When I am done with the new Subnautica, I was thinking of giving ESO a try again. I played this years ago and played some kind of dragon night.
Anyway, in Skyrim I like playing a stealth mage, mostly because of all the utility. Things like casting frenzy, summoning minions, invisibility, explosive traps, and even casting fireballs.
Is there any kind of class with a lot of utility in it in ESO? I do plan on playing a solo character who will be very casual. Any recommendations? It seems that a magic bases sorcerer is considered one of the best solo classes. Anyone have thoughts on this?
Also is crafting really worth it? I remember liking at first because I could make myself better gear than I could find, but then at some point my crafting lagged behind the gear I was finding and so it seemed to become pointless after a while.
The key to that ring is it has no cooldown. So if you have 5 DoTs running every single tick on each of them will heal you. So you’re basically unkillable unless you get stunlocked or one-shot. I main a magsorc so I’m really unkillable.
You can get away without crafting, but it’ll be very expensive and your gear will never keep up. You really do need to research traits, because you can just create items out of thin air once they bind to your account in your “sticker book” but can only make them with traits you’ve researched. The whole crafting thing is one of my primary complaints about ESO. It’s opaque and annoying and I wish I didn’t have to do it.
The other half is the actual combat mechanics. Switching weapons all the time sucks balls. Light attack weaving is terrible and leads to carpal tunnel to boot. They should fix both of these things.
@DeepT If you ask three people to name the best solo class you’ll probably get 4 or 5 answers! Mag Sorc will almost certainly be one of those answers. The skills you want are damage dealing, self healing, and some kind of mitigation. Many classes provide those three in one form or another. Plenty of guides are available on the Internet with more details.
I personally enjoyed crafting in ESO but it will add a lot to your playing time while you gather resources and level up the professions. Leveling crafting requires points that would otherwise go into your combat skill lines so I spread out crafting over several alts. Some people probably try to do it all on one character. Since you are playing casually you shouldn’t out level your ability to use crafted gear if you stick with it. IIRC you won’t be making raid level gear, but most casuals aren’t going to be raiding anyway. You should be able to make good enough gear to do the story line and regular dungeons.
Any class can solo well. You are safe to pick based on flavor. I will say that the simplest classes are sorcs and templars, and the most complex are nightblades and necros. The gap isn’t very wide, though, so you needn’t pick or avoid anything based on that.
One hint if you’re uncertain about what to play: Pick Dark Elf or Khajit as your race. Those two can be optimal for any DPS spec, whether stamina or magicka based. Every class has stamina and magicka builds, and having the flexibility to switch easily can help hedge your bets.
That said, the gap between best race and worst race for a particular class is less than 10%, so pick what appeals.
I’ve seen one bar guides on Youtube that looked viable to me although you can get better results with two weapons once you get the hang of it. Light attack weaving can also boost your damage if you are good at it, but I’ve never been twitchy enough to get good at it. My results on the practice dummy were marginally better to the point where most of the time I just didn’t bother with it and I had no trouble with most PvE content.
Solo content neither requires crafting nor light attack weaving and you only have to switch weapons maybe once in most fights.
You will probably have to look into that stuff if you want to do high end group content. But also, the selling point of ESO is the solo quest content, IMO. You can have (and I have) hundreds if not thousands of hours of fun doing nary a raid and nary a veteran dungeon.
What is the difference between magica vs stamina builds? I mean is there a theme like all magical builds are about DPS and all stamina builds are about being tanky? Or maybe there isn’t a theme its just two ways to build each class?
The idea of a 2h heavy armor necromancer/death knight appeals to me, but every video I see has people playing like a caster. Are some classes just not meant for certain things?
Basically I want to explore the world and not have a tough time about it.
I guess what I am worried about is finding some area or dungeon I want to explore and then I just die horribly unless I find a group, but then find that if I had some build that I could easily do the dungeon.
Just two ways to build things. The main thing to know is that you want to focus on either magicka or stamina, not split between the two. And you can do basically whatever - class skills are IMO a pretty limited percentage of your overall build most of the time. I am personally playing a sorcerer who wears medium armor and mostly kills things with dual-wielded melee weapons. But there’s a couple of very handy sorc skills for the build - Hurricane, which does player-based AoE damage, and one that gives me spell crit (which I ignore), but also a big heal on crits. which I get constantly from the AoE damage I’m shitting out everywhere.
All very true. But if you want to optimize your play you need to do all that stuff. The common guides for magsorc, for example, have me keeping up 3 separate buffs and like 5 separate DoTs, all with a fairly short duration between like 8s and 30s. It’s hella-annoying and I don’t do it.
Yup. But you don’t remotely need to optimize for 95% of the content in the game. I think it’s important to emphasize that for people considering jumping in.
Oh sure, absolutely. If you’re running around solo like me it really doesn’t much matter. I do like how I just wtfpwn mobs out in the world though with a semi-optimized build, a bunch of CPs, and full 5+5+1+1 sets. And that lifesteal ring is like a cheatcode, even though as a magsorc with critical surge I didn’t really need one.
Only thing that might stop me jumping in is horse training. That suuuuuucks.
ESO is completely different from any other MMO in terms of what and how builds are made. It’s worth delving into some youtube vids about various builds, to understand what is really going on. Short version, builds are all or nothing, there aren’t really any “combo” or hybrid builds per se. Builds are more defined by weapons equipped, than they are by starting class, to a large extent. It’s entirely possible to play a magika or stamina build for any class and have it be viable.
For example, one of the best builds in the game is a stamina sorcerer.
This is super important to understand (and good to hear). At some point you will potentially look for guides on how to get gold, and they will almost all tell you to do writs (aka., crafting). Not just on one character, either, but on as many as you can manage. And the game crosses a threshold from fun to second job.
I’m a casual player with mix/max or OCD/completionist tendencies so I easily get swept up by stuff like this. I always think I’m going to be raiding at some point and better have all my bases covered! And as it turns out, I don’t really like crafting. Understanding what kind of player you are, and knowing that you can play without crafting if you tend towards casual is huge.
I write this as much to help convince myself as anyone else…
(Doing housing related stuff, alas, I believe requires crafting. I don’t know how much or the limits without).
I think when you first started out, it will make life much easier by joining a player guild and getting someone to craft you a set equipment. It makes questing solo easier and less frustrating. I wish I knew it in my earlier games.
I couldn’t stand doing writs as they were nothing but a boring grind to me so I stopped doing them. A buddy of mine loved to do them on multiple characters. To each his own.
You can make a lot of stuff for your house with crafting and/or you can get some furnishings from doing antiquities leads. The latter requires access to the Greymoor chapter.
With the crafting bag, and if loading times weren’t such trash I could see it being better - but still a grind that I’d rather not do. Nice to hear there are alternatives for furnishings!
Right - sorry, I meant in the context of trying to grind writs on multiple alts where you’re going to hit that initial load time repeatedly. I agree that once in-game, it isn’t a big problem (though if you are a heavy writ grinder, you’re still going to aim to minimize doors between stations).
