ESO Cyrodiil PvP Guide: Sieges, Keeps, and Emperor

Cyrodiil is the huge open-world PvP zone in Elder Scrolls Online, and it's where the real war happens. Three alliances, the Aldmeri Dominion, the Daggerfall Covenant, and the Ebonheart Pact, slam into each other for 30 days at a time over keeps, resources, and the Imperial City itself. It's chaotic, it gets laggy in the big fights, and it runs on its own rules that don't match the rest of the game.

This one covers the stuff that actually matters once you're in: how Alliance Points and ranks work, the siege weapons you'll be slinging, how to grab resources and outposts without wasting time, what becoming Emperor does for you (and why it's such a grind), and how to put together a group that survives a real zerg clash.

Understanding Alliance Points and Ranks

Alliance Points, AP for short, are the currency of Cyrodiil. You spend them on siege weapons, repair kits, gear from the merchant keeps, and forward camps. You also earn one skill point per Alliance War rank, up to 50 total, which is a big reason PvE players even bother coming out here.

You earn AP from basically everything that helps the war effort: killing enemy players, helping capture or defend keeps and resources, returning Elder Scrolls, and turning in the repeatable quests off the faction notice boards. Here's the thing people miss. You don't have to land the killing blow. Playing support or healing pays out just as much AP as the person doing the damage, so long as you're flagged as contributing to the fight. Sticking with a group splits the AP around, and the per-kill total shrinks a little as the group gets bigger, but you more than make it up in volume.

Keeps and resources also carry a bonus pool that fills up as players die during the battle. When the objective flips, that pool gets paid out to the winners. Translation: a keep that changes hands in a bloody 20-minute fight pays way more than strolling into an empty keep nobody's defending.

AP boosts worth knowing about

• Blessing of War adds 20% to your AP in Cyrodiil. You get it by killing any boss inside one of the small public dungeons scattered around the zone. It's free, it stacks with the other buffs, and there's no good reason to run without it.
• Low Population and Low Score Bonuses double your AP on a campaign that's trailing behind. They can stack with each other, which is why being on the "losing" side for a stretch can actually be the most profitable time to grind.
• Whitestrake's Mayhem, the PvP event that runs a couple times a year, is when AP farming goes into overdrive. The boost used to need a scroll you'd click, but now it's just always on during the event.

One to watch: the Colovian, Molten, and White-Gold War Tortes speed up your Alliance Rank and Assault/Support skill-line progress, but they do NOT raise the AP you actually bank. People buy them expecting to earn faster and end up disappointed.

The rank ladder

There are 50 Alliance War ranks, and you start at the bottom as a Citizen. The names climb through Volunteer, Recruit, Tyro, Legionary, Veteran, Corporal, Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Major, Centurion, Colonel, and on up to Grand Overlord at rank 49, with Emperor sitting past that. Reaching Grand Overlord takes about 60.8 million AP total (give or take), which is a serious long-haul goal, think months of regular play rather than a weekend.

Every rank hands you one skill point and feeds progress into your Assault and Support skill lines. Those lines are where the actually useful PvP skills live: Vigor, a heal over time for you and nearby allies; War Horn and its morphs (the Aggressive Horn version drops Major Force on your group for a burst window); Proximity Detonation; Barrier; and the movement buffs like Rapid Maneuver. A ton of PvE players dip into Cyrodiil purely to unlock Vigor and War Horn, then leave. Fair enough.

Your total AP also puts you on the campaign leaderboard, and for one player per faction it's the key to the throne, which rolls right into the Emperor section below.

How Siege Weapons and Keep Sieges Work

You're not breaking down a keep wall with your sword. In Cyrodiil, sieges are fought with siege weapons, and knowing which one to drop where is the difference between flipping a keep and getting farmed on the front steps.

There are six types, and each has a job. You buy them from siege merchants with AP or gold, set them from your quickslot wheel, and they lock you into operating them until you stow or exit.

The six siege weapons

• Ballistae are your all-rounders. Fast reload, lower damage, great for chewing through enemy siege and sniping players on the walls. A standard ballista does 14,000 physical damage in an area to players and 2,000 to structures. Fire, Lightning, and Cold Fire variants add burn damage, snares, or a magicka drain on top.
• Trebuchets hit the hardest but reload slowest. A Stone Trebuchet drops 35,000 physical damage on players and 4,000 on structures, which is why these are your wall-breakers. The Firepot, Iceball, Cold Fire, and Cold Stone variants layer on area burns, snares, or just bigger raw hits, with Cold Stone clocking 40,000.
• Catapults sit in between. Shorter reload than trebuchets, 50% tougher than ballistae, and built for choking out player stacks. The Meatbag Catapult drops a disease field that cuts healing taken by about half, which is brutal against a defending zerg. Oil Catapults snare and burn, and Scattershot slaps 20% extra damage vulnerability onto anyone standing in it.
• Battering Rams only do one thing: smash keep doors. They need at least three players nearby to even work, and they scale up to six, at which point they crack the door for 8,000 every 8 seconds. Only one ram per alliance per keep, so don't waste it.
• Flaming Oil is a defensive tool. Plant it above a doorway and it dumps burn damage on anyone below, which makes it the natural enemy of a battering ram trying to muscle through the gate.
• Lancers are the fancy Dwemer ones from the Antiquities system. They fire five-shot bursts in elemental flavors. Nice to have, not something you'll lean on.

There's a hard cap of 20 siege weapons per alliance around a single keep. Defenders get a break here: holding the keep's Lumbermill bumps that to 25, then 30 at the next upgrade. Siege also slowly decays even when nobody's shooting it, and it falls apart fast if you leave it unmanned. Enemies can set your engines on fire for 4,000 flame damage every couple seconds, so keep a bucket handy to douse the flames, and carry repair kits to patch them back up.

How a keep actually falls

Keeps have destructible outer walls, outer doors, inner walls, and inner doors, and the base health on those is chunky. Walls sit at 305,000 HP, doors at 150,000. With the keep's Mine and Lumbermill upgraded, walls climb to 410,000 and doors to 195,000, and both start regenerating when they're out of combat. So the standard play is to strip the nearby resources first (more on that in a second), then pound the wall or door with trebuchets until it pops.

Once you're inside, it's not enough to just stand around. You have to hold two capture flags at the same time, the Apse and the Nave, for a set window. Defenders spawn NPC guards once they own the keep, so you'll be fighting those plus any players holed up in the flag room. Clear the room, hold both flags, and the keep flips to your side.

For a clean siege you want roughly this shape: a few siege operators hammering the wall from range, a couple of people guarding the stairs so the defenders can't push out and kill your siege, somebody running the ram if you're going through the door, and the rest of the group ready to flood in and fight for the flags. Siege operators who sit in a kill-zone get deleted fast, and then the whole assault stalls.

Capturing Resources and Outposts Efficiently

Keeps get all the glory, but the little objectives around them are what make a campaign actually run. Resources feed keep upgrades, and outposts hold the travel network together. Skipping them is how you lose a keep you just spent 15 minutes taking.

Resources: wood, food, and ore

Every keep is fed by three nearby resource nodes: a Lumbermill for wood, a Farm for food, and a Mine for ore. As long as your side holds them, the keep slowly upgrades itself.

• Lumbermill (wood) toughens the doors and raises the defensive siege cap.
• Farm (food) makes the NPC guards hit harder and live longer.
• Mine (ore) reinforces the walls.

The part that matters: if an enemy owns the resource, the keep can't use it, and the upgrade just stalls out. That's why the smart move before a big siege is to ride out and flip the resource nodes ringing the target keep. You starve their upgrades, kill the workers to slow production, and leave the walls and doors way softer when you actually attack. A keep with nothing feeding it can't emergency-repair either, so it stays broken open.

Capturing a resource is light work. Ride up, kill the NPC guards, and stand on the flag until it flips. A solo player can usually take a lumbermill or farm if it's undefended, and resources are cheap to grab in terms of time. The repeatable daily quests (capture a few resources, scout a keep or two) pay out a few hundred AP each and add up fast if you do a loop of them on the way somewhere.

Outposts and the Transitus network

Outposts are the smaller, weirder cousins of keeps. There are six of them, three clustered in the middle of the map (Nikel for the Dominion, Bleaker's for the Covenant, Sejanus for the Pact) and three more out at the edges of each alliance's home turf. They don't have outer walls or resource nodes, so they're quicker to take, and they only ask you to hold two flags, the Tower and the Courtyard.

What makes outposts matter is the Transitus Network, the fast-travel web that lets you teleport between friendly objectives. Outposts are the links that keep that web connected. Lose the outpost sitting between your home keeps and a forward keep you just captured, and suddenly you can't respawn there or travel to it at all. Since Update 12 they're also valid respawn points, so holding them is genuinely useful and not just map decoration.

So who actually wants these? Mostly anyone trying to keep a front line alive. For efficient flipping, sweep outposts and resources on your way to a keep, knock out the dailies while you ride, and don't bother chasing an enemy resource way behind their lines unless your group is bored and hunting a fight. The AP-per-minute on a defended keep is higher, but a quick undefended resource cap is free money while you wait for the zerg to form up.

Becoming Emperor and Its Buffs

This is the headline chase of Cyrodiil. One player per campaign per faction can be crowned Emperor, and while they hold the throne, they turn into something close to a raid boss.

How you get the crown

Your alliance has to control all six keeps that ring the Imperial City at the same time: Chalman Keep, Blue Road Keep, Castle Alessia, Castle Roebeck, Fort Ash, and Fort Aleswell. Once all six are yours, the player in that alliance with the most Alliance Points on the campaign gets crowned. It's not a vote and it's not random, it's purely a leaderboard read, which is why serious PvP guilds will funnel AP onto one chosen player during an Emperor push.

You lose the title if your alliance drops back below those six keeps, or if you personally leave the campaign. No throne is permanent.

What the buffs actually do

As Emperor, you pick up five innate passive abilities, and they all scale up based on how many of your home keeps you still hold, climbing from one keep up to six:

• Emperor: Max Health, Magicka, and Stamina up, from 38% at one keep to 75% at six.
• Domination: Resource recovery (Health, Magicka, Stamina) up 50% to 100%.
• Authority: Ultimate generation up 50% to 100%, so you drop ultimates a whole lot more often.
• Monarch: Healing received up 25% to 50%.
• Tactician: Your siege weapon damage to keeps and other siege up 50% to 100%.

Stack all of that on one character and they're genuinely hard to kill while dishing out huge pressure. An Emperor leading a charge can swing a keep fight on their own, which is the whole point. Two catches: Emperors can't wield Volendrung (that big two-handed artifact) for balance reasons, and the buffs only fire in your home campaign. Take your Emperor into another campaign and they're just a regular player again.

The afterglow (and what you don't keep)

When you're deposed, your title flips to "Former Emperor" or "Former Empress," and you get to keep the Emperor costume and dye forever. Way back around Patch 2.1.4, former emperors used to hang onto a watered-down version of the passive bonuses, and people abused the heck out of it, so the devs stripped that out. Nowadays, once you're off the throne, the power is gone. You keep the bragging rights and the outfit, nothing more.

Real talk on the grind: getting Emperor is a campaign-long project. You need a faction coordinated enough to hold six keeps at once, plus you have to out-AP every other player on your side for the whole run. Most folks will never sniff it, and that's fine. But if you're in a serious guild during a push and they aim the AP firehose at you, it's one of the most fun power trips in the game.

Best Group Compositions for Cyrodiil Zergs

Cyrodiil fights come in two flavors: the big messy zerg clashes, and the tight organized "ball groups" that eat those zergs for breakfast. The group cap is 12 players (it used to be 24 back in the old raid days, but that got cut), so a ball group is a 12-person stack built to move and hit as one body.

Why ball groups work

The whole trick is stacking. When 12 people hug tight, their healing, shields, and defensive buffs all overlap on the same spot, and a coordinated 12-stack will roll right over a disorganized 25-stack that can't keep its healers in range. The ball can also dump a wall of area damage onto a flag point and melt anything caught in it. The tradeoff is that the same tightness makes you a fat target for a counter-bomb, so you live and die by how well you move.

The standard 12-person build

A typical ball group looks something like this:

• 2 main tanks, usually Dragonknight or Templar. They lead the push, soak the damage, taunt, and apply the big defensive debuffs.
• 2 off-tanks or "bridge" players, often Wardens. These are hybrids who can tank a bit and cross-heal, gluing the formation together between the main tanks and the healers.
• 3 healers, with Templar being the workhorse thanks to strong burst healing and group buffs. Their job is keeping major defense and mitigation up across the whole stack.
• 4 to 5 DPS, leaning Magicka Sorcerer or Magicka Templar for area burst. Stamina builds show up, but organized ball groups mostly live and die on magicka area damage.

Skills that hold it together

A few Alliance War and class skills are basically mandatory in a ball. War Horn, usually morphed to Aggressive Horn, pumps the whole group's max magicka and stamina and slaps Major Force on everyone for a burst window. Vigor hands out a heal over time so even the non-healers can top people off. Barrier, the Support-line ultimate, throws a damage shield over the stack when things get hairy. And Rapid Maneuver keeps everyone moving at speed between objectives, because a slow ball is a dead ball.

The bomber and the anti-ball

Every now and then someone runs a dedicated bomber, most often a Magicka Nightblade built around the Vicious Death set and Proximity Detonation. The play is to sneak a stacked group, drop the bomb, and watch the enemy ball evaporate. It's high risk, high reward, and pretty much a glass-cannon trick, but extremely funny when it lands.

Good enemy alliances counter ball groups a few ways: dedicated single-target "hunter" builds that pick off stragglers and healers, coordinated Proximity Detonation bombs of their own, and fear or crowd-control locks that scatter the ball for a few seconds. If your ball can't disengage cleanly the moment it gets bombed, you wipe. Movement discipline ends up mattering more than raw damage output.

Big zergs vs. smallscale

Not every fight is a clean 12-stack. Open zergs are just whoever showed up, and they win by weight of numbers and a lot of siege, not by tight composition. If you're pugging into one, slot some group-friendly skills (Vigor, a damage buff, a purge), stay near a healer, and don't wander off alone, solo stragglers get deleted. For smallscale, a handful of friends roaming between objectives, you want self-sufficient builds that can burst someone down and get out, not a support-heavy ball setup that falls apart without its full 12.

One concrete tip to close on: before you commit, pick a single campaign and stick with it for the full 30 days. Rank, AP, and your shot at Emperor are all tied to your home campaign, so bouncing around splits your progress and leaves you starting over every time. Find a guild that runs in your time window, get in their voice chat, and follow the raid lead's calls. That's how keeps actually get won.