Complete guide to fixed lycanthropy (considering balance)

LtAscott

I Apologize in advance for the wall of text. Although there is an inescapably large workload, and over-abundance of trolling and general annoyance over this subject, I still felt as though I should make this post.

To toggle or not to toggle that is the question:
Transformation should definitely NOT become a toggle, that being said, it could be greatly improved upon simply making it require a certain amount of ultimate be generated before it could be used, then DRAINING ultimate at adjustable rates. This way, devour could be repurposed to generate finesse/ult points (still doing its job) and Alpha wolves could buff berserkers' durations *and their own while 2 berserkers are nearby) by decreasing the rates at which ultimate decays.

For example, transform requires 700 ultimate before a transformation can occur, it costs 100 to activate, then decreases ultimate pool by 10 ult/s giving you a baseline timer of one minute. Devouring a corpse could generate 120 ultimate (12 extra seconds) plus your regular generation. Each time you devour, you get a stack of "Gorged" gorged stacks up to 5 times, and it takes about 20 seconds to lose 1 stack of this debuff. After the 2 minutes, the ultimate cost starts to go up, by 5/s every 30 seconds until it runs out, with each stack of gorged reducing the cost by 1 ult/s. Also, we should get the ability to pull ourselves OUT of the transformation early, while keeping the ultimate pool remaining.

This puts a standard limit of 2 minutes onto the transformation. Here is where the pack gets its real benefits, Alpha werewolves get an aura that reduces the ultimate pool drain of an activated transformation, they would also benefit from this reduction when with 2 berserker werewolves. This way, if you have a pack of 3 werewolves together, you all get a standard transformation of 2 minutes, extendable by 2 more minutes for a total of 4 minutes before maintaining the transformation becomes extremely difficult (the cost increases until it cannot be maintained).

Alpha Werewolf-unique passive 20% chance to reflect attacks at 1/2 damage, every 5 points of stamina spent heals for 1 point.

Berserker-unique passive; In berserker transform you have a 20% chance to dodge attacks and can stealth. Sprinting does not break or effect stealth.

Skills; The current skills are great, these additional abilities would not be augmentable or on the skill tree, but only present during the transformation.

1. Unstoppable (passive); 25% reduced damage from aoe attacks, and 50% reduced CC; increased to 50% reduced damage from AOE and 100% reduced CC effectiveness while sprinting. While sprinting or Pouncing in your WW transform your immune to slows/snares, and roots, and all stuns reduced to 0.5 sec. Each spell resisted costs 1/5 its value of WW mana pool, disabled when out of mana.

2. Bite; You tear at your enemies flesh; a random injury occurs with different penalties on target; arm -> disarm for 2 sec; leg -> slow 50% for 2 sec; Torso -> 20% reduced armor and healing received; head -> 2 sec stun. "Go for the throat" (2.5% chance vs target under 50% health) executes the target.

3. Maul; a combination attack of 2 light swipes and a heavy attack, 50% chance to knock target to the ground/interrupts casting.

4. Call of the Hunt (Alpha only); (2.5s cast) calls 2 lesser werewolves to fight for you for 30 seconds (generates 150 ultimate (15 second longer transformation) Lesser werewolves have 25% health and deal 25% of the damage of the Alpha.

5. Feeding Frenzy (Berserker only); channelled (5 seconds) disables the target, berserker jumps on them and forces them to the ground, dealing 10% of max stamina as damage per second, half the damage is dealt afterwards as bleed damage over an additional 5 seconds.

With these changes; WW transformation timer is slightly lengthened, Werewolves can be useful in PVP, while still being vulnerable to ranged direct damage, casts, poison damage and the fighters guild abilities. I don't think anyone will think these suggestions are overpowered.

Keep in mind; bite and maul could be the starting werewolf skills, pounce and roar would each need a skill point to be unlocked, (level 3 ww roar/howl level 5 ww pounce) and the last skill you would only get when you chose to be either an alpha or a berserker (Change to ww level 10).

Brasseurfb16_ESO

Sorry, I read your "considering balance" and between a stamina skill that can deal almost as much dmg as Soul Strike, RNGs everywhere, and a stealthy/dodgy Berserker Werewolf I think you should reconsider the ideas in your post, sinds they don't solve any of the issues werewolves are actualy confronted with.

- First beeing the lack of CC break. Making us immune to CC while printing is just going to make the Werewolf form a free out of jail card, like Ball Lightning is, but won't solve the issue against unblockable CCs in PvE.

- Secondly, you do not adress the issue around our sustain. Werewolves have 0 Healing capabilities beside of devour, and that skill is interupted whenever we get stucked by a hit.

- Finaly, we already have a special timer in werewolf form, wich is much more precise compared to the ultimate bar and the only thing devs have to realy do is to allow us to keep our ultimate when we morph back to human.

Werewolves just needs a couple of tweaks realy, not a total overhaul.

LtAscott

I admit, this would be more of an overhaul than I would like, the "Bite" and "Maul" abilities would heal for portions of their damage or "gorged" could give you an increasing heal over time per stack.

Unstoppable would make it so that in group pvp you couldn't just get stun locked and insta-killed, in PVE, it could have 0 effect, they could make it a conditional buff that only applies to cyrodiil.

ScardyFox

I see nothing wrong with your idea on unstoppable. You're a werewolf for such a short amount of time it makes sense. My idea for it was that when you bought into it (I never named anything), there was a 50% chance that casting a CC effect on a were would backfire and put the caster into a state of fear for 3 seconds.

No, I see nothing wrong with a strong anti CC since we're on such a short timer. They painted us (originally) as powerful berserker monstrosities, a strong anti CC would make us very dangerous in the handful of seconds we have.

Drachdhar

Given that werewolf transform is an ULTIMATE... It should be slightly OP. Considering that it is an ultimate that is very very costly it should be even more OP...
It is my belief that activating Werewolf Transform should make you into a walking facemelter in PvP and PvE, especially when one considers how hard it can be to generate ultimate in PvP.
There are already ultis in the game which are basically I win buttons in PvP, Soul Strike for example. And most of these are pretty easy to activate, unlike werewolf transform.

I think Werewolf needs a massive overhaul, because right now it is very underpowered. A costly ultimate that requires 16 SPs to reach its potential and at least currently will severely weaken you when you activate it.