Hello and welcome to my guide on damage dealing in ESO!
First of all, this is not meant to tell you what set is BiS or what is not. There is no universal BiS in a game as complex as ESO. Sets are situational, buffs are situational, so always be critical of what others tell you, test it yourself, reflect on what you're told. This guide is meant to get players to understand how the game functions at its core, with all the math and statistics behind it. So ideally, after you read this guide, you should be able to determine yourself which set suits your build perfectly and why.
As for the general source of these formulae: they are taken from uesp.net. These guys developed an addon that collects actual ingame damage values and performs regressions with these in order to obtain the true damage coefficients behind the skills. If you question the site and the reliability of the information presented here, i suggest you learn a bit about panel data analysis through multivariate regressions. On the skill coefficient webiste, the R² (indicating the explanatory power of the model used or in this case, how accurate the calculation is) is 99.99% in all cases, with 100% being the most accurate it can be.
We're gonna go through the whole damage calculation formula and determine how different amplifiers affect your base stats, what diminishing returns are in the context of additive calculations, and then do a skill example along the way.
Part One: Calculating Damage
Let's start with the whole damage formula for a magicka skill and then break it down into pieces:
Average Damage done = (Skill Coefficient for Maximum Magicka*Maximum Magicka + Skill Coefficient for Spell Damage*SpellDamage+Flat Damage Amps)*(1 + Spell Critical Chance * Spell Critical Damage)*(1 + Damage Done )* (Spell Armor Mitigation)*(1 + Damage Taken)*(1+Execute Bonus)*(1+Bloodthirsty Bonus)
This looks fairly complex, but it is easier than you think if we break it down into pieces. This formula determines the average damage you will do with your skills, light attacks and heavy attacks in general. Mathematically, we want to maximise the value of this formula, because then we achieve the highest average damage. This is showing the term for magicka toons, but the stamina version looks exactly like that as well.
Please note that all damage and healing you do in cyrodiil and battlegrounds is halved. So for PvP, simply divide the whole formula by 2.
1. Base Damage, Scaling and Skill Coefficients
The first part of the formula is responsible for the base damage you get from your main stats. Every skill in the game has one of the two resource types to scale with, either stamina or magicka. In most cases, it depends on the resource the skill uses, so if a skill costs magicka, it will use your maximum magicka and spell damage. If it costs stamina, it will use your maximum stamina and weapon damage to determine the damage it causes. There are exceptions to this though: Ultimates and certain skills scale with your highest resource, so if your maximum magicka and spell damage is higher than your maximum stamina and weapon damage, the will use magicka and spell damage and vice-versa. The non-ultimates that follow this pattern usually indicate that they use the highest resource in their tooltip.
Some skills, notably sorcerer pets, shields, some healing skills and the final hit of the templar skill backlash and its morphs only use your maximum resource (in some cases your maximum health). Increasing your weapon or spell damage will not have any effect on the strength of these skills.
1. 1. Diminishing Returns in Base Stats
Knowing this, we can already say that maximising your base stats is important to increase your damage. However, you need to take into account that the returns you get from either of those stats are diminishing with increased size prior to the additions you make. Your damage increase in % from going from 2000 spell damage to 2500 is bigger than your damage increase from 2500 to 3000:
40000*0.05+2000*0.5=3000 <=> 0%
40000*0.05+2500*0.5=3250 <=> + ~8.33%
40000*0.05+3000*0.5=3500 <=> + ~7.70%
So the more you already have from one of these, the less benefit you will have, relative to the damage you had before. This is why stacking too much into one resource and neglecting most of the others is often detrimental and not ideal to achieve the highest possible damage.
NOTE: Do not forget that maximum magicka/maximum health also increases your shield strength and therefore has a bit more utility than spell damage/weapon damage. So consider this when you have to decide between maximum resource and other stat choices.
1.2. What are skill coefficients and what is the scaling ratio?
Skill coefficients determine the damage a skill does and are responsible for the difference in damage between skills. Every skill has its own coefficients, one for the maximum resource and one for the weapon stat.
Let's do an example:
Funnel Health from the Nightblade has a 0.0961044 for the maximum resource and 1.00801 for spell damage. This means that the base damage of the ability, without any amplifiers, is equal to roughly 10% of your maximum magicka, plus the value of your spell damage. When you look at the two coefficients, we can see that one is about 10 times bigger than the other. This is not random, it is the same for all skills that scale with your maximum resource and weapon stat. The scaling ratio, calculated by dividing the coefficient for the weapon stat by the coefficient fro maximum resource is always equal to 10.5:
Scaling ratio=Skill Coefficient for Spell Damage/Skill Coefficient for Maximum Magicka=10.5
What does this mean? It shows that spell damage affects your damage done by skills 10.5 times more than your maximum resource. However, the game is balanced around this ratio. Your spell damage will often be around 10 times smaller than your maximum magicka, and the sets and buffs in the game only allow a cetain level of spell damage that you can achieve, and maximum magicka bonuses are in general also around 10.5 times higher than spell damage bonuses.
You can find the respective skill coefficients here:
https://esoitem.uesp.net/viewSkillCoef.php
1.2.1. Maximum resources
Maximum resources are one of the two core determinants of base damage. You get it through enchantments, set bonuses, passives, food and drinks and attribute points. As I stated above, maximising (or rather idealising) the amount you have is crucial to doing damage. Here's the formula in general:
Maximum Magicka =((142 * Level + 858 + 111 * Attribute Flat Magicka + Item Flat Magicka + Set Flat Magicka)*(1 + 0.004 * min(CP.Magicka, 100) - 0.00002 * pow(min(CP.Magicka, 100), 2)) + Food Flat Magicka + Mundus Flat Magicka + Skill2 Flat Magicka)*(1 + Skill % Magicka + Buff % Magicka)
This again looks complicated, but it is easier if we break it down into pieces. The first term (142 * Level + 858) is simply the base magicka that every maximum level character has, and is equal to 10230. On top of that, we add the attributes we invested, which are 64 at maximum: 111*64=7104. Afterwards we have most of the flat magicka bonuses you can get, such as regular set bonuses. 5-piece bonuses do NOT fall under this category because they do not benefit from the CP bonus (why they don't is a different question).
Now comes the tricky part: These base values get amplified by 20%, which is the result of this part of the formula: (1 + 0.004 * min(CP.Magicka, 100) - 0.00002 * pow(min(CP.Magicka, 100), 2))=0.2. This is the reward that all players that invest at least 100 cps into the respective cp tree get. So if you wonder why max magicka bonuses are lower than spell damage flat bonuses with regard to the scaling ratio, then this is the reason why. Most flat bonuses to maximum resources are amplified strongly by your cp level, which is also why investing too much into maximum resources is very detrimental in no-cp content (e.g. sotha sil campaign and battlegrounds).
Then afterwards, we have bonuses that are not amplified by the cp-%, such as food, mundus stones (mage, tower, lord) and 5-piece sets (necropotence, shacklebreaker etc). Take this into account when you use a mundus stone. This is also the reason why using the mage and tower mundus stone is generally weaker than their weapon stat counterpart, as it misses this strong 20% amplifier.
The last amplifier includes things like warhorn, inner light, bound aegis/armaments and passives (nightblades' magicka flood), racial passives et cetera. This affects all bonuses you can get, and is multiplicative with the cp buff.
1.2.2. Weapon stats
Weapon stats are the second determinant of base damage, and they are calculated almost equally to the maximum resource equivalent, but a little easier:
Spell Damage =
(Item Flat Spell Damage + Set Flat Spell Damage + Mundus Flat Spell Damage)*(1 + Skill % Spell Damage + Buff % Spell Damage)
Here, we don't have to consider special scaling from cps, it is simply adding up all flat buffs, then adding up all % buffs you have and then multiplying the two. Spell damage amps can come from set bonuses, your weapon itself (with different values for different weapons) and mundus stones (warrior, apprentice).
Here's the stats from weapons on cp 160 level:
Staves, Bows, Restoration Staffs: 1335
Dual Wield: 1335 + 26% from offhand = 1335+0.26*1335=1682 (includes the 6% from offhand passive, as you will most likely have it)
Two-handed: 1571
One hand and shield: 1335
So you see that twohanders and dual wield have the highest base damage, while the others are equal at 1335. Dual wield always has 20% from the offhand added to the main hand weapon, which is also the proc chance for enchantments on the offhand, but we will get to enchantments and status effects later.
2. Critical Chance, Critical Resistance and Critical Hit Damage
This is an interesting part, because it is a bit more abstract to measure and at the same time easier to calculate. Critical chance is, simply put, the chance you have to deal more damage to the enemy because you hit them in a critical position or spot. This mechanic is part of many MMOs out there, and it is often based on pure luck. Criticial damage then determines the additional damage you do when you critically strike the enemy. So if you want to calculate the average damage you get from critical chance and critical damage, you have to use the following formula:
Average Critical Damage = (1 + Spell Critical Chance * (Spell Critical Damage-Critical Resitance)
So we multiply the critical chance with the critical damage, because the return you get from either of these depends on the other one. If you have a low critical chance, additional critical damage will obviously not be that beneficial to you and vice-versa.
2.1. Critical chance
Critical chance is subject to a bit of inconsistency in the game. Some set bonuses tell you that they increase the crictical rating by 10%, while others say they increase it by 1943 (not in %). Converting absolutes in % is fairly easy: simply divide the number by 219. So for the 1943, we have a % value of 8.87% critical chance. Critical chance can come from set bonuses, cp passives, armor passives, class passives etc.
So all you have to do is to add up all flat values and divide them by 219 to get the %-value and then add that to the %-buffs you have:
Critical Chance = (Set Flat Spell Crit + Skill Flat SpellCrit + Buff Flat SpellCrit)*(1/219)) + 0.10 + Item % SpellCrit + Mundus % Spell Crit + Skill % Spell Crit + CP % Spell Crit
The base critical chance is 10%, which you find as a flat value in the formula above.
NOTE: Proc Sets, so flat damage sets do not benefit from critical, because they are unable to critically strike. So if you want to use many of those in your build, critical chance is likely not that beneficial to you. Same holds for critical damage.
2.2. Critical Damage and Critical Resistance
Critical damage is only applied when you do a critical strike. So if you have 50% critical chance, you will get critical damage in 50% of cases. You always have a base critical hit damage of 50%, so in any case, you get that bonus damage. In PvE, critical damage is easy to calculate:
SpellCritDamage = (CP % Spell Crit Damage + Skill % Crit Damage + Mundus % Crit Damage + Set % Crit Damage + Item % Crit Damage + Buff % Crit Damage + 0.5)
So again simply add up all source you have and the base value of 50%. In PvP, a seconnd factor influences the amount of critical damage you do and receive, namely critical resistance. Critical resistance can be obtained through the cp passive "resistant", set bonuses and impenetrable armor. Both indicate crit resistance as flat values, so we have to translate it into % values so we can compare it to critical damage. 6600 critical resistance mitigate 100% critical damage, so we can say that 66 critical resitance are equal to 1% less critical damage you take:
Critical resistance in % = (Item Flat Crit Resist + Set Flat Crit Resist + Skill Flat Crit Resist + CP Flat Crit Resist)/6600
NOTE: In PvP, this stat is fairly important because other players can (and will) critically strike against you. Also note that in no-CP campaigns, critical chance is lower, so invetsing into critical resistance is less useful there.
In PvE, enemies can NOT critically strike, so critical resistance is not useful there.
2.3. Critical sets and cp increases.
Due to the CP cap increases we get with many updates, we can put more points into critical damage done cp passives. This results in a slow takeover of sets that give you critical chance, because their effectiveness increases with more points put into the cp-star elfborn, as i stated above. This resulted in many players saying that mother's sorrow is universally better than julianos. This is not true (at least not yet): The two sets are within 1% of each other, mother's sorrow is only better if you have major and minor force available at a rate that is very high (often unrealistically high) and if you are a nightblade or templar. In any other case, julianos, burning spellweave and destruction mastery for example are just as good as mother's sorrow. So dont let someone rip you off by paying 500k for a staff of MS, instead, craft yourself Julianos and do something useful with your money. Send someone tons of potatoes, for example.
3. Damage Done
Damage done is basically the universal damage amplifier that affects any damage you do, or a certain type of damage only. There are damage done cps for damage over time effects, direct damage, elemental damage and weapon specific damage done bonuses within the blue cp tree. When you want to calculate the damage you do with a skill, you have to consider these amplifiers and choose the right amplifiers as well.
Here's also where everything comes in that wasn't there before that is not a proc. All other sources of damage done (major and minor slayer, animal companion passive, swords damage done passive, minor and major berserk) get added up here, so they all work additively. As always before the relation holds that the more you already have, the less benefit you have from additional damage done passives.
3.1. Choosing the right CPs
Knowing whether a skill is magic damage, physical etc is fairly easy since it is stated in the tooltip. The difficult part is to assess whther the skill is considered as direct damage or damage over time. Damage over time abilities are either ground-based aoes or debuffs. Both tooltips generally indicate that the ability does something over a certain period or periodically for a timespan. But there are also combinations of the two that deal initial damage and have a seperate DoT-component. Examples are:
Direct damage:
Thrust your weapon with disciplined precision at an enemy, dealing ? Physical Damage and taunting them to attack you for 15 seconds.
This ability is considered as direct, because it only has a one-time hit that occurs immediately.
Pure DoT-Damage:
Unleash a swarm of fetcherflies to relentlessly attack an enemy, dealing ? Magic Damage over 10 seconds.
No initial hit indicated in the tooltip, only the damage over time component.
Combination of direct and DoT:
Slice an enemy with both weapons to cause deep lacerations, dealing ? Physical Damage with each weapon and causing them to bleed for an additional ? Physical Damage over 9
seconds
Here we have an initial hit that is considered direct damage and a damage over time component.
What does this tell us? You have to choose the right CP-Constellation to suit your damage distribution. If you have lots of direct damage (as nightblades do for example) then you will most likely invest more into master-at-arms. If you are more DoT oriented (as dragonknights are), then you will put more into thaumaturge. Weapon cp trees only affect your light and heavy attacks, so these are a bit more niche than the others, but it can be worth putting a few points into these as well, especially after the scaling changes of light and heavy attacks in summerset.
If you use a lot of proc sets, then elfborn and precise strikes might not be the best for you. I recommend using constellations and combat metrics from
@Solinur , because these addons tell you exactly what kind of damage (direct or DoT) you do and which skill does which percentage of your damage so you can build around that.
Combat Metrics Add-On:
http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info1360-CombatMetrics.html
Constellations Add-On:
http://www.esoui.com/downloads/info1736-Constellations.html
3.2. Jump points and diminishing returns in CP stars
The damage done cp points have jump points. What does this mean? They round the benefit you get to the lower full % value. So if you have 15.3% benefit from the elemental expert tree, then you will only get 15% instead of 15.3%. Take this into account when you build our cp distribution to not waste any points. Find a constellation that lets you always be just above 1% in your damage done cps, and then put the rest into spell erosion/piercing for more penetration for example, which does not show any jump points.
Secondly, cp stars show diminishing returns. The more you invest into one star, the less benefit you will have. With the first 64 points into mooncalf, you get 13% recovery. The last 36 will only net you 2% recovery, so it is not worth putting more into there. Try to distribute them in a way that gives you a good "return on investment". Generally, points above the high 60's are mostly detrimental and you'd be better off choosing another star instead.
4. Armor Penetration and Mitigation
This is probably the most complex part of damage calculation, simply because the formula is a bit unintuitive. In ESO, every enemy (may it be a NPC or a player) has a resistance value. You can circumvent that resistance by using items and passives that let you "pierce" through the armor and deal higher damage to the target. So in general, you want to circumvent all armor the enemy has to deal "true" damage. This can either be achieved through own penetration, meaning all sets, buffs etc that increase your own armor penetration rating, or through debuffing the enemy, and thus reducing resistances. There are % amps and flat stats for penetration, and I will go through it in detail
The formula looks like this:
Armor Mitigation =1-((((Target Resistance - Target Debuffs)*(1 - % Penetration ) - Penetration)/(Target.EffectiveLevel * 1000))))
So we start with 1. We start with one because the "true" damage let's us do the full damage. If we manage to achieve the full penetration, we simply do not deduct anything from 1, and therefore do the full unmitigated damage.
Then we have the target's resistance, which is 18200 in PvE for all veteran content mobs and target dummies. In PvP, it depends on how much spell or physical resitance your target has. Then we deduct all the debuffs the target has on it. There are multiple debuffs that apply to this category, such as major and minor fracture or breach (5280 and 1320, respectively), the 5- piece of roar of alkosh (3010) and the crusher weapon enchantment (which is amplifiable with torug's pact and infused and yields 1622, 2108 and 2741, respectively).
Afterwards we deduct % penetration amps, such as the Maul + Mace bonuses that ignore up to 20% of the target's resistance. The key takeaway here is that these %- amps are applied after debuffs, but not after your own penetration. This means that major and minor fracture reduce the effectiveness of mauls and maces, but sets like spriggan, twice-fanged serpent, penetration cps etc do NOT. So be aware which debuffs you have available, because if there are only few debuffs, you might even be better off with a mace over a dagger. The Break-even point between amces and daggers lies somewhere around 5000 & 6000 of penetration debuffs (which is often achieved in trials, but less in four man and solo content). I can provide statistics on this upon request.
After that, your own penetration value is deducted, so here's where most of the sets and the lover mundus belong. You might notice how penetration is mostly shown as a flat value, such as 5280 and 1320 for the major and minor debuffs. This needs to be converted into a % value so we can multiply it with the rest. That's what the denominator of the above formula is for:
The effectiveness of penetration depends on the level of the target. In PvE, enemies are considered as level 50 because they don't have CPs, so the denominator in these cases is 50000, while in PvP it is mostly 66000.
NOTE: There are some types of damage that ignore armor resistance either way, notably bleeds and oblivion damage. Both of these cannot be mitigated, so skills that indicate that they let enemies "bleed" or deal oblivion damage will always inflict their true damage value. This is mostly irrelevant for PvE, but in PvP, this is often an effective strategy against targets with high resistances.
5. Damage Taken
This is one of the more interesting debuffs, because it is basically the only one that mostly gives you the damage buff it shows in the tooltip, because there is only one reliable debuff that gives you increased damage taken (other than incapacitatong strike and soul harvest that is): minor vulnerability.
This debuffs gives you 8% more damage aaginst the target, and will always do exactly that, unless you also apply the 20% debuff from incap or soul harvest to the target. Therefore, the formula is easy:
Damage taken = (8% from Minor Vulnerability + 20% from Incap/Soul Harvest)
Part Two: Special Cases
Now that we covered the basic calculation of damage, we can go into a few specialties, such as damage types, status effects and enchantments, proc damage, oblivion damage, rotations.
1. Damage Types
There are 8 damage types in eso, namely Magic Damage, Fire Damage, Shock Damage, Frost Damage, Oblivion Damage, Physical Damage (including bleeds), Poison Damage and Disease Damage.
All of them are used by different skills and classes. Magic damage and physical damage are the "neutral" sources of damage, so they do not apply any status effects. More importantly, poison and disease are not considered as subcategories of physical damage, so things that specifically buff your physical damage do not necessarily buff the other two. Same holds for magic damage and fire, shock and frost damage. There are sets that buff only abilities of a certain type. If you consider using these, I recommend using combat metrics to check how much of your damage actually is from that specific damage type and then you can compare it to something that possibly buffs all your damage to see whether it is useful or not.
As a starting point, you can check which kind of damage you have and which sources you can use to amplify the damage you have:
![Screenshot_2018-07-30-23-55-062.png]()
Cells with an X indicate that the damage source (indictaed in columns) buff the damage type (indicated in rows).
2. Status Effects and enchantments
Many of the abovementioned damage types have the chance to apply status effects. Status effects are a fun gimmick in eso, because they have become a fairly integral part of many builds, given that they can be very powerful if they are used right. All of these scale with your highest resource, so even a stamina dk can deal damage with fire abilities and burning. In this case, the charged trait is interesting, and we will go through the chances of applying these effects in this chapter as well.
Here's a list of status effects and their functionality:
![xrzp8lS.jpg]()
2.1. So when do they get applied?
Here's a list (taken from older patch notes):
Weapon enchants 20%
Standard ability 10%
Area of effect abilities 5%
Damage over time abilities 3%
Area of effect damage over time abilities 1%
Light and Heavy Attacks 0%
So Enchantments are very effective in proccing status effects, so take that into account when choosing an enchant for your build. If you need minor vulnerability, go for shock. If you need higher burning uptime to strengthen your own blockade, use fire. If you have all these buffs available already (e.g. on a Dragonknight) use an absorb magicka enchant for higher sustain. You can either use the charged trait, torug's pact or the infused trait to increase your status effect chances, and there are passives increasing it as well. While wielding a destruction staff, your chances are increased by 100%. This does NOT mean that you will always apply it, but that your chances are doubled. Here's the formula:
Chance to apply Status effects = Base Chance*(1+% increases)
So with a destruction staff, the chances will be doubled. If you use charged on top (220% increased chance), you will have a to multiply the base chance with 4.2 (Base chance*(1+100%+220%)). Infused basically doubles the chance, as it doubles the speed at which the enchant goes off (reduces cooldown by 50%).
2.2. Wolfhunter Update, Status Effects and Enchantments
The Infused Trait will carry over to the front bar, so if you have infused on the back bar, you will proc it more often on the front bar as well (ONLY the back bar enchantment is affected). Charged will not carry over, the destruction staff passive for status effects also does not carry over.
I tested this thoroughly by examining the status effect chances of each combination:
Infused staff procs every two ticks of elemental blockade. Charged procs every four and leads to a status effect chance of the enchantment of roughly 40% (27 out of 65 in my test). Precise leads to the same result as charged, so charged does not affect the front bar. Same goes for the destruction staff passive. With a resto staff front bar, the proc chance drops to 20%, so you lose half of your proc chance of status effects (11 procs out of 54).
What is possibly however, is to use charged and /or torug's pact on the front bar and have it affect your back bar enchantment, so you can use an infused fire enchant on the back bar and if you you swap to a charged staff the chance for burning is increased. Here i had 67 status effect procs out of 80 (84%).
3. Proc Sets
Proc sets have been item to debates ever since they have been introduced. They basically give you free damage and do what a skill would do, but bound to certain conditions. So the general notion is: If you do X, then you have a Y% chance to cause Z. These are interesting because they allow a certain amount of damage without relying on a perfect rotation. So they are especially interesting for players that don't have the time to invest into rotation practice or simply are new to the game, becasue they can still do enough damage with these sets. I wanted to talk about them because they are basically everywhere in the game, especially now that the relequen set was introduced, they even reach into many high-end trials.
Proc sets do only scale with damage done and penetration. So you can NOT increase their effectiveness by achieveing higher stats. So if you want to build around these sets, go for penetration and damage done, such as major+minor slayer and the lover mundus stone.
4. Oblivion Damage
This damage type is interesting, because it always inflicts the damage it shows on the tooltip, no matter what the the emeny does. It circumvents passives, armor mitigation and shields, and therefore can be very effective in PvP. In PvE, it is mostly irrelevant. While it is good to fight against targets that shield stack and have high resistances, it is also very easy to make it too strong because there is no other counterplay other than trying to outheal it somehow.
5. Rotations
Rotations are the core of damage dealing, may it be in PvE or PvP. In both aspects of the game you want to use your skills as effective as possible, line them up in a certain order so that you achieve the highest damage without wasting resources and casts. As for PvE, rotations are often muscle memory. Here's a guideline on how you can try and idealise your rotation.
1. Don't copy a rotation from high-end players. It is far easier to memorise things you come up with yourself. Use other builds as additional input, but come up with your own build. Have a look at the skills that are available to you. Look at the cost, the damage they do and the duration they have.
2. Structure them in a way on your bar that is easily memorable and suits their duration. Line them up clockwise or counter-clockwise so you simply use them one after the other, and some twice or three times in the case of a spammable.
3. Practice on target dummies. It sounds boring and can be frustrating in the beginning, but if you cannot do good damage on one of these, how will you do it in a raid later on?
4. Slowly adjust your rotation to your needs. It is muscle memory, so it will take time.
5. If you go into a new trial, ALWAYS leave one slot for utility skills. May it be a shield, vigor, whatever. No need in tryharding for the highest dps if you dont know whats going on.
Part Three: How do I maximise my damage?
So how do we maximise our damage? As i stated above, stacking too much into one stat is detrimental, and will not be ideal. So you have to find a certain balance between different stats to maximise the formula above. For testing purposes, I set all damage cps to return the same % value, so we can apply the same amps to all skills.
3.1.1. Set comparison
In this image, i simply copied stats from combat metrics into the above formula. You can see that builds that stack one specific stat (such as spell damage through julianos and apprentice) were less effective than builds who mixed the stats through, such as julianos and thief mundus or mother's sorrow and the apprentice. Lover overall performs best (not even taking into account that it also buffs enchantments), which is not a surprise.
These are just examples, but here you see how close these sets are to each other under the given circumstances:
![3fC4Eeq.jpg]()
Mathematically, it is almost impossible to find the maximum average damage done, because there are too many factors playing a role in the damage calculation. So trial and error is the best we can do for now.
I wanted to add a stamina set comparison, because many people say that advancing yokeda is best, or that ravager is best, or that veiled heritance is best. This shows a full set comparison between those three sets and the respective average damage values you get:
![KRNLfkP.jpg]()
So you see that they are extremely closer to each other, and therefore it is basically not important which one you use. Ravager fluctauates quite strongly in its uptime, veiled heritance and yokeda can reach almost 100% uptimes, but their uptimes are very comparable in long-term fights. To prevent people from saying that this is biased becasue nightblades and templar s have more critical hit damage, here's another comparison for a stamina nightblade:
![ADUxpQD.jpg]()
In all scenarios, Hunding's rage came out on top. This is only logical, because Relequen's main source of damage is the proc set it has, and that is not included in the scenario. The rule there is quite easy: If you have to change the target frequently (and by that I mean within less than ~8 to 10 seconds) or can not hit the target reliably with light attacks constantly, then relequen will not be a good option. If you can stay on one boss permanently, then you can use it and it will be better than hunding's rage,
given that you have the perfect version. If you only have the normal one, these values increase by roughly 50%.
3.1.2. Weighted average damage values
For all of you who don't like math as much, I have a little gimmick. There's a fairly easy way to compare gear ingame in 4 steps without unnecessary dummy testing:
1. Hit a dummy with any skill with a non-critical hit and note the damage.
2. Hit a dummy with the same skill with a critical hit and note the damage.
3. Note down your critical chance.
4. Calculate the weighted average damage value.
The formula is easy:
Weighted Average Damage Value=Non-critical hit+critical chance*(critical hit-non-critical hit)
This is fairly intuitive, because you will always get the non-critical hit. However, you only get the critical hit damage as often as your critical chance allows you to. Rewriting the formula we can also obtain:
Non-critical hit*(1-critical chance)+critical hit*critical chance
So we weight the non-critical hit with the chance to strike normally (1-critical chance), and the critical hit with the critical chance.
Easy example:
Funnel health hit non-critically for 10,000 damage. We have a 50% critical chance to get 90% additional damage, so 19,000 damage. What will the average damage be?
14,500, because we have 10,000*50%+19,000*50%=14,500.
Part Four: Sustain
Sustaining is crucial to damage dealing in ESO. Why? Because if you run out of stamina or magicka, you cannot use skills, which are your major source of damage in ESO. You can maximise your average damage formula all you want, but if you can not do that damage for longer than 30 seconds, then you will lose a lot of damage. You have to find a perfect balance between resource management stats and damage stats to maximise your damage in your situation (group/solo). So in this section, we'll take a look at ways to sustain in this game.
1. Factors of Resource Management
There are multiple ways to approach resource management by yourself in the Elder Scrolls Online, notably: Cost Reduction, Recovery and Heavy Attacking. On either one of those, you’ll want to add as much additional resource restoration abilities and mechanisms as possible. But to begin with, we need to determine how the combat system and resource drain from skillcasting works.
1.1. Average Base Cost of Rotation
To assess how much resource return you need, we need to calculate the cost that your full rotation has and divide it by the length of it to arrive at the Average Base Cost per Second (referred to as AvCost from now on). All calculations in this text are done on a per second basis. This way you can immediately compare different setups by calculating the net resource gain (if it is positive) or net resource drain (if it is negative). Simply put, you know whether you’ll lose resources while executing your rotation or not and also, how fast you’re going to lose them. The formula is as follows:
Netresourcelevel=AvCost+CostRedu+Recovery+AddSustain
With CostRedu being the Resource gain per second granted by all your cost reduction buffs, Recovery being the Resource gain per second granted by recovery, and AddSustain being all additional sustain sources that apply after Cost Reduction and Recovery.
AvCost is a drain, so it is a negative variable. This negative drain gets reduced by CostRedu, leading to the Total Drain per Second. That Drain is then countered by recovery and flat resource restoration mechanisms. The respective points will be explained later on.
1.2. Cost of Skills
In order to determine the Average Cost of Skills, we need to list all the abilities in the rotation, their Base cost (without any reduction) and how often we use them in the rotation. Then multiply the number of casts with the Base cost and divide it by the duration of the rotation in seconds to arrive at AvCost. Formula is as follows:
AvCost=(Skill1Cost*n1+Skill2Cost*n2+…+SkilltCost*nt)/DurRota
So for example, 2x Force Pulse and one Elemental Blockade would lead to
AvCost=(-2700*2-3510*1)/3=2970
Important is that you use 1 skill per second, assuming perfect timing. I’ll introduce a variable that simulates imperfect weaving and skill casting in the next section as getting off 1 skill and weave every one second as basically impossible.
1.3. Global Cooldowns
As I already stated above, perfect weaving on the one second cooldown is impossible and we therefore need another term delivering realistic results. In order to achieve that, I simply used a Basic 0 to 1 variable that is multiplied with AvCost, namely SkillSpeed. 0 would mean you fire off 0 skills and light attack weaves per second, and 1 would indicate perfect weaving and skillcasting. This is the term you want to modify if the simulated drain is not matching your ingame drain. I mostly found a value between 0.8 and 0.9 adequate, but that depends on your capability to execute rotations.
So we then have
Netresourcelevel=AvCost*SkillSpeed+CostRedu+Recovery+AddSustain
This is the basic formula that determines your resource level. We’re now going to take a look at cost reduction in detail.
2. Cost Reduction
Cost Reduction was decreased a lot with Morrowind: 16% from Champion Point Passives and 1% per Armor Piece of Light and Heavy Armor. Stamina Builds even got another 5% increase on top. So your skills will now cost a lot more than before, making it harder to sustain rotations that use a lot and expensive skills.
The Cost of your Skills is therefore very important, and trying to decrease that is a very effective way to sustain, leading us to Cost Reduction.
2.1. Base Calculation
There are two ways to decrease the Cost of your Skills: Flat Jewellery Glyphs and different %-Bonuses.
The Basic Formula for Cost Reduction is as follows:
CostRedu=(AvCost+Sumflatcost)*(1-Sum%Cost)
Where Sumflatcost is the Sum of Jewellery Glyphs you have and Sum%Cost is the Sum of percentages decreasing your ski cost.
Example from above with 1 Cost Reduction Glyph and 5 pieces of light armor:
CostRedu=(-2970+203)*(1-0.1)=-2767*0.9=-2492
And one more time with only 5 pieces of light armor:
CostRedu=-2970*0.9=-2673, which is a full 10% decrease from the original 2970.
You see that when Sumflatcost is applied, you get less return from the Sum%Cost variable. It is only a marginal decrease in effectiveness, but it is still interesting and worth noting for the further analysis.
As Cost Reduction is depending on AvCost, the effectiveness is also depending on the SkillSpeed variable. When you keep casting skills, you get more return on cost reduction.
2.2. Comparing three different setups via calculator
![1.png]()
Looking at the example above, you see that worm cult gives you a return of 80 when applied without a flat reduction glyph. The glyph always gives a 203 return (here 175 as it’s multiplied by 0.9 due to skillspeed). When used after a flat glyph, you have a return of 246-175=71. So you lost 9 Magicka per second by applying a cost reduction glyph and applying worm cult. Of course the reduction from armor passives is also going to get decreased the same way, as all Elements of Sum%Cost.
3. Recovery
Recovery is the second aspect of sustain in Elder Scrolls Online. It ticks every two seconds in and out of combat and restores a flat value of the respective resource pool. Blocking stops recovery, namely the stamina recovery with all weapons but ice staffs.
3.1. Base Calculation
The basic concept works as all (or at least most) calculations in the game:
Recovery=(Base Value+SumFlatReco)*(1+Sum%Reco)
As we want the value per every 1 second, we simply divide the above formula by 2, leading to
RecoperSecond=((Base Value+SumFlatReco)*(1+Sum%Reco))/2
Now for cost reduction, the Base value was negative, making Flat and Percentage Bonuses work against each other. Recovery is positive and is thus giving them a proportional positive.
The Base Value for CP 160 characters is always 514. You can add flat recovery bonuses from glyphs (174 each), sets regular bonuses (129 per item) and special 5-piece bonuses with varying values. The Percentage increases come from a lot of different sources, notably Armor (4% per piece of light and medium armor), Champion Points Arcanist and Mooncalf (up to 15%), class passives, racial passives, vampirism et cetera. I will provide a full list of recovery sources (excluding regular 129 armor bonuses) in the next section.
3.2. Now it’s interesting to see how much sustain recovery can give you in an ingame environment.
![2.png]()
This is a real setup simulation. You see that we have an 86% increase on recovery without the Altmer Passive and 95% with it (28% Light Armor, 10% Vampirism, 12% Warden Passive, 2% Mages Guild, 14% Arcanist CP, 20% Major Intellect, 9% Altmer Passive). That increase gets applied on the flat value of recovery. We see that a glyph is an 162 increase, with 162=(174*1.86)/2. Adding a 9% on the 514 Base recovery is 23, with 23=(514*0.09). Adding both leads to and overall increase of 193 instead of 185, as we have 193=(688*1.95)/2-(514*1.86)/2. So both increases positively influence each other. The overall contribution to sustain by recovery in traditional setups is a lot higher than the contribution of cost reduction, as it is easier to stack and easier to get.
4. Additional Sustain Sources
On top of recovery and cost reduction, there are additional flat bonuses that increase your sustain. Some of them are only available to certain classes, and some of them are only increasing your Magicka or Stamina. I’ll go through the ones that are available to all classes in this section and then look into all five classes in section 6. In the calculator you can simply choose whether you want a certain buff to be active or not by toggling it as “Yes” or “No” in the blue area next to the buff name.
4.1. Minor Magickasteal
Minor Magickasteal is a debuff applied on an enemy that restores 300 Magicka to allies damaging them with a 1 second cooldown. So this is equal to a 300 Magicka gain per second. There are three sources of minor Magickasteal in the game: Elemental Drain from the Destruction Staff Skill Line, Radiant Aura from the Templars Restoring Light Skill Line and Force Siphon from the Restoration Staff Skill Line. Now you might ask why there is no minor Staminasteal, and rightly so. Stamina Builds have an inherent 15% cost reduction on their skills. If they also had a minor Staminasteal, sustain on Stamina Builds would be a lot easier than on Magicka Builds. Minor Magickasteal basically covers the difference between the cost of Magicka and Stamina based skills.
4.2. Orbs and Shards
Orbs and Shards is a term for two different skills that do the same thing now. One is available to all classes (Necrotic Orb/Energy Orb) and one is available to Templars only(Luminous Shards/Blazing Spear). Both of them restore 3960 Magicka or Stamina to the player using their synergy with a 20 second cooldown. Which resource they restore is based on the highest maximum of your resources, so if you have a maximum Magicka of 44000 and a maximum Stamina of 8000, you’re always getting Magicka. The Formula for the Gain per second is therefore
OrbShards=3960/20=198
This is assuming you using the synergy on cooldown, which is not realistic, but the calculator uses all additional sustain sources on cooldown as it is very hard to simulate a delay with a certain standard deviation to one side only. I mostly plan a certain level above 0 for NetResourceLevel to include delays in cooldowns on those additional sources.
4.3. Potions
Potions are a very important source for buffs in ESO. They have a cooldown of 45 seconds and restore a good amount of resources and grant major intellect or major endurance, giving you 20% more recovery for a maximum of 47.6 seconds. I am assuming that we use crafted potions as the give a lot more flat Magicka and a longer duration of major recovery bonuses. The formula for the sustain per second coming from potions is as follows:
Potion=(FlatRestorePot+Resourceful)/45+(BaseReco+SumFlatReco)*0.2
The calculator only uses the first term as the major intellect is factored in prior to the AddSustain section.
Resourceful is the argonian passive which gives 4620 of all resources now on CP 160 characters whenever you use a Potion. The Sustain per second for argonians is therefore
Resourceful=4620/45=103
This is a very potent passive that gives more than any recovery or cost reduction Bonus in most regular setups, as the Base Recovery needs to reach a certain level to give more than a 103 recovery. I will get to that in detail in the racial section.
4.4. Drain Magicka/Stamina Poisons
Poisons are a good sourced of additional sustain. Drain Magicka/Stamina Poisons last 5.5 seconds and restore 238 Magicka each second when they proc. They proc with a 20% chance on light and heavy attacks and weapon abilities, but NOT class abilities. The last 0.5 seconds are not counting, so effectively, the maximum uptime is 50%. The calculator assumes a 30% uptime which was the average of what I got on different setups and classes. You can modify the uptime to match yours individually.You can use any two ingredients that give restore magicka or stamina to get the full 5.5 second duration. A third ingredient will not have any effect on the poison.
4.5. Constitution Passive
This passive is from the heavy armor skill line. It was recently nerfed again to weaken Heavy Armor Sustain in PvP. It gives you 108 Magicka And Stamina per Heavy Armor Piece every 4 seconds whenever you take damage. On a 5/1/1 Setup you therefore get a 27 Stamina and Magicka per second from this if it procs on cooldown. In a dummy fight this obviously won’t help you at all. Formula is as follows:
Constitution=(108*HeavyPieces)/4
This is a major contributor to heavy armor sustain, but not enough to function as a full substitute for light and medium armor pieces, mainly due to the lacking cost reduction of skills.
Looking at an example:
![3.png]()
Obviously, 7 light armor pieces give the best sustain, followed by 6 light and 1 heavy piece, 5 light 2 heavy and 5 light 1 medium 1 heavy. So we have a tradeoff between higher sustain with 7 light and higher damage through higher pools with 5/1/1. The other two setups are compromises in between that also work. This conclusion is exactly the same when looking at medium armor.
A 7 light/medium armor setup is more effective when you have a relatively high skill cost (AvCost) and a high flat recovery value. Here’s the difference between 7 light and 5/1/1 depending on AvCost and (BaseValueReco+SumFlatReco):
4.6. Heavy Attacks
A unique mechanic in ESO is that heavy attacks restore a flat amount of resources when successfully executed to the full duration. The six different weapons restore different amounts of resources, and while Dual Wield, Two-handed, Bow and One Handed & Shield restore stamina, destruction staffs and restoration staffs restore magicka. Here’s a table with the base resources restored of fully charged heavy attacks:
![4.png]()
Dual Wield and One Handed & Shield take the least time to charge, while lightning staffs take the longest, since bows and inferno/ice staffs got their charge time sped up.
Since Morrowind, heavy attacks became a lot more frequent in combat, and they therefore make a good part of damage and rotations and can make the difference between a sustainable rotation and a draining one that runs out within 1 minute of fighting.
Those are the bonuses that all classes have access to, now we’re going to take a look at class-specific sustain sources in detail.
[/spoiler]
Big shoutout to
@Reorx_Holybeard and the UESP crew. The Build Editor where you can find all these formulae as well and play around with builds can be accessed here:
http://en.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildData
Thanks for reading, i hope you learned a little bit, feel free to ask questions. Also a shoutout to my favourite theorycrafting buddy Chris alias
@Nox_Noir, who made lots of people vote for me in the class rep program
![:smiley:]( ":smiley:")
Cheers,
Masel
Also when a boss is about to do a big boom skill that lasts 3 seconds on it's own I have to calculate in server lag and launch the bash well before he starts his dmge to make sure it's being mitigated. Result is that you only mitigate 1-2sec of the boss skill. It should last at least 5 seconds on a boss to be practically useful
