PrinceShroob wrote: »

Unless the tooltip indicates otherwise, abilities scale with the higher of your Magicka or Stamina and the higher of your Spell Damage or Weapon Damage. You would still want to put all your attribute points into Magicka or Stamina because abilities scale with the higher of your Magicka or Stamina--splitting attribute points just means your abilities are weaker because you put points into Magicka or Stamina that aren't going to increase your power, since the other attribute is higher.

Most gear and abilities provide both Spell Damage and Weapon Damage. Potions and class passives like Mountain's Blessing do not.

Let's use Dragonknight as an example. A Magicka Dragonknight will have 64 attribute points in Magicka and will use food that boosts maximum Magicka. Without any active buffs, their Spell Damage and Weapon Damage will be equal. However, drinking a Spell Power potion will only grant the Dragonknight Major Sorcery, meaning their Spell Damage is higher. While their Weapon Damage will be buffed by Minor Brutality from Mountain's Blessing, it will still be lower than their Spell Damage. It's a "wasted" opportunity for damage--if the Dragonknight had Major Brutality instead, their skills would be scaling with Weapon Damage, which would be higher thanks to Minor Brutality from Mountain's Blessing.

That's why you'll see endgame compositions with a tank running Igneous Weapons, or a DPS using Degeneration--these skills provide both Major Sorcery and Major Brutality to the group or to the caster. That not only ensures that the DPS can squeeze every bit of damage out of their group's class-specific buffs, but frees the DPS up to run potions that restore Health, Magicka, and Stamina or provide Minor Heroism.

That brings me to another consideration--although, say, a Sorcerer with Crafty Alfiq and Necropotence would have a huge Magicka pool, and their Resolving Vigor would scale off their Magicka and the higher of their Spell Damage or Weapon Damage, despite costing Stamina, the Sorcerer wouldn't be able to cast the skill very often. So primarily Magicka builds running Stamina skills (or vice-versa) have to be careful with the skills they cast using their "off" resource.

Tanks do and PvP builds may split their attribute points. Previously, you would see some endgame builds adjust attribute points to reach 21k health while running food like Ghastly Eye Bowl, but generally people are either running parse food (max attribute plus recovery) or bistat (Health plus Magicka or Stamina) food now. Tanks need to balance resource amounts to have high health while simultaneously having adequate resources for blocking and casting skills. PvP builds generally run bulkier, but may opt to run lower if they have different defensive options (such as Hardened Ward for Sorcerers).

Turtle_Bot wrote: »

Actually_Goku wrote: »

Hi guys,

I’m thinking of giving the game another go after around 4 years off - I can see a lot has been added and changed, and I’m keen to check it all out.

However, though I do like to try and find information myself, I can’t find a simple and definitive answer to one question: it seems like hybrid builds are a thing, namely, I see a lot of magicka builds using stamina abilities now like vigor, and dual wielding skills as well. In addition, attribute points seem to be more evenly distributed too, is some in health now a necessity?

When I last played, you just pumped all your skill points into magicka/stam if you were damage or healer, and same with your attributes, all 64 into whatever you mained…

Can someone please explain to me in the simplest way possible what has changed to make it viable to do this - does damage no longer scale off max attributes?

Simply put, yes, ability tooltips now scale much more with weapon/spell damage instead of max stats.

There was also the Hybridization changes.

Simply put, abilities now scale from whichever is higher.
- Weapon/spell damage
- Max mag/stam
- Weapon/spell crit.
Whichever of those stats is higher, your abilities will scale off those and ignore the lower (unless the ability specifically states otherwise).


Basically it comes down to, pick whichever morph of the ability is the strongest (or fits best with what your build needs/wants).
Your attributes only really matter to min-max that final few percent of damage and help with sustain (you will still want to put majority of your attributes into the one you will use most often, typically whatever your spammable uses), but if you have enough damage, some attributes into the off resource to cast additional buffs or block/roll more can be good too.


When you pick weapon or spell damage and attributes, the most important part to look at is what minor buff your class gives (sorc/plar lean to spell crit/damage, NB/DK lean to weapon crit/damage) and focus on that with stuff like mundus stones that still aren't hybrid.


If you are doing harder group content then you will want to synergize with your group (e.g. if you have a DK in the group and no plar, then you will want to use weapon damage instead of spell damage to get the most out of DKs minor brutality buff) But this is mostly only for organized group play content such as HM vet trials, DLC dungeon tri-fectas, etc.

TL//DR: attributes are mostly about sustain now, focus your attributes (for DPS) into whichever your spammable (and majority of other abilities) costs to sustain longer.
All abilities scale off the highest, so a stamina cost ability cast from a build that has max magicka and max spell damage will deal the same damage as if it was cast from a build that had max stamina and max weapon damage. It just costs stamina to use it and its the same the other way around as well.