ESO Set Spotlight: Dead-Water’s Guile, Ironblood and Transmutation

Today we are reviewing three more sets in the Elder Scrolls Online - Dead-Water's Guile, Ironblood and Robes of Transmutation.

Are these sets any good, and what different uses do they have in ESO?

Dead-Water's Guile is a medium armor overland set in ESO.

It provides a decent buff to your weapon and spell damage, and also provides some extra health and stamina. In addition, it gives the wearer a special passive ability - whenever you kill an enemy while wearing all five pieces of the set, you will restore 15 points of ultimate.

This last effect does give the set some niche usefulness. You will get a lot of ultimate if you are killing lots of enemies in a short space of time, which in turn allows you to do even more damage by using your ultimate ability often.

So the set is very useful for clearing out packs of trash in a dungeon, trial or arena. You can use the in-game armory system or an add-on to quickly change to this set when you are going to fight a large trash encounter, and then switch back to another set that offers more single target damage when you come to fighting a boss.

Dead-Water's Guile is an overland set which can be obtained in Murkmire.

Ironblood is a heavy armor set that is highly focused on simply making the wearer as difficult to kill as possible.

Wearing the set gives you extra health and armor, and wearing all five pieces gives you a special ability that can be triggered when you take damage. There is a 10% chance to gain 30% damage resistance for 10 seconds whenever you take damage, at the cost of half of your movement speed. This effect has a cooldown of 15 seconds.

The main use of this set is to make very tanky characters in PvP. The buff that it gives it unique, which means it can be stacked with Minor Protection and Major Protection, along with any other similar effects that you pick up. Often Ironblood is just used on a troll tank, which is a tank that is made to be as unkillable as possible to frustrate players. This can actually be somewhat effective because players will waste their time trying to kill one player instead of pursuing the greater objective.

You could also use the set on a PvE tank but I would really only recommend that for absolute beginners who are just struggling to stay alive - the set offers absolutely nothing to the group in terms of support.

If you want to get Ironblood, you can farm it from the Falkreath Hold dungeon which is a part of the Horns of the Reach DLC.

Robes of Transmutation is the final set we are looking at today.

It gives the wearer a lot of extra magicka recovery and some critical chance, and the ability to give allies that you heal an extra 1400 critical resistance. This effectively lowers the critical damage bonus of enemies by around 20%.

Such an effect is very useful in PvP, and it is quite common for organized PvP groups to have a healer who is wearing this set - if you do not have any critical resistance then you will find yourself taking heavy burst damage in PvP. Critical resistance is essential to stay alive and this set helps you and your allies with that.

In PvE on the other hand, critical damage is only a factor for players doing damage to the enemies, so this set offers pretty much nothing in that department. This makes Robes of Transmutation basically a PvP only set.

Robes of Transmutation can be obtained from the Home Base Elite Gear Vendors in Cyrodiil. For players in the Daggerfall Covenant, this vendor can be found at Southern High Rock Gate. For the Ebonheart Pact it is the Northern Morrowind Gate, and for the Aldmeri Dominion you want the Eastern Elsweyr Gate.

The set is obtained from boxes that cost 20,000 Alliance Points each and will drop a random set item. If you don’t want to go through that process or don’t have many Alliance Points, then you can also buy the set from Guild Stores.

We hope you enjoyed this article about item sets in ESO (Elder Scrolls Online). ESO is a massively multiplayer online game developed by Zenimax Online Studios.