@MartiniDaniels and @T3hasiangod that's what I was afraid you'd say. I don't want to min-max (pouty face). I'm at work today, and haven't used Combat Metrics, but I'm on PC and love Bandits UI and other add-ons. Based on Martini's info, I will probably adjust my build a little on my own before posting results.

Here's the best breakdown I can give from memory:
- Shoulders: Tremorscale
- Going for Tremorscale helmet
- 4 pieces Essence Thief, all purple
- 2 pieces Might of Lost Legion, purple
- Working on full Essence Thief instead of Legion
- Jewelry and weapons Spriggans
- Jewelry purple, weapons gold
- Two-hand front bar
- One-hand & shield back bar
- 2x weapon damage rings
- Stam recovery amulet
- Stam armor enchants
- Divines on some armor, Impen on others
- Health on chest and shield
- Lover Mundus
- CP poured into Penetration, Stam & Health Regen, and the Steed Resistances

Rotation goes roughly as follows:
- Eat food for health & stam
- Crit & weap dmg potion
- Start on back bar for debuffs
- PotL for Minor Fracture
- Shielded Assault charge, get dmg shield
- Pierce Armor for Major Fracture
- Aura of Retribution? HoT & DoT
- Biting Jabs for Dmg & Crit increase
- Switch to front bar
- Rune Focus for sustain
- Biting Jabs again
- Critical Charge for Dmg & DoT
- Executioner spam
- Repentance for constant buff & cleanup
- All class passives apply

Note, Repentance is useless except for resource regeneration in a boss fight unless there are adds. Have considered adding Psijic line for damage shield while blocking and the weapon damage spammable.

Does the extra detail help?

Thank you, @T3hasiangod ! I had hoped I could achieve "acceptable levels" remaining off-meta, but it seems the community has been down every road and figured out what clearly doesn't work. To answer a couple of your observations:

1. I went sword-&-board back bar to give me sustain for solo- or two-person content. Oddly enough, I can achieve about the same DPS on the back bar with shield pummel as I can with any 2H attacks I've tried.
2. I had already considered crafting some Hundings, will probably gold out a set of that to accompany the monster set and Spriggan and see how that works.
3. Again, I'm used to running tanks and healers, so when I started the DPS rotation I was immediately dying quickly. I feel like I have to have some shielding and healing or every boss is going to murder me. I'll have to check out some rotation videos as you suggested to see what successful Stamplars are doing.

Thanks again!

To begin with, what is your race. As you said you were a respecd tank I assume your character is a Nord or Argonian? Sadly, buth of these are not "viable" as endgame dps.

DocFrost72 wrote: »

If I may, T3hasiangod is not wrong about there being better options for dps than sword and shield, but it entirely capable of servicable damage. My damage dealer/solo build for templar is inspired off a 5e paladin. You can break 25-30k dps easily with sword and shield, and that will see you through any content it it possible to solo. You also aren't a liability to all but score run trials at that speed.

If you like, I can post my sword and shield + bow build?

I have a s/b Stam sorc that out DPSs most of the randos I find in the group finder.

Main bar- nirn main hand/infused shield with a double damage health poison

Hurricane- barbed trap- bound armaments- deep slash- power slam- ulti, flawless dawnbreaker.

Back bar- infused vMA bow, berzerk enchantment.

Crit surge- consuming trap- dark deal- poison injection- arrow barrage- ulti atro

I actually use toothrow and AY front bar with Maarselok, the 40% Stam cost reduction of bash from the s/b line takes the Stam cost from 1800 to 1100 per bash for me, that was the main draw of trying out using s/b as a front bar weapon set.

My build:

CP now here
I could also make you an absolutely serviceable sword and shield/two hand build capable of vet dungeon damage, if you'd like?

I know it's a big pain, but can you capture a video? I'll show you mine in a bit when I log on. A *lot* of damage comes from light attacks and dots for sure, so managing them is certainly key.

As for bow required, I'd lean more towards optimal than required. I'll show you what I mean when I can get online!

jorabyte wrote: »

I've got pesky ol' job keeping me away from the game, so I can't really get video except during my evening playtime. I want the add-on that shows all the damage numbers on screen as you hit -- is that part of Combat Metrics?

I also want a way to quickly swap skill load-outs between fights. I added Bandits Equipment manager, haven't figured out how to use it yet. Recommendations?

I feel the pain of life taking fun away xD

Damage numbers on screen you can do base game, actually. From memory, steps are;

Hit escape
Options
Combat
Outgoing damage numbers (on)

Combat Metrics breaks down each and every point of damage by source and neatly arranges it post battle. It can be a neat way to tell if certain dots don't have great uptime, or if you let a buff run off. That's like an MRI compared to me watching a video of you dpsing being a physical, as an example.

For fast swapping I use dressing room. You bind it to a number (or to open when you open the skills screen- my favorite) and then name and create a bunch of setups. Up to 18, I think...?

So, did a little testing and preliminary results are actually really neat. So much so I might be switching from bow to 2h.

Firstly, the build.

Bars remain as posted above for sword and shield and bow, but I added a bar to this build; 2H back bar. It hinges on the application of back bar enchant (which for testing I made physical dmg and restore stamina like my bow).



This gave me some really interesting build flexibility, and increased sustain. Let me explain.



That was the results of one test each of bow (top value), and 2h (bottom value) backbars. This is far from conclusive of course, it was merely one shot each. Besides only being a 3 mil skeleton (selected for time convenience and also because you mentioned only doing dungeons), the 2H bar had the extra benefit of a simpler rotation, and me being warmed up. I did not weave bashes to further increase dps like I should have. I made several mistakes often (reapplying dots early, letting them run off too long, missing weaving while adjusting to PTS ping etc etc), so these values could without a doubt fluctuate 2-3k up or down due to crit performance and a smoother, tighter weave.

THAT SAID.

With the 2H backbar, I noticed something strange. I was far better off using just stampede than poison injection and endless hail. My suspicion is the stamina management and one less dot back bar allowed me to weave more jabs into the mix. As such, I wouldn't rush to say 2h is better. What I will say is that the two are both very valid back bar choices.

Oh, the build also comes with 3 ridiculous benefits that will impress anyone you group with beyond doing vet dungeon capable damage.



Let me remind you that this is a dps build capable of 25k (self buffed, in a good group you're gunna shoot over 30k easily) that also has full on tank resistances, applies the warden buff (not pictured above) to teammates to make them harder to drop as well, and through ritual of retribution offers a cleanse AND a very good heal on par with echoing vigor. EDIT: Almost forgot you can also run head first into trash packs with reckless abandon thanks to having brawler, tank resistances, and two heals. Situations where you're separated from the group are just kind of jokes now, and soloing makes this a potent way to eat tremendous amounts of damage.



So yes, I think with enough time to hone a rotation, you could become a very welcome sight in almost any dungeon group.

jorabyte wrote: »

@DocFrost72 that looks sick... but how the hell did you get that kind of number out of Stampede? I was using that, but I never see a DPS result higher than a 12k burst. Was that after laying down some DOTs, then hitting the dummy with Stampede?

Order of things:

Drop restoring focus, then apply stanpede and ritual of retribution, light attack weaving between them. Bar swap cancel retribution and go to front bar. Barbed trap, pierce armor, power of the light, jabs spam until time to reapply power of the light. Once reapplied, bar swap cancel to redo your retribution and stampede, back to front bar to pierce armor. Barbed trap every second time you swap to front bar, restoring focus every second time to back bar.

Make sure you're light attacking between abilities (weaving them, not just doing it after a skill but timing it to get them together as you note in your OP). Make sure you don't reapply dots before they fall off. Heavy attack if needed, but I doubt it will be.

You're only cp 300, so your results will be *slightly* less. Take this build out into the world too, don't just sit in front of a dummy. Obviously honing a rotation will help, but as cheesy as it sounds the real way you're going to get used to and good at as setup is to play it often. I recommend questing, maelstrom (normal), then maybe try your hand at soloing a few easy story I dungeons on normal. Pick up on what works with different fights. How you handle a boss and how you handle a trash pack might vary wildly here (I know it does with me).

And of course, please let me know if I can help further!

I'll have to record some video of myself so you guys can tell me where I'm messing up with overall execution, when I get the chance. I feel I must be fighting wrong, because all the numbers seem to me like they should be working together for more damage. This Templar is Level 50 in all class lines, has all racial passives, had all Medium Armor passives, and when I switched to a more meta loadout, my DPS went down. This one has much to learn, friends.

@jorabyte the trick to dps is laying DoT's then using a spammable until they run out. For example, if you just cast 1 direct damage ability per second you will top out at say 15k dps as there's only ever up to 15k hitting the target, whereas if you lay 3 damage over time abilities, hitting say 3k each then use direct damage you will achieve up to 24k. You then start adding in buffs to increase the damage of these and little by little build DPS up to a respectable number & also dont forget to weave light attacks (as they are on a seperate cooldown you can do la>skill>la>skill in the same time it takes to do skill>skill and this is a free 5-10k dps on top.

But even so there is definitely something up with either the rotation or setup, as just weaving a spammable with no buffs other than a potion + food should easily put you above 10k... If you could get a superstar/cmx screenshot that would be very helpful

jorabyte wrote: »

@Sparr0w will do. I honestly don't understand... I don't have a single DD ability that puts out 15k DPS. Every source of damage is much lower than that -- 8k, 4k... so while I think my rotation and weaving are ok (both need work), I can't stack up damage that isn't there to begin with. Builds I see online have comparable stats, so why are my hits so wimpy? I know you need to see metrics, so I don't expect you to answer that before I can record & post, but to all the masters posting here I want to thank you for your time and insight.

@jorabyte It's not all about what stats you can see, for example most stamina classes run with fairly low stamina pools (29k), but they have reasonably high critical chance, and higher critical damage. Then there's CP, optimising this vs not optimising this is quite a chunk of damage, iirc the difference from cp160 and max cp is around 30% dps.

Then there's other things such as enchants, passives, poisons, weave speed all of which you wont be able to see from comparing the character sheet, but will have a fairly large impact on your dps.

Also dont trust the tooltip, for example my tooltip on soul trap states it does 13k damage over 10 seconds, but on an actual parse it does between 3-4k dps.

@BXR_Lonestar just to be clear, I gave all the stam equipment to my Redguard Warden and will respec him for stamina, the Breton Templar I outfitted and spec'd to be a "Cleric of Holy Flame," a magicka battlemage. I wanted to use the abundance of magicka class spells Templar affords.

@Sparr0w I'm sure I still have timing issues with weaving. My temptation and habit is to spam left-clicks, but I think I have been trying to initiate too many actions at the same time, clogging up the attack queue with commands. Does that prevent attacks from going through, if you mash too many buttons too fast?