fred4 wrote: »

Playstyle-wise it matches what you're describing:

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/578324/imperial-city-melee-magblade-build/p1

Thanks!

Yeah they seem like melee stamblades and only use cloak occasionally, not for defense/escape but to attack. But their damage mitigation seems extremely high even at full health, so probably not 20k resistance like me and not Mark of the Pariah, and no damage shield.

In the above threads I would particularly read Joy_Division's posts and, well, my own .

1. I wouldn't say no to permanent Major Expedition, if it was free. However you are giving up a 5-piece set bonus for that. As a 5-piece bonus that is weak. There are lots of 5-piece bonuses that are more valuable:

• Daedric Trickery gives you 2 - 3 Major overlapping buffs, albeit random ones. Nonetheless the set is highly regarded for PvP and back barrable.
• Mechanical Acuity gives you 5 seconds of 100% crit chance and is a guaranteed proc when you attack. Very valuable on a crit-centric class and, when you control the fight via stealth, it will proc right when you want it. Front bar only needed.
• Darloc Brae is an off-meta sustain set that will give you insane magicka sustain on a stamblade. Nothing, absolutely nothing else beats this, if you can live with the playstyle. Back bar only needed.
• Stuhn is a valuable offensive set that is a guaranteed proc from Surprise Attack. Spriggan is it's more consistent cousin.
• Heartland Conqueror, doubled barred, allows you to amp up your offense on the front bar and defense or weapon enchant proc on the back bar. Very flexible although I am personally not sold on it.
• Good old Shacklebreaker or Eternal Vigor gives you some valuable mag sustain, although simply running something like Bear Haunch food essentially has the same effect.

A typical stamblade runs 2H + bow. You need 2H for Rally. You need Resolving Vigor too, by the way. You need the healing, you want the sustain, you need the pre-buffed Major Brutality so you can be flexible with potions. Simple as that. The bow on the other hand gives you Major Expedition simply from dodge rolling. This makes a set like Adept Rider redundant. I personally also like Race Against Time on a stamblade not least for the +10% crit damage. Main thing though: It gives you root / snare removal and immunity. I personally never run without a skill that does that, be it Shuffle, Race Against Time or Double Take. The reason Race Against time is so valuable is not strictly the snare removal, but the 2 second root / snare immunity, which can make the difference for letting you get into cloak without immediately being locked down again by skills like Bombard, DK Talons or being slowed by templar Jabs or Living Dark.

2. As a PvP stamblade you want to be sitting at 2K to 2.5K stam regen before any buffs, such as a potion or Continuous Attack. That's why woodelf is such a good race for it. That and the woodelf speed passive. Redguard should be OK, but maybe not ideal. Magicka sustain is largely up to playstyle.

As a natural-born magblade, I find it hard to get away from Cloak spamming, which is why I currently run a Darloc Brae back bar when I play stamblade. That set is pretty insane. It procs when you crouch, even if you are still being attacked and technically visible. This gives it a reliability factor that makes the set viable (otherwise it wouldn't be, tbh). You still uncrouch when you attack, but if you play passively / defensively, you can get sustain from it in the middle of combat. Darloc Brae + Vampire + Race Against Time makes you a speed demon in crouch with zero sustain issues casting Race Against Time or Cloak (but not both at the same time) while you move in stealth. You don't run down your stamina either. It is an odd set to get used to, however, because it is hard to tell when you are crouching and when not.

On the other end of the spectrum you could play a stamblade that only has stamina sustain and, thus, limited Shadow Image and Cloak sustain. This will give you maximum damage or some tankiness from a set like Pariah, since you are not investing into a sustain set, like Darloc Brae. You will want to use tri-stat potions at the very least in that case and this be the reason you need to run 2H, not dual-wield, so you can reliably get Major Brutality from Rally and not from that weird dual wield skill no one in their right mind actually slots. You typically want the Major Brutality buffed before you unstealth, by the way.

The middle ground is something like Shacklebreaker, though the easiest way of figuring out how much mag sustain you need is probably using all tri-stat (Hakeijo) enchants on gear and messing around with different foods, such as Smoked Bear Haunch, Lusty Argonian Maid Mazte or Hissmir Fisheye Rye.

3. Well, you can certainly try Pariah and, yeah, I think that would be enough on a nightblade. I would use Swift jewelry. Mainly medium armor. Willow's Path was viable a few patches ago, then it got nerfed again. As a percentage-based set it only makes sense if you have plenty of all regens already and you want more. You're not going to have enough magicka recovery - well, maybe with a high recovery food - for Willow's Path to be meaningful. Health regen in PvP is nerfed into the ground. That only leaves stamina recovery. I did the math on Willow's Path in previous patches. It's just not very good. It was viable when using it to seriously amp up health regen, but that build approach is gone due to health regen now being nerfed by Battle Spirit.

You certainly want more penetration than 6K. Do not go for DOT damage reduction CP. When you cloak, DOTs do not do any damage to you. Could be an issue if you lack cloak sustain, but ... not really. It's burst that kills you. You might go for both AOE and single-target damage reduction, however next patch I would simply go for the new direct damage reduction star and leave it at that. You really want +direct damage, +single target damage, +crit damage and healing (certainly with Acuity) and probably +crit damage from flanking as well. You are a cloaking nightblade. Your opening attack from cloak is a guaranteed crit, regardless of Acuity or not. You make that Incap Strike or Assassin's Scourge, you want those crit damage bonuses. This be the reason for running Race Against Time as well.

I suppose you might try defensive CP for the time being, but the longer you play that class, the more you'll use offense as your best defense, because stamblade is the single class where that really works. Good stamblades, well, I don't play one, so I don't know exactly what compromises they make. However I believe good stamblades are hard to kill, because they use Rally. They don't just not heal and try to escape when under pressure. They heal with Vigor and Rally. I see too many stamblades just dodge rolling. You can cast a skill into a dodge roll in the same second. You don't lose any time doing that. Don't just dodge roll. Cast skills such as Vigor, Rally, Shuffle, Race Against Time or Double Take / Mirage into a dodge roll. Also: Play with Shadow Image, if you fancy that playstyle.

I've been running Acuity (front bar) / Darloc Brae (back bar) / Wild Hunt / 1x Trainee (Cuirass) / Balorgh on my stamblade, but not been totally happy with it. Let me elaborate on the disadvantages of that setup:

• Acuity has a long cooldown. You often get stunned or otherwise side-tracked when you attack and Acuity easily goes to waste. This is even truer now that Zoal is becoming a popular monster set. Zoal + Slippery CP immediately counter-stuns would be gankers. The mitigation for that is to drink an Immovability potion before attacking from stealth, but this loses you potion flexibility.
• Darloc Brae kind of means you're playing a crippled magblade. Oh the irony. That set is trying to give you the very high stealth-sustain a magblade excels at. Guess what, though. In the grand scheme of things stamblades are stronger and don't need to be played that way. If you're a frustrated magblade, like me, you're better off either playing your magblade or learning to play your stamblade properly instead. It's a different playstyle.
• Balorgh can be devastating if you build ultimate on NPCs in IC inbetween engaging with players. If you do not do that, e.g. if you use your cheap ultimate at 70, which is what I am prone to do, then it's not that great.

With this in mind I have just theory-crafted the stamblade build I am going to try next. Based on our conversation I made this an excercise in getting some half-decent resistances, but I didn't use Pariah. I used Heartland Conqueror to get +6K penetration on the front bar and +6K resistances on the back bar. Going with the theme of this thread - getting speed from sets - I also went with Gryphon, a set I had forgotten about. It's actually a great stamblade set, especially now that crit chance has been so nerfed, yet nightblades remain crit damage specialists (+10% passively, another +10% from Grim Focus). You really want the 2 lines of crit from the set. This set was recently buffed so it's 5-piece bonus lasts a decent amount of time, covering a unique / stacking additional source of speed in Minor Expedition and covering the desirable Minor Force buff. This allowed us to go with Shuffle for the all-important snare immunity and the Major Evasion, while getting Major Expedition from rolling on the bow bar. Since we have decent resistances and resistances really need to be stacked to become valuable, Mirage would have been nice, but I'm finding it hard to justify Mirage and Shuffle. When it comes down to a choice, I feel that root / snare immunity will be more valuable.

Using Poison Injection with a Master's bow on the back bar, then jumping in with Ambush is an age-old stamblade playstyle. Don't underestimate the Minor Vulnerability from Ambush and, perhaps more importantly, the Empower. This opening is the approach against tankier targets or ones you could not kill with a gank. Your normal first try at a target is opening with Incap, Surprise Attack or Ambush. Poison Injection is kind of nerfed and not all that popular anymore. Venom Arrow and Mark Target are alternatives. In the latter case you could go with a different bow, perhaps simply one that gives you Armor (Adept Rider bow for the 2-piece bonus only), which would synergise in this build.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData?id=368629

taugrim wrote: »

If this is you, it's laughably easy to get you to execute range. A 20k health target only needs to take 15k damage to get to execute range. A 30k health target by comparison needs to take 22.5k damage to get to execute range, so they can take 1.5x the damage.

For people new to PVP, I typically recommend 1 defensive set, 1 offensive set, and the weapon/mythic/monster set is whichever side of the fence you want to emphasize (e.g. damage, sustain, etc etc).

Thanks! What's the base requirement for HP, resist and stamina for new stamina players do you think?

I was hoping to outrun opponents by adept rider with the ring of wild hunt but it turned out since I die so fast. Also I noticed that:

- nobody blocks in super fluid combat
- nobody raises damage shield
- some players can dodge to avoid CC when they didn't even see me or my attacks - I guess they use Miats PVP Alerts
- ranged attacks are rare in prolonged fights, instead people chase each other with melee weapons
- unlike PvE I often don't have time to properly buff everything when encountering an enemy.

which looks like I need to simplify my controls and abilities as well

There are many medium armour rollerblade builds, they usually have most pieces in well-fitted, and they are great for escaping. The mythic torc of conal constanty necklace is nice of these builds because it manages stam/mag pools, so when you are low on stam you can cloak because your mag increases, and when you are low on mag you can roll because your stam increases. As for resistances there's many useful CP stars, for eg., 'resiliance' will give you crit resistance, and 'duelist rebuff' will reduce your inc damage, and so on.

7k weapon damage, well fitted Gear (probably all items well fitted), eventually 10k penetration with around 27k health, something between 24k and 27k resistances and torc of tonal constancy for stamina and magicka recovery.

This Is a normal build wearing 2 proc sets (One of them vateshran 2h maul with sharpened) and clever alchemist.

All of these stats are before any CP and fully buffed, with CP they obviously can grow more.

CP gives free Dodge Rolls every 30 seconds or so, the Speed Is achieved via race against time skill, everything else Is easly obtainable via the current meta with clever alchemist, vateshran 2h and another DPS set or eventually another proc set.

If You want to survive You have to manager to do One of the following:

1) be a glass cannon (Who hit for First and garden win)

2) be very elusive with High Speed and can provide good damage (for good I mean something like them)

3) out heal their damage with your steongest heals and while Building ultimate to land your wombo combo

4) be tanky having a lot of health (40k or more), a lot of res (over 30k both Spell and physical res) and can sustain your stamina (for block, Dodge Rolls, break free).

5) be less tanky then point 4 while able to sustain your stamina and providing damage in the meantime (passively like the set thews of the harbinger and skills like bone Shield, or activly with delayed burst skills or sera like Crimson Fury, or with dots) but You have to work for your kill during their continue burst.

Without at least One of the previous point You are dead and nothing can be done

fred4 wrote: »

There's also Zoal, which will immediately counter-stun the attacker in that case.

Ha! I guess that's what one guy was wearing, since I got CCed by fear while he did nothing.

fred4 wrote: »

Hmm. You obviously haven't run into many magsorcs ... or maybe those fights ended very quickly ?

I was in EU CP Imperial City, no big battles, only scattered players and casual groups, mostly solo. We had 4 in the group and enemies seem to be all solo. If there was any enemy magsorc they were probably killed by others in my group very fast, but it's only the NBs we had problem dealing with, 4 to 1 and can't win.

fred4 wrote: »

One is that you should always be in a buffed state, no exceptions. While you're running around idle, you should constantly run a buff rotation.

If I keep up buffering, doesn't that mean less resource for attack? Or maybe that doesn't matter since I don't get to keep continuous attack?

fred4 wrote: »

The third is what I call proactive versus reactive playstyles. Proactive builds have 3 or more buff and healing skills they constantly need to cycle. Shields, armor buffs and heals over time are proactive. Reactive builds have less of those skills. Reactive skills include burst heals, Healing Ward, Streak, dodge rolling, snare removal skills and Cloak.

Three buffs is kind of the break-even point, where I would call a build neither reactive nor especially proactive. Stamsorcs can be quite reactive in that they Streak away and dodge roll when in trouble. Nightblades can be reactive. A build with high passive defense can be reactive, but may need a more elaborate attack rotation (DOTs) to do good damage. Funnily enough I find magplars quite reactive in that you build them tanky and block-heal when you've taken some damage. They also have a gap closer and and an execute, which contributes to that reactive feel.

Thanks, I'll try reactive tanky build for nb first... can't even get light weaving right yet.

I seriously doubt you are even built for dealing damage let alone to handle the skill gap.

I feel like you assume you know how to create a pvp character but I'm fairly sure it'll be far from optimal.

Go a head and copy a PvP build from someone and try to get the swing of things first

moo_2021 wrote: »

If I keep up buffering, doesn't that mean less resource for attack? Or maybe that doesn't matter since I don't get to keep continuous attack?

If that is the case, then you don't have enough sustain or you're doing it a bit too much. There is a balance. You can't generally keep shielding all the time or you certainly can't shield stack all the time, because that runs down your magicka very fast. When standing on a flag, waiting for it to flip, keep an eye on your resources. If your stamina is below 100%, cast magicka buffs and possibly a shield. If your magicka is below 100%, but your stamina is full, then block. There are a few tricks to make sure you stay near 100% resources while buff-cycling out of combat:

1. First and most obvious: You only recast buffs when needed, e.g. when they are maybe half run down. Enable the new ZOS feature that shows you buff timers or get an addon to help with that.
2. Make sure you have adequate sustain. I like having around 2K regen on my primary resource on pretty much every build, although I know some people run with less.
3. Get your sustain from the Serpent / Atronach mundus and from drinks. I think many people use those mundus stones since they were buffed to 310. They're good value. As regards to drinks, my advice may fly against common practice. Many people like Sugar Skulls. Sugar Skulls is the most stat-dense food. However:
   
   Building with Sugar Skulls may actually leave you with an excess of the opposite stat. The alternative to Sugar Skulls is using some different food / drink and building with prismatic enchants on gear. People who use Sugar Skulls typically do not use prismatic enchants. They use stat-efficient food, but not stat-efficient gear enchants. This means that, in most cases, Sugar Skulls are not as good as everyone thinks they are. The only benefit is that you save gold / Tel Var on the expensive Hakeijos. If you are a hybrid and you truly need as much magicka and stamina as you can get, if you use prismatic enchants and possibly Triune jewelry with Sugar Skulls, then yes. It's the best food. If you are fine with running low sustain below, say 1.5K, then Sugar Skulls is possibly also best. Otherwise you have to find your sustain somewhere. In that case you might as well switch to a food that gives you sustain (and build with Hakeijos to get health / opposite stat, as necessary) for two reasons:
   
   The first is that only the mundus and drinks contribute to your out of combat regen. Your out of combat regen figures are actually higher than what your stat sheet says. The calculation is weird however. They don't simply scale up from the stat sheet. Out of combat regen only scales with certain things. Armor set regen buffs and jewelry regen enchants are not among those things. Mundus stones and drinks are. This means that if you make two builds with equivalent stats and regens, where one build uses Sugar Skulls and the other build uses a drink, the build with the drink will have higher out of combat resource regen and it will sustain buff-cycling better, such as while standing idle on a flag, waiting for it to flip. I am not kidding. This can make a palpable difference. You will not notice it on every build, however I run a buff-heavy magden and it has been noticeable on that build in the past. This mechanic has also always been a consideration for perma-cloaking magblades, e.g. in order to sustain cloak.
   
   The second reason you might want to run drinks this patch is that procs scale with weapon / spell damage now. We also lost a 20% resource buff factor from having 300+ CP some time ago. However we still have the 20% scaling factor for weapon and spell damage by way of Major Sorcery / Brutality. This means that, in many builds, having weapon or spell damage is now more beneficial than having max resource. Foods / drinks don't give you weapon / spell damage. They give you resources. If you run Sugar Skulls and you are not a shielding build that has to build for max magicka, if you end up putting recovery enchants on jewelry, because you are running Sugar Skulls on anything other than a magsorc basically, then you are IMO doing it wrong. You have built to give away weapon / spell damage in favor of max resource. Your damage and your proc values will probably be lower than if you'd used a drink and gone for full weapon / spell damage enchants on jewelry.
4. If you're running a skill like Meditate, your problems are also solved.
5. If you are a magplar or a magden, consider running the opposite stat sustain skill, e.g. run Restoring Focus or the Bull Netch respectively. Yeah, I know, I know. No one else does this. Well, as far as I'm concerned everyone is stupid . You need stamina sustain in PvP. You need it for break free, for dodge rolling, for sprinting. It might come passively from wearing heavy armor or because you are a high elf. If that works and is sufficient for you, then OK, you're covered. If you simply don't dodge roll much at all, fair enough. You can ignore this. However this is the high damage dodge-rolling patch. For my playstyle some stamina suatain has always felt extremely valuable on magicka classes, more so than even wearing a defensive armor set. In that case, why wouldn't you go with Restoring Focus or the Bull Netch? Those skills give you stamina while blocking or sprinting! You get better block sustain and the sprint sustain is just plain nice. You can sprint on a magplar or magden without running down your stamina.
   
   On stamina classes, of course, those skills are already no-brainers. Restoring Focus, Bull Netch, Dark Deal, those skills will keep you topped up while blocking and doing stamina buff cycles.