Just some suggestions, here, take it or leave it ... and I'm sure other players will have some slightly different ideas than me.

Also, are you a DPS Templar or dedicated healer?

It is also possible to be a magicka Templar tank ... but I'm not gathering that's your goal from the opening post.

1. Sword & Board+Staff is an excellent choice. As a Templar with strong self-heals you can probably pick either staff based on your preferred playstyle. You already pointed out the primary difference ... which is the skills and passives. Destro has more DPS-based single target and AOE skills (suitable for a DPS Templar). Resto has more defensive-based skills and additional heals (suitable for a dedicated healer). When choosing one, don't forget to level the other one up at some point ... since the associated skills are primarily magicka-based.

In contrast, you may have already gathered that S+B and DW have a lot of stamina-based skills. Those skills are awesome for a Stamplar ... but are "not so much" on a magicka Templar. Most magicka-based characters run S+B and DW primarily for the extra set bonuses on armor and weapons ... and/or a handful of champion tree passives. I will occasionally run the defensive posture S+B skill on my dedicated healer due to the length of time it's active and the stun. However, that skill gets switched out often depending on the raid situation.

2. If the goal is to dump all attribute points into magicka (a lot of players do this by the way), then you'll want to supplement that with the appropriate food, drink, and potions.

Your individual setup would benefit the most by queuing up the Orzoga's Red Frothgar ... available through a short quest line in Wrothgar. I'm assuming, here, you have access to the DLC. Orzoga's Red Frothgar adds 5,000 health in the tooltip (which will scale to CP40 in Cyrodiil) and also has magicka regen similar to any drink.

Running Orzoga's should enable you to change your Mundus stone to a more magicka-friendly one. The Apprentice and Atronach are obvious choices. I run the Ritual on my dedicated healer for the extra healing done.

Don't forget to do all of Orzoga's quests to get all of her recipes ... regardless of how bad her food tastes. Some day in the future you may have some Perfect Roe laying around to make gold quality food.

For potions, there are quite a few to choices to pick from. PvPers tend to like immovable (unstoppable) pots. These can either be unstoppable/restore health/restore magicka, unstoppable/restore health/restore stamina, or unstoppable/restore stamina/increase speed. There are also the basic tri-pots (restore health/restore magicka/restore stamina -- PvE and PvP folks use these a lot). In addition, there are several combinations of increase spell damage and increase spell crit. Consult an alchemy guide if you're interested in tailoring a specific potion back over to your build.

It goes without saying, when crafting all of the above, that it's nice to be able to make these items independently yourself. So, you may want to work on your alchemy and provisioning skill lines in your downtime from Cyrodill. There might be enough skill points on your Main to allocate to crafting. Otherwise, start a crafting Alt character.

3. Without a doubt, there are a huge variety of Templar builds running around Cyrodiil and Imperial City. There are standard builds such as running damage shields or wearing straight-up impenetrable on the large pieces (or all pieces) There are also niche builds ... such "buff bots" or "debuff tanks" that either supplement the raid with near-constant buffs (see Transmutation, Meritorious Service, and Spell Power Cure dropped sets) or apply near-constant debuffs to enemy groups. You yourself said you saw some vids ... so you know what I mean.

So, the easiest builds to manage for a magicka Templar are running damage shields or wearing impenetrable. Damage shields work best in light or heavy armor. The light armor passives are more compatable with damage shields ... at the expense of a lower armor rating. In addition, ZOS recently nerfed the harness magicka skill down to 6 seconds. Still a viable build, however, since enemy players can't crit damage shields.

Impenetrable works best in heavy armor and helps your overall defense ... which you said your character is currently getting low marks in this aspect of PvP. It's pretty easy to put 5 pieces of heavy impen on and call it a quality of life improvement in Cyrodiil. You will lose some maneuverability by wearing heavy armor. And, heavy armor passives favor health instead of magicka.

In my opinion, you'll level up too fast to farm a full CP40 dropped (non-crafted) armor set with weapons. So, for entry-level gear, you may want to get a friend or guildie to help you out on a crafted set ... assuming you don't have enough skill points invested in clothing or blacksmithing. If you're on PC NA, you can send me an in-game e-mail with the requested craftable set, level, quality, trait, and style. There may be a modest fee in gold if someone crafts it for you.

Fortunately, there are some good craftable sets out there (Julianos, Seducer, Kagrenac's). Take a look online and see wich one might best fit your role in Cyrodiil ... though it's hard to go wrong with a 5-piece craftable magicka-based set.

If you have access to the PTS server, you can sandbox your build without any penalty for materials usage (it's a test server). If you're on PC EU, template characters are available right now on PTS ... with near unlimited mats and a ton of skill points. Just pick a Templar template character, plug in 40 champion points, allocate skills, and head to Cyrodiil to view your stats. Templates will be available on NA PC in a week or two.

4. Minimum Stats - I'm sure other players will have differing opinions here. 20K Health and Magicka (in Cyrodiil) should be the minimum for a Magicka Templar. Magicka regen should not be below 1,500 ... with ideally a target of 2,000. Basically, if you find yourself running out of magicka frequently during combat (making sure your food/drink buff is still active), that means it's time to increase the regen stat based on your playstyle.

Physical and spell resistance should not be below 15K. For crit resistance, I believe the cap is somewhere around 3,300. Without damage shields, the minimum unbuffed should be 2,200 ... with a target of 2,500-2,800 before buffs are applied.

Crit percentage (%) is 60% or higher for end game crit builds. Newer characters should not be below 40% crit ... and that includes dedicated healers who can get crit heals from time to time.

Spell power touches so many things that you'll don't want to lose track of it with any kind of magicka Templar. Minimum of 2,000 for a low CP character (DPS build).

Of course, your stamina pool and health regen get sacrificed in the above planning and theorycrafting. I don't personally pay much attention to these two ... along with stam regen. However, there might be some other forum-goers that have other ideas different than mine.


Anyway, this was way more than I originally planned on writing. But, it might help others who are also searching for a solution in the forums for their PvP Templar.