PvP gear and how to get powerful?

Xargas13 · December 2016

Hi, recently hit level 50 about 160cp at the moment, and what I don't get is what is the difference between PvP gear and PvE, it doesn't have any damage reduction capabilities or anything. Second, i was doing dungeons at first to get something decent for PvP but got wrecked anyway, so I collected those 20k ap to buy something from vendor in Cirodiil, and to my surprise it was weaker by the stats, I thought "ok maybe it gives more health or adds damage somehow" but no it doesn't even do that, it was weaker then what I got from PvE in every manner. To make long story short I need a guidance into PvP. I don't understand how other players able to kill things so fast when gear never adds any damage, I know I'm missing something.... If you have a link to some sort of guide that would be great, because I couldn't find anything. Thanks in advance.

PS: small question.... Does gear gets better with higher cp level?

davey1107 · December 2016

Some pointers that might help:

1. gear currently caps at c160. Therefore, it never gets more powerful than that...except of course by upgrading the color quality. So a gold c160 item is the best there is.

2. The sets are made to be relatively balanced, meaning that the 2nd, 3rd and 4th piece buffs are generally the same from set to set. If a piece adds weapons critical, a gold c160 set will add 688 weapon critical. This is the same whether it's the weapon crit added by the set Hundings Rage or the set Night Mothers Gaze. So you don't have to get obsessed with the numerical values, the main question is "does my character need those first three buffs" and "what does the fourth do?"

3. when people say Pvp or pve gear, there's nothing that designates these sets as such. They just mean that the set is particularly good for pvp or pve. And sometimes the traits apply to one but not the other. For example, Vicious Death is a pvp set because the 5th trait is "when you kill a player they explode..." when the tool tips reference "players," that means a human player. So the vicious death set's fifth piece bonus only works on humans. You can wear and use vicious death in pve...it's just a bit of a waste. Another pvp set is marksman. It adds bow damage against players, and also reduces the cost of bow abilities. So this set is less limited - inside pvp you get a great damage boost and cost reduction, but outside pvp the cost reduction still applies, so marksman is a little less of a waste than vicious death.

People also sometimes refer to gear as pvp because it comes from pvp rewards - rewards for the worthy, cyroddil vendors, etc. But some of those sets are great for pve too. Hawks Eye, for example, is a great set for pve, but we call it a pvp set because you buy it with app in cyrodiil.

Bottom line...don't worry about a set being a pvp set. Find the one that best benefits your character, there's nothing magical about pve vs pvp sets, it all boils down to what the buffs are.

4. Pvp players hone their gear, so competing means finding good sets for your character and equipping them right. I have no idea what you're playing. Reply to this with @my user name if you want to tell me your class and race and I can recommend some sets.

But the general rule is to wear one or two complete sets, with the right traits, upgraded appropriately and enchanted appropriately. For pvp, when I'm going bow ganking as a night blade wear five pieces marksman (stam recover, steam recover, weapon damage, +8% bow damage and -5% bow costs), and five piece hundings rage (weapon crit, max stam, weapon crit, weapon damage). I also wear a molag kena shoulder for weapon damage. Four of the pieces are impenetrable to help me survive crit hits, and the rest is divines. I have max stam enchants on most of the pieces, with I think one health. This is the config I found that works for me...he hits like a truck, but can survive a few hits to try to escape hairy situations.

5. One of the best pvp players other is sypher. He has tons of pvp builds online that are a great starting point, and his videos are good at explaining why you pair certain sets, skills, etc.

6. As a c160 player, you can wear the best gear in the game. If you make a fully gold hundings Rage set, its stats will be the same as every other player wearing c160 gear. HOWEVER, while the cp cap on gear is 160 the cp cap on players is 561. You are still going to be a little handicapped against c561 players. That 400 cp difference doesn't make you tremendously weaker, but it is significant. Looking at my player, those extra cps get him like 25% more hitting power, 25% more defense, 20% more recovery, with several other perks.

Hopefully this is helpful. Reply @me if you still have questions. The bottom line is that your character can probably use a better gear configuration, but he's probably also a little underpowered and inexperienced for pvp. You just need practice and over time you'll get stronger w more champion points. But you can totally play pvp now...you'll just probably be stronger in a group than out on your own. Do keep defense, and maybe run with some small 4-8 person groups, where you can learn from the more experienced pvpers and benefit from their protection, lol.

Jim_Pipp · December 2016

There are lots of 'tricks' to make a great build, and some people are great at explaining it. Maybe it would help to Google '[your class] pvp build' to see what other people did.

'Deltias gaming' is a very beginner friendly website.

Two tips - if you are going to wear heavy armor (and you should) make sure it is on your chest and legs as you will get more protection than wearing light armor with heavy armor on hands and feet.

Gear is mainly powerful when combined in sets. Based on what you have said, wearing full sets of gear will give you a lot of benefits.

Xargas13 · December 2016

@davey1107 Too long to read.... just kidding:) it was helpful, but there was another question that left unanswered. I'm wearing almost all purple gear, no sets yet, and I see how one guy totally owned three of us, he was wearing some scary light armor, he owned me with some weird ulty, then the second time we tried to gank him he got me with a few spells. He wasn't emperor by the way. So if the gear isn't scaling higher then 160cp how he was able to own us that hard? And he wasn't the only one.... I just barely do any damage to other players and that is my main concern. As for my character it's dark elf sorcerer almost everything is light armor, only gloves and boots are heavy, wanted to level it just in case i decide to switch.

Xargas13 · December 2016

@davey1107 in other words I'm interested in damage protection(since I die so fast) and more damage to other players.

Xargas13 · December 2016

Jim_Pipp wrote: »

There are lots of 'tricks' to make a great build, and some people are great at explaining it. Maybe it would help to Google '[your class] pvp build' to see what other people did.

'Deltias gaming' is a very beginner friendly website.

Two tips - if you are going to wear heavy armor (and you should) make sure it is on your chest and legs as you will get more protection than wearing light armor with heavy armor on hands and feet.

Gear is mainly powerful when combined in sets. Based on what you have said, wearing full sets of gear will give you a lot of benefits.

This is what I have been looking for. Thank you both for advises.

If anyone else have any other input that would be welcome also. I always like to know more.

davey1107 · December 2016

There's a lot here that could be contributing. It doesn't sound like you're configured right, and maybe a little new to pvp. When I gank in pvp w my stam nightblade, you're going to have about 25,000 points of incoming damage before you know I'm there. That's what we need to protect you from. If you and your buddies aren't ready for that, then a good player will squish you all in about ten seconds.

Gear: you need to be wearing sets, even if they're temporary sets and not your endgame gear. A character has 11-12 slots. Let's assume you're using staves and have 11. If you wear two 5 piece sets and a monster shoulder, that's 7 minor buffs and two set bonuses you're missing out on if you don't use sets. That's huge. Honestly, I'd rather play in green c100 sets than play in c160 purple non-sets...the bonuses are massive.

Here's what I'm going to recommend...let's suit you up with a passable config you can play, then replace down the line as you hone your skills. First you need to go buy five pieces of a set that comes in jewelry. It can be any magic build set where you can get arcane jewelry for cheap. I'm actually going to suggest maybe Baharas Curse. It isn't a good end game set, but it will return a ton of health to you and you can probably find five pieces for cheap. Go to guild stores and find the jewelry first (it only comes in blue...don't worry about it). Then get two other pieces for the body. Alternatively, buy vicious death instead of Baharas...it's cheap too. Secondly, get the mats then have someone make you five pieces of Julianos. This is an all-around base set that works great on any magic build. Third, go earn a monster shoulder that gives you a good buff. (Wearing one monster item gives a buff. You can run many non-vet undaunted dailies with 2 people. Or group up with a full foursome. Either way, grind to get something with a good trait and buff to round out your set.)

You want your jewelry to be arcane. The body can be all divines, but if you're going to mostly pvp make some impenetrable. (A couple of these raises your defense in pvp HUGELY). You're right to wear 2 heavy and 5 light. But you do NOT want a heavy belt or gloves (it's complicated, just trust me). So buy your Baharas (or whatever), get your shoulder, then fill in with the crafted julianos gear depending on what light/heavy you still need. Make the weapons sharpened, unless you have the money to make them nirnhoned. Put purple enchants on everything...mostly magic, and a little health. Upgrade the armor to purple. Make the weapons purple, but when you can upgrade them to gold. Julianos is a great set...you can start upgrading the armor to gold if you want...my magic builds always have gold Julianos they use as a base.

If you're wearing mismatched armor, getting you're hear closer to what I've described is going to make you literally twice as strong.

Champion Points: you're 400 under max, so that's a handicap. You want to config as good as you can to help minimize that. Don't spend all over...some options are simply superior. Put all your greens in magic recovery, health recover and reduce magic cost. But the first 75 can go magic recover, honestly. Blues you're racing to 120 in apprentice w a goal of 90 elemental expert and 30 elf born. Elem expert increases damage on EVERY magic attack you cast...this is better than anything else you can spend on. Reds, split evenly between hardy and elemental defender. This reduces all incoming stamina and magic damage.

Skills and playstyle: once you're better geared and cp allocated, you should survive better. But pvp is tough for a sorc. You need wards and buffs. Sypher and Deltia explain this sort of thing in their videos...those are a good place to start.

But in your early days of pvp as a sorc, you're best as a ranged fighter. Defend keeps (this earns better ap anyway). Run in a group with tanks to protect you. Always seek high ground and stay hidden. Turn on your combat text so you can see the damage and heals you're dealing...this is the best way to learn what works. Your job is to get into a well protected position then unleash hell...and sorcs have some pretty potent hell to unleash. Good luck.

AzuraKin · December 2016

Xargas13 wrote: »

Hi, recently hit level 50 about 160cp at the moment, and what I don't get is what is the difference between PvP gear and PvE, it doesn't have any damage reduction capabilities or anything. Second, i was doing dungeons at first to get something decent for PvP but got wrecked anyway, so I collected those 20k ap to buy something from vendor in Cirodiil, and to my surprise it was weaker by the stats, I thought "ok maybe it gives more health or adds damage somehow" but no it doesn't even do that, it was weaker then what I got from PvE in every manner. To make long story short I need a guidance into PvP. I don't understand how other players able to kill things so fast when gear never adds any damage, I know I'm missing something.... If you have a link to some sort of guide that would be great, because I couldn't find anything. Thanks in advance.

PS: small question.... Does gear gets better with higher cp level?

ill explain this in all its glory then some of the other blokes. pve you are focused either on doing damage while avoiding red, and avoiding standing with tank, keeping team alive while doing what dps you can to help kill things while also avoiding red or standing with tank, or you focused on keeping attention of boss on you, applying the appropriate debuffs/buffs to aid dps, and mitigating damage, whereas in pvp you have to focus on being able to survive blows from the enemy (tankiness) not be total dependent on the healers on healers through self healing, and doing as much damage as one can (but dont focus on criticals any solid built pvper will have max impen which reduces crit damage by 50% or in otherwords unless you running 100% crit boost, you will do less damage on a crit then on a noncrit against a pvp-centric build).

example: lets say you dw stam build you push crit to 100% crit damage to 100% and your flurry does 10,000 * crit modifier for a total of 20,000 total damage over 1 flurry. this is great in pvp because instead of doing 10,000 damage you doubled it just by doing critical damage. but in pvp that same build that same skill would only do 5000 damage / by player resistance to physical damage and cp reduction passives. so for sake of this argument to keep it short we penetrated all thier resist and they dont have any cp into physical damage reduction if you want to calculate that your self that is fine. so we see now we done 5000 crit damage instead of 20,000 due to 50% impen resistance + pvp 50% damage nerf. on the other side though if we did not critical strike flurry, we still would have done 5000 damage, so as you can see at 100% damage boost on critical critical and noncriticals are equal, but lets compare to someone if we did not have 100% lets suppose we had only 70% crit damage boost so instead 20k, our crit would have done 17k. divided by 2 that equals 8.5% damage thus if we have lower then 100% crit damage boost, we do not want to crit on enemy players in pvp. thus for pvp, you want rather to focus on max resource, spell/weapon power, damage stacking, ect while keeping crit no higher then 50% ideally lower then 40% in pvp.

so in essence you want impen trait on gear, you want sharpened on weapons.

as to what sets there are a number of sets, personally i would say join pvp guild. reason for that is you can more easily get into pvp group, they generally willing to train you on how to pvp, and can help you choose specific gears. big difference between pug groups and an organized group is synergy of gear (and i dont mean synergy as in the game mechanic). for example, mage dps running vicious death can focus 1 guy in a zerg and kill them and cause a massive burst of damage against enemy players near the focused kill. a tank wearing fasallas + durok's bane can obliterate healing to anyone attack them (by 80% heal reduction if cp is spent into correct cp passive). a stamblade with caltrops with night mothers and sunderflame can remove ~ 12k phys resist from players (combine that with your sharpened that a total of about 17k resist ignored. from here now you would wanna see what type of players they need to round out group, if you know the there gonna be players running full resistance and you wanna be the one to wear them down, spriggan + twice fanged serpent + krag's very strong against fully resisted players as they would have no resistance to you unless they gave up everything for just resistance.

but if you not gonna be tank focused, then any set that aids in you doing more damage will work just as well.

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PvP gear and how to get powerful?

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