Premise
The meta this patch is absolutely awfully. Sload's completely ruins shadowy disguise. Defiles are everywhere and all but require you to either have a purge or damage shield. I've honed this build to counter this meta while also abusing it to the fullest extent. We're taking advantage of everything we can here to cheese kills and survive in this crazy meta. Damage is very high and so much of it ignores traditional mitigation in one way or another(or altogether).
http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=65875Race
Argonian - Don't get cute, its the best mageblade race, it offers the most sustain and the healing bonuses are great and this build can take advantage of the added HP bonus as well. Other races work, but this is the min/max choice for this particular build by a long shot.
Durok's Bane - Chest, Legs, Boots, Infused Resto with Berserker Enchant
Durok's is beautiful for this particular setup. The 5 piece is one of the strongest 5 pc sets available in game. We need max health because we're using that higher health pool to "mitigate" Sloads by giving us a longer window that we can survive it, we're utilizing health regen as a counter for Sload, and the healing gained has excellent synergy with the class toolkit and the Argonian passives. We're stacking into befoul to take maximum advantage of this set, giving us a 45% tooltip. While it doesn't add any traditional damage, the pressure from the 5pc adds an unseen killing power that doesn't show up on the character sheet, this is what makes the otherwise mediocre damage numbers passable. I just want to reiterate, this set cuts healing by 45% for 10 seconds and is effectively unpurgable since it reapplies the debuff on the first instance of damage.
Sload's Semblance - 1x Infused Necklace, Sash, Bracers, Nirnhoned Destro with Double DoT poison
Enough has been said about Sload's on this forum, I don't need to tell you about it. What I will do is mention that the 2/3pc bonuses are on both bars giving us those max stats when we weapon swap, the 4pc spell damage is only on the offensive bar as well as the 5pc, allowing me to have absolute control over the timing of the proc. The synergy between the withering pressure of Sload's and the huge heal debuff of Durok's is a huge contributing factor to our killing power. Again, none of this shows up on the character sheet so you can disregard some of the otherwise underwhelming numbers. We don't allow purge to be a viable counter to Sload because of the array of debuffs and effects we apply.
Troll King
Mageblade will have this set up whenever it is needed. Now, Troll King+Major Fortitude is enough to counter 2 Sload procs, overall this build is boasting a whopping 3600 health regen, which is absolutely nuts when paired with the class HoTs and a strong damage shield.
Willpower - 2pc jewelry 1 Infused 1 Triune
Adds more max magika which is great for boosting our damage and healing.
SkillsFunnel Health - Spammable damage, decent HoT, some group utility.
Mass Hysteria - Instant CC, goes through block, applies a snare. We use this both offensive and defensively. Animation cancel it with a bar swap when its time to go defensive and it will buy you time to get a healing ward off. You could replace this with
Time Stop, its a wonderful skill, but I prefer the defensive applications of Mass Hysteria for my personal play style.
Sap Essence - AoE damage, a small utility heal, Major Sorcery. You could replace this with
Degeneration which is a totally good option and a bit of extra healing, max magika, and regeneration. This is a play style decision, I often fight outnumbered and alone and the AoE damage has sneaky synergy with Durok's since inexperienced players assume their health will top off when they're not being focused, it also let's me see if anyone is taking noticeably more damage so I can single them out.
Merciless Resolve - Bread and butter. Everything we do offensively is built around this skill. You want to have it up often and fire it as often as possible, but you also want to be cognizant that it is central to your burst and hold it in reserve when you're ready to use a combo.
Elemental Drain - Major Breach, Minor Magikasteal, Ancient Knowledge passive. This skill boosts our damage significantly and adds significant sustain, this is a big part of what allows us to run the sustain levels we are.
Soul Tether - AoE burst and CC, Strong healing. CC'ing several players and picking up a good heal as part of your burst combo extends your window and really let's you dig in and focus a target to finish them off. You can run
Shooting Star here since it has great synergy with fear and huge damage, don't run the other morph though since fear already applies a strong snare.
Shadow Image - This is our primary positioning tool. Master this skill, its worth the time investment to become skilled with it because it allows insane fight control and its one of the absolutely coolest skills in the game in my opinion.
Refreshing Path - More AoE pressure that's usually mostly irrelevant but has sneaky synergy with Durok's. Decent HoT, Major Expedition, Shadow Passives. You can replace this with
Deep Thoughts if you want, but its a much more deliberate play style that requires you to play completely around Shadow Image to use it effectively and you'll lose some uptime on Major Ward and Resolve.
Healing Ward - Our primary burst recovery mechanic and a soft counter for Major Defile. A big shield that's primarily used to give our HoTs and Health Regen time to reset our health, we don't ever really need this burst heal to go off. The interaction between Healing Ward and HoTs is what makes using a shield more forgiving when outnumbered, but there are times when it will be inadequate and that's where Shadow Image comes into play, if you've used it correctly it will buy you some space and work as an excellent way to relieve pressure that would normally overcome a shield based defense.
Siphoning Attacks - With good weaving this is both an excellent sustain tool and a heal. Always weave, on both bars. The synergy with Merciless Resolve is absolutely perfect, managing those two buffs and weaving properly is a huge part of the Mageblade experience.
Crippling Grasp - This is a ranged root that offers excellent fight control, use this in conjunction with Shadow Image to create and maintain space against dangerous melee opponents. It also adds a fat DoT and gives us Major Expedition. For some reason people dodge roll out of this root even though it is insanely short. It's basically a second spammable and I've even toyed with the idea of running it in place of Funnel Health and slotting
Race Against Time in this slot to give me on demand Major Expedition and Minor Force. As of yet I haven't started testing that, but this skill is so good and the cost increase on Funnel has me really considering it.
Light's Champion - This is our get out of jail free card, you're effectively unkillable when you cast it.
We're running a combination of Tri-Glyphs and 1 Triune jewelry enchant along with infused trait on large armor. This allows us to run the clockwork food and get the insane health regen we have here.
Previous Versions
Premise
Mageblade typically relies on Stealth and Shields as primary defensive mechanics. When left unchecked these mechanics are two of the strongest defensive mechanics in the game, however, they each have an array of soft and hard counters. With Sload coming into meta and being a hard counter to both of our main defensive mechanics and the introduction of a health based heal I decided to do some maths and see if I could break our dependence upon Stealth and Shields while also answering our biggest weakness - Snares. As such, we're stacking a decent amount of health and healing bonuses on our back bar to get that cloak heal as high as possible. I'm able to get an in Cyrodiil, non-crit, tooltip of 8,992 on this particular set, comparable to any other burst heal in game. We're also boasting a dodge roll cost under 2600. The regen looks low but we have a lot of unseen sustain: Minor Magikasteal, Siphoning Attacks, Consitution, and Resourceful which add over 1000 effective magika recovery.
http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=62049Race
Argonian - Don't get cute, its the best mageblade race, it offers the most sustain and the healing bonuses are great and this build can take advantage of the added HP bonus as well.
SetsDurok's Bane - 2x Arcane Rings(Unique drop) - Chest, Legs, Boots
Durok's is beautiful for this particular setup. The 5 piece is one of the strongest 5 pc sets available in game and unlike many other builds I've found a way to make the 2-4 bonuses relevant. We need max health, we're utilizing health regen as a counter for Sload(more on this later), and the healing gained allows us to push the Cloak tooltip higher as well as boosting our HoTs. We're stacking into befoul to take maximum advantage of this set. While it doesn't add any traditional damage, the pressure from the 5pc adds an unseen killing power that doesn't show up on the character sheet, this is what makes the otherwise mediocre damage numbers passable.
Sload's Semblance - 1x Infused Necklace - Medium Gloves, Light Waist, Nirnhoned Inferno
Enough has been said about Sload's on this forum, I don't need to tell you about it. What I will do is mention that the 2/3pc bonuses are on both bars giving us those max stats when we weapon swap, the 4pc spell damage is only on the offensive bar as well as the 5pc, allowing me to have absolute control over the timing of the proc. The synergy between the withering pressure of Sload's and the huge heal debuff of Durok's is a huge contributing factor to our killing power. Again, none of this shows up on the character sheet so you can disregard some of the otherwise underwhelming numbers.
Troll King
Mageblade will proc this set without any extra effort and it has great synergy with the HoT based healing available as well as offering group synergy.
Endurance 2h infused sword
We're running this 2pc to boost our back bar health, we could run willpower jewels and move Durok's back bar, but that causes us to lose too much healing on cloak.
Skills
The front bar skills are pretty self explanatory,
Funnel Health is your spammable and gives us a nice HoT.
Elemental Drain for sustain and penetration
Inner light packs in a ton of passive damage
Merciless Resolve adds even more passive damage and obviously the whole mageblade tempo is build around setting up combos with will
Mass Hysteria offers an unblockable CC that we're going to combo with
Shooting Star and a spectral bow proc as our finisher against tough targets. We mitigate the expensive cost of Meteor by running heavy and using fear to ensure that every time we drop one its going to do full unblocked damage.
The back bar skills are where things get different so I'll be breaking down the non-traditional ones.
Siphoning Attacks is another sustain tool and heal that's dependent on good weaving to proc
Refreshing Path is a bread and butter heavy mageblade HoT.
Dark Cloak
Our big burst heal, as I already mentioned we have a tooltip of 8,992 in Cyrodiil. That's a bit lower than BoL, but still quite good. Try not to spam this, use it intelligently when its required and take advantage of that low dodge cost and dodge roll cancel this ability, that will give you a big burst heal as well as a small immunity window in which your HoTs and Health Regen will top your health the rest of the way off.
Forward Momentum
A mostly irrelevant HoT, but more importantly it purges snares and gives you immunity. This, combined with the major expedition from Path is how we kite, although you'll mostly be "stationary" kiting around LoS rather than drawing people on long chases because we don't need to gain significant separation to make stealth work.
Structured Entropy
This is your Major Sorcery buff and it also grants you 8% increased max health, boosting our cloak heal. Typically mageblades run degeneration if they slot this skill because of the healing it offers and the fact that the added HP on only 1 bar is typically useless.
Soul Tether
We can't run a traditional defensive ultimate because we're not using a resto staff. As a result I was left to choose between Barrier or Soul Tether, ultimately I went with Tether because along with offering 1,350(in cyrodiil) healing per target it also gives an aoe stun that buys you time and it also passively increases back bar healing, making cloak heal stronger.
Miscellaneous
Tri-Pots
Double DoT poison front bar