CapuchinSeven wrote: »

Rune_Relic wrote: »

CapuchinSeven wrote: »

Kego wrote: »

We have to see as well how good the morphed Healing Spring will be, with its Stamina Regen attached to it, coming in Patch 1.4 and the Dragonstar Arena.

Could help at least in Premade Groups to get enought Stamina Regen for DMG.

It's pretty much just saying to me though, pick up a staff because magic or stamina, that's the only way you should be playing.

Say what ??? Using a spell and staff to provide stamina ?
WTAF!

Rather have stamina pots 2x regen or something.
Why the hell would a stamina build be rocking a staff ?

Healing Springs (see Kego's post above) is a Resto staff ability.

Rune_Relic wrote: »

CapuchinSeven wrote: »

Kego wrote: »

We have to see as well how good the morphed Healing Spring will be, with its Stamina Regen attached to it, coming in Patch 1.4 and the Dragonstar Arena.

Could help at least in Premade Groups to get enought Stamina Regen for DMG.

It's pretty much just saying to me though, pick up a staff because magic or stamina, that's the only way you should be playing.

Why the hell would a stamina build be rocking a staff ?

Invictus13 wrote: »

Here are the things I value the most in all that has been said:

-Reduce the stamina cost of dodge/parry : this can be easily achieved by fixing the amount to the base stamina pool every player has before spending his attribute points. Thus the cost would be a certain percentage of the 1100 or so stamina points every one has, and stamina based builds having 2000+ stamina would be able to use those abilities a lot more often, giving them a special edge over other builds. To me a trained athlete can outperform a scholar in robe easily, and this change would fit in perfectly.

-Give more sense to heavy armor by giving more armor rating difference between the skill lines. For example light gives 100 armor, medium 200 and heavy 300. Increasing accordingly the soft cap would make heavy armor a true choice regarding damage reduction, from both physical and spell damage. Heavy armor is a passive defense against threats, regardless of their origin, whereas spell shields and the like are active defense, focus on magical threats. My point being light armor does not protect better than heavy against magical attacks, it only provides more resources for the user to cast active defense ability.

-Heavy armor is currently only health related and does not allow a viable damage dealer solution. Allowing some skills to increase raw damage output could be the way to see heavy armor dps. Some other mmo have explored this path, making incoming damage part of the damage output resource (rage mechanic in WoW).

-Then the weapons skill lines lack in versatility compared to destruction staff abilities. Tweaking those skills to provide the same practicality in PvE/PvP would also balance the different builds. A mage gains a lot of dps by not having to close in range to dps a target compared to a CaC dps, and the bow AoE is less practical than the impulse skill of destruction staff if the targets are moving.

Resolving those problems would be a major step forward for this amazing game, and I feel like TESO team is not communicating enough to the community on the subject. I think more feedback should be provided to the players on how each point is considered/being changed/rejected. This forum is the opportunity for us to express our concerns, needs and opinions, but it's also a chance for the developers to interact, ask questions, and give feedback.

In my professional life, a project is more successful when both the client and the project team exchange ideas, it works both ways. You have a free brainstorming going on the forums, with very valid arguments being made by experienced and mature players, use it !

So, please, tell us what you think of all those problems, ideas, so that we can all work on it !

Lynx7386 wrote: »

Part of the "only sticks and dresses work" mentality is left-over sentiment from when vet zones were much harder, and before any of the stamina build balancing changes were put into effect.

Realistically, they're not all that far apart anymore. To any min/maxer, however, spell builds are still the way to go. Compared to the destruction and restoration staff skill lines, the dual wield, 2h, shield, and bow lines all look very poorly cobbled together from abilities that do not synergize well with each other or with class skill trees. The way the trees are fundamentally designed causes issues with their use, and even if the balancing act is a little better now than it used to be, it's still clear to anyone trying to make the absolute best of their character's build that you need to use a staff and light armor.



There's a few core issues between magicka(staff) and stamina(melee) builds right now:


1. Stat Synergies:
All class skill trees, and all class abilities, scale with spell power and magicka. MOST class abilities also scale with spell critical chance (a few use weapon critical instead). If you're putting together a magicka-based build using a staff, you're going to want to maximize your magicka, spell power, and spell critical chance. The restoration and destruction staff skill lines scale with those same stats (some of the attacks use weapon power, but will still benefit in some way from spell power or magicka). If your'e putting together a melee weapon build, however, you're encouraged to use stats which do not synergize with what your class skill trees need.

The end result is that if you want to use a melee weapon and have that weapon not suck, you need to gimp your own class skills in exchange. A staff user will always have more powerful class -and- weapon abilities at his or her disposal, while a melee/bow user will always sacrafice one or the other, and not for any real gain.



2. Armor Passives:
The light armor skill line offers a blanket cost reduction to all magicka-using abilities, as well as a small amount of spell critical chance, high spell penetration, and magicka regeneration. For a build that uses a staff and magicka abilities, all of your class abilities will benefit from the spell penetration and reduced cost light armor provides.
The medium armor skill line offers weapon critical chance, stamina regeneration, and reduced stamina costs, as well as some haste. The weapon critical chance will apply to a few class abilities, but not most. The stamina regeneration, reduced stamina costs, and haste do not affect -any- of your class abilities, only weapon abilities.
The heavy armor skill line offers some increased melee weapon damage, but comes horribly short on all other stat perks. That weapon damage increase also doesnt effect any of your class abilities.

With all that in mind, why would you go with anything BUT light armor? The one situation where medium armor 'kind of' works is for a nightblade using melee-crit-based class abilities in conjunction with weapon abilities, but the fact remains that other than a bit of critical chance your class abilities arent benefitting from your armor at all. Heavy armor provides no benefit whatsoever to class abilities.

Additionally, with the huge percentage of players running spell builds right now, the light armor line is offering you massive spell resistance through passives - so you're guaranteed to have more actual defense against enemy players than you would in medium or heavy armor.



3. Resource division:
Dodging, blocking, interrupting/bashing, sprinting, stealthing, and CC breaking are all tied to stamina. Magicka has no innate skills tied to it. For a spell/staff based build, this means that you have your -entire- primary resource pool (magicka) to do whatever you want, and you will always have your entire backup resource pool (stamina) to sprint, block, bash, cc break, or whathaveyou. A melee/stamina build, on the other hand, always has to reserve stamina for these innate skills, and gains no secondary benefits from magicka like a spell user gains from stamina. Not only does this make resouce management more difficult, it means that you're having to split one resource pool between offense and defense, while spell builds have one resource pool for offense and defense, and a second resource pool for additional defense.



4. Skill Tree Design:
Probably the topic that concerns me most here, at the moment, is how poorly designed melee weapon trees are compared to the staff skill trees.

In the destruction staff skill line, you have amazing synergy between weakness to elements, force shock, and impulse - they all benefit from one another. This gives you massive debuffing, single target damage, and area damage in three skills that all work well enough with one another to be put on the same weapon bar. On top of those, you've got moderately good control via destructive touch, and additional area damage through wall of elements.
Through passives, the different staff types (fire/ice/shock) provide you with a little bit of personal choice in how you want your character to play - pure damage, tank-ish, or control based.

In the restoration staff line, you get an innate 10% damage bonus (at least, when at full health) to all abilities - including class abilities. You can also throw combat prayer on your bar (which always hits you as well as allies in front of you) for an extra 11% damage bonus. Healing notwithstanding, that's 21% additional damage output from all of your class abilities just for using one skill slot and having a restoration staff equipped.

Both of these weapon types can attack from range, and all abilities within these trees benefit from the same stats you use to boost your class abilities.

Move on to melee weapons and you find very little comparable synergy in the skill trees. 1h/shield probably has the best self-synergy, with abilities like ransack to boost your armor on use, and defensive posture to passively increase block mitigation and reduce block cost. Everything about the 1h tree is based on reducing enemy damage though, which doesnt really help you in most situations. Even tanks prefer to just use the passives from the shield line and focus on magic-based class abilities, with light armor - some even forgo the shield entirely and rely on the extra damage or defense from the staff lines instead.

The dual wield tree has twin slashes for a spammable attack - but almost all of it's damage is dot-based, which doesnt work when spamming the ability. Flurry does respectable damage, but because it's classified as a channeled dot instead of several individual attacks, only the initial hit will proc weapon enchants or class effects like siphoning attacks. Whirlwind is an aoe execute, which is great when enemies are low on health, but you have to get them there first, and the dual wield line lacks any form of reasonable AoE damage. You either have to give up your best single-target damage ability (flying blade) to get a moderately decent cone aoe (shrouded daggers), or you have to give up your only source of increased single target damage (heated blades) for an aoe that only works on the weakest of enemies and is useless against champions and bosses (ember explosion).
You have a passive to increase damage against stunned, disoriented, immobilized, or silenced enemies... but none of the dual wield abilities do that on demand. the best you've got is disorient from blinding flurry, which is only a 4% chance per hit to disorient.
The best part about the entire dual wield line, better than any of it's abilities or other passives, is twin blade and blunt with dual daggers, which will give you 10% extra weapon critical - and again, that will only apply to a select few skills outside the dual wield tree.

The two handed weapon line is the worst of the bunch. You have no spammable damage ability: only cleave (which puts 75% of it's damage in the form of a dot, which wont work when spamming it) and uppercut (with a cast time, and wrecking blow cant even benefit from it's own damage bonus). Reverse slash is inferior in every way to class execute abilities even when you're heavily stacked on weapon damage and weapon crit chance. Critical charge is probably the best ability in the entire 2handed line, and might actually be enough to make the 2h line worth investing into if it were usable at point blank range for the damage alone. Class based gap closers are more efficient for getting into melee range, and it's a DPS loss to move outside of the dead zone to charge in for damage purposes.
Momentum is probably the worst-designed ability in the entire game, in my opinion. It takes 20 seconds to get to your full 20% damage bonus (whereas with power extraction I can get up to 99% damage bonus instantly, while dealing damage to everything around me). That 20% damage bonus only applies to your weapon attacks, not to any class abilities. The morphs are what really make momentum terrible: you either have to wait a full 20 seconds to get a weak heal once the buff ends (and really, who can plan to need a heal 20 seconds from now in a game where death happens in less than half that time?), or you have to forgo 10% of your damage bonus because you're spamming the ability as a root-break.
The 2handed passives dont seem to have much focus either - you can get splash damage (weak splash damage at that, and only on basic attacks), but that splash damage only applies to a single target. Useless when almost all aoe situations in the game involve half a dozen enemies or more. You can invest in arcane fighter to boost status effects, but you gain less benefit from those effects than someone using a destruction staff (who has spammable abilities that can apply them at 40% or greater proc chance). Lastly you get stamina regeneration when killing a target, but with all of the above issues are you actually going to benefit that much? Chances are you arent killing anything, and without any spammable damage skills you wont be using enough stamina for it to matter.




Everything about this game makes me think that the developers added melee and stamina as an afterthought. All of the innovation and imagination and ideas were used up on the magicka side of things, and by the time they got around to doing melee and stamina they just said "ah, frak it, we're done".

Can you get by using medium/heavy armor and melee weapons? Yes. You may struggle at times, but you can manage, especially now that they've nerfed veteran content.

Is magicka statistically advantaged? Definitely. Any minmaxer can point to the numbers, it's right there in the open for everyone to see. The only reason you have people who -dont- use a staff and dress is because they're either stubborn, ignorant, or dont care how effective their character is.

I have played many mmorpgs and i think that the story you wroted down here, mhm, its logical that light armor have more spell resistance, magicka, and magicka regeneration; medium armor and heavy armor are with better defence, but more with melee direction than light armor and do not give you so much spell crit or magicka that comes from passive opportunitys of light armor.
If medium and heavy armor are same like light armor, then whats the point, no one will ever create any spellcaster, mybe only for PVE .

Lynx7386 wrote: »

Part of the "only sticks and dresses work" mentality is left-over sentiment from when vet zones were much harder, and before any of the stamina build balancing changes were put into effect.

Realistically, they're not all that far apart anymore. To any min/maxer, however, spell builds are still the way to go. Compared to the destruction and restoration staff skill lines, the dual wield, 2h, shield, and bow lines all look very poorly cobbled together from abilities that do not synergize well with each other or with class skill trees. The way the trees are fundamentally designed causes issues with their use, and even if the balancing act is a little better now than it used to be, it's still clear to anyone trying to make the absolute best of their character's build that you need to use a staff and light armor.



There's a few core issues between magicka(staff) and stamina(melee) builds right now:


1. Stat Synergies:
All class skill trees, and all class abilities, scale with spell power and magicka. MOST class abilities also scale with spell critical chance (a few use weapon critical instead). If you're putting together a magicka-based build using a staff, you're going to want to maximize your magicka, spell power, and spell critical chance. The restoration and destruction staff skill lines scale with those same stats (some of the attacks use weapon power, but will still benefit in some way from spell power or magicka). If your'e putting together a melee weapon build, however, you're encouraged to use stats which do not synergize with what your class skill trees need.

The end result is that if you want to use a melee weapon and have that weapon not suck, you need to gimp your own class skills in exchange. A staff user will always have more powerful class -and- weapon abilities at his or her disposal, while a melee/bow user will always sacrafice one or the other, and not for any real gain.



2. Armor Passives:
The light armor skill line offers a blanket cost reduction to all magicka-using abilities, as well as a small amount of spell critical chance, high spell penetration, and magicka regeneration. For a build that uses a staff and magicka abilities, all of your class abilities will benefit from the spell penetration and reduced cost light armor provides.
The medium armor skill line offers weapon critical chance, stamina regeneration, and reduced stamina costs, as well as some haste. The weapon critical chance will apply to a few class abilities, but not most. The stamina regeneration, reduced stamina costs, and haste do not affect -any- of your class abilities, only weapon abilities.
The heavy armor skill line offers some increased melee weapon damage, but comes horribly short on all other stat perks. That weapon damage increase also doesnt effect any of your class abilities.

With all that in mind, why would you go with anything BUT light armor? The one situation where medium armor 'kind of' works is for a nightblade using melee-crit-based class abilities in conjunction with weapon abilities, but the fact remains that other than a bit of critical chance your class abilities arent benefitting from your armor at all. Heavy armor provides no benefit whatsoever to class abilities.

Additionally, with the huge percentage of players running spell builds right now, the light armor line is offering you massive spell resistance through passives - so you're guaranteed to have more actual defense against enemy players than you would in medium or heavy armor.



3. Resource division:
Dodging, blocking, interrupting/bashing, sprinting, stealthing, and CC breaking are all tied to stamina. Magicka has no innate skills tied to it. For a spell/staff based build, this means that you have your -entire- primary resource pool (magicka) to do whatever you want, and you will always have your entire backup resource pool (stamina) to sprint, block, bash, cc break, or whathaveyou. A melee/stamina build, on the other hand, always has to reserve stamina for these innate skills, and gains no secondary benefits from magicka like a spell user gains from stamina. Not only does this make resouce management more difficult, it means that you're having to split one resource pool between offense and defense, while spell builds have one resource pool for offense and defense, and a second resource pool for additional defense.



4. Skill Tree Design:
Probably the topic that concerns me most here, at the moment, is how poorly designed melee weapon trees are compared to the staff skill trees.

In the destruction staff skill line, you have amazing synergy between weakness to elements, force shock, and impulse - they all benefit from one another. This gives you massive debuffing, single target damage, and area damage in three skills that all work well enough with one another to be put on the same weapon bar. On top of those, you've got moderately good control via destructive touch, and additional area damage through wall of elements.
Through passives, the different staff types (fire/ice/shock) provide you with a little bit of personal choice in how you want your character to play - pure damage, tank-ish, or control based.

In the restoration staff line, you get an innate 10% damage bonus (at least, when at full health) to all abilities - including class abilities. You can also throw combat prayer on your bar (which always hits you as well as allies in front of you) for an extra 11% damage bonus. Healing notwithstanding, that's 21% additional damage output from all of your class abilities just for using one skill slot and having a restoration staff equipped.

Both of these weapon types can attack from range, and all abilities within these trees benefit from the same stats you use to boost your class abilities.

Move on to melee weapons and you find very little comparable synergy in the skill trees. 1h/shield probably has the best self-synergy, with abilities like ransack to boost your armor on use, and defensive posture to passively increase block mitigation and reduce block cost. Everything about the 1h tree is based on reducing enemy damage though, which doesnt really help you in most situations. Even tanks prefer to just use the passives from the shield line and focus on magic-based class abilities, with light armor - some even forgo the shield entirely and rely on the extra damage or defense from the staff lines instead.

The dual wield tree has twin slashes for a spammable attack - but almost all of it's damage is dot-based, which doesnt work when spamming the ability. Flurry does respectable damage, but because it's classified as a channeled dot instead of several individual attacks, only the initial hit will proc weapon enchants or class effects like siphoning attacks. Whirlwind is an aoe execute, which is great when enemies are low on health, but you have to get them there first, and the dual wield line lacks any form of reasonable AoE damage. You either have to give up your best single-target damage ability (flying blade) to get a moderately decent cone aoe (shrouded daggers), or you have to give up your only source of increased single target damage (heated blades) for an aoe that only works on the weakest of enemies and is useless against champions and bosses (ember explosion).
You have a passive to increase damage against stunned, disoriented, immobilized, or silenced enemies... but none of the dual wield abilities do that on demand. the best you've got is disorient from blinding flurry, which is only a 4% chance per hit to disorient.
The best part about the entire dual wield line, better than any of it's abilities or other passives, is twin blade and blunt with dual daggers, which will give you 10% extra weapon critical - and again, that will only apply to a select few skills outside the dual wield tree.

The two handed weapon line is the worst of the bunch. You have no spammable damage ability: only cleave (which puts 75% of it's damage in the form of a dot, which wont work when spamming it) and uppercut (with a cast time, and wrecking blow cant even benefit from it's own damage bonus). Reverse slash is inferior in every way to class execute abilities even when you're heavily stacked on weapon damage and weapon crit chance. Critical charge is probably the best ability in the entire 2handed line, and might actually be enough to make the 2h line worth investing into if it were usable at point blank range for the damage alone. Class based gap closers are more efficient for getting into melee range, and it's a DPS loss to move outside of the dead zone to charge in for damage purposes.
Momentum is probably the worst-designed ability in the entire game, in my opinion. It takes 20 seconds to get to your full 20% damage bonus (whereas with power extraction I can get up to 99% damage bonus instantly, while dealing damage to everything around me). That 20% damage bonus only applies to your weapon attacks, not to any class abilities. The morphs are what really make momentum terrible: you either have to wait a full 20 seconds to get a weak heal once the buff ends (and really, who can plan to need a heal 20 seconds from now in a game where death happens in less than half that time?), or you have to forgo 10% of your damage bonus because you're spamming the ability as a root-break.
The 2handed passives dont seem to have much focus either - you can get splash damage (weak splash damage at that, and only on basic attacks), but that splash damage only applies to a single target. Useless when almost all aoe situations in the game involve half a dozen enemies or more. You can invest in arcane fighter to boost status effects, but you gain less benefit from those effects than someone using a destruction staff (who has spammable abilities that can apply them at 40% or greater proc chance). Lastly you get stamina regeneration when killing a target, but with all of the above issues are you actually going to benefit that much? Chances are you arent killing anything, and without any spammable damage skills you wont be using enough stamina for it to matter.




Everything about this game makes me think that the developers added melee and stamina as an afterthought. All of the innovation and imagination and ideas were used up on the magicka side of things, and by the time they got around to doing melee and stamina they just said "ah, frak it, we're done".

Can you get by using medium/heavy armor and melee weapons? Yes. You may struggle at times, but you can manage, especially now that they've nerfed veteran content.

Is magicka statistically advantaged? Definitely. Any minmaxer can point to the numbers, it's right there in the open for everyone to see. The only reason you have people who -dont- use a staff and dress is because they're either stubborn, ignorant, or dont care how effective their character is.