your second skill bar and swapping to it before handing in quests. This is a very efficient way of leveling those skills without having to actually make combat more difficult on yourself by loading up the bar you're mostly using with a bunch of random skills you're trying to level.