Hi fellow pvpers, this is going to be a niche post about a game mechanic that probably has a fairly large impact in your pvp performance:
stam regen & how it interacts with blocking (and sprinting). More specifically, how this interaction can unexpectedly screw your stam regen or have little to no impact on your regen based on timing.
So the basics of regen (for the newer players), you have a regen value for health, magicka, and stamina and every 2 seconds you will gain that value back to your respective resource pool. For health and magicka this value is a guaranteed constant. Every 2 seconds you will gain back the regen value you see on your character sheet. Not so for Stamina but I'll get to that in just a moment.
Blocking and sprinting stops stamina regen. I think everyone knows that. But how does this actually work in practice?
The game keeps track of a regen timer. It counts down 2 second intervals and at the end of every interval it will check your character sheet, find the 3 regen values, and restore that regen value to each pool. When you block or sprint, the stam regen value on your character sheet goes down to 0 for the duration of blocking or sprinting.
Here's the important part: the game does not pause the 2 second countdown at all while you block or sprint. It will continue to check the regen timing every 2 seconds, refer to your character sheet at set intervals, and if that interval comes and you're blocking or sprinting it will give you back 0 stam (the value shown on your character sheet) and continue the countdown.
This probably all sounds obvious but there's an important consequence to this in terms of block and sprint timing:
If you block or sprint only within that 2 second interval, it will NOT hamper your stam regen in any way. You don't have to stop for very long either, you can literally let go in the split second that the game will check your regen values, get the full benefit of the regen, and then go back to blocking or sprinting. So for example, you can travel at nearly full sprint speed without foregoing any of your regen (really great if you stack sprint speed, you can run from a zerg while maintaining most if not all of your stam regen if you can maintain prefect timing on the regen ticks).
Of course this applies the other way. If you block or sprint for a split second during which the game pings your regen value for resource return, you will lose out on the entire regen value. So for example, let's say you fight someone 1v1. It's a 20 second fight (for the sake of simplicity), and you have 1000 stam regen. Throughout this fight, you block 5 times. Each time you block you block only long enough to mitigate an important part of a burst combo (i.e. ulti, dizzy swing, frag, etc.). How much stamina did you miss out on due to blocking 5 times (outside of the block cost itself)? It completely depends on whether you blocked during the split second in which the game checks your regen value:
In scenario 1, every single block landed BETWEEN the 2 second intervals. You lost 0 extra stamina from regen ticks because you blocked.
In scenario 2, every single block landed at the 2 second interval. You lost 10,000 extra stamina from regen ticks because you blocked.
So in the best case scenario blocking had no impact on your stamina sustain. In the worst case scenario the 5 split second blocking cost you a catastrophic amount of stamina, and of course everything in between. This applies to sprint as well (hence if you learn the regen tick timing you can sprint for free, with almost no loss in velocity).
If you run really high stam regen this is very important as you invested a lot of your set bonus space, mundus stone, race passive, skill seleciton etc. toward a value which you can completely negate with a split second block or sprint at the wrong time. The worst case scenario of the above example with 2000 stam regen (which a lot of medium builds gear toward) is a whopping 20,000 stamina in the course of the 20 second fight. Geez that is a COMPLETELY different fight depending on exactly when you hit those 5 blocks.
In conclusion:
Since there's no easy way to keep track of the 2 second interval, and ESO combat being very chaotic to begin with, this largely comes down to RNG. Unless you absolutely refuse to ever block anything and never sprint in combat ever not even for an instant, you will NEVER and I mean *NEVER* get the full character sheet value of your stam regen. I think that is pretty important to take into consideration when you plan your build and in your execution. With magicka, this is not true; you can calculate with full certainty exactly how much magicka you generate during a fight as there is no (what amounts to) RNG mechanic that sometimes costs you nothing and sometimes costs you everything.
But there are some lessons to take into heart (and keep in mind this applies alot more if you run high stam regen builds):
1. Don't block cancel anything unless you really need to. If block canceling is just a natural reflex for you, and (for example) you block cancel every surprise attack and executioner regardless of whether you expect counter pressure or if you really need that extra DPS, then get into the habit of only block canceling when you are REASONABLY certain the value you get is worth the potential loss of your regen. Conversely this makes swap cancelling the safest and cleanest way to animation cancel (though it does swap your bar so it can't always be used).
2. If you really like to theorycraft your builds (and especially if you main stamina classes), just remember that the stamina regen on your character sheet is never going to be available to you all the time. I.e. build for a bit more stam sustain on your character sheet than you think you need.
3. Or conversely, just prepare for the worst and try to build as much non-regen based stam sustain into your build whenever it makes sense (constitution, black rose, bull-netch, leaching strikes, bloodthorn, dark deal, etc.) because those will always give you full value.
FINALLY
Imagine that somebody
@Dorrino anybody
@Dorrino or everybody
@Dorrino makes an add-on to ESO that keeps track of this 2 second interval on your screen with a small visual timer. And every time the game is about to check your stam regen the add-on plays an audio cue (average human reaction time to audio stimulus is 0.17 seconds, so taking lag into account a 0.3-0.4 second warning should allow anybody to react in time).
Imagine every good stam player has this add-on installed and has mastered the timing. Just imagine it, and then you can flame me hard when
@Dorrino actually does this and this becomes the meta.
You're welcome.