Oakensoul Ring buffed again on ESO High Isle PTS - How good is it now?

When we first saw the High Isle PTS for ESO, we wrote about how the item was looking potentially overpowered, allowing players to easily get huge DPS numbers while only using one bar. 

It seems Zenimax thought that it was too overpowered, because they then nerfed it after a couple of PTS iterations. 

In this week's PTS update however, the item has received yet another change, significantly adjusting how the item works and its power level, so we decided to go back and have another look at it. 

Prior to this week's update, the Oakensoul Ring was not in the greatest state, as its main purpose was to give a bunch of Major buffs to the player that were already very common in group play. The ring might have been fairly decent for solo players still. 

The last time we tested it, we found that we had lost almost 15k DPS on our one bar Sorcerer test build, which used Arms of Relequen, Kinras's Wrath, one piece of Slimecraw and the Oakensoul Ring itself. 

First of all, we have to say that the Oakensoul Ring has had one more thing nerfed - even after it's initial nerf it still granted the wearer a bunch of extra maximum health, magicka and stamina. That has now gone, but several new things have been added to it. 

It seems that Zenimax listened to the feedback that the Oakensoul Ring was just giving buffs that were very easy to get in group play, because they adjusted it to instead give several minor buffs, and a couple of major buffs which are harder to get. 

The ring now gives Minor Endurance, Minor Fortitude and Minor Intellect instead of the Major versions of those buffs, and will also now give you Major Brutality, Major Sorcery, Major Berserk, Major Protection, Major Force and Major Heroism. 

Major Sorcery and Major Brutality are easily obtained from potions, so those are not very important. Major Berserk is difficult to get reliably unless you wear the Kinras's Wrath set. It's a very powerful buff as well, giving a flat 10% increase to all of your outgoing damage, so being able to get it from one item slot instead of five just by wearing this ring certainly increases its value. 

The Major Protection is a nice defensive buff, but it's not exactly a game changer. The most interesting buffs are the last two, though. 

Major Force is the same buff that you get from Aggressive Horn, something that organized raid groups usually run a rotation with to get a high uptime for the whole group. The Oakensoul Ring will now give you this buff constantly, even in solo play, which is quite nice. 

And Major Heroism is a very strong buff that's only reliably available to Wardens with their Shimmering Shield skill. This will basically give you an extra 2 ultimate every second whenever you are in combat, which is a pretty huge buff. 

So what does all of this mean?

The only way to find out was to test it for ourselves. 

Originally we just did some more DPS testing using exactly the same build as before, which gave us basically the same result as we got before these changes were made, capping off at around 92k DPS on our one-bar Sorcerer build. However this wasn't really a useful test anymore, because we were wearing Kinras's Wrath which gives us the same buff (Major Berserk) as the Oakensoul Ring now does. This meant we were basically wasting a five piece set slot, so we swapped it out for Tzogvin's Warband, another meta medium armor set, and repeated the test. 

After making this change, our DPS was up to about 100k, so we are now roughly in between the original OP state of the Oakensoul Ring, and where it was after the big nerf. This seems fair enough to be honest - the item is now strong enough to be viable, without giving overly insane buffs. 

One last thing to note is that the Major Heroism is very nice indeed, we were able to summon our Storm Atronach almost as soon as his duration ran out, which really helped our damage output. 

We hope you enjoyed this article about the Oakensoul Ring in ESO High Isle. ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.