You’re not going to get far into Elder Scrolls Online without being forced to fight. Yes, you can get around in Tamriel without getting into too many scrapes – but there is no way to avoid combat altogether. I know people have done pacifist playthroughs in Skyrim, but I wouldn't bother trying in ESO...
Life in ESO becomes a whole lot more pleasurable when you understand HOW combat works in the game. Coming from Skyrim, there are some fundamental differences that you will absolutely need to get to grips with if you are going to survive for more than a few minutes after you step off the boat in Seyda Neen (or get dumped into Coldharbour for all you pre-Morrowind types).
At the most basic level combat in ESO involves two types damage-dealing:
The main fundamental difference between combat in Skyrim and combat in ESO is that you won’t be dealing all your damage from physical attacks. Failure to understand this point leads to inevitable frustration with combat in ESO, indeed my complete failure to grasp this was the main reason I quit playing ESO quite quickly after the game first launched.
Let me explain..
Ziss! That really hurt...
Look at the screenshot above. I’m engaging in combat with a Maormer pirate. This is a low-level enemy on Khenarthi’s Roost – nothing particularly challenging. But it’s got a starting health of 31400. At this early stage (I’m about Level 5 in this screenshot) my main weapon is packing under 2000 damage. See the problem? Combat is going to become incredibly boring if I’m going to need to hit a bog-standard enemy 16 or 17 times to kill it!
Now I can hold down the attack button for a bit longer and fire off a heavy attack – and rain down about 3000 damage onto the hapless Alit. Even so, that’s still going to make combat too prolonged to be fun.
That’s the problem. And the solution is to understand the awesome damage-dealing capabilities that you can get from investing skill points in your abilities. With the right abilities tooled up and slotted, you can deal crippling damage with the press of a button.
OK so you might read that and think that you can just keep triggering abilities in combat without ever needing to whip out a weapon at all. But that isn’t going to work on anything bar the very weakest of enemies. That’s because every time you use an ability you drain the relevant resource pool. For the most part that will be the Magicka pool (although you can morph some skills to use Stamina as you build your character).
If you just spam the ability buttons, you’ll quickly find your resource pool becoming drier than the Alik’r desert. Inevitably that happens just at the worst possible moment – often leaving you effectively defenceless as well as unable to attack.
So the trick with ESO combat is to learn the art of what is sometimes called ‘weaving’. This means the interspersing of abilities and weapons. Once you master this skill, through practice in the game itself, you can ensure that you can be constantly dealing damage in combat whilst never running out of your main resource.
Here are a few things to keep in mind with combat
This one will take advantage of this opportunity
San-daro thinks that getting my block in place would be a good idea
This one knows that sometimes defence is the best form of attack
In the next guide we’ll discuss how to choose the correct balance of abilities to complement your weapon attacks.
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