After reading way too many posts claiming doom and gloom is coming with Morrowind, that pve is ruined and everybody's forced to Boring Heavy Attacks Meta (tm) with anecdotal evidences i finally decided test pve sustain myself:)

Specifically my aim was to verify 2 widespread claims:

1. We need to drastically change our gear setups in pve compared to live to sustain.

2. In any case new pve rotation will require using heavy attacks each 1-2 sec to sustain.

Test setup:

I decided to use CP allocation and most parts of gear setup from Gilliamtherogue's video since he's a well-known and respected member of pve community. The only difference is i used the new War Machine trial set instead of Vicious Ophidian, since pts templates are not equipped with the later (or i'm dumb and wasn't able to find it).

Major Slayer uptime from War Machine was 40-45% from using incap.

CP allocation was identical to Gilliamtherogue's (5:41) in the video.

Skills used were also identical Gilliamtherogue's setup in the video.

Rotation was focused on maintaining Poison Injection, Rearming Trap, Endless Hail, Anti-cavalry Caltrops, Rending Slashes and Major Breach on the target.

Keep in mind that template weapons are all precise, thus expect the parses to be lower than of a live character.

The character race was khajiit. Food used - max hp/max stam. Mundus - Thief.

The only stamina sustain skill used was Leeching Strikes.

The selfbuffed stats with weapon damage glyphs were:



For each variation of gear setup i did 3 parses and chose the average one between the 3 results.

DISCLAIMER: i'm not the best pve player in the game. I did a lot of mistakes during the parses. Treat the results as your average trial dps parses. Not the best, not the worst. So you can expect me to mess up my rotation in a similar way between the parses:)

Now, to the results:

Setup #1, all wpd glyphs

First i did the runs with zero sustain setup. All glyphs were weapon damage:



We can clearly see i needed 26 heavy attacks to sustain over the course of 196 seconds, which averages to roughly 1 heavy attack each 7-8 seconds.

Setup #2, 2 wpd glyphs, 1 stamina cost reduction glyph

This time i swapped one weapon damage glyph for a cost reduction glyph to see if i can reduce the number of heavy attacks required:



Overall dps went down by approximately 3%, the number of heavy attacks didn't chance much though - 22 heavy attacks over 203 sec or 1 heavy attack each 9 seconds on average.

Setup #3, 2 wpd glyphs, 1 stamina recovery glyph



Here we finally start to see a difference. Dps is still 3% less than all wpd setup, but this time the number of heavy attacks is noticeably lower. 17 heavy attacks over 203 sec or 1 heavy attack each 12 seconds on average.

Setup #4, 1 wpd glyphs, 1 stamina recovery glyph, 1 cost reduction glyph

I parsed both 2 recovery glyphs and 1 recovery + 1 cost reduction glyph.

The results were similar, though 1 recovery + 1 cost reduction glyph felt easier to sustain:



Now that's the difference! I only needed 9 heavy attacks over the course of 204 seconds (~3.5 minutes) and overall dps was still within 3-3.5% range lower than all weapon damage glyphs setup.

9 heavy attacks over 204 seconds averages to 1 heavy attack each 22-23 seconds!

Conclusion:

1. As an average pve trials player by paying the cost of 3% less overall dps i was able to perfectly sustain myself with 1 heavy attack ~ each 20 seconds.

2. I still had a choice to increase my dps by a couple of % by drastically increasing the number of heavy attacks required.

3. Even in the worst case scenario i needed one heavy attack each 7-8 seconds which is far from Boring Heavy Attacks Meta (tm) people claim we're going to be stuck with.

4. I used the same meta pve setup people use on live with a variation in the form of the number of recovery and cost reduction glyphs used. The new set, War Machine does not provide any sustain benefits and thus couldn't skew the parse results in this aspect.

I don't know how typical stam nb example is, compared to other pve specs in this respect (heavy-to-light attack ratio), so i encourage you guys to provide your parses in this thread.

Cheers!

edit: completed vmsa using Test Setup 4 with vigor instead of trap. Really enjoyed the experience, all sustain problems were solved by an occasional heavy attack.