The Strider 2.0 (One Tamriel Ready) NB – BOW PVP Build

Replies: 6

Preamble: The original strider was a collection of data from right after the beta to the time it was posted. It included experiences pre champion system, pre craglorn all the way to running around IC ganking for Telvar stones. This update will not include the detailed narrative. This build is more refined, more specific and has very little flexibility. What it does have in common is the play style, this is meant for a bow hunter. Do you or have you bow hunted IRL? If you have you’ll understand the playstyle. This isn’t meant for everyone, it’s a build/style that requires a great deal of patience.

Class: Night Blade. This can work with other classes, but the NB has 3 critical class passives to this build

• Assassination – Master Assassin: Increases Weapon and Spell Damage while invisible or stealthed by 10%. The stun from the Crouch ability stuns for 100% longer.
• Assassination –Pressure Points: Increases Critical Strike and Spell Critical ratings by 1314 for each Assassination ability slotted.
• Assassination – Hemorrhage: Increases damage dealt by Critical Strikes by 10%.

Obviously Night Blade has more passives, but these 3 will be on your bow bar and they support your DPS output.

Race: Khajiit>Redguard>Wood Elf>Imperial: You can go research the passives, any one of these will work, Khajiit will give you the best DPS output for a stealth bow gank build. We can haggle redguard>Wood Elf, meh. If you have race tokens to burn try them all, lol. My toon is an Imperial. I’ve had it since right after beta and I don’t want to spend the money doing a race change.

Mundus: The Warrior – We are stacking weapon damage. You can test shadow and thief if you want, with all the impen and shields in Cyrodiil it’s hard to discern value of either or as it largely depends on the target. For me I like to take the guess work out because I have so little time to play so I focus on one thing and stack it. It’s by no means the perfect methodology, but I’m hitting pretty hard with Warrior.

Gear: Well this is it isn’t it? Let me say straight away there can be MULTIPLE variations. Spriggans, Night Mother, Automaton…. There are so many new sets most of them add good value to the build. You’re going to have 2, 5 piece sets and a 1 piece.  Let’s get maelstrom out of the way first…. They are the best in slot still for weapons because of the 1 piece bonus. The maelstrom bow doesn’t help us here, this is, honestly, a snipe spam build so buffing volley isn’t needed. Your 2H weapon is there to give you rally and a gear slot bonus a maelstrom weapon here is a waste of a maelstrom weapon for this build.

Gear Set 1: 1 piece Molag Kena or Valedrith. This is going to be a shoulder or helm and it’s going to give you +129 weapon damage bonus from the 1 slot. We want to go med armor here I’m not screwing around with the undaunted passives for more resource pool. Either of these sets works because they can be used elsewhere in your ESO gaming portfolio. Grab another valedrith and you have perhaps the most powerful monster set in PVP right now. Another Kena is going to give you access to more weapon OR spell damage (nice for your magi based alt). For this build the goal is 1 piece weapon damage. In terms of traits you want divines if possible but take the best you can get.

Gear Set 2: Marksmen Crest. I know you’re shocked on a bow build. This only comes from Cyrodiil, you can find pieces for sale in guilds. 2 body 3 jewels. Body pieces are medium, stam enchant and DIVINES. (I have Boots and Belt) Jewels are robust and you’re going to throw weapon damage glyphs on them. Spend the money and get purple jewels, gold if you can swing it. Improve the body pieces to gold if you can afford it, gold glyphs all around.

What Marksman Crest gives you:

(2 Items) Adds 129 Stamina Recovery

(3 Items) Adds 129 Stamina Recovery

(4 Items) Adds 129 Weapon Damage

(5 Items) Reduce the cost of your Stamina abilities by 5% and increase the damage of your Bow abilities against Players by 8%.

**** The 5th bonus doesn’t show up on your stat sheet, but it’s potent. Remember this is a PVP build, this set should be swapped if you PVE with this toon that 8% bonus only applies in cyrodiil or sparring.****

Gear Set 3: So with the above you have 4 body and weapon slot (1 bow, 2H) open so we get our next 5 piece. This is where you can drop in one of the new one tamriel sets. Spriggans would work well here. Alchemist is stellar here as well but we don’t really need the health and it’s kind of a throw away for 2 slot bonuses. I went with a crafted set. Why? Because I wanted all divines and didn’t want to grind my little ass off for the exact pieces I wanted. You have the time? Go ahead. I went with old reliable Hundings. I had several pieces already, certainly you can go with other sets here. Leki works, so would night mothers gaze. Hundings just continues to be a solid performer, its time tested. I’m getting crit, weap damage and stamina. So 4 med armor pieces stam enchant and DIVINES. 2H maul, Bow.

Nirnhoned on the the bow would be great. I had one already with sharpened. The 2H (I had one sharpened) is for rally, if you are going to craft it consider if you are going to flip to a 2H melee build down the line with this weapon, if you are sharpened or nirnhoned. If you are going to use this weapon exclusively for this build consider powered which will increase your healing done. Powered will buff the rally heal and vigor. All the pieces in this gear set should be improved to gold if you can.

**** It’s pretty much sharpened or go home****

What Hundings gives you: 

(2 items) Adds 688 Weapon Critical

(3 items) Adds 967 Max Stamina

(4 items) Adds 688 Weapon Critical

(5 items) Adds 300 Weapon Damage.

Skills & Bars: Quick note here you can forgo Focused aim all together and use a heavy bow attack freeing up the slot space. More so if you go to atronach in the CP and bump up bow expert those heavy attacks can do a lot of damage.

Bar 1 – Bow bar

1. Focused Aim: Physical damage this is the big daddy. You should be hitting anywhere from 7K to 18K plus with this if you follow the buff rotation I give you.
2. Poison Injection: Execute and damage buffs from CP as well. This hits dam hard, but has a shorter range then Aim. If you are in range this should follow your first or second focused aim.
3. Light Weight Beast trap: I use this as intended so ya, set your trap it’s nice but it’s more importantly adding 3% damage from the fighters guild passive “slayer”.
4. Camouflage/Evil Hunter: This is a pick em because Camo hunter gives a redundant buff to slot 5 relentless focus they both give minor berserk. Evil lessens the stam cost of fighter guild skills. We need one of them for the major savagery buff and the +3% for the fighters guild passive “slayer” you pick.
5. Relentless focus: This is going to give us minor berserk and endurance. This also gives you access to Assassins will and spectral bow. I’m not using it in this build but its there. Most importantly this is a class skill from the assassin line and gives us access to the important passives I mentioned above.
6. Flawless Dawnbreaker: I know everyone is using smiting, but flawless bumps your weapon damage. This is a ranged build take this morph. With it you not only get the flat 8% increase to weapon damage but another fighters guild skill which now makes your fighters guild passive “slayer buff” plus 9% weap damage. So +17% weapon damage….. ya….

Bar 2 – 2H: Note for this build it’s a buff bar so the weapon choice isn’t critical however if you want to convert the toon down the road for melee plan accordingly.

1. Radiant Mage Light: Mage guild skill. You can pop stealthers, you get a perm stun from stealth immunity and you reduce the damage from stealth attacks by 50%. This is a glass cannon build, having this up can save your bacon. Most importantly this gives us access to the mage guild passive Might of the guild which gives us access to empower increasing damage of your next attack by 20% within 5 seconds. **Mages Guild needs to be maxed to get the passive**
2. Piercing mark: Read the tool tip and you’ll know why this is here. Now this is also an advertisement you are around but it’s too good a skill to pass up on this set up.
3. Resolving Vigor: It’s our main heal.
4. Shadowy disguise: It’s a nice cloak and can get you out of jams but it also guarantees a crit within 3 seconds. Now the perfect rotation for this build is hard to pull off on the initial hit. I find myself using this after a few focused aims fly. I pop this and hit a poison injection.
5. Rally: Major Brutality, 33 second hot.
6. Open: I’m using werewolf berserker. Nice stam regen on my support bar and if I have to melee I can WW. I’m not using ultimate’s in this build much, Flawless is on the bow bar for the +8% weapon damage. I mean if I need a burst fine, but werewolf is for melee in my build. Put what you want here.

[IMG]http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e121/Malic-Valdon/Screenshot_20161128_180004_zpsiqlb9gcm.png[/IMG]

Image notes:

1. 4K weapon damage buffed. You get the +8% damage from Marksman when it hits.

2. There are minimal cyrodiil buffs here we had literally just lost scrolls.

3. Imperial: So I AM NOT GETTING more crit from a racial passive (you would if you were khajiit or bosmer). I am getting buffed stam and health though

Rotation:

1. Stealthed- Rally – Swap – Relentless focus. These two buffs should always be running both have long timers but get in the habit of recasting.
2. Target spotted – Swap –piercing mark. Now at this point if you picked your spot well you go to 3. The target though might be reacting to your mark, you told him you were around if he’s smart he is moving for cover. In that case, HOLD do not panic see what he does.
3. Radiant mage light – swap – focused aim, focused aim. You can get two off fast but remember the empower from the mage guild passive is only applicable on the NEXT ATTACK. The first one should hit HARD the second should bring the target under 50% in some cases you two shot them, in others it’s a filthy stinking magi tank 60K health build, and well you picked the wrong target.
4. Swap- shadowy disguise- swap – poison injection – focused aim. You have to be quick here and it takes practice to get the timing. You want that poison arrow to crit and disguise guarantees that it does.

So the steps above are all strung together in one rotation but the 4 steps are important. You can skip 4 and spam focused aim I mean really it should be close to over anyway. Remember this is the ideal rotation, minimally you want to use the empower buff on your snipe whenever you can. Ideally you want the target when under 50% to eat a poison injection crit.

Foods/Drinks & Potions/misc:       

1. Food: highest max stam food you can find.
2. You’re going to need a stam regen pot, CC immunity pot and invisibility pot.
3. Poisons: I don’t use them, I don’t want to DOT people here I’m ganking for burst. That isnt to say they arent viable with the build. Again I stack weapon damage for the simplicity you want to tweak and test go ahead.

Champion Points:

Blue: The Ritual

• 100 points to Mighty. Buff’s Physical and Poison Damage
• 40 points to Piercing
• 10 points to Thurmagurhe – Buffs poison arrow dot
• 27 points to Precise Strikes

Green: All of them        

• The Shadow – 13 points to Tumbling. Shouldn’t need this much but I always have something here.
• The lover – 64 points to Mooncalf. Boosts stam regen (you’ll probably come in around 1K depending on race)
• The Tower – 100 points to Warlord. Reduce stam cost of abilities

Red: You pick – This is where you bump defenses. You’re glass cannon with this build, plan accordingly. You are going to have to mix and match. Frankly there is nothing here that is going to save your ass if you get pinched by a zerg or ganked. I’ve maxed each one and fooled around with it, in the end I didn’t see much difference as cyrodiil has all sorts.

*** The current Valedrith/Viper poison damage NB META is real. Going all hearty is actually not a bad way to go. ***

Base Recommendation

• The Steed – Resistant – 30%
• The lady – Hearty – 30%
• The lady – Elemental Defender 30%
• The lord – Expert defender (reduces damage from LA & HA) 10%

Conclusion: Here is a link to the Strider 1.0. This had much more narrative on nuances of sniper play in cyrodiil as well as elaboration on passives etc. Thanks for the read and I will post pics soon in an update.

• This topic was modified 3 days, 6 hours ago by  Malic.