The Meta Champion Passive Making a Comeback in High Isle - But How Has It Changed? - ESO

The Exploiter Champion passive is returning to ESO - But is it as strong as it used to be?

By Andrew   •  Published 2 years ago

Seasoned players of the Elder Scrolls Online might remember the Exploiter passive in the Champion Points system. The Exploiter passive used to grant you extra damage output against enemies that were afflicted with the Off-Balance status effect, and making use of this was very common on DPS builds. 

However, this passive was removed last year when Zenimax overhauled the Champion Point system in the Elder Scrolls Online, meaning that players needed to find new ways to increase their damage. However the passive has reappeared on the High Isle PTS, which indicates that we can expect it to return to the game when the High Isle chapter and update release on June 6th.

But can we expect it to be as widely used this time around?

Will Exploiter be worth using in ESO High Isle?

In High Isle, the Exploiter Champion ability will grant you 10% extra damage output against enemies with the off-balance status effect - Enemies are set to off-balance when their heavy attack is blocked (this method doesn't work against bosses, though), and they can also be set off balance if they take shock damage from a Elemental Blockade while they have the Concussed status effect. There are also some other abilities that can apply off-balance, such as Cutting Dive and Flame Lash. It's quite common for enemies to be set off-balance, even without intending to do so, so surely using this passive is going to be a no-brainer, right?

ESO Exploiter passiveESO Exploiter passiveWell, there is an immediate problem with this passive that has persisted from the last time Exploiter was in the game, but due to the changes in the Champion Point system it affects the situation in a different way now (more on that a little later). 

The problem is the off-balance status effect was actually nerfed back in 2020 with the Harrowstorm DLC & update. Specifically, a lengthy 15 second cooldown was added to the status effect, while its duration was fixed to 7 seconds, effectively meaning that the maximum possible uptime of off-balance was around 33%, even in the most optimised groups. This limited the power of the Exploiter passive by quite a bit, but in the original Champion Point system there was no hard limit to how many active Champion abilities you could have, so it was still worth using Exploiter even after the nerf.

Now however, Exploiter is being re-introduced as a slottable Champion ability, and you can only have four of those active at a time from each tree. This means that it has to compete with other powerful champion passives such as Backstabber, Fighting Finesse, Master-At-Arms and several others. With the cooldown of off-balance, you are effectively only going to get around a 3.5% boost to your DPS even if the status effect is applied on cooldown every time, and it's therefore highly questionable if it will be worth using this in PvE boss fights. 

Shock magic is good for setting enemies off-balance in ESOShock magic is good for setting enemies off-balance in ESOHowever, if you are going for burst damage in PvP or in PvE arenas where some enemies have fairly low HP, then you can get much more value out of the Exploiter passive as you will be getting a 10% damage increase for the duration of your damage burst, assuming you are on-point with applying the status effect at the right time.

So in summary, it certainly wouldn't be fair to say that the Exploiter passive is now useless, but it's definitely more situational than it used to be in times of old. 

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

Andrew

Published 2 years ago

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