Hey Ebony Wolf Pack! I know that not everyone was able to join in our seminars on Saturdays and it’s a lot of information to take in. So I’m making this post as a recap of all we’ve gone over and more! Now it will be easier for you to build your werewolf character the way you want to! And remember that you can always ask the more experienced and stronger members of the pack if you have any other questions or need help on anything. Hope you enjoy this “book” I’ve written for you and I hope it proves helpful!
Werewolf 101:
Werewolf is a stamina-based character build. There are two roles a werewolf can play: tank and dps. While werewolves can automatically be both at the same time, it depends on your specific build to see which one you strengthen. Werewolf grants 15% stamina recovery while the ultimate is slotted and 9966 physical and spell resistance in werewolf form. Their passives grant 100% stamina return from heavy attacks and 18% increased weapon damage. You just need to decide which wolf to feed.
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1. Pick Your Role:
A tank werewolf should be built more for sustain of resources and survivability. You’re to be the distraction and the meat shield of the group. Heavy armor, either drink or food consumables, and tanking and stamina sets will help with this. You want to build yourself so in werewolf form, your resistances are capped. For those who don’t know, the resistances hard cap at 33k. Also give yourself plenty of resources to survive, stall, and heal. I always keep at least 25k health and 15k magicka. I can use my heal 3 times before I’m out of magicka. And I have drink consumables so I can get magicka back quickly. Don’t blow through stamina trying to kill your opponent. You will need it to block, break free, dodge roll, fear, and stun. Resource management is the key to werewolf tanks.
A dps werewolf, of course, focuses more on damage. But thanks to the extra 9966 resistances gained when transforming, you will be more durable than the other dps builds of the game and are still capable of the same high damage. You need to stack weapon damage and stamina while still maintaining some survivability through your healing and utilizing dodge roll to mitigate the damage you take. Medium armor, food consumables, and stamina, weapon damage, weapon crit sets will help to maximize your damage. Medium armor will reduce cost of stamina abilities and dodge roll, increase your weapon damage, and give you increased movement speed. When in a fight, don’t stop moving and dodge roll to avoid big hits.
2. Establish Your Build
Sets:
There are many sets, either crafted, drop, or monster, that would work for werewolf. And each would be good in different circumstances. The tank sets would be good for survivability, healing, and sustain while the dps sets are good for damage, mobility, and damage reduction. Since there are a lot of sets to choose from, I won’t explain what each one does. But I will, however, break them down into tank and dps sets. Let’s look at the crafted sets first.
There are a handful of crafted sets that have already been proven as great werewolf’s sets. Shacklebreaker, Hunding’s Rage, Clever Alchemist, and Pelinal’s Aptitude are in this category. But let me list off some other crafted sets that would work as well:
Tank: Fortified Brass, Hist Bark, Whitestrake’s Retribution, Alessia’s Bulwark, Orgnum’s Scales, Shalidor’s Curse
Dps: Kvatch Gladiator, Mechanical Acuity, Night Mother’s Gaze, Shacklebreaker, Hunding’s Rage, Clever Alchemist, Twice Born Star, Morkuldin, Pelinal’s Aptitude
There is a much larger list to choose from in the drop sets category. Seventh Legion Brute, Draugr Hulk, Jailbreaker, and Salvation are some of the more often used werewolf drop sets. Here’s a greater list to choose from (this list does not include sets from Cyrodiil or trials):
Tank: Aspect of Mazzatun, Black Rose, Brands of Imperium, Draugr’s Heritage, Durok’s Bane, Ebon Armory, Green Pact (requires food consumables), Mark of the Pariah, Meridia’s Blessed Armor, Order of Diagna, Plague Doctor, Vampire Cloak (ironic right?), Witchman Armor (great for non Dragon Knight werewolves), Barkskin (medium)
Dps: Truth, Veiled Heritance, Seventh Legion Brute, Bone Pirate’s Tatters (requires drink consumables), Crusader, Draugr Hulk, Fiord’s Legacy, Hircine’s Veneer, Jailbreaker, Leviathan, Ranger’s Gait, Salvation, Senche’s Bite, Spriggan’s Thorns, Strength of the Automaton, Toothrow, Twin Sisters, Viper’s Sting
And to top it all off, you might want to look into using a monster set, which only come in head and shoulder pieces. You get the helmet from the corresponding veteran dungeon and the shoulder from completing Undaunted pledges each day. Bloodspawn, Mighty Chudan, Selene, and Velidreth are some of the more common monster sets you will see.
Bloodspawn, Domihaus, Engine Guardian, Lord Warden, Maw of the Infernal, Mighty Chudan, Scourge Harvester, Selene, Sellistrix, Slimecraw, Spawn of Mephala, Stormfist, Troll King, Valkyn Skoria, Velidreth
Of these, I’d suggest Bloodspawn, Engine Guardian, Mighty Chudan, Scourge Harvester, Selene, Troll King, or Velidreth. But any of these should work; it just depends on your build and preferences.
The First Crescent of the EWP states it best when he said that every werewolf needs to have both a tank and dps set. Otherwise the dps become glass cannons and the tanks hit like a wet noodle. And I agree with this. For example, a medium armor dps werewolf could wear Shacklebreaker and Salvation but wear a tanky monster set like Mighty Chudan to increase their resistances. It will take some trial and error to find the right balance. Be sure to use the UESP ESO build editor to develope your build and test different sets. I’ll leave a link here:
http://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Special:EsoBuildEditor
Armor, jewelry, and weapons:
Once you know the sets you will use, you need to know what traits and enchantments are best. Infused, reinforced, and divines are all good traits for armor pieces, but these work best for certain types and pieces of armor. The head, chest, and leg pieces give the biggest values of enchantments and armor rating. Therefore, putting infused on these pieces will give you the most stats from your armor enchants. Reinforced is better for heavy armor than it is medium since heavy of course has a higher armor rating. And divines will be great for any piece and any type since it strengthens your Mundus stone. And as for enchantments, Prismatic glyphs (made with Hakeijo runes) will overall give you the most of all three stats so you can move your attribute points around to get more of what you need. You will be able to get more health and magicka this way without wasting any points in your character screen.
Jewelry can only be gotten from drop sets and will come with either Arcane, Robust, or Healthy traits. For werewolves, Robust is the best trait to use; Healthy is also good for werewolf tanks. There are really only two enchantments you can use for jewelry on werewolf builds: stamina recovery and weapon damage. Regardless if you are a tank or dps, you will need to find the right balance between the two. In human form, your weapon damage should be a minimum of 2200 and your stamina recovery at least 1200. Many factors will affect this: class, race, sets, champion points, armor type, etc. Improving your weapons to gold will give you an additional 400 or so weapon damage too. If you’re not happy with your current setup, ask one of our more experienced pack members about their builds.
Everyone has two skill bars to use. That means you can choose up to two weapon skill trees to fight with. But some weapons are better than others when werewolf is involved. Since werewolves are stamina builds, staves are not beneficial. So that leaves two handed, dual wield, one hand and shield, and bow. All of these would be good on the werewolf’s back bar, but to get the best damage and to be able to use two complete five sets and a monster set, dual wield must be used on the werewolf bar. It doesn’t matter which type of one handed weapon you use since werewolf claws technically count as wielding fists. Therefore you will get no benefit whether you wield swords, daggers, or maces.
To best utilize your dual wield damage, your main hand should have nirnhoned and your off hand infused. Since your off hand does 3% less damage than your main hand, infused is better for the enchantment rather than simply increasing the damage of the weapon with nirnhoned. You can further your damage by applying a weapon and spell damage glyph to your main hand (procs on light or heavy attacks) and stamina steal to your infused off hand. Both will proc in werewolf form, another benefit to dual wield over two handed.
Champion points:
https://alcasthq.com/eso-championpoints-jumppoints/
The Warrior constellations are all about defense. The Thief constellations are about sustain. And the Mage constellations are about damage. In all points you commit, they must compliment your build. If you’re built for crit, go for more crit chance/damage. If you’re built for recoveries, you’ll need to put a lot of points into Arcane, Mooncalf, and Healthy. If you have damage shields, you’ll want to put points into Bastion. Werewolves will benefit from specific constellations as well. So let’s start with the Warrior.
The Lady will be the most important Warrior constellation for werewolves because Hardy reduces your damage taken from poison. The highest percentage reduction you can get from this is 15%, but there are jump points in the Champion system (see the link above). The points you put into any percentage based constellation will only count on whole percentages, not halves. So for a constellation like Hardy that only gives a max of 15%, putting 75 in will give you 14%. But the next 24 points won’t really change your stats until 100 points are committed to give 15%. So instead of wasting 25 points just to get one more percentage, leave Hardy at 75 and put 49 in Elemental Defender so you unlock Unchained, which reduces the cost of your next stamina ability by 80% for 3 seconds after breaking free.
In the Lord, it really depends on your specific build what you should put your points into. Everyone should have at least 10 points in this constellation to get Field Physician, which reduces the damage received while resurrecting another player by 15%. I suggest Quick Recovery, as it will increase the healing received from healers as well as strengthen your own heals. If you’re a heavy armor user, Heavy Armor Focus is another good one. Just remember not to overcap your resistances. Since I have a lot of abilities that apply shields to myself and one of my sets is Whitestrake’s Retribution, I have a lot of points into Bastion, which makes my shields stronger. If you plan on putting a lot of points in this constellation, getting 75 unlocks Revival, which absorbs 10230 damage for 5 seconds after your are resurrected by another player.
The Steed is going to help the medium armor users and the PvPers. If you use medium armor, you can increase both your physical and spell resistance here with Medium Armor Focus and Spell Shield. Putting 30 points in this constellation will unlock Phase; after using Roll Dodge, your Physical and Spell Resistance are increased by 660 for 3 seconds. It’s not much but you might as well get some benefit. And if you are going to PvP, crit resistance is very important. So put some points into Resistant if you plan on going to Cyrodiil often.
Now let’s look at the Thief. You will definitely want to put 120 points into the Lover constellation. 30 points unlocks Synergizer, which grants 2 Ultimate any time you active a Synergy while in combat. Putting 120 points in unlocks Wind Running, which increases your Movement Speed by 2%. This applies to all types of movement. It also increases Health and Magicka Regeneration by 10% while sprinting. So as I’ve said before, resource management is very important for werewolf builds. The more stats you get back from recoveries and heavy attacks, the better. So you’ll want to put 75 points into Tenacity for heavy attack returns. You’ll also want to put a majority of points into Mooncalf for stamina recovery. If you don’t have much magicka or health recovery, just focus on the stamina and put 75 points into Mooncalf. If you’re a recovery based build, you’ll want to put points into Arcanist and Healthy as well.
There isn’t much of use in the Tower constellation in terms of passives. But everyone can benefit from the reduced cost of break free that Warlord gives. You’ll want to put about half of your remaining points into this skill. The other half can be applied to one of two choices in the Shadow constellation: Tumbling and Shadow Ward. If you’re a heavy armor user, you’ll benefit more from blocking than you would dodge roll so Shadow Ward is better. Medium armor already reduces the cost of dodge roll for each piece of medium armor so Tumbling would be a better fit. Again, there isn’t much of use for passives in the Shadow other than Merchant Favored, which reduces the cost of armor repairs by 10%. This is unlocked by committing 30 points to this constellation.
And finally, the Mage. The Ritual is going to be a werewolf’s biggest damage dealing constellation. Mighty increases the effectiveness of your disease damage like with a werewolf’s Infectious Claws. Putting 75 points in Mighty will increase the damage by 14%. Thaumaturge will increase the effectiveness of damage over time abilities. This also includes Infectious Claws and werewolf bleeds. Putting 48 points in this will increase your DoTs by 18%. And what’s better is that all the passives in this constellation are beneficial to werewolf. Opportunist, unlocked at 10, increases the damage of your next physical attack by 15% after you interrupt a target. Perfect strike, rank 30, increases your Weapon Critical rating by 12%. Exploiter, rank 75, increases your damage against off balance enemies by 10%. And with Last Stand at rank 120, when you fall below 20% Health you gain Major Heroism which grants 18 Ultimate over 8 seconds. This can only occur once every 20 seconds.
In the Atronach constellation, the Master-At-Arms skill increases the damage of your direct damage attacks. Put 56 points into Master-At-Arms to get 20% increased damage with direct attacks. To tell what is considered a direct attack, make damage numbers active in your options menu. Any damage numbers that appear white is considered direct damage and the orange numbers are considered DoTs. Since most of your Mage points would go into the Ritual constellation, the only two passive you will receive is Retaliation, which increases the damage of your next Light Attack by 30% after blocking a Heavy Attack, and Riposte. When you block a melee attack, you have a 15% chance to deal physical damage to the enemy. This can only happen once every 5 seconds.
In the Apprentice constellation, the only skill that really benefits a werewolf is Blessed, which increases the effectiveness by any healing done. So put at least 30 points into this skill. Putting 30 points into this constellation unlocks Spell Precision, which increases your Spell Critical rating by 12%. Spell damage and crit are pretty important for werewolves since your heal is magicka based. The higher your spell damage, the stronger your heal. And the higher your spell crit, the higher your chances to crit your heal!
3. Learn your rotation
When playing as a werewolf, or any class, it is important to develope and learn a rotation with the skills you have on hand. While most players can have 10 abilities and 2 ultimates at any time (the exception being Overload sorcerers), werewolves are limited to the same 5 moves and no ultimate, since werewolf
is your ultimate. So you’ll have to make the most of them. Let’s talk about the moves, their morphs, and how to use them in your rotation.
Skills and morphs:
As I’ve mentioned at the beginning, the werewolf transformation increases your physical and spell resistance by 9966 when in wolf form. You will fear up to 3 enemies when you transform and your light attacks also apply bleeds to your target. The ultimate can be morphed into either the Pack Leader or Berserker. Pack Leader can summon two dire wolves that will attack and snare enemies and will respawn 12 seconds after dying. The Berserker has increased bleed damage and is better for higher damage. Either morph is good so it really depends on your preferences.
Pounce is a werewolf’s gap closer and it’s morphs are Brutal Pounce and Feral Pounce. Brutal Pounce damages enemies in a small radius when you land and is great if you’re in a group of multiple werewolves. But Feral Pounce adds 4 seconds to your timer when you leap from at least 10 meters away. This is the better morph, especially in solo play. Now that the Call of the Pack passive is fixed, this morph is even more crucial.
Hircine’s Bounty is your heal. It can be morphed into Hircine’s Rage or Hircine’s Fortitude. Both are good and whichever one you choose depends on your preferences. Hircine’s Rage increases your damage by 10% for 17 seconds while Hircine’s Fortitude adds a heal over time. Hircine’s Rage is better for a dps and Fortitude better for tanks.
Roar will fear up to 3 enemies and set them off balance. Ferocious Roar sets nearby enemies off balance if a feared enemy is killed. But it’s not very often that you will kill a feared enemy to make the most of this morph. So Rousing Roar is the better morph. Rousing Roar will give you and your allies Major Brutality, which increases your weapon damage by 20% for 23 seconds. Every werewolf needs this morph.
Piercing Howl is you’re main attack and a knockdown ability. Both of it’s morphs are useful and depends on your preferences. Howl of Despair adds the Feeding Frenzy synergy, which increases light and heavy attack damage by 10% for 15 seconds. The other morph, Howl of Agony deals extra damage to feared enemies. For more solo werewolves, Howl of Agony is the way to go. But if you’re part of a group, it helps to have one Howl of Despair in the mix to further everyone’s damage.
Infectious Claws is a cone AoE damage over time ability, dealing disease damage to all enemies hit for 10 seconds. Claws of Anguish puts a healing debuff on enemies that are hit. This skill will wreak havoc in PvP against enemy players as they would have to waste additional resources to maintain their health. Claws of Life will heal you for 50% of the damage done from this move. It’s a great way to get a constant trickle of health back from your enemies in PvE and in PvP. I personally would choose Claws of Life over Anguish but I can see how powerful the other morph could be in the right paws.
Werewolf rotation:
When you are facing an enemy, remember you get a free fear when you transform. Target your enemy by holding down the right stick (Xbox One). Wait until their CC immunity wears off and transform. Once in wolf form, you’ll want to activate your buffs. If you have Hircine’s Rage, use that first. Follow up with Rousing Roar. Then you’ll want to DoT them with some light attacks for bleeds and Claws of Life. Then you’ll want to use Howl of Agony intermittently with light attacks, animation cancelling to burst your opponent. If your stamina gets to half, weave some heavy attacks into your rotation. Reapply your buffs and heal when you need to. If you’re opponent tries to run away, leap at them with Feral Pounce and knock them down with Howl of Agony and burst them if they’re low on health.
Manage your resources! If you’re taking damage and you’re out of magicka, line of sight your opponent. Get behind something and stall. Dodge roll out of damage and use your fear and knockdown to buy time. Keep Claws of Life active so you’re getting some health back. In PvP, tri stat potions will help incredibly! And if you find you’re still having problems, talk with one of our stronger wolves. They will be glad to lend you a paw!
And there you have it! This will help you build your werewolf character. Duel often to learn how to fight each class and challenge the Maelstrom arena. And of course, there is always our Werewolf Wednesday events! So go build your werewolf and join us in the fun!
Would any of you other players like to see this added?
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