Just got to level 40, about 30-40 on all my armor. Stamina I guess, I have 10 points in health and the rest stamina. Necromancer, not sure what you mean by sets. I just started playing like a week ago... feels like I'm playing against the best of the best. I just did another match and I discovered I can see how much damage people do. Only did 75k, people on the other team doing 300-700k. Feels like I'm not even in the game.

Welcome aboard, I'm happy to see a new player with an interest in PvP and battlegrounds. With that said, there is a very steep learning curve to PVP in this game. In addition, there are skills to level and gear to acquire before you can really stand a chance.

You won't have much success in low-level battlegrounds unless your low-level character is being geared up by a friend. My suggestion would be to just have fun with the PVE content until you hit level 50 and 160 CP at which point you can start equipping max level gear. Make sure you are leveling your crafting skills and researching crafting traits all the while. Once you hit lvl50/160cp, you can craft yourself a decent set* and combined it with sets you can purchase for gold off the guild traders. Start with something tanky with a decent amount of regen. Then hit noCP PVP hard, battlegrounds being the obvious choice. You'll die a lot and learn a lot, but at least you won't be at a massive disadvantage gear wise. As you start feeling like you're able to survive more and more, slowly start trading defense and/or regen for damage in your gear setup. With time, and some dedication, you'll start slaying your fair share of players.

*Sets - groups of gear that give bonuses for equipping them simultaneously - https://eso-sets.com/

Ryeloc wrote: »

Just got to level 40, about 30-40 on all my armor. Stamina I guess, I have 10 points in health and the rest stamina. Necromancer, not sure what you mean by sets. I just started playing like a week ago... feels like I'm playing against the best of the best. I just did another match and I discovered I can see how much damage people do. Only did 75k, people on the other team doing 300-700k. Feels like I'm not even in the game.

Sets are your armor sets but under 50 you shouldn’t worry about sets. Just run whatever you pick up overland and whatever gets rewarded through quests to keep the most up to date armor on. Under 50 you out level your armors effectiveness every 4 levels. Keep playing BGs and getting wrecked cause that’s the only way you’ll get better. Check out YouTube for ideas on how to get better but it mostly comes from playing and getting better with your rotation. YouTube is a great place to find and experiment with different builds. Try Dottz gaming like he said above or KristoferESO YouTube channel is personally my favorite PvP guy to watch.

You are not doing anything wrong. This game has one of the steepest PvP learning curves ever. You will get your face smashed in again and again and again. They have better gear than you. They have better skills than you. They have better passives than you. They have have better food/drink than you. They have better potions than you. They have better enchants/poisons than you. They are often in voice chat, coordinating as a team of 4, while your team is full of strangers running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Most importantly, they have way more experience than you. A lot of under-50 PvP is people who have been playing for years doing PvP on new characters. The matchmaking is iffy. You will very rarely be going up against players of similar experience and power and skill level.

If you are willing to accept that PvP takes a long time to get decent at it and even longer to master and that you will die, a lot, you'll be OK. But, the suggestions you get to improve are going to be confusing and overwhelming and total information overload at first. Like trying to explain calculus to a 6 year old who can barely add 1 + 1.

You will likely have to accept small, incremental improvements. Like, "I died in a second but I recognized what was happening in that second before I died. And the next time, I did something different and it took 1.5 seconds for me to die." That is important progress!

Battlegrounds before level 50 can be fun, you get the odd smurfer tryharding but it's not so bad they can be killed if you stick together with your team which is very important. Try getting gear that is in a set that boosts your damage, read all your skill tool tips and use them at the right time instead of randomly spamming things till youre out of resources. Make sure you have a food buff on and a mundus stone. get a blue/purple level weapon at your current level.

At CP level 160 PvP becomes a trainwreck in Battlegrounds. You either stomp or get stomped, very very rarely I play a balanced game.

I'd be happy if they just added a 1v1 battleground mode as would a lot of other people.

Major_Lag wrote: »

Ryeloc wrote: »

not sure what you mean by sets.

To even stand a chance of competing in PvP, you need - at the very minimum - all of the following, in no particular order:

• do not use any non-set gear (non-set gear has very generic-sounding names, such as for example "<material name> inferno staff of frost"),
• aim for the maximum amount of set bonuses possible, the usual setup is to run two 5 piece sets and one 2 piece monster set (for <CP160, replace the monster set with any other set with an appropriate 2pc bonus, as a stopgap measure),
• remember to put appropriate enchants on ALL pieces of your equipment,
• always use impenetrable trait on ALL armor pieces (there are certain exceptions, but they really only apply to highly specialized builds such as bombers and glass cannons, not to "general purpose" PvP builds),
• use a suitable mundus stone buff to complement the rest of your character's build,
• USE BUFF FOOD/DRINK! At all times! Never forget this! Even the trashy food/drink you get from daily login rewards is better than not using anything at all,
• use potions (again, even the purple tristat potions from daily rewards are much better than not using any potions at all),
• If you are under level 50, you can do just fine in battlegrounds by using only crafted sets, no need to grind dungeons for gear before you are >CP160 - especially if you are still learning the basics of PvP,
• at least basic understanding of how the basic game mechanics work (blocking, stuns, fears, immobilizes, break free, immunities, interrupts, gapclosers, chain/pull moves, just to name the very basics),
• basic understanding of how ESO PvP works - resource management, when and how to go on offensive, when and how to play defensively, how to mitigate damage and use Line Of Sight effectively, the importance of burst damage vs sustained pressure, mobility, etc.

If that sounds like a lot to take in... that's because it is.

Even with the right setup (sets, enchants, mundus, buff food/drink, potions, slotted abilities) you will still die a lot - at least, until you figure out the basics of what and how to do.

ESO PvP is such that although using a good build is very important, even the best build will do little or nothing to compensate for a "green" player's lack of understanding of the fundamentals of PvP.

It does not help that the PvE in ESO does absolutely nothing to prepare players for PvP.
The great majority of PvE enemies don't heal themselves, they deal very low damage, never break free from any stuns or roll out of immobilizes, they don't move out of ground-placed harmful effects, very rarely block, they never use Line Of Sight to mitigate incoming damage... the list goes on and on.

Listen to this guy OP. Ive been in your shoes. After 1 year i still consider myself new to PVP and just in the starting phase. Sets and good gear are crucial but knowledge that guy mentioned will make you good at pvp - eventually.

Battlegrounds are supposed to fill up with equal teams. Unfortunately, ZOS hasn't quite worked out the kinks in the Battlegrounds Groupfinder and so drastically uneven teams are more common recently.

Ryeloc wrote: »

I see the sets now, but not being CP 160 they don't seem to matter I'm being told.

Yeah, grinding for sets before you are at least CP160 is a tedious waste of time, since you will outlevel the gear pretty quickly anyway.

That's why I always say to use primarily crafted sets before you hit CP160, they are quite cheap to make - and if you use the right combination of crafted sets, it's perfectly possible to be at least somewhat competitive in PvP.

Sure, with only crafted sets you will be underperforming somewhat, because you don't have a monster set and don't use any dungeon or overland sets - but the crafted sets should nonetheless work well enough for you, at least until you can get some proper (CP160) gear.

Ryeloc wrote: »

Another interesting thing I've been seeing is some people almost seem literally impossible to kill. One match we had all 4 people on one guy and nobody could kill him. Not only was he like a literal tank, he was doing enough damage to kill our team.

I haven't made it into Cyrodill yet, but the battlegrounds are fun for now.

Ohhh boy. Cyrodiil is full of those types - you haven't seen anything yet.

The best counterplay to those tanks is to coordinate an ultidump on them. Of course that requires a decently coordinated group to pull off, ideally with voicechat (discord, teamspeak, etc).
Stamina DDs should use onslaught if possible, to get through these tanks' stupidly high resistances.

In less coordinated groups (no voicechat, not premade group) the next best thing to do is ignore the tanks if at all possible.
Many of those tank builds use sets which significantly increase their damage output when they are taking damage.
They literally thrive on "bad" groups hitting them with a whole bunch of weak, uncoordinated attacks, since that is exactly what they are drawing their strength from.

Ryeloc wrote: »

I thought I was getting wrecked before, now I totally am.

Here are a few more practical tips:

1. Immediately break free of any stuns or other "hard CC" (such as fears, etc). Bind interrupt to a single key, or even better bind it to the mousewheel.
Immediately after breaking free, get ready to roll away from (or block) the incoming burst.

2. Disable "doubletap to rolldodge" and rebind rolldodge to a key. Again, for best results, rebind it to mousewheel (opposite direction as interrupt).

3. Many beginner PvPers make the big mistake of turtling up when pressured (holding block, popping burst heals, as well as damage shields if applicable, while standing more or less in place and not using line of sight for cover).
This is the usual PvE players' reaction which is highly appropriate in PvE, but very very inappropriate in PvP. When you do that in PvP, you are basically nothing more than a harmless target dummy for the opponent to practice their burst on.
Positioning is key... as is mobility.
Try to always stay relatively close to objects which you can use to break line of sight to the enemy, even if it's just a single tree, rock or a piece of rubble. Avoid getting caught with your pants down in the middle of a wide open field.
When playing in a group (which is always the case in BGs), you can also use your own teammates for cover to some extent, but that only works in the group has decent healing and can deal with the incoming damage.
Make sure that you have at least one mobility skill slotted, so you can counter enemy snares. Race Against Time is great for magicka builds on classes which lack better alternatives. For stamina, you can use Shuffle, ideally paired with another ability which grants the Major Expedition buff.
Last but not least... when pressured, try to break line of sight, pop Vigor (or radiating regen + damage shield if magicka), also a potion if needed, and get ready to pressure the enemy right back.
Never turtle up and let the enemies pound on you without pressuring them back - you will be dying every time and never learn anything if you do that.

there are also these really try-hard players, that makes a new char, only leveling and doing battlegrounds from level 10 - level 50, deletes the char and do it all over again

they have legendary crafted gear to like level 10, level 20 and so on, that they transfer to the new char everytime

worst is when its 4 people that premades that do this, since they are fully legendary geared and on voice chat, thankfully they are more rare it seems.

I started leveling a new toon in the way that I know how, slap on a exp scroll some garbage crafted gear and do BG's

They are infested with twinks worse than I have seen before, people who are terrible at PVP overgear a lowbie to kill people who just walked in from their first Banished Cells clear, basically that is what is happening there is nothing you can do aside from join the twink arms race or Level out of under 50 BG and than get a better sense of what you will be up against. At first it will be even more rough though because there are more skilled players but at least with Low mmr you will have a chance to learn what works for you and also with everyone have at least 160 cp gear and impen you can assume beyond that it is build/skill that is blowing you up not just the fact they have farmed and golded out DLC sets to compensate for the fact they can't hack it in real PVP