Event Build - Eola (Basic text)

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    At the moment the formatting looks terrible, I'll be making this post look much nicer and cleaner once I post the build!

     

    *Link to my WiP build post*

     

     

     

    The Girl who Bites

     

    The spider silently slithered down an invisible silk thread to land on the man’s shoulder. He didn’t notice the eight legged creatures stalking approach as it slowly and enticingly clambered across the boiled leather of his jerkin. The multitude of tiny black eyes glittered in the flickering candle light. So small, so impassive, so absolutely predatorial. The legs bent and untwined on hinges of coal black limbs, the movement was subtle, beautiful in it’s own hideous way.   

     

    Eola smiled at the creature. It was just like her: hated and feared and alone. A deserted stalker in a cold dark dungeon. Why do we hate the spider? She asked herself. The spider eats the flies who swarm us and the mosquitoes that suck our blood. We should thank them, not fear them.

     

    “Why you smiling at me, creep?” The man with the spider he hadn't noticed on his shoulder snapped at her.    

     

    Eola flinched. She wasn’t smiling at him, she hated him, she wanted to kill him. But down in these damp, dark cells nobody got what they wanted. Down here you only got one of two things: a beating or a mudder. If you got a mudder you weren't ever coming back. So Eola always got the beating, sometimes, if she was fighting other children she could be lucky and give the beating. But most the time they squared her against older boys, wild dogs and sometimes half dead or sick men, and she would get the beating.    

     

    “What?” He squeaked at Eola, “You gon mute or something, skever spawn, you answer when I talk to ya, yea?”.

     

    “I…” Eola muttered “I… I was thinking about food”. Bad lie. Very bad...

     

    The man lifted his bushy eyebrow at her. “Food ya say? Dumb creature you are, huh, you ain't getting no food, you gonna go hungry for a loooong time girl, you hear me! That’s what u get for biting Slim Sero”

     

    “Will I be getting in a beating tonight then?” Eola asked, afraid at what he might answer.

     

    The man made and obnoxious sound with his mouth before spitting a glob of phlegm at her. “That's what you get”, he said, satisfied at the green tendril smeared across Eola’s face, “You get snot and no food you little sewer witch, that what you get, yea?”.

     

    He leaned closer to her cage before whispering through his half rotten teeth “Slim Sero ain't much happy with you little monster, you won’t be getting in a beating, for that you need food and strength… when Slimmy done with you, heh, you most of all gonna be a mudder”. He laughed, as if the prospect of her death was the most amusing thing he had ever heard.Then he got serious, look at her with hard ugly eyes, and got up to leave her in the cold, iron cage.

     

    As he turned his back, Eola saw the spider bite him in the neck. Clean. Silent. Right into his spine. He gasped in pain, then fell without a warning. His body collided with her cage. His head smashed into the metal bars with a wet thump. He lay still, the ugly bastard, paralyzed by a small unnoticeable creature. His muscles spasmed lazily as his mind tried to force them to obey. But he couldn’t move.

     

    Eola didn’t waste her time. He had the key. He was paralyzed, bitten by the deadliest spider in High Rock, Namira’s Sting. Eola quietly thanked the Lady of Decay, for she had no doubt about who had sent that spider. She stuck her thin, pale arms out between the bars. Grabbed the man’s hairless head and pulled it toward her cage.

     

    Her teeth sank into the flesh of his neck without hesitation. Kill with you teeth girl, kill with them, you hear me. She remembered them saying as she wrestled for her life in the small stone arena. They had urged her to bite the older boy, to draw his blood and kill him. I got my money on yu girl, fuckign bite him! She had done so. He was older and stronger. But she, she was more lunatic than he. She had bitten him, the boy, just as she now bui the man.

     

    “It’s all your fault. You made me this way…” she whispered to the dead man as she nimbly grabbed his keys. “You taught me to bite..”, she unlocked her cage and was gone. “You damned me to become a monster”.  

     

     

     

    ***

     

     

     

    Eola dashes from the shadows with ferocious speed and precision; a nightblade with a focus on survivability and versatility rather than the typical glass-cannon archetype; a build based completely on vanilla sources yet unique in all ways. With a focus on disease-damage and arachnomancy, Eola steadily approaches her victims like an incurable, inevitable killing-infection.   

     

     

     

    Key Features:

     

    • High stats obtained via The Ring of Namira, allows for consistency in fights.

    • Unorthodox nightblade with a focus on survivability.

    • Versatility obtained through a combination of skills and different ways to use them.

    • In-and-out of sneak mechanics that allow for uninterrupted dungeon-crawling.

    • Namira worship and in-depth roleplaying

     

     

     

     

     

    The Build Concept

     

     

     

    One of the things I found most delightful about creating an Eola build, was the sheer diversity at my disposal. In vanilla Skyrim she is listed under the” Nightblade”  (Link) class, which involves Sneak, Destruction, One-handed, Light Armor and Alteration. Yet, Eola also makes use of conjuration and restoration and therefore stands out from other Nightblade archetypes as truly unique in her playstyle.

     

     

     

    For my personal take on Eola I decided to leave nothing out and therefore made our cannibalistic nightblade a jack-of-all-trades type character, who not only makes use of many skills, but also seeks to use these skills in as many different ways as possible.     

     

     

     

    Major Skills: One Handed, Destruction, Sneak, Restoration

     

    Minor Skills: Alteration, Conjuration, Light Armor

     

    Un-perked Skills: Archery, Alchemy

     

    Standing Stone: The Lady

     

    Stat Placement: 200 health / 250 magicka / 150 stamina - excluding the ring of Namira of course. With the ring and its feeding bonus we can bump these stats up to 250 health / 250 magicka / 200 stamina which is a rather significant bonus to a sneaking nightblade character.  

     

     

     

    Seven skills for a build capped at level 30, it does seem like a lot. However, the important thing to understand when building a viable jack-of-all-trades character, is that we only invest in the most beneficial perks; oftentimes we will only grab three or four perks in a skills to gain the most prominent bonuses from each skill tree and thereby gain maximum reward for minimum expenditure.

     

    An example of this is the light armor skill tree form vanilla Skyrim: I oftentimes only grab four perks along the left side of the tree, stopping at Wind Walker, because those four perks grant me bonuses to stamina regeneration, armor and move speed penalty loss. In much the same way we will be perking our Eola build: a few perks here and there to bolster up our stats and spell-combos as much as possible in as few levels as possible... and if I may say so myself it all works out quite wonderfully.

     

     

     

    Another important thing to note are the un-perked skills. Archery is basically because you should always carry a ranged weapon (at least when playing with Hunterborn, Frostfall and all other matter of survival mods). As for Alchemy, we will be using this skill to simulate effects from other magical skills, such as invisibility, paralysis, fear and poisons. No perks are even needed in Alchemy for it to still be enormously helpful in certain situations and thus I found myself using it quite a bit more than anticipated.  

     

     

     

     

     

    The Mistress of Decay

     

     

     

    “You are repulsive, displeasing to the eye. Namira might find favor in you. Approach."   

     

     

     

    Namira is without a doubt the daedric prince of whom we know the least. The Lady of Ancient Darkness is a being so distant from mortal comprehension, that even the smallest of insights of her should be counted a revelation. It makes her unique; no other Daedric Prince is as secluded from the minds of mortals as Namira, no other Daedric Prince has been featured as little as Namira. It was a challenge for me to gather information on her, the wiki is near empty and through all TES games there have only been one or two interactions with the mistress of decay. So before I elaborate on my build, it’s important to elaborate on Namira:     

     

     

     

    "The desire for power gnaws at the gut, does it not, Eola? I can see it does. Excuse my informality, but I feel like I know you, I recognize your craving as if it were my own. You want to control, and the thought makes you slaver like a starving wolf. I can fill your belly, but first, I need to know. Will you kill in order to fill this void?"

     

    • Namira, The Lady of Decay

     

     

     

    Namira is associated with spiders, maggots and other things mortals tend to find repulsive. Her sphere of influence is ancient darkness. The followers of Namira show their devotion by choosing to live in the most squalid of conditions and by outcasting themselves from the norms and traditions of society. The Coven of Namira worship their shadowy mistress by indulging in the most universal of taboos: cannibalism.

     

     

     

    With this information we can already start to outline what a worshipper of Namira needs to act like and live like: squalid, outcast and cannibal are the keywords here. Thus Eola, as we play her, should be an outcast which in turn means staying well away from social and loyalist quest lines like The Companions or The Civil War. However, being an outcast and being disgusting doesn't necessarily mean being evil (although cannibalism isn’t exactly the most heartwarming of activities... then again, what do I know?). All in all this leaves us with a few restrictions in terms of Role Play, but still opens other, more shady paths, for us to travel in Skyrim - allowing us a nice, long playthrough as Eola.

     

     

     

    Suggested Questlines:

     

    • The Thieves Guild - No honor amongst thieves, all they care about is business: if you can steal, sneak and make them a profit, they really don't care what (or who) you eat.  

    • The Dark Brotherhood - From vampire-girls to spider pets. Honestly, The Dark Brotherhood is one of the few places Eola might actually fit in.

    • The College of Winterhold - There reside necromancers, alchemists and eccentric magi so why shouldn't a cannibal be able to exist within the timeless walls of knowledge? My point being that mages might find you fascinating rather than repulsive.  

    • Side quests that involve exploration - you want to spend as much time away from people and cities as possible, Eola is an outcast.

    • Dungeons - The playthrough should be played in a “dungeon crawler fashion”, stay out of civilisation when possible. Explore dungeons, the ancient darkness of our mistress calls us.   

     

     

     

     

     

    Gameplay

     

     

     

    Finally we get to the juice of the build - the gameplay. There are several things to note on this subject: first of all Eola is a Nightblade, which means that we will be basing our gameplay around the sneak mechanic. But unlike other nightblades Eola is more than capable of holding her own in a straight up fight. With the bonuses from The Ring of Namira, Eola will in fact oftentimes prefer to swiftly execute one or two enemies via sneak attacks, feed on the them and then forget about shadowy concealment altogether; instead relying on various perks from the Ordinator mod to enhance her fighting capabilities to match those of a character many levels higher. This leaves us with a simple yet enormously effective and straightforward approach to combat:

     

     

     

    Sneak > Kill > Consume > Flesh Spell + Atronach Summoning > Fight with one-handed and Destruction Spells.

     

     

     

    Defense:

     

    Eola’s survivability comes first and foremost from her abundance of health (obtained via feeding on the corpses of slain foes) but also from her fast-paced playstyle that is naturally achieved through a rather genius placement of perks and maintained with several buffs to stamina and health recovery. This, combined with a low (but essential) armor rating and various flesh-spells, serves as a rather impactful amount of damage mitigation. Furthermore Eola also relies on her Breton blood to grant an essential degree of protection against mages. Safe to say, Eola can survive a lot of abuse, and the character is, in essence, designed to be a tough little bastard - which fits perfectly with Eola’s twisted and mysteriously unyielding personality.       

     

     

     

    Yet there is a drawback. Eola is a sneak-type character as well as a jack-of-all-trades; both playstyles revolve around being a glass-cannon, and as such Eola is simply too thinly spread to indifferently wade through throngs of enemies without getting hurt. In fact, the true strength of this build is the awesome synergy between a solid defense and the factor of top-tier sustainability combined with the sneak mechanic: Eola jumps from the shadows, tossing spells and power attacks about her like an arcane-hurricane before returning to the safety of the shadows to swiftly regenerate both health and stamina. Restoration is used merely as a backup if a situation runs out of hand and is not at all needed in the short intervals between groups of enemies when traversing through various dungeons. Eola will regenerate both health and stamina fast enough without the expenditure of precious magicka, thanks to The Ring of Namira and the Lady Stone.

     

     

     

    All in all The Ring of Namira serves as a solid, stat-based foundation on which the build is structured upon. No fancy glitches. No brilliant exploits, but rather a simple, solid and consistent playstyle.  

     

     

     

    Offense:

     

    Eola’s offensive capabilities come from many different sources and take on just as many aspects - this build is nothing if not diverse. First and foremost Eola relies on destruction and one-handed for a nice and reliable mix of magical and physical damage. When playing as Eola one of our main goals is to be a sort of hybrid, neither preferring a physical- or a magical playstyle, but blending equal amounts of both.

     

     

     

    In the school of Conjuration this duality is achieved by using both Atromancy and Necromancy: the flame- and thunder atronachs cast spells and the undead swing swords. Furthermore conjuration adds more targets on the battlefield for enemies to focus, and although Eola can survive a lot of punishment, she prefers to avoid unnecessary attention. Another great thing about Conjuration is that it has some awesome synergy with sneak: drink a potion of invisibility (or simply hide if your sneak level is high enough) and let your minions take the beating whilst you regenerate your resources or reposition yourself.

     

     

     

    However, the bread and butter for this build is neither found within destruction, conjuration or one-handed, but rather from restoration. With the Ordinator and Apocalypse Spells mods, restoration becomes a skill dedicated to either healing or disease… you have one guess at which aspect Eola will be making the most use of. As The Champion of Namira the disease aspect applied to restoration from these two mods opens up an entirely new way of playing the game as a sort of vile, witchdoctor with a focus on disgusting pets and poison magic… and spiders… lots of spiders.

     

     

     

    Talking about which: Eola is capped at level 30 and in accordance with the rules of The Follow Me Follow You event I had only 30 levels to cover 7 skills.

     

     

     

    Skills and their uses - basic outline of the character:

     

    • Destruction - lightning focus for most burst damage potential. (4 perks)  

    • Restoration - poison focus up the left side, great debuffs and nice synergy with spiders. (6)

    • Alteration - alteration is used as a constant buff to weapon damage and armor bonus (3 perks)

    • Conjuration - Rat King is the only essential perk. Atronachs and undead only serve as meat shields that should be cheap and dispensable (3 perks)

    • One Handed - Basic form of attack, combined with alteration this skill does not need as many perks as one would expect (5 perks)

    • Sneak - used to exploit an in-and-out-of-sneak gameplay style (6 perks)

    • Light Armor - low armor rating, high stamina regeneration, perfect for a nightblade (3 perks)