ESO Master Your Sustain

How To Improve Your Sustain

One of the hardest parts about advancing as a damage dealer in ESO is handling your sustain. It’s something every new player struggles with, and oftentimes they don’t realize why. So today I’m going to break down what you need to do to improve your sustain. Guess what, it’s not hard, it’s just a matter of knowing!

Let’s start with what sustain is. Sustain is your ability to cast skills or abilities throughout a battle without running out the resources required to cast them, such as magicka or stamina. If you are always running out of resources, one or all of these things are probably at fault!

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  1. Food
    1. Food is essential to your survival and your sustain, you should never be in a dungeon or trial without food on
      1. Fantastic stamina food to use while you progress is lava foot soup or dubious cameron throne
      2. Fantastic Magicka food is Witchmother’s Potent Brew
  2. Potions
    1. Potions are a fundamental part of every player’s rotation. Notice i said rotation. They are not meant to be used when you are low on resources, they are meant to be chugged anytime they are off cool down. In other words you should use them proactively instead of reactively. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that when procced a potion provides 20% increased resource regen. Better potions will also increase your weapon or spell damage by 20% and increase your crit rating! YES I SAID 20%. Do not underestimate good potions, they are integral not only to your sustain but to your damage output.
  3. Synergies
    1. Now that you have your food buff, and are chugging potions like they are water its time to start grabbing synergies. Activating a synergy not only gives you resources back, it can also give you a buff depending on which synergy you take. For example grabbing the your friendly sorcerer’s storm atro synergy increases your damage by 25% for 8 seconds!!!!
  4. Passives
    1. Since we are talking about sustain in this video the most important passives are going to be:
      1. Medicinal use from the alchemy tree. Maxing out this passive will grant you 100% uptime on your potions, meaning the potions will last as long as the cooldown. Potions normal only last for a fraction of the their cooldown time until you max out medicinal use. This is incredibly important for your sustain and your damage as potion uptime translates to both
      2. Undaunted passives. – every build in the game maxes out these undaunted passives. These passives are what will give your character resources back when taking synergies
  5. Debuffs like Elemental Drain
    1. Next we have debuffs, like Elemental Drain. For some builds, during long boss fights eating food, chugging potions, and taking synergies just isnt enough. This is where debuffs like Elemental Drain save the day. This is an essential part of mag sustain in prolonged fights as it places magicka steel on the enemy which returns magicka to the damage dealer every time it attacks the afflicted enemy
  6. Champion points
    1. Last and probably least are Champion points. There are passives like mooncalf and arcanist that specifically improve our sustain by increasing passive regen. While all of the items mentioned before this are going to do a lot more for your sustain, champion points are certainly going to help!
  7. Heavy Attacks
    1. Now when all else fails and you still run out of resources, maybe you fell behind on potions, maybe the boss moved and you had to reapply dots more frequently than normal. Maybe the healer fell behind on sending out synergies or you were just unable to grab them. This is when that heavy attack will come in handy. You shouldn’t have to do this often if all other things are being handled, but sometimes it will come down to this. When this happens weave some heavy attacks between your abilities until you can grab a synergy or pop a potion or you just reach a comfortable resource pool again and then return to your normal rotation
  8. Regen On Jewelry
    1. For PVE As a last resort you can put resource regen on your jewelry, but in the games current form this should not be necessary if you are utilizing the previously mentioned items, so this is a little like putting training wheels on your character. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do it, but at least first try to master the other techniques before making this concession. If you are handling the items I mentioned above you should not need to sacrifice weapon or spell damage enchantments for resource recovery enchantments. BUT To be fair, some of those items take time to get, such as the undaunted passives and the medicinal use passives so if your character is new this can be an easy way to help you out until your character has progressed to the point of being able to replace these enchants with damage enchants.