How to make heavy attacks worthwhile

ArRashid

Right now it seems that the only things heavy attacks are good for are:
- damage for low level characters who don't yet have enough resources/regens to spam several spells
- to replenish a few % of resources when you don't have enough for any skills
- knocking down unbalanced enemy

It's just not worth using heavy attacks unless you're a healer with resto staff. Their damage, even AFTER buffing them with things like Flawless Dawnbreaker, Surge or Molten Weapons (which takes almost 2 seconds to activate and last for only 2 pitiful heavy attacks till you have to reactivate it..), they still deal hardly equal damage over ~4 seconds (that is including animation and all) what an instant skill does over 1 second. That's 4x less dps compared to spamming instants/light attacks.


To make weapon based characters truly working, dps should be holding steady whether you spam instant abilities or slowly swing your weapon. Which means increasing damage of moves that take longer to perform and reducing damage of some more "OP" instant casts. So light attack/instant spell should deal less damage than spell with 1.1 sec activation time (+animation) and that spell would deal less damage than fully powered swing of your weapon (which takes around 3 sec just to charge up + animation).

Right now the heavy attacks are just treated as fillers for when you run out of resources.. while it would make WAY MORE SENSE turning that around - making heavy attacks the main source of damage while skills would be just fillers with additional utility, pretty much like most DK's abilities already are (DoT that punishes refreshing, CCs that make mobs immune to CCs for a while, AoE armor reduction for several seconds (but with low damage and DoT to punish repeated casts), passively increasing crit while shooting fireball once in a while on an enemy in range, ...).

Sharee

forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/161031/dk-build-with-63-heavy-attacks-damage

Morvul

most endgame-dps builds actually do "medium attack weaving", which is to say: incorporate animation canceled, partialy charged heavy attacks bevore pretty much every skill useage

Obscure

Yes @ZOS, buff heavy attacks. My build specialising in using them as it's primary source of DPS can only burst in excess of 30k from stealth, and sustain 10-12k DPS that increases the lower health the target becomes whilst constantly keeping my stamina resource full. I want at least 20k sustained and like 50k in burst!

/sarcasm

Erock25

Heavy attacks are in a good place right now.

Joy_Division

Sharee wrote: »

forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/161031/dk-build-with-63-heavy-attacks-damage

Your link is to this thread.

OP is right. But because many of ZoS's abilties / gear do not distinguish between a medium attack (i.e. a canceled heavy attack) and a full heavy attack, buffing them in the sort of ways the OP would like to see will have undesirable consequences.

Sharee

Joy_Division wrote: »

Sharee wrote: »

forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/161031/dk-build-with-63-heavy-attacks-damage

Your link is to this thread.

Hmm, you're right, not sure how that happened. Let's try again

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/161031/dk-build-with-63-heavy-attacks-damage#latest

That thread has some suggestion regarding heavy attacks that make them worthwhile.

ArRashid

Molten Weapons cost a truckload of magicka, take almost 2 seconds of activation animation and last for mere 8 seconds (which means about 2 heavy attacks). That's way too much effort to make things less miserable (but still not quite equal).

Animation canceling is just a plague that should have been eradicated long ago. Oh well, it's not like I actually have time to play ESO more than an hour or two daily even now that it went f2p.. why do I even care..