The Utility of Force Pulse - One of ESO’s Most Useful Skills?

In this article we will look at the Destruction Staff skill Force Pulse and its other morph, Crushing Shock. This is without a doubt one of the most useful skills in Elder Scrolls Online PvE, and we will examine why this is the case.

Both morphs of this ability are very good, but they have different uses. The morphs are quite similar - they both do a decent amount of damage, are quite cheap to cast, costing only 2700 magicka, and they both do fire, frost and shock damage all at the same time, making them good for applying several different status effects to enemies, namely burning, chilled and concussed.

Force Pulse is the morph of this skill that you choose if you want maximum damage output. The single target damage is the same, but the damage will also jump to nearby enemies that are already afflicted with a status effect, helping to increase your multi-target damage. If you’re simply playing as a DPS player with no special role, then this is generally the morph of the skill that you choose.

However the other morph, Crushing Shock, is also very useful. It still does very good single target damage, and is cheap to cast. It has the additional advantage of interrupting a casting enemy, so if an enemy is too far away to bash and you can see that they are about to cast a dangerous ability, you can quickly do a cast of Crushing Shock to put a stop to that threat before it emerges.

Now let’s examine these skills in a little more detail for different roles.

Force Pulse makes a great spammable ability for damage dealers due to its low cost and high damage output. A spammable is an ability that you cast repeatedly when you are not doing anything else, like recasting your damage over time skills or buffs.

As mentioned above, most of the time if you are a damage dealer, you will want to use the Force Pulse morph of the skill. However there are some niche situations where Crushing Shock is needed, for example if you are assigned to interrupt the Llothis mini boss in Asylum Sanctorium.

Whichever morph you are using, the skill is perfectly paired with the Elemental Catalyst set, which sometimes DPS players will run in an organized group. Because Force Pulse does damage of all three elements, you can quite easily use this skill as your spammable ability to get a very high uptime of the elemental weakness.

It’s not very common for healers to run this skill in ESO, however it is much more common for tanks to use it. I main a Dragonknight tank and I have it on my back bar a lot of the time.

But since we aren’t so concerned about the damage output of the skill on a support role, it’s much better to use the Crushing Shock morph for the ability to interrupt enemies - something that is normally the tank’s job to do. Not having to be stood next to the boss at all times in case you need to bash gives us a lot more ability to move around, which is not something to be underestimated.