Update 35 Combat Preview

FrankonPC

Iselin wrote: »

Bad weavers will still weave badly compared to good weavers. All you're going to accomplish with these changes is that you're going to lower every players DPS and will do nothing to close the gap between the low end and high end players.

Especially, as others have already said, the really low end players who tend to often do nothing but pew pew bow light attacks. You're going to end up making their contribution to groups even worse than it already is.

Exactly this.

joseayalac

Low end players don't even parse.

goldenarcher1

KlauthWarthog wrote: »

Light attack weaving and careful upkeep of buffs/dots will still matter. You will still have to put in the work in order to get top DPS. So what is up with all the frowny faces here?

SirNom

ZOS_Gilliam wrote: »

Greetings!

It’s almost time for the next update, and that means it’s time to share some of the reasoning behind the upcoming big shake-ups. This update brings a massive slew of balance adjustments all at once to hopefully reduce the need of large sweeping changes in subsequent updates, since some seemingly minor changes affect a huge part of the game’s combat. The main focuses in Update 35 are twofold: improving accessibility to the game’s combat by increasing the duration of outgoing ability effects (such as damage over time, buffs, and debuffs) and a continuation of the attempt to quell some of the obscene damage production at the high end. Let’s start by breaking apart some of the fundamental realities of ESO today.


Weaving

Currently, to be truly effective in ESO’s combat, you need to learn to manipulate something that is known as “weaving,” which refers to the act of squeezing multiple actions into the global cooldown window. Doing so drastically increases your agency and output, and it is a staple of the game that we’ve come to embrace, as it helps our combat feel different and exciting to participate in once you learn the ins and outs. However, the impact of weaving leads to a massive gap in performance where players who cannot interact with it as effectively are left miles behind those who can. While this is partially unavoidable and an important part of what makes the mastery of ESO or any activity utilizing a similar system particularly satisfying, we want to do what we can to shorten that delta. The closer the gap between the low and high end, the easier it is to create content that can accommodate a wider audience, while making more natural progression points for those looking to improve. To this end, we’ve started to look at the impact that one of the most common and important forms of weaving has in ESO: Light and Heavy Attack weaving.

Coming in Update 35, we’re reducing Light and Heavy Attacks’ impact in damage production by adjusting their damage to deal a flat amount, regardless of stats. We have spent a considerable amount of time investigating the baseline experience that a new player would have with these attacks, using that as our starting point for how much damage they do moving forward. The aim is to not harm the low-end experience, and target only the higher end. In doing so, we hope to reduce the difference of damage potential in a way that retains the satisfaction of learning to weave, where the impact is still felt, but to a much less degree than before.

For reference, in many of ESO’s high-end experiences and activities, the average build sees roughly 15–20% of their overall damage coming from Light Attacks alone, which is a huge contribution to the delta of power we see. While testing these adjustments internally, we’ve seen a reduction of 6–11% to overall damage, which allows for a much smaller and healthier gap while still retaining the sense of mastery and expression of that mastery with weaving.

With this adjustment, we’ll also be making a significant number of changes to item sets, passives, and buffs to ensure classes remain balanced in damage production, while also trying to do a better job allowing builds to amplify these actions (we’ve heard your cries, Heavy Attack build lovers, and we want better for you) without introducing unhealthy gameplay between PvE and PvP.


Combat Effects

The other area we have spent a considerable amount of time on for this update is the uptime of effects in ESO, as these are another huge way to improve your combat capabilities. Outside of weaving, the main limiter of your effectiveness in combat is your ability to output events, such as damage, healing, shielding, etc., which is bound by activating abilities, which in turn are bound within the global cooldown system. Activating an ability from your action bar locks out your other abilities for one second, so, a way to circumvent this system is to utilize actions that add power or extra events without your need to continuously activate them. These are often seen as buff and debuff abilities, or damage and healing over time abilities. Keeping as many of these abilities up as long possible dramatically improves your combat potential, creating another area of mastery and potential of power deltas.

Currently, many of these abilities fall within a 10-second window, meaning to maximize your efficiency, you must activate them once every 10 seconds. With 10 total active ability slots at your disposal, this often creates a situation where you want to load up almost every slot with one of these abilities, adding to your combat output for each duration-based effect you utilize. Between this and the engagement of weaving, this creates a reality where high actions per minute (APM) is required to be effective, as well as a robust rotation to keep as many of these effects up as possible. This in turn reinforces a need to glue your eyes to your action bars, taking you out of the action happening on screen. While this can create exhilarating combat experiences where you need to constantly monitor different activities on screen, it can also be overwhelming and particularly challenging for you to do so at the rate required to be effective.

As such, coming in Update 35, we are increasing the duration of many of these effects in game, primarily damage over time, buffs, and debuffs. By extending the duration, we hope to reduce the stress of many combat rotations, allowing for you to focus more on the action in front of you rather than the action of juggling buffs and debuffs on your ability bar and making the game far more accessible.

Since many of these effects currently add a tremendous amount of power per cast over their duration, simply increasing their duration would merely inject a significant amount of power into the game, where this is already in excess. To combat this, we’re adjusting many of these values to account for their increased duration; there will be overall increase of effectiveness per cast, while reducing their effectiveness per second while active. This should reduce the ceiling potential of many builds, while improving their baseline experiences where many players will have an easier time keeping these effects active. In simpler terms, we’re reducing the damage potential for these abilities per second, while increasing their total output overall.

For example, previously, a damage over time effect would deal 1.5× the damage of a “spammable” attack (such as Surprise Attack) over its duration of 10 seconds, or 0.15 relative damage per second. Now, damage over time effects will deal 2× the damage of a spammable attack over its duration of 20 seconds, increasing its damage per cast while reducing its relative damage per second to 0.1. In accordance with this, many healing over time effects will have their values adjusted to ensure they do not overperform when compared to damage over time, while still being impactful in PvE environments.

Both areas required an extensive pass of existing class ability and passive power to ensure they remain balanced with one another afterward. As such, the PTS patch notes will have a sizable amount of number tweaking. We recognize this will create a lot of changes in how you optimize your builds and how you play them, but it is our hope that by the end of the transition to these standards, the game will be more enjoyable and accessible to everyone.

After these adjustments are live, we are going to focus on any resulting balance issues for the next few updates, hopefully reducing the chaotic nature of change for a brief period after the initial turbulence. We’ll be keeping a close eye on the discussions that come out of this, as well as the initial feedback over the upcoming PTS cycle. Since the scale of these changes is large in nature, please understand it may take more time for adjustments to come since changing one standard affects many specific abilities.


We hope this helps provide some clarity of our goals with the upcoming changes you’ll see and aids in bracing yourself for the number of changes coming as well. We know this is never an easy process, and we appreciate your patience and tolerance as we try to improve the game that you (and we!) love. May your roads lead you to pleasant journeys, and we look forward to seeing you in Tamriel!

I stopped playing back when mag and stam stats were smashed together and because I played at endgame, I felt compelled to play the meta of stamina items on a mag build because to do otherwise would involve me letting my team down (as it is a loss of dps). I could of course play what I want but I do not enjoy getting out dpsed by a clearly better setup. The meta of dw and 2H made no sense to me from on a mag character.. unsure why this was pushed through, no one asked for it. It is more likely that you guys changed the meta unintentionally [snip]

[snip] What is the point in trying to get good at your game? There are no real rewards for learning. [snip]

[edited for bashing]

Jaraal

So they're drastically reducing the overall damage of DOTs, but not reducing how fast other players can purge and cleanse them?

Looks like the tank meta is here to stay, and vastly improved going forward.

RIP PvP.

joseayalac

LuckyGhost wrote: »

Good changes IMO. Light attacks doing 20% of my damage when I had to utilize 10 abilities and 2 ultimates to claw out the other 80% just felt weird. The highest damage ability in a parse was the basic light attack? Never made sense to me.

Light attacks still accounting for 6-11% of the damage sounds solid enough to be rewarding, and even essential for an optimized build, but not so overreaching as it was before. I don't understand the frustration with bringing down LA dmg a little bit tbh...

Basic light attack = hitting with your weapon, why wouldn't it do significant damage if it's literally the damage source you're using the most times? You hit way more light attacks than spammables in a fight.

Don't look at combat from only a parse perspective because it's gonna feel like a spreadsheet game instead of an engaging fantasy combat flavor game in which game mechanics actually make sense.

acastanza_ESO

[snip]
The combat design team needs to stop, right now, take a step back and actually look at the changes the community is actually asking for not this [snip]

[snip] it doesn't make sense from the perspective of the logic of the game itself. A light attack is an attack with the specific weapon you're using, now you're telling me that if I put a spell damage enchant on my inferno staff it's built in attack doesn't respond to it? [snip]

Walk this back NOW.

[edited for bashing]

Wyrd88

I thought there couldn't be anything worse than hybridization changes.
Boi I was wrong.

[snip]
Sincerely yours, End-Game and PVP players.

[edited for baiting]

lQrukl

Coming in Update 35, we’re reducing Light and Heavy Attacks’ impact in damage production by adjusting their damage to deal a flat amount, regardless of stats.

Does it mean that light attacks of Inferno Staff will no longer overperform other staves by 10%?
Or Ancient Knowledge passive has kept as it is?

Thecompton73

Very much not a fan of the change to DOT damage. It's already basically useless in PvP where burst is king. Reducing it's per second damage in return for a longer duration will completely kill an already niche build/play style.

WrathOfInnos

joseayalac wrote: »

LuckyGhost wrote: »

Good changes IMO. Light attacks doing 20% of my damage when I had to utilize 10 abilities and 2 ultimates to claw out the other 80% just felt weird. The highest damage ability in a parse was the basic light attack? Never made sense to me.

Light attacks still accounting for 6-11% of the damage sounds solid enough to be rewarding, and even essential for an optimized build, but not so overreaching as it was before. I don't understand the frustration with bringing down LA dmg a little bit tbh...

Basic light attack = hitting with your weapon, why wouldn't it do significant damage if it's literally the damage source you're using the most times? You hit way more light attacks than spammables in a fight.

Don't look at combat from only a parse perspective because it's gonna feel like a spreadsheet game instead of an engaging fantasy combat flavor game in which game mechanics actually make sense.

This is a good point. It sounds like with the new system, upgrading the quality of a sword from blue to gold, or giving it the nirnhoned trait, to increase it's damage tooltip will no longer affect the amount of flat damage done when hitting things with that sword. It will, however, continue to increase the damage done by casting various spells while holding that sword. Is that true? Seems a little backwards in logic.

Didgerion

Jaraal wrote: »

So they're drastically reducing the overall damage of DOTs, but not reducing how fast other players can purge and cleanse them?

Looks like the tank meta is here to stay, and vastly improved going forward.

RIP PvP.

Well PvP is already in a RIP state.
We do need major changes to revive it! I just don't think that the ones ZOS brings on the table are the right ones.

acastanza_ESO

When more than half the comments are being edited for "bashing" maybe it's time to take a long hard look at if what you're doing is actually wanted by the community or not, huh ZOS?

Hint: WE. DO. NOT. WANT. THIS.

Urvoth

Remathilis wrote: »

Magio_ wrote: »

Some content will and should only be cleared by the very best. People need to learn to accept that.

Also ESO players: the endgame community is dying and PVP is a ghost town. Why isn't ZoS doing something to convince players to do vet content and PvP?

Hmmm like not giving us any pvp content since 2017 and having the same formulaic copy/pasted stuff released over and over for endgame pve? Maybe instead of ruining combat, they could, ya know, add some innovative and fresh content?

MurkyWetWolf198

There’s a better way to help out new players than this. From personal experience, as well as from talking with my fellow players, most of us never learned from the game how to hit high-end dps. Instead, we had to rely on other players teaching us through guilds or even YouTube. This is indicative of how ineffective the combat tutorials are in ESO. For example, I can’t think of a single tutorial explaining up-times or LAW to new players. There aren’t tutorials to explain what the different character stats are. There aren’t tutorials to explain the critical damage cap, nor the way Penetration vs Resistances work. There’s not even an in game formula that explains what the crit rating mean; to know how much value 1528 crit rating is you have to know the conversion to crit chance, which isn’t stated in game.
I would recommend the following; rephrase critical rating to say crit chance instead. Then, give tutorials explaining what WD/SD does, what pen and resistances do. Make these tutorials accessible after they’re introduced too so that players can go back to them when they need them. After this, there should be a section of advanced tutorials that explain the following; sets, buffs, up-times, LAW and other stuff. All of these in conjunction will raise the skill level of newer players because those new players will understand the game much better.
Zenimax, new players are bad because you aren’t teaching them how to be good.
Also, there should be tutorials for trial/dungeon mechanics for new players. I’m tired of explaining the Twins fight from Vmol

Tsunahmie

LA weaving was always a stupid bug that the team has never addressed appropriately.
Get rid of the darn bug once and for all pls
Before anyone ask, I do vet trials occasionally and hate how stupid LA weaving looks. It ruins Immersion ans how skills look. It's ridiculous.


About dots and buffs
Good change , add shields to that and make them scale off spelldmge or change the PvP nerf of 50% to a 30% nerf or something along those lines.

jecks33

as a tank, I can't wait to see my pugs trying to kill a 5mil boss with their new "1.5k dmg light attacks"

pat_awesome

Hi Gill,

I do think the LA attack change is fair, for one it lowers DPS creep and less issues for the introductions of new sets whist also fixing the broken heavy attack PVP scaling and other issues. Makes sense since there is no balance between PVP and PVE skills.

The issue myself and many endgame PVE'ers face is the change of pace of the game. Many people such as myself enjoy the fast paced combat of ESO endgame, pushing dmg, competing against friends. As we have seen power creep has made us use less dots for an additional spammable, for example no more back bar caltrops on a stamblade instead slot camo hunter. Just by dropping 1 dot with a spammable is felt making it less fun in my opinion. Less micro management is needed with this change, sure for newer players it might be good, but where is the vertical progression?. ESO is known for its player skill, light attack weaving, micro management, all these components whist trying not to die.

If people cannot light attack weave for example, keep up dots or even stay alive in content why do the high end players have to adjust for the newer players? shouldn't these people keep putting in the hours to get better like all of us and yourself back in the day.

Constant spammables is going to be boring, and thats fact, i do not see an instance that benefits the playability of any class other than a necro, and even so new players cant even grasp such a class and play it effectively.

I'm all for changes, but the APM and micromanagement change isn't needed. I think oakensoul has already created a solution for these players, sure it needs some balance in PVP but in PVE it sits perfect.

You guys have a great game here, just feels as if the endgame players are always put last.

Jpk0012

A new player was your baseline for LA/HA? What logic does that make? Why not someone with a competent skill level?

Pevey

Cynical_Alchemist wrote: »

I don't see how these changes will narrow the skill gap. You can reduce the light attack damage to a flat base value, but sets like Relequen, Kinras, and Advancing Yokuda (and many others) will still require us to weave well to get high DPS. If a player struggles with weaving, they will lose their stacks for this type of set, and their DPS values will still be much lower than a more skilled/experienced player.

So the changes may not do what was intended (unless there are lots of set changes coming along with the light attack change - RIP my gold/transmute stocks). It will act to minimise power creep, but that is not how the change is being sold to us.

I have seen newish players farming tzogvins or kinras because they heard those sets are good for damage. Based on the logs, they are not LA weaving at all. Now, I could assume they intend to learn. But more likely they have no clue and think these sets will magically increase their dps. (Which is not an unreasonable assumption based on how some other games work, making gear the one and only real determining factor for dps.)

ESO is very different. It's success is due to that difference, and IMO Zos should embrace it. It makes ESO stand out in a sea of alternatives. But from a business strategy standpoint, they don't seem to get this. They are purposely letting go of some of their product differentiation if they go this route.

It would be better to embrace it. New players do low damage because there is NOTHING IN-GAME to help them learn to do better damage. A quick combat tutorial in the beginning when players just want to start playing the game is not the sufficient. ESO's combat is unique, and it deserves to be highlighted by in-game content. Perhaps a special arena or an NPC that lets you do a number of individual trials of increasing difficulty. Each would require a higher level of skill, with feedback on how to improve if you failed.

Didgerion wrote: »

When the new players are out of juice (and they run out of juice quickly) the only thing they can do is light and heavy attack....
aaand the floor is falling again.

This is so true. Sustain in this game is crap, and it hurts new players far more than it hurts experienced players. Increase sustain across the board, and voila, you have raised the floor by a LOT without noticeably moving the ceiling.

MindOfTheSwarm

There was no need to nerf ground DoT’s. These in particular needed buffing if anything. Should have buffed them to 20 seconds, but also increase damage per tick by about 500. Then to balance it out, increase the cost by about 1k so they cannot be spammed.

DoT builds are (were) a thing. The nerf to Thaumaturge and Deadly Strikes all but killed them.
This new update has taken that corpse and completely buried it. It’s all Direct Damage going forward now. The build diversity in this game is getting shallower and shallower, and no… new sets don’t qualify as build diversity.

ManDraKE

And yet agian, re-inventing the wheel with LA/HA attacks for 4th time in the past 4 years? What it's next, another rework of procsets and sustain? The game has been out for 8 years and you still can decide what to do with something as basic as Light attacks

Why instead of making this absurd reworks that nobody asked and that take 2-3 patches to get right, you actually focused on balancing and fixing the stuff that has been broken for longer, or the broken stuff you introduce every single patch that complete breaks the game balance like oakensoul.

The strategy here is clear, keep simplifying the gameplay to sell more crowns at the cost of sacrificing the core combat experience that actually made this game good and made the loyal playerbase to keep active after so many years.

[edited for bashing]

ExoY

Hello Gill,

you did state, your goal is to reduce the maximum damage and close the power gap.
something that i immediatly asked myself is:

Will content be adapted to account for the reduced damage.
One example would be the Xalvakka Hardmode in Rockgrove, which has a build in damage check. It already is the reason for some groups not to be able to complete the hardmode.
( I am not talking about trifecta but just clearing the hardmode )

Wyrd88

Wyrd88 wrote: »

[snip]

[edited for baiting]

[snip]

I was just honest in this post, because for me, as an End-Game and somewhat competitive PVP player repeating changes like this just killing any incentive to play and progress, there's no point in doing so, cause every next patch everything gets simplified and dumbed down, over and over again. Which basically equals to killing aspects of the game that I used to enjoy the most.

[snip]
[edited for discussing moderator action]

PeacefulAnarchy

jecks33 wrote: »

as a tank, I can't wait to see my pugs trying to kill a 5mil boss with their new "1.5k dmg light attacks"

It sounds like it's going to be the opposite. If everyone's LAs, before buffs, are the same, and they do 6-11% of damage for 80k+ parsers then it sounds like those pug LAs, just like your tank LAs, will now be in the 5-10k range.

Gaisma

If you want to help lower-tier players, why not make LAs scale on total DPS instead (but not to a point where doing less damage would be desired)? You would actually boost the players, lessen the gap and not shoot the higher-tear players. The current change to LAs just means that the top-end players will do less damage, but it still won't let your average 50k player clear vRG or vDSR trifecta, most likely not even HMs Their damage will stay the same from this change, if not less as well. I don't understand how this change helps any group of players?

DoTS & HoTs I am fine with, as long as some of the vDLC HM DoTS that tanks have to survive will still be possible to survive through with nerfed HoTs.

Minno

I am not sure what this change will bring. But it does sounds like there is not much of a design intent for the change, aside from "players with less skill should be able to play at a high end".

Sometimes these "quality of life" changes are not very good for the health of the game. For example, one way to raise the floor for us dad gamers is not to adjust what the top 10% can do, but allow us to have a way to play that functions different from the others. Now that way to play should not be the best, but what it should do is allow the choice for the player to pick it if it matches their preferred way to play. So that when said gamer picks it, if they learn to play it well, they can do more dmg/healing than if they were to blinding follow the current meta.

It would be nice to see an updated design intent from the devs on each class/spec and how they think they should function in pve/pvp. Give us a guide on how to approach these types of design changes and offer better feedback. Then we can let the devs create a good pros/cons list for each way of playing so that combat feels more fluid and has downsides to when you mess up.

And then after that, give us the content to push yourselves on. but ESO doesn't have this problem, since they pump out some really challenging pve content that doesn't require addons to show you the mechanics (like how WoW stupidly allows it's players to have).

blktauna

AJTC5000 wrote: »

I would very much hope that the combat team is having regular conversations and updates with the encounters team, as from recent updates, it almost seems like they're working on two different games . . .

LOL conversations with other teams??? PVP players,??? PVE Players??? Maybe really playing themselves???
I swear they work in a vacuum because the stuff they come up with is head scratching.

joseayalac

DOTs are gonna be lame now in most content besides parse reports.

prof_doom

joseayalac wrote: »

DOTs are gonna be lame now in most content besides parse reports.

Ground DOTs might end up being less important (other than for procing enchants / Maelstrom weapons), but I think the single target DOTs are still gonna be alright. Probably gonna see various ground DOTs getting swapped out for Degen or a class skill single target DOT.