Dark Brotherhood Combat Changes

Jade1986

Wrobel wrote: »

In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.

Heavy Armor
A pillar of the ESO experience is freedom of exploration and being able to play how you want. We want you to create characters that are fun, while still being successful in combat. To support this goal, all three armor types need to be effective in multiple situations. Our changes to Heavy Armor focused on giving more resources and more damage, while retaining the feel of a character in heavy armor. We also needed to be careful of not invalidating light or medium armor usage; All 3 armor types must be desirable. This means Heavy Armor needs to be useful for tanking, but also effective at dealing damage. It’s a fine line to walk. To achieve this, we added a new passive that gives increased Weapon and Spell damage, but only when you are hit. This, in addition to the resource gains from Constitution, help distinguish the heavy armor playstyle from light and medium. The longer the battle goes and the more hits you take, the more of an advantage you accumulate. This makes using elemental spells, heals, or melee attacks in full heavy armor powerful. Heavy Armor has more resources and damage than before, but it’s still less than that of light or medium armor. Light and medium armor give you a little more damage and resources, while Heavy Armor gives you a little more survivability. Simply equipping Heavy Armor doesn’t make you an unkillable fortress, and wearing all light armor doesn’t make you a piñata. However, other customization options such as Enchantments, Traits, the Champion System, and attribute point spends will move you in the direction of your choosing.

Charges
For player abilities, reliability is our top priority. We have continued to improve the reliability and responsiveness of charge abilities (specifically Focused Charge, Critical Charge, Shield Charge) over the past few updates. Issues where you couldn’t activate an ability or weapon swap immediately after charging were fixed. With this update, we’ve worked to make charges fire more reliably when on uneven terrain. This issue was caused by having to wait for the server to calculate a path between the caster and target before starting the movement, and often times this calculation was failing. We’ve changed how charges work under the hood so you can now charge up hills and down stairs. In order to increase the reliability of these abilities, we’re also allowing you to charge across gaps in terrain. There is still a height restriction, so you won’t be able to charge up a keep wall. Our goal is to have abilities firing consistently while also maintaining as much realism as possible. We'll have additional fixes for this going into the next PTS update. Please provide us with as much detail as possible if you are still having issues with these abilities.

Damage Shields
Damage shields are extremely powerful because they allow you to build your character fully towards offense while still retaining a strong defense. When adjusting damage shields, it was important to us that they remained powerful abilities that players love to use. We also wanted to maintain the diverse range of shield strengths in the game to avoid homogenization. Some damage shields like the Tri Focus Frost Staff passive give small damage shields, the Magma Shell ultimate gives an entire health bar, and Steadfast Ward gives a dynamic value based on the target’s health

Ultimately, we want to see you commit to being either offensive or defensive when using damage shields, instead of both simultaneously. Decreasing the duration of all damage shields to 6 seconds means that they are just as powerful for stopping high amounts of burst damage. However, there is now less safety with the decreased duration and more skill is required to activate damage shields at the correct time. If you spend 6 seconds trying to finish off someone and get a kill, your shields will drop and you’ll be vulnerable to a counter attack. This change allows damage shields to be strong, lets you continue stacking shields if you wish, but is much more challenging to play offensively at the same time.

Vampire
We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash. Stage 4 gives maximum cost reduction on abilities and full power from all passives, so it’s great when the fires are out. Stages are now 6 hours long, so you have plenty of time to complete a dungeon in your desired stage.

To give more control over vampirism stages, you can now activate a vampire ability to remove 30 minutes from the timer. Each ability activation plunges you deeper into vampirism, so use them carefully.

To go hand in hand with the updates to how vampire works, we’ve also updated the abilities and made them more powerful. Mist Form removes roots currently on your character, making it much easier for vampires to escape sticky situations and helps combat players who use multiple snares. Drain Essence now heals for much more, but it continues to “snapshot” your health value on activation. This mean if you cast the ability at high health, it will heal you for a small amount, even if your health dips low. If you activate it when you are very low health, it will provide a strong heal every tick, even if you receive healing from another source. This helps provide the feeling we are looking for with vampire: High risk, high reward.

Fighters Guild
The Fighters Guild abilities were previously pretty niche and only useful in specific situations. We wanted to make them more broadly applicable, in the same way the Mages Guild is useful for all Magicka-based players who have always had more options in choosing skills. We wanted to broaden the toolkit for stamina, and now Fighters Guild abilities are useful for all stamina characters. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the flavor and personality that Fighters Guild offers. The first step we took was to remove the Undead or Daedra requirement from all abilities and make them deal their bonus effects to all types of enemies. To keep the monster hunter theme, we put a 20% damage bonus to Undead and Daedra on the Skilled Tracker passive. To make these all useful for stamina builds, we changed their damage type to physical so they scale with armor penetration, weapon critical, and the Champion star Mighty. We’re expecting to see a lot more players using Fighters Guild abilities specifically in overland, dungeon, and PvP areas.

Improved Item Traits
Every part of a boss fight should feel awesome in ESO. Combat is fluid and the bosses have a lot of cool abilities, but sometimes the loot can be disappointing. We want all item traits to be useful, and bosses to have more loot. Farming a boss for item drops is great for players who want to collect every set, or players looking to get a specific set with a specific trait. For example, the Exploration trait was a clear choice for redesign since the world is a finite size, and eventually it’s all revealed. We also wanted all traits to exclusively have combat bonuses. Exploration isn’t something you used while fighting monsters, just when running around. All of the newly updated traits are effective while in combat. Training is another example of a trait that, previously, could become less desirable as you progress through the game. Now, it increases XP from kills, so it will continue to help you progress after level 50 and your skill lines are maxed. Some traits like Divines and Infused Armor are already popular so we left them as-is. With this update, high-level content will be dropping items more frequently and with a wider variety of items. Maelstrom Arena now gives a guaranteed set drop after every level, and Sanctum Ophidia will give a set drop for every boss kill. Overall, expect to see set items dropping more frequently and in a greater variety of traits.

The combat team will continue throughout PTS working on bug fixes, balance, and polish of these new features. We'd love it if you hopped on PTS and let us know what you think.

Yeahhhhh, except light armor keeps their spell cost reduction, medium keeps their roll dodge cost reduction, and heavy gets shafted once again, and loses their block cost reduction. Heavy needing sweeping buffs TO ALL THEIR passives, no one EVER asked for passives to be removed -ever- .

bowmanz607

Junkogen wrote: »

Wrobel wrote: »

In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.

Heavy Armor
A pillar of the ESO experience is freedom of exploration and being able to play how you want. We want you to create characters that are fun, while still being successful in combat. To support this goal, all three armor types need to be effective in multiple situations. Our changes to Heavy Armor focused on giving more resources and more damage, while retaining the feel of a character in heavy armor. We also needed to be careful of not invalidating light or medium armor usage; All 3 armor types must be desirable. This means Heavy Armor needs to be useful for tanking, but also effective at dealing damage. It’s a fine line to walk. To achieve this, we added a new passive that gives increased Weapon and Spell damage, but only when you are hit. This, in addition to the resource gains from Constitution, help distinguish the heavy armor playstyle from light and medium. The longer the battle goes and the more hits you take, the more of an advantage you accumulate. This makes using elemental spells, heals, or melee attacks in full heavy armor powerful. Heavy Armor has more resources and damage than before, but it’s still less than that of light or medium armor. Light and medium armor give you a little more damage and resources, while Heavy Armor gives you a little more survivability. Simply equipping Heavy Armor doesn’t make you an unkillable fortress, and wearing all light armor doesn’t make you a piñata. However, other customization options such as Enchantments, Traits, the Champion System, and attribute point spends will move you in the direction of your choosing.

Charges
For player abilities, reliability is our top priority. We have continued to improve the reliability and responsiveness of charge abilities (specifically Focused Charge, Critical Charge, Shield Charge) over the past few updates. Issues where you couldn’t activate an ability or weapon swap immediately after charging were fixed. With this update, we’ve worked to make charges fire more reliably when on uneven terrain. This issue was caused by having to wait for the server to calculate a path between the caster and target before starting the movement, and often times this calculation was failing. We’ve changed how charges work under the hood so you can now charge up hills and down stairs. In order to increase the reliability of these abilities, we’re also allowing you to charge across gaps in terrain. There is still a height restriction, so you won’t be able to charge up a keep wall. Our goal is to have abilities firing consistently while also maintaining as much realism as possible. We'll have additional fixes for this going into the next PTS update. Please provide us with as much detail as possible if you are still having issues with these abilities.

Damage Shields
Damage shields are extremely powerful because they allow you to build your character fully towards offense while still retaining a strong defense. When adjusting damage shields, it was important to us that they remained powerful abilities that players love to use. We also wanted to maintain the diverse range of shield strengths in the game to avoid homogenization. Some damage shields like the Tri Focus Frost Staff passive give small damage shields, the Magma Shell ultimate gives an entire health bar, and Steadfast Ward gives a dynamic value based on the target’s health

Ultimately, we want to see you commit to being either offensive or defensive when using damage shields, instead of both simultaneously. Decreasing the duration of all damage shields to 6 seconds means that they are just as powerful for stopping high amounts of burst damage. However, there is now less safety with the decreased duration and more skill is required to activate damage shields at the correct time. If you spend 6 seconds trying to finish off someone and get a kill, your shields will drop and you’ll be vulnerable to a counter attack. This change allows damage shields to be strong, lets you continue stacking shields if you wish, but is much more challenging to play offensively at the same time.

Vampire
We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash. Stage 4 gives maximum cost reduction on abilities and full power from all passives, so it’s great when the fires are out. Stages are now 6 hours long, so you have plenty of time to complete a dungeon in your desired stage.

To give more control over vampirism stages, you can now activate a vampire ability to remove 30 minutes from the timer. Each ability activation plunges you deeper into vampirism, so use them carefully.

To go hand in hand with the updates to how vampire works, we’ve also updated the abilities and made them more powerful. Mist Form removes roots currently on your character, making it much easier for vampires to escape sticky situations and helps combat players who use multiple snares. Drain Essence now heals for much more, but it continues to “snapshot” your health value on activation. This mean if you cast the ability at high health, it will heal you for a small amount, even if your health dips low. If you activate it when you are very low health, it will provide a strong heal every tick, even if you receive healing from another source. This helps provide the feeling we are looking for with vampire: High risk, high reward.

Fighters Guild
The Fighters Guild abilities were previously pretty niche and only useful in specific situations. We wanted to make them more broadly applicable, in the same way the Mages Guild is useful for all Magicka-based players who have always had more options in choosing skills. We wanted to broaden the toolkit for stamina, and now Fighters Guild abilities are useful for all stamina characters. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the flavor and personality that Fighters Guild offers. The first step we took was to remove the Undead or Daedra requirement from all abilities and make them deal their bonus effects to all types of enemies. To keep the monster hunter theme, we put a 20% damage bonus to Undead and Daedra on the Skilled Tracker passive. To make these all useful for stamina builds, we changed their damage type to physical so they scale with armor penetration, weapon critical, and the Champion star Mighty. We’re expecting to see a lot more players using Fighters Guild abilities specifically in overland, dungeon, and PvP areas.

Improved Item Traits
Every part of a boss fight should feel awesome in ESO. Combat is fluid and the bosses have a lot of cool abilities, but sometimes the loot can be disappointing. We want all item traits to be useful, and bosses to have more loot. Farming a boss for item drops is great for players who want to collect every set, or players looking to get a specific set with a specific trait. For example, the Exploration trait was a clear choice for redesign since the world is a finite size, and eventually it’s all revealed. We also wanted all traits to exclusively have combat bonuses. Exploration isn’t something you used while fighting monsters, just when running around. All of the newly updated traits are effective while in combat. Training is another example of a trait that, previously, could become less desirable as you progress through the game. Now, it increases XP from kills, so it will continue to help you progress after level 50 and your skill lines are maxed. Some traits like Divines and Infused Armor are already popular so we left them as-is. With this update, high-level content will be dropping items more frequently and with a wider variety of items. Maelstrom Arena now gives a guaranteed set drop after every level, and Sanctum Ophidia will give a set drop for every boss kill. Overall, expect to see set items dropping more frequently and in a greater variety of traits.

The combat team will continue throughout PTS working on bug fixes, balance, and polish of these new features. We'd love it if you hopped on PTS and let us know what you think.

Are there any plans to tackle the persisting racial passives imbalance in the future? You're a smart guy. You know what I'm talking about. Your team ha done a lot to balance other game systems but have given up on racial passives. The "health" races are still at a significant disadvantage compared to others. When will this be addressed? Have you considered eliminating the problem entirely by removing max stamina and magicka from damage calculations?

Argonian racial passives are largely deadweight, only functional in niche situations and much less useful compared to other races.

they should be doing races when barber shop comes. They said they dont want to do any major racial changes until they introduced race change, so people dont get stuck with a race they did not want from te changes. Racial changes come with barber shop. They have hinted at (if not said on one of the eso lives) that the barber shop will be q3.

Lord_Eomer

Sorcerer shield nerf down to 6 second is a big issue for me to play as sorcerer...

GRYM.LOCKE

Lord_Dexter wrote: »

Sorcerer shield nerf down to 6 second is a big issue for me to play as sorcerer...

its not the fact it lasts 6 seconds its the way combat works 6 seconds is to low to add into a useful rotation

1: There are areas and maps and zones and instances where skills don't fire etc
2: The game was designed about planning and acting now they want you to react only?
3: They need to get it through there THICK heads PVE Should not be affected by PVP

Nuff said

bowmanz607

GRYM.LOCKE wrote: »

Lord_Dexter wrote: »

Sorcerer shield nerf down to 6 second is a big issue for me to play as sorcerer...

its not the fact it lasts 6 seconds its the way combat works 6 seconds is to low to add into a useful rotation

1: There are areas and maps and zones and instances where skills don't fire etc
2: The game was designed about planning and acting now they want you to react only?
3: They need to get it through there THICK heads PVE Should not be affected by PVP

Nuff said

Use the 10 second shield morph

Didaco

I'll ask here, I don't wanna fill the forum with trash one-question threads: how much more will the cost on dodge rolls and break free be? How much cost reduction will the new well-fitted trait give?

What about the increase in Hardened ward cost?

joshhh_nb

Fix clouding swarm @ZOS_GinaBruno

Junkogen

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

Wrobel wrote: »

In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.

Heavy Armor
A pillar of the ESO experience is freedom of exploration and being able to play how you want. We want you to create characters that are fun, while still being successful in combat. To support this goal, all three armor types need to be effective in multiple situations. Our changes to Heavy Armor focused on giving more resources and more damage, while retaining the feel of a character in heavy armor. We also needed to be careful of not invalidating light or medium armor usage; All 3 armor types must be desirable. This means Heavy Armor needs to be useful for tanking, but also effective at dealing damage. It’s a fine line to walk. To achieve this, we added a new passive that gives increased Weapon and Spell damage, but only when you are hit. This, in addition to the resource gains from Constitution, help distinguish the heavy armor playstyle from light and medium. The longer the battle goes and the more hits you take, the more of an advantage you accumulate. This makes using elemental spells, heals, or melee attacks in full heavy armor powerful. Heavy Armor has more resources and damage than before, but it’s still less than that of light or medium armor. Light and medium armor give you a little more damage and resources, while Heavy Armor gives you a little more survivability. Simply equipping Heavy Armor doesn’t make you an unkillable fortress, and wearing all light armor doesn’t make you a piñata. However, other customization options such as Enchantments, Traits, the Champion System, and attribute point spends will move you in the direction of your choosing.

Charges
For player abilities, reliability is our top priority. We have continued to improve the reliability and responsiveness of charge abilities (specifically Focused Charge, Critical Charge, Shield Charge) over the past few updates. Issues where you couldn’t activate an ability or weapon swap immediately after charging were fixed. With this update, we’ve worked to make charges fire more reliably when on uneven terrain. This issue was caused by having to wait for the server to calculate a path between the caster and target before starting the movement, and often times this calculation was failing. We’ve changed how charges work under the hood so you can now charge up hills and down stairs. In order to increase the reliability of these abilities, we’re also allowing you to charge across gaps in terrain. There is still a height restriction, so you won’t be able to charge up a keep wall. Our goal is to have abilities firing consistently while also maintaining as much realism as possible. We'll have additional fixes for this going into the next PTS update. Please provide us with as much detail as possible if you are still having issues with these abilities.

Damage Shields
Damage shields are extremely powerful because they allow you to build your character fully towards offense while still retaining a strong defense. When adjusting damage shields, it was important to us that they remained powerful abilities that players love to use. We also wanted to maintain the diverse range of shield strengths in the game to avoid homogenization. Some damage shields like the Tri Focus Frost Staff passive give small damage shields, the Magma Shell ultimate gives an entire health bar, and Steadfast Ward gives a dynamic value based on the target’s health

Ultimately, we want to see you commit to being either offensive or defensive when using damage shields, instead of both simultaneously. Decreasing the duration of all damage shields to 6 seconds means that they are just as powerful for stopping high amounts of burst damage. However, there is now less safety with the decreased duration and more skill is required to activate damage shields at the correct time. If you spend 6 seconds trying to finish off someone and get a kill, your shields will drop and you’ll be vulnerable to a counter attack. This change allows damage shields to be strong, lets you continue stacking shields if you wish, but is much more challenging to play offensively at the same time.

Vampire
We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash. Stage 4 gives maximum cost reduction on abilities and full power from all passives, so it’s great when the fires are out. Stages are now 6 hours long, so you have plenty of time to complete a dungeon in your desired stage.

To give more control over vampirism stages, you can now activate a vampire ability to remove 30 minutes from the timer. Each ability activation plunges you deeper into vampirism, so use them carefully.

To go hand in hand with the updates to how vampire works, we’ve also updated the abilities and made them more powerful. Mist Form removes roots currently on your character, making it much easier for vampires to escape sticky situations and helps combat players who use multiple snares. Drain Essence now heals for much more, but it continues to “snapshot” your health value on activation. This mean if you cast the ability at high health, it will heal you for a small amount, even if your health dips low. If you activate it when you are very low health, it will provide a strong heal every tick, even if you receive healing from another source. This helps provide the feeling we are looking for with vampire: High risk, high reward.

Fighters Guild
The Fighters Guild abilities were previously pretty niche and only useful in specific situations. We wanted to make them more broadly applicable, in the same way the Mages Guild is useful for all Magicka-based players who have always had more options in choosing skills. We wanted to broaden the toolkit for stamina, and now Fighters Guild abilities are useful for all stamina characters. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the flavor and personality that Fighters Guild offers. The first step we took was to remove the Undead or Daedra requirement from all abilities and make them deal their bonus effects to all types of enemies. To keep the monster hunter theme, we put a 20% damage bonus to Undead and Daedra on the Skilled Tracker passive. To make these all useful for stamina builds, we changed their damage type to physical so they scale with armor penetration, weapon critical, and the Champion star Mighty. We’re expecting to see a lot more players using Fighters Guild abilities specifically in overland, dungeon, and PvP areas.

Improved Item Traits
Every part of a boss fight should feel awesome in ESO. Combat is fluid and the bosses have a lot of cool abilities, but sometimes the loot can be disappointing. We want all item traits to be useful, and bosses to have more loot. Farming a boss for item drops is great for players who want to collect every set, or players looking to get a specific set with a specific trait. For example, the Exploration trait was a clear choice for redesign since the world is a finite size, and eventually it’s all revealed. We also wanted all traits to exclusively have combat bonuses. Exploration isn’t something you used while fighting monsters, just when running around. All of the newly updated traits are effective while in combat. Training is another example of a trait that, previously, could become less desirable as you progress through the game. Now, it increases XP from kills, so it will continue to help you progress after level 50 and your skill lines are maxed. Some traits like Divines and Infused Armor are already popular so we left them as-is. With this update, high-level content will be dropping items more frequently and with a wider variety of items. Maelstrom Arena now gives a guaranteed set drop after every level, and Sanctum Ophidia will give a set drop for every boss kill. Overall, expect to see set items dropping more frequently and in a greater variety of traits.

The combat team will continue throughout PTS working on bug fixes, balance, and polish of these new features. We'd love it if you hopped on PTS and let us know what you think.

Are there any plans to tackle the persisting racial passives imbalance in the future? You're a smart guy. You know what I'm talking about. Your team ha done a lot to balance other game systems but have given up on racial passives. The "health" races are still at a significant disadvantage compared to others. When will this be addressed? Have you considered eliminating the problem entirely by removing max stamina and magicka from damage calculations?

Argonian racial passives are largely deadweight, only functional in niche situations and much less useful compared to other races.

they should be doing races when barber shop comes. They said they dont want to do any major racial changes until they introduced race change, so people dont get stuck with a race they did not want from te changes. Racial changes come with barber shop. They have hinted at (if not said on one of the eso lives) that the barber shop will be q3.

You think they're actually going to make any major changes, though? I get the feeling that we're stuck with what's currently in place and if they implement a race change these are our options. It seem like they think it's balanced right now and nothing more needs to be done.

bowmanz607

Junkogen wrote: »

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

Wrobel wrote: »

In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.

Heavy Armor
A pillar of the ESO experience is freedom of exploration and being able to play how you want. We want you to create characters that are fun, while still being successful in combat. To support this goal, all three armor types need to be effective in multiple situations. Our changes to Heavy Armor focused on giving more resources and more damage, while retaining the feel of a character in heavy armor. We also needed to be careful of not invalidating light or medium armor usage; All 3 armor types must be desirable. This means Heavy Armor needs to be useful for tanking, but also effective at dealing damage. It’s a fine line to walk. To achieve this, we added a new passive that gives increased Weapon and Spell damage, but only when you are hit. This, in addition to the resource gains from Constitution, help distinguish the heavy armor playstyle from light and medium. The longer the battle goes and the more hits you take, the more of an advantage you accumulate. This makes using elemental spells, heals, or melee attacks in full heavy armor powerful. Heavy Armor has more resources and damage than before, but it’s still less than that of light or medium armor. Light and medium armor give you a little more damage and resources, while Heavy Armor gives you a little more survivability. Simply equipping Heavy Armor doesn’t make you an unkillable fortress, and wearing all light armor doesn’t make you a piñata. However, other customization options such as Enchantments, Traits, the Champion System, and attribute point spends will move you in the direction of your choosing.

Charges
For player abilities, reliability is our top priority. We have continued to improve the reliability and responsiveness of charge abilities (specifically Focused Charge, Critical Charge, Shield Charge) over the past few updates. Issues where you couldn’t activate an ability or weapon swap immediately after charging were fixed. With this update, we’ve worked to make charges fire more reliably when on uneven terrain. This issue was caused by having to wait for the server to calculate a path between the caster and target before starting the movement, and often times this calculation was failing. We’ve changed how charges work under the hood so you can now charge up hills and down stairs. In order to increase the reliability of these abilities, we’re also allowing you to charge across gaps in terrain. There is still a height restriction, so you won’t be able to charge up a keep wall. Our goal is to have abilities firing consistently while also maintaining as much realism as possible. We'll have additional fixes for this going into the next PTS update. Please provide us with as much detail as possible if you are still having issues with these abilities.

Damage Shields
Damage shields are extremely powerful because they allow you to build your character fully towards offense while still retaining a strong defense. When adjusting damage shields, it was important to us that they remained powerful abilities that players love to use. We also wanted to maintain the diverse range of shield strengths in the game to avoid homogenization. Some damage shields like the Tri Focus Frost Staff passive give small damage shields, the Magma Shell ultimate gives an entire health bar, and Steadfast Ward gives a dynamic value based on the target’s health

Ultimately, we want to see you commit to being either offensive or defensive when using damage shields, instead of both simultaneously. Decreasing the duration of all damage shields to 6 seconds means that they are just as powerful for stopping high amounts of burst damage. However, there is now less safety with the decreased duration and more skill is required to activate damage shields at the correct time. If you spend 6 seconds trying to finish off someone and get a kill, your shields will drop and you’ll be vulnerable to a counter attack. This change allows damage shields to be strong, lets you continue stacking shields if you wish, but is much more challenging to play offensively at the same time.

Vampire
We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash. Stage 4 gives maximum cost reduction on abilities and full power from all passives, so it’s great when the fires are out. Stages are now 6 hours long, so you have plenty of time to complete a dungeon in your desired stage.

To give more control over vampirism stages, you can now activate a vampire ability to remove 30 minutes from the timer. Each ability activation plunges you deeper into vampirism, so use them carefully.

To go hand in hand with the updates to how vampire works, we’ve also updated the abilities and made them more powerful. Mist Form removes roots currently on your character, making it much easier for vampires to escape sticky situations and helps combat players who use multiple snares. Drain Essence now heals for much more, but it continues to “snapshot” your health value on activation. This mean if you cast the ability at high health, it will heal you for a small amount, even if your health dips low. If you activate it when you are very low health, it will provide a strong heal every tick, even if you receive healing from another source. This helps provide the feeling we are looking for with vampire: High risk, high reward.

Fighters Guild
The Fighters Guild abilities were previously pretty niche and only useful in specific situations. We wanted to make them more broadly applicable, in the same way the Mages Guild is useful for all Magicka-based players who have always had more options in choosing skills. We wanted to broaden the toolkit for stamina, and now Fighters Guild abilities are useful for all stamina characters. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the flavor and personality that Fighters Guild offers. The first step we took was to remove the Undead or Daedra requirement from all abilities and make them deal their bonus effects to all types of enemies. To keep the monster hunter theme, we put a 20% damage bonus to Undead and Daedra on the Skilled Tracker passive. To make these all useful for stamina builds, we changed their damage type to physical so they scale with armor penetration, weapon critical, and the Champion star Mighty. We’re expecting to see a lot more players using Fighters Guild abilities specifically in overland, dungeon, and PvP areas.

Improved Item Traits
Every part of a boss fight should feel awesome in ESO. Combat is fluid and the bosses have a lot of cool abilities, but sometimes the loot can be disappointing. We want all item traits to be useful, and bosses to have more loot. Farming a boss for item drops is great for players who want to collect every set, or players looking to get a specific set with a specific trait. For example, the Exploration trait was a clear choice for redesign since the world is a finite size, and eventually it’s all revealed. We also wanted all traits to exclusively have combat bonuses. Exploration isn’t something you used while fighting monsters, just when running around. All of the newly updated traits are effective while in combat. Training is another example of a trait that, previously, could become less desirable as you progress through the game. Now, it increases XP from kills, so it will continue to help you progress after level 50 and your skill lines are maxed. Some traits like Divines and Infused Armor are already popular so we left them as-is. With this update, high-level content will be dropping items more frequently and with a wider variety of items. Maelstrom Arena now gives a guaranteed set drop after every level, and Sanctum Ophidia will give a set drop for every boss kill. Overall, expect to see set items dropping more frequently and in a greater variety of traits.

The combat team will continue throughout PTS working on bug fixes, balance, and polish of these new features. We'd love it if you hopped on PTS and let us know what you think.

Are there any plans to tackle the persisting racial passives imbalance in the future? You're a smart guy. You know what I'm talking about. Your team ha done a lot to balance other game systems but have given up on racial passives. The "health" races are still at a significant disadvantage compared to others. When will this be addressed? Have you considered eliminating the problem entirely by removing max stamina and magicka from damage calculations?

Argonian racial passives are largely deadweight, only functional in niche situations and much less useful compared to other races.

they should be doing races when barber shop comes. They said they dont want to do any major racial changes until they introduced race change, so people dont get stuck with a race they did not want from te changes. Racial changes come with barber shop. They have hinted at (if not said on one of the eso lives) that the barber shop will be q3.

You think they're actually going to make any major changes, though? I get the feeling that we're stuck with what's currently in place and if they implement a race change these are our options. It seem like they think it's balanced right now and nothing more needs to be done.

I think it will be an overhaul. That's why they have not made big changes yet. They won't until they can allow people to change

Junkogen

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

Wrobel wrote: »

In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.

Heavy Armor
A pillar of the ESO experience is freedom of exploration and being able to play how you want. We want you to create characters that are fun, while still being successful in combat. To support this goal, all three armor types need to be effective in multiple situations. Our changes to Heavy Armor focused on giving more resources and more damage, while retaining the feel of a character in heavy armor. We also needed to be careful of not invalidating light or medium armor usage; All 3 armor types must be desirable. This means Heavy Armor needs to be useful for tanking, but also effective at dealing damage. It’s a fine line to walk. To achieve this, we added a new passive that gives increased Weapon and Spell damage, but only when you are hit. This, in addition to the resource gains from Constitution, help distinguish the heavy armor playstyle from light and medium. The longer the battle goes and the more hits you take, the more of an advantage you accumulate. This makes using elemental spells, heals, or melee attacks in full heavy armor powerful. Heavy Armor has more resources and damage than before, but it’s still less than that of light or medium armor. Light and medium armor give you a little more damage and resources, while Heavy Armor gives you a little more survivability. Simply equipping Heavy Armor doesn’t make you an unkillable fortress, and wearing all light armor doesn’t make you a piñata. However, other customization options such as Enchantments, Traits, the Champion System, and attribute point spends will move you in the direction of your choosing.

Charges
For player abilities, reliability is our top priority. We have continued to improve the reliability and responsiveness of charge abilities (specifically Focused Charge, Critical Charge, Shield Charge) over the past few updates. Issues where you couldn’t activate an ability or weapon swap immediately after charging were fixed. With this update, we’ve worked to make charges fire more reliably when on uneven terrain. This issue was caused by having to wait for the server to calculate a path between the caster and target before starting the movement, and often times this calculation was failing. We’ve changed how charges work under the hood so you can now charge up hills and down stairs. In order to increase the reliability of these abilities, we’re also allowing you to charge across gaps in terrain. There is still a height restriction, so you won’t be able to charge up a keep wall. Our goal is to have abilities firing consistently while also maintaining as much realism as possible. We'll have additional fixes for this going into the next PTS update. Please provide us with as much detail as possible if you are still having issues with these abilities.

Damage Shields
Damage shields are extremely powerful because they allow you to build your character fully towards offense while still retaining a strong defense. When adjusting damage shields, it was important to us that they remained powerful abilities that players love to use. We also wanted to maintain the diverse range of shield strengths in the game to avoid homogenization. Some damage shields like the Tri Focus Frost Staff passive give small damage shields, the Magma Shell ultimate gives an entire health bar, and Steadfast Ward gives a dynamic value based on the target’s health

Ultimately, we want to see you commit to being either offensive or defensive when using damage shields, instead of both simultaneously. Decreasing the duration of all damage shields to 6 seconds means that they are just as powerful for stopping high amounts of burst damage. However, there is now less safety with the decreased duration and more skill is required to activate damage shields at the correct time. If you spend 6 seconds trying to finish off someone and get a kill, your shields will drop and you’ll be vulnerable to a counter attack. This change allows damage shields to be strong, lets you continue stacking shields if you wish, but is much more challenging to play offensively at the same time.

Vampire
We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash. Stage 4 gives maximum cost reduction on abilities and full power from all passives, so it’s great when the fires are out. Stages are now 6 hours long, so you have plenty of time to complete a dungeon in your desired stage.

To give more control over vampirism stages, you can now activate a vampire ability to remove 30 minutes from the timer. Each ability activation plunges you deeper into vampirism, so use them carefully.

To go hand in hand with the updates to how vampire works, we’ve also updated the abilities and made them more powerful. Mist Form removes roots currently on your character, making it much easier for vampires to escape sticky situations and helps combat players who use multiple snares. Drain Essence now heals for much more, but it continues to “snapshot” your health value on activation. This mean if you cast the ability at high health, it will heal you for a small amount, even if your health dips low. If you activate it when you are very low health, it will provide a strong heal every tick, even if you receive healing from another source. This helps provide the feeling we are looking for with vampire: High risk, high reward.

Fighters Guild
The Fighters Guild abilities were previously pretty niche and only useful in specific situations. We wanted to make them more broadly applicable, in the same way the Mages Guild is useful for all Magicka-based players who have always had more options in choosing skills. We wanted to broaden the toolkit for stamina, and now Fighters Guild abilities are useful for all stamina characters. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the flavor and personality that Fighters Guild offers. The first step we took was to remove the Undead or Daedra requirement from all abilities and make them deal their bonus effects to all types of enemies. To keep the monster hunter theme, we put a 20% damage bonus to Undead and Daedra on the Skilled Tracker passive. To make these all useful for stamina builds, we changed their damage type to physical so they scale with armor penetration, weapon critical, and the Champion star Mighty. We’re expecting to see a lot more players using Fighters Guild abilities specifically in overland, dungeon, and PvP areas.

Improved Item Traits
Every part of a boss fight should feel awesome in ESO. Combat is fluid and the bosses have a lot of cool abilities, but sometimes the loot can be disappointing. We want all item traits to be useful, and bosses to have more loot. Farming a boss for item drops is great for players who want to collect every set, or players looking to get a specific set with a specific trait. For example, the Exploration trait was a clear choice for redesign since the world is a finite size, and eventually it’s all revealed. We also wanted all traits to exclusively have combat bonuses. Exploration isn’t something you used while fighting monsters, just when running around. All of the newly updated traits are effective while in combat. Training is another example of a trait that, previously, could become less desirable as you progress through the game. Now, it increases XP from kills, so it will continue to help you progress after level 50 and your skill lines are maxed. Some traits like Divines and Infused Armor are already popular so we left them as-is. With this update, high-level content will be dropping items more frequently and with a wider variety of items. Maelstrom Arena now gives a guaranteed set drop after every level, and Sanctum Ophidia will give a set drop for every boss kill. Overall, expect to see set items dropping more frequently and in a greater variety of traits.

The combat team will continue throughout PTS working on bug fixes, balance, and polish of these new features. We'd love it if you hopped on PTS and let us know what you think.

Are there any plans to tackle the persisting racial passives imbalance in the future? You're a smart guy. You know what I'm talking about. Your team ha done a lot to balance other game systems but have given up on racial passives. The "health" races are still at a significant disadvantage compared to others. When will this be addressed? Have you considered eliminating the problem entirely by removing max stamina and magicka from damage calculations?

Argonian racial passives are largely deadweight, only functional in niche situations and much less useful compared to other races.

they should be doing races when barber shop comes. They said they dont want to do any major racial changes until they introduced race change, so people dont get stuck with a race they did not want from te changes. Racial changes come with barber shop. They have hinted at (if not said on one of the eso lives) that the barber shop will be q3.

You think they're actually going to make any major changes, though? I get the feeling that we're stuck with what's currently in place and if they implement a race change these are our options. It seem like they think it's balanced right now and nothing more needs to be done.

I think it will be an overhaul. That's why they have not made big changes yet. They won't until they can allow people to change

What gives you that impression? Have they stated that or hinted at it recently?

bowmanz607

Junkogen wrote: »

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

Wrobel wrote: »

In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.

Heavy Armor
A pillar of the ESO experience is freedom of exploration and being able to play how you want. We want you to create characters that are fun, while still being successful in combat. To support this goal, all three armor types need to be effective in multiple situations. Our changes to Heavy Armor focused on giving more resources and more damage, while retaining the feel of a character in heavy armor. We also needed to be careful of not invalidating light or medium armor usage; All 3 armor types must be desirable. This means Heavy Armor needs to be useful for tanking, but also effective at dealing damage. It’s a fine line to walk. To achieve this, we added a new passive that gives increased Weapon and Spell damage, but only when you are hit. This, in addition to the resource gains from Constitution, help distinguish the heavy armor playstyle from light and medium. The longer the battle goes and the more hits you take, the more of an advantage you accumulate. This makes using elemental spells, heals, or melee attacks in full heavy armor powerful. Heavy Armor has more resources and damage than before, but it’s still less than that of light or medium armor. Light and medium armor give you a little more damage and resources, while Heavy Armor gives you a little more survivability. Simply equipping Heavy Armor doesn’t make you an unkillable fortress, and wearing all light armor doesn’t make you a piñata. However, other customization options such as Enchantments, Traits, the Champion System, and attribute point spends will move you in the direction of your choosing.

Charges
For player abilities, reliability is our top priority. We have continued to improve the reliability and responsiveness of charge abilities (specifically Focused Charge, Critical Charge, Shield Charge) over the past few updates. Issues where you couldn’t activate an ability or weapon swap immediately after charging were fixed. With this update, we’ve worked to make charges fire more reliably when on uneven terrain. This issue was caused by having to wait for the server to calculate a path between the caster and target before starting the movement, and often times this calculation was failing. We’ve changed how charges work under the hood so you can now charge up hills and down stairs. In order to increase the reliability of these abilities, we’re also allowing you to charge across gaps in terrain. There is still a height restriction, so you won’t be able to charge up a keep wall. Our goal is to have abilities firing consistently while also maintaining as much realism as possible. We'll have additional fixes for this going into the next PTS update. Please provide us with as much detail as possible if you are still having issues with these abilities.

Damage Shields
Damage shields are extremely powerful because they allow you to build your character fully towards offense while still retaining a strong defense. When adjusting damage shields, it was important to us that they remained powerful abilities that players love to use. We also wanted to maintain the diverse range of shield strengths in the game to avoid homogenization. Some damage shields like the Tri Focus Frost Staff passive give small damage shields, the Magma Shell ultimate gives an entire health bar, and Steadfast Ward gives a dynamic value based on the target’s health

Ultimately, we want to see you commit to being either offensive or defensive when using damage shields, instead of both simultaneously. Decreasing the duration of all damage shields to 6 seconds means that they are just as powerful for stopping high amounts of burst damage. However, there is now less safety with the decreased duration and more skill is required to activate damage shields at the correct time. If you spend 6 seconds trying to finish off someone and get a kill, your shields will drop and you’ll be vulnerable to a counter attack. This change allows damage shields to be strong, lets you continue stacking shields if you wish, but is much more challenging to play offensively at the same time.

Vampire
We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash. Stage 4 gives maximum cost reduction on abilities and full power from all passives, so it’s great when the fires are out. Stages are now 6 hours long, so you have plenty of time to complete a dungeon in your desired stage.

To give more control over vampirism stages, you can now activate a vampire ability to remove 30 minutes from the timer. Each ability activation plunges you deeper into vampirism, so use them carefully.

To go hand in hand with the updates to how vampire works, we’ve also updated the abilities and made them more powerful. Mist Form removes roots currently on your character, making it much easier for vampires to escape sticky situations and helps combat players who use multiple snares. Drain Essence now heals for much more, but it continues to “snapshot” your health value on activation. This mean if you cast the ability at high health, it will heal you for a small amount, even if your health dips low. If you activate it when you are very low health, it will provide a strong heal every tick, even if you receive healing from another source. This helps provide the feeling we are looking for with vampire: High risk, high reward.

Fighters Guild
The Fighters Guild abilities were previously pretty niche and only useful in specific situations. We wanted to make them more broadly applicable, in the same way the Mages Guild is useful for all Magicka-based players who have always had more options in choosing skills. We wanted to broaden the toolkit for stamina, and now Fighters Guild abilities are useful for all stamina characters. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the flavor and personality that Fighters Guild offers. The first step we took was to remove the Undead or Daedra requirement from all abilities and make them deal their bonus effects to all types of enemies. To keep the monster hunter theme, we put a 20% damage bonus to Undead and Daedra on the Skilled Tracker passive. To make these all useful for stamina builds, we changed their damage type to physical so they scale with armor penetration, weapon critical, and the Champion star Mighty. We’re expecting to see a lot more players using Fighters Guild abilities specifically in overland, dungeon, and PvP areas.

Improved Item Traits
Every part of a boss fight should feel awesome in ESO. Combat is fluid and the bosses have a lot of cool abilities, but sometimes the loot can be disappointing. We want all item traits to be useful, and bosses to have more loot. Farming a boss for item drops is great for players who want to collect every set, or players looking to get a specific set with a specific trait. For example, the Exploration trait was a clear choice for redesign since the world is a finite size, and eventually it’s all revealed. We also wanted all traits to exclusively have combat bonuses. Exploration isn’t something you used while fighting monsters, just when running around. All of the newly updated traits are effective while in combat. Training is another example of a trait that, previously, could become less desirable as you progress through the game. Now, it increases XP from kills, so it will continue to help you progress after level 50 and your skill lines are maxed. Some traits like Divines and Infused Armor are already popular so we left them as-is. With this update, high-level content will be dropping items more frequently and with a wider variety of items. Maelstrom Arena now gives a guaranteed set drop after every level, and Sanctum Ophidia will give a set drop for every boss kill. Overall, expect to see set items dropping more frequently and in a greater variety of traits.

The combat team will continue throughout PTS working on bug fixes, balance, and polish of these new features. We'd love it if you hopped on PTS and let us know what you think.

Are there any plans to tackle the persisting racial passives imbalance in the future? You're a smart guy. You know what I'm talking about. Your team ha done a lot to balance other game systems but have given up on racial passives. The "health" races are still at a significant disadvantage compared to others. When will this be addressed? Have you considered eliminating the problem entirely by removing max stamina and magicka from damage calculations?

Argonian racial passives are largely deadweight, only functional in niche situations and much less useful compared to other races.

they should be doing races when barber shop comes. They said they dont want to do any major racial changes until they introduced race change, so people dont get stuck with a race they did not want from te changes. Racial changes come with barber shop. They have hinted at (if not said on one of the eso lives) that the barber shop will be q3.

You think they're actually going to make any major changes, though? I get the feeling that we're stuck with what's currently in place and if they implement a race change these are our options. It seem like they think it's balanced right now and nothing more needs to be done.

I think it will be an overhaul. That's why they have not made big changes yet. They won't until they can allow people to change

What gives you that impression? Have they stated that or hinted at it recently?

About 6 months or so ago. Maybe ic release they stated that they did not want to make drastic changes too racial until they have a way for players to change their races. They said they didn't want people stuck with a race that no longer fits their playstyle. Based on this I assume we will see some decent changes to racials.

Runkorko

bowmanz607 wrote: »

I assume we will see some decent changes to racials.

Yea, like posibility to change race for like ONLY 5-10k crowns... Another "Milky Way"

elven.were_wolf

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

Wrobel wrote: »

In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.

Heavy Armor
A pillar of the ESO experience is freedom of exploration and being able to play how you want. We want you to create characters that are fun, while still being successful in combat. To support this goal, all three armor types need to be effective in multiple situations. Our changes to Heavy Armor focused on giving more resources and more damage, while retaining the feel of a character in heavy armor. We also needed to be careful of not invalidating light or medium armor usage; All 3 armor types must be desirable. This means Heavy Armor needs to be useful for tanking, but also effective at dealing damage. It’s a fine line to walk. To achieve this, we added a new passive that gives increased Weapon and Spell damage, but only when you are hit. This, in addition to the resource gains from Constitution, help distinguish the heavy armor playstyle from light and medium. The longer the battle goes and the more hits you take, the more of an advantage you accumulate. This makes using elemental spells, heals, or melee attacks in full heavy armor powerful. Heavy Armor has more resources and damage than before, but it’s still less than that of light or medium armor. Light and medium armor give you a little more damage and resources, while Heavy Armor gives you a little more survivability. Simply equipping Heavy Armor doesn’t make you an unkillable fortress, and wearing all light armor doesn’t make you a piñata. However, other customization options such as Enchantments, Traits, the Champion System, and attribute point spends will move you in the direction of your choosing.

Charges
For player abilities, reliability is our top priority. We have continued to improve the reliability and responsiveness of charge abilities (specifically Focused Charge, Critical Charge, Shield Charge) over the past few updates. Issues where you couldn’t activate an ability or weapon swap immediately after charging were fixed. With this update, we’ve worked to make charges fire more reliably when on uneven terrain. This issue was caused by having to wait for the server to calculate a path between the caster and target before starting the movement, and often times this calculation was failing. We’ve changed how charges work under the hood so you can now charge up hills and down stairs. In order to increase the reliability of these abilities, we’re also allowing you to charge across gaps in terrain. There is still a height restriction, so you won’t be able to charge up a keep wall. Our goal is to have abilities firing consistently while also maintaining as much realism as possible. We'll have additional fixes for this going into the next PTS update. Please provide us with as much detail as possible if you are still having issues with these abilities.

Damage Shields
Damage shields are extremely powerful because they allow you to build your character fully towards offense while still retaining a strong defense. When adjusting damage shields, it was important to us that they remained powerful abilities that players love to use. We also wanted to maintain the diverse range of shield strengths in the game to avoid homogenization. Some damage shields like the Tri Focus Frost Staff passive give small damage shields, the Magma Shell ultimate gives an entire health bar, and Steadfast Ward gives a dynamic value based on the target’s health

Ultimately, we want to see you commit to being either offensive or defensive when using damage shields, instead of both simultaneously. Decreasing the duration of all damage shields to 6 seconds means that they are just as powerful for stopping high amounts of burst damage. However, there is now less safety with the decreased duration and more skill is required to activate damage shields at the correct time. If you spend 6 seconds trying to finish off someone and get a kill, your shields will drop and you’ll be vulnerable to a counter attack. This change allows damage shields to be strong, lets you continue stacking shields if you wish, but is much more challenging to play offensively at the same time.

Vampire
We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash. Stage 4 gives maximum cost reduction on abilities and full power from all passives, so it’s great when the fires are out. Stages are now 6 hours long, so you have plenty of time to complete a dungeon in your desired stage.

To give more control over vampirism stages, you can now activate a vampire ability to remove 30 minutes from the timer. Each ability activation plunges you deeper into vampirism, so use them carefully.

To go hand in hand with the updates to how vampire works, we’ve also updated the abilities and made them more powerful. Mist Form removes roots currently on your character, making it much easier for vampires to escape sticky situations and helps combat players who use multiple snares. Drain Essence now heals for much more, but it continues to “snapshot” your health value on activation. This mean if you cast the ability at high health, it will heal you for a small amount, even if your health dips low. If you activate it when you are very low health, it will provide a strong heal every tick, even if you receive healing from another source. This helps provide the feeling we are looking for with vampire: High risk, high reward.

Fighters Guild
The Fighters Guild abilities were previously pretty niche and only useful in specific situations. We wanted to make them more broadly applicable, in the same way the Mages Guild is useful for all Magicka-based players who have always had more options in choosing skills. We wanted to broaden the toolkit for stamina, and now Fighters Guild abilities are useful for all stamina characters. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the flavor and personality that Fighters Guild offers. The first step we took was to remove the Undead or Daedra requirement from all abilities and make them deal their bonus effects to all types of enemies. To keep the monster hunter theme, we put a 20% damage bonus to Undead and Daedra on the Skilled Tracker passive. To make these all useful for stamina builds, we changed their damage type to physical so they scale with armor penetration, weapon critical, and the Champion star Mighty. We’re expecting to see a lot more players using Fighters Guild abilities specifically in overland, dungeon, and PvP areas.

Improved Item Traits
Every part of a boss fight should feel awesome in ESO. Combat is fluid and the bosses have a lot of cool abilities, but sometimes the loot can be disappointing. We want all item traits to be useful, and bosses to have more loot. Farming a boss for item drops is great for players who want to collect every set, or players looking to get a specific set with a specific trait. For example, the Exploration trait was a clear choice for redesign since the world is a finite size, and eventually it’s all revealed. We also wanted all traits to exclusively have combat bonuses. Exploration isn’t something you used while fighting monsters, just when running around. All of the newly updated traits are effective while in combat. Training is another example of a trait that, previously, could become less desirable as you progress through the game. Now, it increases XP from kills, so it will continue to help you progress after level 50 and your skill lines are maxed. Some traits like Divines and Infused Armor are already popular so we left them as-is. With this update, high-level content will be dropping items more frequently and with a wider variety of items. Maelstrom Arena now gives a guaranteed set drop after every level, and Sanctum Ophidia will give a set drop for every boss kill. Overall, expect to see set items dropping more frequently and in a greater variety of traits.

The combat team will continue throughout PTS working on bug fixes, balance, and polish of these new features. We'd love it if you hopped on PTS and let us know what you think.

Are there any plans to tackle the persisting racial passives imbalance in the future? You're a smart guy. You know what I'm talking about. Your team ha done a lot to balance other game systems but have given up on racial passives. The "health" races are still at a significant disadvantage compared to others. When will this be addressed? Have you considered eliminating the problem entirely by removing max stamina and magicka from damage calculations?

Argonian racial passives are largely deadweight, only functional in niche situations and much less useful compared to other races.

they should be doing races when barber shop comes. They said they dont want to do any major racial changes until they introduced race change, so people dont get stuck with a race they did not want from te changes. Racial changes come with barber shop. They have hinted at (if not said on one of the eso lives) that the barber shop will be q3.

You think they're actually going to make any major changes, though? I get the feeling that we're stuck with what's currently in place and if they implement a race change these are our options. It seem like they think it's balanced right now and nothing more needs to be done.

I think it will be an overhaul. That's why they have not made big changes yet. They won't until they can allow people to change

What gives you that impression? Have they stated that or hinted at it recently?

About 6 months or so ago. Maybe ic release they stated that they did not want to make drastic changes too racial until they have a way for players to change their races. They said they didn't want people stuck with a race that no longer fits their playstyle. Based on this I assume we will see some decent changes to racials.

I really hope they don't do something too jarastic though. I like my wood elf stamblade's look with the horns option you get with the race and the 21% stamina recovery. I really don't want to be forced to change my race because the racial passives are not viable for my build anymore

Junkogen

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

bowmanz607 wrote: »

Junkogen wrote: »

Wrobel wrote: »

In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.

Heavy Armor
A pillar of the ESO experience is freedom of exploration and being able to play how you want. We want you to create characters that are fun, while still being successful in combat. To support this goal, all three armor types need to be effective in multiple situations. Our changes to Heavy Armor focused on giving more resources and more damage, while retaining the feel of a character in heavy armor. We also needed to be careful of not invalidating light or medium armor usage; All 3 armor types must be desirable. This means Heavy Armor needs to be useful for tanking, but also effective at dealing damage. It’s a fine line to walk. To achieve this, we added a new passive that gives increased Weapon and Spell damage, but only when you are hit. This, in addition to the resource gains from Constitution, help distinguish the heavy armor playstyle from light and medium. The longer the battle goes and the more hits you take, the more of an advantage you accumulate. This makes using elemental spells, heals, or melee attacks in full heavy armor powerful. Heavy Armor has more resources and damage than before, but it’s still less than that of light or medium armor. Light and medium armor give you a little more damage and resources, while Heavy Armor gives you a little more survivability. Simply equipping Heavy Armor doesn’t make you an unkillable fortress, and wearing all light armor doesn’t make you a piñata. However, other customization options such as Enchantments, Traits, the Champion System, and attribute point spends will move you in the direction of your choosing.

Charges
For player abilities, reliability is our top priority. We have continued to improve the reliability and responsiveness of charge abilities (specifically Focused Charge, Critical Charge, Shield Charge) over the past few updates. Issues where you couldn’t activate an ability or weapon swap immediately after charging were fixed. With this update, we’ve worked to make charges fire more reliably when on uneven terrain. This issue was caused by having to wait for the server to calculate a path between the caster and target before starting the movement, and often times this calculation was failing. We’ve changed how charges work under the hood so you can now charge up hills and down stairs. In order to increase the reliability of these abilities, we’re also allowing you to charge across gaps in terrain. There is still a height restriction, so you won’t be able to charge up a keep wall. Our goal is to have abilities firing consistently while also maintaining as much realism as possible. We'll have additional fixes for this going into the next PTS update. Please provide us with as much detail as possible if you are still having issues with these abilities.

Damage Shields
Damage shields are extremely powerful because they allow you to build your character fully towards offense while still retaining a strong defense. When adjusting damage shields, it was important to us that they remained powerful abilities that players love to use. We also wanted to maintain the diverse range of shield strengths in the game to avoid homogenization. Some damage shields like the Tri Focus Frost Staff passive give small damage shields, the Magma Shell ultimate gives an entire health bar, and Steadfast Ward gives a dynamic value based on the target’s health

Ultimately, we want to see you commit to being either offensive or defensive when using damage shields, instead of both simultaneously. Decreasing the duration of all damage shields to 6 seconds means that they are just as powerful for stopping high amounts of burst damage. However, there is now less safety with the decreased duration and more skill is required to activate damage shields at the correct time. If you spend 6 seconds trying to finish off someone and get a kill, your shields will drop and you’ll be vulnerable to a counter attack. This change allows damage shields to be strong, lets you continue stacking shields if you wish, but is much more challenging to play offensively at the same time.

Vampire
We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash. Stage 4 gives maximum cost reduction on abilities and full power from all passives, so it’s great when the fires are out. Stages are now 6 hours long, so you have plenty of time to complete a dungeon in your desired stage.

To give more control over vampirism stages, you can now activate a vampire ability to remove 30 minutes from the timer. Each ability activation plunges you deeper into vampirism, so use them carefully.

To go hand in hand with the updates to how vampire works, we’ve also updated the abilities and made them more powerful. Mist Form removes roots currently on your character, making it much easier for vampires to escape sticky situations and helps combat players who use multiple snares. Drain Essence now heals for much more, but it continues to “snapshot” your health value on activation. This mean if you cast the ability at high health, it will heal you for a small amount, even if your health dips low. If you activate it when you are very low health, it will provide a strong heal every tick, even if you receive healing from another source. This helps provide the feeling we are looking for with vampire: High risk, high reward.

Fighters Guild
The Fighters Guild abilities were previously pretty niche and only useful in specific situations. We wanted to make them more broadly applicable, in the same way the Mages Guild is useful for all Magicka-based players who have always had more options in choosing skills. We wanted to broaden the toolkit for stamina, and now Fighters Guild abilities are useful for all stamina characters. At the same time, we also wanted to keep the flavor and personality that Fighters Guild offers. The first step we took was to remove the Undead or Daedra requirement from all abilities and make them deal their bonus effects to all types of enemies. To keep the monster hunter theme, we put a 20% damage bonus to Undead and Daedra on the Skilled Tracker passive. To make these all useful for stamina builds, we changed their damage type to physical so they scale with armor penetration, weapon critical, and the Champion star Mighty. We’re expecting to see a lot more players using Fighters Guild abilities specifically in overland, dungeon, and PvP areas.

Improved Item Traits
Every part of a boss fight should feel awesome in ESO. Combat is fluid and the bosses have a lot of cool abilities, but sometimes the loot can be disappointing. We want all item traits to be useful, and bosses to have more loot. Farming a boss for item drops is great for players who want to collect every set, or players looking to get a specific set with a specific trait. For example, the Exploration trait was a clear choice for redesign since the world is a finite size, and eventually it’s all revealed. We also wanted all traits to exclusively have combat bonuses. Exploration isn’t something you used while fighting monsters, just when running around. All of the newly updated traits are effective while in combat. Training is another example of a trait that, previously, could become less desirable as you progress through the game. Now, it increases XP from kills, so it will continue to help you progress after level 50 and your skill lines are maxed. Some traits like Divines and Infused Armor are already popular so we left them as-is. With this update, high-level content will be dropping items more frequently and with a wider variety of items. Maelstrom Arena now gives a guaranteed set drop after every level, and Sanctum Ophidia will give a set drop for every boss kill. Overall, expect to see set items dropping more frequently and in a greater variety of traits.

The combat team will continue throughout PTS working on bug fixes, balance, and polish of these new features. We'd love it if you hopped on PTS and let us know what you think.

Are there any plans to tackle the persisting racial passives imbalance in the future? You're a smart guy. You know what I'm talking about. Your team ha done a lot to balance other game systems but have given up on racial passives. The "health" races are still at a significant disadvantage compared to others. When will this be addressed? Have you considered eliminating the problem entirely by removing max stamina and magicka from damage calculations?

Argonian racial passives are largely deadweight, only functional in niche situations and much less useful compared to other races.

they should be doing races when barber shop comes. They said they dont want to do any major racial changes until they introduced race change, so people dont get stuck with a race they did not want from te changes. Racial changes come with barber shop. They have hinted at (if not said on one of the eso lives) that the barber shop will be q3.

You think they're actually going to make any major changes, though? I get the feeling that we're stuck with what's currently in place and if they implement a race change these are our options. It seem like they think it's balanced right now and nothing more needs to be done.

I think it will be an overhaul. That's why they have not made big changes yet. They won't until they can allow people to change

What gives you that impression? Have they stated that or hinted at it recently?

About 6 months or so ago. Maybe ic release they stated that they did not want to make drastic changes too racial until they have a way for players to change their races. They said they didn't want people stuck with a race that no longer fits their playstyle. Based on this I assume we will see some decent changes to racials.

I really hope you're right, but that was 6 months ago. I just have a bad feeling about this. Don't know why. I just feel like they've changed their minds. We shall see. Again, I want what you said to be the case. Something has to be changed.

camilla_noctis

Wrobel wrote: »

In this thread, we would like to give you some insights for some of the major combat changes in the Dark Brotherhood update. We are excited to get these changes into your hands, and hope you’ll hop on PTS to see them in action for yourself! When giving your feedback, it’s most helpful to us when you support your ideas with specific details, math, and logic.
...
Vampire
We wanted the cool thing about Vampirism to be managing the disease. That means adding a reason to be in each stage, and making it easier to manage stages. Now, each stage makes you more vulnerable to Fire damage, but gives you cheaper abilities and activates more passives. This means there’s a reason to be stage 1, but there’s also a reason to be stage 2, 3, or 4 depending on your risk tolerance to Fire damage. Since stage 1 means you take no bonus damage from fire, it’s a great option when running a scorching dungeon like City of Ash.

Hi Eric @Wrobel
First, I want to say I am so glad to have a response to this dialogue regarding vampire stages. It is something I really like about the game and my character since the first week! And at the same time see a lot of things I still think could be tweaked and made even more fun! Just to link for reference, here was my general thoughts to the pts changes and an ensuing discussion.

From my gameplay experience at least, which I'd characterize as a mix of pve and pvp, fire vulnerability is still a little too specific in comparison to the other factors and tradeoffs. Not everyone runs City of Ash on a regular basis. In all but the most challenging/competitive content, extra damage can be "powered through" with heals and such.

Costs are actually in a similar situation, as far as how combat flows in practice. Some encounters you won't be in danger of running out of magicka, it's too short. Other times it does matter and it's been going so long you're scraping the barrel, so there's a risk. Ultimates/bat swarm is good, especially if the aoe situation goes on long enough to chain them; but there are times where I hold onto it for a better moment, or I continue to gain ultimate but there just isn't a use for it due to stop-and-go action. In that case the cost reduction sways between more and less useful as you go. So again, it's a matter of "it depends".

The simplest request I have, is to return passives to being active at all stages, and keep the fire vulnerability vs. cost reduction tradeoff. This is for two reasons. One is, fire vulnerability shares a similar contexual utility as cost reduction, and so deciding this trade-off in a "build" and/or for a situation feels more dynamic. This is the skeleton of the new changes and I think it's a really good idea! The other part of it is, the passives are really important to a lot of people, including myself, to the "feel" of playing a vampire, in particular dark stalker. Many consider losing passives, any/all of them, as a deal breaker for feeding at all.

The result would be this: those that simply don't want to feed and play as they have been, will remain unchanged. Those that want to take advantage of the fire resistance, can do so without losing access to passives. This is not imbalanced, because those passives require a skill to be slotted to be active. Those same skills will eventually reduce the fire resistance. So in that sense, a fed stage 1 vampire is not strictly more powerful than a non-vampire, since removing the skills would remove the passives. Also, accompanying the Fighter's Guild rework, since those skills will be used more for general combat, the extra damage from those regardless of stage is also a persistent weakness.

I know more sweeping changes would take more time investment and risk "rocking the boat", but while leaving that open I would really hope for this simple compromise, as it would really enhance my and others' enjoyment of that skill line!

Stalwart385

@Wrobel Great job with the Heavy Armor changes! Really like it. My builds are better at tanking in PvE and can now compete in PvP. My first project is beating vMA in 5+ Heavy.

I know a lot of people are complaining about the Bracing removal, but Constitution more than makes up for it. Your math shows how closely the stamina side balances out, as did mine. The mana side is the real boon though. Tanks should know how to use that extra mana to block even longer than live. Except for Templar tanks, though I guess the extra heals will make them even better as speed run tanks.

In PvP the extra mana and damage for heavy will give magicka DKs a much needed boost, but I hope the class is still looked at.

An excellent patch for those that like to wear metal. Thanks.

General-Pou

I've read all comments and I'm wondered just few ppl talks about Toppling Charge skill from Templar. Because this skill is not useful anymore in PvP, specially in. Everybody can simply Run away from it, SPECIALLY NIGHTBLADES.


AriBoh wrote: »
Ugh this new animation is terribad. Look at the old TC you run and leap to the target then stab. This newer one you run up directly to the target then jump up and stab in the air. Looks stupid.

And check this too:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gyNG4xQhxYM

coyteriarwb17_ESO

This is why i stopped playing over a year ago. You guys at ZOS don't know a damn thing on balancing classes. You have killed a magicka sorcerers defence and dps. I'm not even going to get into details because you know what I mean and you have been told by many other players. I thought the dark brother hood update was something to look forward to. I would rather there be an expansion on redoing the whole of Sorcerers abilities because you have confused everyone on what the *** you want them to be.

coyteriarwb17_ESO

Erock25 wrote: »

@Wrobel can you please address stam sorcs? We've been begging and pleading for over a year now and with the DB update being THE STAMINA UPDATE, I'm shocked at the lack of attention stam sorc received. I know you have your heart set on Thundering Presence/Hurricane being the one and only tool for stam sorc in their class arsenal, but it just isn't the right choice. You ask any Stam Sorc what their top 4 favorite (and only viable) sorcs skills are and it's Crit Surge, Boundless Storm, Streak, and Bound Armaments. You chose one of the four most useful spells for a stam sorc and decided to give them the other morph. Please we need some sort of direct damage especially with the fighter's guild passive outshining our Sorc weapon power increase per slotted skill. Seriously Eric, I'd really appreciate if you sat down and looked at everything Sorc has to offer stam builds and compared it to what every other class has to offer stam builds. Really think about it and also pay attention to damage types (all of our ultimates are still magic/elemental) and disintegration procs and utility. Every class should have options in both stam and magicka, because frankly every class has options besides stam sorc.

I'm not even surprised. ZOS have been saying Stamina update when in reality they made stamina classes better by destroying magicka users. Resubbed only to unsub again. Disappointed already with the DOB update already.