A Nightblade’s Tale
The Nightblade is one of The Elder Scrolls Online’s launch classes, and it still carries the clearest echo of the classic thief‑assassin archetype. In lore terms, Nightblades are the people who move in the spaces other characters avoid, using shadow, misdirection, and a touch of blood magic to achieve their goals, whether those are contracts, information, or simple survival. Their stories tend to orbit espionage, quiet theft, and targeted violence rather than open heroics, and the game’s skill lines reflect that emphasis on indirect solutions.
Like the other classes, Nightblades are built around three core lines: Assassination, Shadow, and Siphoning. Assassination covers the sharp end of the kit, with skills that close gaps and punish single targets hard. Teleport Strike, for example, lets you flash through the dark to an enemy and hit them while applying Minor Vulnerability, with morphs adding extra damage, area effects, or buffs like Empower and Minor Berserk. The line’s passives raise critical chance and return resources when enemies die, quietly encouraging a rhythm of fast engagements and clean finishes.
Shadow leans into survival and control. Shadow Cloak gives brief invisibility that can be turned to defence or repositioning, while attacks like Veiled Strike (and its morphs) gain extra effects when used from stealth or the flank, including stuns and off‑balance. The Consuming Darkness ultimate and its morphs lay down protective fields that reduce damage taken and hamper enemy movement, making them useful panic buttons in both PvE and PvP. Shadow passives improve armour, block cost, and stealth effectiveness, which lets Nightblades stay slippery even when they step out of pure damage roles.
Siphoning is where the class’s life‑drain and support elements sit. Strife and its morphs convert a portion of dealt damage into healing over time, letting you patch yourself or nearby allies while staying on the offensive, while skills like Cripple slow and weaken enemies at range. Siphoning Strikes and its morphs provide resource sustain, turning light and heavy attacks into a steady trickle of magicka and stamina, and the Soul Shred ultimate offers an area stun and damage burst that can be morphed into more group healing or lifesteal. Passives in this line further enhance ultimate generation and the strength of siphoning effects, which is part of why Nightblade healers are so highly regarded in current trial metas.
On the ground, Nightblades can technically fill any role—damage, healing, or tanking—but their tools lend themselves most naturally to DPS and healer play. As damage dealers they excel at burst and execute phases, with high critical potential and strong finishing skills such as Killer’s Blade, making them effective at deleting priority targets. As healers they bring long‑range, powerful single‑target heals and potent sustain, along with strong ultimate uptime, which groups can leverage for frequent buffs. Tanking is possible but more niche, relying heavily on self‑healing and mitigation through skills and positioning rather than robust class‑specific damage reduction tools, so it tends to demand more effort than on some other classes.
Visually, Nightblade abilities express sharp, flowing lines and muted colours: tendrils of shadow, crimson flashes from siphoned life, and brief silhouettes as you blink from one position to another. Armour and weapon skins often push towards slim profiles and darker palettes, which suits the way many players choose to present their characters, though the class functions just as well wrapped in heavier gear if the build calls for it. For anyone drawn to characters who live slightly to one side of the main stage—operating through stealth, timing, and a mix of steel and sorcery—the Nightblade still offers one of ESO’s most flexible and thematically coherent class experiences.
