Hey there,

I have read some threads about this and I also see a majority of people using light armour/staff/magicka combinations in the end game areas. Obviously magicka builds with light armour and staffs are way more popular and viable for many situations then stamina ones.

I would like this thread to be a gathering of ideas on how to make it more balanced and appealing for players to use medium and heavy armour, use more other weapons and weapon abilities. Currently I have the feeling its about 80-85% percent light armour/magicka users in the end-game. I don't want it to be a hack and slash only game, but for the pve trials its almost necessary to have high dps magicka users, with the ability of switching bewteen aoe and single target usage.

My personal opinion is, that the armour lines are pretty good, all together. Heavy armour got buffed and seems fine to me. Heavy armour is for tankyness and stustaining a lot of damage (focused a bit on meele). Medium is for weapon damage, stamina users, stealth/dodge/speed. Light armour for magicka stustain, magical damage, spell resistance, magicka regeneration.

Now for the weapons/spells/skills. I would say that one main problem is weapon characters have a pretty bad aoe damage. So I would give heavy attacks (all weapons except staves) the ability that they:

1) Do Aoe Damage, cone-like in front of the player (lets say 140° degree angle?)

2) This would also drain some stamina. (Light attacks wouldn't be affected by this, only heavy attacks which would in turn do aoe damage, so it stays fair there also should be a target cap as with other spells). The stamina drain is also important so there wont be magicka users running around with 2h swords instead of staves to max their damage.

To counter this stamina drainage again, which already heavily affects the current stamina chars, I would suggest to raise the stamina regeneration compared to magicka regeneration. I would raise it everywhere by about 35 percent. On accessoires, base regen. etc.

As a last point I would also alter the current weapon skills, to add more utility, as I think that some of them are really weak, if not to say useless. Add some stuns coupled with a cast time (so its interruptable like other class skills), off-balance, heightend stamina regen for few seconds, decrease cost of the next block by 30 percent, absorb 20 percent damage of the next projectile, maybe add a channeling ability for bow like rapid fire shooting 7 arrows or 2.5 seconds (slowing target by 7 percent with every shot). Things like that.

There also could be a skills similar to Equilibrium for the mages guild skill line. Like Delirium from the Dark Brother Hood. Making it drain health and give stamina.

I am not sure about all the values I posted because I haven't done testing etc. so ofc. the angle could be smaller, or some percentage higher-lower, but I think you got the ideas. I think those adjustments would be fair, would make weapons more appealing and fun to use, add more complexity and fix some basic problems without making tweaks between pvp/pve, adding new bars, etc.. So basically now a person with stamina focus could do similar things as a magicka user.
If they want to run/sprint/roll dodge for defensive actions they got roll dodge block.
If they want to do aoe dps, no problem, use heavy attacks. If they ran out of stamina, they still have light attacks. The weapons skills wouldn't be so much about damage, but more utility now as the class skills are (taloons, heals, snares, escapes). Still some damage skill would be nice.

Bow usage seems fine to me, and I would only change the damage output of the currently existing aoe bow skills. So I wouldn't apply aoe damage for the bows heavy attack.


Please don't flame in this thread or complain about how bad everything is etc. Only post if you have an idea or constructive things to add on how to make things more (lets not say balanced, so it will not all become the same, but) more appealing for stamina/weapon builds.