Magplar's reliance on Puncturing Sweep

Cosmo_Nova

While we're all talking about this ability anyway, I figured I'd share my thoughts on it as an essential part of the Magplar's kit.

Simply put, it's easily one of the most useful skills in the game. Spammable cost, AoE damage, and a health steal, so that your damage and healing outputs both increase proportionally to the amount of enemies you're fighting, letting you solo a lot of the more challenging content with relative ease. Not only that, but it also activates the Spear Wall passive, and crucially for DPS, having it slotted activates the Piercing Spear passive which increases your Critical Damage by 10%.

That being said, I'm not a fan of this skill personally, and I switch it out for Elemental Weapon instead. I dislike having a melee-ranged spammable on a staff-wielding character, and aesthetically I don't think it makes a lot of sense for my magic-user to stab enemies with a spear. Unfortunately, not using Puncturing Sweep highlights how much Magplar relies on this one skill to perform effectively.

Of course, I don't think anything is actually wrong with the skill! It's just a matter of my own personal taste. I know some people massively enjoy it and I don't want it to be nerfed or what other people find fun to be taken away. But I do feel like so much of the class identity being in the Aedric Spear skill line goes against the game's philosophy of allowing players freedom with their builds and playstyles.

Update 35 changed the Burning Light passive so that it can be activated by any damage, rather than tying it to Puncturing Jabs and its morphs, with the following commentary:

Currently, this passive is strong arming the Templar into only using Puncturing Strikes as your spammable ability, removing a lot of the potential for other abilities that center around different gameplay. With maintaining the original identity of keeping up the pressure against your primary target, we've removed the restrictions of damage source completely and added a longer cooldown window to reduce burst potential and message spam on the server, helping the passive stabilize to a more expected power budget while vastly improving its flexibility.

This is already a very welcome change in making a variety of Magplar builds a little more viable, and ZOS clearly wants to reduce the amount of reliance on this one skill. To that end, I'm going to suggest some additional changes that might help push the class in the same direction:

Make the health steal a passive. The self-heal is one of the most powerful aspects of this morph. Without it, Magplars have to rely on Living Dark (which isn't really that effective) or Channeled Focus (slow heal and restricts mobility). Making it a passive instead of tying it to a skill will not make Templar any more or less powerful, but will simply allow them to keep themselves alive while not using Puncturing Sweep. This does allow Magplar to be able to self-heal at range, something they can't normally do, but Sorcerer can essentially already do this with Critical Surge, so I don't see it as that much of a stretch. This does mean that the morph effect of Puncturing Sweep will have to do something else, and that the skill line has one too many passives now. I would change Spear Wall to being the morph effect of this skill, since users of a melee-range spammable are more in need of that Minor Protection.

The only problem I can see with this is that it would allow Stamplar access to the healing usually restricted to the Magicka morph and would be a pretty significant unintentional buff. Perhaps make it so that the life steal only applies to magic damage types?

Make Piercing Spear apply regardless of whether or not an Aedric Spear ability is slotted. The 10% critical damage bonus is a very important part of Templar's DPS output, but without using Puncturing Sweep Magplars are forced to slot another Aedric Spear ability somewhere on their front bar to take advantage of it, like Sun Shield (which I don't use because I need the sustain from Harness Magicka) or Blazing Spear (which is annoying, since I prefer to have this on the backbar with my other AoE DoTs and save a space on my frontbar for Inner Light). This wouldn't be a buff - it just saves you from having to do annoying bar-swapping all the time.

Change Puncturing Sweep to a ranged morph of Puncturing Jabs. A bit of a different direction here. Perhaps remove or limit the AoE damage or make the self-heal less powerful to make up for the advantage this skill gets from being ranged. It wouldn't require changing around any passives, and would still make Magplar very reliant on a single spammable - but considering it's no longer inconveniently melee-ranged unlike every other class's Magicka spammable (aside from Sorc, who don't get one), I could easily live with this. On the other hand, it would require designing a new skill effect and would be the labor-intensive solution for ZOS so I don't see it being as likely.

As a disclaimer, I definitely don't think any of these changes are perfectly balanced and cannot foresee every possible DPS or PvP consequence, that's what PTS is for. I'm merely putting out suggestions that I feel might help Templar gameplay be a little more diverse. Would love to hear anyone else's thoughts and ideas!

RedFlint

I main as a Magplar and Puncturing Sweeps has always been my skill of choice for content.
That is not to say I haven't used other skills when the situation didn't allow for close quarters fights, just that if I can get away with Sweeps I'll try to use it. Other skills work fine on the Templar and there was an entire patch where Elemental Weapon was better than Sweeps, but in my opinion, the class identity of Templar should be their Puncturing Strikes. The ability is balanced around being a medium ranged AOE skill paired with Burning Light, something ZOS forgot to account for when they changed the passive and nerfed the skill. Removing more from the skill will be a surefire way to completely kill the ability.

Make the health steal a passive.

I would enjoy a class wide life steal, but it would be extremely overpowered. Crit Surge only procs on crits and only every second, and Nightblade's Swallow Soul is a nice ranged heal over time but it isn't the strongest of heals. Ring of the Pale Order and the Blood Scion ultimate are good examples of how strong life steal can be and should be strongly considered before giving it as a class passive. Templar actually has a second move that gives healing on damage - Radiant Glory. You lose damage in exchange for the heal, which is also how Puncturing Strikes works with Jabs vs Sweeps. So unless the passive nerfs your damage, it would be hard to justify such a perk. Even if it only worked on magic damage it would be insane. Changing Puncturing Sweeps life steal to Minor Protection is not a good trade either, as life steal is much more valuable than that. Unless, sweeps had the benefit of having it's life steal, minor protection, and the class life steal. That would be frightening.

Make Piercing Spear apply regardless of whether or not an Aedric Spear ability is slotted

This wouldn't be the biggest deal, however many passives relate to the class in someway. For example Nightblade's crit damage passive relies on them having an Assassination ability slotted. Templars can slot their ultimate if they don't want to mess to much with their bars. Removing this requirement would simplify the class more but I'm not sure if that is really needed.

Change Puncturing Sweep to a ranged morph of Puncturing Jabs

Templar's spammable is interesting as it is not melee or ranged, it is medium range. This allows them to either picked a melee weapon or ranged weapon depending on if they want the choice of being farther away from their enemy. If you really want to mess with Templars, changing one of the morphs to a ranged with weaker AOE and weaker life steal would really turn their world upside down. It also might look a little silly, seeing someone Sweep from 20m away.

As someone who has played mainly Templar since Vvardenfell and played through several patches, these are what stood out to me. As it stands, Templar's spammable as seen better days and to take more away from it would truly destroy the skill.

Stx

They literally just nerfed jabs to deal much less damage. Feel free to use any spammable you want on templar. The self healing on jabs shouldn't be a class passive, that would be incredibly OP unless you nerfed it to like 8% or something...

ACamaroGuy

Jabs is what sets the Templar apart from other classes. No other class has a class ability to spam that is as effective as jabs (imo). Seems like most other classes rely on the generic skill lines to pull most of their damage from. This is where the class identity is lost that. Every class should have a magicka and stamina option for their class abilities. Every class ability skill line should offer a spammable . No generic skill line should outperform any class ability skill line. The generic skill lines should only complement your class abilities. This is why the Templar is so much fun for me to play with.

xthrshx

Asking again: was it intentional that you made jabs a weaker single target spammable than shards? Or was this an oversight?

Jman100582

Jabs old power really came from the fact that it was the only ability that could line up with burning light procs. If anything you could really just add your burning light tooltip to jabs, and that would be your “true” tooltip. Just nerfing burning light to where it is now would have been enough of a dps loss

Honestly I would much rather have seen burning light changed into a completely new passive, as it promoted nothing but brainless jab spamming. And even then, maybe nerf the single target portion of jabs by like 10% at the most while keeping the new buffed aoe portion. The fact that most of Templar identity is gone with the change of a single skill really shows the state of the class imo. It has little to no tanking ability and general crow control utility, and the heals have nothing that really feels unique about them outside of bubble and cleanse. And even then for pvp the healing on cleanse really isn’t that great

“The house” Templar identity was never properly implemented, and now maybe with the jabs nerf we will maybe see some progress made on that in the coming patches