Elder Scrolls Online Veteran Dungeons Tips

Elder Scrolls Online Veteran Dungeons Tips by patchgrabber

I’m just writing this because I’ve noticed a lack of something when playing in vet dungeons, especially with pug’s. I’m going to give a few tips (nothing groundbreaking but apparently needs repeating) for each role to help these dungeons go smoother, especially for gold undaunted keys. One thing for everyone is that if you know the mechanics of the boss fights in vet dungeons it will go much smoother than if you have to learn by fighting.

Tank:

• Make sure you have a taunt on your bar. There are 2 taunts in this game, both are single-target:
• Puncture in one hand/shield skill line. Melee, uses stamina.
• Inner Fire in undaunted skill line. Ranged, uses magicka but can be morphed to use stamina.
• Especially in vet you must have one of these two skills
• You only need to aggro the big guys, don’t try to aggro every trash mob. Tanks in this game do not need to aggro everyone, dps needs to look after themselves a bit.
• DK chains is not a taunt.
• Do not taunt more than 3 times in 10 seconds or you lose aggro.
• A skill like defensive posture can be great for the passive that increases block mitigation and reduces block cost and similar skills/passives that help with mitigation are very helpful.
• Don’t just block and stand there. I’ve seen several tanks do this and it is very frustrating. A tank needs to help the group. Using low slash to reduce enemy weapon damage, for example (15% off of a boss’ damage is huge), or an AoE ability like sap essence is a great help and can aggro more mobs to you without need for a taunt.
• Block those heavies! gold lines from an enemy means block it, red lines means bash him to interrupt. Seriously. INTERRUPT. Give your healer a break and block the heavies and bash what can be interrupted.
• If a boss has a frontal cone attack, tank it facing away from your group so they don’t have to worry about it.
• Make sure you have enough HP and resistances. Even at low vr ranks you should be having 15-20k health for vet dungeons. This goes for dps too, over 12k health at low vr is necessary; glass cannon builds have no place in vet dungeons, save those builds for PvP.
• Using an AoE ability like caltrops or sap essence can help you pull enemies when you start the fight. Aggro in this game is skewed towards whoever attacks that enemy first, so if you get a bunch of enemies you won’t have to look around for as many to taunt.

Healer:

• Templars, breath of life is your go-to “oh shit” heal. Because of the extra healing from the templar class tree, I like to use morphs that buff others more, like combat prayer morph on blessing of protection. For non-templars I go for the other morph for the increased heals and area.
• Rapid regen is the best morph of regeneration. Non-templars can consider mutagen as an “oh shit” heal, but in my experience rapid is just better.
• Communicate with your group. If you’re not a templar healer, make sure everyone knows that their positioning matters more. If they stay closer together (when mechanics permit) they will get better heals and everyone will be happy.
• Put extra heals or support abilities on your other bar. I like extended ritual on my off bar to lay down quick when the fight starts, for example. Extra HoT help your magicka pool. On my NB I even have energy orb morph of necrotic orb on my off bar, the synergy for that skill is great if someone uses it.
• Use heavy attacks to restore magicka while you fight. Using the absorb magicka glyph on your staff will bump that return up some. An alternative if you are finding your magicka runs low a lot is the last skill in the mages guild tree, equilibrium (morph it to spell symmetry, not balance). This can be risky though, because you will lose health and if a boss times a big attack right after you use it, you could die.

DPS:

This is the role I feel most people take for granted and phone it in.

• Weave attacks and cancelling. You can cut off the animation for an attack with a skill or block, and can cut off the animation for skills with blocks. Make sure you’re using a rotation like light attack → skill → block → repeat to maximize your damage.
• Get those adds! Especially at bosses, give your healer a break and nuke those adds fast (unless boss mechanics make this unnecessary, rarely the case), especially healer adds.
• Make sure you are using the appropriate skills i.e. AoE for trash and adds, single-target for bosses. If you don’t have any AoE then you should be getting some now.
• Focus on weapon or spell damage for stats, if you use stamina or magicka mostly choose the appropriate one. You are dps so you should hit hard. Crit isn’t as relevant any more, but it’s a definitely a plus.
• CROWD CONTROL. I can’t say this enough. CROWD CONTROL. I see little to no dps ever using cc. With fantastic abilities like talons, volcanic rune, encase, aspect of terror, there are plenty of choices to help make those trash mobs go down while making it easier on your tank and healer. With even one dps using cc the fights are much nicer.
• If you are a destruction staff user, pulsar can help a lot with trash, and elemental drain should be used on bosses whenever possible. Really only one person needs pulsar and/or drain, but they can help quite a bit.
• Know your surroundings. Don’t stand in red. This is really for everyone, but watch the ground for red aoe. Turn off grass if you can’t see the ground well. It’s hard for the healer to keep up if multiple people are getting nuked by red circles.
• REZ. It’s not the healer’s job to rez everyone. If you see another member down it’s actually better for dps to rez so that healer can keep everyone alive while the rez is going.
• EXECUTES. I almost forgot about these. Executes are skills that do extra damage to low-health enemies, the lower the health the more damage. Most of them do extra damage when the enemy is at 20% or 15% health and under (but I’m not sure if some start higher). These can include Templar’s Radiant Destruction, Sorceror’sMages Fury, Nightblade’s Assassin’s Blade, Two-Handed skill Reverse Slash. A dps not using executes is just irresponsible unless it’s a DK that doesn’t use two-handed.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, please feel free to add whatever tips you consider helpful. If everyone knows what to do then everyone will be happier and have more keys. :)