Getting to the root of the stamina/magicka problem.

Lynx7386

Part of the "only sticks and dresses work" mentality is left-over sentiment from when vet zones were much harder, and before any of the stamina build balancing changes were put into effect.

Realistically, they're not all that far apart anymore. To any min/maxer, however, spell builds are still the way to go. Compared to the destruction and restoration staff skill lines, the dual wield, 2h, shield, and bow lines all look very poorly cobbled together from abilities that do not synergize well with each other or with class skill trees. The way the trees are fundamentally designed causes issues with their use, and even if the balancing act is a little better now than it used to be, it's still clear to anyone trying to make the absolute best of their character's build that you need to use a staff and light armor.



There's a few core issues between magicka(staff) and stamina(melee) builds right now:


1. Stat Synergies:
All class skill trees, and all class abilities, scale with spell power and magicka. MOST class abilities also scale with spell critical chance (a few use weapon critical instead). If you're putting together a magicka-based build using a staff, you're going to want to maximize your magicka, spell power, and spell critical chance. The restoration and destruction staff skill lines scale with those same stats (some of the attacks use weapon power, but will still benefit in some way from spell power or magicka). If your'e putting together a melee weapon build, however, you're encouraged to use stats which do not synergize with what your class skill trees need.

The end result is that if you want to use a melee weapon and have that weapon not suck, you need to gimp your own class skills in exchange. A staff user will always have more powerful class -and- weapon abilities at his or her disposal, while a melee/bow user will always sacrafice one or the other, and not for any real gain.



2. Armor Passives:
The light armor skill line offers a blanket cost reduction to all magicka-using abilities, as well as a small amount of spell critical chance, high spell penetration, and magicka regeneration. For a build that uses a staff and magicka abilities, all of your class abilities will benefit from the spell penetration and reduced cost light armor provides.
The medium armor skill line offers weapon critical chance, stamina regeneration, and reduced stamina costs, as well as some haste. The weapon critical chance will apply to a few class abilities, but not most. The stamina regeneration, reduced stamina costs, and haste do not affect -any- of your class abilities, only weapon abilities.
The heavy armor skill line offers some increased melee weapon damage, but comes horribly short on all other stat perks. That weapon damage increase also doesnt effect any of your class abilities.

With all that in mind, why would you go with anything BUT light armor? The one situation where medium armor 'kind of' works is for a nightblade using melee-crit-based class abilities in conjunction with weapon abilities, but the fact remains that other than a bit of critical chance your class abilities arent benefitting from your armor at all. Heavy armor provides no benefit whatsoever to class abilities.

Additionally, with the huge percentage of players running spell builds right now, the light armor line is offering you massive spell resistance through passives - so you're guaranteed to have more actual defense against enemy players than you would in medium or heavy armor.



3. Resource division:
Dodging, blocking, interrupting/bashing, sprinting, stealthing, and CC breaking are all tied to stamina. Magicka has no innate skills tied to it. For a spell/staff based build, this means that you have your -entire- primary resource pool (magicka) to do whatever you want, and you will always have your entire backup resource pool (stamina) to sprint, block, bash, cc break, or whathaveyou. A melee/stamina build, on the other hand, always has to reserve stamina for these innate skills, and gains no secondary benefits from magicka like a spell user gains from stamina. Not only does this make resouce management more difficult, it means that you're having to split one resource pool between offense and defense, while spell builds have one resource pool for offense and defense, and a second resource pool for additional defense.



4. Skill Tree Design:
Probably the topic that concerns me most here, at the moment, is how poorly designed melee weapon trees are compared to the staff skill trees.

In the destruction staff skill line, you have amazing synergy between weakness to elements, force shock, and impulse - they all benefit from one another. This gives you massive debuffing, single target damage, and area damage in three skills that all work well enough with one another to be put on the same weapon bar. On top of those, you've got moderately good control via destructive touch, and additional area damage through wall of elements.
Through passives, the different staff types (fire/ice/shock) provide you with a little bit of personal choice in how you want your character to play - pure damage, tank-ish, or control based.

In the restoration staff line, you get an innate 10% damage bonus (at least, when at full health) to all abilities - including class abilities. You can also throw combat prayer on your bar (which always hits you as well as allies in front of you) for an extra 11% damage bonus. Healing notwithstanding, that's 21% additional damage output from all of your class abilities just for using one skill slot and having a restoration staff equipped.

Both of these weapon types can attack from range, and all abilities within these trees benefit from the same stats you use to boost your class abilities.

Move on to melee weapons and you find very little comparable synergy in the skill trees. 1h/shield probably has the best self-synergy, with abilities like ransack to boost your armor on use, and defensive posture to passively increase block mitigation and reduce block cost. Everything about the 1h tree is based on reducing enemy damage though, which doesnt really help you in most situations. Even tanks prefer to just use the passives from the shield line and focus on magic-based class abilities, with light armor - some even forgo the shield entirely and rely on the extra damage or defense from the staff lines instead.

The dual wield tree has twin slashes for a spammable attack - but almost all of it's damage is dot-based, which doesnt work when spamming the ability. Flurry does respectable damage, but because it's classified as a channeled dot instead of several individual attacks, only the initial hit will proc weapon enchants or class effects like siphoning attacks. Whirlwind is an aoe execute, which is great when enemies are low on health, but you have to get them there first, and the dual wield line lacks any form of reasonable AoE damage. You either have to give up your best single-target damage ability (flying blade) to get a moderately decent cone aoe (shrouded daggers), or you have to give up your only source of increased single target damage (heated blades) for an aoe that only works on the weakest of enemies and is useless against champions and bosses (ember explosion).
You have a passive to increase damage against stunned, disoriented, immobilized, or silenced enemies... but none of the dual wield abilities do that on demand. the best you've got is disorient from blinding flurry, which is only a 4% chance per hit to disorient.
The best part about the entire dual wield line, better than any of it's abilities or other passives, is twin blade and blunt with dual daggers, which will give you 10% extra weapon critical - and again, that will only apply to a select few skills outside the dual wield tree.

The two handed weapon line is the worst of the bunch. You have no spammable damage ability: only cleave (which puts 75% of it's damage in the form of a dot, which wont work when spamming it) and uppercut (with a cast time, and wrecking blow cant even benefit from it's own damage bonus). Reverse slash is inferior in every way to class execute abilities even when you're heavily stacked on weapon damage and weapon crit chance. Critical charge is probably the best ability in the entire 2handed line, and might actually be enough to make the 2h line worth investing into if it were usable at point blank range for the damage alone. Class based gap closers are more efficient for getting into melee range, and it's a DPS loss to move outside of the dead zone to charge in for damage purposes.
Momentum is probably the worst-designed ability in the entire game, in my opinion. It takes 20 seconds to get to your full 20% damage bonus (whereas with power extraction I can get up to 99% damage bonus instantly, while dealing damage to everything around me). That 20% damage bonus only applies to your weapon attacks, not to any class abilities. The morphs are what really make momentum terrible: you either have to wait a full 20 seconds to get a weak heal once the buff ends (and really, who can plan to need a heal 20 seconds from now in a game where death happens in less than half that time?), or you have to forgo 10% of your damage bonus because you're spamming the ability as a root-break.
The 2handed passives dont seem to have much focus either - you can get splash damage (weak splash damage at that, and only on basic attacks), but that splash damage only applies to a single target. Useless when almost all aoe situations in the game involve half a dozen enemies or more. You can invest in arcane fighter to boost status effects, but you gain less benefit from those effects than someone using a destruction staff (who has spammable abilities that can apply them at 40% or greater proc chance). Lastly you get stamina regeneration when killing a target, but with all of the above issues are you actually going to benefit that much? Chances are you arent killing anything, and without any spammable damage skills you wont be using enough stamina for it to matter.




Everything about this game makes me think that the developers added melee and stamina as an afterthought. All of the innovation and imagination and ideas were used up on the magicka side of things, and by the time they got around to doing melee and stamina they just said "ah, frak it, we're done".

Can you get by using medium/heavy armor and melee weapons? Yes. You may struggle at times, but you can manage, especially now that they've nerfed veteran content.

Is magicka statistically advantaged? Definitely. Any minmaxer can point to the numbers, it's right there in the open for everyone to see. The only reason you have people who -dont- use a staff and dress is because they're either stubborn, ignorant, or dont care how effective their character is.

ExiledKhallisi

What is wrong with stamina?

-used by sprinting and dodging
-Unless you are redguard, resource managment for stamina is poor.

But I dont know.... my new alt is stamina based and at lvl 39 pulling 700DPS sustained single target in full med armor.

The game is evolving. Give it a few months.

madangrypally

My biggest concerns are 1 and 2. There is also a pretty simple fix that ZoS can do that would fix these issues.

1: Make abilities scale off of the highest stat the character has. Or combine the 2 stats then divide by 2 and that is the value the damage/heal is calculated on.

This will fix the first issue of damage, but number 2 also will need to be fixed to make it effective.

2: Remove the Light Armor and Medium Armor passives that reduce stamina and magicka cost, as well as the stamina and magicka regeneration. These should not be on gear as it just pigeonholes builds. Lower the cost of all magicka and stamina abilities by 21% across the board.

Make gear more about damage and damage mitigation. Do not make it about the type of damage a players does. IE: Magicka or Stamina, Spell Crit or Melee Crit, etc.
IE:
Light Armor increases damage at the cost of more damage taken.
Medium Armor is in the middle and has a slightly less increased damage as light armor but does not take more damage.
Heavy Armor decreases damage at the cost of less damage taken.


If they fixed number 1 and 2 then stamina builds will be in a much better place. My main issue is not stamina builds versus magicka builds, but is Weapon types versus class abilities.

I want to play a great melee based character who uses weapon abilities to supplement my class abilities. That is just unfeasible right now.


Another issue is what effects abilities.
Example:
Unstable Flame:
Deals upfront Flame Damage. While this is "Flame Damage" it is still against a targets Armor Value and not Spell Resist. It works on Melee Critical and not Spell Critical.
Deals DoT Flame Damage. While this is "Flame Damage" similar to the above it is against a targets Spell Resistance and not Armor. It works on Spell Critical and not Melee Critical.

Thus 1 Ability is effected by Weapon Critical and Spell Critical, and goes against an enemies Armor and Spell Resistance.

Would like an ability to all scale the same instead of scaling differently for each damage effect.

Tapio75

Im playing battlemage sorc/storm calling with sword & board and heavt armor, Altmer as race. I kill fast, i survive. I block and use puncture and spell reflect(forgot the name) in every fight. I also block and dudge much. I also sneak a lot.

I have 50/50 magicka and stamina with some perks from heavy armor and sword&board.

for after level 10 i always seem to have enough stamina and magicka available if i fight wisely. After level 10 it seems my resource problems are gone so i must have working build i guess..

I however dont waste stamina on sprinting everywhere like so many seem to do, Sprint is meant to be for short burst of speed and therefore it should use stamina. Sneaking takes just a litle bit stamina and that seems to be manageable by just pausing for a second or half after 3-4 second sneak. It feels to me like the stamina problem is more like a player resource management problem.. At least on my experience but my experience with this kind of builds end to level 20. Have no idea after that.

madangrypally

@Tapio75‌

Leveling with a stamina build is very doable, but they are not as viable late game. I actually have a great stamina nightblade I am leveling in Vet content, that can do some great damage. That same build will be no where near as viable in Trials or be as effective in PvP. I would do better damage with a Restoration staff and class abilities

This is why I tend play other characters once I get to VR12. I cant stand being a staff wielding Templar, Nightblade, or Dragonknight because they were not what I had in mind for those characters. My sorcerer on the other hand is fine with a staff because it fit there character design.

TheAmu

Even if you find a stamina build that works, the fact remains that everything the OP says is true. There is more synergy in a magicka build than a stamina build, and that's the issue.

NekOnOkO

5. There is no any reasonable way for some classes to recover stamina fast enough, while light armor "ultimate" - "harness magicka", warlock armor set and resotration staff heavy attacks basically give you infinite mana pool (in RvR at least).

kitsinni

- Scale class abilities with level not a stat.
- Class skills that work off weapon crit move to stamina
- Third resource for sneak/block/dodge/sprint
- spell/weapon crit combine to crit
- spell power/weapon power combine to power

Done - Now you just use your resource as a resource and everything is nice and balanced.

zbtiqua

Lynx7386 wrote: »

Part of the "only sticks and dresses work" mentality is left-over sentiment from when vet zones were much harder, and before any of the stamina build balancing changes were put into effect.

Realistically, they're not all that far apart anymore. To any min/maxer, however, spell builds are still the way to go. Compared to the destruction and restoration staff skill lines, the dual wield, 2h, shield, and bow lines all look very poorly cobbled together from abilities that do not synergize well with each other or with class skill trees. The way the trees are fundamentally designed causes issues with their use, and even if the balancing act is a little better now than it used to be, it's still clear to anyone trying to make the absolute best of their character's build that you need to use a staff and light armor.



There's a few core issues between magicka(staff) and stamina(melee) builds right now:


1. Stat Synergies:
All class skill trees, and all class abilities, scale with spell power and magicka. MOST class abilities also scale with spell critical chance (a few use weapon critical instead). If you're putting together a magicka-based build using a staff, you're going to want to maximize your magicka, spell power, and spell critical chance. The restoration and destruction staff skill lines scale with those same stats (some of the attacks use weapon power, but will still benefit in some way from spell power or magicka). If your'e putting together a melee weapon build, however, you're encouraged to use stats which do not synergize with what your class skill trees need.

The end result is that if you want to use a melee weapon and have that weapon not suck, you need to gimp your own class skills in exchange. A staff user will always have more powerful class -and- weapon abilities at his or her disposal, while a melee/bow user will always sacrafice one or the other, and not for any real gain.



2. Armor Passives:
The light armor skill line offers a blanket cost reduction to all magicka-using abilities, as well as a small amount of spell critical chance, high spell penetration, and magicka regeneration. For a build that uses a staff and magicka abilities, all of your class abilities will benefit from the spell penetration and reduced cost light armor provides.
The medium armor skill line offers weapon critical chance, stamina regeneration, and reduced stamina costs, as well as some haste. The weapon critical chance will apply to a few class abilities, but not most. The stamina regeneration, reduced stamina costs, and haste do not affect -any- of your class abilities, only weapon abilities.
The heavy armor skill line offers some increased melee weapon damage, but comes horribly short on all other stat perks. That weapon damage increase also doesnt effect any of your class abilities.

With all that in mind, why would you go with anything BUT light armor? The one situation where medium armor 'kind of' works is for a nightblade using melee-crit-based class abilities in conjunction with weapon abilities, but the fact remains that other than a bit of critical chance your class abilities arent benefitting from your armor at all. Heavy armor provides no benefit whatsoever to class abilities.

Additionally, with the huge percentage of players running spell builds right now, the light armor line is offering you massive spell resistance through passives - so you're guaranteed to have more actual defense against enemy players than you would in medium or heavy armor.



3. Resource division:
Dodging, blocking, interrupting/bashing, sprinting, stealthing, and CC breaking are all tied to stamina. Magicka has no innate skills tied to it. For a spell/staff based build, this means that you have your -entire- primary resource pool (magicka) to do whatever you want, and you will always have your entire backup resource pool (stamina) to sprint, block, bash, cc break, or whathaveyou. A melee/stamina build, on the other hand, always has to reserve stamina for these innate skills, and gains no secondary benefits from magicka like a spell user gains from stamina. Not only does this make resouce management more difficult, it means that you're having to split one resource pool between offense and defense, while spell builds have one resource pool for offense and defense, and a second resource pool for additional defense.



4. Skill Tree Design:
Probably the topic that concerns me most here, at the moment, is how poorly designed melee weapon trees are compared to the staff skill trees.

In the destruction staff skill line, you have amazing synergy between weakness to elements, force shock, and impulse - they all benefit from one another. This gives you massive debuffing, single target damage, and area damage in three skills that all work well enough with one another to be put on the same weapon bar. On top of those, you've got moderately good control via destructive touch, and additional area damage through wall of elements.
Through passives, the different staff types (fire/ice/shock) provide you with a little bit of personal choice in how you want your character to play - pure damage, tank-ish, or control based.

In the restoration staff line, you get an innate 10% damage bonus (at least, when at full health) to all abilities - including class abilities. You can also throw combat prayer on your bar (which always hits you as well as allies in front of you) for an extra 11% damage bonus. Healing notwithstanding, that's 21% additional damage output from all of your class abilities just for using one skill slot and having a restoration staff equipped.

Both of these weapon types can attack from range, and all abilities within these trees benefit from the same stats you use to boost your class abilities.

Move on to melee weapons and you find very little comparable synergy in the skill trees. 1h/shield probably has the best self-synergy, with abilities like ransack to boost your armor on use, and defensive posture to passively increase block mitigation and reduce block cost. Everything about the 1h tree is based on reducing enemy damage though, which doesnt really help you in most situations. Even tanks prefer to just use the passives from the shield line and focus on magic-based class abilities, with light armor - some even forgo the shield entirely and rely on the extra damage or defense from the staff lines instead.

The dual wield tree has twin slashes for a spammable attack - but almost all of it's damage is dot-based, which doesnt work when spamming the ability. Flurry does respectable damage, but because it's classified as a channeled dot instead of several individual attacks, only the initial hit will proc weapon enchants or class effects like siphoning attacks. Whirlwind is an aoe execute, which is great when enemies are low on health, but you have to get them there first, and the dual wield line lacks any form of reasonable AoE damage. You either have to give up your best single-target damage ability (flying blade) to get a moderately decent cone aoe (shrouded daggers), or you have to give up your only source of increased single target damage (heated blades) for an aoe that only works on the weakest of enemies and is useless against champions and bosses (ember explosion).
You have a passive to increase damage against stunned, disoriented, immobilized, or silenced enemies... but none of the dual wield abilities do that on demand. the best you've got is disorient from blinding flurry, which is only a 4% chance per hit to disorient.
The best part about the entire dual wield line, better than any of it's abilities or other passives, is twin blade and blunt with dual daggers, which will give you 10% extra weapon critical - and again, that will only apply to a select few skills outside the dual wield tree.

The two handed weapon line is the worst of the bunch. You have no spammable damage ability: only cleave (which puts 75% of it's damage in the form of a dot, which wont work when spamming it) and uppercut (with a cast time, and wrecking blow cant even benefit from it's own damage bonus). Reverse slash is inferior in every way to class execute abilities even when you're heavily stacked on weapon damage and weapon crit chance. Critical charge is probably the best ability in the entire 2handed line, and might actually be enough to make the 2h line worth investing into if it were usable at point blank range for the damage alone. Class based gap closers are more efficient for getting into melee range, and it's a DPS loss to move outside of the dead zone to charge in for damage purposes.
Momentum is probably the worst-designed ability in the entire game, in my opinion. It takes 20 seconds to get to your full 20% damage bonus (whereas with power extraction I can get up to 99% damage bonus instantly, while dealing damage to everything around me). That 20% damage bonus only applies to your weapon attacks, not to any class abilities. The morphs are what really make momentum terrible: you either have to wait a full 20 seconds to get a weak heal once the buff ends (and really, who can plan to need a heal 20 seconds from now in a game where death happens in less than half that time?), or you have to forgo 10% of your damage bonus because you're spamming the ability as a root-break.
The 2handed passives dont seem to have much focus either - you can get splash damage (weak splash damage at that, and only on basic attacks), but that splash damage only applies to a single target. Useless when almost all aoe situations in the game involve half a dozen enemies or more. You can invest in arcane fighter to boost status effects, but you gain less benefit from those effects than someone using a destruction staff (who has spammable abilities that can apply them at 40% or greater proc chance). Lastly you get stamina regeneration when killing a target, but with all of the above issues are you actually going to benefit that much? Chances are you arent killing anything, and without any spammable damage skills you wont be using enough stamina for it to matter.




Everything about this game makes me think that the developers added melee and stamina as an afterthought. All of the innovation and imagination and ideas were used up on the magicka side of things, and by the time they got around to doing melee and stamina they just said "ah, frak it, we're done".

Can you get by using medium/heavy armor and melee weapons? Yes. You may struggle at times, but you can manage, especially now that they've nerfed veteran content.

Is magicka statistically advantaged? Definitely. Any minmaxer can point to the numbers, it's right there in the open for everyone to see. The only reason you have people who -dont- use a staff and dress is because they're either stubborn, ignorant, or dont care how effective their character is.

This. Everything about this post is spot on. This is why even as the raid leader for Da Funk, I can't convince people to let me take my stam nightblade into a raid. It needs to be fixed.

drogon1

Well thought out and insightful post by the OP. Agree with pretty much all his points.

Sneaky-Snurr

kitsinni wrote: »

- Scale class abilities with level not a stat.
- Class skills that work off weapon crit move to stamina
- Third resource for sneak/block/dodge/sprint
- spell/weapon crit combine to crit
- spell power/weapon power combine to power

Done - Now you just use your resource as a resource and everything is nice and balanced.

- Disagree. That would mean 0 fighting chance for lowbies or low VRs against their higher-leveled counterpart. Definitely a no-go
- Agreed. Would make stamina builds more viable on endgame contents/PVP.
- Very much agree on this one. OR maybe give a 3-fold boost for stamina (yes, for realsies). AND/OR maybe impose cost as a static number rather than on a percentage basis for the movements performed.
- Not really sure how I feel about this one. Though, I think it would be an unwise decision to merge them both.
- Same as above.

kitsinni

Sneaky-Snurr wrote: »

kitsinni wrote: »

- Scale class abilities with level not a stat.
- Class skills that work off weapon crit move to stamina
- Third resource for sneak/block/dodge/sprint
- spell/weapon crit combine to crit
- spell power/weapon power combine to power

Done - Now you just use your resource as a resource and everything is nice and balanced.

- Disagree. That would mean 0 fighting chance for lowbies or low VRs against their higher-leveled counterpart. Definitely a no-go
- Agreed. Would make stamina builds more viable on endgame contents/PVP.
- Very much agree on this one. OR maybe give a 3-fold boost for stamina (yes, for realsies). AND/OR maybe impose cost as a static number rather than on a percentage basis for the movements performed.
- Not really sure how I feel about this one. Though, I think it would be an unwise decision to merge them both.
- Same as above.

When I say scale with level they could be adjusted above what they currently would be with no points in Magicka. I guess they should still be boosted by powerThen there would be a baseline that all VR without spell/weapon power added in do with a certain attack at a certain level. That would be adjusted to meet the needs of VR content based on the VR level they are. . Honestly even though I posted it I'm still up in the air on the last two points myself.

I would also add in passives in Heavy armor to use less of the third stat (we'll call it endurance for now) when blocking.

Passives in Medium for less endurance used when sneaking.

Just as examples.

Xiroku

Pretty spot on.

I honestly don't get why all class skills are magicka based, and I don't get why we have a class system to begin with. So many systems/mechanics in this game confound me. I can only hope they are willing to overhaul classes/skills in general, or SpellCrafting is going to just be even more reason to be light armor/staff.

They should of had spellcrafting in place of classes to begin with, and then had all/most of the current class skills put into each school of magic plus newer skills later on, or at least had it that we could pick any 3 skill tree's from the current class skill trees. The glory of TES is to be our own unique class, putting us into predefined classes kills that.


From what I remember, they have classes so people can be unique from other players, or something like that....that's just total bull.


I like the game, but there's too much that questions if I want to keep playing. The biggest reasons I still play is too see what they do with the game, and because it's really the only decent MMORPG on the market right now.

Rune_Relic

Exactly.. you can make magicka last forever in combat.
You have not chance of doing that with melee and stamina.
You are always on a hiding to nothing praying your resource doesn't run out before the battle is won.

go0f1

If you are melee and stamina user you can make light attacks for 200 noncrit.
I play a stamina build for 2 weeks and i destroy this magicka users.

Solariken

madangrypally wrote: »

1. ...combine the 2 stats then divide by 2 and that is the value the damage/heal is calculated on.

2: Remove the Light Armor and Medium Armor passives that reduce stamina and magicka cost, as well as the stamina and magicka regeneration. These should not be on gear as it just pigeonholes builds. Lower the cost of all magicka and stamina abilities by 21% across the board.

Make gear more about damage and damage mitigation. Do not make it about the type of damage a players does.

IE:
Light Armor increases damage at the cost of more damage taken.
Medium Armor is in the middle and has a slightly less increased damage as light armor but does not take more damage.
Heavy Armor decreases damage at the cost of less damage taken.

Great thoughts, friend. I think you just single-handedly bested the balance boss.

Anastasia

Xiroku wrote: »

Pretty spot on.

I honestly don't get why all class skills are magicka based,

>>>and I don't get why we have a class system to begin with.<<<

So many systems/mechanics in this game confound me. I can only hope they are willing to overhaul classes/skills in general, or SpellCrafting is going to just be even more reason to be light armor/staff.

They should of had spellcrafting in place of classes to begin with, and then had all/most of the current class skills put into each school of magic plus newer skills later on, or at least had it that we could pick any 3 skill tree's from the current class skill trees. The glory of TES is to be our own unique class, putting us into predefined classes kills that.


From what I remember, they have classes so people can be unique from other players, or something like that....that's just total bull.


I like the game, but there's too much that questions if I want to keep playing. The biggest reasons I still play is too see what they do with the game, and because it's really the only decent MMORPG on the market right now.

---

Awesome post from o-p.


Xiroku: "...and I don't get why we have a class system to begin with."

Because....hmm...it would be a most curious experiment for any MMO publisher to put out an MMO with important PvP emphasis...and then try to convince PvPrs that everyone can be everything AND then continue to try to get the game to play without the lag/glitches/crashes with all those additional eye candy/spell effects ;o)

(*) If done here in TESO? Muhahahahahahahahahhhahahahaaa! (*)

Sneaky-Snurr

kitsinni wrote: »

When I say scale with level they could be adjusted above what they currently would be with no points in Magicka. I guess they should still be boosted by powerThen there would be a baseline that all VR without spell/weapon power added in do with a certain attack at a certain level. That would be adjusted to meet the needs of VR content based on the VR level they are. . Honestly even though I posted it I'm still up in the air on the last two points myself.

I would also add in passives in Heavy armor to use less of the third stat (we'll call it endurance for now) when blocking.

Passives in Medium for less endurance used when sneaking.

Just as examples.

Regardless, wouldn't that still make a higher-leveled characters' attacks more powerful than their lower-leveled counterpart? I don't see any difference. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear on the point where PVP is also taken into account when I presented my points and not just PVE. You have to take into account when dealing this issue as a whole because buffing/nerfing one side of the equation (PVP and PVE in this case) doesn't make sense and it would make things unbalanced between PVP and PVE.

The implications? Well, players would have to constantly respec and the cost for doing so is high (unless this system changes) just to get the most efficient build for a group dungeon or Craglorn for instance. I'm sure we wouldn't want to constantly respec to achieve our build goals simply because it is expensive to do so.

Those are just what I am capable of foreseeing if such changes occur (not saying i'm correct). What do you think though?

Super_Sonico

This is a great post by the OP and I hope ZOS is paying attention.

A few things to further discuss:

I don't think we should have a 3rd resource bar. That just goes against the history of TES games and other systems can be used to work around the problem. The problem is on the resource drain for stamina builds. To me, the simple fix is to have a % reduction for physical actions (sprint, dodge, sneak, break cc, block) based on the number of equipped stamina skills.

Armor should be about mitigating damage and affecting movement, not affecting the damage you do. I disagree with the notion that wearing light armor allows you to hit harder than you could when wearing heavy armor. It should mean you take less physical damage and move slower is all.

kitsinni

Sneaky-Snurr wrote: »

kitsinni wrote: »

When I say scale with level they could be adjusted above what they currently would be with no points in Magicka. I guess they should still be boosted by powerThen there would be a baseline that all VR without spell/weapon power added in do with a certain attack at a certain level. That would be adjusted to meet the needs of VR content based on the VR level they are. . Honestly even though I posted it I'm still up in the air on the last two points myself.

I would also add in passives in Heavy armor to use less of the third stat (we'll call it endurance for now) when blocking.

Passives in Medium for less endurance used when sneaking.

Just as examples.

Regardless, wouldn't that still make a higher-leveled characters' attacks more powerful than their lower-leveled counterpart? I don't see any difference. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear on the point where PVP is also taken into account when I presented my points and not just PVE. You have to take into account when dealing this issue as a whole because buffing/nerfing one side of the equation (PVP and PVE in this case) doesn't make sense and it would make things unbalanced between PVP and PVE.

The implications? Well, players would have to constantly respec and the cost for doing so is high (unless this system changes) just to get the most efficient build for a group dungeon or Craglorn for instance. I'm sure we wouldn't want to constantly respec to achieve our build goals simply because it is expensive to do so.

Those are just what I am capable of foreseeing if such changes occur (not saying i'm correct). What do you think though?

I think higher level players should do more damage than lower level characters, I think in a large part this is already achieved by higher level characters just having more Magicka/spell damage. The scaling is done on the amount the glyphs you can use supply currently. If it just scaled with your level the amount of magicka you have would not change the damage you do, just how many times you can cast.

In PvP there is already a scaling done so that your stats are boosted to that of a V5, I think they could just scale your class skills to a V5 level. V12's would have an advantage but they probably should.

Stx

The thing that really ticks me off is that almost every attack from weapon skills ties up most of the damage into a DoT...

Cleave, Blood Craze, and Venom Arrow... can't really be spammed without losing a lot of the damage.

This is not the case for most magicka attacks... making them much more efficient for dps.

Most of your points are spot on. The only one I would disagree with is the stamina sharing defensive resources being a bad thing. I think it should be an advantage for stamina users that their primary resource is used for dodging/blocking. The problem is the game isn't built like past ES games where stamina regens much faster than magicka.

If stamina had a faster base regen rate(it should honestly be like twice that of magicka), and effects that 'reduce the cost of stamina abilities' also reduced the cost of dodge/break free, then the system would work fine, and being a stamina user would actually be beneficial for defensive purposes.

Stx

It's like they didn't even think about what a player is supposed to be using as a stamina build while dpsing.

Lets say I use a two handed sword. Okay so the boss fight begins.... I'll critical charge him(from max distance to get the most damage), cool. What the heck, ill hit him with cleave to get that efficient bleed going. .... Now what? I'm not going to use wrecking blow, because not only does the cast time make it terrible dps, but bosses can't be knocked down. I'm not going to use executioner, because the boss is still above 90% and it won't do diddly for damage, so....

What am I supposed to do? tickle him with light/heavy attacks?

Dual wield at least has one skill in Flurry which can be used as a stamina filler, even if the channel makes it less good.

I am a big fan of two handed swords and it works for me in PvP but in PvE all I ever use it for is stamina dump when AEing and building ultimate while AEing with Carve.

Sneaky-Snurr

kitsinni wrote: »

I think higher level players should do more damage than lower level characters, I think in a large part this is already achieved by higher level characters just having more Magicka/spell damage. The scaling is done on the amount the glyphs you can use supply currently. If it just scaled with your level the amount of magicka you have would not change the damage you do, just how many times you can cast.

In PvP there is already a scaling done so that your stats are boosted to that of a V5, I think they could just scale your class skills to a V5 level. V12's would have an advantage but they probably should.

True. Though i'm not saying that low-leveled characters should do the same amount of damage as the high-leveled ones. Another point I didn't make clear (sorry for this lol) is that the former should do sub-par damage compared to the latter. Not too close. Just sub-par.

I agree. V12s have all the right to gain an edge against low-leveled chars. Just concerned on lowbies (lvl ~30) against high-leveled one (~VR1) for example. People would love to have a fighting chance against other players regardless of level.

guybrushtb16_ESO

Stx wrote: »

It's like they didn't even think about what a player is supposed to be using as a stamina build while dpsing.

Lets say I use a two handed sword. Okay so the boss fight begins.... I'll critical charge him(from max distance to get the most damage), cool. What the heck, ill hit him with cleave to get that efficient bleed going. .... Now what? I'm not going to use wrecking blow, because not only does the cast time make it terrible dps, but bosses can't be knocked down. I'm not going to use executioner, because the boss is still above 90% and it won't do diddly for damage, so....

What am I supposed to do? tickle him with light/heavy attacks?

Dual wield at least has one skill in Flurry which can be used as a stamina filler, even if the channel makes it less good.

I am a big fan of two handed swords and it works for me in PvP but in PvE all I ever use it for is stamina dump when AEing and building ultimate while AEing with Carve.

Very much this. I personally still think that stamina builds lack defined stamina dump abilities, skills that to nothing but direct, non-dot damage without any bells and whistles that are meant to be spammed when there are no dots to refresh etc.

Magicka builds get those through classes mostly, but it seems weapon abilities were designed more around the idea of "every skill gets 1 gimmick", just that most of them are not useful in the majority of situations we face, and those gimmicks cut into their "power budget" when it comes to costs.

Faulgor

Super_Sonico wrote: »

This is a great post by the OP and I hope ZOS is paying attention.

A few things to further discuss:

I don't think we should have a 3rd resource bar. That just goes against the history of TES games and other systems can be used to work around the problem. The problem is on the resource drain for stamina builds. To me, the simple fix is to have a % reduction for physical actions (sprint, dodge, sneak, break cc, block) based on the number of equipped stamina skills.

I agree, adding a new resource bar is not a good idea. It turns weapon-focused builds into stamina-mages, which is not what that attribute is supposed to be. Stamina is the resource that should pace combat, being spent for decisive combat actions such as blocking, dodging and sprinting - and stamina builds should excel at this, either by drastically decreasing the cost for such actions as you suggest, or improving their effectiveness with more stamina (e.g., faster dodge rolls). Think Dark Souls.

Talking about the history of TES games, introducing light armor as magic-improving-gear really screwed some things up. Usually, the type of armor mainly influenced its weight and armor rating. What we have as light armor in ESO would have been simple clothing in previous games, which has 0 armor rating but can be enchanted much better. Maybe that is something to consider? Remove the cost reduction passives from armor skill lines, and add a new passive to light armor that improves enchantments on light armor. That would be distinct, but still viable for every build, not just mages. Of course, previous TES games had more interesting enchantments for armor in the first place. Maybe a passive that lets you put jewelry type enchantments on light armor? Just thinking out loud.

Another option to free up the stamina resource for melee builds would be to increase light and heavy attack damage for physical weapons. Mages should use their magicka for their primary damage with spells, whereas warriors and thieves should use their weapons themselves, not another magicka-like resource pool to convert into damage. I.e., current stamina skills would serve more of a utility function, like applying AoE bleeding or poison DoTs, stunning, interrupting, closing gaps. The primary source for damage should be the weapon itself.

Regardless, I agree that weapon DoTs should stack, i.e. bleeding and poison. Maybe up to a limit, say 5 times, but they should stack.

khele23eb17_ESO

Super_Sonico wrote: »

This is a great post by the OP and I hope ZOS is paying attention.

A few things to further discuss:

I don't think we should have a 3rd resource bar. That just goes against the history of TES games and other systems can be used to work around the problem. The problem is on the resource drain for stamina builds. To me, the simple fix is to have a % reduction for physical actions (sprint, dodge, sneak, break cc, block) based on the number of equipped stamina skills.

Just make all skills use the blue bar and rename it to someting appropriate. Theres no need for convoluted band-aid mechanics to be added to the game then and you keep your 3 bars on screen setup from previous games.

CapuchinSeven

ExiledKhallisi wrote: »

What is wrong with stamina?

-used by sprinting and dodging
-Unless you are redguard, resource managment for stamina is poor.

But I dont know.... my new alt is stamina based and at lvl 39 pulling 700DPS sustained single target in full med armor.

The game is evolving. Give it a few months.

And you won't be able to maintain that for a length of time.

My PVP Stamina build never has a problem dodging and attacking but in PVE you'll drain your stamina and your DPS will drop off.

Magic builds in light armour with resto staffs have never ending magic regen and that's why they are able to maintain DPS far far longer.

THAT is the problem with magic and stamina builds.

MorHawk

Stx wrote: »

It's like they didn't even think about what a player is supposed to be using as a stamina build while dpsing.

Lets say I use a two handed sword. Okay so the boss fight begins.... I'll critical charge him(from max distance to get the most damage), cool. What the heck, ill hit him with cleave to get that efficient bleed going. .... Now what? I'm not going to use wrecking blow, because not only does the cast time make it terrible dps, but bosses can't be knocked down. I'm not going to use executioner, because the boss is still above 90% and it won't do diddly for damage, so....

What am I supposed to do? tickle him with light/heavy attacks?

Thanks for this. I was aware of Bow's issues with spammable DPS, but this was very informative as to how it affects 2H too.

CapuchinSeven wrote: »

Magic builds in light armour with resto staffs have never ending magic regen and that's why they are able to maintain DPS far far longer.

THAT is the problem with magic and stamina builds.

Aaaand yes, I agree with this too.

I do sort of have an issue with the ideas regarding magicka being used for sprinting/blocking etc, or having every skill use one pool. Yes it'd solve the balance issue, but surely this can be achieved without complete homogeneity? Seems like a cop-out to me.

CapuchinSeven

Stx wrote: »

What am I supposed to do? tickle him with light/heavy attacks?

No you're meant to use class abilities or weapon swap, people are going to have to accept that a stamina build STILL uses magic class abilities. There is no such thing as a pure stamina build.

I don't think ZOS ever intended for anyone to go full stamina builds, and I don't think stamina will ever be at that point.

Lynx7386

Maybe not, but magicka is and therein lies the problem.

Kego

And that every weapon will never ever be competitive in every content given.
As I see it their is a strenght in every Weapon:

- 2Hander (a lot of AOE DMG, CC and Boss Execution)
- Dual Wield (a huge single Target DPS and an AOE Trash Execution)
- Bow (Medicore Single Target DPS and great AOE DMG)
- 1H + Shield (Tank Skills)

After getting Stamina and Magicka regeneration in line, that both pools runs dry at the same time, ZOS should check if the Weapons can shine on their purpose.

F.e.: 2Hander and Bows could need a big Buff for their AOE DPS, where they should shine but they are far behind against Magicka AOE.

At 2Handers Monument could be changed to a Stamina Regen Buff for the hole group, like Elemental Drain of Destruction Staff.

Bow needs another mechanic for Venom Arrow, cause as it is the Single Target Skill Nr. 1, the Poison DoT is kind of useless, cause it can never tick through. Give it a complete own math where it runs 10 seconds and every new Venom Arrow reset the timer and adds the DoT DMG, stacked up to 3-5.

With those changes you can run a Dual Wield / 2Hander Build as well as Bow/Bow or Bow/2Hander depending if you want AOE from a safe distant or an Execution at Bosses.