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Undeath passive - what am I missing?

Draxund
Draxund
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I mostly PvP in Cyrodiil on my MagPlar brawler. I'm a mediocre skilled player that can hold his own, but I'm not great or anything. I run a build that aligns with other players/streamers/content creators in this new High Isle meta. However, one thing I never did was go vampire--mostly just out of laziness and a slight fear of the debuffs. But given the high damage and bursty nature of this Oaken-meta, I decided to finally bite the bullet and run Vamp for the stage 3 Undeath passive. Watch out Cyrodiil, I'll be an unstoppable templar!

... except I'm barely noticing the mitigation?? Moreover, compared to NOT running Vamp, sometimes I feel like I'm getting melted even quicker than before?? This can't be... I must be doing something wrong. So I double-checked maybe 10 times throughout my gameplay yesterday to see if I missed something. Vamp Stage 3: check. Undeath passive: check. No other changes to my build/food/skills/pots: check. What the what?! So not only do I notice the hit to my mag/stam sustain, I feel like I'm having to heal even more now.

What am I missing here? Is the increased fire damage offsetting Undeath? It seems everyone runs Undeath as mandatory, so it has to be something I'm doing wrong...
  • xylena_lazarow
    xylena_lazarow
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    It doesn't make you tanky on its own if the rest of your build is squishy or you're letting yourself take too many hits, but it's approximately a 5pc Pariah for a low overall build investment, so there's seldom a competitive reason to not run it. It stacks very effectively with other sources of % damage reduction from passives/sets/CPs, and none of these are affected by the enemy's Penetration stat.
    PC/NA || CP/Cyro || RIP soft caps
  • Draxund
    Draxund
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    It doesn't make you tanky on its own if the rest of your build is squishy

    Well I kept everything else the same as before, and I have decent resists and survivability. I mean, I'm not talking night-and-day difference or anything, but there are times I feel like damage is just draining that health down quicker. Just not sure why I'm noticing it.
  • Thecompton73
    Thecompton73
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    Undeath is highly over rated by most people. I've had vampire toons in Cyro for years and the only way it makes you noticeably more survivable is when you have above 35K health and pair it with pariah. In that scenario you can still have around 10K health when both sources of mitigation start to really kick in and by the time you're down to 5K incoming damage gets cut very significantly. Running it on any toon with less than 30K health and no pariah means that by the time you're mitigating even 25% of the incoming damage your health will be so low that any hard hitting ability will still do enough to finish you off.
    Sometimes I run into people that get down to less than 10% health and suddenly seem to stop taking damage. Like they're sitting there with 4K health left and absorbing everything from 5 people pummeling them without going down. It's usually attributed to the undeath+pariah combo but I've had 40K health tank builds using the combo and never experienced that strong an effect which leads me to believe those people know of some other trick besides simply pairing those that makes it possible.
  • DrSlaughtr
    DrSlaughtr
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    Vamp 3 is a nice buff to mitigation but it's effectiveness is drastically over stated. It gives you just a little bit more chance to survive but you still need to heal and escape incoming damage.
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  • Draxund
    Draxund
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    Running it on any toon with less than 30K health and no pariah means that by the time you're mitigating even 25% of the incoming damage your health will be so low that any hard hitting ability will still do enough to finish you off.
    This is really interesting--I had not considered the ramp-up time for getting that mitigation going (particularly in this high burst meta). Originally, I thought Undeath was just a flat 30% mitigation, but after getting vamp I realized it was a ramp-up based on missing health. To try and compensate, I changed one of my sets to Ancient Dragonguard to get the extra resist under 50% health, but it's nowhere near that of Pariah.
  • malistorr
    malistorr
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    My experience is in no-CP Ravenwatch (Cyrodiil) PVP. I have been a level 3 vamp the whole time. I do notice I'll die easier/faster if my vamp level 3 drops down to 2 because I let the 4-hours run out. What I think some people forget is that the mitigation goes higher the lower your health is. So when you're at full health there may be close to no mitigation. I've never seen anything official in writing that describes exactly how this works either. But as a previous poster mentioned, by the time you get to close to 30% mitigation you're probably so low on health that a lot of people can 1-shot you with many abilities. So while I think vamp3 helps with surviving, it's not as much as people think. Imagine if it was really 30% mitigation period! Every player would have to use it or they'd have no chance or being competitive. Pariah buff works the same way. I tried Pariah, Gaze mythic, and vamp 3/undeath and felt pretty tanky but I couldn't kill anyone but a bad player who was already low on health. These days I'm going 2 offensive sets with a defensive mythic. Heavy head, chest, and pants. With the skill that gives almost 6k resists I have my resists at like 28 and 25k and still wearing 4 light pieces divines. It's the most competitive I've ever felt in PVP but I'm also slowly getting better with practice and learning more about how my class and all its skills work and what a good kill combo should look like. People don't get that it takes months of practice to be better than average in ESO PVP and that's if your build is top notch and you understand how to play. Most who try PVP get frustrated because they run into elite players who 2 or 3 shot them quickly and they just give up. Or they avoid fighting because they don't want to die and never get better. You need to play 10-20 hours a week probably minimum to become one of the better players and duel/fight most of that time. That would involve finding the nearest enemy/fight and probably dying 50-times during your 2-hour play session. During your first couple of months maybe you'll get a couple kills per night if you're lucky enough to run into PVE players farming skyshards or something.
    Edited by malistorr on June 28, 2022 11:08PM
  • mocap
    mocap
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    Draxund wrote: »
    I double-checked maybe 10 times throughout my gameplay yesterday to see if I missed something
    maybe you missed the fact that Undeath is linear passive?
    You get 30% damage reduction only when you almost dead. Like at 1% of your HP you can start enjoying 30% reduction :)

    Check some other stuff to pair with Undeath:
    Bloodspawn set
    Ironblood set
    Heartland Conqueror backbar Defending trait (6.5k armor bonus)
    Revealing Flare skill (perma Major protection)
    Temp guard ult (perma Minor protection)
    Major/Minor Resolve
    Duelist Rebuff cp passive
    Resilience cp passive
    Edited by mocap on June 29, 2022 6:09AM
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