Stamina Monster
It is assumed you have already read through the Gear and Arena sections on this site before ready 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.
GEAR OVERVIEW
The most important secondary for a Stamina monster is Physical Damage on Condition (PDOC). Ideally, you want at least 3x on your rings, gloves, and neck. Everything else you do is going to vary on a case-by-case basis, but you want to be able to hit hard.
WEAPONS
Many Stamina monsters prefer the elemental double max Sigil weapons: Spiderfang for heavy, Thunderfell, and Serpentstrike for versa. For one thing, they don’t require months’ worth of grinding to get, and for another, they attack all three of your opponent’s resources at once (Stamina, Magicka, and Health), which makes it harder for them to counter you. If you go that route, you’re going to want to add in some Elemental Damage Ignores Armour (EDIR) with your PDOC.
EDIR bypasses all resistance, so you will still do some elemental damage with every hit, even if the other guy has resistance pots, Resist Elements (RE), resistance Armour, etc. That goes a long way toward causing conditions quickly and often, and giving yourself more of that sweet PDOC bonus.
You can also use aversions (expensive and difficult to maintain if you play a lot, but very effective), strong fast spells that match your weapon’s element like Blind, Lightning Bolt(LB), Fireball (FB), and Ice Spike (IS), or +condition secondaries on your weapon and/or shield (obviously, that’s not in the cards for Spiderfang). You can also try RE denial, either by risking a fast swing at the beginning of the round, or with a strong LB, preferably boosted by the Max Power perk. That’s the most effective way, but it’s also the easiest to counter (and it won’t work at all on high Magicka folks).
The double ravage weapons are great if you’re settling in for a long round, but ideally Stamina monster rounds should be as short as possible. To that end, weapons with a single ravage and extra points to condition, like Stormkiss, Maul of the Auriel, Baridan’s Axe, or Lichkiller work well, especially if you have a shield that boosts the same condition.
If you can double up on +condition, then EDIR is far less important. You can instead focus on secondaries like Prolong Conditions for a longer damage boost and an excellent counter to an opponent in 3x shorten armour, or EDOC/PDIA (Physical Damage Ignores Armour) for more damage.
So which ravage should you use? Well, that’s a controversial subject, traditional wisdom says -Magicka for mages and -Stamina for fighters. However, it is challenging to stop a dedicated mage from casting, or a dedicated fighter from using abilities. A dedicated mage can have 690 Magicka and add an armour Magicka piece totaling 839. So in order to ravage that Magicka pool you would have to hit them 2o times! They will be dead (or you will be) long before you can ravage all their Magicka. You can often have more luck attacking their non dominant trait, removing their ability to do shield bashes. Similarly, fighters are easier when you wreck their defensive spells. This is where double ravage weapons are effective: you don’t have to choose.
So, if you can’t ravage a particular opponent’s dominate pool, wouldn’t it make more sense to just use a +condition/15% boost weapon to kill them faster? Yes… so should you use single or double ravage? Fantastic for people with 500-ish or less of a particular resource. But if the mage you’re fighting has 800+ Magicka and doesn’t use annoying abilities, it has little effect.
Always have Magicka ravage vs a mage, because Max Power-boosted spells HURT. Feel free to leave a Stamina monster’s Stamina un-ravaged if you have a reason to, like killing their Magicka to shut down their defensive spells, or letting them kill themselves while repeatedly quick striking your elemental shield, etc.
RESOURCE ALLOCATION
So, if you want to be a Stamina monster, you’re going to need a lot of Stamina. However, you’re going to want some Magicka too, or people will just nail you to the floor with IS and Para and wreck you.
1x health, 2x Stamina armour is soft and squishy, but you can really leverage the defensive spells for a good chunk of the round, and you’re basically immune to Stamina ravage unless you smack shields a lot.
It’s possible to try this with 2x health, with an even split 450 Magicka/440 Stamina and a Stamina piece gives you 579 Stamina. You’re much more susceptible to ravage, but you’re also harder to kill. If you’re smart about how and when you use your abilities, you can still pull them all off twice. This isn’t bad either, but you’re definitely not going to get the same effect as you would with 700+ Stamina.
The basic point of the Stamina monster is to end rounds quickly. You use strikes to deal out maximum damage with a low risk of stun, and basically punish mages for standing there and staring at you while they cast. Against a heavy weapon user, the goal is to win the damage race against them by wildly mashing buttons and giving them no chance to stun you.
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
1) Divine hide armour. A full set gets you +51 extra regen per second at myth. The Amour Rating is poor, so you’ll have to be picky about how you balance your 6 defensive secondaries, and which spells you use. The shields get you an extra +39/second, which is usually enough if you also have a Stamina neck (+17/second). That leaves you free to use heavy armour, or at least a more defensive light armour like Dragonscale. The downside is your regen shuts off if you get frozen.
2) Subsuming gear. 2x is useful, and 3x is excellent. It also doesn’t stop giving you Stamina when you get frozen, so if you’re still swinging/striking, you’ve got Stamina coming in. It’s not as effective as direct regen, but it’s harder to stop. The downside is the lack of elemental damage, so causing conditions and getting the PDOC to kick in is challenging. You’ll pretty much need to use both EDIR and +condition on weapon and/or shield. Aversions help significantly, but again… expensive. Also, offensive spells to help you hit the condition threshold, but of course you’ll lose access to them several seconds into the round, depending on your Magicka.
If you’re going non-elemental (breaching/Stamina/Magicka weapons) then PDIA is really all you have any use for, unless you want to try casting at people too.
Non-elemental versa and light weapons are quite difficult to pull off unless you’re a strong mage.
Stamina pots. Nice to have, but can get expensive to keep around, and you can’t use them if you’re electrocuted.
DEFENCE
What to do when they freeze you: And they will because stacked EDIR makes that inevitable. So, 3x shorten conditions on your armour helps a lot. You can also use super-retal to discourage people from trying that: frost neck and full frost kit will have them freezing themselves too. You can try Subsuming, as discussed above. Frost pots are wonderful, also. One difficult way to deal with it is to use a low-level RE (say level 2 or 3) specifically for unfreezing yourself. You won’t have much protection while it’s active but casting it will un-freeze you quickly. You’ll have to make good use of Ward/Absorb to avoid IS and Para, or you’ll have to have the correct divine light shield and a bunch of spell resist secondaries, but it’s workable.
Armor
There’s a whole section for armour under the gear section, but if you go the 1x health armour route, at least 1x each slash/bash/cleave resist is extremely useful. 3x SR with the right light shield helps with spells, but you should have Ward and/or Absorb to do the heavy lifting for you. Shorten conditions is probably the most useful armour secondary for a Stamina monster (unless someone attacks you with a breacher or Stamina weapon). The general recommendation is all physical resist armour (turtle) or mixed physical and plenty of shorten (half turtle). 3x spell/shorten is great against mages.
If using divine light armour, mixed Stalhrim and Dwarven armour is best. You can’t really afford to put on a frost piece if you’re using 2x Stamina, but a full set of myth divine armour will get you 50 frost resist, so almost as effective as a Frost armour piece, but without the cost of reducing your Stamina or health.
Things that people will use to kill you
1) high blocks. Smack Shields of Stasis a few times with strikes and watch all your Stamina just disappear. Be careful how you time strikes, and consider GB for block-spammers.
2) LB + Para/IS. They zap you, taking away your defensive spells, and then you are toast. You can counter with divine anti-shock, anti-frost, or anti-poison shields or resist pots. Shock pot to start then RE and spell resist unless they’re a super-mage or using aversions, ignore the zap and directly resist the punchline spell can also work. If you’re aggro enough, you can also stand to get stunned or paralysed a couple times and still out-damage the mage. Easiest for a heavy weapon user, but versa guys have can drop a Mage that way too.
3) Wall of Fire: strong RE works great, as does fire pots.
4) Stacked EDIR on frost builds, especially with FB. If you’ve got the resources to hit them with a couple of strikes while they stand there casting, though, you can generally get the better of that exchange.
SPELLS
Resist Elements: Pros: good elemental protection at high levels, easy to cure conditions at low levels. Helps you win the damage race.
Cons: expensive at high levels, slow to cast.
Absorb: Pros: stops spell effects, even at level 1. You can avoid cooldown timer problems from Harry Bash and stuns from IS, Guardbreaker (GB), and Stagger Bash if you time it right. Great against Para. Cheap, instant cast.
Cons: doesn’t stop damage, so a strong IS will still freeze you. Very short duration, so timing is tough.
Ward: Pros: stops all elemental damage from one powerful hit, even at level 1.
Completely negates IS, Blind, Para, Fireball. Instant cast.
Cons: Won’t do much vs channelled spells like FrostBite (FB), Poison Cloud (PC), Consuming Inferno (CI) except buy you an extra half second before you’re conditioned.
Blizzard Armor: Pros: takes half of all incoming damage before it gets to you, even at level 1. So usually, a 1,000 damage combo crit comes at you, meets your resistances, AR, etc. and slides through as, say, 750 damage. With BA, that 1,000 damage hit gets cut to 500, then hits your armor and becomes 250. It makes blocking a breaching hit with a hide shield or weapon a lot more bearable (not safe, but at least not instant death). Instant cast and it lights up quickly at start of round.
Cons: expensive, slow cooldown (7.5 seconds between uses).
WARLOCK'S RING (WR)
Most think you should not use WR for a Stamina monster build. Most of your damage should be coming from abilities, so why give up 2 of your 8 offensive secondaries just so you can manually swing faster when you aren’t manually swinging much? Use WR if you are going full health tank with limited resources, but know you will have to fight the old fashioned way at the end of the match.
ABILITIES
Quick strikes are a versa Stamina-monster’s bread and butter. It’s nice to have a shield bash or GB in there against some people, though. Generally weight your loadouts with Recovery Strikes (RS), Piecing Strikes, and Quick Strikes (QS), and swap QS out manually as needed. Venom Strikes isn’t really worth its cost,
Keep abilities at level 1. Your weapon has much more to do with how powerful your strikes are than any other factor, so the ability to spam strikes is more important than wasting 100 Stamina just to get 6 more damage or whatever.
RS can be used during another quick strike to dump 4 hits in rapid succession. In PvE this is bugged so that RS does no damage if you use it too soon after another ability, but in PvP it works well.