A tight rotation and good build will not run out of resources and will not need to heavy attack, especially in a good group providing resource sustain synergies and regen buffs. Heavy attacks are mostly done in an emergency. Different players will need different amounts of sustain, which can be gained from food/drink, enchantments, sets, skills, CP, etc. If you are struggling with resources, you should sacrifice some damage for sustain. If you seem to never run of resources, sacrifice some sustain for more damage. You'll need to find a a balance. And it may change as you get more efficient and effective.

Sustain, the only time damage is more a priority over sustain is in PvP builds designed around finishing a fight in the shortest amount of time possible with an overwhelming amount of damage, and even then those PvP builds have plans for when things go south and how to sustain healing and buffs till they can regain the upper hand.

Build the sustain you need, and then as Dagoth_Rac said ease it off by replacing it with more damage. Every class has a different set of abilities and passives that'll effect their sustain so the answer to one playstyle won't be the same for another.

Like for example my Dragonknight runs 0 sustain sets and glyphs, but only because of Combustion, a charged inferno staff, tri-potions, the Battle Roar passive, and to top it all off Vampire's Blood for Blood.

My sustain is abysmal, but because of Blood for Blood in fights I can keep fighting without taking too much magicka out of my pool. I can't take my DK build and put it on my Sorcerer because Sorcs don't do well in melee, and they don't have Battle Roar to just get resources back on ult casts. My Sorc as a result has a couple regeneration glyphs because of that, but they can still hit pretty hard because their kit is tuned to accommodate that.

depends on groups, content and build.

Apparently your question is not about vet trifecta trial group as well as content. And you don't use HA builds. In this case just run few dungeons/trials, then reduce (if needed) your sustain to rise DPS, like using SPD/WPD glyph on jew instead of regen.

Quethrosar wrote: »

heavy attacks take over a second to fire so how can that be good for dps? pure dps and magic is out in roughly 10 weaves with light attack. drink potion with magic regen. buffs wore off, need to redo them, dps still taking a hit, oh magic ran out applying the buffs. so what's the correct thing to do? do you not worry about self buffs in a normal well put together group ?
do you not use fully charged heavy attacks?

I hate dots, this has never been my play style since everquest. i like big nukes.

It sounds to me like you need to worry more about efficiency than sustain tbh, and if you become more efficient, you will have higher DPS. What I mean by this is that the DPS doctrine right now is to maintain DoTs/AoEDoTs up at all times, weave light attacks in between skills, and once all DoTs are up, alternate between a spammable and light attacks - wash, rinse, repeat till execute phase (under 25%) and then replace spammable with your execute. It's boring, but it is literally the only way you can have sustainably high DPS.

Quethrosar wrote: »

how do dots give dps?
a dot ticks for maybe 1000 a second.
if i want to burn a 500,000 hp mob to the ground in 20 seconds i need to do 25,000 dmg a second every second.
even with weaving and a dot or 2 hitting for 1000 a second, i have never seen criticals consistantly hit this dps.
the highest i have seen is shards for 32000. i am talking solo play not group.
by the time it gets to near the end of the fight i need magica. so i started using dark conversion and that works good but it cuts out over a second of dps.

i can solo elden root 1 and arx easy, but of course on the 1.5 million hp mobs i have to be slower because i need to regen magica with potions and dark conversion.

i just do not see how it is physically possible for someone to keep constant high dps on a 3 million dummy, nevermind the trial dummy. maybe they have bursts and report that number. i can have a 40k dps burst if crits work in my favor. but i don't see how someone can sustain that dps every second for a few minutes.

The best I can do is compare a simple burst combo and a sustained DPS combo with some tooltip info from a current build I run.

Let's ignore Crits as well, even though Crits add a ton of damage (and this build is setup for Crits so the tooltips are even lower than they would be if I were built differently), and I am also ignoring any buffs that might be applied, including self buffs, and why not, also ignoring light attack damage. Just base tooltip damage to be very simple with this.

I have 5 skills that do damage. Wall of Elements, Elemental Orb, Crystal Frags, Force Pulse, Haunting Curse.

So, for a Burst combo, I would use Force Pulsing, Haunting Curse, and Crystal Frags.
FP tooltip: ~6,800
Curse Tooltip: 9,710
Frag proc tooltip: 13,343

So, just spamming FP once a second, I am getting at least 6,800 DPS alone. Add in Curse, which procs after 3.5 seconds and 8.5 seconds, I am getting nearly 20K damage over the course of 9 seconds. Frag has a 33% chance to proc.

So, over a nine second fight, I cast Curse first, and I get 8 FP spams in before I need to recast Curse. So of those 9 skill casts, 1/3 proc frag. But frag proc doesn't proc frag proc, so maybe I get 1 frag proc in there to use properly, which means I get 1 less FP cast.

All said, that burst approach is netting me, over the course of 9 seconds, 80,363 damage. Or, 8,929 DPS.

Now, with a dot rotation included, using just 2 DOTS, over that same 9 seconds.

Cast Curse, Cast WOE, Cast Orb, Spam FP until Frag proc.
WOE Tooltip: 975
Orbs Tooltip: 1,417

So, 2 Curse procs, 8 seconds of WOE, 7 seconds of Orbs, plus a single Frag proc, and 5 FP casts, over 9 seconds: 84,482 damage, or 9,386 DPS.

Now, that is fairly close in DPS. HOWEVER, the dot build has the advantage of WOE and ORBs having a 14 second and 10 second duration. So, you have less cost associated with keeping them up for a longer duration of time, which means you have additional damage ticking in the background while you are doing damage with more bursty skills.

On top of that, Light attacks, and importantly, crits are going to be ticking away. So, just in sources of damage alone, the DOT rotation, with 5 sources of damage, with have more oppurtunities to increase damage through criticals than the rotation using 3 damaging skills. And still, you have to add group and self buffs in. That WOE tooltip could easily be 3K per second after buffs, if not higher. I also didn't even include ultimates in this either, of which, those are adding in DPS as well.

I get around 50K DPS using those 5 skills for damage on my Solo build.

i'm really just trying to understand how people can run a CONSTANT 40k+ dps for the WHOLE time you need to kill a 6 million hp dummy. no buffs, not trial dummy. just a dlc vet boss dummy.

i feel like this could be people saying oh hey look i did 60k dps 1 time !
hell i can do 60k dps if the right crits hit at the right time. single shot mobs.

i don't feel bad about my skills, i can do 40%+ of the group damage on bosses so i am carrying my weight.

Quethrosar wrote: »

i'm really just trying to understand how people can run a CONSTANT 40k+ dps for the WHOLE time you need to kill a 6 million hp dummy. no buffs, not trial dummy. just a dlc vet boss dummy.

i feel like this could be people saying oh hey look i did 60k dps 1 time !
hell i can do 60k dps if the right crits hit at the right time. single shot mobs.

i don't feel bad about my skills, i can do 40%+ of the group damage on bosses so i am carrying my weight.

Okay...
Let's take a look at how people can produce damages on a combat dummy and not run out of juice.

Step 1: Understand how much juice you're drinking
When I look at my combat logs using the add on it shows I am using somewhere between 1250 and 1900 stam (or mag) and between 250 and 700 mag (or stam).

Step 2: Know your sustain
The number on your character sheet for recovery... is halved during combat (because that number is how much you regain every second outside of combat, but only every 2 seconds within it). So, if you're looking at the recovery and it reads 1500... that means during combat you get 750/second. If it reads 2k, which is a decent number for a DD, then that's 1000 per second.

BUT WAIT....
If I am spending 1900 per second but only getting 1000 back.... HOW DO I NOT RUN OUT?

This is where alternate sources of sustain matter.
1) Undaunted synergy. A trial dummy provides you with a Templar ability as a synergy that grants you like 3k stam (or mag). This means you get the 4% back from undaunted passives AND the flat 3k or so the actual synergy offers.
2) Potions. While parsing on a dummy, you dont want to waste bar slots or gcds using your usual crit and 20% dmg buffs, so you chug pots constantly to get a higher parse. The side effect of this means every 45 seconds (with the alchemy passives) to get 30% more recovery on top of the 7500 resource you re-gain
3) Any other abilities if you need them. These are fairly limited for some, but perhaps it's as simple as using a resource regeneration ability before the combat to get 20 seconds of a Templar rune. I wont go into detail too much on this one as it's something for you to discover through trial and error.

Step 3: Practice your rotation
After you ensure you've got the basics of sustain covered, focus on your rotation.
Pretty much every DD build in ESO is identical. Some require more skill to get the timing right, but there's no diversity in their structure because of a heavy lack of cooldowns involved (which is how other games create their randomness).

As a StamSorc, for example, you slot 2 pets (taking 4 of the 10 slots), Crystal weapon, Daedric Prey, Bound Armanents leaving 3 slots for DoTs and other damage fillers.
Then, practice your rotation - the main reason for practice is less about getting it perfect, but more to get an idea of how much resource you are spending and whether you can afford to support the rotation!

Step 4: Balance sustain with dps
Maybe add a dot of the other resource can fix things?
Maybe you need to replace your ring enchants with recovery?
Maybe you need to change the rotation and drop an ability which, while higher damage, is costing you too much resource and overall a dps loss (whirling blades is a good example on a stamsorc - you see parsers not use it because, while it's higher damage during the execute, it's not sustainable)

Hopefully this provides enough of a starting point as to how people are getting 140k+ parses (I am only about 105k on my stamden, so I'm not an expert).