Mayhem is upon us!
Updated: February 19, 2024

Some of you may be entering Cyrodiil for the first time. For others, it’s just another day with more mass killing of opponents. The intent of this guide is to provide a high level overview of what you should consider to ensure that you achieve your goals of making a lot of AP, getting a lot of reward boxes, and participating in as much mayhem as possible!

While you can enter Cyrodiil, collect quests, and make your way around surfing the zerg (following where the most players go), and you’ll probably make some good alliance points (AP), there are quite a few small things that you can do to ensure that you bring the most value to the faction and contribute well to fights – rather than being a hindrance to success.

During Mayhem, there are a lot of PvE players coming into Cyrodiil, and most of them haven’t read this guide. This means that they’re either very squishy and easy to kill, or they’re set up as tanks who will bring little to no value to fights. Most bombers will build for crit, and will be using builds that cause chain reactions of death such as Vicious Death, Plaguebreak, and the Occult Overload CP. If they get one single kill on someone squishy, almost everyone else around that person will also die. It’s very simple to say “don’t be squishy”, but doing so without being a tank can be challenging.

Build Recommendations:

• If you are experienced in PvP, this probably doesn’t apply to you – though I hope that it will help with any considerations or advice that you give others (notably new players).
• Read through the grouping framework at https://darkelves.com/zerg if you’re looking to group up and want to know how to build.
• Read through https://darkelves.com/builds if you want to know what kind of builds the min/max ball groups use. Note that if you’re not in a ball group where everyone is contributing to the group, then these builds can still be great, but you will need to get a source of major expedition for yourself (usually Race Against Time from the Psyjic tree).
• Be aware that most PvE builds don’t work well in PvP. You may do great damage, but you’re “VD fodder”.
• You should have approximately 35k health. Put all of your 64 character points into health, and then balance your gear enchants to achieve your other goals. If you can’t quite make 35k, do your best to keep your health as high as possible. In most builds, 64 points in health and tri-chants on your major pieces (head/chest/pants) should get you to about 33-34k, and you can get another 1k from red CP.
• The food/drink you use should give you health and the stat you need. I tend to prefer tri-food for health/mag/stam from Bewitched Sugar Skulls, but there are many viable options. Your priority (per above) should be reaching 35k health, then adding the stat you need most of. If you’re in a magicka-oriented build, having above 15k (even closer to 20k with tri-food) stamina is very helpful for breaking free, dodging, and the occasional blocking.
• All of your gear should have the Impenetrable trait to reduce critical damage. This is what will kill you most often (along with siege).
• In the red CP tree, take Celerity for movement speed, Slippery to help automatically break you free from hard crowd control (CC), and Pain’s Refuge to reduce incoming damage when you have negative effects on you (there will be many). This leaves one red CP of your choice, and I usually recommend Boundless Vitality for more health (if you’re under 35k), Bastion if you’re running shields in a group (Barrier, or a set such as Imperium or Combat Physician), or Spirit Mastery to resurrect your allies faster (especially if you’re playing a Templar).
• In the blue CP tree, take Ironclad, Unassailable, and Enduring Resolve to reduce incoming damage of direct, area, and over time. This leaves one blue CP of your choice, and I usually recommend Occult Overload so that when you get a kill, it can chain reaction kill others around your target.
• In the green CP tree, take Gifted Rider and Steed’s Blessing to increase your speed getting from keep to keep when you don’t have transit. This leaves two green CP of your choice, and I usually recommend Rationer and Liquid Efficiency to save gold on consumables, though during this even you do get additional resources from nodes, so faster harvesting and extra chance for more materials are viable.
• When picking the sets you want for your build, choose one set that is more defensive, and one that accomplishes your goal (more healing, more damage, or a proc). If one of those sets is crafted, make that the medium armour one. If one of those sets is light or heavy, use neck, rings, and one weapon – or neck, rings, and two body pieces so you can still maintain 5 medium. If one of those sets can be run on only one bar (such as Clever Alchemist or many other proc sets), then you can use a back bar arena weapon.
• Monster sets can bring enormous value, though if you will be using a Mythic item such as Snow Treaders or the speed ring (the two most common), then you’ll have to either break one of your 5-sets or your monster 2-set. Many solid builds include a monster 2-set, a Mythic 1-set, two arena weapons (master’s, maelstrom, asylum, or other), a 5-set, and two extra pieces (Trainee or one Trainee and one Druid are most common for the 2 extras). There is no absolutely wrong build, but there are many builds that are wrong for you to achieve your goals. One of my favourite solo builds is back bar Clever Alchemist, front bar Rallying Cry, Balorgh or Sellistrix monster set (depending on how you want to play), one Mythic, and one Trainee (for the 1-set health bonus).
• If your goal is to play defensively (defending keeps from attack), the Earthgore set for healing and purging ground effects is likely best, though the Sellistrix monster set is also a great choice if you’re doing some damage, as it will provide an area stun every 6 seconds.
• Use 5 medium armour. Most players who don’t die to area damage bomb chain reactions or Plaguebreak (per above) will die when they run out of stamina. Medium armour gives you more stamina sustain, more output, and lets you slot Shuffle or Elude. Both morphs give you Major Evasion which reduces area (and siege) damage by 20% (this is VERY important). Shuffle removes snares and lasts for 20 seconds, while Elude (the other morph) lasts 35 seconds and gives you Major Expedition when you take area damage. If you’re going to use Snow Treaders or have Race against Time slotted, pick Elude as it lasts longer.
• You must source your own Major Evasion skill. If you’re not in 5 medium, and not a NB who have their class skill (Mirage), then the Spectre’s Eye set on your back bar is a great option. If all else fails, you can use Quick Cloak from the dual wield skill line.
• If you’re not sure what build to use, A combination of Order’s Wrath (always active in 5 medium armour) with Wretched Vitality on one bar (for amazing resource regen) and an arena weapon on the other bar works very well. If you want to be more defensive or you don’t believe that you’ll have the reaction times needed to fight well, and just want to run around having fun, a great set to use is Imperium. It will put a shield on you and your allies when you take damage, gives some extra health, and can contribute to your team’s success (by you and your group members dying less).

Play / Style Recommendations:

• You will die. Probably a lot. There will be bombers, gankers, 1vPotatoers (most call them 1vX’ers, but as those players don’t actually fight similarly skilled players – otherwise they’d never win, this term is more accurate), and chain reactions of Plaguebreak and Vicious death that will leave huge piles of bodies. Death happens in PvP all the time, and you shouldn’t be discouraged. Every time you die, try to think about why you died, and if there was anything you could have done better – such as not stacking too close to other masses of players who haven’t read this guide and who aren’t following these recommendations. Note that when you die in range of a keep or resource, you contribute to the tick! Dying every 5 minutes (that’s how long it takes for you to be worth full AP again) is a good thing as if you win the fight, your team will get more AP!
• Use cross heals as much as you can. Echoing Vigor and Radiating Regeneration apply Heal over Time (HoT) effects to your allies, and will help a LOT when they are bombed or otherwise take damage. If everyone in Cyrodiil who was close to others cast a few echoing Vigors (16 second timer per player hit) and Radiating Regens (10 second timer per player hit), your faction and team would die a lot less. If you have a Maelstrom resto staff, you can spam Radiating Regen when people around you are taking damage and it will self-sustain your magicka. MOAR HOTS!
• DON’T TAKE OTHER PEOPLES’ SIEGE UNLESS IT’S SITTING OPEN FOR MORE THAN 10 SECONDS, and get off the siege immediately after using it.
• Don’t purge if you’re around other players. If you’re playing in a group or are intending to zerg surf (be in the same place as a lot of others), it’s not a bad idea to take the skill(s) off your bar. If you’re a healer, don’t run the Curse Eater or Stendarr sets (both only work in your group), and don’t run the blue CP that removes negative effects on low health targets. If you don’t follow this advice, you will probably be responsible for killing (a lot of) players on your own faction due to the Plaguebreak set as it causes area damage when purged.
• Unless you’re in a large group, don’t run Barrier. Barrier only applies to people in your group – NOT the people who happen to be around you, and is a waste of an ultimate in most cases (when not in a large group running stacked).
• Don’t block for more time than it takes for big damage to hit you. You’ll be tempted to block all damage, but that will just drain your stamina and you will likely die a few seconds later. Pay attention to when there’s a pull such as Dark Convergence, or when opponents are pushing into you running proxies and ultimates, and those are the times to block if you can’t get out of the way (use an immovable potion and run or roll).
• You will see some players permanently blocking – those are specific niche builds meant to just.. stand there and block. They don’t do much other than sometimes burn siege, and they’re not worth your time. You can ignore those players and they won’t be able to do anything other than.. stand there and hold block. In PvE, there are taunt skills that work. In PvP, these players rely on your team mates being uneducated (or obsessive about killing every last thing) so they waste a minute or two killing the one tank target rather than killing 20+ other targets in the same time. TLDR: If you have anything better to do, don’t waste time killing tanks (unless you’re firing meat bags and cold fire siege on them – which will often kill them).
• Use immovable potions (the PvP vendors sell health/invis/immovable ones for AP), and roll dodge taking you outside of damage areas if you think that there’s going to be a pull or bomb.
• When you’re on siege, fire then immediately get off and cast at least one skill (renew a HoT, buff, cast an area skill, etc.) before you get back on and fire again.
• Most players can easily run three siege in a perfect triangle if they’re not casting in between, or two if they are (per above). If there aren’t 20 offensive siege at a keep you’re attacking, drop and use more siege!
• Note that fire siege does less damage to doors and walls. You should always use basic (stone) siege when you want to open a keep.
• If you’re a healer, please read through https://darkelves.com/casting-styles/ and watch the video for your class. That knowledge will help a lot. Healers should always be casting while in combat, and the Maelstrom resto staff will ensure that your magicka sustain is adequate (while in combat).

What To Do:

• If you just want to make AP, read https://darkelves.com/making-ap/
• If you’re looking for a group, rather than just typing “LFG” in zone, try letting the group leaders know what you’re set up for and/or capable of. Something like, “Necro Healer in Rallying Cry / Earthgore / Snow Treaders LFG” or “NB Healer in Pillager / Ozezan / Master’s / Maelstrom LFG”. While some groups are open to everyone, the groups that try to maintain at least a somewhat reasonable composition will have higher likelihoods of success.
• If you want to play solo, I’m not the best person to advise as most of my solo builds involve being a troll, running scrolls, bombing (Dark Convergence back bar / Vicious Death / Balorgh / Master’s 2H), or sieging while just chilling.
• If you see large swords on the map of your faction’s colour, there’s probably something interesting happening.
• You can use the RDK addon (see info at https://darkelves.com/addons) for a list of all locations where your faction has siege up, as well as any already-flagged locations with opponent siege. More siege = higher likelihood of fun things happening!
• You can head to any of the towns to do quests, though be aware that a LOT of gankers stalk those locations as they consider PvE players easy kills!
• If you come across a ball group that seems to be invulnerable, the best way to fight them is to get a few friends, set up your buffs and damage similar to how you would as a ganker, and then one player Silver Leash pulls one opponent to the team while everyone does damage. Negates make this much easier. Ball groups are stronger when they’re together, and you have to do enough damage to get past all their HoTs and burst healing, so pulling someone out of their area heals and doing 3-4 players worth of burst damage will often get the kill.

INTRODUCTION

Healing as a stamina warden is both simpler and more challenging than healing as a templar. Your kit is smaller with only a select few healing spells, and you have to keep more independent buffs up, but you make up for it with a level of burst healing that a templar can only output in some specific circumstances with builds that have among the highest of skill caps.

GEAR

Your front bar needs to be two daggers, as the Dual Wield passive Twin Blade and Blunt for daggers increases your critical strike chance.

Your back bar will be a bow if you’re using Bombard, or a 2H Maul (Master’s, perfected preferred) if using Carve. See the section on the back bar’s skills for that decision.

I recommend the Swift trait on at least two of your three jewelry to ensure that you have the speed to maintain appropriate positioning outside the group for better coverage of Soothing Spores.

The key to stamina warden healing is your critical strike percentage. You need to increase it to somewhere between 60% and 80%, while maintaining sufficient stamina regeneration to keep your skills usable for the duration of a standard engagement (ask your raid leader what that time is, usually between 30 and 60 seconds). Considering the requirement for critical strikes on healing, Leviathan is going to be your base set. This provides one maximum stamina bonus, with the rest being critical chance.
You may want a second 5-set bonus that provides a buff to the group such as Powerful Assault. This will proc on your Echoing Vigor casts, hitting six allies every cast. A maximum of twelve targets may have your 10 second HoT (Heal over Time) at any given time.
If your group’s style will require you to spam more big heals for a longer fight duration, then Battlefield Acrobat is a great option.
If you want to maximize your raw healing, Briarheart will add critical strike chance and a significant amount of weapon damage. It will also heal you for extra when you critically strike (heal) others! This set requires that you damage someone to proc it, so you will need a ranged skill that can critically hit at least once every 15 seconds. Using a bow with bombard on your back bar, or using the caltrops skill are simple methods of keeping the buff up.
For your monster set (head and shoulders), your best option is Nightflame. The 1-set bonus of maximum magicka is not optimal, though you will still be using magicka, and your stamina regeneration should be quite high, so this is not a wasted stat. Nightflame will drop a totem that heals allies every second for 10 seconds, and as long as you keep healing it will keep dropping on cooldown (every 10 seconds). The amount of the heal is not as high as many HoTs, but it’s consistent, and can be the difference between someone dying and getting out of a negate or cc with very low health.
A common alternative monster set is Earthgore. Earthgore is valued not so much for the heal, but for the ground effect removal when it procs. The challenge with Earthgore is that it will often proc at the same time if multiple healers are using it, potentially wasting all but the first one. This set should be on a healing class that outputs the most consistent and regular HoTs and heals, so if you have templar healers in raid, you probably won’t be running this.
Troll King is another solid set that is very often discounted in favour of others. While Nightflame is almost always a better choice, the extra health recovery is equivalent to another HoT, and helps the group by increasing passive healing without being limited by location (as the totem is). For highly mobile smaller groups who are planning to farm a tower, or the top floor of a keep, Troll King is very viable (though this build is less so).
Bloodspawn is a very good option, as it comes with stamina regen, and will give you 13 ultimate every time it procs (quite often in combat). This will allow you to cast even more Healing Thickets. The set you likely use will be a toss up between Nightflame and Bloodspawn.

CONSUMABLES

As usual, I recommend that both bars have poisons, specifically the 4.4 second Immovable poison on your ranged bar (if you have one), and the 3.9 second Immovable poison on your melee bar.

Bewitched Sugar Skulls is likely the best choice for food, as it provides all three stats with some health regen.

Potion preferences are up to the individual, though the staple Health/Stamina/Immovable and Health/Lingering Health/Invisibility as well as something with Minor Heroism (for ultimate regen) are nice to keep slotted.

SKILLS

The front bar skills that are most appropriate are as follows:

• Echoing Vigor. This is the staple HoT (Heal over Time) that you need to cast twice every ten seconds. This HoT is limited to twelve targets, and applies to six targets every cast. Note that the application is capable of overlapping, so if you have a free cooldown available casting it again is not necessarily a wasted cast.
• Soothing Spores. This is your big / burst heal. Like most stamina skills, it can be cast while silenced, so while your templar and magicka warden raid healers are trying to get out of a silence, you can laugh your way through spamming some enormous critical heals.
• Camouflaged Hunter. This skill is on your bar to provide major savagery, which increases your critical strike chance. It’s also nice to detect stealthed opponents. An alternative to this skill is Green Lotus. I prefer Camouflaged Hunter as it applies the critical strike bonus as a passive as long as it is slotted without needing to spend a cast cycle for it. If you want the buff available while on both bars, then use Green Lotus on your back bar, and another skill in this slot.
• Shuffle. Shuffle will give you immunity from snares for five seconds (assuming you’re using 5 pieces of medium armour), and must be on your front bar.
• Deceptive Predator. Deceptive Predator provides you with Major Expedition for 6 seconds. It also provides Minor Evasion, reducing damage from area attacks. If your group has someone whose responsibility is to maintain Major Expedition (such as a stamina sorcerer spamming Charging Maneuvers, this this skill may be replaced, though consider that in order to cover everyone perfectly with Soothing Spores you will need to be outside the group, and thus will usually need Major Expedition more often. Even with someone keeping up Charging Maneuvers, Minor Evasion has tremendous value in allowing you to stay in an otherwise untenable position to get one more Soothing Spores off from a perfect position to save your group.
• Healing Thicket. A lower cost and high value healing ultimate – what’s not to love? While the other morph (Enchanted Forest) will almost always give you an extra 20 ultimate on cast (lowering the time to your next cast), Healing Thicket’s HoT will remain on players for 4 seconds once they leave the area of the effect – which will often coincide with a bomb, so those extra 4 seconds of healing will often save a life.

Echoing Vigor	Soothing Spores	Camouflaged Hunter	Shuffle	Deceptive Predator	Healing Thicket

Your back bar has one variable slot that will usually either be Bombard or Carve, then the rest are utility and buffs:

• Bombard, Carve, or Corrupting Pollen. If your buffs are up, Echoing Vigor has been cast twice, and there’s no need for burst healing, Bombard your opponents to snare them. If Bombard is already covered by someone else, or your opponents are using Snow Treaders (preventing snares or slows from affecting them) Carve with a Master’s Perfected 2H is a great option should your group wants more killing power vs large stacks. If you don’t already have a source of Major Defile for the group, then Corrupting Pollen is a great source for applying the debuff to opponents, though the Champion Point layout may change with more points in Befoul.
• Turn Evil. Minor Protection (8% reduced damage) while standing within the effect (on a ram, a flag or in a choke) is very powerful if you don’t otherwise have it available. The true value of this skill is in applying fear to opponents. The other morph, Ring of Preservation, provides a HoT while standing in the effect. For groups that are stationary, this may be helpful, though for those with high mobility Turn Evil is the best choice.
• Bull Netch. This buff gives you major brutality for extra weapon damage, removes 1 negative effect from you every 5 seconds, and most importantly restores stamina while active.
• Expansive Frost Cloak or Ice Fortress. Both of these skills apply major resolve increasing physical and spell resistance for twelve players in your group. Expansive Frost Cloak has a range of 28 meters, and Ice Fortress has a range of 8 meters but also gives you Minor Protection, reducing your damage taken by 8% for 24 seconds. Your group should have one warden with Expansive Frost Cloak for every 12 players in the raid. If you will be playing with a style of staying outside the raid for maximum dispersal of your Soothing Spores (20 meter range), then the assurance of having minor protection is significant in keeping you alive and in position. If your raid doesn’t have enough wardens (one for every twelve players), then you’ll need to use Expansive Frost Cloak.
• Shimmering Shield. While each cast protects you from 3 projectiles, the significant value in this skill is the application of Major Heroism for 6 seconds (when hit), granting you 3 ultimate every 1.5 seconds. A big part of your effective healing will be your Healing Thicket ultimate, and this will bring it back up much quicker.
• Reviving Barrier. Your barrier will often be larger than that of magicka classes. Your raid leader may call for your barrier before entering a breach, as your Healing Thicket will be available very quickly – whereas other healers may take longer to get their ultimates up.

Bombard, Carve, or Corrupting Pollen	Turn Evil	Bull Netch	Expansive Frost Cloak or Ice Fortress	Shimmering Shield	Reviving Barrier

PLAY STYLE

Here is the logic behind what I cast and prioritize for standard Cyrodiil medium (12) to large (24) group scenarios. The lower the number of the line, the higher the priority, so for every cast you could start at the first option, if that’s not needed, consider the second, if that’s not needed consider the third, etc.

1. If your group has many players with less than half health, Reviving Barrier. This will protect them while you and your burst healers get them back up to full health.
2. If you see significant incoming damage, Healing Thicket. The area HoT may be negated, but it will still last four more seconds.
3. If there are players missing 25% or more health within the area of your cone, Soothing Spores.
4. Keep two casts of Echoing Vigor up every ten seconds.
5. If you are slowed or snared, or are about to run through a slow or snare, Shuffle.
6. Ensure that your Major Resolve buff is up, Expansive Frost Cloak or Ice Fortress.
7. Keep Bull Netch up. You need that stamina regeneration.
8. If you need major expedition to keep up, catch up, or get into position, Deceptive Predator.
9. If your ultimate is not up, and there are players or NPCs who will attack you, Shimmering Shield.
10. If there are multiple opponents within five meters who do not have crowd control immunity, or you have allies standing in a high damage area (such as on a ram) who could use 8% damage mitigation, Turn Evil.
11. Conditional skills depending on what weapon is being used on the back bar:
    1. While using a bow back bar, if there are opponents in range who are not immune to snares, Bombard.
    2. While using a 2H back bar, if there are opponents in range who are not dead, Cleave.
12. If you have nothing better to do and there’s someone stealthed, Camouflaged Hunter.

CHAMPION POINTS

You can see my suggested champion points for this build in the screen capture below. This CP layout is meant for high healing with some damage capability as well.

Note: This is accurate as of late 2019. Not much has changed since then other than how logs should be assessed and some of the details of how healing works. I’ll update this guide sometime soon to correct those items.

I’m sure that most players have seen or heard people talk about their statistics, how much damage they do, how much healing they do, and other metrics. While there are some people running private addons that are capable of extracting a lot more information, what I’m going to explain is how anyone can see some data.

Before you try enabling logs, the Recount addon, or any other combat metrics addon, please keep in mind that they may be very resource intensive on less powerful systems. You should consider running the same scenario with and without enabling logging or addons in order to accurately judge the difference in performance (if any).

There is a built-in function in the game that will create a file locally on your computer with the full details of everything that happens to you in the game. To turn this logging function on, all you need to do is type /encounterlog in the text chat window. Logging will then start for everything about your, your group’s, and your opponents’ activities to a file located at:

C:\Users\%username\Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live\Logs\Encounter.log

Note that new logs are automatically appended to the file, and it can grow enormous, so you should only turn on logging when you want to gather data. If you crash, log out, or sometimes even transit to another zone, the log may end. You can type /encounter log again to re-enable it.

The file will start by listing all the players in your (current) group. This is an example with myself and three others:

3,BEGIN_LOG,1594774326711,15,”NA Megaserver”,”en”,”eso.live.6.0″
3,ZONE_CHANGED,181,”Cyrodiil”,NONE
3,UNIT_ADDED,1,PLAYER,T,276,0,F,6,7,”Crown”,”@Crown77″,11052765831725045509,50,1359,0,PLAYER_ALLY,T
3,UNIT_ADDED,3161,PLAYER,F,277,0,F,1,4,”Alpha”,”@alpha”,0,50,1539,0,PLAYER_ALLY,T
3,UNIT_ADDED,11140,PLAYER,F,278,0,F,6,7,”Bravo”,”@bravo”,0,50,933,0,PLAYER_ALLY,T
3,UNIT_ADDED,3444,PLAYER,F,279,0,F,4,4,”Charley”,”@charley”,0,50,1518,0,PLAYER_ALLY,T

Note that your own name will be listed first, then everyone else’s. Lines for each player will be based on alphabetical order after your own. In this example, I’ve changed the names to alpha, bravo, and charley with those same @names. If someone has themselves set anonymous, then they will show up as empty quotation marks: “”,””. If you take a screen shot of your group members (open the party window and hit print screen), you can then later go back and edit the text file replacing all of the “” with the names of the people in your group.

Ensuring That You See Accurate Data For Each Player

In order to have everyone’s character names appear in the log without “Anonymous #” (saving you the time to manually enter them, then look up who joined the group in what order for later “UNIT_ADDED” lines that you would otherwise need to find and edit), they will have to make a change in their game settings. Open Settings, Combat, and under Encounter Log change the option to Appear Anonymously to OFF. If you don’t do this, your data will still show up in the logs, but it won’t add your name to it. Anyone in your raid can easily identify who you are based on your casts, gear, buffs applied, and activities during combat, so this doesn’t actually keep you anonymous, it just removes your character name so that if data is made public other people won’t identify which character was yours.

Once you’re done with a logging session, you should manually rename the Encounter.log file to something unique. I like to use the date and a short description, for example: 2020-06-18_Duel_With_Drace.log or 2020-06-18_PvP_Duo_With_Tiny.log.

Once you have a log, you then need to parse it. The contents won’t make any sense to most people as you can see in this sample line of healing:

34480,COMBAT_EVENT,HEAL,GENERIC,MAGICKA,714,3866,72143404,68401,1,
18450/18450,5533/32163,9918/10794,4/500,396/1000,0,0.6265,0.4477,1.3156,*

I’ve written some tools to do analytics for my own purposes. If you’re not interested in doing so yourself, https://www.esologs.com/ is a great site that can do it for you. The site (as of 2020/07) is more PvE than PvP oriented, and considers PvP fights to be “Trash Pulls” rather than boss fights, so just be aware that it may look confusing at first. It will separate all of your time logging into sessions or fights when you are in combat, making it easy to see what’s going on in each fight.

If you upload your logs to the ESO Logs web site, be sure that you set the session to private, or at least unlisted. There may be data in there that your guild considers proprietary, and that should not be shared with the public!

If you use the ESO Logs site, you can see detailed info about everyone in raid. For example:

Example Data from a Test Duel
Your own character gear and skill bars.
The gear and skill bars from people who are in group with you. In this case Drace was my opponent, but we were grouped up so I could see his info.
Skill, ability, buff, and debuff up-time. In this example (duel) you can see that my Shadow was up for the second half of the fight, and I cast a Sap just after the Shadow came up.
Who did damage. In this case, I did 92.05% of the damage to the target, and my Shadow did 7.95% of the damage.
Graphs that show damage and healing over time. In this example, it shows my damage over the (approximately) 37 second duel.
How much damage and the percent of total damage done by ability. You can also see healing done by ability.
If you want to get even more details, you can see the number of casts, hits, crit percentages, up-time, and DPS.

Some of the ways to analyze logs aren’t very obvious. Here’s an example of two players’ Radiating Regeneration statistics over a fight. Although the image sizes don’t match perfectly, it should be relatively easy to compare columns.

• In this example, we’ve confirmed that the number of players healed by each healer averaged 5.4 and 5.5. This means that the cast likely hit the same person twice a few times, so sometimes casting it twice applies the HoT (Heal over Time) on five people, other times six people. In some rare cases it may only be four people.
• The uptime of both healers is very close (63.34% vs 64.58%). This means that they had Radiating Regen up for about the same amount of time during the fight.
• The average cast value including overheal was 2.1k for the first healer, and 2.3k for the second. This implies that the second healer had slightly higher stats (max magicka and/or spell damage) than the first, or perhaps has the Ritual mundus whereas the other healer didn’t (which should be corrected).
• The amount of overheal is very close (92.05% vs 92.39%), implying that both healers were likely keeping their casts up around the same times. If one healer let their HoTs lapse during big damage moments, the numbers would be different with one healer having less overheal. Good healers think alike!
• The first healer cast it 102 times, and the second 72 times. This is an issue. If both healers had very similar number of targets, uptime, and overheal, the likely conclusion is that the first healer cast the spell 30 times while their regen was already up, either refreshing it part way through, or moving it to another player. The spell lasts 10 seconds per target, and at the time this guide was written, a maximum of 6 targets could have one healer’s regen at the same time, it should have been cast twice every 10 seconds (now the cap has been lifted, so this isn’t accurate anymore). 30 wasted casts during a fight of about 7.5 minutes is a lot. If we look at the rest of the statistics for these two healers, we can see that the first healer has a lot less casts of energy orbs, illustrious healing, and hasty prayer, resulting in the overall healing and value to the group of the first healer being a lot lower than the second healer. This is something very simple to address/improve/correct.

Did this affect the group’s performance?

Probably not significantly, as most healers overheal a lot (80-90%), so that particular healer’s drop in performance (wasting 30 casts in the fight that could have gone to other skills) wouldn’t have made a difference to the group’s success. If another raid has less healers, where every one makes a difference (to match incoming damage or if the group is spread), it would have definitely impacted the group. If damage was ever greater than healing output, those extra 2 casts per 10 seconds from one healer could have changed a wipe into a win.

Another challenge arises when different healers each have a weakness like the above, but each one is different! Without logs like this, it’s not realistic or feasible to identify what they may be. If almost every healer is under-performing by 25% and all for different reasons, more healers will be needed to achieve a baseline and that takes away from other roles in the raid.

In this particular scenario, a simple solution (and one that I’ve been using for months for myself) is to add a buff widget showing Radiating Regeneration in an obvious icon on your screen. Since the spell will usually prioritize the healer casting it, with a double cast there’s an almost certain change of you casting it on yourself. When the icon disappears or the timers on the buff icon is down to 1 second, it’s time to double cast it again. Since I started doing that (and paying attention to it), my own Radiating Regeneration efficiency has increased significantly.

For most people, looking in this much detail will be more effort than they want to spend. For those who seek to be the best that they can be, analyzing information like this is very important.

If all of these logs are too much effort, you can also use the Recount addon to show you real time numbers, as well as graphs of total damage, healing, and distribution. It takes a lot less effort to click the button on the Recount window than to load up logs! Here are two examples:

In this example, you see a templar’s healing.	In this example, you see a warden’s healing.

There is an enormous amount of information available in these logs, and if you would like to analyze your own play to better understand what you’re doing, what happens, and how you can better improve, using these logs is a great resource!

I’d like to explain more about feeding or AP boosting. The simple explanation of the term(s) is the scenario where you have players from another faction come and allow you to kill them repeatedly to make AP. If they die on a resource and you get the defence tick, you get the same amount of AP for killing them from the tick. If they die on a fully leveled-up keep (as of 2019/Q2), then you get five times the amount of AP you made for killing them from the tick.

Keep in mind that a player’s AP value when killed resets after five minutes, and they’re worth less AP until that five minute mark has been reached. I believe that the increase from being worth zero AP one second at the time of resurrection to being worth full AP after five minutes is linear, though have never tested that. In order to optimize feeding, there will be a five-minute delay in between when the player being fed will make their AP, and this is easily noticed by those who are looking for it.

In order to identify someone who is being fed, the easiest method is to look at the leader board. If their score increases with a very consistent amount of AP every five minutes, then it’s possible that they are being fed. It’s also possible that they are in a big fight that keeps going on (we’ve seen fights last for hours where both factions keep coming back), or they may be using some over-performing skills (I’ll get into that later on). Other possibilities include players duelling, players testing skills, players testing AP returns after a patch, though in most situations it will be someone being fed.

A simple way to identify a potential feeding location is to look for small swords on the map in an area that wouldn’t otherwise make sense. They look like this: and will appear whenever more than two players are killed within 30 seconds in a certain range. If they only appear every five minutes, then the likelihood is high that someone is being fed or boosted.

An example from 2019/05/13 follows:

Here is the starting leader board positions. I was playing my warden Coroin@crown77, and the Adrestia guild group wanted to push one of their members One Chaturbate Token@sovietkun up to get emperor. You’ll note that we’re both in the mid/high 900k area.

A few minutes later, One Chaturbate Token (hereinafter referred to as Soviet) jumped up by about 75k AP. He then continued to increase by about 75k every five minutes until a few of us went to investigate Blackboot, where we saw small yellow and red swords appear every five minutes.

A direct correlation between 75k ticks at Blackboot and Soviet’s increases was identified.

Looking at this leader board screen shot, Soviet had 1,662,773 AP.

I took a transit shrine from Roebeck where we had just taken back the farm to Blackboot, and repaired a wall making 86 AP. Seconds later, I got a tick for 38,174 AP. This number is almost exactly half of what Soviet’s leader board increases were every five minutes:

You can then see in the next leader board update that Soviet increased by exactly that amount (38,174 AP), and I increased by that same amount + 86 AP (which I got for the wall repair).

Soviet: 1,700,947 – 1,662,773 = 38,174

Coroin: 1,151,579 – 1,113,319 = 38,174 + 86 = 38,260

From the beginning in the 900k range, about one hour passed where Soviet increased by about 75k per five minutes except for the four periods where I stole half his ticks. In those four periods, he increased by the same amount as I did (around 38k excluding the 86 AP wall repairs). In some updates, he didn’t wait the full five minutes and made about 70k, with the largest update being 78k, which was probably a perfect five minute wait between the time that his guild mates resurrected each other and when he killed them again.

It looked like they would continue feeding / boosting AP regardless of my stealing half their ticks, so we went to interrupt them near Blackboot mine where we saw the small swords appear:

By this point, Soviet had made about 789k AP in that hour, as can be seen on this leader board screen shot:

Soviet: 1,752,460 – 963,457 = 789,003

Coroin: 1,190,081 – 992,928 = 197,153 (of which about 150k was from stealing his ticks).

Once they were located and interrupted, the players feeding scattered and logged back into their AD toons. It’s interesting to note that they claim to have all been playing together fighting “normally” the whole time, yet Soviet is the only one who made any AP during the period.

This was the Adrestia group about five minutes after they were interrupted when they went back to their AD characters:

It is important to note that feeding and AP boosting is not against the Terms of Service, the EULA, or the Code of Conduct, but it is seriously frowned upon by the community and many people consider it “cheating”.

Section 9 of the Terms of Service state:

You agree not to use any hardware or software or any other method of support that is not authorized by ZeniMax or that may in any way influence or advantage Your playing abilities, or influence or advantage Your use of the Services.

To our knowledge, this is the only paragraph that can be relevant to these activities, though ZOS’ interpretation of said paragraph is only related to the use of cheating programs and hardware – and not activities taken by players without any of these types of cheating mechanisms.

If you’re considering being fed AP, then keep the following in mind:

• • The people feeding AP are not going to be making AP while feeding, so there’s no real value to them in doing so. They probably won’t want to do this for long (unless you’re compensating them).
  • People will talk, and take screen shots or videos like the ones above, and it will get out. It’s very easy to accuse people of such when you don’t understand AP farming techniques and strategies, and many of the high AP earning players have been accused of this (myself included). Consider that it’s one thing for whining jealous people to accuse others, though it’s another if there is actual proof. With proof, your reputation (if you have one) will take a hit, and it can impact your social enjoyment of the game. Some people don’t care, and we’ve seen many posts on the forums and screen shots of players being fed both on the map and using exploits to get outside of the map (under the world or past the mountain barriers).
  • If people are aware that you’re not making your AP legitimately, then they probably won’t want to help you get Emperor.
  • It is very easy to find you doing this, as when you kill a few players in an area, there will be swords on the map. Seeing consistent swords on a resource that is not flipping during the early campaign is very obvious, and it’s very likely that people will come to disrupt your activities.
  • We’ve heard of a few PvE guilds who would do this in order to help new players or new characters get the required skills in the Alliance War skill line (caltrops / vigor / proxy). I personally believe that this has less of an impact, as it won’t affect the leader boards past the first few hours of a campaign.

I posted the below on 2019/05/14 in Discord explaining my position on this event:

Yesterday someone was caught with their guild feeding them to top the AD Vivec leader boards. I’d like to make my position clear on that, as there have been quite a few arguments on the matter.

My issue with this is case of balance, where everyone has an opportunity with the same potential.

The players / guild who were feeding are good players, and are probably all among the top 5% of PvP players in the game in terms of skill. They have the skills to make top AP. There’s no need for them to play unethically (subjective statement).

Regarding other types of activities that make more AP than is expected with normal fighting (this point was brought up by one of them that other people do or did these in the past so it’s ok for them to feed):

• There is a case of skills over-performing such as undaunted skill line abilities with synergies. If you are a solo player (not in group) and use them around many other players, you can get higher returns on AP while in range of the players who have used your synergies. Many players know about this (including the ones who were feeding), as it was made public months ago and they were directly told in voice comms (Discord) the morning of this event.
  If done well, having personally used these skills a lot as a player who is solo most of the time (including that morning), I know that it can result in between 20% and 35% more AP per hour than you would make normally.
  If someone wants to slot a skill on their bar, then use that skill on the Alessia bridge (example of where many players congregate), then they’re not doing anything outside of normal fighting activities even if a skill is over-performing. I use these skills regularly, and while you may disagree with using them to make AP, they are skills that anyone can use anywhere at any time.
• In the case of a resource or outpost swapping (which was a thing with broken BB mine a while back, and outposts before ZOS changed the tick requirement to having 5 minutes pass), anyone could participate in taking the resource repeatedly, and everyone had the same potential for AP. Show up and you get AP. Everyone can see it happening and can join in, so there’s nothing unbalanced. There were cases of players leaving an AFK macro at Bleakers (where DC and EP swapped it continuously for days) achieving AR50 Grand Overlord in less than a week.

If you feed, you’re unleveling the playing field and it becomes a question of resources, which we measure in time, money, and people:

• With enough time, you can make more AP than people with less time. As an example, working full time gives me less time to play, so someone who is off school for the summer or unemployed can easily make more AP than me. There’s nothing wrong with this in principle, as better players can make more AP in less time, though there is a balance here. Many of us don’t like that Emperor will often go to the person who sleeps least and has the most time spent on the computer, but it is still a balance.
• With enough money, you can pay people to stand and die for you feeding you ticks. What’s to stop a player from bringing in 50 other players to feed ticks? Absolutely nothing. For each player feeding another, the one being fed can make about 140k / hour in an optimal situation.
  If feeding were included in acceptable activities, then that player will make 7.5 million AP / hour. Many, many people in ESO have gold measured in hundreds of millions or even billions. If someone offered other players one million gold to stand there for an hour or two and die every 5 minutes, would people do it? I’m sure that they would. There would be no way to beat that person on the leader board (not considering seeing swords on the map and interrupting for the sake of this point).
• With enough friends or guild mates who want to help, a similar scenario to the point above is applicable. In the case of this event, based on the ticks I saw (repaired a wall and got half the tick), there were probably 6 (maybe 7) players feeding. One player gives about 2k AP when killed, and the tick for that player is about 10k (five times at a fully upgraded keep). Ticks of about 75k with a bit less than 12k per player (considering imperfect timing) would require seven players feeding.

None of the above feeding scenarios are against the Terms of Service, EULA, or Code of Conduct. ZOS have made their position clearly known that the players can do what they want, and if they want to role-play killing each other, they are welcome to do so. Many people talk about players policing themselves, though we all know that’s not going to happen. There’s very little that we can do to stop feeding, and I’ve always argued vehemently against feeding because it messes up the balance of the boards.

That’s the summary of my position. If you want to feed for emperor, you can go right ahead, but I’m going to clearly state that I believe that it’s a shitty thing to do.

Regarding the allegation that I myself use over performing skills to make more AP, I freely admit that, and some may call me a hypocrite for such. The techniques and methodologies that I use to find those skills and determine their performance for AP percentage returns were also made public as well as the use of synergies, applying debuffs, and spamming skills like Inevitable Detonation when running solo to get very high returns on other players’ efforts killing (best when I’m on AD and I throw them out at DC vs. EP fights).

Some people disagree with using them, and they’re entitled to their opinion. Bug reports were made for every skill and set that we believe is over or under performing, and it’s on the ZOS development team to change these things if they want to. If they want to declare something “an exploit” as they did gap closing over non-contiguous ground until they changed their code, they are entitled to do that. If they declare something an exploit, then we will obviously not use it – though we may argue with them. Until and unless they explicitly state that “using the altar skill when you are solo and there are other players around you is an exploit”, I fully intend to keep using altars on the Alessia bridge until they change how that skill works. Incidentally we’ve tested on PTS, and it looks like AP percentage returns are being much better balanced in the Necromancer update (2019/05/20).

In my opinion, and you are welcome to disagree (as I’m sure many of you do), there is a very big difference between:

• Running up to the bridge or a breach and dropping an altar, then spamming trapping webs or inner fire.
  and
• Having your guild mates swap factions and feed you ticks.

In ZOS’ opinion they are both acceptable practice. If you as a player disagree, again, you’re entitled to your opinion. The ToS allow for all of this, and it’s on each player to determine their own code of ethics.

A very simple method for ZOS to address these types of situations would be to eliminate any AP that one player gets from killing another if there have not been any other players who made AP off of the killed player in a subsequent kill/death. If you are against feeding, suggest this or something like this to ZOS. If you have other ideas on how to combat feeding, please feel free to let me know the details, and I’ll add them here and suggest them to ZOS myself.

INTRODUCTION

I’m sure you’ve all noticed the propensity for larger and larger groups in Cyrodiil, and the unfortunate direct effect of these groups’ size being increased lag, latency, desyncs, and disconnects.

This document is an attempt to pass on all the things I’ve learned through testing various skills and addons in the lag conditions when trying to fight such a group, and a few skills and strategies that could help to coordinate enough damage to get past 30 players spamming healing springs with Earthgore on even more.

Nothing I’m saying here is revolutionary, it’s all information that is out there and existing theory crafters are aware of. My hope is that this will help disorganized groups, smaller groups, and individuals to think about how best to contribute to a “faction” win against an opposing faction stack.

SETTINGS & ADDONS

In order to decrease the likelihood of crashing or desyncing before you even start to fight, there are a few steps that could help. Note the “could”, as there is no cure for server performance issues other than ZOS fixing things on their end (game code and/or server hardware).

• In Settings -> Video, turn off Show Additional Ally Effects
• In Settings -> Video, decrease Particle Suppression Distance. The maximum is 100, which is what I have mine set to most of the time. I’ve found reducing that to 40 helps a lot when there are 100+ players on the screen in the distance, and simply approaching them causes you to crash.
• In Settings -> Video, decrease Maximum Particle Systems. The maximum is 2048, which is what I have mine set to most of the time. I’ve found reducing that to 1024 helps a lot when there are 100+ players (including allies and opponents) on the screen.
• In Settings -> Audio, turn Footsteps Volume to zero. I’m not certain if this makes a difference, though there were a few discussions where people claimed that it did. In theory, 100+ players’ footsteps being processed at the same time could cause challenges in the game client. If I confirm that this does or doesn’t work, I’ll update this document.
• If you’re using a combat log such as FTC or Combat Log Statistics, turn it off. If you absolutely need one (my mental health requires it), use the Recount addon. The reason many of these addons cause problems during fights is the number of events that would appear in them, and their inability to handle that many events. Recount rate limits these events.
• If you’re using a buff/debuff tracker, note that some of them will cause your game client to freeze when you have more than 20 debuffs on you (that happens often enough in such fights). I’ve found that Bandit’s built in buff tracking is the least resource hungry and quickest to update.

STRATEGIC CONSIDERATIONS

Traditionally, large groups (24 in the past, now 12) would use similar movement, attack, defence, and extrication strategies when fighting other large groups (and randoms / PuGs in the area). Whichever group executed the strategy best would win, and/or whichever group made the first mistake would lose. This does not apply to fighting multiple stacked groups, as no matter how well you do versus the first and second groups, the third or even fourth will come in when you’re low on resources, have no ultimates left, and can’t extricate.

When dealing with multiple stacked groups, the primary strategic considerations are as follows:

• They are not going to position optimally as a structured min/max group or even a normal PuG (Pick up Group) will. They will be much more spread out, notably due to having 4 different leaders, as well as containing random players who joined who won’t move as well with the regulars. If you’ve ever watched a PuG move and compared it to a “ball group”, watching the multiple stacked groups move is that same difference again.
• Even though they’re spread out, they will still all cast proxy or shalk (warden bugs skill) when commanded to do so. Being anywhere near the explosions results in a high likelihood (near guarantee) of you dying (80 times 1k damage is more health than players can run).
• Even with a perfect ultimate dump, you’re not going to kill them all. You may get half, or even ¾ of them, but there will be some outlying players or even another group who get a camp or get resurrections.
• Change your goals when fighting such a group. The strategies for killing most of a group then forcing the rest to run won’t work on multiple stacked groups. Even 20 (of 80) remaining players can ult dump on you after you’ve finished your bomb.
• Set reasonable goals of killing a certain number of opponents or groups, after which your goal should be to extricate and get ready to fight again.
• With 80 players, it is feasible for them to always have a warden’s sleet running while in combat. Plan for 30% damage mitigation when you perform your calculations of how many ultimates to drop at the same time.

STRATEGIES

There are a lot of strategies that will still work when fighting a faction stack, as long as you consider the points above (among many other things). Some notable ones to include in your and/or your group’s strategies are:

• Inevitable Detonation is an amazing skill. While it does have a cast time, and that cast time may be extended to 2 or 3 seconds in lag, if you manage to get a few players casting it at the same time (especially those in a Spinner/VD/Balorgh type of build) then your targets will die almost every time. If you’re solo or in a small group, Inevitable Detonation is still a great skill due to the number of players it hits at high enough damage to put you well onto the AP table for when the players hit die.
• The opponent groups will be healing and purging A LOT. Heal debuffs are critical to getting past the sheer raw numbers that they can bring. Players that have a focus on debuffing should have 100 champion points into The Shadow -> Befoul tree, giving them a 55% increase in the effectiveness of healing reduction abilities.
  • A warden casting Corrupting Pollen.
  • A more survivable build wearing the Thurvokun set.
  • DK’s banner ult.
  • Templar’s Dark Flare may take even longer to cast than Inevitable, and while it may be of value, it should not be the focus of a group’s defile debuffs.
• Coordinate different types of siege. If you’re getting ready to fire your siege, watch where someone near you is firing theirs. You should wait an extra second or two so that you both fire at the same time at the same target – ensuring a kill rather than just getting opponents to low health and hoping someone else will kill them.
  • While some players may have snare immunity from their individual skills, Retreating Maneuvers no longer applies snare immunity to everyone in group. Oil catapults to slow and remove stamina.
  • Scattershot catapults to increase damage.
  • Meat bag catapults for heal debuff.
  • Ballistae & Trebuchets: Cold fire siege hits hard on the initial hit, especially on vampires, but considering the sheer number of purges going out you can’t count on the DoTs to tick. A normal stone ballista can hit players for 6-8k. If times well (during other players’ bombs), it can make a huge difference!
• Snare them. Then snare them some more. Finally, hit them with more snares! The more snares, the easier they are to hit with siege and other AoE skills. The more snares, the more they will spread out trying to move at different speeds allowing you to single target players of interest.
  • If you run a magicka build and are used to running one handed weapon & shield on your defensive bar, swap them out for an ice staff. You can still block with an ice staff at reduced (magicka) cost, saving your stamina for breaking free, roll dodging, or sprinting. You can then also run ice Blockade (morph of wall of elements that has a greater area) which applies a slow and immobilize (to chilled opponents).
  • If you run a stamina build, slot Caltrops.
  • If you’re a magicka warden, slot Gripping Shards.
• Traditionally, ball groups would proxy up, shalk (warden bugs) up, then run into and through their opponents with destro ultimates, point AoE ultimates (such as NB Tether), and hard crowd control (cc) such as fears or warden Sleets to stun opponents. While this may still work in some circumstances for very well coordinated groups, keep in mind that your opponents – the multi group faction stack – will likely be doing something similar. If you have a semi-organized group, try practicing keeping on the outer edge of such a group and constantly re-positioning to ensure that while your ultimates are up you are hitting a good number of opponents, and while you have to rebuild your ultimates you can extricate and stay safe until you’re ready to hit them again.
• Keep your buffs up. Continuous attacks gives you 10% weapon and spell damage. That 10% is compounded with all other bonuses (major/minor). When you’re looking to burst down an opposing group, every extra bit of damage helps!
• Time your damage. If you or your group doesn’t have enough damage, call out in /yell or better yet have everyone join the same voice communications channel (Discord). Just having one person call out timing on damage makes a huge difference!

DEALING WITH A LAGGY GAME

If the game is really lagging so badly that you can’t stay connected, your skills don’t fire, and you’re ready to smash your keyboard into your screen, it’s probably time to take a break. Go make a sandwich and/or a hot chocolate, kiss your significant other, and find something else to do (clothing optional). You’ll be a lot less frustrated, and probably have a lot more fun than staring at a screen and hoping that the next engagement lets you actually fight for more than 20 seconds before you get kicked to login.

Updated: 2020/12/27

You should have already read the Making AP and Emperor sections, so I’m not going to repeat very much from those. The short, short summary: In order to become Emperor you need to be at the top of the leader board, and have all six of the inner “Emperor Ring” keeps taken by your faction at the same time.

PLANNING AND PREPARATION:

• Prepare multiple sets of gear and plan for different builds depending on what you’re going to be doing. You might have some time playing solo, small group, or even join zergs depending on the state of the map and what you’re trying to accomplish.
• Talk to the guilds that play the map, and if you’re able to open up good relations with them, it will be a lot easier later on to get their help flipping the ring.
• There may be a time that you have to lead your faction and wrangle the PuGs, so an addon like “Auto Invite” will make that easier. Remember that most players are not very organised, and their builds will not have synergy for the group that you put together (or join), so if you want the group to succeed then you’ll need to fill in for whatever is needed.
• You will need to keep track of your AP, so get an addon that is capable of helping you maintain your sanity. Ghostbane created a great one.
• Ensure that you have all five of the PvP quests completed (kill, scout, keep, resource, scroll), so that you can turn them in 30 seconds after the scoreboard opens.
• Talk to your friends, and get help. You probably won’t be able to do this alone, and having at least 2-3 friends with you at all times will help you maintain sanity. I can’t stress this point enough!
• Ten minutes before the scoreboard opens, head over to a delve and get ready to kill the boss. At 2 minutes before the scoreboard opens, kill the boss to get your 1-hour AP buff (20% bonus AP), then get back to the gates and prepare to turn in your quests. Note that dying to the monsters in the delve will let you respawn at your gates and get into position much more quickly than exiting the delve, running to a keep/outpost, and transiting to the gates.
• Look at the scoreboard (hit “J” then click the last tab) and check when the campaign opens. It will usually be about 45 minutes after the campaign closed (if I recall correctly).

MAKING AP:

• Now that you’ve turned in your quests and have a small lead over the rest of the players who have not prepared for this, pick up new quests. It’s a good idea to have one of your friends keep an easy quest in their list so that they can share and re-share it to you each time you turn it in. For DC, the capture Chalman Mine quest is the one we tend to do most often. For AD, it’ the capture BRK Mine quest, and for EP it’s the capture Aleswell Farm quest. These three resources are taken very often, and retaken relatively quickly, so as you have the opportunity to head over to those locations, you should be getting the extra bit of AP for those quests.
• Depending on the state of the map, your skill level, the people with you, and a whole slew of other things, the initial AP farming session will take different forms. You may want to play as normal, you may want to go ganking, you may want to try to farm a resource, or you may want to go and take opponent resources one after the other.
• If the map is relatively dead, resource taking nets you 1800 AP (with your 20% buff and assuming that nobody has died) each, so going to a keep with three resources available and taking them one after the other before moving to the next keep and repeating that continuously could net you 5400 (1800 x 3) per keep, and about 10 keeps per hour if you move optimally giving you five minutes to go get your AP buff every hour when it falls off. Including the occasional kill, that will probably reach about 75k AP / hour.
  • Note that the O-tick from taking a resource will include the AP from any player deaths. To clarify how that works, if someone dies, then the AP from their death would be added to the 1800 you get on the O-tick, though that extra AP would be divided among all the people there.
• When keeps are being taken, you probably want to be in the area. There will be more players to kill, and the O-tick will be a nice bonus.
• When possible, use methods that do a lot of damage to opponents even if you don’t kill them yourself. Stock up on cold fire ballistae, trebs, scatter-shots, and oils so that you hit the most number of opponents with a good amount of damage in the shortest amount of time. Keep an execute skill on your bar and spam it on players who get low standing in oils. If you’re in a magicka build, running the Vicious Death set while using siege is a great way to get extra tags on players while using siege. Low damage skills like Caltrops won’t do enough damage to be worth AP, though skills like Inevitable Detonation when spammed on multiple targets as they are grouped up can be very nice for taking advantage of other players’ efforts in killing these opponents. As long as you stay in range of the opponents, you’ll get AP when they die.
  • Think about the skills you have available to you. Purifying Light or Power of the Light from a Templar will store damage and proc after 6 seconds. If you spam that on different targets who are under someone else’s oil or about to be bombed by another group, then the procs and subsequent heals (from the magicka morph) will gain you good contribution percentages for the incoming AP (Templar Nerfs in late 2019 killed this option). Think about every skill, and if it can be used to net you more AP than simply killing one target at a time.
• The most important point to make about making AP is that you have to keep playing. If you take a break, then someone else will probably pass you on the leader board. Everyone needs to sleep, so plan your resting hours for when the campaign is dead and there’s a lot less AP to be made. If you’re in it for the long run, then it might even be in your interest to sleep or take a break in prime time. With lag and disconnects / crashes happening often enough, you may make more AP with less population on the map. Record your AP per hour every hour and keep track of when works best for you.
  • Remember that it is against the Terms of Service to have multiple people play on the same account. It has happened many times, and I’m sure some of you have seen some player able to be online for 5 days with zero down time (indicative of multiple players on the same account), but if you do this you risk the consequences of violating the Terms of Service.
• You have also probably heard about AP feeding, and having lots of friends play on another faction in order to “feed” you AP and ticks at a resource. This was a big complaint on console for a long time – in that the person(s) at the top of the leaderboard would have an entire guild feed them AP when someone else was catching up on the leaderboards. This was all done out in the open with no attempts to hide it. This isn’t against the Terms of Service, but it is seriously frowned upon by the community and many people consider it “cheating”. If you’re considering being fed AP, then keep the following in mind:
  • The people feeding AP are not going to be making AP while feeding, so there’s no real value to them in doing so. They probably won’t want to do this for long (unless you’re compensating them), so if you rely on this method, it probably won’t last for long enough to get Emperor.
  • People will talk, and take screen shots or videos, and it will get out. It’s very easy to accuse people of such when you don’t understand AP farming techniques and strategies, and many of the high AP earning players have been accused of this (myself included). Consider that it’s one thing for whining jealous people to accuse others, though it’s another if there is actual proof. With proof, your reputation (if you have one) will take a hit, and it can impact your social enjoyment of the game. Some people don’t care, and we’ve seen many posts on the forums and screen shots of players being fed both on the map and using exploits to get outside of the map (under the world or past the mountain barriers).
  • If people are aware that you’re not making your AP legitimately, then they won’t want to help you get Emperor.
  • It is very easy to find you doing this, as when you kill a few players in an area, there will be swords on the map. Seeing consistent swords on a resource that is not flipping during the early campaign is very obvious, and it’s very likely that people will come to disrupt your activities.
  • We’ve seen PvE guilds do this in order to help new players or new characters get the required skills in the Alliance War skill line (caltrops / vigor / proxy). I personally feel that this isn’t much of an issue as they are not affecting the leaderboards, and are thus not impacting anyone else’s ability to play and achieve emperor.
• Renewing your AP buff by killing a delve boss is very important, though try to do so when you’re on a break or there’s nothing significant happening. During the time it takes you to get to the delve, zone in (load screen), kill the boss, then either die to mobs and resurrect at the gate (load screen) or run out (load screen) and get back to the action you’re not making any AP. The next hour’s 20% extra AP needs to be more than the AP that you didn’t make during the time lost getting the buff.

TAKING THE EMPEROR RING:

• This part is rather obvious. You need for your faction to have possession of all six Emperor keeps. The more large groups that coordinate to take them all at the same time, the higher your likelihood of success.
• Some players won’t want to get Emperor for their faction, as that tends to cause the other two factions to gang up on your faction. While you defend the last Emperor keep, your faction may lose everything else on the map including your scrolls. What you do is up to you, but you also have to respect that other players will do what they want as well. Be mature in zone chat, and try your best to convince others that having you as Emperor is in the best interest of your faction.
• If there’s no chance of getting it during prime time (probably happens once per campaign reset at most), then the middle of the night is the time to do this. Many players have disdain for the “PvDoor” (Player vs. Door) concept, though if it’s the only way to take all six keeps when very few others are playing, then it’s your choice on how and when to do it.
• The order in which you take the keeps is important, primarily due to your opposition. If you leave the easiest keep for last, and the hardest keep for second to last, then you’ll probably have an easier time. There won’t likely be a faction stack (almost every player in the opposing faction) at the second to last keep, so you’ll have a better chance of taking it. The last keep should belong to the faction with the least population / power / capability at the time you’re pushing for Emperor, and a separate group from the one taking the second to last keep should be starting on the last keep shortly after the second to last keep flags. There are many strategies for timing, and I’m hoping that this example gives you an idea of what you should consider if you’re directing or leading groups.

ONCE YOU HAVE EMPEROR:

• The most important thing to do now is to thank every one that helped you. You did not do this yourself, so take 30 seconds and build better relations with everyone out there letting them know that they are appreciated.
• The next thing to do is equip the gear you prepared for being Emperor. You have a lot more regen, so switching to damage enchants on your jewellery (instead of regen or cost reduction) is the first consideration. If you’re running a sustain or regen oriented set, change it to a max-resource set (as Emperors get extra resource pools) and/or a damage set. Blood Spawn is usually the best monster set, as the proc for extra ultimate is doubled for the Emperor!
• The skills you use will also probably change a bit. Your ultimate will hit a lot harder due to the much larger resource pool, and you may want a lesser cost ultimate available (such as Dawn Breaker) so that you can cast it every couple seconds due to all of your extra ultimate generation.
• Go kill things. KILL ALL THE THINGS. If you’re going to take another keep (such as tri-keeps to open scroll gates), the Emperor should be sieging with their double siege damage buff.
• If you’re going to take a scroll, the Emperor should not be the one to pick it up, as if they are needed elsewhere to defend a keep, they need to be able to mount and move out as fast as possible (you can’t mount while holding a scroll).
• Have fun! You’ve put in an enormous amount of effort, so enjoy it while it lasts. The faction with Emperor will usually be ganged up on by the other factions, so your Emperor status may only last for an hour. It’s up to you how to have the most fun during the time that you are Emperor!

WHEN YOUR EMPEROR STATUS IS AT RISK:

• You should very rarely leave the last keep. If you trust the players there, and believe that you can take another keep before your opponents take your last keep then go and do your best, though it’s usually a tough decision.
• Expect lag. Expect lag to the point that many players will disconnect and won’t be able to get back in the game. Expect your FPS to drop such that the game is almost unplayable. Expect most players in your faction to get fed up and just let the last Emperor keep go in order to reduce the amount of lag and get back to playing normally.

ONCE YOU’VE BEEN DETHRONED:

• Switch back to your normal build.
• You now have a series of decisions to make:
  • Will you keep AP farming to get Emperor again?
  • Will you play normally and if it happens then it happens (being crowned again)?
  • Will you drop campaign so that someone else can be on top of the leader board right away? I suggest that you not do this. Keep your place on the leader board so that you have a greater chance to get gold rewards at the end of the campaign.
  • Will you play another of your characters so that someone else can pass you and be on top of the leader board? This could be a nice gesture if you farmed AP with a friend the whole time and said friend is in second place. It’s now your turn to help them farm as fast as possible. Once your friend has gotten slightly ahead of you (perhaps by 50k), then swap back to your former Emperor character and keep making AP.
• If you have not done so already, put on your Emperor costume, Former Emperor title, and check out how the Emperor Red colour looks on the gear or other costumes that you usually wear.
• Most importantly, be gracious and thank everyone that helped you.

A good distribution of champion points is key to maximizing your damage or healing output, and minimizing the damage that you take.

As of June 2021, the standard PvP champion point for all players that I recommend are:

Most groups will want to use the red tree for extra health, armour or regen.

Most groups will have their damage dealers use the blue tree for extra damage (area, crit, etc).

Healing compositions will want variable blue tree choices, and if the healing composition has someone running Transmutation, then the Resilience slotable is less critical.

• Cleanse Sorcs, Healing Necromancers and any healer using Curse Eater will want Salve of Renewal to add an area heal centred on any player on whom they remove a negative effect.
• Templar healers and other burst roles should use From the Brink to provide a shield when healing low health targets.
• One or two healers in group should use Enlivening Overflow to increase the team’s regeneration by 150 (on overheal).

I’ve been intending to write up a choose your own adventure style decision tree on choosing where to go dependent upon your goals, though haven’t yet put enough time into it.

Where you go will depend on your primary and secondary goals, such as:

• Make the most points
• Defend keeps from opposing faction
• Take keeps from opposing faction
• Increase your faction’s campaign points
• Take campaign points away from opposing faction
• Crown your faction’s emperor
• Dethrone an opposing faction’s emperor
• Steal an opposing faction’s scroll
• Have good / balanced fights with opposing groups

Remember that not everyone has the same goals, and this is a video game meant for having fun. While some people want to always play for the campaign, others want to make points, and others are just looking for good fights regardless of what else happens on the map.

Do what your leader tells you to do.

Learn to cast / use skills as you move.

Learn when to roll dodge, and practice movement and skills/casting coming out of a dodge.

Learn to recognise the animations of every skill in the game, so you know when you need to move out of something (like a DawnBreaker).

Most importantly, never stop moving. If you stand in one place, you will probably die.

Some of this is the responsibility of the group leader, though every individual needs to be aware of where their opponents are located, where damage is coming from, the existence of red circles on the ground (indicative of AoE or siege), and where to position in order not to get hit.

People dropping siege can make or break a fight. Siege needs some space, and has a projectile time (before it hits), so locating your friendly siege well is very important. The person(s) running siege also need to be protected (they can’t just stand out in the open and expect not to be attacked.

When running siege, you should get on the siege to fire when it’s ready, then immediately get off of it and maintain awareness of your surroundings. If counter siege is aimed at you, get out of the circle it’s going to hit, then go back in and fire your siege.

Line of sight is another important principle. An area of effect projectile spell will not hit you if it can’t see you, though a single target projectile will still hit you if it starts travelling before you move out of sight.

When in and group and in stealth, don’t use any skills! There are some that can be safely used in stealth, though the people who are watching you don’t know that, and can easily give away your stealth position. If there is a group of people in stealth near you, you should stealth as well so as not to reveal them.

If there is a large train of players (grouped up tightly) moving towards you, then roll to the side! If you stay directly in front of them, it doesn’t matter how tanky or survivable you are, you’re not likely to live through it. It is better to use some stamina in a dodge roll then all of your (or your healers’) resources staying alive in the face of high damage.

If someone is moving towards you with a proxy detonation on them, move away until the proxy explodes and then attack. If you can’t move away, blocking the detonation is usually your best option, though be wary of destro staff ultimates that can’t be blocked.

A good leader understands all of these principles (among many other things), can predict what opponents will do, and make the right calls to counter them

A good leader is completely useless unless the people in the group all perform well. If the leader calls for movement, you should move. If you stay where you are, you may get one more kill, but more often than not the leader knows or sees something you do not, or is strategizing for the next movement and if you do not follow commands then the group is less powerful. You may have gotten that one kill, but you’re going to miss out on the next 20 kills because of it, or put others in your group at risk because they have to come resurrect you rather than keep on killing.

Do what your leader tells you or get out of the group.

Updated: June 2021

Introduction

Does your group consistently lose fights in Cyrodiil? Do you seem to get ROFLStomped every time you come up to another organized group? It may be the leader, it may be a huge difference in skill, it may be that their group composition and builds are much better aligned than yours, or it may be a combination of all those and more.

Group composition is one of the biggest challenges that leaders and strategists face. Many groups have different players in different raids, and expecting strict adherence to build details can be challenging. Rather than provide detailed gear, set, skill, and champion point specifications that are subject to change more often than I want to update these guides, I’m going to provide a high level overview of how I look at group composition strategies with a few examples in the hope of helping you better strategize your own groups.

This is meant to help groups who are trying to figure out how to plan their compositions and builds, or solo/small players who want to join groups of 12 and be able to perform for the group rather than for their own numbers or kill records. If your group already has a strategist building a composition for you, this may serve as reference material to them, though keep in mind that your strategist knows your group (leader’s, damage dealers’, healers’, and supports’ preferences, styles, and capabilities) better than I do, and will be better able to set up builds that best compliment their capabilities and styles.

The Raid Leader

While it’s reasonable for the raid leader to be a damage dealer,  they are the ones who will control group movement and the location where damage should be focused. Considering that there is a 1-2 seconds gap between where the leader sees themselves on the screen and where everyone else is located, hard cc is the most important capability in the leader’s arsenal. Whether it be fears or stuns, the leader has to be able to maintain them, while keeping their awareness of everything and everyone around them. Instant cc is most often associated to a magicka NB due to their fear skill. Turn undead from the Fighter’s Guild skill line is a viable alternative for a stamina build. I personally prefer magicka NB leaders, though everyone has their preference. As long as you have a hard cc in your kit, and manage your damage dealers to focus on the opponents that you hard cc, any class can be a good leader.

Stamina Speeder

Every group needs one stamina build running Charging Maneuver for major and minor expedition. Historically this would be a stamina healer, often a Warden due to Green Lotus and Mend Wounds (Psyjic) synergy and their wonderful ability to keep healing while standing in a Negate. My current preference is for the Stamina Speeder to be a Sorc damage dealer running Powerful Assault with one other damage set and a monster set (if not using a Mythic) such as Selene. They will use Shuffle (5 medium armour) for Major Evasion. Their first priority is to keep Charging Maneuver up (cast every 7 seconds for an 8 second buff ensuring near 100% uptime), then deal damage – often with Whirling Blades. I’ve seen some viable builds using Vicious Death on weapons and jewelry (enchanted with weapon damage), though have never tried it myself.

Damage Dealers (Magicka)

Damage dealer builds are likely among the most consistent for most groups. Keeping in mind that many min/max groups will have their own opinions, and my recommendations here are based on what will work best for the most groups of diverse players. My current preferences are for one DK (Talons / Deep Breath), then NBs and Wardens (highest damage after NB) for main sources of damage. Necromancers are awesome for graveyards and smash (ult), though they don’t bring as much damage as other classes. If you have two Necromancer healers who can supply graveyards and the occasional smash ultimate, you may not want any Necromancer damage dealers in your composition.

• Between sets, character points, passives, enchants (most should be tri-chants), and champion points, you should have 30k health. Unbuffed.
• You should be in 5 light, 1 medium, and 1 heavy armour.
• Most builds will be using Harmony on their jewelry with weapon/spell damage enchants. The first part of the damage cycle should be coordinating proxy detonations with a harmony synergy on a Necromancer’s graveyard, a Templar’s Nova, and as many other relevant synergies as possible.
• Choose a defensive 5-set. As of 2021/06 with procs working again in Cyrodiil, Vicious Death is once again the great group killer. It doesn’t matter how good your group is when a few random players close enough to you can cause your group to wipe.
  • This is why I believe (as of 2021/06) that all classes except for NB (as they have their own source of Major Evasion) should be running Spectre’s Eye. The 5-set bonus provides Major Evasion for 30 seconds whenever you cast a magicka ability.
  • You can keep your back bar weapon(s) as Spectre’s Eye along with three body pieces, so you only need it to swap to your back bar, cast a magicka ability every 30 seconds (when it falls off – as it won’t refresh the buff timer) to maintain that sweet 20% AoE damage mitigation.
  • Alternatively if you back bar a special weapon (such as Vateshran, VMA, Master’s or others) then your front bar would be a crafted Spectre’s Eye staff, something very easy to acquire (unlike the Burning Spellweave destro staff that took me more than 200 runs to get).
  • More detail on Spectre’s Eye vs. Gossamer is lower down in the healer section.
• Choose an offensive 5-set. This will likely be Vicious Death. Kill one player and start a chain reaction. This is the way.
• Your monster 2-set will likely be Balorgh. Ensure the highest damage during bombs. If you’re going to use a Mythic set piece, breaking Balorgh and using only 1 piece is a viable option.
• You have many options for your weapon bars. I’m not going to make recommendations, as there are too many viable options between Vateshran, Master’s, vMA, and others. Pick what works best for you and your group. I’ve noted some success with a front bar Lightning Staff of Spectre’s Eye and a back bar VMA Resto staff (for that sweet magicka regen). Again, pick what works best for you, keeping the above ideas in mind.
• In your Champion Point setup:
  • Unassailable (blue) provides 10% mitigation of area damage. This is one more defence against VD procs and ultimate bombs.
  • Slippery (red) will automatically break you free of cc every 21 seconds. You may believe that you can break free quickly, and you may have tried this CP and found that it doesn’t always work (necessitating a manual break free), though there will be times in high lag and latency situations where it will break you free before you even realize you’re hard cc’ed.
  • The rest of your CP should orient towards movement speed in green, extra damage in blue, and health/armour/defence in red.
• If you are a NB and have slotted Phantasmal Escape (for Major Evasion), you don’t need Spectre’s Eye and can run a second damage set. I enjoy Mechanical Acuity for guaranteed critical strikes on bombs.

Healers

Healing compositions can be challenging, especially with the limited number of set slots available. Once again keeping in mind that these recommendations are meant to help the most groups, as well as solo players who are looking to build for groups. If you have a min/max group with your own theory crafters, take the information here as idea inputs and not gospel.

• Between sets, character points, passives, enchants (most should be tri-chants), and champion points, you should have 30k health. Unbuffed.
• You should be in 5 light, 1 medium, and 1 heavy armour.
• Most builds will be using magicka regeneration enchants with one Swift and either the Arcane (max magicka) or Infused (more effect of the enchant) on their other jewelry. I personally prefer running three Swift.
• Choose a defensive 5-set. As of 2021/06 with procs working again in Cyrodiil, Vicious Death is once again the great group killer. It doesn’t matter how good your group is, if there are a few random players close enough to you, their deaths will ensure yours. This is why I suggest Spectre’s Eye on all classes except for NB (as they have their own source of Major Evasion). The 5-set bonus of Spectre’s Eye provides Major Evasion for 30 seconds whenever you cast a magicka ability. You can keep your back bar weapon(s) as Spectre’s Eye along with three body pieces, so you only need it to swap to your back bar, cast a magicka ability every 30 seconds (when it falls off – as it won’t refresh the buff timer) to maintain that sweet 20% AoE damage mitigation. Every healer (not Cleanser) who is running Spectre’s Eye back bar should have a Master’s resto front bar to supply the regeneration buff from their Illustrious casts.
• Before choosing a healing (proc) set, first confirm what classes you have healing:
  • Templars are the classic healer. Their value used to come from Breath of Life, though this skill’s smart targeting has been decidedly not-smart for a long time. Run a few tests yourself by having a few friendly players all use Equilibrium to keep their health at different levels (as low as possible on one, and missing only a few thousand health on others). You’ll note that the *big* heal from BoL won’t always hit the player with low health, it’ll even sometimes hit out of group on a guard or other friendly player missing 1k health rather than the group member right in front of you missing 25k health. It’s still a powerful skill, though the NB and Necromancer single target burst heals have better / smarter targeting, so in the current patch (as of 2021/06) I recommend only one Templar healer in an optimal healing composition. Value comes from Extended Ritual being capable of proc’ing various sets and CP, in addition to solid mid level area heals from Repentance (with bodies) and Ritual of Rebirth (or Hasty Prayer if you don’t have a speeder in your composition).
  • Night Blades have a diverse skill set, and will use more Resto staff skills. Merciless Resolve gives them 10% extra critical healing, and they will want to have (blue) CP providing 10% more critical healing (for 20% more than others – at least those without the CP as well). Most of their healing will come from Healthy Offering (smart single target), Blessing of Restoration, and Illustrious. The value in a NB is that they bring their own Major Evasion, so can run two healing sets without affecting their survivability.
  • Necromancers have the best mid level area heal in the game. Renewing Undeath is a good area heal slightly larger than most, and it will purge (removing 3 negative effects) from anyone in the area if you consume a corpse. Between their own Spirit Guardian (10% damage mitigation) corpses and dead bodies, this becomes a spammable heal/purge made even better by the new Salve CP (area heal on removal of negative effects) that can get a group out of a counter bomb consuming one corpse on each cast after killing a group of opponents.
  • Sorcerers run Cleanse and Power Surge. VMA resto staff back bar with Radiating Regen for magicka recovery.
  • Wardens don’t bring as much value right now. Their cone heal provides minor regen buffs, any of their healing provides a buff to max health (though this can come from Radiating Regen on a damage dealing Warden), but otherwise they tend not to be as valuable as the above three classes.
  • Dragon Knight healers are of very low value in PvP. They just don’t have the kit that other classes do. Some players enjoy them, and there’s nothing stopping them from playing how they want, though they’re not welcome in my compositions.
• Based on having five to six healers in a group, at least one of which is a NB, there are between six and eight healing sets available (one for each healer and two on NBs). The sets I recommend are as follows:
  • Curse Eater. The cool down for Curse Eater is on the player (not the healer), so having two of these in group is reasonable. Curse Eater can be great on any healer, though Necromancers with the Salve of Renewal CP (area heals when removing a negative effect) complements their purges from Renewing Undeath. By stacking the negative effect removals on Necromancers, the slottable CP won’t need to be on the other healers (just Cleanse Sorcs).
  • A second Curse Eater either on your second Necromancer or on your Templar.
  • Transmutation. Considering that NBs gain extra crit healing (from maintaining Merciless Resolve), I’ve tended towards giving them any set that has critical strike chance on it.
  • Worm Cult. Extra magicka regen for the group always helps. I tend to prefer this as the second set on a NB.
  • Spell Power Cure. More damage buffs! This works very well on a Sorc, and will be easily applied by their Power Surge and Radiating Regen.
  • Meritorious Service. This needs to be on a Sorcerer, as every cast of Cleanse will apply it. 3450 resistance is just over 5% damage mitigation.
  • If there’s a seventh set slot available, Combat Physician is very viable as a second set on a NB (who also runs Transmutation with the extra critical strike chance bonus).
  • If there is an eighth set slot available, Hiti’s Hearth is viable. The heal from Hiti’s Hearth isn’t large, though it will proc other heal-based procs. While a proc isn’t supposed to proc another proc per game design, this has been a long running bug (years), so may be viable in some contexts. The stamina cost reduction is very nice in some context.

• Alternative sets:
  • If the group is not running Spectre’s Eye, then Gossamer is a requirement. The buff only lasts one second, and only applies when actual damage is healed, so the initial hit from an incoming bomb will not be mitigated. The decision between everyone (except NBs and the stamina builds) running Spectre’s eye and having multiple Gossamer sets in group is one for your strategist. I’ve found that it takes three Gossamer in a group to ensure adequate coverage. Considering how high damage is (as of 2021/06), Spectre’s Eye will likely be the better choice.
  • Hiti’s Hearth. The heal from Hiti’s Hearth isn’t large, though it will proc other heal-based procs. While a proc isn’t supposed to proc another proc per game design, this has been a long running bug (years), so may be viable in some contexts. The stamina cost reduction is very nice in some context.
  • Hollowfang Thirst. Hollowfang work exceptionally well for some groups, and horribly for others. It depends on movement style, and how much fighting you’re going to be doing in more cramped conditions (keeps and chokes) where the Hemoglobin balls can spawn.
  • If the group runs tightly stacked (seven meter range), Almalexia’s Mercy may be viable. It’s not as powerful as prior to the 2021/06 patch, though the output is still reasonable. I don’t love this on a healer, as it doesn’t require healing – so it can be on any player such as a dedicated defile/support DK if you want one in group (I don’t).
  • Prayer Shawl. Prayer Shawl applies on overheal, so it’s more of a preparatory skill increasing the available health pool pre-bomb. If your group is min/max or at least regular experienced players, its value is a lot lower. If you’re running a Pick up Group (PuG), then it may be viable to help newer and squishier players.
  • Saxheel Champion. Some believe this to be viable for a healer with the Replenishing Barrier ultimate. As you’re moving into a bomb, the healer casts Barrier to protect your group from counter damage, giving your damage dealers 20% extra critical damage (especially those NBs in Acuity/VD). The use of this set will depend on how your strategist sets your group and how your leader wants to run your bombs.

• Monster Sets:
  • Earthgore (as of 2021/06) only removes negative ground effects directly under the player on whom it proc’ed at the time it procs. The animation of Earthgore’s blood rain is not related to ground effect removal – only the range of who the heals may tick on. The Earthgore heal will also not always target the lowest health player in range (per tool tip) – this was inconsistent in our testing. Thanks to the Ballistic crew for their time in helping to test this.
  • Bogdan the Nightflame totems have a reasonable heal with a reasonable radius, and running a few of them in group can help a lot when on a ram, in a choke, or in any given bomb or negate that you’re trying to live through. Nightflame can be amazing or useless depending on the group style, positioning, and what they’re fighting.
  • Symphony of Blades. Resource regen every 18 seconds per player when they’re under 50% resources. One of these in every group is very valuable.

As of 2021/06, Regardless of Earthgore’s limitation, it’s still a very powerful set, and will remove a good number of ground effects. In the first two raids post-patch (with procs back), of 34 total negates in which Earthgore proc’ed on one of our group, there were 19 of them removed. Earthgore is never a wrong choice on a healer, though you shouldn’t rely on it for actual healing. I suggest that you have your healers try Nightflame (perhaps an even split with half in Earthgore and half in Nightflame) and see how it feels to you.

• • Ensure that you’re looking at logs to assess its healing, and ensure that you’re looking at the times before players die – not just the total healing amount that it does.
  • Huge healing when you’re only taking cursory damage is wasted.
  • Keeping big heals out just in case you’re about to be bombed may be reasonable or may be a waste of resources. It’s subjective, contextual, and there’s no right or wrong – you do what your raid leader (or heal leader) tells you to do, be it “your best” or “what I tell you to do”.

• Champion Points

Enlivening Overflow (blue) provides 150 resource regeneration on overheal. This should be on one healer, as the buff doesn’t stack (it actually does in some circumstances, though that’s a bug and not working as intended.

From the Brink (blue) will shield a ally that you heal when they are below 25% health. The base shield size in Cyrodiil (due to Battle Spirit) is 5,500. This can be very significant in giving your low health group members (and allies you heal) one more tick of damage before they would otherwise die. I believe that this should be on one healer in group,  and likely the one with the most consistent healing ticks being applied. In my own play style, I get the best results on a Templar for this, though we haven’t yet run enough raids with this new CP to confirm a position.

Salve of Renewal (blue) provides an area heal centered on any player on whom you remove a negative effect. This definitely needs to be on Cleanse Sorcs and Necromancer healers. Its value on other healers will depend on how much they purge/cleanse and on whether they’re running the Curse Eater set.

Sample Group Composition

I’ve prepared a template with a sample group composition at https://tinyurl.com/healingcomp

Conclusion

There is no one true way, and no single composition that will win vs. all others. Your strategists and leaders need to decide for themselves how you’re going to play, what you’re going to fight, and with the players that you have available, what is best for your group.

There are optimized builds for every set of roles and responsibilities in a group. Some may need more weapon damage, some more spell damage, some larger resource pools, some more resource regeneration, and some more defensive stats. The gear, enchants, and skills that you use / equip / put on your bar are what determine if you have the potential to be great. Good gear does not make a good player, but it does give the player a higher likelihood of success.

Every individual has a role and responsibilities. Some examples are: Stamina DPS, Magicka DPS, Disruptor (disrupts the opponents with cc), Protector (ensures that certain key members of  your group don’t get targeted) and Healer. Note that there is no such thing as a tank in PvP, or rather a PvP tank doesn’t serve much purpose other than to be an ultimate generator for opponents.

If you come into PvP thinking you’ll be “the tank”, very few good leaders will want you in their groups. There is a requirement for “tanky” players to assume other roles (such as applying defile or other healing debuffs to opponents), but there is no dedicated Tank role as there is in PvE since you have no control over who your opponents attack. If they think even a little bit about what they’re doing, they will target the high priority players first (such as known group leaders, healers, or high damage doers) – not the person who will last to the end of the fight who doesn’t do anything useful. It can be fun to be “the tank” and last a long time before dying, though you should also consider that you’re not going to make very many points by just standing there holding block.

Be very wary of taking advice from people. People build biases based on what they like to do, not necessarily what is best for them or their group.

Be even more wary of copying the builds you see popular streamers use. Many of them have a very niche play style, and tend to play for their audience rather than to be good at the game. I often call many of these players “1 v Potato” players rather than their self-titled “1 v X’ers”. If you see one person kill five others, then it’s a near certainty that those five others were not very skilled. In most situations, one player vs two other players of the same skill level will result in the one player dying / losing. In some cases the two may be outplayed, or one may make a mistake, though when considering equal skill it’s very unlikely for an outnumbered player to win. This is of course what many of the “1 v X’ers” count on, as it promotes their stream and brings in more fans who will help them make more money. The exception to this is usually an Emperor (the the Emperor section for more info) who, as a good player with an appropriate Emperor build should easily be able to take on five other players if using the right strategy.

There are many buffs that give benefits to your allies, and debuffs that take remove benefits or add hindrances to your opponents. Read all of the passives of all of your skill lines, and ensure that you are keeping your needed buffs up at all times.

A simple example that is not used near enough is Choking Talons. Most DKs use the morph that adds more damage, though the Choking morph reduces opponent damage by 15%. If your group is going to charge into an opposing group of 20+ players, having a tanky DK go in a few seconds early and cast Choking Talons a few times before you hit them can make a huge difference.

The timing on your own buffs is also very important. If you’re using DW (either as stamina or magicka) then the cast of Quick Cloak just before you’re going to get hit by AoE damage will negate an additional 20% of said incoming damage. When I lead groups, I’ll often call for “20 second buffs”, meaning that I’m giving people 3-4 seconds to apply everything that they want before going in. I’ll sometimes call “20 second buffs” as we disengage or if the engagement is delayed by a few seconds to ensure that my team’s buffs are all up for as long as possible without them needing to spend casting time reapplying them.

There are also some sets that provide buffs to your allies such as Spell Power Cure (increase spell damage). Having such a set on a player who can provide the associated buff to as many players in your group as possible can greatly increase the performance of your group.

Crowd control is one of the most critical and under rated mechanisms in the game. There are two types of crowd control, hard and soft. Hard usually causes a loss of control of your character (such as being feared or knocked up/down), while soft usually causes you to be unable to move, but you can still cast spells or use skills (such as being snared by Talons or Bombard).

Lets consider a NB’s fear skill. It hits 3 targets, and puts them out of the fight for between 1 and 2 seconds (one or two casts of skills). One player casting fear doesn’t do any damage or healing, though negates the activities of three opposing players for the same amount of time (or more) it took to cast the fear. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), fear is not a smart targeting system, and may hit someone who is immune from cc (as they’ve just broken out of a cc effect), so continued fears within a large group of opponents will probably only take out two targets after the first few seconds of fighting, though two for one is still very good especially if you’re outnumbered!

Snares are critical to taking out groups that move tightly together. A few people casting snares will cause some opponents to get stuck for a second or two, fall behind the moving group, and lose the protections that being in said group (all balled up) provides them. They’ll be much easier to kill. A strung out group can be focused down one by one, whereas a balled group needs to be AoE’ed.

Having your NBs cast fear regularly, your DKs talons, your archers Bombard (though consider that you can’t snare someone with cc immunity using bombard), your ice staff users slows and the use of ultimates that knock up (Meteor), down (Nova) or snare (ice destro staff ultimate) in the right place can all cause your opponents to get out of position, panic, or use up their critical stamina resources getting out of them. A player with no stamina can’t block or escape, and can be killed much more easily.

Defensive statistics are important, though too many people focus on staying alive and ultimately lose fights as they can’t do enough damage. I personally prefer glass cannon builds (the best defence is a good offence) when running in small groups and more defensive builds when in medium to large groups (as we expect to fight other medium to large groups with a lot of outgoing damage). In a group with good healers and crown control, being able to kill off the high priority targets of your opposing groups will increase the likelihood of winning an engagement.

• The first and most important concept of defence, is that you need to pay attention. Don’t just blindly follow along with the group. Watch what’s coming at you, where you’re going, judge where siege is likely to hit, what opponents are around, what buffs you have active and which ones you should cast or recast in different time frames. Awareness is what makes the difference between life and death.
• The way defensive stats work: 32,000 resist mitigates 50% of incoming damage (you take half of the damage that you should per attacker’s tool tip). Your resist minus your attacker’s penetration will result in a number. Each 660 Resist in that number mitigates 1% of incoming damage up to a maximum possible mitigation of 50%.
• Everyone should be running a skill/buff that gives major defensive stats (Immovable, Rune Focus, etc.) and/or a skill for added mitigation (Blade Cloak for DW to mitigate AoE damage, Dodge from NB or medium armour passives, shields, or others).
• Keep moving. If you stop moving, you’re a bigger target.
• If there is only one significant group of opposition, don’t ignore individuals. They may be able to set up siege, or single-target burst down one of your squishy members (your own bombers or healers). They may bitch about you zerging them down, but you’ll regret leaving them alive if they gank your back line or burn your siege.
• Use shields if you can. 3-4 sequential casts of a shield will often let you look at incoming destros and laugh at them. You should still move out of the way and follow your leader’s directions, though your survivability in the face of the bomb will increase.
• If you’re a vampire, use mist form. You can’t be snared, and you get major expedition, in addition to taking less damage while you get out of high damage situations (or a destro bomb).
• Keep Race Against Time (RAT) up while moving. If you can’t be snared, you’re less likely to be single targeted by those whose reaction times (to hit moving targets on their screens) are lower.
• Note that if you have cast a shield, and then enter mist form, the damage that the shield takes (before your health is hit) will be mitigated by mist form, so your shield is effectively 4 times more powerful (as of Q4/2019).
• Healing is not only the healers’ responsibility. If a stamina DPS player is PvP skill rank 5, then the Vigor skill is a great AoE heal. Casting it when you know your group is about to take large AoE damage will help everyone. The Cleanse morph of Purge uses a lot of magicka, though the heal on it effectively negates one large hit from almost anything. Some buffs also heal or apply a HoT (Heal over Time). The less your healers have to heal you all at once, the longer they can keep everyone alive.
• Your opponents may have players (mostly) dedicated to spamming cc, or you might just get hit by a few snares and slows here and there. They will be snaring you with sorcerer’s encase or DK’s talons, they may be slowing you with an ice wall of elements or caltrops, and you’re not going to be able to move. This is why most groups need to have dedicated players on Purge, magicka builds need RAT (see above) and why everyone needs to have Immovable pots ready to use when the leader calls for them.
• If you’re running a defensive ultimate, be ready to cast it when being hit. Warden’s Sleet provides a defensive 30% damage mitigation, and ticks towards cc’ing opponents. If you have someone running Nova, keep in mind that Nova reduces opponent outgoing damage by 30%, which is different from the Sleet’s 30% mitigation of incoming damage. If your group is snared and have no choice but to eat a bomb, Sleet defensively, Nova on top of your group and have both primary and secondary AoE healers start spamming their heals.
• Learn about your opponents if they are regular organised groups. Their leaders will have relatively consistent play styles, so if you can predict what they’ll do most of the time, living through their bombs, countering them and winning fights will be easier.
• My calculations based on Impenetrable vs. Reinforced traits: http://goo.gl/Zng18G
• My crit vs. impenetrable calculations: http://goo.gl/84hnar

Offensive tactics first involve knowing how likely you are to win a fight. Some groups are better than others for a variety of reasons (coordination, balance, composition, leadership, experience, min/maxed builds, etc) and knowing that you are outclassed can save a lot of frustration and change the tactics that you’re should use in order to try and win an engagement.

Every player should be min/maxed for their role and responsibilities. For offinsive players that means that they should be able to do the most damage without being 1-shot or dying in in the first few seconds of a fight.

Every major patch the min/max for each class/spec may change, so always pay attention to the theory crafters (if you don’t want to do it yourself). For stamina builds, you will probably stack the most weapon damage and maximum stamina with sufficient crit. For magicka builds, it will be the most spell damage and maximum magicka with sufficient crit. You’ll need a reasonable amount of resource regeneration, and to choose the right skill on your bars. I’m not going to go into each build, though if you are in a good PvP guild I’m sure that there are people who can help you. Some high end guilds even have required builds for certain roles and responsibilities. If you’re new to the game and want a quick recommendation, I’m usually happy to spend a few minutes (as long as I’m not in battle) helping people out – regardless of your faction.

• A good balance of outgoing damage types is critical to every group.
• Coordinating your damage so that it all hits at the same time makes it much more difficult for opposing healers to keep their players up.
• The best timing on execute skills to kill opponents is based on their health. Most become effective at 20 or 25%.
• Debuffs that reduce healing mean you’ll have less damage to do in order to kill an opponent that is receiving heals from a healer (or themselves using one of their own skills). When playing in groups, have someone in a defile build. Fasala’s Guile for minor defile with a warden’s Corrupting Pollen for major defile is a good combination. This will help deal with their healing.
• Get siege on your opponents. The more damage you can as often as you can. If there are multiple players sieging, try to target the same opponents. If you see two groups about to engage, try to hit the location of the most opposing players as they engage (as so that their healers can’t keep up with the damage that your siege does and the damage that the opposing group is doing).
• People with a high enough PvP rank should be using the skills available from it, most notably detonation. This puts a bomb on you that detonates after a few seconds and damages all enemies that are close enough. There are groups who all run that skill (even those who are stamina builds). Consider that a stamina build may only do 1,500 damage with that skill (after mitigation) and a magicka build can crit at  10k. If you have 12 people all running that skill, even if they each only do 1,500 damage, their opponent is just about dead and can be killed with one tick of an ultimate.
• Knowing when to use your skills is critical. When you see a group of opponents running at you with blue glowing lights and big red circles around them (they’ve all cast Proxy Det as described above), run away for a few seconds until they detonate, and then turn around to do your damage. If you take the damage from all those detonations, then you’re reducing the likelihood of winning the engagement. Proxy Det will take a few seconds to re-arm, so you’ll have time to kill them before it explodes again.
• Tab target a player with higher importance (such as healers or the group leader – if known). Tab targeting makes things easier if you try to single target a player in order to disrupt the group. Some groups fall apart when the leader dies, others will obsess about getting their healers back up (if they run low on burst healers), and others won’t care and just continue to play and recover as normal or run to drop a camp for their dead.
• Plan to snare, immobilise, and hard cc (crowd control) your opponents. An opponent who is feared for a few seconds is not doing damage or healing. An opponent who is immobilised or knocked back is not moving with their group. There are a lot of ways to separate opponents from their groups. Wardens can use their circle to teleport them. DKs can grab one with chains. NBs can drop a fear trap in their path, and cause a few to be separated if they don’t break free quick enough. Those that become separated need to be targeted and taken down quickly.
• Be quick and accurate with Negates. Players can’t cast in a Negate. Once they’re in, they won’t be able to anything other than run towards you and hope that whatever they case previously (such as their destro ultimate) does damage while getting out of the negate – or retreat. It’s up to the leader to call for a defensive or offensive Negate. You’ll hopefully have a few of them in group.
• Prepare and practice baiting. If a few players are able to get close enough that your opponents believe that they have a good chance to get kills, they’ll likely charge and pop their ultimates. The baiting players should have Retreating, and immovable pot ready, and someone to heal them from range. As soon as the opponent ultimates are out and will only last long enough for the rest of your group to get into them, it’s time for your counter bomb.
• When running in a group, your ultimates (at least some of them) have to go off at the same time. To do enough damage to wipe another group, consider how long your opponents will be in range of your damage, how much healing they’re likely to have, and how mobile they will be. You also have to consider how much damage they’re going to do to your own group, as you have to be alive in order to do damage! This is why many groups run very tanky builds that do low damage, and rely on numbers with very few glass cannons to output enough damage to kill their opponents. A good base for medium to large groups is to have at least three destros and one sleet ready to go as soon as you hit opponents, and to try and have the engagement occur in your own negate. Remember that Earthgore procs will remove negates, so you should have a second one available at all times.
• If you don’t kill all of your opponents in the first engagement, try not to let them resurrect. You’ll probably take out half, maybe 3/4 of a tanky group if you execute your bomb or counter well. There will probably be at least one templar in Kagrenac’s Hope (faster resurrecting speed) trying to get them back up. If it looks like they won’t be able to recover, some will likely stay to delay you, while a few of them will run away to get a camp up. It’s your (leader’s) choice on how you deal with this – be it to kill the ones left, chase the runners, or let them go so that they can form up again and you can have another good fight!
• If your opponents spread out to avoid a bomb (as they should), try to go after the squishiest players. Ignore the tank with 50k health and kill the healers and bombers first!
• Against a good guild group, your approach needs to much more cautious. If they are “retreating” against anything less than 2-3 times their number, they aren’t retreating, they are baiting you into a choke to nuke you. Do not follow into the chose. Let other players make them use all of their ultimates or bait them out if you can, and then hit them when they are unable to fight back.

There are way too many people saying way too many different things about PvP. The builds to use, strategies to play, and focus on different skills and abilities will be very different depending on the type and style of PvP that you will play. This is my attempt to ensure that as many people as possible are not given false, misleading, or wrong information.

Some of the information here may seem obvious to you. Please keep in mind that my goal is to educate new players, and help longtime players to identify any gaps in their knowledge. Along with all that you’ll find some different perspectives, detailed spreadsheets with the math behind how and why things work, and some of my own thoughts and strategies on PvP.