Stamina Nightblade Beginner Build ChampPoints 160 PvE

“Adroit Nightblade”

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Resource Management
• Setup CP 160
  • Gear
  • Skills
  • Champion Points
  • Important Info
• Rotation
• Summary

Introduction

Welcome to the Stamina Nightblade Beginner Build PvE “Adroit Nightblade”. This build is balanced for 160 Champion Points. It should be your next step to work on this setup after completing the Stamina Nightblade Beginner Guide. The focus on this setup will be to get you ready for veteran dungeons with basic gear and to make sure that you have enough sustain and good survivability. With this setup you can start farming your gear for the end game Trial & Dungeon Builds on this website.

It will also explain some more advanced game mechanics which you don’t have to master right away, but should be aware of.

If you have more questions, you can also ask someone in our community partner discord about this Stamina Nightblade Beginner Guide.

• Basic Gear Setup
• 160 Champion Points
• Good Sustain
• Good Survivability
• How to play Stamina Nightblade

The Stamina Nightblade Beginner Build Details

Resource Management

Resource management is one of the most important things for all builds, you need to learn how to be able to sustain yourself. I will mention a few tricks in this section of the guide.

Nightblades can sustain their rotation easier then other classes, just make sure to keep up Leeching Strikes in your rotation.

Forgetting to re-activate Leeching Strikes can mean you loose a lot of sustain over time. If you notice it drops off, immediately re-apply it.

Incapacitating Strike now also gives you resources every time you do a light attack. That is why we always want to either run it on the backbar or the frontbar.

All points go into Stamina.

Dubious Camoran Throne

The Dubious Camoran Throne drink is one of the key things that Stamina setups use to increase Stamina recovery and thus their sustain. It gives Max Health, Max Stamina and Stamina Recovery as stats. You can obtain this for a quite cheap price in most guild stores. Always make sure that you have this drink active. It scales with your level, so you can even use this while you are low level.

Heavy Attacks

Heavy attacks (hold attack button) restore a huge amount of resources when you successfully hit the target. Make sure to do a heavy attack from time to time when you drop low on Stamina. Also, when an enemy is off balanced, you will get twice the amount of Stamina back from a heavy attack.

Absorb Stamina Enchantment

Using an Absorb Stamina Enchantment on our frontbar will also increase sustain. Every time the stamina damage enchantment damages an enemy, we also get a small junk of stamina back. Having an infused weapon even increases the effect and shortens the cooldown.

Stamina Recovery Glyphs (optional)

I do recommend running one stamina recovery glyph on your jewelry, if you want you can also use a second one if you still think your sustain is too low.

Gear Setup CP 160

Here you will find three basic Stamina Nightblade Beginner Build Guide Setups. As soon as you hit CP 160 it would be good if you get a Monster Set, the headpiece is a guaranteed drop when you finish a veteran dungeon, in our case Selene’s Web. If you do not have a Monster Set yet, just use some random gear pieces there.

Shoulders drop from the reward chests you can buy at each of the Undaunted enclaves in every major city of the base game. Depending on where the monster sets drop, it also drops from the chest from whom you received the quest. Just go into their shop and look for the Monster Set’s name.

• I will also explain down below what other sets that you should start farming, sets that can always be handy to have somewhere in the bank.
• We are using a 6 Medium and 1 Heavy setup because of the Undaunted Mettle passive that you want to unlock as fast as possible, so you receive 4% more overall resources (Stamina, Health, Stamina).
• Additionally, Divine is the ideal trait for body pieces, but if you can’t find/afford it, don’t worry about it too much. You can still find a Divine piece at a later time or transmute it to your desired trait!

Beginner Setup 1

This would be the ideal setup, but it takes some time and requires you to spend some time farming dungeons.

If you have help or gold

This setup is without a Monster Set, but requires you to either know someone that can craft this, or have the spare money to buy these parts in a guild store.

This one is without a Monster Set and you can find all these pieces in Overland content

Where can I get the gear?

Hunding’s Rage: Craftable, Guildstore
Agility: Guildstore
Nightmother’s Gaze: Craftable, Guildstore
Spriggan’s Thorns: Bangkorai, Guildstore
Witchman Armor: The Rift, Guildstore
Darkstride: Rivenspire, Guildstore
Leviathan: Crypt of Hearts I, Crypt of Hearts II

Monster Sets (Recommended)

Stormfist: vet Tempest Island (Head), Undaunted Pledges (Shoulder, Glirion)

Sets that you should also farm

In addition to the basic setup that is listed up there you should also farm some other sets that you will need sooner or later.

Selene’s Monster Set

Selene: vet Selene’s Web (Head), Undaunted Pledges (Shoulder, Glirion)
The other two are strong monster sets as well, but for the Stamina Nightblade Selene’s is preferred.

Arms of Relequenn Trial Set

Arms of Relequen Your Light and Heavy attacks apply a stack of harmful winds to your target for 5 seconds. Harmful winds deal 200 Physical Damage every 1 second. 20 stacks max. You can find it in a DLC Trial called Cloudrest in the Summerset DLC.

Tooth of Lokkestiiz Trial Set

Tooth of Lokkestiiz is currently among the best Trial Sets that you can get from normal trials, but it requires you to have the newest chapter, Elsweyr. This set’s fifth bonus only counts for Dungeon and Trial monsters though, so don’t throw away your other gear just yet!

Skills

This skill layout will be very close to the normal skill setup that we use in endgame builds like the Stamina Nightblade Rampage Build. You might not have all the necessary skills yet, but I suggest that you start working on obtaining those specific skills as soon as possible.

Skills Explanation

• Endless Hail: The first skill we activate for the rotation. It is an AoE skill that will deal damage over time (DOT) and has a 10 second cooldown.
• Poison Injection: The second skill we activate for the rotation. It is also on a 10 second cooldown and aside from dealing also more damage to low health targets, it deals damage on impact and has a dot.
• Consuming Trap: This is the third skill we activate, as it is on a 10 second rotation as well. It is a powerful DoT.
  
• Surprise Attack:  After activating all your skills, this is the one you want to be using mainly, while weaving Light Attacks. It doesn’t only reduce a target’s Physical Resistance when you stand behind it, but also deals a decent amount of damage!
  
• Relentless Focus: When you have weaved 5 Light Attacks in between a skill, this skill will become a Spectral Bow from which you shoot a powerful arrow.
  
• Killer’s Blade: When your target is below 25% health, this ability will deal a ton of damage! This is your so-called Execute.
  
• Barbed Trap: When this trap is triggered, it will deal damage immediately, as well as over time. as well as increase your Critical Damage by 10% for as long as it’s up.
• Incapacitating Strike: If you have a single target that doesn’t have much health, you can use this to deal a lot of damage when you don’t have enough Ultimate Points for Dawnbreaker, but usually we use this Ultimate only as a passive Ultimate.
  
• Dark Shade: This Shade will fight at your side and deals damage to not only your target, but also all enemies around it. It’s also important is to keep it up for Major Maim. Cast it before every fight and keep it up!
  
• Leeching Strikes: Casting this pre-fight and keeping it up during the fight is very important! It will help you restore Stamina and keep you going.
  
• Dark Cloak: An ability that will heal you upon activation, but will not stealth you anymore.
• Flawless Dawnbreaker: Undoubtedly one of the stronger Ultimates. Not only because it deals a lot of damage, but also because it affects multiple targets and increases your Weapon Damage for 20 seconds.
  

Skill lines you have to work on as Nightblade

You want to make sure to max out all the following Skill lines and grind up all the skills and morphs of:

All Nightblade Class Skill-lines

Dual Wield

Medium Armor

Heavy Armor (Because of Juggernaut passive)

Fighters Guild

Undaunted (Passives only)

Provisioning (Gourmand & Connoisseur)

Alchemy (Medicinal Use)

Yes, that is a lot of Skill-lines, it will take a fair bit of time to completely level up all of those, but it will be worth it. If you want more information about each of the skill lines, make sure to visit ESO-Hub.com. The website has all the skill lines up to date for Elder Scrolls Online.

Champion Points

Below you can find the Champion Points setup for this build. Work your way from top to bottom in your allocation. For more information on Champion Points, please visit the Champion Points Overview Page on ESO-Hub.com.

Hovering over each perk will give you insights on what it does. Presets are also provided for each of the allocations below.

Click the tab below to open the allocation.

Important Info for Stamina Nightblade Beginner Build PvE

Buff-Food

Dubious Camoran Throne (Max Health, Max Stamina, Stamina Recovery)

This Drink is scaling with your health, so you can use it with any level!

Mundus Stone

The Lover (Increased Physical Penetration)

Race

If you want to learn more about the races, you can check out the Racial Passives article. In general, all stamina based races will work for a stamina based setup. Orc is usually the preferred choice for most people due to the highest damage output.

Orc
Wood Elf
Khajiit
Dark Elf
Imperial
Redguard

Potions

You can use those potions, they drop from Monsters, so you should have plenty of them. You can also buy those potions in the guildstore, they are very cheap.

In case you are still unsure on how to mix the ingredients together, you can check out a alchemy simulator here: Alchemy Simulator

Passives

In the end you want to have all these passives active with this build:

• Assassination: Master Assassin, Executioner, Pressure Points, Hemorrhage
• Shadow: Refreshing Shadows, Shadow Barrier, Dark Vigor, Dark Veil
• Siphoning: Catalyst, Transfer
• Dual Wield: Dual Wield Expert, Ruffian, Twin Blade and Blunt
• Bow: Long Shots, Accuracy, Ranger, Hawk Eye, Hasty Retreat
• Medium Armor: Dexterity, Wind Walker, Improved Sneak, Agility, Athletics
• Heavy Armor: Resolve, Constitution, Juggernaut
• Fighters Guild: Slayer, Banish the Wicked, Skilled Tracker
• Undaunted: Undaunted Mettle
• Racial: All
• Alchemy: Medicinal Use
• Provisioning: Gourmand, Connoisseur

Attributes

All Attributes go into Stamina

Rotation

The “Weaving Beginner Guide” explains how to weave Light Attacks between abilities, which is also called Animation Canceling. It enables you to deal more damage and a lot of other perks – just check it out!

___________________________________________

Prebuff with Leeching Strikes, Relentless Focus and Shade. The Shade won’t attack unless you are already in combat.

Endless Hail > Light Attack > Dark Shade > Weapon Swap

Light Attack> Barbed Trap > Light Attack> Consuming Trap > Light Attack> 9x Surprise Attack (with Light Attack inbetween) > Weapon Swap

Restart

At 25% and below, use Killer’s Blade instead of Surprise Attack.

We want to have the Spectral Bow proc from Relentless Focus, so we want to weave Light Attack and Surprise Attack 5 times together until we can shoot the bow, while having all the other buffs active.
Don’t forget about Leeching Strikes and the Barbed Trap, as we want these active as well!

Summary

So, what do you need to do when you have read this Stamina Nightblade Beginner Build?

Aside from farming gear, you will also need to level skill lines. If you haven’t yet maxed your class skill lines, now would be a good time.

Also, you will need to maximize Fighter’s Guild and Undaunted and start working on, as you will need that for future builds.

For Fighter’s Guild you need to either complete Dolmens orkill Daedra and Undead. For Undaunted you need to complete dungeon achievements or do the Daily Quests at the Undaunted Enclave in the major cities.

In case you want the Psijic Skill line you need to start the Summerset Main Quest until the point you get to Artaeum and then do a questline until Level 10.

If you want to know more, you can check out the Fighters Guild, Mages Guild and Undaunted Video.

You really should start with Undaunted Pledges as soon as possible, which is usually at Level 45. You will receive keys for every Pledge which in turn will grant you access to receive the Monster Shoulder pieces, just make sure to save the keys till you hit level 50 and Champion Point level 160, because that is the maximum level gear cap.

Gear is the most important thing that you can get now and if you don’t want to spend hundreds of Transmutation Crystals on transmuting your gear, you will want them in the ideal trait. This can take a while.

If you want to deal the most damage possible, you will want to consider learning everything about weaving. Especially with Nightblades, Light Attack weaving is essential. It basically means that you cancel the Light Attack animation with a skill. In theory you make a Light Attack and then almost immediately afterwards you cast a skill. Since this is depending on your latency, it will take you some time to figure out when exactly this “almost immediately” is. If you want to know more, I wrote a “How To Weave” Guide!

You might also want to get involved with guilds, in order to get easier and more regular access to trials (especially for veteran trials later on), crafters and even a guild store. Since you can have up to 5 guilds, no guild needs to fulfill every requirement. You can even have a guild for just chatting. Still, having a guild for each purpose is a good idea and will cover all your bases.

Getting Skill Points are also very important, depending how thorough you were with Skyshards, quests and dungeons.
Leveling a character is more than just reaching Level 50 and oftentimes requires you to get more than by just grinding your way up, which is why grinding levels as a beginner is usually a bad idea.
If you should find yourself in need of more skill points I suggest you complete the group events of the Public Dungeons that you can find in ESO. If you need help in finding out where to get skill points and which you are still missing, try out Urich’s Skill Point Finder!

Another important thing is Crafting (Crafting Professions). Sure, depending on how social you are, you can always find someone to craft you gear, or depending on how skilled you are at earning gold you can also just what you need, but the true power and also getting rich in-game is by learning how to craft and learning all the traits. You might sometimes hear people saying how important it is to do you writs and it is true, it is easy money and gets you a lot resources.

The only thing it requires though is for you to not throw away what you loot and of course most ideal would be if you had the endless crafting bag of ESO Plus, but you can also get around that by storing all crafting materials on characters meant solely for storing.

Learning how to craft yourself will make it way cheaper for you to upgrade your gear, craft your own supplies and learning the traits will help you when you find gear with not so ideal traits because you can just transmute them into the trait of your choice.

PvP can also be a very powerful tool. It doesn’t only help you with getting better at avoiding things and survival, you can also make a lot of money with Alliance Points or even Tel’var Stones. At the end of every campaign you can receive a Transmutation Geode which holds 50 Transmutation Gems if you have gained at least 25000 Alliance Points in that Cyrodiil campaign.

Since you are still very low in Champion Points I would suggest choosing the non CP campaigns. If you want to make as much AP as possible though, I recommend playing Battlegrounds.

It is advisable to get a daily routine of things to do, if you want to gain Champion Points quickly without actually farming them. Try using EXP boosts such as scrolls or drinks when doing these.
A way to establish one could be this:

• Daily Dungeon queue
• Daily Battleground queue
• Crafting Writs
• Undaunted Daily quests

What’s next?!

• Solo Stamina Nightblade Build
• Dual Wield/ Bow Stamina Nightblade Build
• Bow/ Bow Stamina Nightblade Build

Related Topics:

• “How To Weave” Guide
• New Player Beginner Guide
• Champion Points & Power Leveling Guide
• Race Guide
• Alchemy Guide
• Provisioning Guide