Zenkosh Guide for U50

Simply because of how much group utility they provide and how well they can uptime Z'en.

As you can see from the subclass example in the table above, there is a fair bit of group utility coming from a pure Dragonknight. If we put some other class on zenkosh, then we need to assign Stagger, Standard and Major Berserk uptimes to someone else. Tanks can't really do this properly, because Standard needs to be placed exactly in the player's group, which isn't possible everywhere. Also, having good Stagger uptime on a tank is much harder than on a DD. A healer DK sounds like a joke, so we come back to a support buff DD. And it makes no sense to run both a support zenkosh player and a separate support DK without zenkosh, since a pure DK can provide the group buffs and run the zenkosh at the same time.

Also, no other class or spec in history can uptime full Z'en stacks as well as a pure DK in U50.

So basically you can make a WW or Warden zenkosh, but it will just be suboptimal in 95% of cases, and your Z'en uptime will be slightly lower than what's possible with a DK.

Blocking synergies is simply not needed because nowadays we have 3+ stable synergies that no one can "steal" from you.

But even so, a lot of players believe that synergy-blocking addons are something necessary, so let's break this popular myth. For each synergy we have the following parameters: how many people can see the synergy button when the skill is used, how many people can press the button before it disappears for others who could see it, and finally how we can control which players can see and which can use the synergy.

For example, let's consider the Grave Robber synergy (Necromancer's Boneyard skill). It only shows to a random 3 people inside the Boneyard area (even if all 12 players are standing in it), and only one player can press it. So what are the chances for a zenkosh player to get Grave Robber from a single Boneyard cast? Let's say all the dps players are stacked together and the tanks and healers are elsewhere, so there is a 3 / 8 = 37.5% chance to even see the synergy. Then we need to react quickly and press it first out of the 3 people who can see it. To simplify, let's forget about the fact that we also need to press synergies on time for good uptime, and say that our chance to press it is 37.5% / 3 = 12.5%. Technically we can increase this chance with blocker addons, but not by much. The ESO API cannot prevent a synergy from showing to specific players, so these addons just prevent you from pressing it (you won't see the synergy button on your screen if it is blocked, but the game still fires it for you). So even if all group members have Grave Robber "blocked", there is still a 37.5% chance for the zenkosh player to see it, and the same 37.5% chance to press it (since the other 2 who could see it can't press it). A big win for blocking-addon users, you would say, but let's dive deeper and prove that blocking synergies is not good.

First of all, 37.5% to see and press a synergy is still too low, we can get much more stable synergies even without any addons like I mentioned before. Second, if other players block synergies they lose the dps from them too. By blocking Grave Robber we get a 100% - 37.5% = 62.5% chance that no one presses the synergy each time Boneyard is cast. Huge group dps loss! Let's hope that's enough to convince you to never use synergy-blocking addons.

Grave Robber

Synergy Odds Simulation

Closest to targetSynergy Blocker

Target

You

→You

You

You

You

You

You

You

You

You

All players in stack...

37.5%

You press it

62.5%

Nobody presses

0 grave robbers wasted while reading this guide because of blocked synergies