@Weevah - First, you're correct that a pure heal spec is hard to level because the only time that is needed is in dungeons, and dungeon xp is terrible. . . thus resto-staff levels are hard to get.

My work-around is to have a dps weapon and spec and a heal spec. You know how to build a heal spec. It's all heals and Sun Fire for a snare to help you kite when adds get on you, so I'll share my dps build with you.

Aedric Spear -
Explosive Charge - to quickly close to melee range with enemies (also, it's fun if not much damage)
Biting Jabs - Cone damage mana burner, this is your main attack skills.

Dual Wield -
Blood Craze - DoT with vamp (great for boss fights)
Steel Tornado - PbAoE stamina burner. This is great for adds in boss battles. I'm considering going back to Rapid Strikes as it does much more damage, but it is single target and the animation is very long. I like having both options, but don't have space on bar for both (and wouldn't use bar for both if I had the space - something else would get it).

Restoring Light
Breath of Life - Expensive mana emergency heal.

Light Armor
Get all passives

This build does a ton of damage, has great mobility, and is a lot of fun to play. You will level Restoring Light (half your healer spec) easily through quests, and you'll get many levels in Restoration Staff from when you run dungeons or switch to full healer for Skull public groups. I'm level 33 and my resto staff is about 10 levels behind my dual wield. . . which isn't that big of a deal really. I imagine once I get to VR5 and start healing veteran dungeons, I'll have it maxed out in a day.

Having said all that, I absolutely agree that leveling dungeons need to have better rewards. Eventually, we'll be playing alts, and people won't want to run all the PvE quests again. Currently, the fastest xp in the game is mob-grinding, so we can expect alts to do that once people have seen the game's story. . . and that's bad because it isn't fun and will lead to less retention. My guess is that they'll change it once the player-base has more people with max level characters. They'll probably also adjust them to spread out in levels more so that you constantly have a dungeon that is level appropriate to run instead of having wide gaps between sets of 3 dungeons.

Also, I'd really like a need before greed system. I find myself getting gear that i put up on the guild store a lot and I bet those with me get gear I'd actually WANT while they'd actually want the gear I have. . . and they need the dungeon finder to be made less exploitable by griefers. That's a really big deal and something everyone will be screaming about in a month (or less) when griefers get bored and start victimizing other players. So this probably won't remain an issue and there are other big issues with dungeons for them to work on.

Btw, it's fun to play as dps, and you'll eventually want the ability to smoothly move between them - especially for PvP - but even in dungeons I've been the last one up before with the boss nearly dead and was able to switch over to my dps spec instantly so that I could take him out without any troubles.

Thanks for your post bean19 and for sharing your workaround! I hope others reading this post will also get something out of it.

Your dps build makes a lot of sense. It is similar to a Templar dps build I used for questing. I used Destruction staff, to take advantage of my high Magicka thereby increasing weapon damage.

Did you put any points into stamina?

Did you have low survivability while soloing in light armor?

I used heavy armor + aedric spear skills/passives with traited destruction staff heavy attacks when out of magicka.

Quickly switching to dps to finish a boss or pvp would be a very useful skill to have, agreed.

Well, the problem is that dungeons (the real ones not solo dungeons or public dungeons) gives no exp whatsoever.

The dungeons are one of the only sources of content that is suited for a group. I am questing with some friends and we have a decent group but we only do the dungeons once for the skill point then back to questing (that we could do solo but we just like to play together).

So, what I think the OP is asking for is what many of us asked for during beta events and other things. Give the players more than one viable path to lvl 50 (not only questing). This is what dungeons were initially but they totally destroyed that in live.

Now, dungeons are abmyssal exp and the only real paths to get experience is by chain questing (solo or in groups, there is no challenge whatsoever so everyone run pure dps builds if you do this consitantly with a duo or more) or by grinding mobs in the open world (since they couldn't remove that exp as well... more people would be upset if they got close to zero exp while killing mobs during questing.

So, if you allow open world mobs to give exp, why don't you allow dungeon mobs (that are actually alot harder) to give exp? The logic eludes me.

There seems to be a lack of understanding as to what the original post was about. So I am going to attempt to clarify the position and feelings of a lot of players.

TL;DR Let me play the game my way instead of railroading me.

-At the moment there is little to no point in running a dungeon once.
-Healers and tanks (even dps) gain a lot of experience (and by that I mean learn how to do their job not advance their character) by running dungeons.
-The desire of people to rerun dungeons is not about attaining max level is the shortest possible time, it is about learning the dungeons and having fun in those dungeons because its how we WANT to play the game.
-We are being FORCED to spend points (kinda meh because there are so many) in skills that we do not want to use so that we can do an activity that we do not want to do (quest).
-Dungeons are not currently a 'hey I want to play with a group'. They are a do once and forget thing. Best case you do it a couple of times at most before you get jack of it because each dungeon worth of xp can be earned in 5 minutes of grinding on mobs or questing.
-Learning which abilities work it what situation and the particular build that works for you is a process that is largely being denied to healers and tank AND dps. No one that wants to take part in trials (raid) is going to want a group member walking into their group with no dungeon experience and worst of all a non maxed skill line for there role at max level. To do so is to have an avoidable liability in your party.
-With zero incentive to rerun a dungeon, a valuable part of the community is missing from the game.

Atm my option if I WANT to do dungeons I have two options;
Spec dps, zerg through content that I am not interested in, respec healing with low skills (both numerical and actual) and flail around for a while at max level when things are getting serious wiping my group because I don't know what is going on with my abilities.
OR
Take a really really long time getting to max level, leveling my healing skills as I go, still doing things I don't want to do because the xp gain in dungeons is negligible at best.

It's not about getting there faster ... hell I'll happy to get there a little slower than someone in the world. Just give me some xp so that it doesn't feel like I'm wasting my time when I 'play' and atm it feels like a chore to get to 50 so that I can start playing the game.

Oh and to all the people saying "But I'm a healer with bow skills" etc that's great, you can be a hybrid/off healer I don't want to be.

Well, that's - just as Simon said - the very crux of the matter. With such low incentives of running dungeons, how is anyone going to get more experienced with boss mechanics, skill set up and gear choice, no matter which role you might prefer?

I am impressed, most posts in this forum aren't a little bit productive or even helpfull, this post actually is^^

As for the leveling builds, I can share 2 workarounds, haevy and light armor, to lvl with if anyone is interessted...

But I encountered different problems now at VR1:
1: Some people are used to seeing ae heal spam from not templar healers all the time, if you don't use healing springs, you will get asked/flamed or even kicked as a templar xD
2: With leveling as a hybrid yo put yourself in a dangerous situation! I am nearly half trough Vr1 now and all 3! class skills and many weapon/armor skills are still not lvl 50, restoration staff is at lvl 40...

And we need a option to exclude a armor piece from deconstructing xD I am constantly missing items of my 2 sets because of this xD

So far from my experience you will never use 4 healing skills in dungeons. in Fact at the moment I run with 2 skills that actually HEAL, 2 DPS skills one of these providing a stamina buff. and magelight for the 20% spell crit. + my ultimaate works as defensive and offensive as well. The main focus for me has been an even balance between the 3 class tree's so that they level together which will give me greater options once I hit max level.

I understand what you are trying to say in the fact that you would like to level as someone who heals people but i believe the reason that there is little exp in dungeons is so that players experience the entire world that has been created instead of spending there entire time level rushing in dungeons.

You could possibly try an alternate approach and see if there is someone who is around the same zone or doing the same quests as yourself and offer to provide heals/support to them while they kill.

The problem is not having all the heal skills while you lvl, the problem is, if you hit 50, you will need most of them in dungeons^^
I did a couple of them and switched avery bossfight, i am using 12 - 20 different skills all the time, depending on group, pull, tank and boss^^
And all of these skills need their lvl and their morphs....

The real issue is that we are being forced to level one way, quest's which are not all that interesting in the long run.

Mothanos wrote: »

The big problem with Zenimax is they sold this game with - "play the game how you want to play it"
But the only way to play it is by questing questing questing questing questing questing questing questing questing questing questing.

There are no other options then ' questing '
Cyrodiil pvp quest was alot of fun, our guild leveled abit with those quest and we had ops running everyday, but since they made ait a daily no1 is going there anymore as you cannot level up in pvp anymore.

Dungeon exp.....its total ***, being a healer is double ***....

Healing spec and grinding is bleh....

iam sorry if i come across as a whiner / craycray, but they should open up this game for more playstyles if they want to keep me playing in the long run...
No way i am going trough the same quests a second time, and no way in hell i pay a sub for an mmo that forces me to walk the same path again on my alts with no altervatives.

They might be looking at a extremely high dropoff by limiting this playstyle to people who like to play alts.

Dont get me wrong i realy love this game !! damn its one of the better mmo's out there atm
But long term ? alt friendly ? no way...

This is the message

I dont know....Im a pure healer and i have never had issues in this game. I am now at vet rank 2 and enjoying every minute of the game when I am online.

Some bosses/mobs might take a bit longer to kill but even at vet 2 I can manage 3-4 mob packs when questing.

The dungeons for me are for fun. More xp would come handy, you are right but I can manage with this much xp as well.

One more thing to mention here, I usually quest solo.

Custos91 wrote: »

And we need a option to exclude a armor piece from deconstructing xD I am constantly missing items of my 2 sets because of this xD

http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info300-ItemSaver.html#info