Staves can be tricky to light attack with, especially the fire staff (I'm assuming that's what you are using). The shock staff is easier imo, but obvs you can't use that. I end up medium weaving with a fire staff because I find I can keep it up for longer without making a mistake.

Do you have access to a target skeleton? They are good to practice on. Just alternate a light attack with the same skill over and over, slowly at first to ensure that stuff actually fires off, but then pick up the pace until you start to misfire the light attacks. If you are misfiring light attacks then you have not left quite enough time after the light attack before hitting the skill button. There is a rhythm to it that you will learn. If you still find it difficult to keep up the regular light attacks then just settle for medium weaving instead; the dps is about the same I believe, light attacking is supposed to be a bit quicker but I honestly can't tell. I find medium weaving much easier; you just hold the mouse button down a tiny bit longer so 2 fire balls come out, and this seems to mean you don't have to have such accurate timing.

When it comes to sustain do you have any cost reduction? Your high regen and trouble sustaining make me suspect you don't. Try swapping a regen glyph for a cost reduction glyph and see if that makes any difference to when you run out of mag.

If you are doing a typical do rotation, your Magicka drain should be around 1500~. So if your Regen is like you say, sounds like you are casting something more often than you should be. With your Regen, you should never have to heavy attack.

There are several factors that go into dps, and tbh rotation is probably the most impactful. Your gear as long as it's 5pc light armor and an inferno staff it will pretty much be 25k+ with the right rotation. There's several variations of rotations and I've tried them all, coming out to be roughly the same dps. I can help with rotation of your interested.

The thing I did to learn how to light weave as fast as possible is I would left click then as soon as I saw my character move, press the ability you want. Now once you get used to the timing of that, you'll know that it would go like this. Light attack > skill, light attack>skill. And the time between is as small as you can comfortably make it.

Tbh I thought learning medium weaves was harder, back when they were the meta and hit significantly harder, but sometimes would not fire at all because you released too early.

Anyways I'm happy to help a fellow mag DK out. I'd marry this class if I could.

Update: After adding rearming trap and engulfing flames into my rotation (albeit clumsily), and using all of the same gear with all of the same enchants, traits, and improvement levels, my DPS went from around 16k to around 18k. This rotation is tricky though, and weaving in light attacks has proved to be difficult. However, the uptime on Off Balance has saved me a lot of resources giving the free higher-damage whip, so that helped a lot with sustain. What is a generally accepted rotation for high damage output? It seems like every second, a DOT or ele drain is out and I need to reapply and it's almost overwhelming. Will that just come more easily with practice, or am I trying to do too much?

This is my front bar, and my back bar is Elemental Blockade, Eruption, Rearming trap, Flames of Oblivion, and Molten Armaments. I'm using a vMA staff on my backbar thus why my blockade is on the backbar. My Standard is the ult for that bar, and I have shooting star on my front bar as you can see here.



I'm currently running a little unorthodox build, using two charged staves, mother's sorrow with 3 rings 1 armor and 1 staff front bar, and 1 grothdar for the max magicka and 5 burning spellweave. Using thief and focusing on crit was the idea behind this build, though I went with charged because I find the burning tick rather potent and helps buff the damage of elemental blockade. I'm also using a charged enchant on the front staff, so that when I'm in groups with a lightning blockade I get increased whip procs.

Here's an example parse of a solo test on the 3 mil dummy. To the left you can see under the "Old CP" that is my current CP distribution for the blue CP.



My rotation WAS something I had the muscle memory to do in my sleep, recently I added a vma staff though, and moved my blockade to the backbar which changed my rotation up a little bit... I messed it up a couple times in that parse, but its the highest I've gotten since changing from the regular infall/bsw/grothdar or skoria meta.

My old rotation when I had the blockade on the front bar (which is probably easier) was as follows. With my front bar being whips, embers, flames, wall, inner light, and shooting star. Backbar being ele drain, eruption, trap, flames of obliv, and inner light, and standard of might.

FHA = Full Heavy Attack
LA = Light Attack

Start of fight, cast ele drain, pop a spellpower Pot( I use them for the extra regen initially, then the extra mag over regular pots), and inner light, swap.

step 1a: FHA -> LA -> Eruption -> LA -> Rearming Trap ->LA-> Flames of Oblivion -> LA -> Standard of Might -> Swap, go to step 2.

step 1b: LA -> Eruption -> LA -> Rearming Trap ->LA-> Flames of Oblivion -> LA -> Ele Drain, Swap, -> (LA -> Whips) x2, go to step 2.

step 2: LA -> Engulfing Flames -> LA -> Elemental Blockade -> LA -> Burning Embers -> (LA -> Whips) x 5 -> LA -> Engulfing Flames -> LA -> Elemental Blockade -> LA->Burning Embers -> Swap.

Go to step 1b, casting a standard of might every time its up, typically on the fourth backbar it will be coming up.

If you are low on magicka, cast a FHA instead of LA-> Whips x2.

I did that rotation for almost 2 years with very little variation. It took a lot of practice to get it down, but its easy for me now.. The new rotation though is slightly different and gets me confused now and then xD.

If it helps, try just focusing on doing 1 step. For example, I spent several hours when I was first learning this, of doing just the front bar rotation, then I'd add in a backbar rotation, then once you can do the whole thing without an ult, add it in as well.

As far as weaving tips, like I said before its just practice. Knowing when you can cast an ability without negating your light attack because you casted it too early, is tricky but just takes practice. Its just a timing thing. Another thing that might help is BE DRAMATIC when you weave. Take your time, click, wait, ability, wait, click, wait, ability, wait. Then slowly speed up the time between. Keep getting faster and eventually you will find the cutoff. See how fast you can successively LA-> skill.

Test this with a free skill, like Elemental drain, so that you can do it for as long as you like. (or until your target dies) and remember, you want to Light attack first, then skill. Because when you do skill then LA it waits for the animation to finish on the skill, and there's a nasty delay.

So here's my 2 cents. I hope this helps you be a better Mag DK and good luck setting the world on fire! Lemme know if you have any questions. If you are on PC NA I can also meet up with you and help you out.

Edit: the rotation I listed was assuming you maintain your current high recovery, and do not need a lot of full heavy attacks. If you switch glyphs to spell damage, then I would suggest using molten armaments and casting it before step 2 every other time you are about to go to step 2. If that's confusing I can help explain it further...

As long as you have bsw, any combination of julianos, silks, mother's sorrow, infallible aether, or moondancer or willpower is all within 2-5% of the same dps. I think you're gear is fine for what you have.

I'd suggest just by looking at your parse, change your mundus to lover, and what is your CP distribution?

Update, switching my mundus to the lover has increased DPS to 22k, all else the same. I'm not having any regen problems, but I am getting down to the bottom of my magicka pool near the end. If it were a 6mil dummy, I'd have to weave in some heavy attacks, but with my current setup, I'm also afraid to switch my mag regen glyphs for some spell damage glyphs. Any thoughts on that?

Edit: So the regen may be because I switched from Max Health, Max Mag, Mag regen purple food to Max health and mag blue food to get back up to 40k magicka, as a replacement for the Mage mundus stone. Will test again with regen/max mag/max health food

Edit 2: Switching to food with regen, DPS went down to 21k, but had zero trouble with sustain. So I think that wins for me, and I'll swap out one of my regen glyphs for a spell damage one.

Also, what is the quality of your staff?

@WatchYourSixx just downloaded Constellations, I will take a look at optimization of my Champion Point distribution. I was keeping ele drain on the target at all times for the parses I posted, and I am on the NA server. My staff quality is purple, and the trait is defending (because I'm cheap and stupid) on the front staff (Silks) and Powered on the back (again, cheap and stupid). I imagine just switching to Infused staves will tremendously help, and farming some Sun and BSW gear that is divines instead of the random collection of traits I have on my gear now. Your parse looks great using roughly the same gear, so I'll definitely start farming for some better traits and start improving my qualities up to gold. I play a high elf, so I'm not sure if that automatically sets me behind DPS capabilities of dark elves, but hopefully it isn't a dealbreaker. And I also have all of my passives maxed out for all class skills, racial, destruction staff, and light armor. Would you recommend that I back-bar a lightning staff the way you did? Because I have a purple lightning staff of the sun with a better trait, I believe, but I was always afraid of using it since I'd lose the fire damage boost. But then again, that wouldn't be a problem if I switched to Julianos, plus I can control the traits on that.

@Thestephenmcraeub17_ESO I don't wanna hijack your thread, but - maybe both of us could post video of what we are doing and get some feedback? Thoughts everyone?

I highly recommend optimizing your CP, as well as Golding out a infused staff. You will have about a 200~ spell damage boost which should equate to roughly 1-2k dps increase just from the spell damage. Then using infused you will see a little more dps as well. The divines traits will increase dps as well, roughly 5% or more of an increase in dps from divines traits.. I think your on your way!

@parkham rotation is everything to managing DK skills. Luckily we have really nice matching timers so our dots run closely to each other. With my rotation listed above I get about 90% or higher uptime on all my dots and abilities except flames of Oblivion and trap, because they have a shorter duration than eruption.

I opted to reply to the thread as opposed to a direct message in the hopes that this helps others, and if anyone had any input they would like to add that they can.

@Thestephenmcraeub17_ESO have you made any progress lately? I'm curious how it's been going.

@WatchYourSixx ok, so I started running 5 BSW and 5 SotS armor and jewelry and gave up my awful trait SotS staff for a crafted, non-set infused inferno staff. To compensate, I swapped out my monster shoulder for another piece of SotS, and the results are pretty shocking. Having an infused staff (and one day, hopefully a Maelstrom or Master's inferno staff) has increased my DPS by quite a bit. Up to 26k now, single target, self-buffed. And that's with a purple staff, running spell power pots. I gotta say, this improvment has been nice to see. Any other tips and tricks you might have to help push me over 30k? I think the next step is to farm infallible aether, but if I'm wrong, and you have some advice, I'm all ears.