You can search for Joy Division’s Guide to Midyear Mayhem in these forums...she writes a pretty thorough PvP guide for people who don’t know much about PvP. I’ll add some tips.

You’re looking for a total of 88,000 pa for vigor. 145,000 for caltrops (lvl 6). About 1 million to level to assault/support 10. That’s not so bad...even an inexperienced player can earn over 100k/night.

Some AP earning tips:

- join a busy campaign. Even as a newbie. You will earn more in your server’s business campaign than playing some non-cp abandoned campaign.

- Earn 20% more AP: you can get a one hour buff called blessing of war by killing any delve boss. So every hour, go kill a boss...the AP really adds up. Turn on your long term buff interface thing if you want to see the timer...it also shows in your character sheet. Also, note that Cyrodiil delves have more than one boss. Most have two or three, some have as many as five. They spawn weird...when one dies, it starts a timer for one of the others to spawn. So sometimes you have to roam around between their spawn points.

- Always hold the repeatable quests: from the six boards at your base. These reward decent ap, 500 - 3500. Always hold these quests, you never know when an opportunity to complete them will arise. And if you get a horrible quest spawn (capturing some impossible far away keep), abandon the quest and pick up a new one until you get a favorable one.

- follow the push: as the night wears on, your faction will inevitable lose a bunch of keeps and then rally. When your faction is pushing you will have great AP opportunity. Make sure to have your ap buff up! Watch for your team to start an assault on a captured keep...you’ll see your siege engines show up on the map screen, then the keep will be highlighted as under attack. Follow your guys up there and help them capture it. Then follow them to ring and capture any outstanding resources. Then move on to the next. Base value for capturing a keep and three resources is 10,500 AP...more with the buff and eso plus and possible other Cyrodiil buffs. If you get pushed way back then recapture the lost territory, on a good night you bam bam capture four keeps and are halfway to vigor.

- use AOEs. Especially in defensive scenarios. When you’re defending, AOE the attackers to get in on kills and earn ap.

- help defend (new with Summerset). There are these buckets of AP that are rewarded for successful attacks and defenses. Now in Summerset, you need to help out to get in on the bucket reward. This means participating in a battle and dealing damage, or repairing a wall/door. Carry some repair kits, and make sure to help out at each location. Note...you don’t have to help to earn the base capture rewards mentioned above. This is the battle pool of ap, which is different.

- defend strategically. I don’t know what class you are, I’m a nightblade. Doesn’t really matter. When you’re defending up on a wall, everyone will just button mash spam attacks at each other. You can get better AP by being strategic. Step back from the wall. Go into sneak. Restore your resources. Buff. Step forward in sneak. Look for an opportunity...someone who is hurting and in range. Then unleash holy hell on that one target. Focusing hard on a single target is better than just spraying damage all over the place.

Group up. A good group will earn you decent AP. Just put out a zone chat. Or look for a PvP guild on your server. Don’t be worried you’re new...groups aren’t like trial groups where everyone is super serious. People group now because they want to smoke out and run in circles earning AP, lol. And if you find a good group, add them as friends and group up again in the future. Most busy campaigns have four or five groups who run all the time and earn good AP.


Tips for survival

You’ll die a lot, but I can for sure help you reduce your expected deaths from 1,000 to 997 1/2.

Gear: PvP is rough. Those of us who play a lot know how to kill you quick and painless. Well, I’ve always assumed eight arrows in the torso is painless. You know...I’ve never asked. Anyway, if you want to survive you might invest in specialized gear for PvP. Alcast has PvP setups for all of his builds. The important things right now are to (usually) incorporate a little heavy, and some pieces with impenetrable. These will reeeeeeally help. When I snipe a player with no impen, I’ll crit for 18k. Impen drops this to 7k...big difference.

CPs: I don’t think you need special PvP CP setups, but just make sure you’re invested in the basics and not a lot of ancillary crap. For example, in red you need hardy, elemental defender and ironclad...all damage reduction, versus like healing buffs or whatever else is in reds. It’s all about damage reduction, buffing your damage output, and resource regen/preservation.

Learn to sneak: even if you’re not a nightblade, try not to stand around offering yourself as a juicy target. If you’re in the open, crouch. Also, spend some time watching others and learning the patterns. 95% of people play the same way and do the same routines over and over. When a keep flips, the capturing team sweeps for hidden enemies. In the same dang pattern every time. Learn their patterns, and you can learn to anticipate where and when they’ll be.

Speaking of sneak, work up your legerdemain: if you plan to PvP, you’re probably going to want to sneak around a bit. You can reduce the stamina cost of this by up to 40% via a passive in legerdemain. You need to get to level 16...here’s the easiest way. Once a day, go to the ships docked in daggerfall. There are barely any npcs. Steal everything. Fence it all...lander the cheap junk. It takes about a dozen trips to level leger to 16, but it’s worth the investment.

Slow night? No fighting? Go do some town quests. The five towns (the three capturable ones plus chedinhal and...um...the volcano one) will spawn ten repeatable quests per day PER TOWN. That’s fifty per day you could do. These are five minute quests - go kill a bear, go grab this chest, etc. They reward a tiny bit of AP but and A LOT of xp. If things are slow, go level some skills and your character. These are great for blowing through enlightenment xp, but not that good for ap.

Get some invisibility + speed pots. Blessed thistle, blue enteloma, namira rot. You go invisible and you get a speed boost. These will be a little tricky to master because you cannot take ANY damage or the pot fails. But as a newbie you might find yourself cornered or spotted or whatever and want to disappear. I’m not a newbie, and I blow through a hundred a week...but I’m a stealthblade, so...yeah.

Hope that helps. With some luck, you should be able to get those vital stam skills in a couple of nights. Fully going to assault 10 will take longer, but it’s entirely doable in a month or two, even for a new PvP-er.