3363

It’s still on sale at GMG. Didn’t see Kerzain’s post the first time, but I just now picked up a copy.

3364

Same, grabbed a copy and d/l it tonight. Any server/class/race recommendations for newbies, is there a Qt3 guild?

3365

It’s all one big server, so no worries about choosing. There are PvP campaigns, but you don’t have to worry about that yet (and when you do hit level 10 and get to choose one, pick Blackwater Blade for all new characters).

I’d be happy to suggest race/class/build basics, but you might provide a bit of guidance. Classic spellcaster, warrior or thief? Healer, tank, DPS? Do you focus more on PvE or PvP? There are a lot of combinations, and some work a lot better than others.

3366

I’ll focus on PvE and prefer a warrior, though perhaps one with a touch of magical abilities.

3367

I just got this. I like stealth or magic or pet classes. I also like PvP. What are the recommendations?

3368

There are three big choices to make: 1) Faction, 2) Race and 3) Class. I’ll summarize them below:

Faction. This is the most important choice, as it determines who you can group with. You will never see members of another faction outside of PvP, so you have to align with your friends and join the same one. Guilds can be multi-faction, so you can talk to everyone, but that’s it. There are three factions:

  • Aldmeri Dominion. High Elves, Wood Elves and Khajit. The faction leader is voiced by Kate Beckinsale, which is a selling point for some ;)
  • Daggerfall Covenant. Bretons, Orcs and Redguards
  • Ebonheart Pact. Nords, Dark Elves and Argonians

They all have excellent questlines. I play Aldmeri Dominion, as that was where my launch guild chose to start. Note, you can buy upgrades in the shop that allow you to play any race (or an imperial) in any faction.

Class

There are two broad categories of builds, spellcasters (magicka builds) and weapon users (stamina builds). Each class has fairly tremendous flexibility, and each can be built primarily around magicka or stamina. Almost all builds will actually have both spells and weapon abilities, but their primary damage-dealing skills will be limited to either magicka or stamina, due to how they scale. In short, you may have a warrior who does damage with stamina-based weapon abilities, but they’ll still use magic spells for utility, crowd control and buffs.

  • Dragonknights. In a stamina build, they’re classic warriors (DPS or Tank). In a magicka build, they’re pyromancers. They’re great either way. Some of their signature skills include Dragon’s Blood (self-heal), Reflective Scales (wrap yourself in wings to reflect spells and arrows) and Dragon Leap (grow wings and leap into a group of foes, causing massive damag and a stun).

  • Templars. In a stamina build, they’re warrior-priests, who can DPS or Tank. In a magicka build, they’re the premiere healers. Any class can heal, but Templars are the best at it. They stab people to death with bolts of sunlight, debuff casters so their own spells hit them and have a wide variety of single-target and group heals.

  • Nightblades. Stamina NB’s are classic rogues, and they’re especially suited to dual-wield or bows. Magicka NB’s are elusive, sneaky bastards who drain life and become almost impossible to even see on the battlefield. The class has the skillset you’d expect – stealth, stuns from stealth, heal debuffs and the like.

  • Sorcs. Stamina sorcs are… well, they’re awful. This is the one class spec that has nothing going for it other than promises from the devs to fix it someday. Magicka sorcs are classic spellcasters, with an emphasis on lightning spells. Magicka sorcs are the only pet class (though pets are optional – I never use them on my sorc). They have teleports, powerful self-shields and a wide variety of ways to explode things with magick.

Races

Any race can work with any class. If you’re a min-maxer, however, it’s advisable to match your race with the resource you plan to use (magicka or stamina). Some races make much better spellcasters, and some make much better weapon users.

For spellcasters, it’s High Elves (bonuses to magicka and elemental damage), Breton (reduced spell cost, bonus to magicka) or Dark Elves (big bonus to fire damage, making them excellent Dragonknight casters).

For weapon builds, you want Imperial (huge stamina and health bonuses), Redguard (big stamina bonus and regen stamina on hit with melee weapons) or Orc (currently mediocre, but they are getting a bonus to melee damage in about 6 weeks). For stealth-based stamina builds, Wood Elves and Khajit have excellent bonuses.

The above isn’t exclusive. There are some very good and effective players with odd combinations working well. One of the best PvP’ers in NA is a stamina sorc. My PvP guild’s leader is an Argonian (who are good at nothing). So, you can make an orc sorcerer work – he’ll just do about 6 or 7% less damage than an Altmer. As a min-maxer myself, though, I’ll tell you that my NB is a Bosmer, my DK is an Imperial and my Sorc is a Breton who wishes he’d picked Altmer ;)

Anyway, enough for now.

3369

For magic/pets, go Sorcerer. Stealth is probably best with a Nightblade.

3370

If you want to see what kinds of skills each class has, here’s a link to a calculator. Choose your race and class first:

http://esohead.com/calculator/skills

You’ll note that on the second page, skills are listed in a bunch of categories to the left: Class, Weapon, Armor, World, etc. Only the three skill lines listed in Class are unique to a class. Anyone can grab the skills in Weapon, Guilds, etc.

3371

One thing to note, if you want to play a race that doesn’t normally play in the realm you want, you can buy the “Adventurer’s Pack” from the crown store, and it lets you play any race in any realm. You also get some other stuff too, like a pet and treasure chests and crap I think.

It’s like 1900 crowns, so if you buy a single month’s sub, you can pick it up without spending any additional money.

Regarding stealth, one thing that I like about this game is that you are less traditionally bound to class roles.

Basically, any class can be stealthy. Nightblade has some benefits to it, but it’s main stealth power isn’t really the primary stealth mechanic anyway. Any character can sneak around, and get various skills to support it. In terms of stuff like pickpocketing, anyone can focus on it just by doing it. If you steal stuff, then you open up the world skill tree Legerdemain, that improves things like pickpocket chance, stamina used by sneaking, etc.

Likewise, if you want to play a nightblade, you can play them in a variety of different ways. You can use a bow, or a two-handed sword, and go stamina based… or you can play it magicka based and focus more on their nightblade skills and less on the weapon, using something like a destruction staff instead.

It’s pretty wide open in a lot of cases.

Your class only affects 3 of your skill lines… the other, what, 10 or 15, are all available to anyone who wants to do them.

3372

FYI, Oghier mentions his Nightblade is a Bosmer…Bosmer is a Wood Elf.

Also, be aware that you can only have 5 skills available at a time, plus an Ultimate. Each skill costs 1 skill point to buy and needs to be on your hotbar while you play in order to level it up (Rank 1 to 4). Once you max out a skill, you get the option to Morph it which costs 1 skill point and allows you two choices to modify the skill to make it better. At level 15, you can equip another weapon in a second slot along with the same or different skills and swap between your two weapon sets. However, I don’t think you get any xp for skills that are not on your active hotbar.

Use all Bookshelves. All of them. Even if they have the red ‘Steal’ in the mouseover tip (just reading a bookshelf does not actually take anything…no idea why some bookshelves have the ‘Steal’ warning).

Lastly, a very minor tip that probably doesn’t really affect anyone but me…if you decide to get certified in Enchanting to do Enchanting Writs (aka Work Orders), hold on to any and all Jera Potency runes. I have to spend nearly a half hour every day looking through all the Guild Traders I can find for them just to complete the Teir 2 Enchanting Writs since they require Petty glyphs instead of Slight glyphs. grumble

3373

Also I think this is the first game I’ve encountered where the size of your resource pools also affects the magnitude of your skills. So the more stamina you have, the more damage your stamina consuming skills will do (same goes for magicka/magic consuming skills.) So this means if you’re looking to min/max, you’ll only want to invest in one stat (along with health, if needed.) Some tank or PvP builds might want to go for a more mixed approach.

3374

Personally I’m avoiding bookshelf on my enchanter until enchanting is in the 40s. Every skill in the game except enchanting is easy to raise.

3375

Problem is - class skills always use magicka (though a few have stamina morphs) and most weapon skills always use stamina (except for staffs), and since you’ll usually rely on a combination of weapon/class skills, you really need to divide points between them unless you’re a pure caster.

3376

Well from a min/max perspective, it means that if you’re focusing on stamina you should only use magicka skills for utility (ie. if you’re DK, you can still use stuff like reflective scales/dragon blood, since one doesn’t scale and the other scales with health) and if you’re magicka, you’re mostly using stamina for blocks/dodges (since there aren’t many stamina pure utility skills.)

Of course, you don’t really have to min/max to play the content ;)

3377

I have never heard about this in ESO. Has the community tested this and it is now considered standard knowledge? I have literally never read anything about max Stamina or Magicka having an effect on skills and spells that use those pools. If you have a link to a forum thread or article, I would really like to read it.

3378

Elder Scrolls Online is currently $12.00 at GMG when you use the following discount code:

ITADEA-LGMGSA-LESVVC

-Todd

3379

I just can’t resist at that price.

3380

Yup, someone even tested it in thread earlier in this thread.

I think this might have changed fairly recently (near the beginning of the year) with 1.6. I only started playing after so I’m not sure. You should be able to find recent discussions by googling for ESO damage formula etc.

3381

In-game, if you hover over the stamina or magicka bars in the character page, the tooltip says that maximum stamina/magicka is used to scale various stats including weapon damage. Check it out.

3382

Yeah, this is a new thing as of patch 1.6 I believe.
Now, every skill’s damage is directly affected by the stat used to execute it. Also, there are no more soft-caps on skills.

So, in order to really min/max it, you’d want to dump EVERYTHING into either stamina or magicka.

Pure casters are fairly easy to pull this off with, especially with a sorc or something where you can set up a shield that drains health from your magicka pool… in that case, maxing out your magic maximizes everything, and the only thing you sacrifice is a limitation in stamina for things like dodging.

For physical damage dealers, you end up wanting to max stamina, and then limit your class skills to either utility skills, or skills that you morph into stamina skills.