Top 10 ESO Subclassing Character Builds (Update 46)

The Elder Scrolls Online’s Update 46 has brought unprecedented flexibility to character building through subclassing. This innovative system allows players to blend abilities and passive bonuses from various classes, unlocking a vast array of unique and powerful combinations. With countless ways to customize your adventurer, pinpointing the most effective setups can be a challenge. After extensive exploration and testing, we’ve identified the top 10 subclassing builds designed to inspire your next journey through Tamriel, catering to solo explorers, PvP combatants, and group specialists alike.

Top 10: Subclassing Werewolf

While werewolves traditionally don’t possess class skills in ESO, they significantly benefit from class passives. This build cleverly combines the most advantageous passives from three distinct classes to forge an exceptionally potent werewolf form, maximizing its inherent strengths and creating a versatile combatant.

Skill Lines

• Storm Calling (Sorcerer): Boosts vital stats like health, magicka, and stamina recovery through Capacitor. Energized enhances physical damage, while Amplitude increases damage based on enemy missing health, making your attacks deadlier.
• Aedric Spear (Templar): Burning Light grants additional damage, and Balanced Warrior provides a valuable 6% bonus to weapon damage, spell damage, and armor, improving both offense and defense in werewolf form.
• Grave Lord (Necromancer): Rapid Rot dramatically increases damage-over-time (DoT) effects by 10%. Given the werewolf’s natural DoT abilities like Claws of Life and Brutal Pounce, this passive delivers a noticeable impact, boosting overall damage output.

Gear Sets

• Tide-Born Wildstalker: Offers substantial bonuses, including a significant 12% increase in direct damage against monsters, which is crucial for maximizing your werewolf’s raw power.
• Order’s Wrath: Elevates both critical chance and critical damage, ensuring your fierce attacks land harder and more frequently.
• Oakensoul Ring: This mythic item provides a wealth of powerful major and minor buffs, streamlining your rotation and vastly enhancing your character’s overall effectiveness with a single-bar setup.
• Slimecraw: The one-piece effect grants additional critical chance, further pushing your damage potential.

Top 9: Zookeeper Pet Build

The Zookeeper is a master of minions, commanding an entire army of pets focused on damage, tanking, and healing. This build excels at soloing almost any content in the game, providing a visually spectacular experience as you traverse Tamriel with your loyal creature companions.

Skill Lines

• Daedric Summoning (Sorcerer): Summon Unstable Clannfear acts as a reliable tank, drawing aggro. Summon Twilight Tormentor adds significant damage, or can be morphed into Twilight Matriarch for powerful healing. Harden Ward offers personal and pet shielding.
• Animal Companions (Warden): Eternal Guardian (ultimate) summons a resilient bear that can revive itself, adding formidable presence. Deep Fissure applies Major and Minor Breach, substantially reducing enemy armor for increased damage.
• Grave Lord (Necromancer): Death Knell grants bonus critical chance against low-health foes. Dismember provides over 3,000 extra penetration. Rapid Rot boosts damage-over-time effects by 10%, benefiting staff heavy attacks and Skeletal Arcanist’s AoE.

Gear Sets

• Maw of the Infernal: Summons a fire-breathing pet, expanding your summoned forces and adding to your overall damage.
• Sergeant’s Mail: Significantly amplifies your damage, especially when seamlessly integrating heavy attacks into your combat rotation.
• The Oakensoul Ring: Simplifies the build by providing numerous powerful buffs on a single bar, eliminating the need for complex bar swapping and making it exceptionally strong and user-friendly.

Top 8: One Bar Magicka Sorcerer

This subclassed version of the one-bar Magicka Sorcerer refines the popular heavy attack playstyle. Strategic skill adjustments make it even more potent, offering superior damage and survivability for solo content without compromising on ease of use.

Skill Lines

• Storm Calling (Sorcerer): Foundational for heavy attack builds. Critical Surge provides essential passive healing, crucial for solo survival. Energized boosts shock damage, amplifying the effectiveness of your lightning staff heavy attacks.
• Assassination (Nightblade): Relentless Focus stacks for a substantial 400 weapon and spell damage bonus, allowing for a powerful spectral arrow release with burst damage and healing. Passives like Master Assassin, Executioner, Pressure Points, and Hemorrhage provide immense critical chance and damage, easily pushing you over 70% crit chance.
• Grave Lord (Necromancer): Unnerving Boneyard delivers AoE damage, Major Breach, and Minor Vulnerability. Death Knell grants critical chance against low-health enemies. Dismember adds over 3,000 penetration, and Rapid Rot boosts DoT effects by 10%, further empowering your heavy attacks.

Gear Sets

• The Oakensoul Ring: Supplies all crucial major and minor buffs on a single bar, greatly simplifying combat and boosting overall performance.
• Sergeant’s Mail: Dramatically increases heavy attack damage, making your primary offensive skill hit much harder.
• Storm Master: An excellent choice for builds aiming for a high critical chance, ensuring consistent burst damage.
• Slimecraw: Its one-piece effect provides an additional critical chance, enhancing your offensive capabilities.

Top 7: Subclassing PvP Build

This subclassing PvP build excels at delivering synchronized bursts of AoE damage and powerful debuffs. It allows you to unleash a devastating combination of damage and negative status effects on your adversaries, making it highly effective in both small-scale and large-scale engagements.

Skill Lines

• Draconic Power (Dragonknight): Dragon Leap (ultimate) provides burst damage, mobility, and a stun. Hardened Armor enhances your defensive capabilities. Coagulating Blood offers a strong, scaling heal based on missing health.
• Animal Companions (Warden): Deep Fissure applies Major and Minor Breach, significantly reducing enemy armor. Bull Netch provides reliable damage and sustain buffs, keeping you ready for prolonged fights.
• Grave Lord (Necromancer): Blighted Blastbones adds AoE damage and applies Major Defile, reducing enemy healing. Pestilent Colossus (ultimate) delivers a powerful burst of damage when timed precisely, coordinating with other abilities for maximum impact.

Gear Sets

• Balorgh: Grants a significant bonus to damage and penetration after using your ultimates, making it perfect for timed burst plays in PvP.
• Dagon’s Dominion: This AoE damage set further amplifies your damage spikes, especially when multiple abilities are cast simultaneously.
• Wretched Vitality: A strong sustain set that compensates for not using the Dragonknight’s Earthen Heart skill line and its Battle Roar passive, ensuring you have enough resources for prolonged engagements.

Top 6: Subclassing Healer Build

Subclassing healers can be exceptionally strong, integrating the best healing and buffing abilities from various class kits into one cohesive and powerful build. While it showcases the Warden, this versatile setup can be adapted for any class mentioned, as it relies on broad synergies rather than specific class mechanics.

Skill Lines

• Green Balance (Warden): Maturation (passive) grants Minor Toughness to your group, boosting maximum health. Budding Seeds offers potent AoE healing. Lotus Flower provides Major Savagery, Prophecy, and passive healing on light and heavy attacks.
• Siphoning (Nightblade): This skill line significantly enhances ultimate generation. Catalyst grants ultimate on potion use, Magicka Flood provides extra resources, and Transfer generates ultimate every four seconds. Funnel Health procs passives and offers multi-target healing, while Siphoning Attacks ensures excellent sustain. Soul Siphon provides an emergency group heal.
• Restoring Light (Templar): Extended Ritual offers crucial AoE purging. Channeled Focus provides armor, magicka sustain, and self-healing. Breath of Life is a strong burst heal. Passives like Mending, Sacred Ground, and Master Ritualist are invaluable for healing and resurrecting allies.

Gear Sets

• Spell Power Cure: Effortlessly provides Major Courage through overhealing, making it simple to maintain with the build’s abundant passive and over-time healing.
• Master Architect: Can be placed on the back bar with Aggressive Horn to grant your group easy access to Major Slayer, significantly boosting their damage.
• Nazaray: Extends debuff durations on enemies, increasing your group’s overall damage output and utility.
• Symphony of Blades: Offers valuable sustain for your entire group, ensuring everyone has the resources they need.
• Ozezan The Inferno: Provides additional armor and healing, bolstering your survivability and healing throughput.

Top 5: Subclassing Tank

Tank builds have reached new levels of strength and versatility in group content, and the Subclassing Tank is a prime example. While typically based on the Dragonknight, this build can be effectively adapted with any class mentioned, as its power stems from synergistic skills rather than class-specific scripts or sets.

Skill Line

• Earthen Heart (Dragonknight): Battle Roar (passive) offers excellent ultimate-based sustain. Mountain’s Blessing boosts group weapon damage. Stone Giant increases damage taken by enemies. Igneous Shield provides a shield, Major Mending, and sustain, while Igneous Weapons gives Major Brutality and Sorcery. Magma Armor is a potent emergency ultimate.
• Soldier of the Apocrypha (Arcanist): Cruxweaver Armor grants Major Resolve and Minor Breach, generating Crux. Spite Ward offers a free damage shield. Runeguard of Still Waters provides Minor Resolve and Protection for the group. Runic Sunder is a versatile taunt. Gibbering Shelter (ultimate) offers a substantial group shield. Passives like Circumvented Fate (Minor Evasion) and Implacable Outcome (ultimate generation) further enhance utility.
• Siphoning (Nightblade): Siphoning Attacks is arguably the best sustain skill available. Power Extraction provides AoE damage and debuffs. Soul Tether (ultimate) is excellent for AoE stunning trash pulls. Passives such as Catalyst (ultimate generation) and Magicka Flood (resource enhancement) contribute significantly to resource management.

Gear Sets

• Saxhleel Champion: Maximizes Major Force uptime when using ultimates, perfectly aligning with this build’s high ultimate generation.
• Powerful Assault: A strong back-bar option that can be easily procced with Razor Caltrops (Assault skill line) for consistent group buffs.
• Archdruid Devyric: One of the strongest choices, providing on-demand Major Vulnerability to significantly boost group damage.

Top 4: Subclassing DPS

When it comes to subclassing for damage per second (DPS), several powerful configurations emerge, particularly when incorporating the Arcanist class. These builds focus on maximizing damage output through unique skill interactions and synergistic passives, offering diverse and effective ways to dominate encounters.

Skill Lines

• Herald of the Tome (Arcanist): Fatecarver consumes Crux to unleash immense channeled damage, with morphs for shielding or extended duration. Cephaliarch’s Flail boosts damage, Crux generation, and healing. Recuperative Treaties, on the back bar, provides sustain, Crux, Major Sorcery, and Brutality. The Languid Eye (ultimate) delivers potent AoE damage.
• Assassination (Nightblade): Relentless Focus grants a passive 400 weapon and spell damage, culminating in a powerful spectral arrow. Soul Harvest boosts damage against a single target by 20%. Passives like Master Assassin (crit chance while flanking), Executioner (sustain), Pressure Points (more crit chance), and Hemorrhage (10% crit damage, Minor Savagery) make Nightblade an excellent choice for crit-focused DPS.
• Dawn’s Wrath (Templar): Radiant Glory is excellent for single-target fights, often outperforming Fatecarver. Solar Barrage boosts all class skill damage by 5%, making it universally beneficial for subclassing. Prism (ultimate generation), Illuminate (Minor Sorcery), and Restoring Spirit (cost reduction) enhance overall performance. Shocking Banner further aids in Crux generation for faster Fatecarver beam uptime.

Gear Sets

• Tide-Born Wildstalker: Superb for buffing direct damage against monsters. This set significantly boosts skills like Fatecarver and Radiant Glory, which now deal direct damage, maximizing their impact.
• Coral Riptide: A potent DPS set for those with access to trial gear, offering high damage potential when managed correctly.
• Velothi Ur-Mages Amulet: A Mythic item that provides a constant 15% bonus to damage done, offering a substantial and always-active damage increase.

Top 3: Elementalist Build

The Elementalist build embodies a mage fully dedicated to the three core magical elements of ESO: fire, shock, and frost. This setup harnesses the destructive power of all three, creating a versatile and visually stunning playstyle that excels in various combat scenarios.

Skill Lines

• Ardent Flame (Dragonknight) – Fire Element: Firmly establishes your fire magic theme. Burning Embers provides burst healing, while Cauterize offers heal-over-time. Flames of Oblivion and Engulfing Flames further enhance fire damage. World in Ruin (passive) boosts your fire damage significantly.
• Storm Calling (Sorcerer) – Shock Element: Boundless Storm delivers AoE shock damage, coupled with armor and movement speed buffs. Critical Surge significantly enhances your healing. Energized (passive) provides bonus shock damage, while Amplitude (passive) increases damage based on enemy missing health, and Capacitor (passive) improves recovery.
• Grave Lord (Necromancer) – Frost Element: Grave Lord’s Sacrifice boosts all your DoT effects. Unnerving Boneyard provides frost damage with AoE Major Breach. Glacial Colossus (ultimate) grants AoE Major Vulnerability. Rapid Rot (passive) enhances DoT damage, Dismember (passive) increases penetration, and Death Knell (passive) improves critical chance.

Gear Sets

• Deadly Strike: Amplifies your damage-over-time effects and the channeled portion of your shock staff heavy attacks, contributing significantly to sustained damage.
• Runecarver’s Blaze: Adds bonus fire damage to every DoT you apply, resulting in a substantial overall damage boost across your elemental attacks.
• Zaan: Enhances fire damage, especially valuable for single-target engagements and boss fights.
• Sea-Serpent’s Coil: Improves damage reduction and grants access to Major Berserk and Major Courage, both highly beneficial for solo play, enhancing both offense and defense.

Top 2: Ultimate Frost Mage

For players seeking a truly distinctive experience in ESO, the Ultimate Frost Mage build offers a unique approach. Primarily designed for solo content, its core mechanics can be easily adjusted to suit group play, focusing on chilling and freezing enemies while dealing substantial frost damage.

Skill Lines

• Herald of the Tome (Arcanist): Tentacular Dread deals AoE frost damage, roots enemies, and makes them take up to 11% more damage with three Crux stacks. Fulminating Rune also has a strong frost damage component. Recuperative Treatise provides sustain along with Major Brutality and Sorcery.
• Winter’s Embrace (Warden): Ice Fortress grants an armor buff. Winter’s Revenge deals AoE damage. Arctic Blast offers an AoE stun and potential burst healing. Northern Storm/Permafrost (ultimate) is a crucial defensive ultimate for soloing. Glacial Presence (passive) increases Chilled status effect chances, and Piercing Cold (passive) boosts frost damage by a significant 15%.
• Grave Lord (Necromancer): Glacial Colossus (ultimate) applies AoE Major Vulnerability. Unnerving Boneyard provides frost damage and AoE Major Breach. Death Knell (passive) grants bonus crit chance, Dismember (passive) provides bonus penetration, and Rapid Rot (passive) enhances DoT effects. Chilling Contingency (Mages Guild, Scribing) is a powerful, customizable ice spammable for Crux generation and Minor Force.

Gear Sets

• Frostbite: Boosts your frost damage abilities by a solid 8%, directly enhancing your primary damage type.
• Order’s Wrath: Increases both your critical chance and critical damage, ensuring your chilling spells hit harder and more reliably.
• Iceheart: A monster set that complements this build perfectly, providing a damage shield and additional frost damage.
• Ring of Pale Order: Invaluable for soloing, offering significant self-healing to keep you alive through challenging encounters.

Top 1: One Bar Solo Magicka Templar

The One Bar Solo Magicka Templar stands out as an exceptionally robust and straightforward build, perfectly suited for players who prefer to tackle content independently with minimal bar swapping. Its core strength lies in its potent healing, damage, and survivability, all consolidated on a single skill bar.

Skill Lines

• Aedric Spear (Templar): Puncturing Sweep is your primary damage source and self-heal. Radiant Ward is an outstanding damage shield that scales with enemies hit, applies Minor Maim, deals direct damage, and can even heal via the Reaving Blows champion point star. Passives like Piercing Spear (25% bonus crit damage), Spear Wall (Minor Berserk/Protection), Burning Light (magic damage), and Balanced Warrior (damage/armor) are all active.
• Animal Companions (Warden): Deep Fissure applies Major and Minor Breach, significantly reducing enemy defenses. Fetcher Infection deals damage-over-time and applies a debuff. Flourish (passive) grants a 20% bonus to recovery, and Advanced Species (passive) provides additional critical damage, further boosting your offensive capabilities.
• Assassination (Nightblade): Merciless Resolve grants bonus damage and a burst heal. Soul Harvest is excellent for single-target damage. Master Assassin (passive) provides bonus critical chances while flanking. Executioner (passive) offers additional sustain. Pressure Points (passive) increases crit chance, and Hemorrhage (passive) provides a 10% boost to crit damage and Minor Savagery for even more critical chance.

Gear Sets

• Tide-Born Wildstalker: One of the best options for Templars, as Puncturing Sweep deals direct damage. Its crafting flexibility allows for pieces like a heavy chest for increased armor, ideal for solo play.
• War Maiden: Boosts all of your magic damage, which applies to every damaging skill in this build, including Soul Harvest, Deep Fissure, and Puncturing Sweep. This universal buff makes it outperform other sets like Deadly Strike.
• The Oakensoul Ring: Highly recommended for its ability to provide essential major and minor buffs, simplifying the build’s effectiveness on a single bar.
• Slimecraw: Adds a crucial critical chance bonus through its one-piece effect, consistently enhancing your damage output.

Final Thoughts

ESO’s subclassing system, especially with Update 46, has truly unlocked a new dimension of build diversity. The possibilities for creative and powerful character development are boundless, catering to every playstyle imaginable. Whether your ambition is to command an army of loyal pets, encase your foes in ice, or dominate the PvP battlegrounds, these top 10 builds offer a fantastic starting point. Let them ignite your imagination and guide your next unforgettable adventure across the vast lands of Tamriel!