I mean I just won the largest dueling tournament NA/PC has had in quite a long time using dw mageblade. It’s harder to pull off and quite weaker compared to destro mageblade, but I love it and do my best to make it work these days. I established the destro mageblade meta since IC patch, which took off when dueling was added in One Tamriel, but dual wield is my one true love. It is the OG as you said.

Here are recent videos of it in action open world:

https://youtu.be/C1vwOgtAnzI

https://youtu.be/Bl-7Mm2wOew

https://youtu.be/ND4FFvKfN0M

Here are the final matches of the tournament last Saturday:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/204253518?t=12628

I’ll answer questions tomorrow. Need sleep.

I'm running meele magnb aswell.
If you are an argonian try this build:
2H/5L
5 pieces clever alchemist (only active on dw bar)
5 pieces necropotence
2 pieces maw of the infernal
Run 3 potion speed glyphs on your jewellery your damage will still be crazy high (hit 25k meteors against pugs)
Mundus: Atronach

You don't need any stam on the build i'm using it with 600 stamregen and 9.9k max stam.

Your frontbar looks as such:
Focus, leeching strikes (stam version), cloak, concealed weapon, fear Ult: incap
Backbar: 1 flexspot (i used swallow soul for ranged weaving or entropy), cripple, healing ward, shadow image, mistform Ult: resto ult

Why use certain skills?
Leeching strikes: it gives you free stam with every weave resulting in 200 free stamregen and another heal over time. It also gives you 4k stam when the effect ends after. If someone pressures you a lot and you have to dodge 2 times and break free, you can simply cast leeching strikes again and you can break free again.
Why no shield? Because you don't want to get hit in the first place and in meele combat your shield is gone in no time and it drains too much magicka. The build is set up to sustain cloak endlessly while not going dry in a 10 min fight against anyone not using mag drain poisons.
You get your survivability 100% through avoiding damage with cloak and shade that's the reason why you want to use maw of the infernal, i can't count how often ppl were focusing my pet with ults and everything and i could pick the weak ones 1 by 1. Also the damage is pretty good 4-5k hits are nothing to sneeze at because you get another damage Pool in a gcd which is good as you lose your heavy attack damage by running DW.

If you aren't an argonian this build won't work!!

For other races i advice this build:
5L/ 2H
5 pieces seducer (only active on frontbar bar)
5 pieces necropotence
2 pieces monster what ever you want i like shadowrend, maw of the infernal or for max damage 1pc infernal guardian + 1pc domi

3 spelldmg glyphs on jewellery
Atronach mundus

With this build you can reach 50k magicka on a breton with good sustain and good damage.

For weapons i advice 1 nirn (main hand!!) and 1 infused with prismatic damage glyph and wpn / spelldmg glyphs.

Your burst rota looks as such: apply cripple and maybe another dot with light attack weaves, then switch to meele attack with Concealed and LA weaves until will is up if you can stun with incap and use will this kills 99% of all players if not possible use fear + incap + will this should be enough

I'm running a 2h and Resto set up at the moment on mine. The survivability with forward momentum is actually insane.

LittlePinkDot wrote: »

Hmmmm so will this DW work for stamblade? Im following a bow gank pvp build with the 2hander on back bar. But im finding DW so fun I wish I could use bow/DW instead of the 2hander.

It's about magblade

Ashamray wrote: »

BohnT wrote: »

Lexxypwns wrote: »

@BohnT you running immovable pots for 50% CC immunity uptime? Vitality pots? I see the potential for sure but I’d imagine a nice tasty potion is the icing on the cake here

Tbh 99% of the time i was using the alliance war magicka potions, for 100% major sorcery uptime , with argonian it's enough to run with those as you are at 100% health almost all the time and 4.8k stam will let you cc break another time.
And this is in 1vX
But if i was in a pinch i just popped a tripot or a cc immunity + health + mag.
But as you are 90% of the combat in hide you won't get too much dmg on you.
For comparison I've been running this build for almost 5 months now and I'm still at 116/200 tri pots and 43/100 cc immunity potions and i pvped every day for 2-3 hours.

But what do you do when you can't cloak away? Die?

There are only a few situations where i can't cloak:
1. enemy ground aoes & direct damage aoes (steel Tornado, shalks etc): This is the easiest thing to deal with, use mistform to LoS with rocks etc and then immediately use cloak and run away from the object into open field. Most people are dumb enough to spam their AoE around the object so you can easily escape.
2. Aoes which follow the caster (hurricane, solar barrage, bat swarm) in conjunction with gap closers: This is way harder but still doable. Your best friends in this case are shadow image, cripple and fear. Place your shade and run away from it ~ 15 m then fear your enemy port to your shade and cloak (this works much better if you jump down a rock and ppl are following you)
3. Mage light, detect pots, soul assault and reveal poisons. This will be a hard time but with more experience you know who spams these things and you can kill them 90% of the time if you can't kill them i have a rule of thumb. If more than 4 ppl are following me i try do do the same thing i in 2. if they are less i can survive with healing ward spam until i have enough ult to use resto giving me the opportunity to kill them.
4. Zergs with all of the things above. The best advice i can give you is don't get in a situation where you have to fight a zerg solo. Try to use shade and mistform to potentially evade but don't expect it to work everytime. The best advice is really don't engage zergs, with magnb you can choose your fights and that's what you want to do. After 2 weeks or so i could reduce my deaths to 0-8 (from 20-30) depending how bad my latency was with 180-240 kills every day (3-4 hours play time)
5. there is one build that will kill you everytime you meet it but i won't tell anyone what it is. When you fight it you'll know in this case nuke the *** out of the player or decide where you want to respawn

Have to say, I've extensively tried both destro/resto, and DW magblade, and for me, DW is massively more fun.

It's a really fun way to play the class but it does put you at a disadvantage, sadly.

I've spent the best part of a year trying to make it work in PVE and PVP, but I recently caved in and went double staff. It's amazing how much easier it is, but I miss being a sick blade wielding mystic assassin.

If anything the experience has taught me a lot about the class, I feel like I'm a lot stronger and better at it thanks to the gruelling process of trying to make a sub-optimal setup work.