1.6 Time to Kill tends to be much faster, detailed analysis

WebBull

Of course. It's all marketing. The entire massive mostly unneeded re-balancing is nothing more than marketing. But, ZOS will muck it up so bad that they will very likely lose more players than they will gain.

JackDaniell

Hello, unfortunately I have not been able to access the PTS yet as I am experiencing some nauseating technical difficulties.

As a longtime Stamina based player, I am very eager to test out 1.6 on the PTS and see for myself how it will effect my build. I play 7/7 medium armor on my Templar and am quite curios how my play style will be effected by this update especially since I have been actively keeping up with the forums since 1.6 PTS release.

As soon as I am able to, I will log onto the PTS and provide any feedback I can offer as posts like this have me quite concerned. I hope to be able to solve the Stamina problem.

Teargrants

What's going to happen when 1.6 goes live if they don't change this (especially the stamina drain), is that those who dip out for a month to grind champion points on whatever the new best grind spot is before ZOS nerfs it, will have a gigantic advantage on those who just stayed in Cyrodiil to pvp normally. When the grinders come back they will be the new elite effectively, especially when compared to the new B2P players that reach V14 in April.

This is worse than the Undaunted grind power gap, because you actually had to give up gear slots to work them into your build. The champion point gap will affect everything from ability cost to damage taken, basically everything in the game that has a numeric value attached to it.

Grim13

Teargrants wrote: »

What's going to happen when 1.6 goes live if they don't change this (especially the stamina drain), is that those who dip out for a month to grind champion points on whatever the new best grind spot is before ZOS nerfs it, will have a gigantic advantage on those who just stayed in Cyrodiil to pvp normally. When the grinders come back they will be the new elite effectively, especially when compared to the new B2P players that reach V14 in April.

This is worse than the Undaunted grind power gap, because you actually had to give up gear slots to work them into your build. The champion point gap will affect everything from ability cost to damage taken, basically everything in the game that has a numeric value attached to it.

This is my biggest issue, by far.

I only PvP... and now that ZOS have seen fit to arbitrarily weaken me so that I can slowly grow back to where I am now by allocating CPs, I'm well aware that I'm doomed to become increasingly weaker, comparatively, as time goes on.

In many ways the level cap enabled a more level playing field in PvP. The only negatives of note being class imbalance (and lag, etc.)... Now, imho, balance has been *** out the window.

Stamina is so bloody borked right now that a couple, simple cc breaks seem to drain it all. Blocking is downright foolhardy. This, even with my 7/7 Medium Stam NB.

Idk, I realise that it will take time to learn the new systems... but I'm already missing the current PvP, lol.

Guess I better PvP on the live server as much as humanly possible prior to March.

cozmon3c_ESO

death to everyone until someone figures out how to keep stamina while doing cc breaks, dodges and blocks. even stam builds cant keep up.

Teargrants

I think I found the solution. As a sorc your Pokemon will keep fighting for you as you lie on your ass unable to CC break!

kijima

It's not in what you do say, it's what you don't say Teargrants.

I can just tell you are thrilled about pets being buffed for sorcs

Teargrants

kijima wrote: »

It's not in what you do say, it's what you don't say Teargrants.

I can just tell you are thrilled about pets being buffed for sorcs

Gotta catch em all!

themizario

I tried all armor sets heavy medium light, shield stacking and I still melt. I'm not giving up just need to find the right build. Against 2 players I still melt no matter the combo.

Used to be able to make the fight last!

It's all about L2P for me - not blaming ZOS.

I feel like a newb all over again. Anyone find a decent DK build yet? PM me please.

Open to learning.

Xsorus

I've found the only way to survive fights on pts server is to dump 62 points into stamina and put health enchants on all my gear. This gives me a good bit of hp, close to 30k. Then I run 5 construct right with has 20% crit damage reduction. With full 7/7 heavy armor... I'm able to stay up quite a while like this. Trying to go in as medium was basically a death sentence.

I may swap my nightblade over to this setup come live... I think it would actually work better then my dk currently.

Vesir

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

I've found the only way to survive fights on pts server is to dump 62 points into stamina and put health enchants on all my gear. This gives me a good bit of hp, close to 30k. Then I run 5 construct right with has 20% crit damage reduction. With full 7/7 heavy armor... I'm able to stay up quite a while like this. Trying to go in as medium was basically a death sentence.

I may swap my nightblade over to this setup come live... I think it would actually work better then my dk currently.

the question is, can you kill anyone like that?

Sypher

I'm not going to lie to myself.

I'm a little disappointed over all. I'll post/upload my reasons sometime tomorrow.

Poxheart

Sypher wrote: »

I'm not going to lie to myself.

I'm a little disappointed over all. I'll post/upload my reasons sometime tomorrow.

Yep. The grind is going to be soul crushing.

Xsorus

Vesir wrote: »

xsorusb14_ESO wrote: »

I've found the only way to survive fights on pts server is to dump 62 points into stamina and put health enchants on all my gear. This gives me a good bit of hp, close to 30k. Then I run 5 construct right with has 20% crit damage reduction. With full 7/7 heavy armor... I'm able to stay up quite a while like this. Trying to go in as medium was basically a death sentence.

I may swap my nightblade over to this setup come live... I think it would actually work better then my dk currently.

the question is, can you kill anyone like that?

Surprisingly yes, gotta use two hander with it but it's damage is decent

PF1901

Teargrants wrote: »

What's going to happen when 1.6 goes live if they don't change this (especially the stamina drain), is that those who dip out for a month to grind champion points on whatever the new best grind spot is before ZOS nerfs it, will have a gigantic advantage on those who just stayed in Cyrodiil to pvp normally. When the grinders come back they will be the new elite effectively, especially when compared to the new B2P players that reach V14 in April.

This is worse than the Undaunted grind power gap, because you actually had to give up gear slots to work them into your build. The champion point gap will affect everything from ability cost to damage taken, basically everything in the game that has a numeric value attached to it.

Damn, this all sounds so promising - can't wait!
/sarcasm off

Lithium Flower

So far all my biggest apprehensions about the champion system seem to be true based on my experience on PTS.

1. No more versatility - the days of having a veteran 14 with lots of skill points to play around with various play styles - tanking, pvp, damage dealing, magicka build, stamina build, etc are over. You have to specialize in one type of thing to be good enough to compete with everyone else specializing in that one thing. The best thing about eso was that the ability to change role and play style with a change of gear. Now gear and attributes and passives are much, much weaker. Champion Points are necessary to make up the difference and you can't get every passive in every constellation.

2. Champion System is not going to remove the Grind, but exacerbate it. We're all going to be much weaker than live, gear will mean much less until supplemented by the champion points. Right now, you grind/quest to veteran 14 and it might take 2 weeks, it might take a month but once you're there, you're as powerful as any other veteran, distinguished only by your skill and gear you can acquire. It's far more equalizing. It takes 400k xp to yield 1 champion point, that means that instead of the 15 million xp or so you need after level 50 to be on an even footing, you will need 1440 million and even then you can't play every role your chosen class has potential for.

3. Buy 2 win - Given the above, it makes sense why 'conveniences' like experience boosts, potions and soul-gems are going to be money-makers for ZOS. They will be the only respite from the Sisyphean grind awaiting everyone and relief from the acute health/magicka/stamina shortage. As well as flashy pets and exotic mounts to keep casuals distracted from the fact that they will never have a reasonable chance to try competitive end-game content (which to be honest is now another distant memory with all future content downscaling to the player).

olsborg

Lithium Flower wrote: »

3. Buy 2 win - Given the above, it makes sense why 'conveniences' like experience boosts, potions and soul-gems are going to be money-makers for ZOS. They will be the only respite from the Sisyphean grind awaiting everyone and relief from the acute health/magicka/stamina shortage.

This is depressing me, but you are right. At this time, I cant see that the champion system will bring anything but a grind to the game, since its not pure buffs you get from it, merely lessening the fact that you are nerfed in 1.6.

Subtomik

I really hate that I cant just throw on my gear and tank like i used to. it was a lot of fun to mainheal/dps(poorly) and tank anytime for whatever roll my group needed.

Koensol

DDuke wrote: »

Mauz wrote: »

I think what he meant is that if you grind x month in craglorn you're back on todays level and can 1 button spam your way through life.

Increasing TTK wouldnt make sense. Its right now for me 1-5min. After 5min most peoples incl. me run away cause its boring. This x10 would result in all fights ending in a draw.

What concerns me...cause I dont like grinding...is how much is the difference between a character who grinded loads of champions pts and a character that developed slowly e.g. by pvp only.

TTK for anyone below 3k health is currently <0,1 seconds for me, while TTK of anyone above 3k health is more around 15 mins - never, if they start permablocking & spamming heals/shields.

In other words, balance is completely borked.

Was it ever not borked? I envy ZOS for trying this cooldownless combat system with similar mmo abilities as other games, but its just so hard to balance all the spamming.

Kas

i haven't played on PTS myself yet (I think I'll waint till I can play my EU chars). From what I've heard, stamina drain seems to be one of the main problem reasons. What's holding immovable + damage shield no-block builds back?

Bashev

Kas wrote: »

i haven't played on PTS myself yet (I think I'll waint till I can play my EU chars). From what I've heard, stamina drain seems to be one of the main problem reasons. What's holding immovable + damage shield no-block builds back?

Your resources are reduced and immovable is expensive skill and doesnt last long.

Teargrants

Kas wrote: »

i haven't played on PTS myself yet (I think I'll waint till I can play my EU chars). From what I've heard, stamina drain seems to be one of the main problem reasons. What's holding immovable + damage shield no-block builds back?

That's pretty much what most templars are running on pts. NBs are pretty much half bow blades half siphon blades. DKs have battle roar, switching to heavy armor helps with stamina. As a sorc, I shelved my heavy armor build for now and settled with max spell dmg light armor.

The biggest thing I found I can do is put 3 reduce stam cost enchants on my jewelry, it gives a very noticeable improvement to the stam drain. Best work around I've found as a magicka build.

Manoekin

IDK I've had a lot of fun on the PTS. I've been able to play the same way I play on live without much problems as far as stamina goes. I'll admit that there is a problem, but nothing that you can't work around. The only time I really notice dropping really fast is when there are multiple people focusing me, or an archer spamming snipe which hit me for 1/3 my life on PTS when I blocked it.

As mentioned, unless something is done about set bonuses this will be the patch where everyone stacks 2-3 piece bonuses for the massive stat increases. A friend of mine has 5k more hp, 2k more magicka than me all abilities and class/race being equal aside from the fact he doesn't use the healer set, but 2 other sets that add stats. It's just too powerful right now imo.

As another poster said you can stack impen to reduce crit damage... except that impen values on PTS are the same as they are on live. Thus, 450 impen for me on live makes it so I very rarely get crit, and on the PTS it just reduces the critical damage I take by 14%. This means the enemy gets a 43% crit damage buff on me. It is not powerful. Even if you went 7/7 impen it's only going to increase very little. There's a Champion System skill to spec into to also reduce this, but as we've all figured out it's going to take forever to get even halfway to reducing that crit damage, and completely negating it seems like it's just not possible until you can get 100 points into that single passive. This needs a change before live, more than anything else.

Editing to say that I want crits to be powerful, and that if anything impen should work as it does on live with reduced values. I don't want the game to end up being where I spec out of crit anyway because my crits will do no damage once people level up. Critical strike chance in the patch has actually been nerfed. The issues with high crit are because certain things are stacking when they shouldn't be. Such cases should be reported as bugs.

Cody

something was off about stamina...

I wont blame the CS system, ill blame screwed up scaling to the new resource pool numbers.

DDuke

The more I think of this, the more it makes me believe they intend you to max. out the Champion System passives for blocking etc, to have same kind of survivability as you currently have on live.

This is a good change imo, because it makes you choose between being tanky & dealing DPS (there are some awesome passives for that as well), which is something I've been looking for since the game launched.

If they had kept the current blocking costs etc, you'd be virtually unkillable after maxing out Champion System.

Now they just need to balance dmg shields & healing, which have become even more important now... perhaps make them require CPs & proper gear also to be useful? I think my idea of separating spell dmg & healing into different stats could still be a good idea

And I wouldn't mind if they significantly increased the amount of health we get. The more the better (no one likes getting one shot all the time).

Soulac

PvP is totally broken now, shield spam all the way.
After some tests with Araxleon you can just spam Harness/Hardend or Harness/Healing Ward or whatever to survive. You don´t run out of Magicka and u take zero dmg, well done.

Heavy Attacks are incredible powerful, cloak is buggy in a way that u can´t imagine (not negative for NB, negative for their opponents), Snipe is ignoring the brand new Boneshield-Shield and Spellcosts are totally broken.

Instead of taking everything times 10, they changed nearly every value in this game completly different:
- Basestats of Magicka/Stamina AND health is lower now, not only Health.
- Enchantsments on Jewelry are *** und not worthy unless u go for Blockreduction or general Costreduction. Regeneration/dmg glyphs are very low.
- Costs of nearly every Skill are lower now, as example my BASE cost of Veiledstrike on Live is 280, on PTS it´s 2394, that´s not times 10.
Same with Funnelhealth, which is normaly the identical cost like Veiledstrike, but it costs around 800, yes 800, on PTS.
That´s less than my Regeneration.

The PvP in the future:
Shield Spam even more than we already got and infinity Stamina/Magicka for everyone. In addition to that gankers will mostly one hit you as long as you´re not a "tank" with heavy armor and much health.

gg wp.

Araxleon

Soulac wrote: »

PvP is totally broken now, shield spam all the way.
After some tests with Araxleon you can just spam Harness/Hardend or Harness/Healing Ward or whatever to survive. You don´t run out of Magicka and u take zero dmg, well done.

Heavy Attacks are incredible powerful, cloak is buggy in a way that u can´t imagine (not negative for NB, negative for their opponents), Snipe is ignoring the brand new Boneshield-Shield and Spellcosts are totally broken.

Instead of taking everything times 10, they changed nearly every value in this game completly different:
- Basestats of Magicka/Stamina AND health is lower now, not only Health.
- Enchantsments on Jewelry are *** und not worthy unless u go for Blockreduction or general Costreduction. Regeneration/dmg glyphs are very low.
- Costs of nearly every Skill are lower now, as example my BASE cost of Veiledstrike on Live is 280, on PTS it´s 2394, that´s not times 10.
Same with Funnelhealth, which is normaly the identical cost like Veiledstrike, but it costs around 800, yes 800, on PTS.
That´s less than my Regeneration.

The PvP in the future:
Shield Spam even more than we already got and infinity Stamina/Magicka for everyone. In addition to that gankers will mostly one hit you as long as you´re not a "tank" with heavy armor and much health.

gg wp.

Also Magicka DPS isnt a thing... you can tank forever with unlimited magicka.
and damage is soo much weaker so magicka builds are basically only useful for healing

Subtomik

As someone who has never had
Anything but sub par dps I feel like my destro single target burst is very strong. If I combo well it seems difficult for most builds to survive

Soulac

Here u go... Skip the record problem, i don´t want to record again..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rjv8L40w7a8

Teargrants

Subtomik wrote: »

As someone who has never had
Anything but sub par dps I feel like my destro single target burst is very strong. If I combo well it seems difficult for most builds to survive

Pictured: Sub-to-milk w/ his staff combo