ESO Skill Review - Low Slash

Following on from last week’s article about Force Shock, it is time for the second installment of our weekly skill review, this time looking at Low Slash from the One Hand and Shield skill line, and its morphs.

Low Slash is the basic version of the skill, and as its name suggests it will make your character do a low slashing attack with their one handed weapon.

The basic version is a single target attack, which does not do especially high damage, however its one upside is that it will afflict the target with Minor Maim, reducing their damage done by 5%. This debuff used to be stronger than this, and when it was nerfed it made the skill quite a bit weaker. While 5% less damage done by an enemy is better than nothing, it’s also not a huge difference. This has made it harder to justify using up a slot on your skill bar to use this skill.

But what do the morphs of Low Slash have to offer? Are they useful?

Choosing Deep Slash will add a couple of extra things to the skill. Firstly, and most notably, it causes the skill to become multi-target, also applying its effects to any enemies who are within a 6 meter radius of the target enemy.

In addition to this, all enemies hit by the skill will be hindered by a 30% reduction in their movement speed for four seconds. The Minor Maim from the basic version of the skill will also be applied to all enemies who are hit.

Finally, the damage output of the skill is also increased by roughly 20% when using this morph, which is nice, but it’s still not enough to make it viable as a spammable skill. If you want a spammable from this skill line you are best off using Power Bash which does considerably more damage for a lower cost.

So are there any uses for Deep Slash? Well, not many to be honest. The only reason that I can see for choosing this morph is if you want something to buy you time when dealing with several attackers in PvP, by slowing them down and decreasing their damage output, however there are better options in the game to fulfill this purpose, such as the Dragonknight’s Choking Talons or Sorcerer’s Daedric Mines.

Of course if you are doing easier content like quests or normal dungeons then you can use pretty much any skills you like, but for higher level gameplay Deep Slash just lacks impact.

So, does the final variation of this skill save it?

Heroic Slash is very similar to the basic Low Slash version of the skill, but with one extra feature - it also gives you Minor Heroism for 12 seconds when you successfully hit an enemy with it, which will effectively restore 8 ultimate to you for each cast (the effect will not stack, however).

This effect, combined with the Minor Maim debuff had traditionally made this skill a core part of the toolkit for many tanks in the Elder Scrolls Online, but is this still the case now?

Once again, the skill suffered due to the nerf to Minor Maim, which used to grant 15% damage reduction and now only grants 5%. The extra ultimate from Minor Heroism just isn’t that powerful on its own, and there are other ways to generate extra ultimate on tanks anyway, such as by activating the Mountain's Blessing passive on Dragonknights. Generating extra ultimate on tanks isn’t always necessary either, as in trials they are generally in a warhorn rotation anyway.

Having said all of that, if you have a free skill slot on your tank then you can still get some use out of this skill, but in its current state I wouldn’t recommend prioritizing it, in pretty much any case ever.

But what about PvP? Well it’s a similar story here too. Getting more casts of your ultimate can help to stack the odds in your favour a little bit, but the debuff that this skill applies to your enemies just isn’t very strong nowadays, so again it’s a case of using this only when you have a free slot available for some reason.

We hope you enjoyed this article about Low Slash and its morphs in ESO (Elder Scrolls Online). ESO is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.