Vampire tank, pve and pvp, necro or nightblade?

Magicwillow · September 2020

Im struggling to choose between the two ? what you think is better ?
Im mostly going to do BG and a bit of cyrodil and lot of world exploration and quest. Sometimes dungeons and veteran dungeons hm but almost never raid .
What would you suggest?
Vampire daark elf is the way im going to play the class no matter what.

Kardrik · September 2020

Vampire tank? Why would you do that in its current iteration?
A non vamp tank would be stronger in every way.

Magicwillow · September 2020

for RP reason

Vevvev · September 2020

Vampire tank.... oh boy.... uh... Dragonknight? Oh you want Nightblade or Necromancer. I'm sorry I don't know how to answer. With the amount of one shot mechanics being a stage 3 tank to get the tanking passive is effectively worthless. Also the 8% increased cost in skills is going to completely and totally wreck your sustain. As a Tank you're building into a lot of health and resistances to survive the one shots so you don't have a lot of magicka and stamina to work with.

Edit: Also the 8% increased cost is at stage 3. At stage 1 it is 3% increased cost, stage 2 is 5%, and stage 4 is 12%!

Magicwillow · September 2020

and what is i stay in stage 1?

Vevvev · September 2020

If you stay in stage 1 the effects of vampirisim wouldn't be as bad. Only -10% health regeneration, 3% increased non-vampire abilities, and 5% extra flame damage.

The ultimate can be used I guess to boost your health by 10k points for a brief period of time, but at stage 1 it will cost you 314 ultimate. It is up there with the werewolf transformation in terms of cost and a cheaper defensive or utility ultimate would work better for a tank.

Mistform is an option if you somehow get caught blocking on the wrong weapon bar. It reduces incoming damage by 75% which is pretty good, but is outclassed in certain scenarios. Take into account the following:

The base amount of damage you block is 50%
Sword and Shield/Ice Staff increase the amount of damage you block by 20% making it equal 70%
Sword and Shield also increases the amount of damage you can block from projectiles and ranged attacks by 14%. This makes it 84% damage blocked if it is a ranged attack.
If you play as a Dragonknight you can block an additional 10% of damage. This makes standard attacks 80% damage blocked and ranged attacks at 94% damage blocked.

Magicwillow · September 2020

i dont want to be the best tank ever and do raid and stuff.
i just wanna tank in pvp, and in pvp be able to do dungeon in veteran hard mode. I dont want to raid.
And i really cant pick up between necro and nighblade.

Vevvev · September 2020

I hear nightblade statistically has the best durability but necromancers actually have a couple of good tanking abilities worked into their kit. Like a pull they can use to bring the ranged mobs into your DPS's AoE's or pull key targets from a ball group in PVP into your own ball group. There is also a pull ability in the Fighter's Guild skill line called Silver Leash that is a morph of Silver Bolts. I don't tank much in PVP since I focus more on damage dealing so someone else would probably be more knowledgeable on it.

Magicwillow · September 2020

i also want to be an offensive tank and deal lot of damage in pvp

Vevvev · September 2020

Tanks lack offensive firepower due to the fact they're tanky. Best way to have damage and tankiness is sadly proc sets. Since the sets don't scale with your offensive stats you could equip a couple and try to line them up with a good burst. You might kill a couple of the weaker players with that strategy but the more experienced will quickly learn what they need to do to avoid them.

Like for example Icy Conjurer can be dodged and Zaans can be turned off with a quick dodge roll away.

idk · September 2020

Magicwillow wrote: »

for RP reason

If it is for RP reasons wouldn't the answer to the question being posed be based on RP as well?

KennyAr · September 2020

I think that necro may be better. Nightblade doesn't seem to have skills which you can get your health back steadily. Nightblade seems to focus more on attacks.

As a necro one can create a bone followed by siphon to do significant damages to a boss or multiple targets. Siphon is a dot lasts for 12 seconds that you have enough time to use scythe to attack while getting back your health steadily while keeping up your stamina.

lozq · September 2020

Have a read through the skill lines, particularly the passives and decide for yourself what you'd like to offer the group.

https://eso-skillbook.com/skilltree/nightblade

https://eso-skillbook.com/skilltree/necromancer

The 'Tanking' tree for nighblades is the shadow tree - passives are:

Refreshing Shadows
Increases your Health, Stamina, and Magicka Recovery by 15%.

Shadow Barrier
Casting a Shadow ability grants you Major Resolve for 6 seconds, increasing your Physical Resistance and Spell Resistance by 5280. This duration is increased by 25% for each piece of Heavy Armor equipped. Current Bonus: 0%. Current Duration: 6 seconds

Dark Vigor
Increases your Maximum Health by 3% for each Shadow ability slotted. Current bonus: 0%.

Dark Veil
Increases the duration of your non-invisibility based Shadow abilities by 2 seconds.

As you can see, quite good for keeping yourself alive but your group utility is going to come almost exclusively from the gear and skills you use. The siphoning tree does increase ultimate generation, which can be very useful. I tank with my nightblade a bit, and I don't think there's anything unique I can do for the group that having a nightblade DD wouldn't already bring to the table. You have a couple of heal-over-time abilities that are handy and access to Incap Strike and Siphoning Strikes which are very good for keeping your sustain up via light/heavy attacks. But yeah...other classes, especially DK and Warden just have more built-in group utility.

All I know about necros is that they have some solid debuffing skills, and I've seen plenty of them in PUGs.

If this is primarily for RP reasons, I think either would be fine. If you like the blood magic, essence sapping, dark shadow knight vibe then go nightblade. If reanimating corpses floats your boat, go necro.

KennyAr · September 2020

I actually just started an Orc 2H + 1H and Shield tank to see how good it is. Spirit Guardian is another skill which heals over time.

Nova_J · September 2020

If you're doing rp it doesnt really matter. But if I had to pick I would pick necro simply because they have more group utility. High uptime Major and minor vulnerability is incredibly strong. You can use earthgore for your monster helmet as well, really cool effect and healing/cleanse.

Heimdarm · September 2020

I would use a nightblade, but this based on my past experience from long ago. I just returned to the game so this might be a wrong asnwer.

If you stay stage 1 vampire than it is still possible to build a health recovery tank, and nightblade has a passive for it. It also has a ton of self healing to proc troll king.

If you build a stage 4 vampire than it might be still possible to build a max health pool tank and in that case the nightblade's % based self heal skill (the other morph of invisibility) can make it almost invincible.

If you want a more "standard" build I would still choose nightblade. Why? Because even, if you want to be a pro tank later that can do all content, if you use the right sets you can tank all content as a stage 1 NB tank. Yes, I just returned, but I don't think that extremely hard content were released and stage 1 vampirism has not that bad drawbacks..

You wrote that you want a vampire for roleplaying reasons, in that case I would really suggest to choose nightblade. NB's skills has very similar animations like a vampire, you will feel that the class and the vampirism were created for each other. They perfectly fit.

EDIT:

And nightblade has a very bigy advante to other classes: It has both magicka and stamina gap closer, spammable, executioner. Don't matter what kind of weapons you will use later, you can use the NB's class skills.

It's gap closer I think fits perfectly with vampirism, its like a flashy jumping.

KennyAr · September 2020

I brought a 2H/1H&shield orc necro tank/health build to level 30 now. So far it's even more playable than my stam dk and warden. Somehow I have 7 piece of heavy armor (can't find better leather pieces yet). It's basically not killable so I bet you can go higher than stage1 vampirism, as its health never drops in general hunting and quest bosses. Only when against a group that its health drops in rare situations. That's without eating any health food. With health food then it's never an issue.

it attacks like crazy, better than my 2H stam DK. It kills everything around in like 10 seconds, a bit behind the magplars (I hate them because whenever they are around they kill faster than I do). The tactics is a bit boring though. It's always a bone followed by 2 uppercuts, repeat several times till opponent's health drops to half then use bone and slice to finish off in a second. You can kill a group this way really fast. You may have to deal with the mages first, then the archers and last the melee mobs. Use scythe when health starts to drop, usually once is enough to get the blood to nearly full. The only shortcoming I can see is that it easily gets stunned due to 2H is slow.

I don't know if it's still so invincible in upper levels, as some classes such as my magwarden is OP at lower levels but less sustainable at higher levels. Some such as my 2H DK kill fast in early stage but not later. I bet that it still kills fast once getting the Siphon skill.

By far I like it even more than my DW stam necro which is level 42 now. DW kills slower before getting Siphon and is less sustainable with leather pieces, relatively speaking.

Apology for my poor English.

Jim_Pipp · September 2020

So a vampire tank is disadvantaged, and a tank that tries to also dps struggles in both roles... but you can make them if you accept their best won't be competitive,

I recommend NB, lots of complimentary passives, but mainly their skills do magic damage like Vampires skills, so war maiden is your damage set.

What kind of tank do you want to be? For your second set, if you choose a meta set your group will appreciate you. In 4 man dungeons the Ebon set isn't great, but 3 balls of floating blood make good rp. If you want to be selfish/dps wear medusa as 5 heavy. If you want to live dangerously then Armor master is a blast - light armor sustain/damage passives and heavy armour resistance using a huge damage shield.

Run the damage morphs of your skills but put cp to boost your healing received, you'll need it to toggle simmering frendzy to get another huge spell damage boost! I'd recommend jumping between stage 1 OR stage 3 vampire, minimise those penalties or at least avoid the jump to stage 4.