Celerity build (by Sir Cedric/Sir Dancealot)
It is assumed you have already read through the Gear and Arena sections on this site before reading this guide. If not, you should do so first as there are concepts there that need to be understood first.
Skill points and Races in this build section should also be read first.
It is also assumed you have read both the Warrior and Heavy Weapons sections before this guide, as many of the concepts and principles around gear and spells apply here as well.
Overview
A Celerity weapon is a combat enchanted Versatile weapon. This increases the attack speed by 31%. Therefore, it allows you to get more hits per round, especially, more hits when your opponent is stunned, sooner quick strikes, sooner blocks and reaction times. However, it includes no elemental damage so your damage per strike is lower, but your overall damage is increased by the extra strikes throughout the round.
It should be noted that an attack time, consists of both a swing and then a cool down period before your can swing again. Increasing the attack speed doesn't change the time it takes to swing, but reduces the cool down period before you can swing again, thereby reducing the overall time it takes from one swing to another by 31%.
If you add Warlocks Ring (WR) to your build, then the increase in attack speed is added to the celerity weapon and Enchantment Synergy (ES) is applied. For example with ES 4, 31% + 24% = 55% x ES 4 = 66% increase in Attack Speed. This may look like a wonderful increase, however, it can cause issues with game play if you have high ping and lag. Therefore, unless you live in an area with good access to the Elder Scrolls Blades game server (with low ping, low lag), you may find the game mechanics struggle with this level of increase.
I wield the versatile celerity weapon 2 handed (without a shield) for the extra damage. It’s fun to play but does make you more vulnerable, especially against heavy players and you don’t have bashes to use.
But your high block comes up faster this way, so with enough practice, this is a big plus.
Ideal secondaries are ravage Magicka and/or Stamina. Unfortunately, that combination is extremely rare, so any single ravage is likely to be the best you will get. Potentially, fortify fire if you use WoF or fortify frost, to make a frost Retal more efficient, could be useful, but are fairly limited in their benefit and should not be focused on.
Supporting gear for a Celerity weapon.
Of course, everyone has slightly different gear, but this will give you an idea of how to start off with what you already have and to prioritise what to craft/enchant first.
These are my basic stats: as you can see, I have an equal split.
This is what I’m wearing:
Offensive Support Gear
I find 4 x Physical damage Ignores Armour (PDIA ) very important, as you only do physical damage. Therefore, you want to maximise it with 4 x PDIA. I have 2 Magicka and 2 Stamina regeneration pieces for an even regeneration of both attributes.
One ring has Wall of Fire (WoF), which can come in handy if you want to force your opponent to cast Resist Elements (RE).
Other than that, I have a boost on Guardbreaker (GB), which can be useful because your opponent is stunned a little longer, allowing more strikes.
My neck only has one secondary (PDIA) but the boosts are excellent; 5 ES, 5 Matching Set and 4 Maximum Power (MP). PDIA/shorten stun would be the ideal!
The rings both have PDIA + Elemental Damage Ignores Resistance (EDIR). The EDIR comes in handy if you decide to use a Retal Necklace (of course you want the Retal Necklace to have PDIA as well.
My gauntlets are PDIA/prolong. However, prolong is useless in this build, but these are the only gauntlets I have with PDIA. Note Physical Damage On Condition (PDOC) and Elemental Damage On Condition (EDOC) have no usefulness in this build, because you opponent is not going to be conditioned, as you are doing no elemental damage. Only PDIA is really useful, though increase primary enchant can help. However, on a weapon, too much speed boost may run into game mechanics problems like was described above with WR, therefore prioritize PDIA over all other secondaries.
Armour
You want to be as tanky as possible, so 3 x health armour is a must. Especially because you don’t have a shield.
I have 3 x shorten, 1 slash, 1 bash and the helmet has +15% main, which gives extra health. As you can see my total health in the arena is 3365, so that’s super tanky!
Alternatively, I can swap some pieces and have 2 x shorten mini turtle (one of each physical resist) and + 15% main. It depends a bit on the opponent which setup I use.
3 x shorten is great as you get out of condition before you high block drops!
Sheilds
The main reason for not using a shield is the base damage.
With a shield your base damage lies between 206 and 212 (assuming you have Armsman maxed out and depending on how high your boost is from your neck). Against someone with turtle style armour, which will take 140 damage off each swing, leaving only about 70 damage per hit. Without a shield this is between 234 and 241, so that makes a huge difference. Because you don’t do any damage other than physical, you need all the help you can get
Remember that fighting without a shield it makes your high block come up much quicker, so you’re more agile. However, especially against heavy weapon players, you are less protected. This means that you must stun your opponent at some point, thankfully the faster raising of your high block makes this easier.
If you do decide to use a shield, then Staggering Bash would come in handy as you can get some swings in while they’re stunned. Also you’ll take less damage when you block your opponent, but you also do less damage.
Using a speed focused build with Heavy Weapons
You can use this exact same setup for 2 handed (heavy weapons) breaching, except I would recommend 3 x PDIA instead of 4, with Warlocks Ring (WR). In this instance, adding WR increases your speed to the similar value as a Versatile weapon and there is no ES increase, so game mechanics issues are unlikely to be a problem.
Like with the versatile weapon, your high block comes up faster this way, so with enough practice, this is a big plus.
Using a speed focused build with Heavy Weapons
You can use this exact same setup for 2 handed (heavy weapons) breaching, except I would recommend 3 x PDIA instead of 4, with Warlocks Ring (WR). In this instance, adding WR increases your speed to the similar value as a Versatile weapon and there is no ES increase, so game mechanics issues are unlikely to be a problem.
Like with the versatile weapon, your high block comes up faster this way, so with enough practice, this is a big plus.
Skill Tree
I have maxed out all augmented elements for Retal. Also, Barbarian and Armsman are maxed, because I use both Heavy as well as Versatile weapons. Maxing out augmented elements is not necessary, but I don’t need these points anywhere else. Most of my abilities I prefer to have at level 1 so they can be used multiple times, using minimal stamina, similarly with most of my spells.
Tactics
Practice attack cancels and overhead swings, as these are very important.
You will also need to retrain your critical hits, because the timing is slightly different to anything else. However, don’t always go for the critical hit, as sometimes you can get in an extra swing, while your opponents are stunned, if you don’t critical. You just have to practise and experiment with that….
Plus try to get the quick (non-crit) swing in at every available opportunity. Not only for damage, but ravage as well.
People do tend to use frost against you to slow you down, so get used to being frozen and consider frost Retal necklaces and frost resist potions.
Mages
Playing against a mage is a bit different. I swap my helmet (or boots depending on the equipment you have) for a Magicka piece with shorten. In addition, I load only defensive spells; so RE, Ward and Absorb. I have no Spell Resist (SR), but learning to time ward and absorb well is way more reliable. Plus, against a mage you don’t need to be as tanky, so 2 x health is sufficient.
Some final thoughts and considerations
If you do decide to go 3 PDIA/WR consider this:
- you do less damage per hit
- you get stunned a lot easier, because it’s pretty wild
- you are 100% relying on having to stun your opponent at some point to make the extra speed really beneficial
- it’s way harder to do crits
- you may find the game unable to play smoothly due to such an increased speed, your device and the server cannot keep up
This build will take some time to develop and experiment with and is gear dependent, and remember, manual skills are a critical facet of this build.
Congratulations, you just decided to make your life as difficult as possible in the arena! A celerity build is one of the hardest to pull off, if not the hardest, but it’s oh so satisfying when you can make it work!
Note, even if you’re not going to continue with it, practising with celerity for some time trains your manual skills like nothing else!
What I did at first for a few seasons
In the first two weeks I ONLY played celerity. Cups don’t matter that much yet and you can practice it against every type of opponent. This way you get better at the manual fighting (which is a must) and also you find out what kind of opponent it works best against.