Healing in The Elder Scrolls Online

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My character in ESO is coming along nicely.  I guess you can say I play a “Blood Mage.”  I’m a Nightblade with a Restoration Staff, and I plan to one day become a vampire.  I take the life force from others and siphon it off to heal myself and my allies over time.  I can also lay down some great ‘smart hots’ and ‘aoe hots’ (heal over time) abilities to a group.  Everything I do is based around living longer than the enemy, and killing them in the process.

Honestly, I haven’t spent a lot of time in PvP.  Most of my time is spent PvEing with Graev and enjoying the world.  My healer has been more than capable of all content I’ve encountered.  Graev (tank), our friend as a DPS, a random DPS, and myself cleared all of the 20-23 dungeons (3 of them) yesterday in a marathon session.  All of them were actually pretty easy for me to heal.  The hardest encounters are those with lots of monsters all activating abilities at once.  If people stay out of the red circles, block when they need to block, and play it smart then my spec works great.  I contribute to the DPS and keep everyone alive with moderate effort.

I say moderate effort, but it’s not quite the same as other games.  Healing can be frantic.  I feel almost like a Druid in WoW.  I won’t ever have the direct heals of a Paladin, and I have to keep everyone hotted up.  I don’t stare at hotbars and play wack-a-mole.  I pull out my bow and fire off some shots, cast lots of siphon spells, and contribute to the DPS as much as possible.  I’m enjoying myself.

The dungeons themselves have been pretty decent.  The boss fights are fairly straight forward, and the trash mobs are just enough to give you pause but not enough to feel like you’re wading through trash.  We’ll have to see how the later ones pan out.

My build is still missing 3-4 very key abilities that will make everything I do 10x better.  Part of that involves becoming a vampire, which itself is pretty involved and carries with it a series consequences like you find in previous Elder Scrolls games.  If I can convince Graev, well go into PvP tonight and I’ll be able to bring you more of those impressions.

Overall, I have to say my class choice has been superb thus far.  I can kill things quickly, live almost forever, and bring a ton of group utility. Check out a video of us killing a boss in last night’s dungeon run after the break.

  • Nicely done! I intend to have my Breton Nightblade be a healer as well, but it’s still early days on her yet. Currently I’m working a dark elf fire wizard dragonknight instead, and having a blast with it.

  • Hi ya Keen…I went Nightblade too but I didn’t like it I did a steath shadow bow build I made but I ended up not liking it.

    So I changed to DragonKnight and love it.

    But im not a norde im a imperial and part of the daggerfall convenet =)

    Also Keen what faction are you?
    That’s my build I love it so much fun=)

    • Hi Samantha,

      I’m Ebonheart Pact. I’m not sure why your build link didn’t work. The characters may be rendering weird. My Nightblade is 100% not stealthy. You may enjoy that route more, but a DK is also a great class.

  • Neat. My Templar build is mostly built around kiting, except I wear heavy armor and plan on having a s&b at 15… so really it’s a bunch of stuff I think is cool 🙂

  • Keen, i am curious if you could post your build. I just started playing this week, and also am trying a nightblade healer w/ resto staff. Only lvl 7 but I don’t really find my damage output to be all that fantastic, while relying mainly on funnel health for damage as well as the basic attack from the resto staff.

  • @Proximo: Changed it to Youtube for you. 🙂

    @Werit: Cool! I think I rely too heavily on mana regen from the light armor. Wish I could wear heavy. 🙂

    @Rayvn: Here’s a rough version of what I’m playing with right now. I’ve decided to use a bow for a while, though. You can go look at the build and see that I have way more abilities than slots. I do a lot of swapping.

  • Thanks Keen, you really didn’t have to, I watched the vid on my desktop later on. It was meant as a tip for the future, youtube is king of compatibility ^^
    But thank you very much nonetheless!
    Loving your updates from TESO, I think you where surprised as I am to find that it’s actually a very enjoyable game, I did not expect to enjoy it this much at least.

  • So does the PVE play out like guild wars 2 did since there is no true trinity of classes? Does any content require a dedicated tank or can everything be facerolled by anyone?

    Also how is the PVP panning out? Do people die fast or slow? Is there much strategy to a 1v1 fight or is it who can press buttons faster?

    Last but not least, any update on the 3 monther theory?

  • @sikk

    There is definitely a holy trinity going, whereas GW2 “did away” with that. You need a tank/healer/dps, especially for the veteran pve content. The veteran pve demands a lot more awareness from the average joe than most MMO titles to date. First off there are only 4 people (group dungeons) so if one person is mucking around, people notice. Secondly, the boss mechanics actually HURT, and because of the design involved with healing, there is a finite amount of heal dumping that healers can do. After that people die.

    This isn’t to say healing doesn’t work, just that healing is more of a constant/overall thing coming from the healer, and that burst damage can only be tolerated once in a while, meaning that if people are stupid and stand in fire (or whatever), the healer will be forced to let them die (unable to burstheal forever). This promotes a learning environment for people that are used to baby-me MMO pve. I won’t mention names, but WoW and GW2 seem like perfect examples of said baby-me style.

    PvP… ah the glory of the game. The answer to your question is both. People can die incredibly fast, or incredibly slow, but more often it is in the median. There is definitely more strategy involved in 1v1, instead of simply “mashbuttonzfaster”. There is a plethora of Crowd Control (CC). ESO has done well though with this mechanic. People have always whined that “not being in control” of their character is stupid. I haven’t ever personally had that opinion, but I understand their point. In ESO every CC can be broken out of early… for a large stamina cost. This means that if you do not WANT to wait for that 15 second mezz (called disorient in ESO) to wear off, you can burn some stamina and be out of it. Said “breaking out” of CC also grants you a short immunity to at least that kind of CC (not sure if all CC or just what you broke out of).

    So PvP is once again a matter of skill. I have been in a three man group that bombed 15 enemies at once. I have also been facerolled by a group of 30+ in my group of three. I have also escaped said zergs many many more times than died to them. Everyone being able to stealth is amazing. Finally, the healer in a small man pvp group is not just screwed when the zerg wanders by! (Personal Triumph!)

    Play it. I know that my friends and I will be playing ESO for longer than three months. Absolutely.

  • Which Campaign/Alliance are you Drath?

    On Dawnbreaker/Daggerfall Covenant here, and we are always outnumbered with a keep not held to our name for longer than 10 minutes. But it just means we get to kill sooooo many AD.

  • My main character is Covenant as well, but I am the Wabbajack campaign unfortunately. I could easily get enough points to switch though, I’ve only played a little bit and already have 7500 points after about only an hour of PvP which if I can find a group I might switch. I am slow at leveling though I am only 26.

  • Ya, we had emperor for awhile but Dominion has started pushing us back I noticed last night when I checked the campaign. I remember when I was playing though, EP was being sneaky and actually backdoored one of our keeps cutting off supply lines to Roe which Dominion was sieging cause us to lose it eventually, even though we took it back.