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Not every Nightblade relies on subtlety and stealth. Discover today’s brutal player build!
Many Nightblades stick to the shadows, preferring to take enemies by surprise. Not the Berserker. Today’s featured player build charges into combat with a battle cry and a roar, cutting down everything in its path. If you’re looking for a change of pace for your sneaky, quiet Nightblade, this might be just what you’re looking for.
We want to see your favorite build, too! Send it in to community@elderscrollsonline.com so we can consider it for an upcoming Battlemaster’s Corner. Don’t forget to include a couple nice screenshots of your character!
The Berserker
My character is a Khajiit Nightblade in the Aldmeri Dominion named M'asad Lynx. While he has gone through many different iterations and builds throughout his career, I've finally settled on what I like to call the Berserker build. This build is all about seeing red and swinging the biggest weapon you can find. Berserkers are famed for their reckless approach to combat, relying on brute strength and boundless rage to carry them through to victory.
This is mostly a weapon-focused build, and it relies heavily on stamina. Nightblade class abilities are used as supplementary boosts in combat for self-healing and further bolstering the Berserker's damage. My Berserker wears seven pieces of medium armor and gears as much as possible for maximum critical chance, weapon damage, stamina, and health. Nightblade passives grant fairly large boosts to stamina recovery, critical chance, and critical damage, all of which help the Berserker along.
Primary Skills
Two-Handed – Single-Target Damage
Critical Charge (Critical Rush): This ability is a charge/gap closer with a good bit of damage tied to it. The real trick here is that the damage increases based on how far away your target is. Most players consider charge abilities as something you just start a fight with or use to get around, but the Berserker uses Critical Charge as one of his primary high-damage attacks.
Uppercut (Wrecking Blow): The biggest hitter in the Two-Handed line, Uppercut also adds a knockback and stun component. The Wrecking Blow morph offers a substantial boost to your next weapon attack (though it does not apply the bonus to another Wrecking Blow), allowing for some good follow-up combos.
Reverse Slash (Executioner): Our execute/finishing ability. Executioner is notable for increasing the damage of all of your other Two-Handed abilities on low health targets. It also has a synergy with Rally, which I'll explain later on.
Strife (Swallow Soul): The only non-stamina ability on the first skillbar. Swallow Soul deals some moderate burst damage to the target at a reasonable magicka cost, but the real benefit is that it applies a heal-over-time effect to you, restoring 25% of the damage done every two seconds for 10 seconds. On top of that, it increases all healing you take from any source (including itself) by 10%, synergizing well with other abilities used in the build.
Momentum (Rally): This is our big weapon damage buff, and should be kept active at all times. Rally lasts for 20 seconds, boosts Two-Handed weapon damage by 20%, and heals you every couple of seconds. If you get into a sticky situation, Rally can be re-activated before its duration has completed, granting you a moderate burst heal that gets bigger the longer that the buff has been active.
Ultimate: Dawnbreaker (Flawless Dawnbreaker): Just for being slotted, Flawless Dawnbreaker boosts your weapon damage by an additional 13%. Obviously, just about everything on our single-target bar is based on weapon damage, so this is a clear choice. Occasionally, I'll swap this for Death Stroke (Incapacitating Strike), especially for PvP situations, where you need to reduce the healing an opponent can bring to bear.
As I mentioned, this weapon bar is what the Berserker relies on for single-target damage. Against most targets, especially those that aren’t paying attention to you, a simple Heavy Attack -> Wrecking Blow -> repeat combination works relatively well and will put out a respectable amount of damage. When fighting targets that can be knocked back by Wrecking Blow, I'll lead with that and immediately start backing up while casting Swallow Soul once. By the time the knockdown from Wrecking Blow wears off, you should have a good bit of distance between you and your target, at which point you can charge back at him with Critical Rush, adding a huge amount of burst damage to the rotation. As long as Swallow Soul and Rally are kept active, your health should recover at a high enough rate to deal with most incoming damage.
Secondary Skills
Two-Handed - Area Damage
Path of Darkness (Refreshing Path): When dealing with groups of enemies, every bit of healing and defense counts, and even though the Berserker is an offensive build, it helps to have some extra healing when charging into the fray. Refreshing Path can be laid down on your approach to a group, granting you a huge boost to movement speed, dealing damage over time to enemies, and returning health over time to allies in the area.
Cleave (Brawler): This is our primary damage source once we're in the crowd. Brawler grants you a fairly large damage shield with each enemy hit, so the more targets you swing at, the better.
Reverse Slash (Executioner): Though Executioner is primarily a single-target skill, it’s used here for the passive damage bonus it gives to other Two-Handed abilities when hitting low health targets. This essentially turns Cleave into an execute once the pack of enemies is sufficiently injured.
Drain Power (Power Extraction): Since we rely almost entirely on Cleave for damage when fighting large groups of enemies, it's important to maximize the damage that ability deals. Power Extraction can provide you with up to 99% increased weapon damage based on how many targets it hits. This combines with the 20% damage bonus from Rally, granting you a potential 119% bonus damage—more than double what you'd normally be hitting for.
Haste (Focused Attacks): This ability is primarily taken for its 40% bonus to stamina recovery while active rather than the attack speed increase. Repeatedly using Cleave can take up a lot of stamina, and this offsets the cost.
Ultimate: Consuming Darkness (Veil of Blades): Probably one of the best area-damage ultimates available in the game, Veil reduces your damage taken (and the damage taken by your allies), slows enemies, and does a hefty amount of damage over the duration to anything in its area of effect.
The rotation here is pretty simple: Activate Rally from your first weapon bar before the fight, pick a target to cast swallow soul on, then swap weapon bars and cast Refreshing Path as you charge toward the pack of enemies. This provides you with three different heal-over-time effects as you initiate combat, keeping you alive while you get your buffs going. Once you're into the thick of it, cast Power Extraction to boost your damage and Focused Attacks to boost your stamina recovery, then start swinging away with Cleave. If you're fighting at least four targets, each Cleave will provide you with a damage shield big enough to keep you from taking any hits until your next Cleave lands. Depending on the incoming damage, you can use light attacks in-between each Cleave for extra killing potential.
Ability Swaps
While the Berserker is a weapon of brute force, sometimes a little strategy and adaptation are needed when the battle calls for it. Here are some abilities I occasionally swap out to help turn the tides:
Mark Target (Reaper's Mark): This isn’t something you want to use at the start of a fight unless you're certain you will kill the target in a couple of swings. Instead, I tend to cast Reaper's Mark on a low-health target just before using Executioner, as the target's death will grant you a weapon and spell power bonus and restore 60% of your maximum health—a lifesaver if you're in a battle that's going poorly. This is a particularly useful ability in PvP. Typically, I'll swap out Swallow Soul for Reaper's Mark on my first weapon bar for PvP engagements.
Siphoning Strikes (Leeching Strikes): On occasion, an opponent that is immune to Wrecking Blow's knockback effect and who deals significant damage can be difficult to take on as a Berserker. This usually amounts to the various zone bosses. For those situations, I'll often replace Critical Rush (which is less useful against targets that cannot be knocked back away from you) with Leeching Strikes. While it does reduce the damage I deal, the health return in combination with Rally, Swallow Soul, and Refreshing Path can be critical in keeping myself alive.
Alternatively, Entropy (Degeneration) from the mage's guild line can be used in place of Siphoning Strikes. While it does not restore stamina/magicka on hit, which makes it less useful for drawn-out battles, it does provide healing over time and a 15% chance to gain 100% of the damage you deal with weapon attacks as health, making it potentially more useful as a healing aid.
