Elder Scrolls Online Classes: The Most Important Tips You Need To Know

Elder Scrolls Online Classes
Updated:
22 Aug 2024

Out of the 4 Elder Scrolls Online Classes, Which is The Best?

The Elder Scrolls Online is a MMORPG developed by Bethesda. Like most MMORPG games it features different playable classes with different abilities to enhance your gameplay experience. Unlike other games that feature lots of different classes TESO only features four separate classes. They are: Dragon Knight, Templar, Night Blade, and Sorcerer. Now we will go over each of them and try to find which one is a good fit for you.

​Dragon Knight

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The Dragon Knight is the best tanking class in the game

The Dragon Knight class in TESO is a strong warrior class. He is able to deal a good amount of melee damage and with one of the available skill lines wield very powerful magic. He has three available skill lines: Ardent Flame, Draconic Power, and Earthen Heart.

  • Ardent Flame – The Active Abilities and the Ultimate Abilities all deal flame damage. The Passive abilities increase flame damage, ability duration, and increase burning damage.
  • Draconic Power – The Ultimate ability deals physical damage and knocks enemies back. The Active abilities all help defense and healing. The passive abilities increase defense and healing.
  • Earthen Heart – The Ultimate ability limits the damage you receive and deals flame damage. The Active abilities can be viewed mostly as supportive. One increases yours and your allies spell damage. Another gives you and your allies a damage shield. Two stop enemies for a short period. The last does flame damage and reduces enemy movement speed. The passive abilities increase duration of abilities, restore stats when using ultimate, and increase weapon damage for you and allies while an ability is active.

Dragon Knight Character Creation:

The best class to take advantage of the Dragon Knights Ardent Flame abilities is the Dark Elf

Reasons You Should Choose Dragon Knight:

  • Easy to understand abilities from the very beginning
  • Best suited for a Tanking role (with defense abilities and heavy armor)
  • Great class for either PVP or PVE

Strengths of Dragon Knight:

  • Good damage dealing in the long run (can take on almost anything but will take a while to win)
  • Only class that can pull an enemy towards them (very helpful in PVP and PVE)
  • Easy to build for any role you want to fill

Weaknesses of Dragon Knight:

  • While it is capable of a lot of damage it doesn’t deal it quickly
  • Requires more skill and tactics to take on challenging enemies than other classes
  • Doesn’t have any one-shot abilities or powers

Here are some of the best possible builds you can do:

DK Armor Master by GODPRODIGYSON
The Flamedancer by ESO1220
Dragon Knight Healing Build by Mr. T the Tank 

Dragon Knight Gameplay: 

Dragon Knights are very well equiped to wield two handed weapons and fulfill the tank role

Templar

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The Templar has the best healing skill line in the game so he fits the healer role very well

The Templar class is a very interesting one. With the dragon knight it is naturally suited to be a tank or damage dealer but you can build it to be a healer. The Templar however is suited naturally to be a tank or a healer. It also has some decent damage dealing abilities. The Templar class also has three available skill lines: Aedric Spear, Dawn’s Wrath, and Restoring light.

  • Aedric Spear – The Ultimate ability and the Active abilities all do some sort of magic damage. Some stun enemies or give you a damage shield. The Passive abilities increase damage and resistance.
  • Dawn’s Wrath – The Ultimate ability does magic damage and an ally can stun the enemy for a couple seconds. The Active abilities mainly do magic damage, one does fire damage. The passive abilities increase duration of the active abilities, grant additional ultimate, increase spell damage, and reduces the cost of magicka, stamina, and ultimate abilities.
  • Restoring light – The Ultimate ability and most of the Active abilities heal you and your allies. One active ability cleanses 2 harmful effects from you as well as healing you and allies. The last one creates a rune which increases both your physical and spell resistance while you are inside it. The passive abilities all increase your healing abilities.

Templar Character Creation: 

You always want to pay attention to the racial skill lines to get the most out of your class

Reasons You Should Choose Templar:

  • Good class for playing in groups (Every group needs a tank and a healer built properly this can fill both)
  • Naturally suited to be a Tank or a Healer
  • Great for beginning players as the Healing skill line will come in handy

Strengths of Templar:

  • Best healing skill line out of all the classes
  • Great for PVP or Group dungeons
  • Can be a powerful ranged damage dealer

Weaknesses of Templar:

  • Only has one real defense ability
  • Damage output not as good as other classes.
  • While you can build it to be it is not a good natural solo class

Some of the best possible builds are:

High Resistance Heal Tank PVP by Unknown
Stamina Temp by Cap
Templar DPS by Optics Leader 

Templar Gameplay: 

Aedric Spear is the best skill line of the Templar for damage

Night Blade

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The Night Blade Class is the most stealthy class of them all

The Night Blade class is the typical stealth class. They can sneak and have a whole skill line dedicated to stealthily attacking their enemies. They also have very helpful magic that can hinder enemy stats. The three skill lines are: Assassination, Shadow, and Siphoning.

  • Assassination – The Ultimate ability deals magic damage and increases your damage against them. The active abilities deal magic damage, increase your dodge chance, reduce enemy physical and spell resistance, and increase your damage. The passive abilities increase damage while hidden or invisible, increases critical ratings for slotted assassination abilities, restores magicka for kills with abilities, and increases damage done.
  • Shadow – The Ultimate ability immobilizes enemies and makes you invisible. The active abilities make you invisible for a short time, deal magic damage and stuns enemies, deals magic damage and increases your movement speed, cause enemies to flee for a short amount of time, and summons a shade to fight by your side dealing magic damage. The Passive abilities increase your stamina regeneration, reduce your damage after sneaking, increases your health, increases duration of abilities.
  • Siphoning – The Ultimate ability deals area of effect damage and stuns enemies. The active abilities all drain your enemies’ stats to make them weaker. One drains there health and gives a portion of it to you. The passive abilities increase the effects of potions, increase max magicka for each slotted ability, increases healing done by siphoning abilities, grants you more ultimate when you do damage with a siphoning ability.

Night Blade Character Creation: 

The Elder Scrolls Online offers alot of different ways for you to customize your character's appearance 

Reasons You Should Choose Night Blade:

  • No other class can sneak like this one
  • Has the capability of doing more damage than other classes
  • Good in a group or for solo adventuring

Strengths of Night Blade:

  • Very efficient damage up close or from far away
  • Very stealthy can either do extra damage sneaking or don’t fight at all
  • Very high movement speed

Weaknesses of Night Blade:

  • Doesn’t have great healing abilities
  • Doesn’t have great defense
  • Is mainly built around providing damage and nothing else

 Here are some good builds to consider:

The One Man Army Stamina PVP by DFP
Magicka Nightblade PVP by ChronicPsychosis
Dark Energy PVP by gordo123796mwx

Night Blade Gameplay: 

The night blade's stealth ability makes it suitable for quiet close range combat or ranged out of sight attacks

Sorcerer

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The Sorcerer class has the best available magic skill line out of all the other classes making it the most suitable class to make a mage out of

The Sorcerer class is the best class for magic abilities. While other abilities have access to magic the Sorcerer comes out on top. The Sorcerer like every other class has three skill lines. They are Daedric Summoning, Dark Magic, and Storm Calling.

  • Daedric Summoning – The Ultimate ability and the Active abilities all summon different things to help you fight. Some stun enemies, some damage them, and some interrupt them. The passive abilities restore your magicka when your pet is killed or you unsummon it, reduces the cost of ultimate abilities, increases your health and stamina recovery when you have a Daedric summoning ability slotted, and increases your max health when you have a pet summoned.
  • Dark Magic – The Ultimate ability stops enemies from casting magic and stuns them. The active abilities deal magic damage and stuns enemies, immobilizes enemies, disorient an enemy, restore health and magicka, deals magic damage and immobilizes enemies. The passive abilities reduce magicka and stamina cost, heals you when you hit an enemy with an ability, increases the duration of abilities, and increases spell critical when you activate an ability.
  • Storm Calling – The Ultimate ability and most of the active abilities deal shock damage. The other active abilities increase weapon damage and stun enemies. The passive abilities increase magicka recovery, increase your physical and shock damage, increases spell damage and weapon damage for every storm calling ability slotted.

Sorcerer Character Creation: 

A good class to choose for the sorcerer would be the high elf due to its boost it gets to destruction staff and magicka

Reasons You Should Choose Sorcerer:

  • This is the most powerful magic class you can choose.
  • Good for group or solo
  • Offers good damage and the ability to have a daedra fight alongside you

Strengths of Sorcerer:

  • Good crowd control abilities that are helpful in PVP or PVE
  • The only class that offers the ability to summon multiple pets to help you
  • The strongest magical abilities of all the classes

Weaknesses of Sorcerer:

  • Naturally has lower defense
  • Naturally has lower health
  • Not a great class unless you have the proper build

That being said here are some of the best builds for the sorcerer:

Stealth Healer by PoopOnAMonkey
Dark Summoner by Unknown
The Trigger Happy Mage by momobyte 

Sorcerer Gameplay: 

Storm Calling is one of the skill lines available to the sorcerer class, it focuses mainly on dealing shock damage to your enemies and stunning them

I hope that this guide proves helpful to you. That being said it is just a “guide” simply to guide you not set in stone rules. TESO is different from other MMORPG games in that because of the rest of the skill lines available to you other than just your class skill lines you can build any class however you want. You can make a class with poor healing skills a healer by leveling up the restoration staff skill line and equipping a bunch of those abilities. You can make a tank out of a class with horrible defense by leveling up the heavy armor skill line and using those abilities. Also while they don’t make a huge difference if you want to get the absolute most out of your class you have to choose the right race. That’s an entire article in itself but for example the dark elf gets a racial boost to flame damage and dual wielding so he would be perfect for a dragon knight damage dealer. Just food for thought. I’ll end this with just play however you want, experiment, and most importantly have fun that’s all that really matters.

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