SORCERER, STAFF & LIGHT ARMOUR ABILITIES

Critical Surge: The heal on this is now practically useless. With greatly reduced ability to tackle groups, even those several vet ranks lower than the Sorcerer, solo PvE survivability has taken a massive hit which is entirely unwarranted. The ability should serve both weapon and spell damage builds, not either or then more damage or survivability as Hobson's choice. Give minor damage buffs and modest heal calculated from 6 crit-hit targets as basic, and then boost to major damage buffs or larger heal for the morphs. Not everyone playing a Sorc. wants to run pets to survive solo PvE!

Wall of Elements: The damage on this ability is now so very low it's a fools choice to even take it. It also doesn't stack so this significant under-performance can't be partially resolved by stacking. Why is it even offered as a choice - no-one in their right mind will take it, it's useless. Get real with the damage on this easily avoided aoe.

Prodigy & Concentration: Both now require 7/7 pieces of Light armour to be usable. Heavy armour passives require no more than 5/7. Why punish LA wearer's with this bias? Also, 7/7 prerequisites punish those who grinded for Undaunted 2 piece set gear, or who want to play the very popular 5/2 armour hybrids. They have to lose multiple passives to wear their gear now, whereas heavy armour wearers with Undaunted 2 piece sets or 5/2 armour splits are unaffected. Utterly unfair and counter to the reasons you introduced the Undaunted sets in the first place, surely? Change this back to 5 pieces required for all armours.

SORCERER V10 CRIT SURGE BUILD LIVE VS SORC V14 BUILD PTS- THE MISSION? TRY TO KILL A SWARM OF WASPS.

I have just tried a completely different build to what I have on live. Comparison:

Pre 1.6 - VR10 level in purple gear could kill a pack of wasps easily in Craglorn, running with crit surge/destro build. (And then kill a pack of Welwas and run through Skyreach after that...)

Post 1.6- VR14 in gold gear died like six times over, and didn't manage to kill swarm of wasps. I tried a number of different combinations...1 pet, 2pets..2pets and bound armour, entropy, crystal frags, force shock, daedric curse, conjured ward,lightning flood,impulse

• I had eaten purple food to increase all stats.
• I had put all red points into the Light Armour Focus on the Lady Constellation.My thinking here is that it will increase my armour and since spell resistance is calculated on how much armour that piece provides this will help there too.
• I put all green points into Healthy (Health Regen) on the Lover.
• All blue points were shared out across Elfborn(increase spell crit damage), Elemental Expert (increase damage with elements)and Spell Erosion(raise % of spell resistance your spells ignore) on the Apprentice. On a positive note the Apprentice constellation will grant you 12% spell critical after you invest 30 points into it.

Due to the health and light armour nerfs I take massive amounts of damage very quickly. Now that I have nothing that will reliably heal me(crit surge changes) I barely have time to do any damage or heal myself before dying.

I doubt I will be attempting to kill a pack of Welwas which I could also kill in live. No way in hell would I be able to run through Skyreach which I've successfully done in live on a number of occasions.Perhaps single targets would be killable with pets but my AOE experiment failed. I don't know how many players would be able to successfully deal with a pack of mobs using the pet controls, but this is going to take some effort to master.

Due to the fact that pets take up 2 slots EACH on your bar, it drastically reduces what other skills you can slot. If you combine that with Bound Armour its 6 slots removed from your bar.Perhaps I could have used CC but sacrificed healing? Or my only weapon attack?No wait- I could drop my execute skill..Or ..you get the picture.

Admittedly Im using PTS template and the skills aren't fully leveled up. So perhaps when I get my own character this may change. Or perhaps I'm just not skilled enough as a player to play a sorc anymore. That will be a sad day indeed.

On a side note- completely agree with this:

Max2497 wrote: »

xaraan wrote: »

Day 2 testing:

RESOURCES -- It kind of feels like, instead of adding a bunch of cool powers with the champion system to make us stronger, you nerfed a lot of stuff and will require us to open up a lot of Champion point skills in order to get back to where we were. Things like block cost, crits, etc. all will require maxing out of the CS lines in order to be where they were at pre-1.6."

I agree with this completely. I thought the point of the champion system was to have a way to continue to improve our characters. Instead, my characters feel substantially less powerful than before and it's frustrating to need to obtain champion points just to get back what was taken away.

I've completed all 6 crafting writs the last couple of days and have noticed that the required amount of mats are still the same as on live. I'm a bit shocked that this is still the case considering the amount of feedback on how poor the current system has been since they were implemented. Failing to properly reduce the mat requirements is going to continue to discourage crafters from completing these. It appears that instead of reducing the required mats to encourage participation, you have instead reduced the ability to receive high level mats via hirelings to force players into completing the writs. This not only hurts players that dedicated valuable skill points on hirelings, it also ignores the crafting writ issues of risk vs reward. Not the best way to handle this at all in my opinion and I really hope that this can be addressed prior to release.

Here are a few suggestions and issues I've noticed since playing PTS so far:

Feedback
Crafting Writs
Nice job on moving dangerous mobs away from Craglorn crafting writ survey locations! Much safer to collect mats now so thank you! The required amount of mats to complete the blacksmithing, woodworking and clothing writs are still too high though to justify the effort. Reducing the mat requirements in half would go a very long way to encouraging players to pursue these writs on a routine basis. Also, enabling these crafting writs to count towards the Indomitable Adventurer (1500 quest completion) achievement should be a no brainer.

Justice System – 150129-001884
The price to launder items, food items at least, seem rather excessive at this point. It essentially defeats the entire purpose saving items since they could be purchased for nearly the same price without the hassle or risk of being caught obtaining in the first place. Cutting these in half or even better free for food items should be considered.

Better Sorcerer Pet Death Notifications – 150129-001892
Since pets appear to be the intended standard DPS skills now, better audio and visual notifications of their deaths would be nice. I’ve found myself running for dear life a couple of times already when my trusty clanfear has decided to get itself killed (too easily I might add). A louder and/or more distinct audio notification, as well as a noticeable visual indicator (for the hearing impared) such as a red glowing flash around the player for example, would really help to mitigate the death runs I’m forced to make continually make.

Sorcerer Pets Need to Be Combined Into One Skill – 150129-001909
I understand that the goal is to enable better customization and distinction between the clanfear and twilight pets by utilizing two different spell buttons, but with the overall intention that both pets will need to be active to make the play style useful. This is forcing sorcerers to lose out on an additional possible spell, and realistically gives players only one attack spell (crystal shards/crushing shock) and at possibly one shield (aka hardening ward)/heal ability (crit surge, entropy). That leads to a VERY boring and mindless one button smash combat technique with the occasional heal/shield recharge thrown in. This is made even worse with the fact that in order to use effective weaoon swapping you have to waste an additional skill on the second bar, or be willing to constantly respawn your pet and wait for it to reaquire the mobs when swapping back each time. Definitely not the engaging combat that players hope for and is no different than the AOE/crit surge that’s currently seen for Craglorn group mob Spellscar farming on these days. Combining the pets into one skill, with either defensive or offensive morphs available, will hopefully give sorcerers a more even advantage to the other 3 classes.

Bugs
Teleporting Prevented from Refuge - 150129-001850
I’m unable to teleport to any friend or guild member from the refuge in Belkarth. Is this intentional? If so, I really don’t understand the point in preventing players from doing this.

Twilight Pet Resummons Issue After Pet Death (unable to submit bug report)
I’m noticing that there are random times when re-summoning my twilight pet following it’s death that I will be charged magicka for the resummons and my action bar show icon indicates that the pets is active, but the twilight does not actually respawn. I’m then forced to dismiss the pet and then re-summon it in order to have it spawn correctly. This has caused me to die on multiple occasions due to the loss of healing and DPS. I’ve only noticed this happening so far while fighting groups of mobs in Craglorn with both pets, hardening ward, inner light active, and crystal shards/crushing shock on my action bar.

Unable to Purchase Items from the Guild Store – 150129-001876
I’m unable to purchase any items from the any of my five guild stores. Anytime I attempt to either double-click the item, or hit the E key to purchase any item I receive an audio indication of coins being taken, but no gold is removed and I receive a “could not find specified item” notification. I’ve disabled addons, and attempted to use store filters with the same indications present.

Soris_ESO wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

TESTING SUGGESTIONS

• Play through a Trial, Dragonstar Arena, or hop in Cyrodiil and try out the new abilities and game balance. Be sure to also pay attention to the new combat animations while you play.
• Participate in our scheduled in-game events on the PTS, like running a Trial or battling in Cyrodiil!

Cannot done with these *** templates

totally agree. make level 30 templates to test skill leveling etc. But an Engame template needs the morphs. seeing that you can level your main skills well before vet for the most part, having v14 toons with level one skills is quite an oversight. our testing will be way off
AKA the template is useless for testing we have to use our toons

can you please add a duration to the orgnums scales crafted set 5 piece bonus? im glad they finally fixed it so it works but I don't like losing the 50% health regen as soon as my health goes above 60% or I swap my weapon sets in combat.

UPDATED 06.02

Changed:
- Wording of tutorial feedback.
- Wording of animation feedback.
- Face FX feedback more precise and specific.
- Updated feedback to Justice System, relating to npc guards.
- Revised feedback to the Major and Minor buff system. Opinion about this system keeps evolving with more play time.
- Added more elaboration to the changes to the weapon stat system.
- Added more elaboration to the changes to hirelings and crafting writs.
- Revised my current feedback for classes, skills and abilities.


The New Tutorial:

This is vastly improved. Well done! The new experience literally sucked me in, even though I have played through this many times before. It almost felt too short!
In regards to the experience for new players in general, I think it may be worth reverting the change where players now start in their first major city, instead of on the starter islands. The current version does more for current players wanting to quickly skip the starter island, then it does for easing new players into the game. Priority for the starter experience should be new players, not convenience for established players.
Instead of arriving in the first major city and having the option to travel to the starter island via a npc, it may be better that fresh characters arrive on the starter island and have the option to travel directly to the first city via a npc. Current system but flipped around.


Animations, Audio and Combat:

Awesome! Really enjoying how much better animations and the weight of the combat looks, sounds, plays and feels.
Weapon swapping is a dream now. /cheer
Only gripe I’ve noticed, is that the animation for your characters legs seem to have an incomplete animation when firing staff light attack. The legs and arms seem to clip into a new position without actually stepping/moving into it.
One suggestion that would go a long way for increasing the feel of combat responsiveness in the game, especially for new players unaware of how ESO combat functions, is adding a toggle for combat abilities activating on “button press” or “button release”. The default ought to be set to “button press”.
ESO currently uses “button release” and this has many new players thinking that abilities are unresponsive, since they do not know that an ability triggers on key release.
Sometime ago, I macro’ed all my combat keys to generate “key release” on “key press”, and that vastly helped the feel of using abilities.

New Camera Options 3rd Person:

Damn nice. (x10)

Face FX:

NPC’s in dialogue now look straight at you more often, which makes this look better and more involving.
Bugs with Face FX (mouths/lips) seem less frequent, but still occur from time to time. I have not yet seen the extremely open eyes bug on PTS, but I’m still seeing errors in how mouths and lips open and close. One example is the mouth not properly opening when talking and lips clipping into each other when the mouth is closed. The opposite may also occur, where lips don’t properly close.
Bugs with Face FX does not seem to be tied to specific npc’s, but more of an issue with the system itself (face fx), where random errors can occur with any npc.

The Justice System:

Pure win. Enough said. Can’t wait for the Enforcer vs Outlaw element to be added. This really added some depth to the game, even with only the pve element added.
The superman guards seemed somewhat immersion breaking on paper, but from the possible issues that could occur in a mmo environment, it is understandable that the guards are configured the way they are.
A possible alternative would be having the guards be tough, and gain increasing number of reinforcements if they are killed.

The Champion System:

I like it. A lot. The presentation and the UI looks great.
The 400k per point is done at a decent pace as long as you have quests available. Some quests on PTS have netted me up towards 20k - 64k just for handing in the quest, not to mention the combat xp acquired to while doing the quest. Bit concerned how this will play out if you have no quests to complete. Combat XP gains on PTS did seem okay. Killing packs of 3 normal vet 10 quest mobs gave me close to 4k xp (enlightened).
Xp gain for PvP and for PvE group content (dungeons/vet dungeons/trials) seems to be a concern. It is important that XP gain for challenging activites are at minimum on par with solo questing. Preferably xp gain for challenging group/pvp content should be a strong incentive to pursue these types of content.

The Major & Minor buff system:

Feedback on this system has been hard to write. It requires a lot of testing on different classes under varying conditions. My impressions of the system keeps evolving the more I play with it. It is very apparent that a lot of thought has been put into the system, and it seems very well balanced in many aspects. I also like the general idea of the system, and many aspects of how it has been implemented. There are however some issues that need to be looked at.
Some players have raised the concern that stats have been removed from our gear and abilities, and been put into the Champion system. I disagree with this statement, on the basis that yes, there has been a shift in stats between systems, but these shifted stats seem to have mostly gone into the Major/Minor buff system, and not primarily into the Champion system.
One primary example of this is critical strike chance/rating. A character with 40.6% crit chance on live, will have his stats from passives and gear converted to 27.5% crit chance total. Which is quite a drop. However several slotted abilities now have been changed to have 2099 crit rating, which translated into +10% crit chance. With these abilities slotted, my pts crit chance went back up 37.5%. So the total amount of crit that has been either nerfed or shifted into the Champion system is actually minimal. Round about 3.1%.
Due to this, my conclusion about the shifted stats, is that these have actually gone into our abilities, in order to facilitate creation of the Major/Minor buff system.
A possible balancing benefit of moving portions of stats from gear and onto abilities, is that it causes improved gear to be still desirable, but the gap between players becomes less.
However , since many stats now have been moved from elsewhere and converted into these buffs, it has created way too many skills that are now “required” to have on your bar. On prime example here is “Major Savagery” being tacked onto Expert Hunter. Other sources of crit rating are limited for some classes as a melee character, and thus this ability now is a “must” on your skill bar regardless of the situation/encounter. Another example is Entropy and Mage-Light. Some classes using caster staffs will be stuck with these abilities on their bar, since they have no other sources for the buffs provided by these abilities, thus leaving room for only three other skills. Thus the flexibility on an already limited skill bar has been further reduced. On most of my builds on PTS I now only have about one skill slot to juggle around. There are many good skills I would like to use, but the buff skills take priority under pve endgame min/max considerations, and knocks anything else out of consideration. Flexibility and variance on playstyle based on the situation, encounter and group situation, has unfortunately been seemingly reduced.
Think the issues mentioned above may be exactly the opposite result of what the new system was hoping and intending to achieve. The new system in itself is great, but be careful about implementing to many "must have" skills, or limited sources for certain buffs, thus limiting the choices on our skill bar.
It may be very worthwhile reducing/reverting/removing buffs for weapon damage, spell damage and crit rating from the major/minor buff system, and reverting these stats back into our gear and passives, thus creating more breathing space for our skill bars.

Weapon stats being changed to a generic “dmg (power)” rating:

Great!
Really like how the dmg stat on a weapon now is the basis for your spell damage and your weapon dmg stats.
Only concern here is how this will effect desirability of non-Templar healers, given that previously Templar heals would scale of spell dmg + magicka and resto staff heals scaled of weapon dmg + magicka. Interesting to see DK’s receiving a source for the “Major Mending” (healing done) buff. NB’s also have their base healing numbers increased by slotting a number of siphoning abilities. Since Templars only have their class heals increased by their passives and abilities, restoration staff spells from DK’s and NB’s will be stronger then restoration staff spells used by an equally geared Templar. Thus somewhat balancing Templar healers’ vs DK/NB healers. However Sorcerers have no such heal strength gain mechanics in 1.6. Previously sorcerers’ resto staff users benefitted from having the strongest class based personal weapon dmg buff in the game (surge). An offset for Sorcerer healers in 1.6 needs to be looked at.

Hirelings and Crafting Writs:

Not tested this, but will comment on the patch notes.
Even though I love all the sweet stuff my hireling send me, I’ve never been comfortable with a system that grants me large numbers of high quality crafting martials, without it requiring any player interaction besides slotting skill points in a passive.
It is better when players actually play the game to get the rewards in the game, instead of just getting them passively.
I’m not saying that hirelings should not have a chance to find something special to send you, but this should not be too frequent.
By moving the frequency of rare materials and tempers from hirelings and over to writs, you are hitting many birds with one stone.
Writs become more worthwhile. Normal materials become more valuable. Loot drops for deconstruction become more valuable. Player interaction is increased.
Nice.
ESO has the potential to have a novel and really good “token” system for loot, while at the same time ensuring that crafting is a very worthwhile and important game system. The “tokens” in this case being high grade crafting materials from deconstructed loot rewards (pve/pvp).
Unfortunately, loot rewards from pve and pvp are severely devalued, due to the on live sheer stupendous amount of high grade (blue/purple/gold) that are finding their way into the economy from accounts with 8 characters using maxed hirelings.
The best way to keep the important role crafting has in ESO, encourage group activities (pve/pvp) in a mmo environment, and to make loot and rewards from in game activities actually desirable, is to significantly reduce high grade crafting material rewards players are getting from passive activates (hirelings) and unchallenging activates (node farming). Blue(rare), Epic(purple) and Legendary (gold) should primarily (don’t read exclusively) come from rewards for active and challenging pve and pvp content.

Skills and abilities:

General feedback:
Overall, I'm really enjoying many of the revamped skills. They are great fun to play with. There are so many new good options for skills to use, I'm having a hard time choosing which ones to use. However there is a sore point, as previously mentioned, in regards to how the major and minor buff system is now making more skills “required” on our skill bar.

Tooltips:
The new expanded descriptions are generally good. There is still some need for clarity in regards to how long certain effects last. Many abilities are vague in regards to how long the buffs and debuffs of the abilities last.

Classes and roles:

Having each class viably able to play each role in the game (Tank/healer/caster/melee) is something I’ve really enjoyed. The live version of the game does a good job of this.
On PTS (1.6) there is some issues with the sorcerer in this regards though. For the non-templar classes, the sorcerer in 1.6 is the only class that does not have effects that increases its healing done with restoration staff spells.
Another issue for the sorcerer in 1.6 is that it has the weakest class specific effects/skill combinations for melee builds.
The sorcerer used to have one of the strongest class self-buffs for weapon dmg (surge - though mitigated by soft cap), which synergized well with resto staff builds and other melee skills. This has been removed/normalized, without introducing other supporting effects in the sorc skill lines.


Surge and Morphs (Active – Storm Calling):

The heal component of Crit Surge has unfortunately been rendered quite weak and random due to the 0.25 second internal cooldown.
Basically anything that can crit, will trigger this cooldown. Bleed ticks, light attacks, bashing, the first tick of a channeled attack – anything that does minor crit damage – thus causing the heal you get every 0.25 seconds to be next to nothing. The heal component is now completely RNG.
I’ve always felt that the heal of this skill was too strong in the PvE environment, but there must be better ways to balance this ability.
If the new increased AoE caps are the cause for the introduction of this cooldown cap – then a possible solution is to have the heal only proc from the first 6 targets taking full dmg from an AoE attack.
If the amount of healing received from a single target is an issue – then a possible solution is to reduce the heal percentage of crit dmg done.
Capping out the number of targets generating the heal and tweaking (reducing) the heal percentage, while removing the 0.25 sec internal cd seems to be the way to go. That would at least remove the hopelessly random feel of the heal Component from Crit Surge, and make the ability more valuable.
Surge (+morphs) now synergizes very badly with flame staffs (combustion ticks), bows (acid/poison ticks) and 2h weapons (bleed ticks).

Focused Charge (Aedric Spear – Active)

Was the internal cooldown actually reduced as listed in the patch notes?
This ability still feels unwieldy and clunky.
Why can’t Focused Charge, and it morphs, have the same functionality and responsiveness, in regards to executing follow-up attacks/actions, similar to the other charge abilities in the game?
For the current version on PTS, the internal cooldown for Focused Charge is still longer then then the animation run time.
It is preferable that the animation contains some visual indicator, as to when the next ability can be used. Currently it does not, since the cooldown runs longer then the animation.
If this ability is to have an internal cooldown, make it just a tad less than the actual animation time. Preferably for the point where the spear connects with its target.

Summary

1.6 is impressive! The work that has been done with how the game feels to play is just outstanding. There are some considerations and tweaks that are defiantly needed for some game systems, but overall this is one sterling patch.
There seems to be some more omissions in the patch notes. One of them being the new expanded delves, and the other is mention of the continued efforts to reduce phasing issues for groups.

Champion points The enlightenment system has a negative effect on game behavior in its current form. When enlightenment means that your xp is worth 4 times more than non enlightened xp, then it means that people will not or should not do Caldwells silver and gold while in a non enlightened state.

Soloable xp at veteran levels is a precious and limited commodity in this game, so you absolutely should do anything to maximize them while you have them.

When enlightenment give you 4 times the xp then it dictates what you can do too much. Instead you should drop the bonus to x2 and drop the xp cost of cp's to 200k.

Crit surge Something has to change here. Sorcerers were already hurting bad in the live game and now you take away their most important class skill. I have not encountered a single player with a sorc main who weren't angry and frustrated on the PTS.
I suggest that both morph heal per attack you do while active and that the heal value depend on the stat used for the morph. That way you avoid the current dot tick to heal trap of the version on the pts.

Alchemy Giving potions the same buffs as abilities has severely limited the utility of potions in the game and removed the fun free flowing feeling of the entire system, With the current form on the pts you basically now only use healing potions because most of the other effects you need, you will already have in your skills on your bar.
And the NB nerf to their shiphon potion use were unnecessary since potions have been rendered so irrelevant by the changes. I understand that it was done because the new buff system does not allow variables to the buff effects, but what you put in instead were useless. You need to come up with something else useful instead.

If you want to make Sorcerer pets fun to use and useful, make them like the Theurgist pets in DAoC.

Give the option to summon as many as you want, as you summon them, they attack the target. They have a 6 or 10, 15 etc second duration depending on what is balanced and adjust passives to extend that. Also tune the damage so at maximum number of pets, it's comparable to the damage of the other trees.

• Make the Clanfer run down the target and snare the target with tail sweeps.

• Make the Familiar move to 15 meter range and cast fireballs that do a dmg over time.

• Make the Winged Twilight throw wind gusts that do damage and stun the target.

This allows a pet build to do real actual damage that's comparable with the other trees using pets and have fun doing so. The Theurgist was an amazingly fun and unique class design compared to the class structure in other MMO's and RPG's.

Nightblades have the shadow pet in the shadow tree with a similar mechanic, it's coded and should be easy to implement.

angelyn wrote: »

Enodoc wrote: »

angelyn wrote: »

HEAT STATUS/BOUNTY TRACKER

I’m talking about the thing in the bottom right hand corner that tells you how hot you are.

Ideally I would like to have something like the heat tracker thingy having a label on it..even if its just N for Notorious and then somewhere else that I could click that tells me what Notorious means for my character.

I believe it's segmented into three to correspond to each of the heat levels (Disreputable, Notorious, Fugitive), but it probably could be a bit clearer. Maybe by changing the icon in the middle to something depending on the level, à la Assassin's Creed. (My PTS hasn't finished patching yet; when it has I may be able to make some more suggestions.)

Ahah!! Now they just need to label them or change the gauge to have more than one colour...I'm not suggesting green/yellow/red but at least it would be more meaningful than all red....or something.. I've not seen the Assassin's Creed one but I'm open to anything that makes it a bit easier for people to see what status they are currently in.

I've explored it a bit more now that my PTS is updated, and I think I understand it a bit better. Red is Heat and white is Bounty, heat decays quickly and bounty decays slowly. If the sword in the centre is red, you're a Fugitive (Kill on Sight). There's no difference between Disreputable and Notorious though, so I would suggest a change which replaces the sword with other icons depending on the level you're at. For example: while Disreputable, the icon could be the "stolen item" hand icon in grey; while Notorious, the icon could be the beta "bounty" icon (masked criminal) in white; and Fugitive would keep the sword icon in red.

This essentially keeps the colouring of the outer section the same, but changes the centre icon based on your bounty level. I'll upload some examples of these later.

Don't think this point has been picked up on

Nightblade - Assassination line passive
Executioner - Restores magicka after killing an enemy with an assassination ability.

If all the Assassination skills are morphed to use Stamina, why would I want magicka back. Please can this be changed to either stamina or magicka depending on the setup.