[Skill Change] Stamina return and skills tooltips

thorspark

Hi,

First of all, thanks to Zenimax for working on balance issues. I've seen many improvements in the past months and I'm hoping we will eventually come to a place where every game style will be represented. I work a lot on Theory Crafting for DKs, NBs and Sorcerers, trying to find new ways of playing.

Today, I'd like to discuss two subjects:

Stamina return

There is still an issue with Melee Weapons (MW) in the 1.3 version. It's not about dps. It's not about ability cost. It's about stamina management.
All classes get skills to manage Magicka, and there's a bunch of ways to get magicka back:

• Class Skills (I won't list them all)
• Destro Staff passive (Destruction expert)
• Resto Staff Heavy attack (10% magicka return)
• Equilibrium and morphs (Mage's guild)

These skills and passives allow a sustainable magicka based dps, which is very important in trials.

At the moment, there is not such possibility for Stamina. There are few class abilities that return Stamina and even fewer Weapon/Guild skills to do it. Vampirism is the only skill line that allows a good stamina return and is not suitable for bosses as you can't drain them more than once.
After many trys, I found that stamina based builds work well for short fights (AOE or Single) but can't stand a long fight.

Here are some leads on how to fix this :

• Give all Stamina based weapons (2H,DW,1H+S,Bow) a new effect on regular attacks : Light Attacks give back 1.5% stamina back and heavy Attacks give 5% Stamina back.
• A new spell on Fighter's guild : Berserker. For 10 seconds, the player becomes berserk, his armour is reduced by 70% and gains 100-140 stamina per second. One morph would reduce the armour debuff(60% to 30%), the other would add increase damage on weapon attacks and skills (3% to 12%).
• ... If someone has another idea.

The Berserker spell would also help a lot with the NB playstyle as they are more dodgers than warriors. Feel free to share your ideas.

Skill Tooltips

At the moment, the skill tooltips are a mess. It's really difficult to know from which stat they scale and what they affect.

For example, Flawless Dawnbreaker affects "Weapon attacks" and after testing it, it affects both weapon attacks (light/heavy) and weapon skills.
Molten armaments is supposed to add 30% crit for 6 seconds on "Weapon attacks" but only applies to light/heavy attacks.

Some skills scale from max stamina but crit scales from magical crit. There are a lot of different combinations and it requires a lot of testing to sort this out.

Is it possible for you to update the tooltips to add the following information :

• Affects : Weapon attacks, Weapon skills, All Skills, Class Skills ...
• Damage scales from : Max Stamina, Max Magicka, Spell Power, Weapon Power ...
• Crit scales from : Spell Crit, Weapon Crit.

This would help us a lot to figure out effective synergies when trying new builds.

thorspark

It could also have a toggle skill like inner light or a set effect.

Absorb : Toggle to activate. Reduce Max Stamina by 10%. When hit by a (unblocked) melee attack, recover 30-45% of damage taken as Stamina. Can occur only once every 3 sec.

For all those who say that it's a problem to be able to block/attack at the same time, it would be a way to encourage people to block more efficiently and not hold the block button for the whole fight.

Lancillotto

A couple of additional suggestions:

1) What about simply softening the cap on stamina regeneration?

2) Some sets that restore some amount of stamina when you are under a certain percentage (e.g., 30%) would be nice. The set should work like those for health or magicka, i.e., it wouldn't work more than once every minute or so.