Replies: 1

Hey guys!  I’m kind of new here, but have recently become heavily addicted to ESO.  I played Skyrim and that’s where I fell in love.  I think I have decided on becoming a PVE archer.  I am open to any kind of advice!

Thanks in advance!

Replies: 63

EDITS:

9/27/2016 – Updated for Update 12

Get ready for a Bow/Bow PvE build!

Shoutout to @fire0 (@rokrdt05) for coming up with the amazing rotation that allowed me to get such fantastic results with a bow and for tanking 4-5 hours of Bloodspawns in the process of optimizing said rotation.

Race:

1. Khajit

Attributes:

All in Stamina

Food:

Health and Stamina

Mundus:

Thief and Shadow

Champion Point Distribution:

Blue tree:

100 Mighty, 56 Precise Strikes, 31 Thaumaturge

Red tree:

Points evenly across Hardy, Thick Skinned and Elemental Defender

Green tree:

100 into reduced cost, the rest into regen.

Gear Choice:

7/7 Medium

5 Divines Twice Born Star all Stam Enchants

1 Divines Velidreth Armor Stam Enchant

1 Divines Kragh Armor Stam Enchant

3 Vicious Ophidian Jewelry Weapon Damage Enchants

1 Sharpened Maelstrom Bow

1 Sharpened Master Bow

Bar setup

Main bar (vMA Bow): Guard, Light Weight Trap, Endless Hail, Focused Aim, Relentless Focus. Ultimate – Flawless Dawnbreaker

Execute bar/AoE (Master Bow): Guard, Razor Caltrops, Poison Injection, Relentless Focus, Killer’s Blade. Ultimate – Ballista (Shooting Star for AoE).

Rotation:

Step 1 (Master Bar): Merciless Resolve>Shooting Star>Potion>Caltrops>Poison Injection>Bar Swap

Step 2 (vMA Bar): Endless Hail>Medium Weave>Light Weight Trap> Focused Aim + Medium Weave x 4>Assasin’s Will>Relentless Focus>Bar Swap

Step 3 (Master Bow): Poison Injection>Bar Swap

Restart at Step 2. Throw Razor Caltrops Down every 3rd bar swap.

When the target reaches 25% the rotation changes. You must go to melee range for Killer’s Blade.

Step 1(vMA Bow): Ensure that Merciless Resolve is up>Endless hail>Bar Swap animation cancel

Step 2 (Master Bow): Poison Injection>Killer’s Blade + Medium Weave x 6.

Restart at Step 1 if the target can still take the full duration of all the DoT’s. If it cannot, keep using Killer’s Blade the target.

Reasoning:

1. Why Bow/Bow?

Because its something different and it utilizes the newly available weapons from vDSA. Because being ranged allows one to be safer and thus serrve the group better. Because you provide additional group utility. Mainly it is because it allows us to utilize both the Maelstrom and Master Bows, both of which are quiet extraordinary.

2. Why Guard?

Our Range Trap Skill provides minor force, but it is not up on Target 100% of the time. This build a crit-heavy build I prefer to have Minor Force 100% of the time. Double slotting Evil Hunter would be a viable alternative if you wanted to get rid of the skill, but it would only increase your weapon damage by around 87.

3. Why Focused Aim?

While Lethal Injection is our number one choice if there is a stamplar in the group, Focused Aim provides great utility if there is no Stamplar in group.

4. Why Master Bow?

Master bow provides a whopping 301 weapon damage on targets affected by your poison injection. In Single target fights this amounts to 440+ weapon damage (after buffs). This is a huge buff and it is on the back bar because the vMA passive buff gives 189 weapon damage, which is much better than the 1k stam you get passively from the master bow.

5. Why Light Weight Trap?

Because it is ranged and allows us to stay away from the target. Thos allows our bow attacks and skills to benefit from increased damage via Bow passives.

6. No Assasin’s will during execute?

No, because the damage is too low compared to the other skills at our disposal.

7. Why Razor Caltrops?

Razor Caltrops lasts for 30 seconds, which perfectly synergizes with our rotation.

8. Why Ballista?

Ballista is the best single target ultimate at our disposal (Use Shooting Star for AoE), since we are staying at range for the majority of the fight.

9. Why is Killer’s Blade on the Master Bow bar?

So while you can swap Trap and Killer’s blade, I found that the ranged version of trap is very difficult to place. The trap has no collision with mobs, so you literally have to aim it at their feet. In order to get the trap to land consistantly I use the Endless Hail and medium weave to prepare my Trap’s position. The time gained from Hail’s long animation when combined with a medium weave allows me to place it at the target’s feet with great accuracy.

DPS parses:

Here is an unbuffed bloodspawn parse from the PTS:

View post on imgur.com

Additional testing:

1. Minimizing Assasin’s will procs due to low damage.

2. Adjusting rotation to find a way to make Killer’s Blade work well on the front bar.

3. Testing Mephala as an alternative to Velidreth.

• This topic was modified 3 months, 1 week ago by  Nosferatuzod.

Replies: 992

PTS 2.6 Changes

• Updated block cost formula
• Added sneak damage formula to Miscellaneous equations

Acknowledgement

A special thank you to addon developers for allowing me to understand the mechanics in the game in particular @Atropos for FTC, @SpellBuilder for LUI, @Kith for Srendarr, @Coolmodi for MitigationPercent and TemplarExecute and all the other developers for the bunch of addons I use daily in ESO. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the community for the kind words and valuable discussion about ESO game mechanics

Introduction

This post is divided into two main sections: Fundamental Equations and Application of Equations. Fundamental Equations covers the majority of calculations in the game while Application of Equations uses the derived equations to draw conclusions regarding what trait or mundus to use. While my initial focus was on Magicka Sorcerers, the focus has spread a bit and is probably of interest to most Magicka based classes. Note that a large number of equations can be applied to Stamina builds as well by simply substituting for the relevant stamina analogue. I am lacking healing related equations and I may delve into that in the future. Also include, at the end of this post, are spreadsheets that implements the Fundamental Equations as well as Application of Equations. The equations and values use are valid for the Orsinium PTS so some of it will be incorrect in the current live version 2.1.x. The spreadsheets can be used to determine the relative strengths of different sets. The spreadsheets are view only to prevent tampering but please feel free to make a copy for your own calculations. If you do use the spreadsheets I would appreciate feedback in terms of accuracy or ease of use.

Fundamental equations

Stat pool

[spoiler]

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/71601bd4a0cdca1614aa8bb99f33ce78.png [/img]

The Base value at C160 is 8744 for Health and 7958 for Magicka and Stamina. Attribute points is the number of points spent in Health, Magicka or Stamina multiplied by 122 for Health and 111 for Magicka and Stamina. Gear covers most things like set bonuses and enchants. Gear1 appears to be a peculiarity unique to the 5 piece bonus of Destruction Mastery and Necropotence.

CPI is a cumulative percentage increase due to points spent in the corresponding constellation and can be calculated as follow

The Lord Mundus gives 1452 Health. The Mage and Tower Mundus gives 1320 Magicka and Stamina, respectively. Divines is the sum of divines. For example 4 pieces of green equipment with divines (4.5% each) means Divines = 1.18. Limited testing on the PTS suggest that Divines is rounded to 2 decimal places.

Example

I have a C160 Breton Sorcerer on the PTS. My gear gives me 7924 Magicka. This includes enchantments and gear bonuses. I have 64 points in Magicka, thus Attribute Points is 7104. I have 100 Champion Points in the Mage constellation which means that CPI is 1.134. I am using the Crown Fortifying Meal which gives 3617 Magicka. Skills is 1.31 (8% Bound Aegis, 5% Inner light, 2% Magicka Controller, 10% Gift of Magnus, 6% Undaunted Mettle). Putting this all into the formula, My in-game Magicka pool in the PTS is 38899.

[/spoiler]

Spell damage

[spoiler]

The Apprentice Mundus provides 166 Spell damage at C160.

[/spoiler]

Ability tooltip value

[spoiler]

The tooltip value for the majority of skill conforms to where a and b are coefficients. b is typically around 10.5 and a varies for each skill. The range of a is typically between 0.02 to 0.2. It is quite challenging to get extremely accurate values for a even with plane fitting over a large data range. We can fix b without much loss in the fitting for a thus we can introduce to concept of effective pool

This allows a fast evaluation method for different builds with varying Magicka and Spell Damage.

A technically more accurate estimate can be obtained by using

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/eb82a847e05085af973286c03deaa144.png[/img]

However the first formula presented in this section usually provides sufficient accuracy and will be used for the remainder of this post.

Some skills notably Hardened Ward and Annulment scale of only Magicka. In some cases the coefficient a is modified by Champion Points, at the time of writing, Thaumathurge appears to increase the tooltip for all abilities even non-DoTs. Elemental Expert is correctly being applied to tooltips. In the remainder of this post, it will be assumed that tooltip refers to the base tooltip unmodified by Champion Points.

A very well made skills browser by @uesp

http://esoitem.uesp.net/viewSkills.php

A list of skill coefficients for the PTS 2.3.2 can be found at

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YN8YWDpi1-d4CfoagRy1F9ath2w2nb-TniL4MjdJdz4/edit?usp=sharing

A list of all skill coefficients and the weird ones by @uesp

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/257330/list-of-skills-that-behave-differently-than-most

[/spoiler]

Recovery

[spoiler]

The recovery formula was altered after PTS 2.5. Thanks to @Reorx_Holybeard for the following equation

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/40bd6b5c6c97ff7d75295074fedafeba.png[/img]

Base Magicka and Stamina recovery at C160 is 514. Base Health recovery at C160 is 309. The Atronach mundus provides 198 Magicka recovery at C160. Examples of Skills are Magicka Controller [Mages’ Guild Passive], Major Intellect, Recovery [Light Armour Passive], and Spellcharge [Altmer Passive].

[/spoiler]

Spell Cost

[spoiler]

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/45bbe8e269618bbdfe89962ca52f7559.png[/img]

The Base Cost of a spell is the tooltip cost value, without any points in Magician and without any equipment or skills that provide either a percentage or flat cost reduction. Flat Cost Reduction is typically in the form of enchantments on jewellery and % Cost Reduction comes from skills and passives. Note that the 2 piece Molag Kena is a 33% cost increase when activated.

Example

I am calculating the cost to cast Force Pulse. The Base Cost is 2700 at C160. I have 92 points in Magician (15.2%) and 1 legendary reduce spell cost enchantment (203 each). %Cost Reduction is 0.23, 15% from Evocation [Light Armour Passive], 5% from Unholy Knowledge (Sorcerer Passive) and 3% from Magicka Mastery [Breton Passive]. The cost for casting Force Pulse is

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/05a25c89698b9d667f22ee8b5ccfe599.png[/img]

This matches the in-game cost for Force Pulse in the PTS.

The base spell cost varies with level and @uesp has explained how it works

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/pts-2-1-2-sorcerer-arithmagic/page/25/#post-645278

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/pts-2-1-2-sorcerer-arithmagic/page/27/#post-646518

[/spoiler]

Spell Critical

[spoiler]

Simply add up all sources that increase Spell Critical. 219 Spell Critical rating is equivalent to 1% Spell Critical

[/spoiler]

Critical modifier

[spoiler]

This formula has been updated due to changes in [2.2.4]

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/8380394feeb5f779fdb00b73b0ec0245.png[/img]

where Fl is the floor function, Rd is the round function and Elfborn_Real is similar to the tooltip value of Elfborn but when it is used no unexpected rounding errors are found. Rd(x, 2) rounds a number to 2 decimal places and Fl(x, 0.01) truncates a number at the 2nd decimal places. Here are examples of both functions in action, Rd(23.458,2) = 23.46, Fl(23.458,0.01) = 23.45. Skills tested were the Piercing Spear passive and Trap Beast (Minor Force). Thanks to @Beltan3 and @hofawd with some help in getting this formula down. It appears that Critical multiplier is floored after Major Force is calculated but further test are needed to confirm this.

By the way, if you don’t mind some error in your calculation, a simpler formula is

Due to rounding errors, Elfborn still suffers from jump. Any points in between jumps do not increase your critical modifier. @Erraln has kindly listed all the jump points in this thread but for convenience, I’ll put them here as well. The Elfborn jump points are at

1,2,4,7,9,12,15,18,22,26,29,33,38,42,46,51,56,61,66,71,76,81,87,92, and 98.

[/spoiler]

Resistance

[spoiler]

Your spell resistance can be calculated with the following formula

where Gear is the sum of tooltip armour values, Resolve is a Heavy Armour Passive, Defending is a weapon trait. Other includes Breton Spell Resistance Passive, Balanced Warrior Passive (Templars), Major Ward, Spell Warding and Spell Shield CP.

Similarly, physical resistance is calculated as follows

The Lady mundus provides 1980 Physical Resistance at C160 and is put into the variable Other. The Reinforced trait increases the tooltip armour value and will be included when calculating Gear. The Shield Expert passive under the Steed increases the tooltip value of the shield thus is also included in Gear.

Example

I have 5 pieces of heavy armour, 1 medium and 1 light. The sum of all my tooltip armour values, Gear, is 16666. Resolves grants 1811 resistance and Spell Warding grants 363 Spell Resistance. I have a legendary defending weapon equipped (6%). My set bonus for physical resistance is 5805. I have 100 points in Heavy Armour Focus (5281). I also have the Spell Resistance (Breton passive) and Balanced Warrior (Templar passive) passives. With Major Resolve and Ward active, I estimate my physical and spell resistance to be

My actual physical and spell resistance are 35951 and 31828, respectively.

[/spoiler]

Critical resistance

[spoiler]

Critical resistance is not needed in PvE since monsters do not do critical damage. An enemies’ critical modifier can be reduced by equipping gear with the Impenetrable trait or by spending points in the Resilient champion point sign. Every percent in Resilient decreases the enemies’ critical modifier by the same amount and every 250 points of critical resistance reduces an enemies’ critical modifier by 3.5%

Example

If you are PvP’ing against an enemy with a critical modifier of 0.5 and you have 500 critical resistance (2 legendary equipment) and 48 points (15%) in Resilient, then

[/spoiler]

Miscellaneous equations

[spoiler]

Block Cost

The block formula is

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/0f8abf3fdf3681345845807585d3d1b8.png[/img]

Example

If you have 100 points in Shadow Ward, 8 pieces of Legendary Sturdy gear, 3 Legendary Shield play enchants (203 block cost reduction each), 2 points in Fortress (36% block cost reduction) and Defensive Posture slotted your block cost will be

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/e7ee81f8634ebd9d8a38d0c51484a3b2.png[/img]

The in-game block cost is 88.

Base Cost vs Level

@uesp has found how most cost scale with level. The link is provided below.

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/pts-2-1-2-sorcerer-arithmagic/page/32/#post-651311

Sneak Damage

@MrTarkanian48 has reported the PvE sneak damage formula to be

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/f2b7c3a2653388d0b6deba9c91ba08c6.png[/img]

where Sneak Bonus is 3.75 for Melee attacks and 1.46 for Ranged attacks. I have verified this using Wrecking Blow, 2H Heavy Attack, Bow Heavy Attack, Focused Aim and Hidden Blade.

In PvP the Sneak Bonus is 0.27.

[/spoiler]

Damage calculation

Base damage

[spoiler]

The base damage formula is where

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b7a7c91d99b14abfe8c893ee2f089f23.png[/img]

Attacker Bonus includes relevant champion point signs, Minor Berserk [Combat Prayer] and Elemental Talent [Altmer Passive]. These stack multiplicatively. Defender bonus refers to relevant champion point signs. Battle Spirit can be included by simply multiplying by 0.5. In 2.2.3, the impact of Thaumathurge is included in the tooltip but the impact of Elemental Expert is not included in the tooltip, so be wary you’re not double counting Thaumathurge. Resistance is the relevant physical or spell resistance. Penetration is the sum of percentage based penetration. For magicka builds, this is either 18% for a legendary nirnhoned weapon or 28% when using a legendary nirnhoned weapon and casting a Destruction Staff spell due to the Penetrating Magic passive. Examples of Flat Penetration are Concentration for Light Armour users, Spell Erosion and Piercing. The base Flat Penetration is 100. Veteran rank 16 corresponds to level 66. For PvE, most mobs have a level of 50. Examples of Armour Debuff are Major and Minor Fracture and Breach, 5 piece bonus of Night Mother’s Gaze and Glyphs of Crushing. The resistance of some bosses in 2.1.x can be found at [2.1] Project Resistance.

PvE Example

A C160 Breton cast Crystal Fragments on Slimecraw (Wayrest Normal Dungeon). Slimecraw’s spell resistance is 18200.The tooltip value without any points in Elemental Expert is 7832 (Refer to the section Ability tooltip value if you’re confused). I have 75 points in Elemental Expert (20.4%) and 25 points in Spell Erosion (1492 Flat Spell Penetration). My Flat Spell Penetration is 100[base]+4884[Concentration]+1492[Spell Erosion] = 6476. I’m using an epic sharpened staff (12% penetration). I have combat prayer active. Given these values

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/06d9e9727846e66a62317b084ddd9d5f.png[/img]

and

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/cf0e9d18ad53a1b61504051fb3ffcf93.png[/img]

The actual damage recorded by CLS is 8243.

[/spoiler]

Average damage

[spoiler]

The average damage when taking into account critical damage is

[/spoiler]

Healing calculation

Base Healing

[spoiler]

The base healing formula for a healer using a variety of sources of Healing Done and Healing Taken and Healing Received isThe Tooltip value is increased by Restoration Master, Soul Siphoner, Major Mending and the Ritual Mundus. These add additively. Healing Done was tested with Blessed. Healing Taken was tested with Tormentor and Leeching sets. Healing Received was tested to be additive with Quick Recovery [Champion Point], Rapid Mending [Heavy Armour Passive], Minor Vitality [Swallow Soul & Coagulating Blood], Burning Heart [Draconic Power Passive] and Quick to Mend [Argonian Passive].

Example

A C160 Argonian cast Healing Springs. This character has 12% Healing Taken from the Tormentor and Leeching Sets and has 100 points in Blessed (25% Healing Done) and 100 points in Quick Recovery (16% Healing Received). In addition, this character is wearing 7 Heavy armour pieces (7% Healing Received), has the Minor Vitality buff, has a Draconic Power ability active and has 3 points in the Quick to Mend passive. This tooltip value includes the bonuses from Restoration Master, Major Mending and the Ritual Mundus.

The recorded in-game healing is 3264.

[/spoiler]

Application of equations

Champion Point System

Warrior

[spoiler]

Most players will be looking to spend points in either Hardy, Elemental Defender or Thick-Skinned. Sorcerers will also be looking to spend points into Bastion. Not much can be said for Armour Focus or Spell Shield as a 100 points provides only 5281 resistance which corresponds to 8% mitigation at C160 which corresponds to 20 points in Hardy or Elemental Defender. In addition, Armour Focus and Spell Shield are affected by percentage penetration and are not taken into account when a damage shield is used.

[/spoiler]

Thief

[spoiler]

For Magicka builds, the decision is on how to spread points between Magician and Arcanist. Essentially, we’re trying to optimise the function

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/c214533a81871daf4e80c8016e8182bf.png[/img]

This function represents the average magicka gain per second. Since this spreadsheet is rather complicated, I recommend selecting your Race and Class and then filling in all the grey filled cells. Most of them should be reasonably easy to understand and I’ve made comments for most of them. Ensure that the Final Magicka Recovery and Final Spell Cost matches your ingame values to make sure all inputs are correct. The two inputs that require further explanation are Average Base Spell Cost and Cast per second. Both can be determined from a parse. I’ll provide an example in the future. But for now assume that I casted 10 Funnel Healths and 1 Crippling Grasp over 20 seconds. Look up the Base Spell Cost of both spell which are 1233 and 2923 respectively. The Average Base Spell Cost can be determine from Input – Spell Cost or from the Skill Data spreadsheet. So my Average Base Spell Cost is (1233*10+2923)/11=1387. Cast per second is 11/20 = 0.55. Look over to the right and find Recovery 0, Cost Reduction 0 to determine the ideal CP distribution.

If you wanted to mess around with the number of jewellery to enchant remove the impact of jewellery from Magicka Recovery – Gear and Spell Cost – Gear (Flat CR) then just look at the corresponding output line. The spreadsheet can be found at

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yp90QzJnsL5PNqSgKqDGv9IpYzJajG_tnlslFNPOf9g/edit?usp=sharing

[/spoiler]

Mage

[spoiler]

For a Magicka damage dealer, there are five signs of interest, Elemental Expert, Thaumathurge, Spell Erosion, Elfborn and Staff Expert.

The mechanics of all these except Staff Expert have been discussed in the sections on Critical Modifier and Base Damage. Staff expert increases the damage of light and medium attacks that is your weaving damage. Light and medium staff attacks are also increased by Elemental Expert.

In order to determine the optimal Champion Point distribution, we first need to consider the ratio of Elemental, DoT and Staff attacks. Then we can optimise the following function

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/34fbbb2fa63e4600fc57d33892aaed2d.png[/img]

One way to approach this is to enumerate all possible CP distributions and then calculate the function. However, this is quite a challenging task since with 167 Mage CP and 5 CP stars to consider the total possible of combinations is 30507895 (166C4). Although, some of these can be eliminated through some insight on the relative strengths of the CP stars. While this can be done, I have decided to make the equation a bit more accessible with the loss of a tiny amount of accuracy. I’ve included a spreadsheet that will do this

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zp9v1Vp4Z7X6zfDfcxTwyAnejv-tEC5LujbXYBiVMDk/edit?usp=sharing

On the first sheet you’ll see a range of inputs including

• Number of Champion Points
• Critical Chance
• Critical Modifier
  • Defined as Critical Damage/Non-Critical Damage – 1
• Target Resistance
• Target Level
• Percentage Penetration
• Flat Penetration
• Elemental Ratio
• DoT Ratio
• Staff Ratio

It will output the ideal CP distribution in Elemental Expert, Thaumathurge, Staff Expert, Elfborn and Spell Erosion. It does not take into account the Elfborn jump points in the calculation so if it suggest a non-Elfborn jump point it will also display the nearest Elfborn jump points. Also all CP passives are ignored. This means that there may be situations where it will not recommend putting 30 points into the Apprentice first.

[b]How it works?[/b]
It starts by assuming you have 0 in all 5 CP stars. It then calculates the following function
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/34fbbb2fa63e4600fc57d33892aaed2d.png[/img]
for an increase of 1 point in each star. It selects the optimum distribution then keeps going until it reaches your stated number of Champion Points. I had to use a continuous equation to model how the CP stars vary with points spent. The equation used can be seen in Sheet 3. Because a continuous equation was used some deviation from my previous discrete optimisation will be present. In addition, I could not include the impact of Elfborn jump points thus jump points are suggested at the end of the optimisation. While the previous discrete optimisation is probably better to model the jump points, I hope that this method of presenting the ideal mage CP distribution for magicka builds will be easier to use thus increasing it’s accuracy as you can put in your own relevant values instead of looking for the closest table match.

[/spoiler]

Nirnhoned, Precise and Sharpened

[spoiler]

When evaluating between these three item traits it is imperative to recall the average damage formula
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/c8e47c9206272329442c1f052556e45b.png[/img]
where
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/6c76bc41801c5681338675f8df447ea1.png[/img]
The skill coefficient, a, depends on the skill in question and an excellent list of skill coefficients can be found at http://esoitem.uesp.net/viewSkills.php. b is around 10.5 for most abilities. Attacker Bonus refers to certain Champion Points like Elemental Expert, Mighty or Thaumathurge and includes certain skills and passives such as Major or Minor Berserk. For simplicity, we can just set this to one and ignore it for the large part.
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/a3e8ed29ac85f6385da83e30b32c5558.png[/img]
Armour debuffs include Major/Minor Breach, 5 piece bonus of Roar of Alkosh and the Crushing Enchantment. An example of percentage penetration is Penetrating Magic (Destruction Staff). Flat Penetration includes the base penetration of 100, Concentration and Spell Erosion/Piercing.
In order to compare the three traits, we can convert both the additional flat penetration offered by Sharpened and the extra critical chance into Spell/Weapon Damage. Finally we can convert the Spell/Weapon damage equivalence to an increase in an arbitrary ability tooltip.
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b7e1a10f2fe44d0a348e0bf093431f10.png[/img]
I’ll use a generic magicka build as an example, I’ll assume a Magicka pool of 40k and Spell Damage of 3k which is reasonably typical for endgame builds. Only legendary trait values are considered.

Nirnhoned
It increases the tooltip value of a weapon by 11% which in turn increases Spell/Weapon damage by 11% before any buffs. For a staff, this corresponds to a base increase in spell damage of 146 Spell Damage and for dual wielding swords it corresponds to 175 Spell Damage. Typically this base spell damage is buffed by 25% by Major and Minor Sorcery. So you would expect 183 Spell Damage for a staff and 219 Spell Damage for dual wielding swords. Thus if we’re dual wielding swords, Nirnhoned leads to an increase ability tooltip of roughly 3.2%.

Precise

The 7% increased weapon and spell critical can be converted to an equivalent spell damage with the following equation
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/2e08159d5318ba91f289615627110a2c.png[/img]
A reasonably common spell critical for endgame builds is around 60% and a critical modifier between 0.6-0.7 is typical for most magicka builds. This assumes around 30 points in Elfborn which is a fairly common recommendation from my Champion Point optimisation spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zp9v1Vp4Z7X6zfDfcxTwyAnejv-tEC5LujbXYBiVMDk/edit?usp=sharing) thus the spell damage equivalence for Precise is about
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/a14bcc98f941708c3e08c9dc585d6084.png[/img]
This translates to an increase in average ability tooltip by 3.5%. Note that we can reach this answer quicker by noting that
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b0e456a1b8187b22a006b0a3b38309dc.png[/img]

Sharpened
In a similar fashion to the previous section, the increased physical and spell penetration of Sharpened can be converted to an equivalent spell damage or more directly into an increase in ability tooltip
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/4eb213a3c116c3240cb0a5e9d334837e.png[/img]
where Mitigation has been separated into a Sharpened component and everything else. The key concern here is that the Resistance of a target cannot go below zero. Let us consider a typical 4 person dungeon, bosses have around 18k resistance and trash have anywhere from 10 to 18k resistance (http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/2-1-boss-resistance/). The main source of armour debuff is Major Breach (5280) and Flat Penetration for Magicka Characters is at least 4984 (100 base + 4884 Concentration). Flat Penetration is typically higher by around 1-2k depending on the number of points assigned into Spell Erosion. This means the average boss will have about 6.5k resistance and 100% of the Sharpened bonus is used meaning that it increase ability tooltip by
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/be0b8972f9ca271d690a7d1eb5273e1e.png[/img]
Unfortunately, Sharpened is useless on any mob with less than about 12k resistance as its resistance is already reduced to zero from other sources. So at first glance, the optimal trait seems to be Sharpened for bosses and Precise for trash, similar to the meta on Live.
But there may be another way around this, given that we are reaching unmitigated damage it is reasonable to remove all points from Spell Erosion and apply it all into Elfborn instead. Then a more interesting question would be how much resistance does Sharpened need to remove for it to be equivalent to Precise. Precise provides 3.5% increase in ability tooltip, this value can be achieved if Sharpened removes at least 1750 resistance. My optimal champion point spreadsheet tends to suggest around 30 points in Elfborn which corresponds to this value. Thus it is possible to simply use Sharpened for most trash and all bosses and put 66 points in Elfborn (67 points in Elfborn works the same as 66 points so spent the last point in something else like Staff Expert. In this way Sharpened is acting at worst equivalent to Precise but you get additional points in Elfborn thus increasing your average damage or it significantly outperforms Precise on bosses.

Although I’ve only discussed magicka builds primarily, this conclusion of using Sharpened in most situations holds true for stamina builds as well. Stamina builds do not have a Flat Penetration skill but this is compensated by several armour debuff methods.

[/spoiler]

Divines and Infused

[spoiler]

The current meta advice suggest using Infused on large pieces (Head, Chest, Legs and Shield) and Divines on small pieces (Shoulders, Waist, Hands and Feet). There are no other viable traits for optimising damage. However, with the buffs to the Thief and Shadow mundus stones this advice is called into question. In this section, I will derive the conditions where Infused or Divines should be used. It is quite laborious mathematics and this section has been implemented in my spreadsheet. The equations here are to explain how the calculation is done.

The amount of magicka gained from using Infused on a legendary large piece instead of Divines, Inf, is173 is the difference between in enchantment of a C160 legendary Magicka enchant on an Infused large piece compared to a non-Infused large piece. CPI and Skills were defined in Stat Pool.

The average damage when using an Infused piece is

The coefficient, k, in this section isDmg_Inf can be separated into two parts, Dmg_Base and Dmg’_Inf. The former is the damage component from not using any trait and the latter is the bonus damage coming from using infused

The average damage increase when using Divines depends on the mundus stone. For completeness, I’ll analyse the Apprentice, Mage, Thief and Shadow mundus stones.

Apprentice

The average damage increase when using Divines with the Apprentice mundus isSkill_SD refers to abilities and buffs that increase spell damage, notably Minor and Major Sorcery and the Expert Mage passive.

Again this can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Divine^App’

Mage

The average damage increase when using Divines with the Mage mundus isSkills refers to abilities and passives that increase maximum Magicka and was defined in more detail in <b>Stat Pool</b>.

Again this can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Divine^Mage’

Thief

The average damage increase when using Divines with the Thief mundus is

Again this can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Divine^Thief’

Shadow

The average damage increase when using Divines with the Shadow mundus is

I’m using a simplified form of the Critical Modifier equation here but in my implementation of the equation in my spreadsheet I use the more exact form of the Critical Modifier. Skill_S refers to skills that increase the critical modifier such as Piercing Spear [Templar passive], Hemorrhage [Nightblade passive], Trap Beast [Minor Force] and Aggressive Warhorn [Major Force].

This can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Divine^Shadow’

The way to decide between Infused and Divines is then to evaluate Dmg_Inf’ - Dmg_Divine’ with the corresponding mundus stone. Since several variables need to be taken into account, I’ve simply implemented my calculation into my spreadsheets. On a personal note, in the majority of calculations that I have performed Divines with Thief or Shadow outperforms Infused. However, if the Apprentice or Mageis used then Infused on large pieces is preferred.

[/spoiler]

Mundus stone: Apprentice, Mage, Thief and Shadow

[spoiler]

There are four mundus stones of interest to optimising Magicka based damage dealers. They are the Apprentice, Mage, Thief and Shadow. I’ll begin with the average damage equation for each mundus. Astute readers might notice a striking similarity with the section <b>Divines and Infused</b>.

ApprenticeIn this section, the coefficient, k, is defined to be

Skill_SD refers to abilities and buffs that increase spell damage, notably Minor and Major Sorcery and the Expert Mage passive.

Dmg_App can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_App’. The former is the damage component without any mundus active and the latter is the damage from using the Apprentice mundus.Mage

Skills refers to abilities and passives that increase maximum Magicka and was defined in more detail in Stat Pool. Separating into a base and Mage component yieldsThiefOnce again, this can be separated into a base and Thief component.

Shadow

I’m using a simplified form of the Critical Modifier equation here but in my implementation of the equation in my spreadsheet I use the more exact form of the Critical Modifier. Skill_S refers to skills that increase the critical modifier such as Piercing Spear [Templar passive], Hemorrhage [Nightblade passive], Trap Beast [Minor Force] and Aggressive Warhorn [Major Force].

This can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Shadow’From this, we can easily conclude that the Apprentice mundus is preferred to the Mage mundus in nearly all cases for increasing damage sincewhereAt C160 the Apprentice provides 166 Spell Damage, <i>b</i> is approximately 10.5 and Skill_SD is typically 1.2 due to the Major Sorcery buff. The Mage gives 1320 Magicka at C160 and Skills is typically around 1.31 for a Sorcerer and is lower for Templars. Putting this into the equation, we obtainThus the Apprentice is preferred. The Mage mundus is sometimes preferred due to increasing Magicka pool for stronger shields and higher pet damage as these scale solely off Magicka.

For the comparison between the Apprentice and Thief there are no easy simplifications and one is left to evaluateThere are many variables and no obvious simplifications thus I have simply implemented the laborious calculation in my spreadsheet. Similarly the comparison between Apprentice and Shadow is very involved and is implemented in the spreadsheet.

While the equations presented for the Thief are a crude approximation due to the complicated rounding in the more accurate formula for Critical Modifier, it is possible to make a rough comparison between the Thief and Shadow mundus stones.Thus the Thief is better ifThis is equivalent toIn the Orsinium PTS, the Shadow mundus increases Critical Modifier by 12% and the Thief increases Critical Chance by 11%. Putting this values in, we get the following inequalitywhich means that Thief is better than Shadow if your Critical Modifier is at least ~10% greater than your Critical Chance.

[/spoiler]

Percentage Penetration and Spell Damage Equivalence

[spoiler]

Since Maelstrom weapons cannot come in Nirnhoned, it is natural to ask how does a non-set Nirnhoned destruction staff compare to a Sharpened Maelstrom destruction staff.

To evaluate this, let us consider T1 and T2, where T1 is the base damage with S1 extra spell damage and T2 be the base damage with no extra spell damage but 4% extra penetration. Then

where M is Max Magicka, S0 is the base spell damage, S1 is the extra spell damage for T1 and

Note that any penetration that is common to T1 and T2 can be seen as just a reduction in the Resistance.

We then proceed to solve T1-T2=0 for S1

We can rearrange this to get

Now we have to put some typical endgame values, I’ll let M=43487, S_0=3764 and Mit=0.19 (17k boss resistance, 14% penetration, 4984 Focus, 0 Spell Erosion). Mit’=0.04*0.34

Thus for the stats assumed a Sharpened Maelstrom Destruction Staff is better than a non-set Nirnhoned Destruction Staff as the 4% additional penetration is equivalent to 133 Spell Damage which is less than the Maelstrom enchantment of 189 Spell Damage

[/spoiler]

Julianos and Twice-Born Star

[spoiler]

Due to changes to Elfborn and skills that increase critical damage, TBS is no longer optimal from a DPS point of view. In the spreadsheets below, I have introduced a new metric called the Combined Metric. This metric was introduced because staff attacks scale differently from abilities. For most abilities 10.5 Max Magicka ~ 1 Spell Damage but for staff attacks 40 Max Magicka ~ 1 Spell Damage. To obtain the Combined Metric, I assume approximately 15% of total dps comes from Heavy (Medium Attacks) and 85% comes from abilities, then the weighted average of the Ability and Attack metric results in the Combined Metric.

We see then that for the Combined Metric on staffs, Law of Julianos is better by about 1.5%. Previously, my calculations showed that Law of Julianos was ~0.5% better than TBS but that was without taking into account the higher Attack Metric. On the dual wield bar, we should use the Ability Metric since no weaves are used and in this situation Julianos is better by around 0.5%.

If you were to replace one magicka enchantment on a large piece in favour of health so that the Health with Julianos and Twice-Born Star are comparable then on the staff bar Julianos is better by 0.1% but worse by 0.1% on the dual wield bar. To help put all these percentage differences into context, my rough calculations suggest that not having Divines on one piece (maybe you have been unlucky and have a bank full of Well-Fitted Molag Kena shoulders/helm) equates to a loss of ~0.5%

I’ve heard of people saying that Twice-Born Star is better with lower CP but I have yet to see extensive calculations that demonstrate this. Using the spreadsheets below, I varied the amount of CP by adjusting both the number of points invested into the Mage Tree and assumed that the first 100 points will be put into Elemental Expert followed by all points (up to 66) into Elfborn. While this CP distribution is not absolutely optimal, it is reasonably close. In this case, even with 100 Mage CP (300 total CP) Julianos is better than Twice-Born Star on the staff bar (0.3%). On the Dual-Wield bar, Julianos outperforms Twice-Born Star at 129 Mage CP (387 total CP)

Note: Ignore the Magicka Recovery and Spell Cost boxes. I was too lazy to move them away before I took the pictures.

Twice-Born Star Staff

Twice-Born Star Dual Wield

Law of Julianos Staff

Law of Julianos Dual Wield

[/spoiler]

Damage distribution

[spoiler]

Damage calculation in ESO is rather straightforward you either crit or don’t crit. This leads to a binomial distribution. If you repeat the event (of using an ability) a sufficient number of times you can approximate the binomial distribution with a normal distribution with the following statistics
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/61662e6f049959bb0e8c03c16d6fdd8f.png[/img]
Since stats can already be estimated along with tooltip values and base damage numbers, it is possible to create total damage normal distributions (or DPS distributions) for different item sets.

So if I were to redo my section on Julianos and Twice-Born Star, I could use the calculated stats to calculate the tooltip value of Force Pulse. Here is a summary of the data required to create the normal distributions
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/16c57a35d6614f38ce30632d1c2c0422.png[/img]
and the distributions themsevles
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/a9d73ccaaf67a357e58fb3df5de03813.png[/img]
It’s rather interesting because initially I thought that while the average of Julianos was greater than Twice-Born Star, I felt that the higher crit modifier of Twice-Born Star would mean that there would be a good chance of it doing more damage than Julianos if crits went your way. However, in the case of 300 Force Pulses which is 100 cast or about 100 seconds of just using Force Pulse, not only is the average damage of Julianos greater than Twice-Born Star but the maximum damage for Twice-Born Star is rather similar to Julianos. It is still true that the SD of Julianos is smaller than the SD of Twice-Born Star. Even if Force Pulse were casted only 10 times (30 counts), you would expect similar’ish distribution.

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/cb97e0c6dc2ecffa63712efa850fd112.png[/img]
From here it’s straightforward to calculate the difference of the distributions
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/ab8617aa20061ebb7d63ac69b28fa6f4.png[/img]
We can setup damage thresholds and calculate the chance that a single test will be incorrect, inconclusive or correct. Someone a bit more motivated than me could then calculate the minimum sample size to get a reasonable estimate of the distribution and the chance of Type 1 or Type 2 errors.

To show that the calculated curves are reasonably close to the simulated curves, I’ll start of by showing the situation where you cast Force Pulse a 100 times so 300 data points and your recorded the total damage. If you repeated it a 100 times you’ll get something like the green curve below
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b317eb4a2af6aa009819d6cf1f6ddbed.png[/img]
It doesn’t match the calculated curve (blue) that well because repeating it 100 times is a bit low. If you repeated it 10000 times, things get much better
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b1e30417dea3d345ece323b7d56dcd0b.png[/img]
For me this means that I’m better off just calculating the mean and basing my conclusions off that or calculating the damage distributions (now that I’ve done the maths once and have a few scripts that are easily editable) than spending time in game casting Force Pulse on a boss repeatedly to get determine which set is better. I’ll still keep testing in game to ensure the base equations are accurate though.

[/spoiler]

Scathing Mage and Law of Julianos

[spoiler]

In the Thieves Guild update, the Scathing Mage set was buffed. In this post, I’ll compare Scathing Mage to Law of Julianos.

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/bb063b468347e95e7047caabd7109e95.png[/img]

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/23bb51c96f2fb73ab8ec479737736122.png[/img]

There are several approaches in determining when Scathing Mage is preferred over Julianos. I suggest looking at the number of attacks required to proc Scathing Mage. From there we can estimate the uptime of Scathing Mage and then it is a straightforward comparison to Julianos.  I’ll show some example calculations based on my sorcerer.

The proc chance per attack with Scathing Mage is quite simplistically

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/39bd55e4010aa3de560a75e0ca2b5338.png/img

Assuming that all attacks are independent we can model the resulting distribution of required attacks to proc Scathing Mage with a geometric distribution. In order to demonstrate that the geometric distribution is a suitable model I did some in-game testing. I counted the number of hits required to proc Scathing Mage. I only did 50 trials but I was reasonably convinced by the results. I trial here is defined as the number of hits needed to proc Scathing Mage. The image bellow summarises my in-game testing as well as the theoretical model. I was reasonably convinced with validity of the model despite the low number of trials.

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/dc2fb0638eeea04db760d3d713f1e828.png[/img]

The median of this distribution is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/abb9cc082e2dd040ff366d470e080985.png/img

The median corresponds to the point where 50% of the time you’ll need less than X attacks to proc Scathing Mage and equivalently 50% of the time you’ll need more than X attacks to proc Scathing Mage. From this, it is reasonably straightforward to calculate the median amount of time required to proc Scathing Mage

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/2fce4dc69097fa60da63c88df4a279cf.png/img

From this the uptime of Scathing Mage is expected to be

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/2d0b1cb207399236d4f207555a772ccd.png/img

where there is an implicit assumption that the internal cooldown of Scathing Mage is the duration of the proc, which is based on personal testing during the IC PTS. The effective spell damage of Scathing Mage is then

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/329dffa8d5bd76270c9a6437147e8f54.png/img

Or to simplify it in a single equation

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/b49f7d5d2c2df70fc2e9c9f642313d56.png/img

Let us consider a magicka Sorcerer using the Thief mundus (6 pieces of Legendary divines) and with a precise staff. The spell critical of this character is 71.2% or 74.2% with Minor Prophecy active. I timed myself doing 50 Force Pulse/LA weaves and could do it in 1.16 seconds per weave or equivalently 3.45 attacks per second. Since this is probably close to the upper limit of attacks per second, I would estimate that the upper limit of the Scathing Mage 5 piece bonus for the magicka Sorcerer in question is

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b2280c04400c4d3902a0ec4cb1469035.png[/img]

A more practical approach to estimating SM SD equivalence is by looking at a parse and determining the number of non-DoT attacks per second. In the example parse below, I estimate the number of non-Dot attacks to be 84 (Force Pulse + Crystal Fragments + Light Attack) which means that the number of non-DoT attacks in this example is 2.37 (parse duration 35.5s).

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/0fcffd520f31a5d7cf527e0d7b8fea5e.png/img

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/1fadf00f2cab5bc35f05b7815c7943ff.png [/img]

This is 97 SD greater than the 5 piece bonus of Julianos. Since this character has 43486 Max Magicka and 3189 Spell Damage, the 80 spell damage corresponds to an average tooltip damage increase of ~1.7%

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/ac81b09e0c86ff5b02e226815f968e9d.png/img

So based on the example parse above, if I were to use Scathing Mage instead of Julianos I would expect a DPS increase of around 425 (1.7%*25000). There is a slight simplification here since Light Attacks depend more strongly on Spell Damage than abilities so in fact my Light Attacks will do more than 1.7% damage with Scathing Mage.

However most Sorcerers rely quite a bit on Overload so the SM SD equivalence during Overload needs to evaluated. The magicka Sorcerer is using Nirnhoned swords (Spell Critical of 64.2%) for Overload and does 0.862 non-Dot attacks per second

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/53fdb3d0debd9e510b9ecb5b668fba95.png/img

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/7fce65bb137f736cf6541a23b0e618d3.png[/img]

This is 38 SD less than the 5 piece of Julianos and corresponds to an average damage loss of ~0.6% during Overload or around 200 DPS (0.6%*32000).

[img]https://embed.gyazo.com/cbbcdc7c53a45ecd4f84acd046128486.png[/img]

During Overload, I use about 18 Ultimate per second. It takes 6 seconds of non-Overload time to generate 18 Ultimate. Thus on average Scathing Mage provides an increase of 336 DPS.

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/cbbcdc7c53a45ecd4f84acd046128486.png/img

This is based on the assumption that you Overload all things equally.

To Precise or not?

An additional question that arises when using Scathing Mage is whether a Precise or Sharpened/Nirnhoned weapon should be used.

Percentage penetration can be converted into equivalent spell damage with the following equation

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/3ada96f9efdc3420d21eb367c5db50ae.png/img

where the variables Mit_pen and Mit_Base are defined as

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/7b6269eff8d8e32e404b97b768d552e6.png/img

For simplicity, b is assumed to be 10.5. Using some typical values, 14% penetration (Sharpened) is worth about

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/be902ff2a43440be00d60f24d023360a.png/img

Additional Spell Critical from Precise can be converted into equivalent spell damage with the following equation

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/041cfc55fa27b0f4d18543a469916e0b.png/img

Again using typical values, 7% Spell Critical (Precise) is worth about

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/904a16e266123aa639b78339a64efa80.png/img

This means that for mobs with 13k resistance which is a typical value for bosses debuffed with Major Breach, Sharpened/Nirnhoned is preferred over Precise. However, going with Precise will increase the uptime of Scathing Mage and the question is whether the increased uptime will compensate for the difference. Using my first parse with Force Pulse, the spell damage equivalence of Scathing Mage is expected to be 418 with a Sharpened Staff

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/56f87973fa67c101399fe90a5e4728b2.png/img

While the spell damage equivalence with Precise is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/03f64160421f05f6216c5df3ec104611.png/img

Thus the average Spell Damage gain from using a Precise weapon with Scathing Mage compared to Sharpened is 9 base spell damage which is increased to around 11 by Major Sorcery and Expert Mage. However, the spell damage equivalent difference between Sharpened and Precise on a PvE monster with 13000 resistance is 93 which is larger thus a Sharpened weapon is still preferred even when Scathing Mage is used.

[/spoiler]

Molag Kena and Nerien’eth

[spoiler]

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to compare Molag Kena to Nerien’eth on a single target.

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/51745b00e9d25ae967e6af384c879ab7.png[/img][img]https://i.gyazo.com/0ec8951c920931204c9e9750e772835d.png[/img]

The image for Nerien’eth was taken without CP. The tooltip is increased by both Elemental Expert and Thaumathurge.

My Max Magicka and Spell Damage with Nerien’eth is 43486 and 3189, respectively. The spell damage is with Major Sorcery and 3 Sorcerer abilities slotted. Molag Kena provides 129 Spell Damage and an additional 516 Spell Damage when proc’ed. I estimate a maximum uptime of Molag Kena at 86% (6/7 as you cannot re-proc it when it is active). This means that the maximum Spell Damage from Molag Kena is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/c8737a1ef76049810d16fc2e67e1c6fb.png/img

This is increased to 722 Spell Damage after taking into account Major Sorcery and 3 Sorcerer abilities (6% increased Spell Damage from Expert Mage passive). Based on my Max Magicka and Spell Damage, this corresponds to an increase of ability tooltips by ~9.8%

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/406434a5b7484e6175c0be7729bb8379.png/img

So we can roughly say that we would expect a DPS increase of ~9.8% with Molag Kena. This is an approximation since Light Attacks depend more on Spell Damage than abilities so will be increased by more than 9.8%.

There are two ways to determine the contribution of Nerien’eth. One way is to look at a parse. In the example parse below, we can estimate the DPS increase of Nerien’eth by dividing the total damage contribution of Lich Crystal by the total damage dealt less the damage done by Lich Crystal. For the example parse below it turns out to be ~9.8%, similar to the estimated upper bound DPS increase with Molag Kena.

[img]https://embed.gyazo.com/1fadf00f2cab5bc35f05b7815c7943ff.png[/img]

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/03728b91b444b5a5aee5326f5eab3d35.png/img

The method above does depend on the RNG or a particular parse so a theoretical approach would be beneficial. The DPS contribution of Nerien’eth can be modelled by first modelling the number of attacks required proc Nerien’eth with a geometric distribution and then we will be able to obtain the uptime of Nerien’eth and finally estimate the DPS from the uptime.

I first tested the validity of a geometric distribution with in-game testing. I counted the number of attacks required to proc Nerien’eth and made the following image

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/3993ed88b8b263545bf487f4200b291b.png/img

The median number of attacks required to proc Nerien’eth is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/733b8efb9fb4b271cf5bf692f6f4f31a.png/img

which means that the median amount of time required to proc Nerien’eth is

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/f6f27bb264fb434cbb5d49b071628c70.png[/img]

Since you cannot have two Lich crystals at once, the internal cooldown of Nerien’eth is estimated to be 3 seconds. Thus, I would expect one Lich crystal every

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/2bd5faede6423ce4dd0eaeb01494eb52.png/img

From my parse above, I did 84 non-DoT attacks over 35.5 seconds which means the number of non-DoT attacks that could proc Nerien’eth is 2.37. So I would expect one Lich crystal every

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/ebb9410f4990265279431636928ff6ab.png/img

The average damage for each Lich Crystal is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/9d760160a21b4057fa19f5f9d31708ea.png/img

Let’s say I have 100 in Elemental Exper (25%) and 2 in Thaumathurge (1.6%) and my spell critical is 71.2% and my critical modifier 0.62 then the average damage for each of my Lich Crystal is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/3e7495c85f1c7b6043961c0b981bd5df.png/img

So my expected DPS with Nerien’eth is 2319 (13385/5.77) which was reasonably close to the example parse. Based on this, I conclude that Nerien’eth is comparable to Molag Kena for the rotation shown in the parse.

Additional note: I considered making a comparison between Molag Kena, Nerien’eth and Skoria but there is something very peculiar about Skoria. It appears that DoTs must be running for some period of time before it can actually proc. I counted the number of Puncturing Sweep hits required to proc Skoria and found that for the first few hits Skoria will never proc. This is shown in the image below. A similar result can be obtained when using Elemental Blockade (data not shown)

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/077b32051fa6c58cda73e308f6a3c0eb.png/img

[/spoiler]

Maw of the Infernal

Cost increase in Dark Brotherhood

Character SpreadSheets

Best character building site

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildEditor

[spoiler]

Only made them for Sorcerers, Templar and Nightblades at the moment.Feel free to make a copy for your own calculations.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e2M7ZU9ZKBxCNhDmvfS4GKPs_Nx7YLUny9vBmPaUmgA/edit?usp=sharing

@Beltan3 has made an awesome calculator. The post is at

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/stats-calculator/

and the calculator itself can be found at

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-_behjvbr6L0e2F3pge5aumfKInY6rsqv61x27JHic/edit#gid=1127244779

[/spoiler]

Other useful spreadsheets (I’ve listed them at various points in the post but sometimes I forget where they are too :/ )

TG Mage CP Distribution
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zp9v1Vp4Z7X6zfDfcxTwyAnejv-tEC5LujbXYBiVMDk/edit?usp=sharing

TG Skill Coefficients
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YN8YWDpi1-d4CfoagRy1F9ath2w2nb-TniL4MjdJdz4/edit?usp=sharing

• This topic was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by  Asayre.

Replies: 15

Background – This build was designed pre-one tamriel after hearing about the Heavy Attack Mag DK and Sorc setup in game. Having then seen NOS’s No Spammable here and a few in game friends trying different variations that had been heard around Tamriel, etc. the Heavy Attack concept seemed unique, but definitely workable and I was determined to make a BiS version.

Originally I believe the concept of the HA build on a mag sorc was because of their low performance in trials compared to other classes in update 10-11 and then having a build keep 100% aether up-time in trials makes for a huge group DPS increase, also freeing up another gear option for a healer/s.

Once One Tamriel (Update 12) dropped and Illambris became an absolute must, this build evolved into a very unique gear setup (see below).

I’ve been playing a Sorcerer Tank since Xbox release and decided to add a DPS option by obtaining a variety of gear, testing CP, rotations, etc, so I could also DPS on the same toon if required. I’ve only told a few people about this build in game and wanted to get it posted, especially after having positive discussions with NOS about it. Enjoy!

Race – High Elf, next would be Dark Elf for this particular build.

Mundus – Thief (only) as we are no longer running TBS due to Illambris taking up 2 slots.

Attributes – All into Magicka

Food – Max Health, Max Magicka (bi-stat)

CP –
- 83 Elemental Expert
– 3 Staff Expert
- 26 Elfborn
- 75 Thaum (Tested with and without the exploiter passive and honestly it’s just too nice.)

Green tree, max out reduced cost, followed by 30 into tumbling and 57 into tenacity. We don’t add points to regen as our regen is just too low anyway and because our rotation includes 2 x heavy attacks, the tenacity points are really nice and creates an active rotation regen. Tumbling points, just because sometimes we need to dodge roll.

Red Tree is really trials dependent, in VMoL we would be in Ele Defender and Spell Shield, in VSO we split and put a lot in thick skin and hardy. Really depends on the content, but you can even split and I always put 30 in Bastion for the resurrection passives.

Gear – 5 / 1 / 1 

3 x Willpower Arcane Jewellery with Spell Damage Enchants (keep a healthy in your inventory in case you don’t have ebon).

2 x Illambris Divines (1H and 1M)

5 x Infallible Aether Divines body pieces (Jerkin only, as we don’t gold out dresses).

1 x Maelstrom Lightning Staff Sharpened on the front bar

1 x Master Inferno Staff Sharpened on the back bar (for the buff to destructive clench and max magicka)

As you can see, we have 5 different set bonuses here (1 x 5 Piece, 1 x 2 piece, 1 x 3 piece and 2 x 1 Piece).

All max magicka enchants on gear.

Bar Setup -

[img]https://s23.postimg.org/sk6zpmwtn/skills_HA_Sorc1.png[/img]

We slot Stalwart Guard instead of Bound Aegis, for the crit damage. It acts as a replacement for the loss of the shadow from not wearing TBS, guards a fellow group member, applies force to their build (a sorc would be perfect) and our max magicka pool is still super high without bound aegis. I prefer the Thunderous Rage ULT as opposed to the fire, based on extended duration, sorc and high elf passives incl. disintegrate. Therefore I do front bar Destruction Ult and back bar shooting star for the max magicka passive on bar swap.

A few other options here is to simply run bound aegis instead of Stalwart guard, and also take inner light off the back and slot power surge for the heals. I have found the above setup to output the most damage, but this comes down to comfort of the class and how good your group is. In 4 man content if I’m running with randoms, I would simply slot power surge and bound aegis and have inner light only on the front bar. You could arguably slot bound aegis instead of inner light with stalwart guard for the extra spell damage and 1% max, but I keep inner light there for when I swap power surge in and out, also to empower our initial heavy attack (crystal frag testing to come).

Potions – Essence of Spell Power (no crit reagent required, if bars set as above and inner light is slotted).

Rotation – 

Velocious Curse > Inner Light > Bar Swap > Fully Charged Heavy Attack > Liquid Lightning > LA > Destructive Clench > Bar Swap > LA > Wall Of Elements > LA > Velocious Curse > Thunderous Rage > Full Charged Heavy Attack > Crystal Frag [ONLY ON PROC] < Full Charged Heavy Attack > Velocious Curse > Bar Swap > LA > Liquid Lightning > Continue…

Having 2 active skills on our front bar allows for a large chance to proc our crystal frag. If you do not proc a crystal frag, simply do not throw it, and only throw the frag in the middle of the 2 heavy attacks. The main reason for the crystal frag is for the minor prophecy self and group buff when using a dark magic ability (from the sorcerer passives), it is also really nice burst when the frag hits and Velocious Curse expires. However with the timing of the rotation being quite rigid, we do only throw the frag in the middle of the 2 heavy attacks (there is enough time to proc a frag on our last curse and still throw an instant cast by the time we get back to it).

Character Sheet (buffed) –

[img]https://s28.postimg.org/fig7f6n3h/HA_Sorc_Guard_Char_Sheet.png[/img]

DPS –

According to the bloodspawn test (as we don’t have any parse sheets on xbox) this build is pulling 37k single target DPS with no raid buffs. Yet the most amazing thing is that every ability except the crystal frag is AOE damage, so expect a huge parse in AOE fights (most in game fights are AOE).

Our tank here is using a crusher and buffing me with igneous weapons.

Hope you enjoyed the build, it is my first so please leave some comments/feedback. If I have missed anything let me know!

I will be doing more testing on this and keep it updated.

-RedVyper

13/12/2016 [From the land down under]

• This topic was modified 2 weeks, 6 days ago by  RedVyperOfDorne. Reason: Title clarity

Replies: 35

[spoiler title = "Change Log"]

10/10/16 – Updated skills and gear sections

10/6/16 – Updated for One Tamriel DLC

9/15/16 – DPS Parse Added

9/8/16 – Character sheet image updated; champion point distribution changed, along with description

9/2/16 – Superstar addon image added; skills changed along with skills description; fixed rotation

8/23/16 – Updated rotation and skill bars

8/15/16 – Updated gear descriptions

[/spoiler]

Intro: We’re going to put the NASTY in Duck Dynasty, as in you’re dps is going to be sick if you follow this guide (maybe a slight exaggeration, but it makes the name work).  Without Maelstrom weapons and subpar CP allocation/gear you will still likely be able to break 20k DPS, and with an optimal set up and clean rotation you will be able to pull 30k – 40k+ single target.  Please note that this guide is intended to help you with dungeons and trials only and is not meant for vMA or other solo play.

Shout-outs: I would like to thank all the many theorycrafters out there who have been putting in work long before I became involved in endgame content.  These people include, but are not limited to – @FearTurbo, who has a great guide out there that first helped me with my initial foray into Stam DK; @Asayre, who’s thread and website have been invaluable; @Nosferatuzod, who has been a resource and muse; and of course the fine folk at Requiem and From the Dust who have allowed me to raid with them and grow as a player.

 CHARACTER SHEET

[img]https://s18.postimg.org/4db65lzvt/Smush_Superstar.png[/img]

-From SotH, will be updated once I have my Divine Kra’gh shoulders

Race: I’m an Orc, because that’s how I wanted to roll on Day 1 and that’s not going to change, Race Change Tokens be damned.  If you want to be pro, you’re ideally going to choose a race that gives you more substantial passives.  The Khajiit crit bonus is OP and makes them a great choice for this build; if you never want to worry about sustain issues over longer fights then Redguard is great as well.

Attribute Points: All into Stamina.

Mundus Stone: Thief – you want as much crit as possible.  If you are running TBS (see below) then you also want the Shadow Mundus stone.

Champion Points

Warrior: For true optimization, you would shift these around depending on the trial.  If you don’t want do that, you’ll be fine splitting your points between Elemental Defender and Hardy, maybe with some into Thick Skinned as well.  You can be kind to your healers too and put a little bit into Quick Recovery.

Thief: Max out cost reduction, then put the rest into recovery.

Mage: I currently run 90 Mighty, 50 Thaumaturge and 47 Precise Strikes.  This may change slightly for you depending on your gear and raid buffs, so I encourage you to check out Asayre’s website and do your own dps test to find your optimal distribution.  The general idea is that  all our damage is either physical or poison/disease (with Standard being the exception), and the vast majority of our damage is coming from DoTs (everything except our medium attack weaves).  In raid situations, you will also have considerable boost to your crit damage, making Precise Strikes very important as well.

Gear

7 Medium Divines with Stamina enchants.  Make sure that your armor is at least purple quality, and if you can afford it, gold your sets out.

Head & Shoulders – Kra’gh.  This new set is best in slot and a must have for our build.  The one piece penetration bonus is the best thing going for Stam builds, and the 2 piece set will boost your dps nicely.  If you don’t have these 2 pieces yet, run Velidreth instead.  Another fun option is to run an additional 2 pieces of VO here.  While this will not maximize your dps, it can be fun to do for farming runs where you aren’t as concerned about time, as the speed bonus and increased resources are great.

Jewelry – Vicious Ophidian with Weapon Power enchants.  If you haven’t farmed that yet, Alkosh or Robust Agility will do fine, just make sure to enchant them with Weapon Power.  For a great thread discussing the differences between all these jewelry sets, go here.

Other 5 Pieces – this will vary depending on your situation.  For my trials team, I run Night Mother’s – you always want one person running this set in your squad for the 5 piece penetration bonus.  If someone in your raid is already using NM, then you can use TBS instead (while being sure to pick up the Shadow Mundus stone).  The dps difference between NM and TBS is minimal, however, TBS is nice in that you get a health bonus of about 1k.  Note: TBS wins out in an optimal raid setting where warhorn is consistently on cooldown.  If you are not in an optimized raiding team, or if you are simply doing a dungeon, using NM is fine.

Weapons: Sharpened vMA Dagger, Sharpened vMA Axe, and Sharpened vMA Bow.  If you don’t have vMA weapons, then crafting up NM or Hundings will do fine in the meantime.  Just make sure that they’re Sharpened and golded out.  You get the greatest return on investment by upgrading your weapons to gold, as opposed to any other piece of armor.  So even if you’re cheap GOLD OUT THOSE WEAPONS!!!  If you then have the funds left over, upgrade your armor as well.  NOTE: This is the best set up for single target damage; for trash, you want 2x daggers on your front bar, as the axe bleed becomes pointless and you’re much better off maximizing crit.

If you are going to craft your weapons, you will want the Weapon Damage enchant on your bow and one of your main bar weapons, on the other you will want poison damage.  The poison enchant will be increased by your CP, and having Weapon Damage on both your bow and other weapon helps ensure greater uptime (note: due to the cooldown, both WD enchants cannot proc at once.)

Food: Blue Health and Stamina.

Potions: Essence of Weapon Power.  Ideally you want to have these on cooldown and be 3/3 in Medicinal Use so that you have constant uptime on your weapon damage bonus.

Skills

[img]https://s11.postimg.org/rxez2eh8z/Smush_Skills.png[/img]

Bar 1 (DW):  Rapid Strikes | Venomous Claws | Rending Slashes | Camo Hunter | Rearming Trap/Flex                      Ultimate: Flawless Dawnbreaker

Bar 2 (Bow): Endless Hail | Caltrops/Flex | Poison Injection | Flames of Oblivion | Acid Spray/Vigor                           Ultimate: Standard of Might

Your flex spot will be dictated by your group needs and the situation.  As a DK, be prepared to run chains for your group.  As a stam user, you may be expected to run rapids if your team is going for competitive raid scores.  If you don’t need to run either, slotting Vigor is a great option. Blade Cloak is also great for damage mitigation, especially in vSO.  Caltrops is a worthwhile skill to run on your back bar if you have the room as it will net you about a 1k dps increase; however, be aware that different morphs of caltrops do not stack against single target.  I run Anti-Calvary Caltrops since I also run 5 piece NM, so I have a chance to proc the debuff on multiple enemies.

I used to run trap on my back bar instead of acid spray, and had steel tornado on my front bar.  This is a fine option for AoE and many of you will be comfortable doing this.  As @AlphaRahl pointed out, however, the above set up provides us with an additional Fighter’s Guild skill on our main bar, increasing our dps, while also allowing us to stay ranged when dealing with mobs.  In case it’s not obvious, this is why we have Flawless on our front bar – you will essentially never use this, but it’s there for the passive damage increase – always continue to generate ultimate until you can pop Standard, unless it’s at the very end of a fight or you’re desperate for resources.

Camo Hunter and FOO are on our bars to provide us with crit bonus.  Unfortunately, it still seems as though the crit bug exists, essentially meaning you need to have a crit buff on each bar, or just don’t use one at all.  Additionally, FOO provides us with a small dps increase with a minimal cast time as it can be animation cancelled with a bar swap.  Lastly, FOO can be used as a Magicka dump against the Serpent in vSO.

Rotation: I medium attack weave (MA) before all my front bar DoTs except for the first Rapid Strikes.

Starting on your back bar:  Hail > Caltrops > Injection > FOO > Bar Swap > Rapid Strikes > MA Claws > MA Rapid Strikes > MA Rending > MA Rapid Strikes > MA Trap > rinse and repeat, dropping Standard as needed.

The general idea here is that you want to alternate Rapid Strikes with your other front bar DoTs to empower them via your MA weapons. Furthermore, by adhering to this rotation you will be empowering your Endless Hail as well.  You want to reapply Caltrops every 3rd rotation.  Also, you want to animation cancel Trap with bar swap is it is normally a long animation.  To maximize dps, drop Standard after having applied your back bar DoTs for the second time – this will ensure that all your DoTs are up and Standard will hit the hardest.  To see this rotation in action, check out Alcast’s video.

Since DKs don’t have an execute, you will essentially run this rotation for the entire duration of the fight.  The exception is at the very end of a boss encounter, as you will spam Rapid Strikes when it is clear that your next rotation of DoTs will not be able to fully run their course.

For trash and AoE situations, simply keep up Trap and Hail while light attack weaving Acid Spray.  For fights where you need additional ranged damage, feel free to slot Snipe.  Focused Aim is likely the morph you want since it will give your group Minor Breach; if you have a Stamplar on your team or if someone else is already running Focused Aim, then you want Lethal Arrow.

 DPS PARSES

Bloodspawn, 38.1k: unbuffed (SotH)

[img]https://s10.postimg.org/xu98w3hsp/Screen_Shot_2016_09_15_at_9_48_12_PM.png[/img]

Stone Atronach, 35k: 5 VO no Monster Set (One Tamriel)

[img]https://s14.postimg.org/7gd4wp2ht/Smush_Stone_Atronach_Parse.png[/img]

That is all, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reply below.  I’m always open to feedback and look to improve my build whenever possible.

Happy Gaming,

Duck

• This topic was modified 1 day, 21 hours ago by  Duckbutta.

Replies: 2

How to level legerdemain fast in 5 easy steps

Replies: 5

I build the game as a deal of gold sub. and dowloaded for about 5 hours. Now i created a breton, my objective is to be an templar tank with healing spells, some kind of Lineage 2 paladin. But i have no idea at what skill points i should put the points, maybe magika and health??? Please help.

• This topic was modified 18 hours, 31 minutes ago by  Ximineitor.

Replies: 118

Hey everyone, I’m Geraint (@GeraintAmbrosia) from the EU Megaserver and member of the social/casual guild Alith (http://www.alitheso.com)

I thought I’d share my Dragon Knight PvE tanking build(s) “The Blockade” with you all.
The Blockade is a main tank build for group endgame PvE such as trials, veteran hardmode pledges and VDSA only, I don’t do PvP or vMA with this build and I don’t promote it.
In this build guide you will also find gear set variants for trial off-tanking as well as high ultimate generation, please note that these builds are optional and not part of the main build setup and just presented for when you are not the main tank of your group!

The skill points spent are only for the mentioned build(s) – please follow the skill & CP setup info link below for details – feel free to spend points in other skill lines with your remaining points.
My build lists Champion point allocations for a character with 90, 150, 240, 300, 360, 420, 480 and 561 champion points.

Changes for One Tamriel are in green

Latest update:
October 16th, 2016 – build update for One Tamriel patch

[spoiler]
October 2nd, 2015 – build overhaul for Imperial City, build update video
May 10th, 2015 – added new section “Food & Drinks”, made changes to champ point distribution for 90, 120, 150 & 180 points, removed 360 champ point setup, changed trait recommendation for the gear to reinforced, adjusted skill use on bar 1 & 2 (personal preference).
April 26th, 2015 – included video section & City of Ash video
April 7th, 2015 – Weapon trait recommendation change
March 23, 2015 – old CP video removed & corrections on CP passives
January 23rd, 2016 – build overhaul for Orsinium DLC, build update video
June 4th, 2016 – build overhaul for Dark Brotherhood DLC
June 12th, 2016 – build video for Dark Brotherhood DLC
[/spoiler]

Build video (Status: One Tamriel)

Race

I personally use an Imperial for the health & stamina passives but the build works for all races. I also have a Dunmer DK running the build with no problems.
Other good race options are Nord, Argonian and Orc.
I’m a Vampire now.

Attribute distribution

If you are NOT an Imperial, Nord, Argonian or Orc you might want to put more attribute points into Health.
For veteran pledges I tend to stay at ~27k health, in trials I’m at ~33k (with food buff, Warhorn etc. excl.), more information about that in the gear section.

I currently run 15 Mag / 4 Health / 45 Stam on my Imperial.

Pledge gear attribute values with purple 3 stat food buff, hardened armor & Lord Warden buff (values might change depending on gear enchants)
[img]https://i.imgsafe.org/06ac46261f.png[/img]

Trial main tank gear attribute values with purple 3 stat food buff, hardened armor & Lord Warden buff (values might change depending on gear enchants)
[img]https://i.imgsafe.org/06a952bb1c.png[/img]

Food & Drinks

I’m using purple 3 stat (CP 150/160) food.

Mundus Stone

I found The Atronach a really good choice if you are already used to trial tanking and it’s my suggestion for experienced tanks that are already familiar with this build.

Otherwise you can also choose either The Tower (Stamina), The Mage (Magicka, or if you really can’t live without The Lord (Health) instead.

Special Ability: Vampire

Being a vampire as tank is no longer as bad as many thought, it’s actually pretty good (check out the passives!)
There are only a few locations like City of Ash where you might have problems being a vampire tank.
If you are a Dunmer your passive mitigates the higher flame damage a bit and for all other races if you think you take too much damage just feed and run those special instances at Vampire stage 1, problem solved.
But even at Vampire stage 4 it should be possible if you got a decent group.

Skills point & Champion point distribution link (based on Imperial and Atronach mundus):

http://www.eso-skillfactory.com/en/share/12008/

I didn’t place points in other weapon trees other than One Hand and shield as well as crafting (except for the important Alchemy and Provisioning ones).
You can distribute the remaining skill points in the other trees as you like/need.

Champion Point distribution

The CP setup is based on using the Lord Warden Set option when tanking – in case you are using Bloodspawn you can redistribute the CP from “The Lord” to “The Lady” (into Hardy and Elemental Defender).

I’m no longer providing 2 different CP choices for magicka or stamina based dps gear for the vWGT Inhibitor fight as the difficulty of this pledge got nerfed and there are some good DK dps gear guides here on TF, please choose a gear set you like for this single dps encounter from there.
The Blockade is now a full tank only build with no special dps CP alloction for just this one fight.

Champion point selection in detail:
[spoiler]
Setup for 90 points

Warrior Star Signs

The Lord – 10 points into “Heavy Armor Focus”
The Lady – 10 points into “Elemental Defender”
The Lady – 10 points into “Hardy”

Thief Star Signs

The Lover – 30 points into “Arcanist” (magicka regeneration)

Mage Star Signs

The Apprentice – 30 points into “Blessed”

Setup for 150 points

Warrior Star Signs

The Lord – 10 points into “Heavy Armor Focus”
The Lady – 20 points into “Elemental Defender”
The Lady – 20 points into “Hardy”

Thief Star Signs

The Lover – 30 points into “Arcanist”
The Tower – 18 points into “Magician”
The Tower – 2 points into “Warlord”

Mage Star Signs

The Apprentice – 50 points into “Blessed”

Setup for 240 points

Warrior Star Signs

The Lord – 10 points into “Heavy Armor Focus”
The Lady – 30 points into “Elemental Defender”
The Lady – 30 points into “Hardy”
The Lady – 10 points into “Thick Skinned”

Thief Star Signs

The Lover – 30 points into “Arcanist”
The Tower – 40 points into “Magician”
The Tower – 10 points into “Warlord”

Mage Star Signs

The Apprentice – 50 points into “Blessed”
The Atronach – 30 points into “Melee Weapon Expert”

Setup for 300 points

Warrior Star Signs

The Lord – 10 points into “Heavy Armor Focus”
The Lady – 40 points into “Elemental Defender”
The Lady – 40 points into “Hardy”
The Lady – 10 points into “Thick Skinned”

Thief Star Signs

The Lover – 30 points into “Arcanist”
The Tower – 47 points into “Magician”
The Tower – 23 points into “Warlord”

From 300 point onwards I try to use a 2:1 point distribution for Magician to Warlord

Mage Star Signs

The Apprentice – 70 points into “Blessed”
The Atronach – 30 points into “Melee Weapon Expert”

Setup for 360 points

Warrior Star Signs

The Lord – 10 points into “Heavy Armor Focus”
The Lady – 47 points into “Elemental Defender”
The Lady – 47 points into “Hardy”
The Lady – 16 points into “Thick Skinned”

Thief Star Signs

The Lover – 30 points into “Arcanist”
The Tower – 60 points into “Magician”
The Tower – 30 points into “Warlord”

Mage Star Signs

The Apprentice – 90 points into “Blessed”
The Atronach – 30 points into “Melee Weapon Expert”

Setup for 420 points

Warrior Star Signs

The Lord – 10 points into “Heavy Armor Focus”
The Lady – 57 points into “Elemental Defender”
The Lady – 57 points into “Hardy”
The Lady – 16 points into “Thick Skinned”

Thief Star Signs

The Lover – 30 points into “Arcanist”
The Tower – 70 points into “Magician”
The Tower – 40 points into “Warlord”

Mage Star Signs

The Apprentice – 100 points into “Blessed”
The Apprentice – 10 points into “Elemental Expert”
The Atronach – 30 points into “Melee Weapon Expert”

Setup for 480 points

Warrior Star Signs

The Lord – 10 points into “Heavy Armor Focus”
The Lady – 67 points into “Elemental Defender”
The Lady – 67 points into “Hardy”
The Lady – 16 points into “Thick Skinned”

Thief Star Signs

The Lover – 30 points into “Arcanist”
The Tower – 78 points into “Magician”
The Tower – 39 points into “Warlord”
The Shadow – 13 points into “Shadow Ward”

Mage Star Signs

The Apprentice – 100 points into “Blessed”
The Apprentice – 30 points into “Elemental Expert”
The Atronach – 30 points into “Melee Weapon Expert”

Setup for 561 points

Warrior Star Signs

The Lord – 10 points into “Heavy Armor Focus”
The Lady – 80 points into “Elemental Defender”
The Lady – 80 points into “Hardy”
The Lady – 17 points into “Thick Skinned”

Thief Star Signs

The Lover – 30 points into “Arcanist”
The Tower – 96 points into “Magician”
The Tower – 48 points into “Warlord”
The Shadow – 13 points into “Shadow Ward”

Mage Star Signs

The Apprentice – 100 points into “Blessed”
The Apprentice – 55 points into “Elemental Expert”
The Atronach – 30 points into “Melee Weapon Expert”

[/spoiler]

Gear

My armor setup is 1L / 1M / 5H to get the maximum out of the Undaunted passive.

Starter Tanking gear (< 299 CP)

[spoiler]

Bloodspawn  – Footman – Hist Bark:

Head – Heavy – Bloodspawn – Infused – Prismatic enchant
Shoulders – Medium – Bloodspawn – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Chest – Heavy – Hist Bark – Infused  – Prismatic enchant
Gloves – Heavy – Footman (not sure if sturdy is now possible in case it is use sturdy) – Prismatic enchant
Belt – Light – Hist Bark – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Pants – Heavy – Hist Bark – Infused – Prismatic enchant
Boots – Heavy – Footman (not sure if sturdy is now possible in case it is use sturdy) – Prismatic enchant

Jewelry – 2x Footman rings,  1x Footman necklace – block cost reduction enchant on all 3
2x 1h weapon – Hist Bark – Defending – Stamina or Magicka leech enchant
2x Shield – Hist Bark – Infused – Prismatic enchant

For the Head & Shoulders Undaunted set a heavy Head and medium Shoulders would be best, if you are unlucky to find them you can use either armor type to complete the set just make sure to create the Hist Bark belt in the right armor type to preserve the Undauted armor type attribute passive bonus.
If you can’t afford to craft prismatic enchants, enchant the items with any missing attribute enchants that you might need instead
I completely removed the Engine Guardian option for this build update, the only way I can see it still working is pumping lots of points into “Heavy Armor Expertise” to get at least close to the pdef. cap again.
You have to decide if it’s worth sacrificing points from Hardy and/or Elemental Defender for it – if you choose to do it then Engine Guardian still works with this build.

[/spoiler]

Endgame Tanking gear > 300 CP

I prefer Lord Warden set as the proc chance is 50% (!) compared to Bloodspawn’s 6%.
50% means the proc buff is active pretty much all of the time and close range dps also profit from the shadow orb.

The pdef & spell resist is not as high as Bloodspawn (~3.7k compared to ~6.8k) but the buff is active most of the time compared to Bloodspawns 6% proc chance.
I personally would suggest to use 3x infused on the big armor parts, 4x sturdy on the rest and put some left over points (up to 13) into the Shadow Ward CP passive.

If you want to go full sturdy you can free up the points from Shadow Ward and put them into Magician and/or Warrior.

I completely removed the Engine Guardian option for this build, the only way I can see it still working is pumping lots of points into “Heavy Armor Expertise” to get at least close to the pdef. cap again.

You have to decide if it’s worth sacrificing points from Hardy and/or Elemental Defender for it – if you choose to do it then Engine Guardian still works with this build.

Let’s have a look at the new (set)gear / trait options.

Pledge gear setup

Lord Warden – Hist Bark – Bahraha’s Curse

Head – Medium – Lord Warden – Infused (sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Shoulders – Light – Lord Warden – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Chest – Heavy – Hist Bark – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Gloves – Heavy – Hist Bark – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Belt – Heavy – Hist Bark – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Pants – Heavy – Hist Bark – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Boots – Heavy – Hist Bark – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant

Jewelry – 2x Bahraha rings (any attribute trait you need), 1x Bahraha necklace (any attribute trait you need) – 3x block cost reduction enchant
2x Bahraha Shield – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
2x Bahraha 1h weapon – Defending – 1x Stamina or Magicka leech (main bar) – 1x crushing enchant (2nd skill bar)

For the Head & Shoulders Undaunted set a medium Head and light Shoulders would be best so you can change the other gear parts easier for trials gear or other sets.

If you can’t afford to craft prismatic enchants, enchant your armor with any missing attribute enchant that you might need.

Why did I chose Bahraha?
[spoiler]
In case you don’t know the set bonus:

(2 Items) Adds 1064 Maximum Health
(3 Items) Adds 967 Maximum Magicka
(4 Items) Adds 967 Maximum Stamina & take 40% less damage from traps
(5 Items) Your damage abilities have a 25% chance to create desecrated ground for 5 seconds, snaring enemies within for 70%, damaging them for Magic Damage every 1 second and healing you for the damage done.
Not only do we get bonus to all 3 attributes, the best part is when this set procs (and many mobs are in the area of effect) you basically don’t need a healer and the healing you get is just crazy!
Yes, you will lose around 500 magicka & stamina but the 5 piece bonus is really worth taking as tank, furthermore with the change to the heavy armor Constitution passive you gain more stamina & magicka anyway.
[/spoiler]

Trial gear setup (main tank)

Lord Warden – Hist Bark – Ebon Armory

Head – Medium – Lord Warden – Infused (sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Shoulders – Light – Lord Warden – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Chest – Heavy – Hist Bark – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Gloves – Heavy – Ebon – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Belt – Heavy – Ebon – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Pants – Heavy – Hist Bark – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Boots – Heavy – Hist Bark – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant

Jewelry – 2x Ebon rings (any attribute trait you need), 1x Ebon necklace (any attribute trait you need) – 3x block cost reduction enchant
2x Hist Bark Shield – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
2x Hist Bark 1h weapon – Defending – 1x Stamina or Magicka leech (main bar) – 1x crushing enchant (2nd skill bar)

For the Head & Shoulders Undaunted set a medium Head and light Shoulders would be best so you can change the other gear parts easier for trial gear or other sets.

If you can’t afford to craft prismatic enchants, enchant your armor with any missing attribute enchant that you might need.

Trial gear setup (off tank)
I chose the gear for this setup so you can concentrate on off tanking and still do decent enough damage with partly automatically activated set bonus skills.

Tremorscale – Defending Warrior – Alkosh/Bahraha

Head – Medium – Tremorscale – Infused (sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Shoulders – Light – Tremorscale – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Chest – Heavy – Defending Warrior – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Gloves – Heavy – Defending Warrior – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Belt – Heavy – Defending Warrior – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Pants – Heavy – Defending Warrior – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Boots – Heavy – Defending Warrior – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant

Jewelry – 2x Alkosh rings (any attribute trait you need), 1x Alkosh necklace (any attribute trait you need) – 3x block cost reduction enchant
2x Alkosh shield – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
2x Alkosh 1h weapon – Defending (but it doesn’t really matter most of the time for off-tanking) – 1x Stamina or Magicka leech (main bar) – 1x crushing enchant (2nd skill bar)

If you are unlucky with drops or don’t have Alkosh set yet like myself as I was away from the game for a while you can still use your pledge gear set Bahraha’s Curse instead (check the pledge gear section above for details)

Tremorscale & Defending Warrior set bonus:

[spoiler]
Tremorscale
(1 items) Adds 967 Max Stamina
(2 items) When you taunt an enemy, you have a 50% chance to cause a duneripper to burst from the ground beneath them, dealing 6500 Physical Damage to all enemies within 4 meters and reducing their Movement Speed by 70% for 8 seconds. This effect can occur once every 4 seconds.

Defending Warrior
(2 items) Adds 1935 Spell Resistance.
(3 items) Adds 1935 Physical Resistance.
(4 items) Adds 1604 Maximum Health
(5 items) When you block an attack, you deal 4000 Magic Damage to all enemies within 10 meters of you and heal for 100% of the damage done. This effect can occur once every 10 seconds.
[/spoiler]

Ultimate regen gear setup
This setup will basically work in any situation, I just put it here as alternative but it’s not meant to replace the main tanking setup.
Don’t use ultimate %-cost reduction sets, as DK you want to have a high ultimate cost for higher attribute refresh from the Battle Roar passive!

Compared to the other gear setups you have to change the medium armor Undaunted set piece to heavy to retain the undaunted set bonus for 1L /1M / 1H for this setup.

Blood Spawn – Tava’s Favor – Hide of the Werewolf

Head – Heavy – Blood Spawn  – Infused (sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Shoulders – Light – Blood Spawn  – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Chest – Heavy – Tava’s Favor – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Gloves – Medium – Hide of the Werewolf – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Belt – Heavy – Tava’s Favor – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant
Pants – Heavy – Tava’s Favor – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
Boots – Heavy – Tava’s Favor – Sturdy – Prismatic enchant

Jewelry – 2x Hide of the Werewolf rings, 1x Hide of the Werewolf – 3x block cost reduction enchant
2x Shield – Tava’s Favor shield – Infused (Sturdy optional) – Prismatic enchant
2x 1h weapon – Hide of the Werewolf 1h weapon – Decisive trait would be best (any other good trait works too tho) – 1x Stamina or Magicka leech (main bar) – 1x crushing enchant (2nd skill bar)

Hide of the Werwolf set bonus:
[spoiler]
(2 items) Adds 1064 Max Health
(3 items) Adds 967 Max Stamina
(4 items) Adds 129 Weapon Damage
(5 items) When you take damage, you generate 5 Ultimate. This effect can occur once every 5 seconds.
[/spoiler]
Skills

Main Tank / Pledges skills

Bar 1

1 – Ransack (Taunt) – because Pierce armor still bugs out with other skills.
2 – Heroic Slash
3 – Hardened Armor / Volatile Armor (I tend to use Volatile now)
4 – Igneous Shield
5 – Defensive Stance or Absorb Magic / possible utility slot if you use 7 or 8 sturdy gold pieces
U – Agressive Warhorn

Bar 2

1 – Inner Rage (ranged Taunt)
2 – Choking Talons
3 – Unrelenting Grip / Igneous Weapons (slot only if there are no other DKs in your group)
4 – Coagulated Blood / Deep Breath / Rearming Trap
5 – Defensive Stance or Absorb Magic / possible utility slot if you use 7 or 8 sturdy gold pieces
U – Magma Shell / Spell Wall (byebye Rakkhat and Lord Warden projectiles)

Off Tank skills

Bar 1

1 – Ransack (Taunt) – because Pierce armor still bugs out with other skills.
2 – Heroic Slash
3 – Hardened Armor / Volatile Armor (I tend to use Volatile now)
4 – Igneous Shield
5 – Defensive Stance or Absorb Magic / Mystic Guard
U – Agressive Warhorn

Bar 2

1 – Inner Rage (ranged Taunt)
2 – Unrelenting Grip / Burning Embers / Invigorating Drain/ Igneous Weapons (slot only if there are no other DKs in your group)
3 – Elude
4 – Coagulated Blood / Deep Breath
5 – Defensive Stance or Absorb Magic / Mystic Guard
U – Shooting Star / Spell Wall / Devouring Swarm (or any ultimate you like, you probably will use Warhorn most of the time anyway)

Keep in mind that Invigoration Drain is a channeled spell so you can’t block while it’s channeling.
Best time to use it is at the start of a fight or if you have Spell Wall ultimate active.

Ultimate regen skills

Bar 1

1 – Ransack (Taunt) – because Pierce armor still bugs out with other skills.
2 – Heroic Slash
3 – Hardened Armor / Volatile Armor (I tend to use Volatile now)
4 – Igneous Shield
5 – Defensive Stance or Absorb Magic
U – Agressive Warhorn

Bar 2

1 – Inner Rage (ranged Taunt)
2 – Choking Talons
3 – Elude
4 – Coagulated Blood / Deep Breath / Unrelenting Grip / Igneous Weapons (slot only if there are no other DKs in your group)
5 – Defensive Stance or Absorb Magic / Invigorating Drain
U – Shooting Star / Devouring Swarm / Spell Wall

Keep in mind that Invigoration Drain is a channeled spell so you can’t block while it’s channeling.
Best time to use it is at the start of a fight or if you have Spell Wall ultimate active.

===========================
I hope this tanking guide helps you in your tanking build decisions, if you have questions or want to comment on it please reply here or pm me ingame on the EU server (@GeraintAmbrosia).

• This topic was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by  GeraintAmbrosia.

Replies: 588

Replies: 456

Hello, before i start i would like to say 2 things. First, i’m now basing my posts more around build videos, where i go over the build, show the rotation, etc.

Secondly, for all the newer players out there reading this guide: This build is based around Hardcore endgame raid content, the gear needed is far from the most beginner-friendly to farm, this build however is built to be the absolute minmaxed and best setup you can get, anything after getting every piece of right gear, skills, champion points etc is upto you to do as well as possible with it.

I will however include some easier to farm gear setups and options if your group setups are not optimal.

Note: I HIGHLY recommend you watch my build video before reading further, most of the basic stuff about the build is explained here, you can read this post for more detailed explenations,options and rotation details.

• Race: 

The way i see it, if you’re not either a High Elf or a Dunmer your dps will be noticably lower compared. Most people say Breton is an ok choice, i disagree with this, i think that if you’re trying to do the most damage you possibly can, you should be either one of these 2 races, if we take 2 players, where both players know what they’re doing, one is a Dunmer, and the other is a Breton, the Dunmer will come very easily on top in DPS, i’m not going to state any spesific numbers, because these things are hard to measure 100% accurately, but i’d say as a Breton you could loose upto 4k or more single-target damage. This being said, a Breton player who knows what he is doing, vs a Dunmer who has no clue what he is doing. The Breton will come on top, you dont automaticly get good because you have the right race.

This being said, the best race to use is Dunmer. The difference between High Elves and Dunmers are not the most significant, but there still are some differences.

As a Dunmer you get 3% more flame damage then a High Elf, in exchange for 1% less Max Magicka. You might say: not all your skills are flame damage, but all your skills scale off magicka, so wouldn’t 1% magicka be better? No, 1% Magicka does not mean 1% more damage, your damage does scale off Magicka, but not to the exact amount, 1% Magicka does not mean 1% More Magic damage. However the Dunmer passive does mean 3% more pure damage, and with the sets and skills you use, you get a whole lot more benefit from this.

• Gear:

So, i’m going to list a variety of different possible setups, all these setups will do well, and wich one is best might depend on your playstyle, group setup and skill. Therefore i recommend you try out as many of these setups as possible, and find the one wich you get the best results with.

Setup #1; Grothdarr, Burning Spellweave & Mothers Sorrow: Maximum Damage

The most ideal and highest damage possible setup, this is the version i use, and the one i show in the build video.

Helmet: Grothdarr, (Heavy Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Shoulders: Grothdarr, (Medium Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Chest: Burning Spellweave , (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Legs: Burning Spellweave, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Gloves: Burning Spellweave, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Belt: Burning Spellweave, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Shoes: Burning Spellweave, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Necklace: Mothers Sorrow, Arcane, Spell Damage Enchantment

Ring #1: Mothers Sorrow, Arcane, Spell Damage Enchantment

Ring #2: Mothers Sorrow, Arcane, Spell Damage Enchantment

Weapons:

On the mainbar i use 2 Swords of a Mothers Sorrow, one in Precise and one in Sharpened. One “Increase weapon & Spell Damage” Enchantment, and one Flame Damage enchantment (Prismatic when fighting Daedric/Undead).

On my offbar i have a Maelstrom Inferno Staff in Sharpened.

Setup #2; Grothdarr, Moondancer, Mothers Sorrow (or Burning Spellweave): Easier Sustain and safety.

This setup is one i’ve used in the past for nodeath runs in trials, it gives you alot more sustain, and therefore allows you to swap out Channeled Focus with Dampen Magic (or Harness magicka), and you can cast it without much problem of running out of magicka.

Helmet: Grothdarr, (Heavy Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Shoulders: Grothdarr, (Medium Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Chest: Mothers Sorrow , (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Legs: Mothers Sorrow, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Gloves: Mothers Sorrow, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Belt: Mothers Sorrow, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Shoes: Mothers Sorrow, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Necklace: Moondancer, Arcane, Spell Damage Enchantment

Ring #1: Moondancer, Arcane, Spell Damage Enchantment

Ring #2: Moondancer, Arcane, Spell Damage Enchantment

Weapons:

On the mainbar, use 2 Moondancer Swords, one in Precise and one in Sharpened. One “Increase weapon & Spell Damage” Enchantment, and one Flame Damage enchantment (Prismatic when fighting Daedric/Undead).

On offbar i prefer a Moondancer Inferno Staff in Sharpened with the “Charged Weapon” trait (flame if fighting daedra and your mainbar has a prismatic enchant), thats simply just for comfort. A Maelstrom Inferno Staff in Sharpened works equally as good.

Setup #3; Grothdarr, Twice-Born Star, Moondancer/Aether, Willpower : More Beginner friendly, very easily obtained gear.

This is FAR from the best setup, but if you’re completely new to the class and dont want to spend a ton of time farming gear or a ton of gold buying it, this could be a nice setup for you to get a feel for the class and still pull decent numbers.

Helmet: Grothdarr, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Shoulders: Grothdarr, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Chest: Twice-Born Star, (Heavy Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Legs: Twice-Born Star, (Medium Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Gloves: Twice-Born Star, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Belt: Twice-Born Star, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Shoes: Twice-Born Star, (Light Armor, Divines, Maximum Magicka Enchantment)

Necklace: Moondancer/Infallible Aether, Arcane, Spell Damage Enchantment

Ring #1: Moondancer/Infallible Aether, Arcane, Spell Damage Enchantment

Ring #2: Moondancer/Infallible Aether, Arcane, Spell Damage Enchantment

Weapons:

On the mainbar use 2 Willpower swords in Sharpened, One “Increase weapon & Spell Damage” Enchantment, and one Flame Damage enchantment.

On the offbar use a Maelstrom Inferno Staff preferrably in Sharpened, if not use a crafted staff in Sharpened with Increase Spell Damage enchant, and replace the Spell Damage enchant on your sword with the “Charged” (shock damage) enchant.

• DPS Parses & Fight Videos

[spoiler]Varlariel (Aethrian Archive Veteran Mode) 55,6k DPS: [img]http://i.imgur.com/DMik9fK.jpg[/img]

[Well Fitted] Mantikora Speedkill:

[Well Fitted] Varlariel Speedkill (not the parse from the picture):

You can also see all my videos on my youtube channel.

[/spoiler]

• Regularly asked questions:

Why 1 Sharpened 1 Precise? Should i use that?:

This really depends on your raidgroup, when it comes to me, i’m a member of a raidgroup where we have one of the highest uptimes of buffs out of all the topguilds, the reason i use 1 Sharpened is because our resistance debuffs have such a high uptime that most of the time, there is only 3k resistance left on the boss, and with 2 sharpened i would overshoot that resistance by 2k, therefore i go 1 precise instead.

If you do not have atleast 2 players using the “Roar of Alkosh” set, 2 healers and a tank with the Infused Crushing Enchant, atleast 60% uptime on Power of The Light, x2 Sharpened will most likely be better for you.

Why is Burning Spellweave better then Twice-Born Star?

Think of it like this. Let’s only count the 5 piece bonuses of these two sets, in order for Burning Spellweave to outdps the second mundus stone, you would require a 50% uptime on the set buff, this is EXTREMELY easy to do. My average uptime is close to 60%, wich makes it way better.

Now, let’s count the 2,3 and 4 piece bonuses. Twice-Born Star has 1 magicka bonus, thats not bad, but it also gives you health and stamina, this has 0 affect on your dps. While Burning Spellweave gives you damage and crit, making it much much more usefull.

Grothdarr? Is this the best undaunted set?

YES! Grothdarr is ridicilously overpowered, in addition to being a completely ridicilous amount of damage, having a high proc chance and being AoE. It also helps proc Burning Spellweave.

• The Most efficient way to farm Mothers Sorrow

Because of the strength and demand of this set, it is extremely expensive, especially the swords wich are the most important part.

Most people think the best way to farm this set is killing world bosses or killing mobs in the Public Dungeon in Deshaan, this is not the case.

The most efficient way to farm Mothers Sorrow is much less known, and involves farming chests.

Step #1: Download the addon “HarvestMap” on ESOUI.com (Link)

Step #2: Go to http://www.teso-harvest-merge.de/ Upload your already downloaded HarvestMap Files. It will merge them with a community database, and add any nodes not already in the database to a register of every resource node/chest etc in the game. After you have uploaded them and they have been scanned for new nodes, you can download the community files, wich include every chest in the game.

Step #3: Use the built-in “FarmTours” feature ingame with the HarvestMap addon, follow the arrow and open every chest you see.

Make sure you have 75 points in “The Shadow” champion tree giving you more chance for set items

• Final Note:

That’s it for the One Tamriel update, this update to my build is very different to others, so i’m really curious to hear feedback on how you like it, much less detailed info and explenations in the written guide, and more in the build videos.

I will also upload a rotation guide sometime in the future, so stay tuned for that.

Also feel free to ask me any questions about the build in this thread or on my youtube channel, i do my best to answer everyone as well as i can.

You can also contact me in-game on PC EU, @Latter, i will not respond if i’m in a raid so keep that in mind. I really appreciate it when people tell me they like my build!

• This topic was modified 1 hour, 35 minutes ago by  Latter.

Replies: 0

Hi, im a new player and my first toon is an orc dragonknight, i use heavy armor and two handed weapon, the question is: i want to do damage and a kind of offtank, so i dont know if i need to put skill points to stamina only,or a mix of stamina and health,so?? Please help!!!

Replies: 803

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to my magicka nightblade guide for patch v2.6.9. As of lately, I’ve been kind of inactive when it comes to ESO, however due to a large ammount of requests I’ve decided to update this build, but please keep in mind, this build is based on my experience in trials, in raiding, but I have NOT done calculations on what can is the best, what I am gonna be writing in this guide is simply what I find to be the best, from my experience. For you that don’t know me, I am a DPS player for Hodor, and have been with them for well over a year now. Over the course of this time, I’ve been considered by many as one of the best DPS players in the world, and I’ve been playing nightblade, and dragonknight over this time, so im very familiar with both the classes. Please keep in mind, before we get into the good stuff, that nightblade as of this patch, is one of the weakest DPS classes, HOWEVER, you can still beat other classes on the occation, but it’s said much more easily than it is done.

Core

So, this is the gear we will be running, now let me explain. We’re using five piece spellweave, as it gives us the higher spelldamage uptime, and makes burning a viable dps factor, it’s from my experience BiS. Infallible or moondancer jewelry, it doesn’t matter too much, however if you have two sharpened swords go for moondancer. For trashpacks, we will be using dual wield swords, currently im using willpower sharpened swords as I don’t have moondancer swords, hopefuly that will change soon though. For our undaunted set, we will use grothdarr on bosses where we can stand melee, and valkyn on bosses where we’re forced to go ranged. Now, you might ask why no llambris? I haven’t gotten a llambris shoulder yet, but I don’t think it would be worth it as you don’t have a source of lightning. Pretty straight forward really, for those that doesn’t have burning spellweave, scathing mage or twice born star is good alternatives too.

These are our stats, buffed with a spellpower potion. Nothing fancy really, you should be above 16k hp ~ anything below that is kinda yolo, but do as you please.

Mundus Stone

The Thief
We will be using the thief for extra spellcrit in this build, having more crit with a high aggressive warhorn uptime, and crit modifiers such as trap beast, is gonna help us out alot.

Skills

Crippling Grasp, Force Pulse, Elemental Blockade, Inner Light, Merciless Resolve, Elemental Rage
Twisting Path, Sap Essence, Trap Beast, Impale, Inner Light, Soul Harvest

NOW, something very important here. This is not the best bar setup, this is the one I’m used to, and I don’t have the patience to practice the new one, simple as that. However, this does require you to have a moondancer/infallible inferno sharpened staff. You should be using the following then.

This will make the most use out of the critical passives a nightblade has, but as you can see it will give you some clear rotation issues as path is a 11,5 second cooldown, and blockade is 8. However, I feel when it comes to the bars you just have to play around with it and come up with what you prefer, as mentioned above you can see what I prefer.

Champion Points

Now, before I get into it. By no means am I a genius, I just tried some points here and there, and this seems to be giving me good results.

95 Elemental Expert

40 Elfborn

8 Spell Erosion

1 Staff Expert

43 Thaumaturge

When it comes to the warrior and the thief, just put points into whatever you need, I change mine up all the time so it would be useless to share.

Races

Darkelf is the best race, as you have a ton of fire damage, however high elf is also a viable option. As I’d usually tell people, whatever tickles your pickle.

Parses

More to come aswell, and I know I can do alot better on these parses, but it’s still something I guess.

Final Words

I’d like to give a big thank you to the entire Hodor, especially the members of the hodor core group. I’d like to give my love, @Hjelmi a big kiss too for keeping me alive during all of this, I don’t know how you manage it. Also, big thanks to @Selawa for helping me brainstorm, and @Blackroxee for betraying nightblades and going to the sorcerer side. For those of you that don’t see your names here, you know who you are, and I highly appreciate it. Remember, FULLFIST!

– @IWM

• This topic was modified 3 weeks, 4 days ago by  Mashinate.

Replies: 231

Changelog

[spoiler]

24-Jun-2016: Updated for Dark Brotherhood DLC

20-Aug-2016: Updated for Shadows of The Hist DLC

30-Oct-2016: Updated for One Tamriel

[/spoiler]

[img]http://i.imgur.com/wx3Nmtw.png[/img]

..

Overview

After the release of the new and challenging 12 man trial Maw of Lorkhaj and the updated Veteran Sanctum Ophidia, Aetherian Archive and Hel Ra Citadel Sorcerer will have to adapt to a new play style rather than just Overload the bosses because of the 5 minutes + encounters. The old Overload Sorc is still viable and strong for all end game content except Veteran Trials. This build is another strong option to go with if you are sick of Overload spamming and still you will be able to get very good numbers.

• Race
• Attributes
• Mundus Stone
• Champion Points
• Stats
  
• Potion
• Gear
• Skills & Rotation
• DPS Screenshots
• YouTube
  

Race

Now that Dark Elf got buffed its probably your best choice as sorcerer, but doesn’t mean High Elf is useless now. I even believe they might be both equally powerful.

Attributes

I have all my 64 attribute points into Magicka. and I barely hit the 17k hp. You might gonna need to invest some points into HP if you lack CP. usually 18k is high enough for end game content as a DD with low amount of CP and 17k hp if you have a decent amount of CP.

mundus stone

The Thief

Champion points

Note that this CP distribution is based on @Asayre ‘s spreadsheet, so big shout out to our math genius.

 The Mage

• Elemental Expert : 100 points
• Elfborn : 66 points
• Thaumaturge: 20 points
• Staff Expert: 1 point

 The Thief

• Magician : 100 points
• Arcanist : 87 points

The Warrior (depends on what you are doing)

Stats

Out of Combat

[img]http://image.prntscr.com/image/bcb76d15aa754694814f8ce130ac4cd1.png[/img]

..

In Combat

[img]http://image.prntscr.com/image/a42d1f6c5c9541ff9462a1f234422598.png[/img]

Potion

[img]http://i.imgur.com/8fb7ren.png[/img]

I usually use Essence of Spell Power to buff myself with Major Sorcery which is very important for Damage Dealers, also to restore good amount of magicka back. The crit bonus is invalid because we have inner light which gives the exact same buff. Also make sure to have 3 skill points in Medical Use under Alchemy skill tree to increase the duration of the buff significantly.

Gear

Make sure to have 1 piece Heavy and 1 piece medium for benefit from the Undaunted Mettle passive which will increase your max stats by 6%. What you will need is:

[img]http://image.prntscr.com/image/ed044923a1b746d6b28211554e5c4c09.png[/img]

• 5x Burning Spellweave (Drops in City of Ash I & II)

• 2x Ilambris (Head drops in Crypts of Heart I)
  

• 3x Moondancer / Infallible Aether Jewelry (Moondancer drops in Maw of Lorkhaj, Infallible drops in AA/HRC/SO)
  

• 1x Moondancer / Infallible Aether Staff

• 1x Inferno Maelstrom Staff (Drops from Vet Maelstrom Arena)
  

Precise or sharpened?

Currently Sharpened wins over Precise in most cases, however I haven’t got the chance to test Precise in a good support group. Will do that some time.

Double Inferno or Inferno/lightning?

Its always better to have both of them and use Lightning on trash AOE and use Inferno on bosses

skills & rotation

Single target bars

[img]http://image.prntscr.com/image/46e3814374034bb49066c5ecb52b8abc.png[/img]

Bar 1

1. Velocious Curse: Hits quite hard and also deals AOE splash damage, really nice for single target.
2. Force Pulse: Main Single target spam ability.
3. Crystal Fragments: A no brainer, this bad boy can crit for 40k+.
4. Bound Aegis: 8% more free magicka and some resistance!. Why the hell not!.
5. Inner Light: 10% more crit and 5% more magicka. (and 2% more from passives)
6. Shooting Star: We are using this on bosses only.

Bar 2

1. Liquid Lightning: One of the most powerful DoT in the game. It does insane amount of damage and must be up all the time in single target and AoE situations.
2. Mages’ Wrath: Your powerful execute, not as powerful as Jesus Beam or Impale sadly.
3. Elemental Blockade: One of the strongest abilities in the game for Magicka users, a must use for AOE and single target.
4. Bound Aegis: As above.
5. Inner Light: As above.
6. Fiery Rage: Insanely powerful ultimate on trash, it has more tooltip damage than meteor but costs more. Thats why we don’t use it on bosses mostly.

As for rotation it is as following:

Potion > Curse > Shooting Star > Liquid Lightning > LA > Elemental Blockade > LA > Curse > LA > Force Pulse > LA > Crystal Frag (when it procs) ….. and repeat (recasting on cooldown)

In case you are fighting a boss that spawns more than 2 adds occasionally you can keep your dots up (Blockade and liquid) and heavy attck with lightning staff. The splash damage from it will be enough to deal with them.

AOE BARS (Optional)

[img]http://image.prntscr.com/image/9812406c137b49c5937e540be4c88557.png[/img]

Bar 1

1. Flame Pulsar: Our main AoE spam ability, DoT from fire ring is useless as its overwrites every time we use the skill. so I would rather reduce target’s max hp by 10%.
2. Force Pulse: Main Single target spam ability.
3. Proximity Detonation: With Thieves guild patch, it requires far less AP to unlock this beast, only good for AOE though not single target.
4. Bound Aegis: 8% more free magicka and some resistance!. Why the hell not!.
5. Inner Light: 10% more crit and 5% more magicka. (and 2% more from passives)
6. Shooting Star: Really strong ultimate specially on trash mobs, have 12 ultimate points on each enemy hit is just so good.

Bar 2

1. Liquid Lightning: One of the most powerful DoT in the game. It does insane amount of damage and must be up all the time in single target and AoE situations.
2. Mages’ Wrath: Your powerful execute, not as powerful as Jesus Beam or Impale sadly.
3. Elemental Blockade: One of the strongest abilities in the game for Magicka users, a must use for AOE and single target.
4. Bound Aegis: As above.
5. Inner Light: This is free spot since its buffs and dots, I might have execute here to kill big mobs faster.
6. Power Overload: We are not using this, its just here if you need access to third bar and have whatever skill you need there.

As for rotation it is as following:

Potion > Proxi > Liquid Lightning > Elemental Blockade > LA > Shooting Star > Spam Pulsar ….. and repeat

Remember that these bars are optional as you can still hit for same or more damage from your single target bars.

DPS parses

Zhaj’hassa The Forgotten

[spoiler][img]http://image.prntscr.com/image/5e926a8e9fee462b997b565103b8f403.png[/img][/spoiler]

..

The Twins (from @Paulington)

[spoiler][img]https://puu.sh/rXLoO/91f51c70a1.png[/img][/spoiler]

..

Rakkhat

[spoiler][img]http://image.prntscr.com/image/cb1ffa85f9f64b4793ca9a62d5d4a007.png[/img][/spoiler]

Youtube

Zhaj’hassa The Forgotten

..

The Twins (from @Paulington)

..

Rakkhat

• This topic was modified 2 months ago by  Yolo-Wizard.

Replies: 1

• This topic was modified 3 weeks ago by  Brrrofski.

Replies: 0

How To Make A Lot Of Gold In ESO – Farming

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A Thorne In The Lion’s Paw.

Hearthfire, 2E 583.

Peace is ever short lived; a brief repose between the spells of conflict, and the bouts of strife. For five fleeting years, there has been a quietude in Tamriel; the people gladly, and willingly oblivious to the presence of a loathsome, villainous few. With the death of Baron Strucier at the hands of the Imperial Empire – at least that was how it was recorded – the Righteous Army of Ysgramor, a name foul and unbefitting of their damnable goal, all but disappeared into the shadows. Baroness Cynthia eluded the Empire, and others whom were tasked with her capture, and continues to do so.

During such distractions, others have attempted to deal a swift blow at the turned backs of their enemies, though mostly with disappointing outcomes. Others proved more dangerous. The Aldmeri Dominion, believing themselves somewhat responsible, attempts to hide the attempts of said organisation, though with increasing lack of success. The Veiled Heritance, or at least a splinter group, or perhaps another group entirely merely made in homage, have proven quite capable, and quite difficult. Given the Heritance’s origins in the Dominion, Ayrenn has attempted to shield the other provinces from their attacks, as well as avoid the spreading of knowledge regarding them; though doing so without raising suspicion is becoming more dangerous as time passes, and as the Heritance grows more bold in its acts.

Amidst this hidden chaos, a seemingly unimportant event arises, though with yet untold consequences. Southpoint; a small port town in Southern Valenwood, has found itself under new leadership – Lycidas Blackthorne; the Lord of House Blackthorne, and a Breton of apparent respect in Grahtwood. Though imaginably harmless, the presence of Breton leadership in Valenwood would be an affront to many; though for various reasons yet to be revealed. On the 15th day of Hearthfire, Lycidas Blackthorne’s coronation to become Mayor of Southpoint shall be a public spectacle, as well as a day of judgement.

The transitory peace is ending, as such supposedly trivial concerns become the burdens of many.

Feel free to fill out the character application for any new characters, or just for the sake of doing so.

Name: Ava Blackthorne.

Sex: Female.

Race: Breton.

Age: 26 When first infected with vampirism.

Place of birth: Daggerfall.

Home: The City of Southpoint in Valenwood.

Religion: Worships The Daedric Prince Molag Bal.

Vampire bloodline: Keerilth.

Profession: Assassin.

Class: Necromage.

Specialization: Magic.

Attributes: Willpower, Intelligence.

Birthsign: The Lady.

Major Skills: Blade, Destruction.

Minor Skills: Conjuration, Restoration, Illusion, Light Armor, Sneak.

Name: Lycidas Blackthorne.

Sex: Male.

Race: Breton.

Age: 65 When first infected with vampirism.

Place of birth: Daggerfall.

Home: Southpoint.

Religion: Worships The Daedric Prince Molag Bal.

Vampire bloodline: Keerilth.

Profession: Ruler.

Class: Templar

Specialization: Combat

Attributes: Intelligence, Strength.

Birthsign: Warrior

Major Skills: One-Handed, Speech.

Minor Skills: Destruction, Heavy Armor, Illusion, Block, Smithing.

Name: Marissa Blackthorne.

Sex: Female.

Race: Breton.

Age: Age: 24 When first infected with vampirism.

Place of birth: Daggerfall.

Home: Southpoint.

Religion:  Worships The Daedric Prince Molag Bal.

Vampire bloodline: Keerilth.

Profession: Enchantress.

Class: Sorceress.

Specialization: Magic.

Attributes: Willpower, Intelligence.

Birthsign: The Mage.

Major Skills: Destruction, Conjuration.

Minor Skills: Alteration, Illusion, Restoration, Enchanting, Alchemy.

Name: Avelyn Blackthorne.

Sex: Female.

Race: Breton.

Age: 27 When first infected with vampirism.

Place of birth: Daggerfall.

Home: Southpoint.

Religion: Worships The Daedric Prince Molag Bal.

Vampire bloodline: Keerilth.

Profession: Hunter.

Class: Archer.

Specialization: Archery.

Attributes: Agility, Speed.

Birthsign: The Shadow

Major Skills: Archery, Speech.

Minor Skills: Light Armor, Sneak, Smithing, One-Handed, Lock Picking.

Name: Adriyan Gavyrayn

Sex: Male

Race: Dunmer.

Age: 32 When first infected with vampirism.

Place of birth: Balmora.

Home: Southpoint.

Religion: Worships The Daedric Prince Molag Bal.

Vampire bloodline: Keerilth.

Profession: Teaching Electromancies to the Keerilth Coven.

Class: Electromancer.

Specialization: Magic.

Attributes: Intelligence, Endurance.

Birthsign: Tower

Major Skills: Destruction, Light Armor.

Minor Skills: One-Handed, Illusion, Sneak, Lock Picking, Alchemy.

Name: Victoria Blackthorne.

Sex: Female.

Race: Breton.

Age: 34 When first infected with vampirism.

Place of birth: Daggerfall.

Home: Southpoint.

Religion: Worships The Daedric Prince Molag Bal.

Vampire bloodline: Keerilth.

Profession: Commander of House Blackthorne’s Guards.

Class: Knight.

Specialization: Combat.

Attributes: Strength, Endurance.

Birthsign: Warrior.

Major Skills: One-Handed, Heavy Armor.

Minor Skills: Block, Destruction, Speech, Archery, Restoration.

• This topic was modified 1 month, 1 week ago by  Ava Blackthorne.

Replies: 1

Hi, im a new player and my first toon is an orc dragonknight, i use heavy armor and two handed weapon, the question is: i want to do damage and a kind of offtank, so i dont know if i need to put skill points to stamina only,or a mix of stamina and health,so?? Please help!!!

Replies: 49

A Thorne In The Lion’s Paw.

Chapter I

Ascension

Loredas, 14th day of Heartfire, 2E 583.

The Soul Cairn, 4.34am.

Ava Blackthorne & Marissa Blackthorne, The Soul Cairn.

” Well that was certainly worth the trouble, wasn’t it ? ” The Keerilth chuckled to herself, as she continued collecting soul gems from the fallen bonemen, who were now nothing more than tiny piles of black soul ashes laying on the ground. ” You think we have enough Marissa, or should we sweep for a few more ? “

Marissa looked up, before turning her attention back to filling her travel back with the soul gems. ” This should be enough, but always better to be safe. Besides with Father’s coronation being tomorrow, we don’t have much time, we need to start wrapping this up. ” She spoke, as she quicken her pace.

While The Soul Cairn is primarily inhabited by the souls of those unfortunate enough to be soul trapped then killed, it has long been a place of interest for the Keerilth vampire clan. With them often taking time to explore it’s vast realm, searching for both soul gems, and any other secrets it might hold. They were never foolish enough to consider making deals with The Ideal Masters, knowing that would mostly likely bound them to The Soul Cairn, and keep their souls from reaching Coldharbour upon their deaths. They did however find a strange sense of peace while inside The Soul Cairn, in a lot of ways it was very much like Coldharbour, but still not enough for them to be foolish enough to make a deal with The Ideal Masters. They more so saw it as a place of sanctuary, as a place to harvest important resources such as soul gems, and rare alchemical ingredients for alchemy, that could be found inside of the realm of The Soul Cairn.

With the coronation of their father Lycidas Blackthorne to the position of the mayor of Southpoint taking place soon, the Keerilth clan was hard at work preparing themselves for the coming change in their lives, but also in preparation, should other vampire clans native to Valenwood try dislodging them. The threat of attack from outside of Valenwood was unlikely, but not impossible, the Keerilth had no shortage of rivals. Ranging from The Cyrodiil Vampyrum Order, the Bonsamu, The Whet-Fang, all the way to the self proclaimed, ” pure bloods ” known as Lamae’s bloodline of vampires. The Keerilth had not bothered to form alliances with the other factions of vampires scattered throughout Cyrodiil, seeing them as inferior, or simply too stupid to bother with. Through out the years the clan had been preparing for an assault on their home, both in Southpoint, and their lair known as The Eternal Abyss. Located deep in the forest’s of Greenshade, just west out Southpoint, this is where the clan maintained it’s primary stronghold in the province of Valenwood.

Previously Mayor Aulus has served as the mayor of Southpoint, until His mind was twisted by Sheogorath and forced into turning Southpoint into a cesspool of madness. House Blackthorne took advantage of this situation, by publicly denouncing him as an incapable leader and vied for ownership over Southpoint. Due to it’s ruling not governed by birthright, but rather a more democratic approach, House Blackthorne was given the chance to prove themselves capable and decent rulers of the port. It took some time, but with the backing of House Shadyhollow, as well as the support from House Velvntia they eventually earned the majority vote, leading to Lycidas Blackthorne being selected by the citizens of Southpoint to claim the position as the brand new Mayor of Southpoint. House Blackthorne had earned the respect of the citizens of Southpoint, by helping stop the former Mayor Aulus, and restoring the city to it’s former glory. Many lives were saved due to the actions of the Keerilth clan, particularly House Blackthorne, as well as House Shadyhollow, who had had saved the city from certain madness at the hands of corrupted mayor. The battle that took place during this time left most of Southpoint in complete ruins, and resulted in the death of many of Southpoint’s inhabitants to be killed, including several members of the Keerilth clan itself. It was the actions of House Blackthorne during this time of chaos that lead to many in Southpoint as seeing the Blackthorne’s as trustworthy leaders in the community. This was not the only contributing factor to their rise to power, the success of their family business, their ability to transport goods, all the way to their vast wealth all contributed to this recent accession.

Ava stood up, taking a moment to brush off her clothes, before turning towards Marissa. ” Let’s get going, tomorrow is going to be a long day. ” Together the two began walking back towards the way they had came, they were no strangers to The Soul Cairn, having been here countless times before today.

” These spell tomes should prove to be interesting, just goes to show you never know what you are going to find around here. ” Marissa commented, as she pulled out the tome to conjure a Wrathman. ” Always nice to find something unique, and we have more than enough soul gems, more than worth the effort “

” Tomorrow will also prove to have been worth of the effort, finally we can start shaping Southpoint as we see fit. “

Marissa felt satisfied for the first time in a long time, looking forward towards the future of Southpoint. While their new position would make somethings more difficult, with feeding being the utmost concern for the coven, they already had plans in place for the coming change. For all of their evil deeds over the years they had never once taken an innocent life inside of Southpoint to satisfy their need to feed, instead they relied on alternative measures of obtaining fresh blood. The clan much preferred to feast on the blood of those who threatened the security of Southpoint, from cut throats, bandits, even that of rival clans. During The Alliance War they even went as far as to feed on fallen Ebon Heart Pact soldiers who they had defeated in battle, but never did they once attack those from The Daggerfall Covenant, knowing that should they be defeated by either The Aldmeri Dominion, or The Ebon Heart Pack that it could potentially be the end of the High Rock as they knew it. As much as they called Valenwood their home they had never given up hopes of returning to High Rock to reclaim what they had abandoned so long ago, this was just the beginning of a much greater vision, a vision of reclaiming what was theirs, a vision of their ascension.

” Looks like they don’t want us to leave, well let’s try not to disappoint them now ! ” Marissa laughed, as a couple of Bonemen began charging towards them from each side, their weapons at the ready. The Keerilth sorceress responded by lashing out towards the closest Boneman with a vicious bolt of lightning.

Ava smirked as she watched bones go flying into the air as a result of Marissa’s lightning bolt, she unsheathed her sword, slashing as the nearest Boneman with her Blackthorne Blade. Her strikes quickly found their mark, within a matter of seconds the Boneman was nothing more than a scattered pile of bones. With two more quickly closing in she raised her free hand into a position to where she could freely cast spells, before casting a dark orb towards the ground in front of her. The orb had an area of effect, one that stunned both of the Bonemen, severally slowing them both down for just a couple of moments.

” Take this ! ” Marissa shouted, as she began to cast a series of dark orbs herself, striking the Bonemen directly from behind as Ava attacked with a spell known as dark flames, engulfing the Bonemen in black fire as they collapsed to the ground, before turning into piles of black soul ashes on the ground around them.

” Pathetic little things aren’t they ? ” Ava smirked once again, as she knelt down to quickly collect more of the soul gems from the black soul ashes. Marissa did the same, it didn’t take long before the two sisters where back on their way, walking towards the portal connecting to a chamber within The Eternal Abyss.

Marissa walked in front of Ava as the two approached the portal, before stopping, then turning to face her sister. ” See you on the other side, try not to dally ! ” She chuckled as she walked through the portal, and within a matter of moments stepped out on the other side, setting foot back inside of Valenwood.

Ava shook her head with a large smile on her face before stepping through, only to bump directly into Marissa as she emerged on the other side of the portal. ” Speaking of dallying. Come on shake a leg, move it, we don’t have all day, your words, not mine ! ” She spoke teasingly, as she gently pushed passed Marissa.

” Let’s drop these off, then we can return to Southpoint, there are a few things there I want to ensure are taken care of before tomorrow. “

• This topic was modified 1 month, 1 week ago by  Ava Blackthorne.

Replies: 995

PTS 2.6 Changes

• Updated block cost formula
• Added sneak damage formula to Miscellaneous equations

Acknowledgement

A special thank you to addon developers for allowing me to understand the mechanics in the game in particular @Atropos for FTC, @SpellBuilder for LUI, @Kith for Srendarr, @Coolmodi for MitigationPercent and TemplarExecute and all the other developers for the bunch of addons I use daily in ESO. I would also like to extend my gratitude to the community for the kind words and valuable discussion about ESO game mechanics

Introduction

This post is divided into two main sections: Fundamental Equations and Application of Equations. Fundamental Equations covers the majority of calculations in the game while Application of Equations uses the derived equations to draw conclusions regarding what trait or mundus to use. While my initial focus was on Magicka Sorcerers, the focus has spread a bit and is probably of interest to most Magicka based classes. Note that a large number of equations can be applied to Stamina builds as well by simply substituting for the relevant stamina analogue. I am lacking healing related equations and I may delve into that in the future. Also include, at the end of this post, are spreadsheets that implements the Fundamental Equations as well as Application of Equations. The equations and values use are valid for the Orsinium PTS so some of it will be incorrect in the current live version 2.1.x. The spreadsheets can be used to determine the relative strengths of different sets. The spreadsheets are view only to prevent tampering but please feel free to make a copy for your own calculations. If you do use the spreadsheets I would appreciate feedback in terms of accuracy or ease of use.

Fundamental equations

Stat pool

[spoiler]

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/71601bd4a0cdca1614aa8bb99f33ce78.png [/img]

The Base value at C160 is 8744 for Health and 7958 for Magicka and Stamina. Attribute points is the number of points spent in Health, Magicka or Stamina multiplied by 122 for Health and 111 for Magicka and Stamina. Gear covers most things like set bonuses and enchants. Gear1 appears to be a peculiarity unique to the 5 piece bonus of Destruction Mastery and Necropotence.

CPI is a cumulative percentage increase due to points spent in the corresponding constellation and can be calculated as follow

The Lord Mundus gives 1452 Health. The Mage and Tower Mundus gives 1320 Magicka and Stamina, respectively. Divines is the sum of divines. For example 4 pieces of green equipment with divines (4.5% each) means Divines = 1.18. Limited testing on the PTS suggest that Divines is rounded to 2 decimal places.

Example

I have a C160 Breton Sorcerer on the PTS. My gear gives me 7924 Magicka. This includes enchantments and gear bonuses. I have 64 points in Magicka, thus Attribute Points is 7104. I have 100 Champion Points in the Mage constellation which means that CPI is 1.134. I am using the Crown Fortifying Meal which gives 3617 Magicka. Skills is 1.31 (8% Bound Aegis, 5% Inner light, 2% Magicka Controller, 10% Gift of Magnus, 6% Undaunted Mettle). Putting this all into the formula, My in-game Magicka pool in the PTS is 38899.

[/spoiler]

Spell damage

[spoiler]

The Apprentice Mundus provides 166 Spell damage at C160.

[/spoiler]

Ability tooltip value

[spoiler]

The tooltip value for the majority of skill conforms to where a and b are coefficients. b is typically around 10.5 and a varies for each skill. The range of a is typically between 0.02 to 0.2. It is quite challenging to get extremely accurate values for a even with plane fitting over a large data range. We can fix b without much loss in the fitting for a thus we can introduce to concept of effective pool

This allows a fast evaluation method for different builds with varying Magicka and Spell Damage.

A technically more accurate estimate can be obtained by using

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/eb82a847e05085af973286c03deaa144.png[/img]

However the first formula presented in this section usually provides sufficient accuracy and will be used for the remainder of this post.

Some skills notably Hardened Ward and Annulment scale of only Magicka. In some cases the coefficient a is modified by Champion Points, at the time of writing, Thaumathurge appears to increase the tooltip for all abilities even non-DoTs. Elemental Expert is correctly being applied to tooltips. In the remainder of this post, it will be assumed that tooltip refers to the base tooltip unmodified by Champion Points.

A very well made skills browser by @uesp

http://esoitem.uesp.net/viewSkills.php

A list of skill coefficients for the PTS 2.3.2 can be found at

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YN8YWDpi1-d4CfoagRy1F9ath2w2nb-TniL4MjdJdz4/edit?usp=sharing

A list of all skill coefficients and the weird ones by @uesp

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/257330/list-of-skills-that-behave-differently-than-most

[/spoiler]

Recovery

[spoiler]

The recovery formula was altered after PTS 2.5. Thanks to @Reorx_Holybeard for the following equation

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/40bd6b5c6c97ff7d75295074fedafeba.png[/img]

Base Magicka and Stamina recovery at C160 is 514. Base Health recovery at C160 is 309. The Atronach mundus provides 198 Magicka recovery at C160. Examples of Skills are Magicka Controller [Mages’ Guild Passive], Major Intellect, Recovery [Light Armour Passive], and Spellcharge [Altmer Passive].

[/spoiler]

Spell Cost

[spoiler]

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/45bbe8e269618bbdfe89962ca52f7559.png[/img]

The Base Cost of a spell is the tooltip cost value, without any points in Magician and without any equipment or skills that provide either a percentage or flat cost reduction. Flat Cost Reduction is typically in the form of enchantments on jewellery and % Cost Reduction comes from skills and passives. Note that the 2 piece Molag Kena is a 33% cost increase when activated.

Example

I am calculating the cost to cast Force Pulse. The Base Cost is 2700 at C160. I have 92 points in Magician (15.2%) and 1 legendary reduce spell cost enchantment (203 each). %Cost Reduction is 0.23, 15% from Evocation [Light Armour Passive], 5% from Unholy Knowledge (Sorcerer Passive) and 3% from Magicka Mastery [Breton Passive]. The cost for casting Force Pulse is

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/05a25c89698b9d667f22ee8b5ccfe599.png[/img]

This matches the in-game cost for Force Pulse in the PTS.

The base spell cost varies with level and @uesp has explained how it works

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/pts-2-1-2-sorcerer-arithmagic/page/25/#post-645278

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/pts-2-1-2-sorcerer-arithmagic/page/27/#post-646518

[/spoiler]

Spell Critical

[spoiler]

Simply add up all sources that increase Spell Critical. 219 Spell Critical rating is equivalent to 1% Spell Critical

[/spoiler]

Critical modifier

[spoiler]

This formula has been updated due to changes in [2.2.4]

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/8380394feeb5f779fdb00b73b0ec0245.png[/img]

where Fl is the floor function, Rd is the round function and Elfborn_Real is similar to the tooltip value of Elfborn but when it is used no unexpected rounding errors are found. Rd(x, 2) rounds a number to 2 decimal places and Fl(x, 0.01) truncates a number at the 2nd decimal places. Here are examples of both functions in action, Rd(23.458,2) = 23.46, Fl(23.458,0.01) = 23.45. Skills tested were the Piercing Spear passive and Trap Beast (Minor Force). Thanks to @Beltan3 and @hofawd with some help in getting this formula down. It appears that Critical multiplier is floored after Major Force is calculated but further test are needed to confirm this.

By the way, if you don’t mind some error in your calculation, a simpler formula is

Due to rounding errors, Elfborn still suffers from jump. Any points in between jumps do not increase your critical modifier. @Erraln has kindly listed all the jump points in this thread but for convenience, I’ll put them here as well. The Elfborn jump points are at

1,2,4,7,9,12,15,18,22,26,29,33,38,42,46,51,56,61,66,71,76,81,87,92, and 98.

[/spoiler]

Resistance

[spoiler]

Your spell resistance can be calculated with the following formula

where Gear is the sum of tooltip armour values, Resolve is a Heavy Armour Passive, Defending is a weapon trait. Other includes Breton Spell Resistance Passive, Balanced Warrior Passive (Templars), Major Ward, Spell Warding and Spell Shield CP.

Similarly, physical resistance is calculated as follows

The Lady mundus provides 1980 Physical Resistance at C160 and is put into the variable Other. The Reinforced trait increases the tooltip armour value and will be included when calculating Gear. The Shield Expert passive under the Steed increases the tooltip value of the shield thus is also included in Gear.

Example

I have 5 pieces of heavy armour, 1 medium and 1 light. The sum of all my tooltip armour values, Gear, is 16666. Resolves grants 1811 resistance and Spell Warding grants 363 Spell Resistance. I have a legendary defending weapon equipped (6%). My set bonus for physical resistance is 5805. I have 100 points in Heavy Armour Focus (5281). I also have the Spell Resistance (Breton passive) and Balanced Warrior (Templar passive) passives. With Major Resolve and Ward active, I estimate my physical and spell resistance to be

My actual physical and spell resistance are 35951 and 31828, respectively.

[/spoiler]

Critical resistance

[spoiler]

Critical resistance is not needed in PvE since monsters do not do critical damage. An enemies’ critical modifier can be reduced by equipping gear with the Impenetrable trait or by spending points in the Resilient champion point sign. Every percent in Resilient decreases the enemies’ critical modifier by the same amount and every 250 points of critical resistance reduces an enemies’ critical modifier by 3.5%

Example

If you are PvP’ing against an enemy with a critical modifier of 0.5 and you have 500 critical resistance (2 legendary equipment) and 48 points (15%) in Resilient, then

[/spoiler]

Miscellaneous equations

[spoiler]

Block Cost

The block formula is

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/0f8abf3fdf3681345845807585d3d1b8.png[/img]

Example

If you have 100 points in Shadow Ward, 8 pieces of Legendary Sturdy gear, 3 Legendary Shield play enchants (203 block cost reduction each), 2 points in Fortress (36% block cost reduction) and Defensive Posture slotted your block cost will be

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/e7ee81f8634ebd9d8a38d0c51484a3b2.png[/img]

The in-game block cost is 88.

Base Cost vs Level

@uesp has found how most cost scale with level. The link is provided below.

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/pts-2-1-2-sorcerer-arithmagic/page/32/#post-651311

Sneak Damage

@MrTarkanian48 has reported the PvE sneak damage formula to be

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/f2b7c3a2653388d0b6deba9c91ba08c6.png[/img]

where Sneak Bonus is 3.75 for Melee attacks and 1.46 for Ranged attacks. I have verified this using Wrecking Blow, 2H Heavy Attack, Bow Heavy Attack, Focused Aim and Hidden Blade.

In PvP the Sneak Bonus is 0.27.

[/spoiler]

Damage calculation

Base damage

[spoiler]

The base damage formula is where

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b7a7c91d99b14abfe8c893ee2f089f23.png[/img]

Attacker Bonus includes relevant champion point signs, Minor Berserk [Combat Prayer] and Elemental Talent [Altmer Passive]. These stack multiplicatively. Defender bonus refers to relevant champion point signs. Battle Spirit can be included by simply multiplying by 0.5. In 2.2.3, the impact of Thaumathurge is included in the tooltip but the impact of Elemental Expert is not included in the tooltip, so be wary you’re not double counting Thaumathurge. Resistance is the relevant physical or spell resistance. Penetration is the sum of percentage based penetration. For magicka builds, this is either 18% for a legendary nirnhoned weapon or 28% when using a legendary nirnhoned weapon and casting a Destruction Staff spell due to the Penetrating Magic passive. Examples of Flat Penetration are Concentration for Light Armour users, Spell Erosion and Piercing. The base Flat Penetration is 100. Veteran rank 16 corresponds to level 66. For PvE, most mobs have a level of 50. Examples of Armour Debuff are Major and Minor Fracture and Breach, 5 piece bonus of Night Mother’s Gaze and Glyphs of Crushing. The resistance of some bosses in 2.1.x can be found at [2.1] Project Resistance.

PvE Example

A C160 Breton cast Crystal Fragments on Slimecraw (Wayrest Normal Dungeon). Slimecraw’s spell resistance is 18200.The tooltip value without any points in Elemental Expert is 7832 (Refer to the section Ability tooltip value if you’re confused). I have 75 points in Elemental Expert (20.4%) and 25 points in Spell Erosion (1492 Flat Spell Penetration). My Flat Spell Penetration is 100[base]+4884[Concentration]+1492[Spell Erosion] = 6476. I’m using an epic sharpened staff (12% penetration). I have combat prayer active. Given these values

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/06d9e9727846e66a62317b084ddd9d5f.png[/img]

and

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/cf0e9d18ad53a1b61504051fb3ffcf93.png[/img]

The actual damage recorded by CLS is 8243.

[/spoiler]

Average damage

[spoiler]

The average damage when taking into account critical damage is

[/spoiler]

Healing calculation

Base Healing

[spoiler]

The base healing formula for a healer using a variety of sources of Healing Done and Healing Taken and Healing Received isThe Tooltip value is increased by Restoration Master, Soul Siphoner, Major Mending and the Ritual Mundus. These add additively. Healing Done was tested with Blessed. Healing Taken was tested with Tormentor and Leeching sets. Healing Received was tested to be additive with Quick Recovery [Champion Point], Rapid Mending [Heavy Armour Passive], Minor Vitality [Swallow Soul & Coagulating Blood], Burning Heart [Draconic Power Passive] and Quick to Mend [Argonian Passive].

Example

A C160 Argonian cast Healing Springs. This character has 12% Healing Taken from the Tormentor and Leeching Sets and has 100 points in Blessed (25% Healing Done) and 100 points in Quick Recovery (16% Healing Received). In addition, this character is wearing 7 Heavy armour pieces (7% Healing Received), has the Minor Vitality buff, has a Draconic Power ability active and has 3 points in the Quick to Mend passive. This tooltip value includes the bonuses from Restoration Master, Major Mending and the Ritual Mundus.

The recorded in-game healing is 3264.

[/spoiler]

Application of equations

Champion Point System

Warrior

[spoiler]

Most players will be looking to spend points in either Hardy, Elemental Defender or Thick-Skinned. Sorcerers will also be looking to spend points into Bastion. Not much can be said for Armour Focus or Spell Shield as a 100 points provides only 5281 resistance which corresponds to 8% mitigation at C160 which corresponds to 20 points in Hardy or Elemental Defender. In addition, Armour Focus and Spell Shield are affected by percentage penetration and are not taken into account when a damage shield is used.

[/spoiler]

Thief

[spoiler]

For Magicka builds, the decision is on how to spread points between Magician and Arcanist. Essentially, we’re trying to optimise the function

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/c214533a81871daf4e80c8016e8182bf.png[/img]

This function represents the average magicka gain per second. Since this spreadsheet is rather complicated, I recommend selecting your Race and Class and then filling in all the grey filled cells. Most of them should be reasonably easy to understand and I’ve made comments for most of them. Ensure that the Final Magicka Recovery and Final Spell Cost matches your ingame values to make sure all inputs are correct. The two inputs that require further explanation are Average Base Spell Cost and Cast per second. Both can be determined from a parse. I’ll provide an example in the future. But for now assume that I casted 10 Funnel Healths and 1 Crippling Grasp over 20 seconds. Look up the Base Spell Cost of both spell which are 1233 and 2923 respectively. The Average Base Spell Cost can be determine from Input – Spell Cost or from the Skill Data spreadsheet. So my Average Base Spell Cost is (1233*10+2923)/11=1387. Cast per second is 11/20 = 0.55. Look over to the right and find Recovery 0, Cost Reduction 0 to determine the ideal CP distribution.

If you wanted to mess around with the number of jewellery to enchant remove the impact of jewellery from Magicka Recovery – Gear and Spell Cost – Gear (Flat CR) then just look at the corresponding output line. The spreadsheet can be found at

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yp90QzJnsL5PNqSgKqDGv9IpYzJajG_tnlslFNPOf9g/edit?usp=sharing

[/spoiler]

Mage

[spoiler]

For a Magicka damage dealer, there are five signs of interest, Elemental Expert, Thaumathurge, Spell Erosion, Elfborn and Staff Expert.

The mechanics of all these except Staff Expert have been discussed in the sections on Critical Modifier and Base Damage. Staff expert increases the damage of light and medium attacks that is your weaving damage. Light and medium staff attacks are also increased by Elemental Expert.

In order to determine the optimal Champion Point distribution, we first need to consider the ratio of Elemental, DoT and Staff attacks. Then we can optimise the following function

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/34fbbb2fa63e4600fc57d33892aaed2d.png[/img]

One way to approach this is to enumerate all possible CP distributions and then calculate the function. However, this is quite a challenging task since with 167 Mage CP and 5 CP stars to consider the total possible of combinations is 30507895 (166C4). Although, some of these can be eliminated through some insight on the relative strengths of the CP stars. While this can be done, I have decided to make the equation a bit more accessible with the loss of a tiny amount of accuracy. I’ve included a spreadsheet that will do this

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zp9v1Vp4Z7X6zfDfcxTwyAnejv-tEC5LujbXYBiVMDk/edit?usp=sharing

On the first sheet you’ll see a range of inputs including

• Number of Champion Points
• Critical Chance
• Critical Modifier
  • Defined as Critical Damage/Non-Critical Damage – 1
• Target Resistance
• Target Level
• Percentage Penetration
• Flat Penetration
• Elemental Ratio
• DoT Ratio
• Staff Ratio

It will output the ideal CP distribution in Elemental Expert, Thaumathurge, Staff Expert, Elfborn and Spell Erosion. It does not take into account the Elfborn jump points in the calculation so if it suggest a non-Elfborn jump point it will also display the nearest Elfborn jump points. Also all CP passives are ignored. This means that there may be situations where it will not recommend putting 30 points into the Apprentice first.

[b]How it works?[/b]
It starts by assuming you have 0 in all 5 CP stars. It then calculates the following function
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/34fbbb2fa63e4600fc57d33892aaed2d.png[/img]
for an increase of 1 point in each star. It selects the optimum distribution then keeps going until it reaches your stated number of Champion Points. I had to use a continuous equation to model how the CP stars vary with points spent. The equation used can be seen in Sheet 3. Because a continuous equation was used some deviation from my previous discrete optimisation will be present. In addition, I could not include the impact of Elfborn jump points thus jump points are suggested at the end of the optimisation. While the previous discrete optimisation is probably better to model the jump points, I hope that this method of presenting the ideal mage CP distribution for magicka builds will be easier to use thus increasing it’s accuracy as you can put in your own relevant values instead of looking for the closest table match.

[/spoiler]

Nirnhoned, Precise and Sharpened

[spoiler]

When evaluating between these three item traits it is imperative to recall the average damage formula
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/c8e47c9206272329442c1f052556e45b.png[/img]
where
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/6c76bc41801c5681338675f8df447ea1.png[/img]
The skill coefficient, a, depends on the skill in question and an excellent list of skill coefficients can be found at http://esoitem.uesp.net/viewSkills.php. b is around 10.5 for most abilities. Attacker Bonus refers to certain Champion Points like Elemental Expert, Mighty or Thaumathurge and includes certain skills and passives such as Major or Minor Berserk. For simplicity, we can just set this to one and ignore it for the large part.
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/a3e8ed29ac85f6385da83e30b32c5558.png[/img]
Armour debuffs include Major/Minor Breach, 5 piece bonus of Roar of Alkosh and the Crushing Enchantment. An example of percentage penetration is Penetrating Magic (Destruction Staff). Flat Penetration includes the base penetration of 100, Concentration and Spell Erosion/Piercing.
In order to compare the three traits, we can convert both the additional flat penetration offered by Sharpened and the extra critical chance into Spell/Weapon Damage. Finally we can convert the Spell/Weapon damage equivalence to an increase in an arbitrary ability tooltip.
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b7e1a10f2fe44d0a348e0bf093431f10.png[/img]
I’ll use a generic magicka build as an example, I’ll assume a Magicka pool of 40k and Spell Damage of 3k which is reasonably typical for endgame builds. Only legendary trait values are considered.

Nirnhoned
It increases the tooltip value of a weapon by 11% which in turn increases Spell/Weapon damage by 11% before any buffs. For a staff, this corresponds to a base increase in spell damage of 146 Spell Damage and for dual wielding swords it corresponds to 175 Spell Damage. Typically this base spell damage is buffed by 25% by Major and Minor Sorcery. So you would expect 183 Spell Damage for a staff and 219 Spell Damage for dual wielding swords. Thus if we’re dual wielding swords, Nirnhoned leads to an increase ability tooltip of roughly 3.2%.

Precise

The 7% increased weapon and spell critical can be converted to an equivalent spell damage with the following equation
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/2e08159d5318ba91f289615627110a2c.png[/img]
A reasonably common spell critical for endgame builds is around 60% and a critical modifier between 0.6-0.7 is typical for most magicka builds. This assumes around 30 points in Elfborn which is a fairly common recommendation from my Champion Point optimisation spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zp9v1Vp4Z7X6zfDfcxTwyAnejv-tEC5LujbXYBiVMDk/edit?usp=sharing) thus the spell damage equivalence for Precise is about
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/a14bcc98f941708c3e08c9dc585d6084.png[/img]
This translates to an increase in average ability tooltip by 3.5%. Note that we can reach this answer quicker by noting that
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b0e456a1b8187b22a006b0a3b38309dc.png[/img]

Sharpened
In a similar fashion to the previous section, the increased physical and spell penetration of Sharpened can be converted to an equivalent spell damage or more directly into an increase in ability tooltip
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/4eb213a3c116c3240cb0a5e9d334837e.png[/img]
where Mitigation has been separated into a Sharpened component and everything else. The key concern here is that the Resistance of a target cannot go below zero. Let us consider a typical 4 person dungeon, bosses have around 18k resistance and trash have anywhere from 10 to 18k resistance (http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/2-1-boss-resistance/). The main source of armour debuff is Major Breach (5280) and Flat Penetration for Magicka Characters is at least 4984 (100 base + 4884 Concentration). Flat Penetration is typically higher by around 1-2k depending on the number of points assigned into Spell Erosion. This means the average boss will have about 6.5k resistance and 100% of the Sharpened bonus is used meaning that it increase ability tooltip by
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/be0b8972f9ca271d690a7d1eb5273e1e.png[/img]
Unfortunately, Sharpened is useless on any mob with less than about 12k resistance as its resistance is already reduced to zero from other sources. So at first glance, the optimal trait seems to be Sharpened for bosses and Precise for trash, similar to the meta on Live.
But there may be another way around this, given that we are reaching unmitigated damage it is reasonable to remove all points from Spell Erosion and apply it all into Elfborn instead. Then a more interesting question would be how much resistance does Sharpened need to remove for it to be equivalent to Precise. Precise provides 3.5% increase in ability tooltip, this value can be achieved if Sharpened removes at least 1750 resistance. My optimal champion point spreadsheet tends to suggest around 30 points in Elfborn which corresponds to this value. Thus it is possible to simply use Sharpened for most trash and all bosses and put 66 points in Elfborn (67 points in Elfborn works the same as 66 points so spent the last point in something else like Staff Expert. In this way Sharpened is acting at worst equivalent to Precise but you get additional points in Elfborn thus increasing your average damage or it significantly outperforms Precise on bosses.

Although I’ve only discussed magicka builds primarily, this conclusion of using Sharpened in most situations holds true for stamina builds as well. Stamina builds do not have a Flat Penetration skill but this is compensated by several armour debuff methods.

[/spoiler]

Divines and Infused

[spoiler]

The current meta advice suggest using Infused on large pieces (Head, Chest, Legs and Shield) and Divines on small pieces (Shoulders, Waist, Hands and Feet). There are no other viable traits for optimising damage. However, with the buffs to the Thief and Shadow mundus stones this advice is called into question. In this section, I will derive the conditions where Infused or Divines should be used. It is quite laborious mathematics and this section has been implemented in my spreadsheet. The equations here are to explain how the calculation is done.

The amount of magicka gained from using Infused on a legendary large piece instead of Divines, Inf, is173 is the difference between in enchantment of a C160 legendary Magicka enchant on an Infused large piece compared to a non-Infused large piece. CPI and Skills were defined in Stat Pool.

The average damage when using an Infused piece is

The coefficient, k, in this section isDmg_Inf can be separated into two parts, Dmg_Base and Dmg’_Inf. The former is the damage component from not using any trait and the latter is the bonus damage coming from using infused

The average damage increase when using Divines depends on the mundus stone. For completeness, I’ll analyse the Apprentice, Mage, Thief and Shadow mundus stones.

Apprentice

The average damage increase when using Divines with the Apprentice mundus isSkill_SD refers to abilities and buffs that increase spell damage, notably Minor and Major Sorcery and the Expert Mage passive.

Again this can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Divine^App’

Mage

The average damage increase when using Divines with the Mage mundus isSkills refers to abilities and passives that increase maximum Magicka and was defined in more detail in <b>Stat Pool</b>.

Again this can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Divine^Mage’

Thief

The average damage increase when using Divines with the Thief mundus is

Again this can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Divine^Thief’

Shadow

The average damage increase when using Divines with the Shadow mundus is

I’m using a simplified form of the Critical Modifier equation here but in my implementation of the equation in my spreadsheet I use the more exact form of the Critical Modifier. Skill_S refers to skills that increase the critical modifier such as Piercing Spear [Templar passive], Hemorrhage [Nightblade passive], Trap Beast [Minor Force] and Aggressive Warhorn [Major Force].

This can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Divine^Shadow’

The way to decide between Infused and Divines is then to evaluate Dmg_Inf’ - Dmg_Divine’ with the corresponding mundus stone. Since several variables need to be taken into account, I’ve simply implemented my calculation into my spreadsheets. On a personal note, in the majority of calculations that I have performed Divines with Thief or Shadow outperforms Infused. However, if the Apprentice or Mageis used then Infused on large pieces is preferred.

[/spoiler]

Mundus stone: Apprentice, Mage, Thief and Shadow

[spoiler]

There are four mundus stones of interest to optimising Magicka based damage dealers. They are the Apprentice, Mage, Thief and Shadow. I’ll begin with the average damage equation for each mundus. Astute readers might notice a striking similarity with the section <b>Divines and Infused</b>.

ApprenticeIn this section, the coefficient, k, is defined to be

Skill_SD refers to abilities and buffs that increase spell damage, notably Minor and Major Sorcery and the Expert Mage passive.

Dmg_App can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_App’. The former is the damage component without any mundus active and the latter is the damage from using the Apprentice mundus.Mage

Skills refers to abilities and passives that increase maximum Magicka and was defined in more detail in Stat Pool. Separating into a base and Mage component yieldsThiefOnce again, this can be separated into a base and Thief component.

Shadow

I’m using a simplified form of the Critical Modifier equation here but in my implementation of the equation in my spreadsheet I use the more exact form of the Critical Modifier. Skill_S refers to skills that increase the critical modifier such as Piercing Spear [Templar passive], Hemorrhage [Nightblade passive], Trap Beast [Minor Force] and Aggressive Warhorn [Major Force].

This can be separated into two components, Dmg_Base and Dmg_Shadow’From this, we can easily conclude that the Apprentice mundus is preferred to the Mage mundus in nearly all cases for increasing damage sincewhereAt C160 the Apprentice provides 166 Spell Damage, <i>b</i> is approximately 10.5 and Skill_SD is typically 1.2 due to the Major Sorcery buff. The Mage gives 1320 Magicka at C160 and Skills is typically around 1.31 for a Sorcerer and is lower for Templars. Putting this into the equation, we obtainThus the Apprentice is preferred. The Mage mundus is sometimes preferred due to increasing Magicka pool for stronger shields and higher pet damage as these scale solely off Magicka.

For the comparison between the Apprentice and Thief there are no easy simplifications and one is left to evaluateThere are many variables and no obvious simplifications thus I have simply implemented the laborious calculation in my spreadsheet. Similarly the comparison between Apprentice and Shadow is very involved and is implemented in the spreadsheet.

While the equations presented for the Thief are a crude approximation due to the complicated rounding in the more accurate formula for Critical Modifier, it is possible to make a rough comparison between the Thief and Shadow mundus stones.Thus the Thief is better ifThis is equivalent toIn the Orsinium PTS, the Shadow mundus increases Critical Modifier by 12% and the Thief increases Critical Chance by 11%. Putting this values in, we get the following inequalitywhich means that Thief is better than Shadow if your Critical Modifier is at least ~10% greater than your Critical Chance.

[/spoiler]

Percentage Penetration and Spell Damage Equivalence

[spoiler]

Since Maelstrom weapons cannot come in Nirnhoned, it is natural to ask how does a non-set Nirnhoned destruction staff compare to a Sharpened Maelstrom destruction staff.

To evaluate this, let us consider T1 and T2, where T1 is the base damage with S1 extra spell damage and T2 be the base damage with no extra spell damage but 4% extra penetration. Then

where M is Max Magicka, S0 is the base spell damage, S1 is the extra spell damage for T1 and

Note that any penetration that is common to T1 and T2 can be seen as just a reduction in the Resistance.

We then proceed to solve T1-T2=0 for S1

We can rearrange this to get

Now we have to put some typical endgame values, I’ll let M=43487, S_0=3764 and Mit=0.19 (17k boss resistance, 14% penetration, 4984 Focus, 0 Spell Erosion). Mit’=0.04*0.34

Thus for the stats assumed a Sharpened Maelstrom Destruction Staff is better than a non-set Nirnhoned Destruction Staff as the 4% additional penetration is equivalent to 133 Spell Damage which is less than the Maelstrom enchantment of 189 Spell Damage

[/spoiler]

Julianos and Twice-Born Star

[spoiler]

Due to changes to Elfborn and skills that increase critical damage, TBS is no longer optimal from a DPS point of view. In the spreadsheets below, I have introduced a new metric called the Combined Metric. This metric was introduced because staff attacks scale differently from abilities. For most abilities 10.5 Max Magicka ~ 1 Spell Damage but for staff attacks 40 Max Magicka ~ 1 Spell Damage. To obtain the Combined Metric, I assume approximately 15% of total dps comes from Heavy (Medium Attacks) and 85% comes from abilities, then the weighted average of the Ability and Attack metric results in the Combined Metric.

We see then that for the Combined Metric on staffs, Law of Julianos is better by about 1.5%. Previously, my calculations showed that Law of Julianos was ~0.5% better than TBS but that was without taking into account the higher Attack Metric. On the dual wield bar, we should use the Ability Metric since no weaves are used and in this situation Julianos is better by around 0.5%.

If you were to replace one magicka enchantment on a large piece in favour of health so that the Health with Julianos and Twice-Born Star are comparable then on the staff bar Julianos is better by 0.1% but worse by 0.1% on the dual wield bar. To help put all these percentage differences into context, my rough calculations suggest that not having Divines on one piece (maybe you have been unlucky and have a bank full of Well-Fitted Molag Kena shoulders/helm) equates to a loss of ~0.5%

I’ve heard of people saying that Twice-Born Star is better with lower CP but I have yet to see extensive calculations that demonstrate this. Using the spreadsheets below, I varied the amount of CP by adjusting both the number of points invested into the Mage Tree and assumed that the first 100 points will be put into Elemental Expert followed by all points (up to 66) into Elfborn. While this CP distribution is not absolutely optimal, it is reasonably close. In this case, even with 100 Mage CP (300 total CP) Julianos is better than Twice-Born Star on the staff bar (0.3%). On the Dual-Wield bar, Julianos outperforms Twice-Born Star at 129 Mage CP (387 total CP)

Note: Ignore the Magicka Recovery and Spell Cost boxes. I was too lazy to move them away before I took the pictures.

Twice-Born Star Staff

Twice-Born Star Dual Wield

Law of Julianos Staff

Law of Julianos Dual Wield

[/spoiler]

Damage distribution

[spoiler]

Damage calculation in ESO is rather straightforward you either crit or don’t crit. This leads to a binomial distribution. If you repeat the event (of using an ability) a sufficient number of times you can approximate the binomial distribution with a normal distribution with the following statistics
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/61662e6f049959bb0e8c03c16d6fdd8f.png[/img]
Since stats can already be estimated along with tooltip values and base damage numbers, it is possible to create total damage normal distributions (or DPS distributions) for different item sets.

So if I were to redo my section on Julianos and Twice-Born Star, I could use the calculated stats to calculate the tooltip value of Force Pulse. Here is a summary of the data required to create the normal distributions
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/16c57a35d6614f38ce30632d1c2c0422.png[/img]
and the distributions themsevles
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/a9d73ccaaf67a357e58fb3df5de03813.png[/img]
It’s rather interesting because initially I thought that while the average of Julianos was greater than Twice-Born Star, I felt that the higher crit modifier of Twice-Born Star would mean that there would be a good chance of it doing more damage than Julianos if crits went your way. However, in the case of 300 Force Pulses which is 100 cast or about 100 seconds of just using Force Pulse, not only is the average damage of Julianos greater than Twice-Born Star but the maximum damage for Twice-Born Star is rather similar to Julianos. It is still true that the SD of Julianos is smaller than the SD of Twice-Born Star. Even if Force Pulse were casted only 10 times (30 counts), you would expect similar’ish distribution.

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/cb97e0c6dc2ecffa63712efa850fd112.png[/img]
From here it’s straightforward to calculate the difference of the distributions
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/ab8617aa20061ebb7d63ac69b28fa6f4.png[/img]
We can setup damage thresholds and calculate the chance that a single test will be incorrect, inconclusive or correct. Someone a bit more motivated than me could then calculate the minimum sample size to get a reasonable estimate of the distribution and the chance of Type 1 or Type 2 errors.

To show that the calculated curves are reasonably close to the simulated curves, I’ll start of by showing the situation where you cast Force Pulse a 100 times so 300 data points and your recorded the total damage. If you repeated it a 100 times you’ll get something like the green curve below
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b317eb4a2af6aa009819d6cf1f6ddbed.png[/img]
It doesn’t match the calculated curve (blue) that well because repeating it 100 times is a bit low. If you repeated it 10000 times, things get much better
[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b1e30417dea3d345ece323b7d56dcd0b.png[/img]
For me this means that I’m better off just calculating the mean and basing my conclusions off that or calculating the damage distributions (now that I’ve done the maths once and have a few scripts that are easily editable) than spending time in game casting Force Pulse on a boss repeatedly to get determine which set is better. I’ll still keep testing in game to ensure the base equations are accurate though.

[/spoiler]

Scathing Mage and Law of Julianos

[spoiler]

In the Thieves Guild update, the Scathing Mage set was buffed. In this post, I’ll compare Scathing Mage to Law of Julianos.

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/bb063b468347e95e7047caabd7109e95.png[/img]

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/23bb51c96f2fb73ab8ec479737736122.png[/img]

There are several approaches in determining when Scathing Mage is preferred over Julianos. I suggest looking at the number of attacks required to proc Scathing Mage. From there we can estimate the uptime of Scathing Mage and then it is a straightforward comparison to Julianos.  I’ll show some example calculations based on my sorcerer.

The proc chance per attack with Scathing Mage is quite simplistically

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/39bd55e4010aa3de560a75e0ca2b5338.png/img

Assuming that all attacks are independent we can model the resulting distribution of required attacks to proc Scathing Mage with a geometric distribution. In order to demonstrate that the geometric distribution is a suitable model I did some in-game testing. I counted the number of hits required to proc Scathing Mage. I only did 50 trials but I was reasonably convinced by the results. I trial here is defined as the number of hits needed to proc Scathing Mage. The image bellow summarises my in-game testing as well as the theoretical model. I was reasonably convinced with validity of the model despite the low number of trials.

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/dc2fb0638eeea04db760d3d713f1e828.png[/img]

The median of this distribution is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/abb9cc082e2dd040ff366d470e080985.png/img

The median corresponds to the point where 50% of the time you’ll need less than X attacks to proc Scathing Mage and equivalently 50% of the time you’ll need more than X attacks to proc Scathing Mage. From this, it is reasonably straightforward to calculate the median amount of time required to proc Scathing Mage

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/2fce4dc69097fa60da63c88df4a279cf.png/img

From this the uptime of Scathing Mage is expected to be

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/2d0b1cb207399236d4f207555a772ccd.png/img

where there is an implicit assumption that the internal cooldown of Scathing Mage is the duration of the proc, which is based on personal testing during the IC PTS. The effective spell damage of Scathing Mage is then

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/329dffa8d5bd76270c9a6437147e8f54.png/img

Or to simplify it in a single equation

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/b49f7d5d2c2df70fc2e9c9f642313d56.png/img

Let us consider a magicka Sorcerer using the Thief mundus (6 pieces of Legendary divines) and with a precise staff. The spell critical of this character is 71.2% or 74.2% with Minor Prophecy active. I timed myself doing 50 Force Pulse/LA weaves and could do it in 1.16 seconds per weave or equivalently 3.45 attacks per second. Since this is probably close to the upper limit of attacks per second, I would estimate that the upper limit of the Scathing Mage 5 piece bonus for the magicka Sorcerer in question is

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/b2280c04400c4d3902a0ec4cb1469035.png[/img]

A more practical approach to estimating SM SD equivalence is by looking at a parse and determining the number of non-DoT attacks per second. In the example parse below, I estimate the number of non-Dot attacks to be 84 (Force Pulse + Crystal Fragments + Light Attack) which means that the number of non-DoT attacks in this example is 2.37 (parse duration 35.5s).

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/0fcffd520f31a5d7cf527e0d7b8fea5e.png/img

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/1fadf00f2cab5bc35f05b7815c7943ff.png [/img]

This is 97 SD greater than the 5 piece bonus of Julianos. Since this character has 43486 Max Magicka and 3189 Spell Damage, the 80 spell damage corresponds to an average tooltip damage increase of ~1.7%

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/ac81b09e0c86ff5b02e226815f968e9d.png/img

So based on the example parse above, if I were to use Scathing Mage instead of Julianos I would expect a DPS increase of around 425 (1.7%*25000). There is a slight simplification here since Light Attacks depend more strongly on Spell Damage than abilities so in fact my Light Attacks will do more than 1.7% damage with Scathing Mage.

However most Sorcerers rely quite a bit on Overload so the SM SD equivalence during Overload needs to evaluated. The magicka Sorcerer is using Nirnhoned swords (Spell Critical of 64.2%) for Overload and does 0.862 non-Dot attacks per second

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/53fdb3d0debd9e510b9ecb5b668fba95.png/img

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/7fce65bb137f736cf6541a23b0e618d3.png[/img]

This is 38 SD less than the 5 piece of Julianos and corresponds to an average damage loss of ~0.6% during Overload or around 200 DPS (0.6%*32000).

[img]https://embed.gyazo.com/cbbcdc7c53a45ecd4f84acd046128486.png[/img]

During Overload, I use about 18 Ultimate per second. It takes 6 seconds of non-Overload time to generate 18 Ultimate. Thus on average Scathing Mage provides an increase of 336 DPS.

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/cbbcdc7c53a45ecd4f84acd046128486.png/img

This is based on the assumption that you Overload all things equally.

To Precise or not?

An additional question that arises when using Scathing Mage is whether a Precise or Sharpened/Nirnhoned weapon should be used.

Percentage penetration can be converted into equivalent spell damage with the following equation

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/3ada96f9efdc3420d21eb367c5db50ae.png/img

where the variables Mit_pen and Mit_Base are defined as

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/7b6269eff8d8e32e404b97b768d552e6.png/img

For simplicity, b is assumed to be 10.5. Using some typical values, 14% penetration (Sharpened) is worth about

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/be902ff2a43440be00d60f24d023360a.png/img

Additional Spell Critical from Precise can be converted into equivalent spell damage with the following equation

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/041cfc55fa27b0f4d18543a469916e0b.png/img

Again using typical values, 7% Spell Critical (Precise) is worth about

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/904a16e266123aa639b78339a64efa80.png/img

This means that for mobs with 13k resistance which is a typical value for bosses debuffed with Major Breach, Sharpened/Nirnhoned is preferred over Precise. However, going with Precise will increase the uptime of Scathing Mage and the question is whether the increased uptime will compensate for the difference. Using my first parse with Force Pulse, the spell damage equivalence of Scathing Mage is expected to be 418 with a Sharpened Staff

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/56f87973fa67c101399fe90a5e4728b2.png/img

While the spell damage equivalence with Precise is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/03f64160421f05f6216c5df3ec104611.png/img

Thus the average Spell Damage gain from using a Precise weapon with Scathing Mage compared to Sharpened is 9 base spell damage which is increased to around 11 by Major Sorcery and Expert Mage. However, the spell damage equivalent difference between Sharpened and Precise on a PvE monster with 13000 resistance is 93 which is larger thus a Sharpened weapon is still preferred even when Scathing Mage is used.

[/spoiler]

Molag Kena and Nerien’eth

[spoiler]

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to compare Molag Kena to Nerien’eth on a single target.

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/51745b00e9d25ae967e6af384c879ab7.png[/img][img]https://i.gyazo.com/0ec8951c920931204c9e9750e772835d.png[/img]

The image for Nerien’eth was taken without CP. The tooltip is increased by both Elemental Expert and Thaumathurge.

My Max Magicka and Spell Damage with Nerien’eth is 43486 and 3189, respectively. The spell damage is with Major Sorcery and 3 Sorcerer abilities slotted. Molag Kena provides 129 Spell Damage and an additional 516 Spell Damage when proc’ed. I estimate a maximum uptime of Molag Kena at 86% (6/7 as you cannot re-proc it when it is active). This means that the maximum Spell Damage from Molag Kena is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/c8737a1ef76049810d16fc2e67e1c6fb.png/img

This is increased to 722 Spell Damage after taking into account Major Sorcery and 3 Sorcerer abilities (6% increased Spell Damage from Expert Mage passive). Based on my Max Magicka and Spell Damage, this corresponds to an increase of ability tooltips by ~9.8%

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/406434a5b7484e6175c0be7729bb8379.png/img

So we can roughly say that we would expect a DPS increase of ~9.8% with Molag Kena. This is an approximation since Light Attacks depend more on Spell Damage than abilities so will be increased by more than 9.8%.

There are two ways to determine the contribution of Nerien’eth. One way is to look at a parse. In the example parse below, we can estimate the DPS increase of Nerien’eth by dividing the total damage contribution of Lich Crystal by the total damage dealt less the damage done by Lich Crystal. For the example parse below it turns out to be ~9.8%, similar to the estimated upper bound DPS increase with Molag Kena.

[img]https://embed.gyazo.com/1fadf00f2cab5bc35f05b7815c7943ff.png[/img]

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/03728b91b444b5a5aee5326f5eab3d35.png/img

The method above does depend on the RNG or a particular parse so a theoretical approach would be beneficial. The DPS contribution of Nerien’eth can be modelled by first modelling the number of attacks required proc Nerien’eth with a geometric distribution and then we will be able to obtain the uptime of Nerien’eth and finally estimate the DPS from the uptime.

I first tested the validity of a geometric distribution with in-game testing. I counted the number of attacks required to proc Nerien’eth and made the following image

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/3993ed88b8b263545bf487f4200b291b.png/img

The median number of attacks required to proc Nerien’eth is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/733b8efb9fb4b271cf5bf692f6f4f31a.png/img

which means that the median amount of time required to proc Nerien’eth is

[img]https://i.gyazo.com/f6f27bb264fb434cbb5d49b071628c70.png[/img]

Since you cannot have two Lich crystals at once, the internal cooldown of Nerien’eth is estimated to be 3 seconds. Thus, I would expect one Lich crystal every

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/2bd5faede6423ce4dd0eaeb01494eb52.png/img

From my parse above, I did 84 non-DoT attacks over 35.5 seconds which means the number of non-DoT attacks that could proc Nerien’eth is 2.37. So I would expect one Lich crystal every

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/ebb9410f4990265279431636928ff6ab.png/img

The average damage for each Lich Crystal is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/9d760160a21b4057fa19f5f9d31708ea.png/img

Let’s say I have 100 in Elemental Exper (25%) and 2 in Thaumathurge (1.6%) and my spell critical is 71.2% and my critical modifier 0.62 then the average damage for each of my Lich Crystal is

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/3e7495c85f1c7b6043961c0b981bd5df.png/img

So my expected DPS with Nerien’eth is 2319 (13385/5.77) which was reasonably close to the example parse. Based on this, I conclude that Nerien’eth is comparable to Molag Kena for the rotation shown in the parse.

Additional note: I considered making a comparison between Molag Kena, Nerien’eth and Skoria but there is something very peculiar about Skoria. It appears that DoTs must be running for some period of time before it can actually proc. I counted the number of Puncturing Sweep hits required to proc Skoria and found that for the first few hits Skoria will never proc. This is shown in the image below. A similar result can be obtained when using Elemental Blockade (data not shown)

[img] https://i.gyazo.com/077b32051fa6c58cda73e308f6a3c0eb.png/img

[/spoiler]

Maw of the Infernal

Cost increase in Dark Brotherhood

Character SpreadSheets

Best character building site

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildEditor

[spoiler]

Only made them for Sorcerers, Templar and Nightblades at the moment.Feel free to make a copy for your own calculations.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e2M7ZU9ZKBxCNhDmvfS4GKPs_Nx7YLUny9vBmPaUmgA/edit?usp=sharing

@Beltan3 has made an awesome calculator. The post is at

http://tamrielfoundry.com/topic/stats-calculator/

and the calculator itself can be found at

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-_behjvbr6L0e2F3pge5aumfKInY6rsqv61x27JHic/edit#gid=1127244779

[/spoiler]

Other useful spreadsheets (I’ve listed them at various points in the post but sometimes I forget where they are too :/ )

TG Mage CP Distribution
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zp9v1Vp4Z7X6zfDfcxTwyAnejv-tEC5LujbXYBiVMDk/edit?usp=sharing

TG Skill Coefficients
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YN8YWDpi1-d4CfoagRy1F9ath2w2nb-TniL4MjdJdz4/edit?usp=sharing

• This topic was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by  Asayre.