In defence of SacroBones

kyatos_binarini · February 17

First of all, I want to say that I'm absolutely against the replacement of Stalking Blastbones. This change is literally a destruction of our main damage skill.
However, after a few tests on PTS, I realized that the idea of casting corpse-consuming spells on ourselves is a possible fix for LoS problems with siphon/tether skills, and the +20% DoT/Grave Lord damage boost is also a nice buff.
Like many people mentioned before, the necromancer has other useless skills that can be replaced (like Grave Grasp), so why not use them for this change?

OtarTheMad · February 17

While yes the LOS issue is not as big, you also lost corpses at enemies feet so you lost the corpse damage boost with boneyard and siphon is harder to line up unless you’re in melee range.

CameraBeardThePirate · February 17

The other issue with the self centered Tethers is that they're incredibly small AoEs - 5m is tiny. Try it out in any sort of fight with moving targets and you'll see how few ticks actually land.

C_Inside · February 17

Not to mention with Syphon has a range of 28 meters so by casting it on yourself you lose out on 28 meters of AOE cleave. Try hitting 2 crystals in Cloudrest with Syphon when it's centered on you.

No, SacroBones is completely useless as a replacement for Blasbones imo. Only use for it is on a HA build. Because you're totally gonna use necro for your HA build right?

ItsNotLiving · February 17

The issue with putting the buff somewhere else is that Blastbones has an extremely high tooltip and if you put a 20% damage buff on it (or even a 10% buff) plus the stalking modifier and all of that coupled with the fact everyone in PvP is forced to be a vampire that adds another 13% damage increase from fire damage Blastbones the amount of damage would simply be too high and lead to loads of silliness.

StarOfElyon · February 17

kyatos_binarini wrote: »

First of all, I want to say that I'm absolutely against the replacement of Stalking Blastbones. This change is literally a destruction of our main damage skill.
However, after a few tests on PTS, I realized that the idea of casting corpse-consuming spells on ourselves is a possible fix for LoS problems with siphon/tether skills, and the +20% DoT/Grave Lord damage boost is also a nice buff.
Like many people mentioned before, the necromancer has other useless skills that can be replaced (like Grave Grasp), so why not use them for this change?

Yeah but they could also make this part of the Necro armor buff. It's already an underwhelming skill compared to other armor buffs in the game that either does healing or does damage.

JerBearESO · February 17

C_Inside wrote: »

Not to mention with Syphon has a range of 28 meters so by casting it on yourself you lose out on 28 meters of AOE cleave. Try hitting 2 crystals in Cloudrest with Syphon when it's centered on you.

No, SacroBones is completely useless as a replacement for Blasbones imo. Only use for it is on a HA build. Because you're totally gonna use necro for your HA build right?

Does it buff HAs?

bar_boss_A · February 18

JerBearESO wrote: »

Does it buff HAs?

First two ticks are considered damage over time

Urvoth · February 18

ItsNotLiving wrote: »

The issue with putting the buff somewhere else is that Blastbones has an extremely high tooltip and if you put a 20% damage buff on it (or even a 10% buff) plus the stalking modifier and all of that coupled with the fact everyone in PvP is forced to be a vampire that adds another 13% damage increase from fire damage Blastbones the amount of damage would simply be too high and lead to loads of silliness.

Nah, there are plenty of other skills that hit just as hard or harder on average than blastbones these days, plus are more instantaneous and reliable. An extra 20% damage to blastbones would only put it into a more competitive position.

Dogvahkiin · February 18

Can anyone please confirm if the "new" Blighted Blastbones morph can still be casted out of combat?

MashmalloMan · February 18

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

The other issue with the self centered Tethers is that they're incredibly small AoEs - 5m is tiny. Try it out in any sort of fight with moving targets and you'll see how few ticks actually land.

Boundless Storm, Deadly Cloak, and the first 8 seconds of Hurricane say hello. Welcome to the club

This 5m self centered 2s tick frequency aoe dot standard is absolutely terrible and only got worse with the improved range for melee from 5m to 7m.

I can't tell you how refreshing it is to use Templar's Solar Barrage every once in awhile after struggling with the aforementioned skills continuously.

katorga · February 18

C_Inside wrote: »

Not to mention with Syphon has a range of 28 meters so by casting it on yourself you lose out on 28 meters of AOE cleave. Try hitting 2 crystals in Cloudrest with Syphon when it's centered on you.

No, SacroBones is completely useless as a replacement for Blasbones imo. Only use for it is on a HA build. Because you're totally gonna use necro for your HA build right?

I think the change was a middle finger. Let's change the skill so that Necro's delayed burst, their showcase ability at release, is cast at themselves.

The damage buff, especially with the limits on what it affects, needs to be 100%.

(meanwhile let's slip in some more massive NB buffs).

JerBearESO · February 19

katorga wrote: »

C_Inside wrote: »

Not to mention with Syphon has a range of 28 meters so by casting it on yourself you lose out on 28 meters of AOE cleave. Try hitting 2 crystals in Cloudrest with Syphon when it's centered on you.

No, SacroBones is completely useless as a replacement for Blasbones imo. Only use for it is on a HA build. Because you're totally gonna use necro for your HA build right?

I think the change was a middle finger. Let's change the skill so that Necro's delayed burst, their showcase ability at release, is cast at themselves.

The damage buff, especially with the limits on what it affects, needs to be 100%.

(meanwhile let's slip in some more massive NB buffs).

The fact that it jumps on and explodes on the user to buff them is exceptionally poor concept

MashmalloMan · February 19

I like the general idea of the skill because I believe hybridization while good for the game, highlighted how poorly designed the classes were. We were just picking the blue cost or green cost before, now we need to pick skills based on playstyle and that wasn't and isn't present for most classes. It means every class effectively feels the same.

I'd like to see a future for ESO where they make the morphs more about playstyle rather than colour. Sorc for example, it's more about no pet vs pet sorc instead of stam vs mag. It's fairly well designed with the morph choice between Haunting Curse and Daedric Prey (although it still needs work). This similar morph decision which decides your playstyle is now being implemented into Necromancer, however it's done in a poor way leaving many people scratching their heads. Why?

Blastbones Sacrificial Bones

Reduced damage of flaming skeleton by 50%.
Instead of the summoned skeleton jumping to your target, it jumps to the caster, dealing damage to nearby enemies and infusing the caster with power for 10s, increasing damage done with Grave Lord Necromancer and dot effects by 15% 10%.
- Stalking Blastbones Grave Lord’s Sacrifice
  - Morph: Now summons an additional skeleton after 10s to jump to the caster, increases the bonus from 10% to 20%, and now allows your next corpse consuming effect to target yourself as a corpse.
Blighted Blastbones
- Morph: Now scales based on highest max resource, the damage of the flaming skeleton is doubled and now targets your enemies instead of you. Applies major defile and the Burning status effect to enemies hit.
- Note, the double damage will bring the skill back to its original tooltip from live, it retains the base skills 10% damage done bonus for 10s, deals flame damage instead of live's disease damage.

"Developer notes:"

Grave Lord's Sacrifice retains 50% of the damage from Blastbones and summons 2 skeletons instead of 1. You become the blast zone, the power bonus now applies to all Necromancer skills instead of just Grave Lord. It becomes a bit more fun to use instead of a dead cast because it deals damage around the caster. With this change, it generates 3 corpses instead of 2 over the 20s which is necessary for the loss of Blighted Blastbones 1 corpse every 3s.

Blighted Blastbones retains the original 100% tooltip, deals Flame damage instead of Diseased, but still procs Major Defile and the new guaranteed status effect, except it's Burning. It has dynamic cost, and buffs all your Necromancer/dot damage by 10% for 10s.

Basically, as a Stalking Blastbones user, you lose the 10-50% Stalking mechanic (which kinda sucked and rarely hit its full value, but it was better than nothing). However, it's replaced with the new mechanic to give +10% damage for 10s to Necro/dots, guaranteed burning, and now Major Defile.

There, everyone is happy and now the 2 morphs feel better to use, distinct from 1 another, yet still clearly based on the same concept of a skeleton that explodes and deals aoe damage.

MashmalloMan · February 19

For fun I decided to make tooltips of my above idea.

The 10/20% damage bonus is kinda strong after reviewing and comparing to something like Solar Barrage. I could see a 5/15% split probably being a bit more fair, but whatever. Tooltip looks cool and I'd like the morph choice a whole lot more.

robpr · February 19

MashmalloMan wrote: »

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For fun I decided to make tooltips of my above idea.

The 10/20% damage bonus is kinda strong after reviewing and comparing to something like Solar Barrage. I could see a 5/15% split probably being a bit more fair, but whatever. Tooltip looks cool and I'd like the morph choice a whole lot more.

I had a similar idea, but instead of one morph explodes on you and one on target, they both first explode on you giving you the buff, then as long as duration holds you cast regular versions of BB.
-Blighted BB either casts faster or automatically recasts (Shalks)
-Stalking BB increase their damage on distance as they do now.

DrNukenstein · February 19

MashmalloMan wrote: »

For fun I decided to make tooltips of my above idea.

The 10/20% damage bonus is kinda strong after reviewing and comparing to something like Solar Barrage. I could see a 5/15% split probably being a bit more fair, but whatever. Tooltip looks cool and I'd like the morph choice a whole lot more.

That's a very interesting idea. The bones jump to you and blow up on you and it's a buff too. That change alone would give me reason enough to try out necromancer.

@zos That's such a good idea. Do that. Of all the bones to throw to the class that is about bones, that's the bone to throw.

katorga · February 19

JerBearESO wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

C_Inside wrote: »

Not to mention with Syphon has a range of 28 meters so by casting it on yourself you lose out on 28 meters of AOE cleave. Try hitting 2 crystals in Cloudrest with Syphon when it's centered on you.

No, SacroBones is completely useless as a replacement for Blasbones imo. Only use for it is on a HA build. Because you're totally gonna use necro for your HA build right?

I think the change was a middle finger. Let's change the skill so that Necro's delayed burst, their showcase ability at release, is cast at themselves.

The damage buff, especially with the limits on what it affects, needs to be 100%.

(meanwhile let's slip in some more massive NB buffs).

The fact that it jumps on and explodes on the user to buff them is exceptionally poor concept

I wonder if you can CC a necro's buff, hahahah.

Lystrad · February 19

MashmalloMan wrote: »

I like the general idea of the skill because I believe hybridization while good for the game, highlighted how poorly designed the classes were. We were just picking the blue cost or green cost before, now we need to pick skills based on playstyle and that wasn't and isn't present for most classes. It means every class effectively feels the same.

The more I think about it the more I agree with this. The current design where morphs are similar to eachother made sense in a world where classes were hyper specialized into being martial or magical but in this current world of more open ability usage it comes across as kind of a design hinderance. In the long term it would probably be healthy to re-evaluate every class, weapon, guild and world skill and set them up so one morph keeps the spirit of the base ability while the other radically changes the design or role of the ability similar to crystal shards and encase. Actually after the sorc ability changes the entire dark magic skill line is pretty good about this other than exchange.

TmanFoody · February 19

They should consider changing a different skill rather than Blastbones. Make another skill that generates corpses and buffs the class.

OtarTheMad · February 20

TmanFoody wrote: »

They should consider changing a different skill rather than Blastbones. Make another skill that generates corpses and buffs the class.

Sadly this change is looking like it is staying. Maybe if they change some other abilities that are meh it’ll be okay but I’m not gonna hold my breath. I’d turn into a Smurf before necro got the changes it needs

MashmalloMan · February 20

TmanFoody wrote: »

They should consider changing a different skill rather than Blastbones. Make another skill that generates corpses and buffs the class.

That won't ever happen because they're trying to provide Necromancers with 2 playstyle options.

If you placed it somewhere else, you're still forcing the skill ceiling of Necro to be tied to the 3s Blastbones minigame they're trying to circumvent.

But yeah, tried out the new ability on PTS this week. The corpse gen is technically a fix, but they've created a bunch more problems for no reason.

The skills potential is now tied to a second Necro skill instead of being strong on its own, of which is a skill no one really likes in the first place for numerous reasons. This is as stupid as Winters Revenge requiring an Ice Staff to get a 30% buff which is practically mandatory at this point. It feels like a dead cast until you start combining it with skulls. That seems so silly. Just make the base skill stronger without skulls being a requirement.
The 3rd cast Skull aoe/corpse mechanic is so important if you're choosing this skill over Blastbones, you basically need to use Venom Skull instead of Richochet Skull because it passively procs the stacks by casting other Necromancer skills where as Ricochet Skull just gives you more cleave, to which you're already getting from Sacrifice..
By being tied to Skull, it steals some of the strength it offers via the 15% class/dot damage bonus you could use elsewhere. I imagine a lot of people would have wanted to potentially use Scythe as a spammable with this. The ability basically says... naw, don't do that.. or if you do, make sure you use Venom Skull and cast it every 3 skills... WHICH means we're right back to square one with the Blastbones 3 second minigame they're trying to avoid.
Fun factor. Nothing about Sacrifice is fun. It has no visual indicator that an aoe skulls went off, so you don't know a corpse is being made which makes rotations clunky. It has to be cast in combat despite being a self buff. It feels very unrewarding to use.

Not to mention they left BB in the same state despite all the feedback.