Hi and welcome to the game!

So there's a difference between "I want to play the best possible character" and "I want to have fun with my character and play what I want." The good news is that you can play whatever you want and have fun doing it. The bad news is that you won't necessarily be as effective as you could be if you were playing a more optimized build. I'll try to lay out why the meta suggests what it does in terms of what would be "more" effective, but I'm sure that you'd been able to have fun with the character regardless.

Let's start with race. You want to play a Nord! Awesome. So, you are right that the Nord racial passives are more geared towards stamina than magicka. Fortunately, racial passives won't make a huge difference unless you are trying for top tier DPS or somewhat in PVP. Having racial passive sthat help your attribute will make your life a little easier, but not having htem match shouldn't be too bad. So if you want to make a Nord who studied magic at the College of Winterhold or something, you go for it!

Your class is a magicka based Dragonknight. Awesome! I love dragonknights, in fact my main character is a Dunmer MagDK. You'll have a lot of skills that are fire-based, skills that heal and protect you, and skills that lock down the enemy. MagDKs are good fire-based DPS and make excellent tanks if you decide to change roles later. (Stamina Dragonknights are also awesome. Some of the Dragonknight skills morph to cost stamina and become poison based. StamDKs will make more use of weapon skills like Bow, Dual Wield or Two-handed.)

Weapons: So, its beneficial in this game to put all your attributes towards either magicka or stamina. This is because your weapon damage scales from how much stamina you have, and your spell damage increases the more magicka you have. You can do a hybrid build with both, but its far less efficient unless you do some specific builds. It'll be easier to choose stamina or magicka.
Generally, magicka characters use staffs (ice, fire or lightning). You might see One-hand and Shield or Dual swords on some tanks or DPS builds. Staff skills use magicka, so they hit harder the more magicka you have.
Generally, stamina characters use weapons like Bow, One hand and shield, Two handed, and/or Dual Wield. Weapon skills use stamina, so they hit harder the more stamina you have.
Now if you want to mix and match staff and two handed, you can make it work, but it will be less effective than if you match your weapons/staff to the attribute you are focused on. If you go magicka dragonknight, you'll find that your destruction staff hits much harder than your two-handed weapon because you have more magicka.
Also, an important way to regain resources is to heavy attack with your weapon. Bows, one hand and shield, two handed and dual wield all restore stamina when you do a heavy attack. Staffs all restore magicka. So on a magicka character, you'll need at least one staff to heavy attack to restore resources.

Armor:
In general, for PVE:
Magicka DPS or Healer: Light armor
Stamina DPS or Healer: Medium armor
Tank: Heavy Armor

Light armor gives you spell penetration, spell resistances, spell critical, and reduces spell costs. All of those are pretty important for doing DPS.
Heavy Armor gives you increased resistances and increased health, plus more armor value. But it won't really help you with doing damage, which is why its mostly only used by PVE tanks. (PVP is another matter entirely, but that's a different discussion).

Now, if the reason you want heavy armor is because you feel like you are dying a lot, there's a couple of options.

• Make sure your gear is reasonably close to your level. While leveling, you are scaled to CP 160 but you'll get better benefits from that scaling if your gear is close to your current level.
• Put health enchantments on your light armor until you are at a comfortable level of health. Endgame DPS aim for about 16-18k health, but for leveling purposes you'll probably want more health than that.
• Wear heavy armor on your Chest and Leg pieces for the greatest amount of armor, then wear light armor on the other 5 pieces to get benefits from the light armor passives.
• Use skills that increase your spell and physical resistances. Dragonknights have Spiked Armor, which is great for making you harder to kill.

Overall, you can play all of these things and you should be able to do most overland questing content with a Nord Magicka Dragonknight using a Destro Staff/Two-hander in heavy armor. It won't be the most effective build ever, but you should be able to complete content. If you do want to go for a more effective version of the build, a Nord Magicka Dragonknight with the Destro staff in light armor should do just fine. (It can't be any worse than questing with my Dumner MagDK Tank with One Hand and Shield for the whole main questline, and she did fine, just slow.)

Hope this helps! Whatever you go with, I hope you have fun with your character!

the_dottir wrote: »

Hello I just downloaded this game a week ago
I have already searched alot around for builds and so on
I have come up with a magic DK because I find the best skills for me to use are the one which are Magica
So I see I have to use cloth, destruction staff
Here comes my questions
I really like two handed sword would it be okay to switch between using two handed and a destruction staff? or would it be dumb considering two handed skills are mostly stamina?
I reaaaallly like to use heavy armor would it be okay to use cloth in dungeons (for extra Magica, dmg (I want to play as DPS and I am mostly PVE player))
I would love to play a nord though I know other chars are better for the purpose for Magica characters would it be very bad if I played a nord?

It is an awesome game but I find it very confusing because it is so "free" I am used to playing games where if u chose a warrior u cant benefit from cloths and so on

I hope you guys understand my English and what I mean

Sorry game isnt free as claimed your going to have a hard time lacking damage and sustain and most content is just out of the question as a heavg armor nord dk swapping to a 2h

My advice is just don't look for ultimate builds, play the game and find your playstyle. Along the way, you will learn what is best and create your own epic build. This is what happened to all my friends that followed the cancer youtube builds, guides etc:

- they got overwhelmed and quit the game
- by following someone else's play style and build they didn't really get into the game and they quit
- some managed to pull off cancer builds from the guide after months of farming the gear, just to realize the build is not viable anymore...so they quit the game.

Making your own unique character is what ESO is about. It makes me sad seeing everyone running same broken(OP) builds. Don't try to be the best #1 in leaderboards, it will ruin your experience. I'm one of the very few that never followed any guide, never made more than 1 character, and I'm doing very well and enjoying the game for what it is. Sure I still meet some weirdos that don't take any damage and can kill everyone in 2 hits, but who cares.

the_dottir wrote: »

Hello I just downloaded this game a week ago
I have already searched alot around for builds and so on
I have come up with a magic DK because I find the best skills for me to use are the one which are Magica
So I see I have to use cloth, destruction staff
Here comes my questions
I really like two handed sword would it be okay to switch between using two handed and a destruction staff? or would it be dumb considering two handed skills are mostly stamina?
I reaaaallly like to use heavy armor would it be okay to use cloth in dungeons (for extra Magica, dmg (I want to play as DPS and I am mostly PVE player))
I would love to play a nord though I know other chars are better for the purpose for Magica characters would it be very bad if I played a nord?

It is an awesome game but I find it very confusing because it is so "free" I am used to playing games where if u chose a warrior u cant benefit from cloths and so on

I hope you guys understand my English and what I mean

If you want to only play casually then your choices will have little to no affect but if you ever want to get into the harder end game content racial choices do make a difference.

the_dottir wrote: »

I still dont really know what to do and I am already a bit discouraged to play because ofc I want to be good with my character which I am about to build - doing good dps and such.

Don't put too much pressure on yourself. When you're completely new to the game, like with everything, you need time and practice to get good enough to "play with the big boys", i.e. join vet dungeons and raids. That was the case for everyone, even the best players. Enjoy the game, because it's a game and thus something you should enjoy.

The fact that you came here and asked for help and information already shows that you're not a "pure casual" player who just does overland quests and nothing else!

Just be aware that overland questing is ridiculously easy compared to group content, thus it's not really going to "prepare" you for what waits in dungeons. On the other hand, don't be discouraged either! The tier-one dungeons on normal (Banished Cells, Fungal Grotto and Spindleclutch) are extremely easy compared to say vet DLC dungeons. So once you feel comfortable with your character, join a group for one of those dungeons, maybe through zone chat asking specifically for other "newbies", and make your first experiences.

I still remember mine, when I first did Banished Cells, about a month after I started with the game, and only did overland stuff thus far. My first though was, wait a minute, this boss has 1.2 MILLION health? That must be a display glitch, how are we supposed to kill that guy? Thing is, they MUST have that much health. A boss fight in a group dungeon is supposed to take a while, and not be over in 5 seconds.

But I find it really sad that I cant use all of the spells which my character is getting because they need Magica and will not hit hard unless I go the "mage way"

Yeah that's true unfortunately. You need to get used to having lots of skills that you can't use in all situations/builds. Then again, you can only put 10 skills on your bars, so considering you have class, weapon, armor and other skills, you have way more than you can use anyway.

When you guys say casual does it then mean i cannot join raids, dungeons and so on ? because that will be a huge problem as I love dungeons, raids and being in a guild but I also love questing?

Like I said before, everybody (maybe except those pros that did like 10 other MMOs before) starts out as a casual player and works their way up to easy and then more and more difficult group content. Casual in this context rather means like "I play this only rarely, for relaxation, I don't care how good I am, and don't care about improving myself, as long as I can kill some overland mobs and do some quests". You clearly do not fall in that category.

I have one more newbie question I have gotten a free crate and got a really ugly hair bun with flowers in it can I sell my "collectibles" or delete them because I wont ever use such a thing? haha