PTS Patch Notes v1.6.3

Darkintellect

Grao wrote: »

So...


Light Armor - Used to reduce target's spell resistance (?) which would help the entire raid. Now it selfishly increases your spell penetration and your damage alone. For some reason this tastes like a nerf.

ZoS is attempting to make Light Armor unique and valuable with the changes and buffs to Medium and Heavy.

By allowing it to be a debuff, you only eed a single light armor character and everyone in Medium and Heavy armor get the bonus. It's not right and with the boosting of spell resist values for monsters, this was another measure to keep Light Armor in line for penetration and damage where Heavy and Medium armor are focused more on physical attacks.

david.haypreub18_ESO

Lightning Splash, Lightning Splash, Lightning Splash. They keep trying to trumpet it as the salvation of the Sorcerer class...

I hate to tell them, but it's just not that good... and one ability is nowhere near a solution to the problems of the class in general.

Time to try something different.

jcasini222ub17_ESO

Yeah for solo instancing at least allow it to be 2 deaths, mistakes happen and I'd rather not quit an instance just to get the normal difficulty back up.

Vyle_Byte

It has become blatantly obvious to me that ZOS is not and does not intend on listening to any suggestions in dealing with our sorcerers. I have seen some fantastically laid out posts recently that go in to great detail about what is needed, and these posts are completely ignored.

The fact that ZOS is happy with where sorcerers are right now, along with the continuous nerfs every time there is an update tells me they don't care about our thoughts and opinions on the class. They are doing what they want to do with it. Period. Nothing we say is going to change their minds, they don't want a 'sit down' with us, people. No amount of wishing it was so is gonna make it happen.

1.6 = sorcerers rerolling templars.

dylanjaygrobbelaarb16_ESO

rophez_ESO wrote: »

Rydik wrote: »

Mountain's Blessing: This passive ability now grants only one Ultimate every six seconds.
One more "joke" passive ability, thx =\

DK nerfs keep rolling in. Everyone I know is prepping a Templar alt for 1.6.

thats becasue they are the types of players who all rerolled dk, the cycle continues

Grao

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

kurstein wrote: »

Damm slow DL speed on patch I am on a 50/50mb fiber and only get 500kb/s. my normal DL speed is 5-6Mb/s

Do you limit DL speed on PTS?

We don't limit download speed on the PTS.

Sometimes it takes a little time for the distributed patch files to get to their destination. It should speed up. If it doesn't improve shortly, you can try closing the launcher and restarting to see if it speeds up. If your download speed doesn't increase within an hour or so, you could put in a support ticket.

Nice time on that response @ZOS_JessicaFolsom. Sad that no one is addressing the sorcerer's concerns here though.

Even sadder on a personal level that the hours my guild spent discussing sorcerers with you were apparently completely pointless. I can't put on words how upset and disappointed I am right now.

danno8

timidobserver wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

OVERVIEW
Radiant Destruction: The damage for this ability now scales up at the same rate as the Two Handed ability Reverse Slash.

@ZOS_GinaBruno‌
This isn't very useful for someone that doesn't use a two-hander or care how we compare to two-handers. Please add the percentage change just like every other ability that was changed. We should at least be able to gauge exactly how much we were nerfed.

For 2 handed is starts slow at 50% health and kinds goes like this:
50%-40% Health ; 101-125% increase
40%-30% ; 125%-150%
30% - 20% ; 150%- 225%
20%- 10% ; 225%-300%
10%-0% ; 300% - 400%

What's that you say? The max is only 300% on the tooltips? Yah I know. In all my testing the damage was always greater than the listed maximum.

For instance the base damage at 100% health that I tested was 214. The killing blow at less than 10% health was always 750-830. More than 3.5x the base.

The way I figure it it must be considrederd that the base hit is considered 100%, so going to 2x base damage is 100% bonus damage.

edit : % mistake fix.

Enodoc

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

This patch will be approximately 10GB due to updates to the VO throughout the game.

Doesn't look like I'll be participating in this test round then

Alchemy

• Potions granting various major buffs now have effect icons associated with them.
• Alchemy water in Cyrodiil is now Veteran Rank 1. Additionally, water will scale to your level when sourced from (largely solo) instances that scale to your level.

• Sounds promising; that sounds like what I was asking for with respect to the Active Effects section of the Character screen.
• If water is now VR1 in Cyrodiil, where am I supposed to get Level 40 (Filtered) water from? Cyrodiil was the only good source of Filtered Water.

Achievements

• Renamed all Group Challenge achievements to Group Event achievements.

Why? Are they not Challenging enough any more?

timidobserver

danno816_ESO wrote: »

timidobserver wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

OVERVIEW
Radiant Destruction: The damage for this ability now scales up at the same rate as the Two Handed ability Reverse Slash.

@ZOS_GinaBruno‌
This isn't very useful for someone that doesn't use a two-hander or care how we compare to two-handers. Please add the percentage change just like every other ability that was changed. We should at least be able to gauge exactly how much we were nerfed.

For 2 handed is starts slow at 50% health and kinds goes like this:
50%-40% Health ; 1-25% increase
40%-30% ; 25%-50%
30% - 20% ; 50%- 125%
20%- 10% ; 125%-300%
10%-0% ; 300% - 380%

What's that you say? The max is only 300% on the tooltips? Yah I know. In all my testing the damage was always greater than the listed maximum.

For instance the base damage at 100% health that I tested was 214. The killing blow at less than 10% health was always 750-830. More than 3.5x the base.

Yeh, but what I want to know is what radiant destruction was compared to what it is now, like everything else. I want the % decrease. I don't care about two-hander.

Gravord

Still no option to morph one of the dk lashes into stamina/weap dmg

Attorneyatlawl

Ryzium wrote: »

All stormcalling abilities got an increase in cost, that is not counting the increase in cost passively by not having the 10% increase in cost from changing the expert mage passive.

As I know many people have posted, a 10% increase spell power only equates to about 3-4% increase in damage which is a generous statement.

The nerf to Overload, the only good ultimate for solo PvP and PvE, just got super nerfed, and that is after the nerf to Negate Magic. Only have 4% increased damage is ludicrous. I am confised on the "buffs" this ability gives us. since the magicka return is laughable low and doesnt scale off max magicka but rather level.

Surge can now proc on shields which isnt a buff its a fix to a bug. Also because you can now apply on hit effects to shields that means you can crit a shield... a shield that doesnt mitigate any damage. Finally crit surge has a cool down on the heal and power surge cost much more than the mages guild ability entropy and its morphs which gives the same buffs and then some.

People who dont play sorcs dont understand that our dps and utility abilities costs ALLOT. We have the highest costing dps abilities in the game BEFORE 1.6 After 1.6 we are going to have stupid high costs on top of passives and actives that are worthless in every build other than 1.

ie: pets and their passives only work for pet builds. Not to mention the increase health recovery passive and the crit passive which both are worthless.

Sorcs shouldnt become the new DK's and face roll everyone but to nerf a class that has been nerfed since patch 1.1 is very disheartening. Give sorcs an ability that is instant cast and deal physical damage from a reasonable 12m range and no sorc will ever complain again.

To be fair, if sorcs ever got a spammable dps skill with frags we would be supremely powerful since we could shred block spamming classes and have an ability to proc frags with that deal good sustain damage.

END RANT

Where exactly are seeing a cost increase to the spells themselves in those notes? CTRL+F'ing for magicka, storm, and a few ability names comes up with nothing other than the minor passive reduction going away in favor of ~3-4% damage worth of spell power (assuming 3-4 sorc abilities slotted including an ultimate, and your gear loadout having 1700ish spellpower). Not exactly a trivial amount... it adds up just like everything else does .

The overload damage nerf in 1.6.3 is fairly minor in the grand scheme of things considering the massive damage buff it got with the 1.6 patch. They're talking about the tooltip section where it said "This attack gains 12% extra damage.", not the old damage values from 1.5 vs. 1.6. As an example if your old tooltip was 8700dmg on light attacks with it, you now would hit for 8700 * 1.04 = 9048 with it, vs. the pre-change amount of 8700 * 1.12 = 9744. That's around a 7.6% damage increase you're missing out on with it in comparison to 1.6.2, but you're gaining ~3-4% damage from the Expert Mage spelldmg passive which helps bridge the gap mostly regardless. The biggest benefit of overload isn't really in its damage, anyway, though it does hit hard as of 1.6.

Surge proccing on shields isn't a bug fix, since on live you can't crit shields at all anyway . You now can get crit surge heals off of unmitigated damage hits against people's barriers... nothing to scoff at. I'm just glad they got it fixed in time for 1.6. The internal heal cooldown is too minor to really matter at all at this point, since it can be procced about as often as you could generally be hitting 1-2 targets in the first place with crits. Without an internal heal cooldown on it you'd be gaining absolutely absurd amounts of healing especially on aoe, since impenetrable no longer reduces your chance to crit against them but just lowers the bonus damage some. It's a huge net gain, particularly against any higher-tier players you fight since impen was easy to stack to where most people's crit would never even hit them, and your chance even with hugely-stacked crit wouldn't have been very high if you went for a massive-crit build. Great against PUG-lings you would have smashed anyway, but gimps you against the harder fights since you had to sacrifice a lot to pump it to high levels.

I play a sorc, though I'm waiting to take my newer one (currently vr7 and holding) up when 1.6 drops for champ XP. I'd wager most high-end players have one of every class anyway either vr14 or well into the veteran ranks. Having a sorc is nothing particularly special .

You're also wrong about the pet/pet passives only benefiting pet builds. If you put your mind to it you can come up with some very nice and great uses for the exploding familiar + passive, or to a lesser extent the clannfear, since they're instant cast, when you add in that rebate will refund most/all of the cost with a proper amount of magicka. They even auto-die when you swap bars, a nice ease-of-use function for these purposes .

I'll agree the crit passive isn't very good since it only boosts nearby allies, not yourself, at least as of 1.6.2.

Sorcs don't need to be the new DK's. They're already far beyond that in 1.6 from my theorycrafting and testing for PVP purposes. But perhaps most people are making the same mistake of trying to just re-create their existing builds/loadouts on 1.6 when so much has changed, ending up with low hitpoints + too much damage + low mitigation. I spent a few days and have come up with multiple builds that are positively brutal for PVP so much so that it'll make my quite-powerful DK look like a joke (I've yet to do any pve theorycrafting for the sorc since I don't have any particular want to play one for raids/etc and will just continue using my dk for those purposes).

Heads-up: major changes in 1.6 as far as stats, mitigation, and ability tweaks go, in addition to the buff system & how it stacks/doesn't stack. And the champion point system additionally, not to mention crit being WYSIWYG & health not having a giant bonus over mag/stam per gear level or attribute point allocations. That point seems to be lost on most here: bringing your same old football to a game that now more resembles football 2.0 isn't going to cut it.

(And no, I will not post up everything for copying , if you want the power you will need to plan it, test it, and math it out yourself.)

Rioht

Well, its official. My sorc is now my farm alt.

Rolling a Templar...

Navaya

Siphoning attack got buffed, nice!

Grao

Rioht wrote: »

Well, its official. My sorc is now my farm alt.

Rolling a Templar...

Good luck... I started a DK when ZoS announced the nerfs to Negate, but honestly... This game is sounding less appealing with every new patch.

EsORising

So everyone and their mama was running around with destro staffs and skirts because it was so OP and ZoS balances it a little and everyone cries I'm nerfe and say sorc and DK are useless. Are you kidding me? They barely touched you and they added a + for every -. Maybe if you try to change it up besides clicking impulse 10x to kill 10 mobs at once you might find out they are still good classes. You might not be able to do OP stuff like kill 15 mobs at once anymore but your still a good class.

With NB as my main i couldn't dream of AOE farming like DK's, sorcs, and temps but I'm happy with NB anyways. I'm glad they balanced things out and DK and Sorc are not useless. You just need to get used to being average instead of OP, which was the point of the balance.

danno8

timidobserver wrote: »

danno816_ESO wrote: »

timidobserver wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

OVERVIEW
Radiant Destruction: The damage for this ability now scales up at the same rate as the Two Handed ability Reverse Slash.

@ZOS_GinaBruno‌
This isn't very useful for someone that doesn't use a two-hander or care how we compare to two-handers. Please add the percentage change just like every other ability that was changed. We should at least be able to gauge exactly how much we were nerfed.

For 2 handed is starts slow at 50% health and kinds goes like this:
50%-40% Health ; 1-25% increase
40%-30% ; 25%-50%
30% - 20% ; 50%- 125%
20%- 10% ; 125%-300%
10%-0% ; 300% - 380%

What's that you say? The max is only 300% on the tooltips? Yah I know. In all my testing the damage was always greater than the listed maximum.

For instance the base damage at 100% health that I tested was 214. The killing blow at less than 10% health was always 750-830. More than 3.5x the base.

Yeh, but what I want to know is what radiant destruction was compared to what it is now, like everything else. I want the % decrease. I don't care about two-hander.

Ah, well I believe Radiant was scaling faster in the early stages (50% health), and I agree it was very fast to get someone from 50% to dead. It needed tweaking.

Below 20% looks the same to me, from what I remember testing. It's basically death to anyone in that range.

timidobserver

EsORising wrote: »

So everyone and their mama was running around with destro staffs and skirts because it was so OP and ZoS balances it a little and everyone cries I'm nerfe and say sorc and DK are useless. Are you kidding me? They barely touched you and they added a + for every -. Maybe if you try to change it up besides clicking impulse 10x to kill 10 mobs at once you might find out they are still good classes. You might not be able to do OP stuff like kill 15 mobs at once anymore but your still a good class.

With NB as my main i couldn't dream of AOE farming like DK's, sorcs, and temps but I'm happy with NB anyways. I'm glad they balanced things out and DK and Sorc are not useless. You just need to get used to being average instead of OP, which was the point of the balance.

I AoE farm just fine on my NB.

Folkb

Flesh Atronachs throughout Tamriel are beefier, spikier, and more disgusting than ever before.

This has been on my mind since launch lol

Valen_Byte

Attorneyatlawl wrote: »

Ryzium wrote: »

All stormcalling abilities got an increase in cost, that is not counting the increase in cost passively by not having the 10% increase in cost from changing the expert mage passive.

As I know many people have posted, a 10% increase spell power only equates to about 3-4% increase in damage which is a generous statement.

The nerf to Overload, the only good ultimate for solo PvP and PvE, just got super nerfed, and that is after the nerf to Negate Magic. Only have 4% increased damage is ludicrous. I am confised on the "buffs" this ability gives us. since the magicka return is laughable low and doesnt scale off max magicka but rather level.

Surge can now proc on shields which isnt a buff its a fix to a bug. Also because you can now apply on hit effects to shields that means you can crit a shield... a shield that doesnt mitigate any damage. Finally crit surge has a cool down on the heal and power surge cost much more than the mages guild ability entropy and its morphs which gives the same buffs and then some.

People who dont play sorcs dont understand that our dps and utility abilities costs ALLOT. We have the highest costing dps abilities in the game BEFORE 1.6 After 1.6 we are going to have stupid high costs on top of passives and actives that are worthless in every build other than 1.

ie: pets and their passives only work for pet builds. Not to mention the increase health recovery passive and the crit passive which both are worthless.

Sorcs shouldnt become the new DK's and face roll everyone but to nerf a class that has been nerfed since patch 1.1 is very disheartening. Give sorcs an ability that is instant cast and deal physical damage from a reasonable 12m range and no sorc will ever complain again.

To be fair, if sorcs ever got a spammable dps skill with frags we would be supremely powerful since we could shred block spamming classes and have an ability to proc frags with that deal good sustain damage.

END RANT

(I've yet to do any pve theorycrafting for the sorc since I don't have any particular want to play one for raids/etc and will just continue using my dk for those purposes).

Gee, I wonder why that is??

glak

Medium Armor
Agility: Fixed an issue where this passive ability was granting spell damage in addition to weapon power.

@ZOS_GinaBruno‌
Serious question.
Is extra spell power being given to wielders of melee DPS weapons a feature or also an issue?

Gyudan

Suggestion:
Step 1: Keep Expert Mage as it was (reduced cost on Storm Calling Spells)
Step 2: Change Daedric Protection (20% health recovery) to Daedric Might (2% spell power for each sorcerer ability slotted)
Step 3: Enjoy a Piña colada
@ZOS_GinaBruno

edit: this is not 100% realistic since pets don't benefit from spell bower, but basically moving around passives from one tree to the other (Unholy Knowledge could be with summoning) and getting rid of the current Daedric Protection could help.

Samadhi

@ZOS_GinaBruno‌

Please give my thanks to whoever has been working on the Sorcerer changes.
Looking forward to trying some new and different things with my Sorcerer; we've gotten some interesting changes over the past few patches.
Appreciate the creative problem solving that has gone into providing these changes. Glad that the company decided to take alternate routes and think outside of the box, instead of just making the box more cushioned.

chrisvoyerb16_ESO

How come my characters have not been copied? I do not want to start from the beginning again. When can we expect them to be copied?

Gyudan

chrisvoyerb16_ESO wrote: »

How come my characters have not been copied? I do not want to start from the beginning again. When can we expect them to be copied?

It's EU's turn this week. Which server are you from?

Sleevez340

Mountain's Blessing: This passive ability now grants only one Ultimate every six seconds.

Prism: This passive now grants only one Ultimate every six seconds at rank 1. The Ultimate gain per six seconds at rank 2 has been increased from 2 to 3.

Is this real? I play a templar, but for christs sakes knock it off. Its very clear that you are just picking a class and making op for now, this is some grade a blizzard bulls***. This is a BLATANT idiotic change. How can you think your player base is so blind? I can't fathom the thought process that triggers something so ridiculous.

chrisvoyerb16_ESO

I am on North American server. Can I just switch server?

Edhelas_Naven

All you people crying Nerf! Nerf! Nerf!, as if it is the end of the world, don't you think that someone at ZOS must surely be reading all your complaints as you unravel how you play the game.

Just because you complained about something and the changes made do not suit you, does not mean they are not listening. There must be a reason behind them choosing to make the change that way and even publish it in patch notes. Perhaps to dispell the notion of, this class build will always be the best for that class. And as the change is still on the test server, things may still change after testing.

Rather than cry doom, ask why they have made such a change, and if you can test, you test and give feedback. The developers know all the underlying mechanics that we players may not be able to see immediately and in addition, possible exploits, or rather that class build that exploits something somehow that gives an unfair advantage.

Similarly if you are looking for that build where you just want to spam skills without engaging and reacting to the world they have designed for you to explore, then you really should rethink your approach to the game. Mere suggestion not an order. Those numbers is really not all there is.

Why someone would limit thier class build creativity to just a set of 12 active skills on thier action bar as the be all end all, when there are many skills available to choose from is beyond me. I cannot tell you how you should build your character but if a group of players insists that a given set of 12 active skills is the best in a given class, neglecting all the other skills available, this game will be a bore.

david.haypreub18_ESO wrote: »

Lightning Splash, Lightning Splash, Lightning Splash. They keep trying to trumpet it as the salvation of the Sorcerer class...

I hate to tell them, but it's just not that good... and one ability is nowhere near a solution to the problems of the class in general.

Time to try something different.

Yes it is time to try something different, if you keep playing the same thing, smashing the same skills, it gets boring for a while.

You have alot of skill points to try different active skills and if you can survive with it, and it is effective in the task at hand, and also you enjoy it during your adventures with or without a group, you will not cry doom always when there is a change. Such changes open doors for experimentation adding more enjoyment to the game.

Grao

Darkintellect wrote: »

Grao wrote: »

So...


Light Armor - Used to reduce target's spell resistance (?) which would help the entire raid. Now it selfishly increases your spell penetration and your damage alone. For some reason this tastes like a nerf.

ZoS is attempting to make Light Armor unique and valuable with the changes and buffs to Medium and Heavy.

By allowing it to be a debuff, you only eed a single light armor character and everyone in Medium and Heavy armor get the bonus. It's not right and with the boosting of spell resist values for monsters, this was another measure to keep Light Armor in line for penetration and damage where Heavy and Medium armor are focused more on physical attacks.

Do you think the loss of the other DPSes will be compensate by an increase on the one caster using light armor DPS? I doubt. So in the end, this is a nerf to light armor general damage.

Grao

Sleevez340 wrote: »

Mountain's Blessing: This passive ability now grants only one Ultimate every six seconds.

Prism: This passive now grants only one Ultimate every six seconds at rank 1. The Ultimate gain per six seconds at rank 2 has been increased from 2 to 3.

Is this real? I play a templar, but for christs sakes knock it off. Its very clear that you are just picking a class and making op for now, this is some grade a blizzard bulls***. This is a BLATANT idiotic change. How can you think your player base is so blind? I can't fathom the thought process that triggers something so ridiculous.

It is the Age of Templars!

Grao

Edhelas_Naven wrote: »

All you people crying Nerf! Nerf! Nerf!, as if it is the end of the world, don't you think that someone at ZOS must surely be reading all your complaints as you unravel how you play the game.

Just because you complained about something and the changes made do not suit you, does not mean they are not listening. There must be a reason behind them choosing to make the change that way and even publish it in patch notes. Perhaps to dispell the notion of, this class build will always be the best for that class. And as the change is still on the test server, things may still change after testing.

Rather than cry doom, ask why they have made such a change, and if you can test, you test and give feedback. The developers know all the underlying mechanics that we players may not be able to see immediately and in addition, possible exploits, or rather that class build that exploits something somehow that gives an unfair advantage.

Similarly if you are looking for that build where you just want to spam skills without engaging and reacting to the world they have designed for you to explore, then you really should rethink your approach to the game. Mere suggestion not an order. Those numbers is really not all there is.

Why someone would limit thier class build creativity to just a set of 12 active skills on thier action bar as the be all end all, when there are many skills available to choose from is beyond me. I cannot tell you how you should build your character but if a group of players insists that a given set of 12 active skills is the best in a given class, neglecting all the other skills available, this game will be a bore.

david.haypreub18_ESO wrote: »

Lightning Splash, Lightning Splash, Lightning Splash. They keep trying to trumpet it as the salvation of the Sorcerer class...

I hate to tell them, but it's just not that good... and one ability is nowhere near a solution to the problems of the class in general.

Time to try something different.

Yes it is time to try something different, if you keep playing the same thing, smashing the same skills, it gets boring for a while.

You have alot of skill points to try different active skills and if you can survive with it, and it is effective in the task at hand, and also you enjoy it during your adventures with or without a group, you will not cry doom always when there is a change. Such changes open doors for experimentation adding more enjoyment to the game.

I am sorry, we've all been asking Zenimax to explain how their process work for months and so far they've been very tight lipped.

Zenimax doesn't offer explanations, just decisions. They don't care if we understand where those changes are coming from as long as we accept them, keep paying for the game and stop complaining on the forums.