It's now less than three weeks until the PC/Mac release of the new ESO Necrom Chapter, with the new Expansion coming on June 5th (or June 20th for console players). If you're a regular player of ESO, then pretty soon you'll be thinking about whether or not you need to farm the new sets to keep your character up to speed.
Most of the time, the most powerful new sets that come with a Chapter launch are the trial sets. So today we'll be taking a look at the new trial sets in Necrom to see if they're any good, and if it's worth going out of your way to get your hands on them.
All four of these new trial sets will be obtained from the [Sanity's Edge] trial. If you complete the trial on Veteran difficulty then you'll get a slightly more powerful Perfected version of the set.
Ansuul's Torment Set in ESO Necrom
The first of the new Trial sets is Ansuul's Torment. This is a damage-focused Medium Armour set that grants you some extra Critical chance and Offensive Penetration, along with the Minor Slayer buff. If you're wearing all five pieces, you'll get a passive 7% damage bonus against monsters (on top of the buff you already get from Minor Slayer), with the ability to get another 7% on top of that when you interrupt an enemy.
Increasing our damage output by a flat percentage is always a nice buff - if you're doing a special role in your trial team where you are interrupting a lot of enemies, then this set is going to be especially nice for you, as you'll regularly be getting an extra 14% damage.
We can't ignore the similarities between this set and Bahsei's Mania, a set which rewards you with up to 12% extra damage output depending on how low your Magicka pool is. If you're managing to interrupt an enemy every 10 seconds, then Ansuul's Torment is going to be stronger - however this scenario is very unlikely.
In most cases, Ansuul is pretty much going to be a weaker version of Bahsei that's easier to use, as you're still getting a 7% bonus passively, without needing to run at low resources.
Peace and Serenity Set
The Peace and Serenity set is a Light Armour set focused on the DPS role. Wearing this set, you're going to passively get extra Critical Chance, Weapon and Spell Damage and Minor Slayer.
When you're wearing all five pieces, one of two things will be happening depending on your current situation. If you're standing still, you'll get an extra 465 Weapon and Spell Damage, a pretty significant helping of extra damage.
However, when you move, you'll lose that damage buff and instead get 203 Health, Magicka and Stamina Recovery.
The damage bonus from this set is definitely quite strong - but you're going to need to be careful when using it. The set is ideal for standing still and parsing, and therein lies the problem - most actual fights in ESO don't work like that - you're going to need to move around a lot.
I can already envisage situations arising where players stand still and risk taking dangerous amounts of damage because they're trying to squeeze as much uptime from this set as possible. So if you do decide to use this set, just try to remember that dead players have a DPS output of zero.
Test of Resolve Set
Test of Resolve is a Heavy Armour tank set, and quite an unusual one at that. When wearing it, you passively gain some extra armour, max health and the Minor Aegis buff. With all five pieces, you get a pretty odd extra ability that can trigger.
If you are below 35% health and take damage, one of two things will happen. If your stamina is low, you will heal to full health and regain all of your Magicka and Stamina, and also gain Major Aegis and Major Protection, giving you 20% PvE damage mitigation or 10% in PvP.
If your Stamina is high, then you'll instead infuse all of your Major and Minor buffs with Major Aegis, allowing you to share a 10% damage mitigation with your team.
To prevent immortality, this effect has a one minute cooldown.
This set is basically a very selfish tank set masquerading as a group support set. There are probably a small number of niche situations where giving your team Major Aegis is useful, but the long cooldown and specific proc conditions make the set inflexible for that purpose - and in most cases there's going to be better buffs or debuffs that you could be providing instead (like Major Vulnerability from the Turning Tide set).
However, if you're a new tank who is struggling a bit and you want a free get out of jail card that renews once per minute, then equipping this set will definitely help you out quite a lot.
In a nutshell - this is a very long way from being meta, but it could be very useful for learners.
Transformative Hope Set
Finally, we have the Transformative Hope set, a Light Armour Healer set. Wearing this set will passively grant you 4% more Healing output, along with some Magicka Recovery and the Minor Aegis buff.
The five piece bonus is where things get very interesting with this set. If you heal someone who is below 40% health, you'll give them a 3 second buff called Spark of Hope. This doesn't do anything on its own, but if you've managed to heal them to 90% health by the time it expires, then both you and the person you healed will get Major Heroism for 15 seconds, with a 20 second cooldown per target.
This means it's possible on paper to have a 75% uptime of Major Heroism in your team, however this requires people to be low on health precisely every 20 seconds, which is certainly unlikely.
It seems we have yet another set in this Chapter that encourages DPS players to take silly risks - if you know your healer is running this, then you could take damage on purpose to get a nice helping of Major Heroism, one of the most powerful buffs in the game, but if something else suddenly happens to you while you're doing that, you're going to be in trouble.
If you're playing as a Healer then I do recommend picking this one up - Major Heroism is very powerful indeed, you just need to be aware that the set isn't going to do anything if people never drop to low health.
We hope you liked this article about Trial Sets in ESO Necrom. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
