The great stat and standardization thread

MincMincMinc

The main topic of discussion is on core build aspects that are blatantly not standardized or balanced. The following will cover nearly a decade of my logic on how to min/max any setup in this game, highlighting the poor balance that creates the numerical "Best In Slot" concept. The main goal would be to bring back tension to many of the following choices.

• How to come up with a standard
• What stats are needed?
• Stat balance (2-4 piece worth)
• Enchant
• Food
• potion
• Mundus
• CP
• Traits
• Broad Gear balance (5 piece bonus, arena weapon, mythic, monster)

Due to not being able to edit this first post, the following post will be a saved broken down list of points made on topics. Pick and open whichever spoiler you want and respond with the topic bolded in your post.

MincMincMinc

How to come up with a standard?

1. Come up with what stats you want in your game
2. Figure out your core build choices and which stats should be traded for what. Tier your choices(max stat vs wd vs pen)
3. Figure out what ratio should one tier trade for another. The tier system is important as it is easier and easier for certain tiers to get out of control math wise. (part of the reason %dmg buffs will drastically beat out max stat buffs)
4. Figure out what ratio core aspects should compare to each other Attributes vs Food choice for example.
5. .
6. Lastly move on to rebalance more indepth build choices such as maj/minor, classes, skills, 5pieceSets, etc

What core stats are needed? (leaving this not in a spoiler as the tier concept is important to understand, generally a tier 3 choice will be better than a tier 1 choice if available.)

Tier 1 (capacity sustain): Max Health, Stam, Mag
Tier 2 (Additive modifiers): Damage, crit chance, Recovery Health, Stam, Mag,
Tier 3 (% modifiers): Pen, Armor, %dmg, %mit, %critDmg, %critResist, %healingdone, %healing Received, Movement speed


Stat Balance (2-4 piece worth)

For the most part you can trade all of the above mentioned Core stats within 2-4 piece bonuses. (also in mundus) So it is imperitive to lay out what ratio one stat is worth vs another. My greatest example is with max stam vs WD vs pen. Currently on a numerically min/maxed pvp stamsorc/warden, these are the fully buffed&debuffed differences in damage done to a target.

If I add one line of WD it would provide 40% more damage than one line of Max Stam (keep in mind sorcs get a bonus % stam which helps max stam, otherwise this should be 50%)
If I add one line of Pen it would provide 90% more damage than one line of Max stam (closer to 100% if not a sorc)

This is why I split up core stats into the 3 tiers. Ideally it would make sense for max stam to be worth less than WD output wise, since you get the capacity sustain and damage. IF capacity sustain was needed. For capacity tension you would need to rebalance all recovery sustain to the point where half of builds are running surplus and half are running deficit.(this is not the current dynamic)

For the pen vs WD dynamic, the ideal is that pen doesn't contribute to healing. This tension falls apart as zos adds in more unique scaling heals. Polar wind, hardened for example. Or skills that just do not scale, blood magic for example is just a flat value. Why stack wd on a stamsorc if your healing doesn't need it, just stack Tier3 stats like pen and %healing to drastically boost damage and critsurge heals.

Enchant balance

Armor enchants (tier1 stat trade): This should be simple and impossible to mess up. We have health, stam, mag, tri. The problem is that tri glyphs do 1.5x the stats. This leaves no choice tension. One is absolutely numerically superior. Just make them all 1:1 trades. You could even throw in duo glpyhs for mag+stam, mag+health, and stam+health

Jewelry enchants (tier2 stat trade): Again with the same issue, numerically the weapon damage glyphs just provide more. Why did they even add extra recovery on these...... the game already has too much sustain.

Weapon enchants: These are all up in the air. Much like most 5 piece bonuses, these provide effects that cannot be numerically compared outside of certain builds. Note that for the most part you can trade tier2 and tier3 stats. For instance the weapon damage increase glyph vs a shock glyph(minor vuln).

Food/drink balance

Again pretty straight forward certain foods are just vastly more stats than others. Go look at all of the gold foods. These should fall in line with the balance of 2-4 piece bonuses combat wise. Foods like blood mara or hissimir should be purely balanced around combat, the special effects for vampire shouldnt matter balance wise.

Current example: The food people think is "BIS" for pvp would be Bear Haunch. IMO this is a big mistake most people make. A food like Hissimir provides much more benefit since it provides all tier 2 stats. In pvp the health recov is useless, for some reason zos didn't want this stat even though some classes are designed for it - stamsorc rant. Then it comes down to the Health+rec VS the boosted Recov. If you convert it all out based on 2-4 pieces the haunch has 1k more hp.... so it is more efficient right? Well not really since recovery is a tier 2 stat which is worth 50% more than a tier 1 max stat elsewhere in your build. Thus the recovery is worth way more since you dont need to trade a tier 3 or 2 choice for recovery somewhere else. Instead you use food to load up on tier 2. Not to mention Hissimir is practically free vs haunch which is 10k per?

Potion Balance

Mainly the standardization here is to compress the spell crit and weapon crit pots to give just "crit". Otherwise the standardization to be addressed is how some major buffs and minor buffs able to be acquired here show a clear imbalance. For example the major expedition pots are 1/3 the uptime of major crit...... my takeaway is that major expedition needs to be balanced out such that it can have the same uptime. (seeing that it wasnt addressed in the maj/min update)

I dont have much to cover hear other than this is a place to trade mostly tier3 stat buffs that are not obtainable elsewhere in your build. I always suggest pickout out pots towards the very end of you build design.

Mundus Balance

Again there are numerical balances if you consider comparing tiers. One example being that regen mundus is more efficient than wd mundus, even though they are equal trades for 2-4 piece. Strangely they made sure WD (tier2) and pen (tier3) mimic the 2-4 piece balancing. While this may sound like a good choice, I would urge to always choose a tier 3 stat over a tier 2. Even if you compare tier 3 stats, they are really unbalanced. For example the shadow %crit damage&healing drastically outweighs the pen mundus. The ritual healing is actually one of the more guaranteed useful mundus, however shadow is worth more around about 30% crit.

This mainly shows the issue when your tiers are so drastically apart usefulness wise.

CP Balance

Here you can trade all tiers of stats along with some 5 piece effect equivalent bonuses. The largest issue here is how defensive cp is on multiple levels. The blue tree lets you trade %damage, %mit, %healing. Then on the red page you can trade sustain and %mit. For the most part sustain is already given out like candy so inevitably out of your 8cp bonuses you will end up with half mit choices then maybe a balance of healing and damage cp. So probably 6/8 defensive cp.

The next level is when it comes to healing vs damage. %healing cp comes in 10% where %damage comes in 6%. Taking that further generally enemies will mitigate the % damage done, where there isnt much mitigation to the % healing.

Traits

Armor Traits: Mainly trading between tier 3 stat bonuses, unused traits are unsurprisingly tier 2 stat bonuses. These could be replaced with tier 3 bonuses like healing taken or done, etc.

Weapon Traits: Again unsurprisingly people choose to use tier 3 traits instead of tier 2 traits. Sharpened and powered is numerically stronger than WD.

Jewelry Traits: These are somewhat balanced like 2-4 piece bonuses between max stat vs infused(wd) vs resists. (protective 1190 is equivalent to the 104wd gained from infused.... before they added the extra random recovery for no reason.) Regardless of this balance, bloodthirsty and swift ends up blowing it out of the water.

Gear, 5 piece, Mythic, Arena, Monster

This choice should be feel like a secondary class, effectively modifying whatever class you choose.

Tier 1-3 stat sets. These should have a numerical value based on a ratio of the 2-4 piece values. (we can include kiss/curse sets here like new moon acolyte...... honestly dont know why they didnt make more like that.)

Stat Proc Sets. These should fall into two Proc conditions, either Uptime or Uncomparable. An example of Uptime is like clever alch being 675wd x 20/45s = 300wd average. The uncomparables become extremely hard to compare and very situational. An example of a good one is something like hew and sunder. Where the pen proc can be insanely high, but based not only on the number of enemies, how close the enemies are, and also has a cooldown. Our problem currently is that zos releases some sets that have the bonus of an uncomparable set with really no proc condition. Example being rallying cry. It has a 100% uptime while providing 2x 5 piece bonuses to your group.(in a 10 man group it amounts to 1x 5 piece bonus to all of your group == 10x 5 piece bonuses from one set.)

Proc Effect sets: Example being Tarnished nightmare. Do I really have to spell out why bypassing the GCD system and skill system is a good idea? Proc effect sets like tarnished need to be linked to gcd skills. Think of them as arena weapon bonuses except for certain skill groups. A good example would be Unleashed terror adding a benefit to a telegraphed skill that is clear and noticeable. A bad example is Vate 2h where the damage proc is not linked to a gcd on an animation canceled medium attack, giving no telegraph. For a set like vate2h or tarnished nightmare to ever be acceptable, it has to have a clear telegraph followed by a reaction period, followed by the effect. So tarnished should play a sound, then wait 1s, then do the damage if not reacted to.