Subclassing makes me want to believe

necro_the_crafter

First, lets adress the positives:

The changes we see with this week were called for.
GLS+beam is no more, Armaments un-nerfed, Liquid Lightning buffed, Jesus beam un-nerfed (a bit), DK sustain adressed, piercing cold buffed, ult gen item-sets nerfs shows that they decided to hurt itemization instead of classes, which is also indicative of ZoS considering players feedback.

Now, everyone will have to grind a bunch of exp to level new lines, and collect a bunch of skyshards, which, in theory, should create some activity of differntly skilled players around the world of tamriel. This is great for social part of the game. My only concernes is instanced exp grinds that would isolate players, which in turn will limit possible social interactions caused by sudden need of getting exp and skill points.
I expect open world to become much more alive and guilds become more active, and its always a good thing.

Overall big meta shake up, and leveling everyone to the same baseline is great. I would love to expirement and discover new builds in the enviourment where everyone is lerning.

Now the questions:

Necro is no longer a unique class with self-synergies, and templar and sorcs self-synergies are better, since they are on base version of spells, while necros are on morph.
With those changes necros also deserve to have graverobber self-synergie on the base ability, and avid needs more love, since self-synergie is no longer contributes into power budget of a skill, so it no longer deservers its own morph.

We had a double beetles and double curse, now we are getting double spec bow and double armaments. How long it will take to realise that GLS =/= double blastbones? Where is the balance in that? Also what about arcanist dread and dks whip and templars purifing? when those skills getting theirs double-charge?

Larger issue:

Skill lines balance. Composition inside skill lines is imbalanced. While there is a decent choises for dps, for healing and tanking there is not so much, and for PvP there is clear favourites, that outcompetes everything else by a far margin.

Class unique resourse. Some skill lines like bone tyrant or solider of apoch is good only with the classes they belong to, because they rely on class unique resourse provided by another skill line of same class, which willl create even less options for tanking.

Class identity now needs a new medium, since class skills wont do that anymore. We still have a third round of class sets, but it would be nice to also resive class unique mythics and master weapons that interact with a single class skill - enchancing it in some or the other way, as well as more class unique scripts or even grimouars for scribing.

Damage types needs further diversification. less sourses of magical damage and more elemental please.

Customisation of skills is represented through a pre-built skill styles. Having a tool to at least recolor current animations will help players to build a theme of their new sublassed character.

Dissapointmets:

Subclassing hit us all in the back of our heads in a most unexpected way. Earlier this year we read a letter that clearly says that new features will be released when they are ready, while subclassing doesnt seem ready in a slightest. Interactions like GLS and beam werent properly thought out, skill lines composition were'nt considered at all. For a huge system like this you will expect a clean up first, shuffling of the skills and balancing around potential interactions, but instead we got bonked with subclassing, and left with the promise that devs will deal with aftermath of this new system later down the year.

11.0.3. We got hyped up for chunk, but got 13 lines of combat balance. Im my dictionary 13 isnt considered a chunk. Dissapoinment hits harder when you set with expectations.

Hybridization is still unfinished, alchemy, enchanting and provosioning are in dire need of overhaul.

ZhuJiuyin

11.0.3 is strictly speaking positive, but the number is too small and it is not what most players expected. In addition, some common requests did not appear in 11.0.3, such as the black magic line buff, Necro GLS rework, concerns about Grim Focus, etc.

If there is a combat balance similar to that of 11.0.3 next week, and adjustments are made to black magic, GLS, etc., perhaps more players will feel at ease.