Need Help w/ Skill Lists & Crit

LunaRae · November 2014

ZOS_JoeBlackburn wrote: »

Hey Guys,

Qhival's post is super informative, and hopefully we can help clear up a little more of the critical strike info for you. Currently critical strikes are based on the defense that an ability checks when it goes off.

So when you use an ability like Uppercut, it checks against the target's Armor when it does damage. This means it has a Critical Strike chance based off of your Weapon Critical stat.

If you are using an ability like Crystal Shards that checks against the target's Spell Resistance when it does damage, it will base its Critical Strike chance off of your Spell Critical stat.

For Update 6 we are making a huge effort to make sure that everything that costs Magicka scales in damage based off your Max Magicka and Spell Damage, and uses Spell Critical as its Critical Strike Chance. Similarly, all abilities that cost Stamina will scale in damage based off your Max Stamina and Weapon Damage, and use Weapon Critical as their Critical Strike Chance.

We know that currently it’s a little confusing to determine what stats modify your abilities when you put them on your bar, and we are working to make sure it will be very obvious in the future.

This game desperately needs clarity like this. Please also include in your review class abilities that should behave like weapon abilities. Scale off of stam/weapon dmg/weapon crt instead of how it is now. Class abilities should offer a balance between magika and stamina builds.

thesongoftimeb14_ESO · November 2014

Can you repeat the part of the stuff about the things?

Iduyenn · November 2014

so... if i want to mix my class- skills with stamina weapons i am screwed even more, because stacking only spellpower or weapondamage will be more effective... (if you realy want to make every magicka abbility scale by spellpower/spellcrit).

So... do we get morphs to make some skills based on stamina?

Hoodster92_ESO · November 2014

@ZOS_JoeBlackburn‌

This is a good step in the right direction, however truthfully I don't think this changes the balance between being a magica user and a stamina user. The pay off for being up close, and especially having your attacks user the same resource that allows for blocking and dodging isn't high enough. Yes we have potions and natural regeneration, but for high movement fights melee stam builds still get the chaft of after having to dodge all the mechanics or block attacks, needing to sacrafice dps again in order to re establish that resource bar just to survive the mechanics. So unless something is done with making either a higher regenration for players using dual daggers or 2 hander, they are still technically at a disadvantage and ultimately will perform less dps. Another possibility is giving melee attacks a higher base damage so that when they are in the thick of things they are contributing more which gives them room to use that stamina to dodge mechanics, knowing that when they finally are able to attack they can start wailing on their enemies, keeping up their dps.

Secondly class skills are one of the biggest keys to having higher amounts of damage, if all skills scale off magica and spell damage you give magic users a wider variety of skills to pool from then stam users simply by the fact that most skills cost magica and arn't bound by weapon like stam skills are. If you were to make certain skills, for example, Templars Aedric Spear tree cost magica and scale off of Weapon dmg, you give templars the capabilities of having a damage ability that allows them to burn their mana on when they wish to regain stamina, allowing them to keep in the fight with out sacrfacing huge amounts of dps.

Due to the triple resource set up ESO has and using stamina as the tool for dodging and blocking I understand its hard to balance, and even the suggestions I have made probably have some flaws, but still some thing needs to be added about either giving melee people a more abilities to create builds from, or a revamp on some class abilities completely.

onlinegamer1 · November 2014

ZOS_JoeBlackburn wrote: »

Hey Guys,

Qhival's post is super informative, and hopefully we can help clear up a little more of the critical strike info for you. Currently critical strikes are based on the defense that an ability checks when it goes off.

So when you use an ability like Uppercut, it checks against the target's Armor when it does damage. This means it has a Critical Strike chance based off of your Weapon Critical stat.

If you are using an ability like Crystal Shards that checks against the target's Spell Resistance when it does damage, it will base its Critical Strike chance off of your Spell Critical stat.

For Update 6 we are making a huge effort to make sure that everything that costs Magicka scales in damage based off your Max Magicka and Spell Damage, and uses Spell Critical as its Critical Strike Chance. Similarly, all abilities that cost Stamina will scale in damage based off your Max Stamina and Weapon Damage, and use Weapon Critical as their Critical Strike Chance.

We know that currently it’s a little confusing to determine what stats modify your abilities when you put them on your bar, and we are working to make sure it will be very obvious in the future.

Hi Joe, please look here:
http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/126297/the-way-skill-descriptions-should-look#latest

In case you don't want to go look, I'll repost:

timidobserver · November 2014

I am really looking forward to swapping Crushing Shock to Spell Damage. 1 class doesn't benefit from it. 3 do benefit from it. Net gain.

Spangla · November 2014

Makes weapon damage and weapon crit even more useless imo. Please stop messing around with the mechanics of the game

Sord · November 2014

Just a couple of cents from me here. Why not just reduce the cost of dodge for MA and reduce the cost of Block for HA toons A LOT so that they don't really cost much at all like 75-90% reduction. Thus not really effecting their stam pool. MA are meant to dodge/roll where HA are meant to block, I mean really how could someone wearing plate male do an active roll, they won't, they can't it is almost impossible, and dodging in plate mail seems unreal as well this is why in the real world of actually wearing plate male they had a shield to block and mitigate damage.

I also never really see magic users active dodging or blocking (ok Gandulf does some but he is just bad ar$, but then he is like 1000 years old and travels the world) and if they do it is taxing on them because they are not super physical. But a rogue, ranger, assassin, thief, MA type characters are bouncing all over the place like gummy bears and it doesn't effect their stam because it is second nature to them. But they can also Parry (not block) other weapons so may they have reduction to parry (which is block) but not as much as a shield and HA based toon maybe the block is built into the duel wield, 2 handed abilities (30-40%) along with the 1h/s line which is even higher reduction (50-60%) and the HA line gives a 20-30% reduction to blocking. But they have to have that weapon type equipped and each piece of armor gives a certain % equaling the total bonus.

This would make it so that stam users are able to use the abilities that are appropriate for what they are suppose to do as well as the weapon wielding toons and not effecting their stam pools very much since each active dodge/roll/block would be reduced to 50 stam (wear stam reducing jewelry it might cost nothing or like 10 stam?).

I think this would resolve a lot of the problems for stam users and their stam pool but still keep it expensive for those that don't have the right eqt. But dodging in a robe and ton of waving cloth isn't going to be easy either, as you would jsut get wrapped up in it if you did it a lot. Don't believe me go get a big ass wool blanket use some safety pins and a rope to tie it to your waste and start doing some leaping dodges and see if you don't get all wrapped up in it and see how easy it is to just get up and move around after jumping around and rolling on the ground (if someone does this PLEASE video tape it cause that would be funny as heck, *ROFL*)

davedesigns · November 2014

ZOS_JoeBlackburn wrote: »

For Update 6 we are making a huge effort to make sure that everything that costs Magicka scales in damage based off your Max Magicka and Spell Damage, and uses Spell Critical as its Critical Strike Chance. Similarly, all abilities that cost Stamina will scale in damage based off your Max Stamina and Weapon Damage, and use Weapon Critical as their Critical Strike Chance.

nikolaj.lemcheb16_ESO wrote: »

Well I do hope they realize that NBs need their weapon crit on their class skills. NBs are build to be stealthers. Stealthers need medium armor. Medium armor give weapon crit.

If they make the NBs sneak attack use spell crit then it makes no sense that the stealth armor give weapon crit.

@ZOS_JoeBlackburn‌ How will this effect Nightblades who have many class skills that cost mana but are melee attacks (Assassination, Shadow)?

Are the melee class skills going to cost stamina now or will we need to start stacking spell crit? I spent a lot of time and skill points building for weapon crit and now it's all being changed?

Sord · November 2014

davedesigns wrote: »

ZOS_JoeBlackburn wrote: »

For Update 6 we are making a huge effort to make sure that everything that costs Magicka scales in damage based off your Max Magicka and Spell Damage, and uses Spell Critical as its Critical Strike Chance. Similarly, all abilities that cost Stamina will scale in damage based off your Max Stamina and Weapon Damage, and use Weapon Critical as their Critical Strike Chance.

nikolaj.lemcheb16_ESO wrote: »

Well I do hope they realize that NBs need their weapon crit on their class skills. NBs are build to be stealthers. Stealthers need medium armor. Medium armor give weapon crit.

If they make the NBs sneak attack use spell crit then it makes no sense that the stealth armor give weapon crit.

@ZOS_JoeBlackburn‌ How will this effect Nightblades who have many class skills that cost mana but are melee attacks (Assassination, Shadow)?

Are the melee class skills going to cost stamina now or will we need to start stacking spell crit? I spent a lot of time and skill points building for weapon crit and now it's all being changed?

I think they are going to shift it more toward what you are built for with all the complaints for balancing stam based builds I can only see more class abilities actually being changed to stam and therefore being weapon crit and damage based vs spell crit and spell damage based. I can't see them changing any mellee stuff to being magica based. If they went the opposite way I have a feeling this game would have a lot of people so much more enraged. People want stam balance so I don't think you have much to worry about.

Spangla · November 2014

Ok So - Figured out a sweet build:

Managed to beg borrow and steal to get geared - then they released new set items.

1 Month Later - V14 comes out all gear pointlesss - Beg borrow and steal time.

Not long after - Resto Staff Nerfed - great my build nerfed YAY! Even tho dk way more op

1 Month Later - Stealth nerfed to rain in snipe - GREAT! My build nerfed again as I primarily use ambush from stealth as an opener. Why was ambushed nerfed to rain in snipe?

Now - More messing around with stuff by the sounds of it. Can i actually HAVE SOME DAM TIME TO PLAY THE GAME!

ALSO YOU REALISE THIS CHANGE WILL BUFF DESTRO STAFF SKILLS EVEN MORE! IMPULSE SPAM MORE PLEASE

Syntse · November 2014

Just the information I have been looking for. Bookmarked this thread so I can revisit it to check how the skills behave at least until Update 6.

Really hope @onlinegamer1 suggestion gets implemented too.

Sord · November 2014

Spangla wrote: »

ALSO YOU REALISE THIS CHANGE WILL BUFF DESTRO STAFF SKILLS EVEN MORE! IMPULSE SPAM MORE PLEASE

Not if they do some other adjustments to skills and abilities. I think they know about the mass impulse spam zerging and I am sure, since 1.6 seems to be geared to skill and ability balancing, that it is one of the top issues to figure out how to balance. Balancing is just part of a new game, it can't possibly work perfectly from the start and it takes about 1 year to start getting the kinks really ironed out, at least from games I have I have played and games are always doing balancing stuff, even WOW when I left it after it being up for 5 years still was balancing powers out and they did it by making every class, power and role nearly identical, LAME. I only played it for 3 years.

Pyatra · November 2014

Sord wrote: »

Spangla wrote: »

ALSO YOU REALISE THIS CHANGE WILL BUFF DESTRO STAFF SKILLS EVEN MORE! IMPULSE SPAM MORE PLEASE

Not if they do some other adjustments to skills and abilities. I think they know about the mass impulse spam zerging and I am sure, since 1.6 seems to be geared to skill and ability balancing, that it is one of the top issues to figure out how to balance. Balancing is just part of a new game, it can't possibly work perfectly from the start and it takes about 1 year to start getting the kinks really ironed out, at least from games I have I have played and games are always doing balancing stuff, even WOW when I left it after it being up for 5 years still was balancing powers out and they did it by making every class, power and role nearly identical, LAME. I only played it for 3 years.

The way to mitigate the spam zerging is do the opposite of what everyone expects. Staffs can be used by anyone, it's a weapon and already uses Weapon Damage, so maybe Staffs will go Stamina as it's not your Magic that you are using. Of course that will cripple the sorcs ASSUMING they don't realize this, but some alterations to a specific skill (morph alternative) and poof. Stam staff build works now. Not sure about the other classes though.

Dublicious · November 2014

Erock25 wrote: »

ZOS_JoeBlackburn wrote: »

For Update 6 we are making a huge effort to make sure that everything that costs Magicka scales in damage based off your Max Magicka and Spell Damage, and uses Spell Critical as its Critical Strike Chance. Similarly, all abilities that cost Stamina will scale in damage based off your Max Stamina and Weapon Damage, and use Weapon Critical as their Critical Strike Chance.

@ZOS_JoeBlackburn‌

I hope the team is fully considering all ramifications from swapping destruction staff and resto staff abilities to be scaled off of spell damage. The most glaring one is that Sorcerers, currently entrenched in 3rd place for end game PVE DPS and 2nd or 3rd depending on who you ask for healing, will be doing significantly less DPS and healing than they currently do.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRR we could consider that they may... MAY.... do more than make just this one change in a major patch...

SirEwan · November 2014

Any word on if Critical Surge would also be changed to increase Spell Damage?

Tanis-Stormbinder · November 2014

Even if they change Critical Surge, we would still be losing the Flawless Dawnbreaker passive buff.

akriden · November 2014

Thanks for the great overview.

@Qhival‌ @ZOS_JoeBlackburn‌
A question: can this overview also used for the comparison spell- and weapondamage?

I'm not really sure, cause for example soul shred scales with weaponcrit. the tooltip means the skill deal magic damage. And magic damage scale with spelldamage. So i have to increase weaponcrit and spelldamage to Power Up this skill, right?

Sord · November 2014

akriden wrote: »

Thanks for the great overview.

@Qhival‌ @ZOS_JoeBlackburn‌
A question: can this overview also used for the comparison spell- and weapondamage?

I'm not really sure, cause for example soul shred scales with weaponcrit. the tooltip means the skill deal magic damage. And magic damage scale with spelldamage. So i have to increase weaponcrit and spelldamage to Power Up this skill, right?

You are right, if it uses mana or is magic based it uses spell damage if it uses stam or does physical damage it is based on weapon damage. I made the list because crits were not that basic in figuring out. But it sounds like this is all changing.

Qhival · November 2014

akriden wrote: »

Thanks for the great overview.

@Qhival‌ @ZOS_JoeBlackburn‌
A question: can this overview also used for the comparison spell- and weapondamage?

I'm not really sure, cause for example soul shred scales with weaponcrit. the tooltip means the skill deal magic damage. And magic damage scale with spelldamage. So i have to increase weaponcrit and spelldamage to Power Up this skill, right?

for now the damage type is pretty simple. If it's a class skill it uses spell power, if it's a weapon skill it uses weapon power. The information we provided is strictly for critical, because damage type is pretty straightforward.

Qhival · November 2014

if it uses mana or is magic based it uses spell damage if it uses stam or does physical damage it is based on weapon damage.

that's almost true, mana/stamina actualy doesnt determine damage type. It would be true if staves used magic instead of weapon power. So the best thing to say is class skills = magic power, weapon skills = weapon power.

Hopefully I didnt just screw your build up with that information haha :P

akriden · November 2014

This is good to know, thanks for the help.
Additional question: whats with fighters, mage guild and undaunted? and the skills from alliance war and open world? they scale with weapondamage?

guybrushtb16_ESO · November 2014

akriden wrote: »

This is good to know, thanks for the help.
Additional question: whats with fighters, mage guild and undaunted? and the skills from alliance war and open world? they scale with weapondamage?

I'm not exactly sure about right now, but AFAIK at least at some point, some of the fighter's guild skills actually scaled with stamina and spell damage...

Qhival · November 2014

@guybrushtb16 I believe all fighters guild and mage guild abilities use spell power. Fighters guild is another tree that you can't just assume all stamina abilities use weapon power.

If you ever want to be completely sure, the folks over at ESOHEAD have tested all the moves.

http://www.esohead.com/skills/35750-trap-beast

for example, if you look at the above link you will see that trap beast has a spell damage slider, which means it uses spell power.

set44ub17_ESO1 · December 2014

Can we update the list as well to show all abilities and add witch dmg aplies to each as well? Or Are the weapon abilities use weapon dmg?

Sord · December 2014

I will do my best to get it updated on the OP but I just had a baby girl, 5 days old, so time is restricted.

Septimus_Magna · December 2014

As a dps sorc I fear this update... Taking away weapon dmg for staff abilities will make crit surge pretty much useless. Sorcs dont have any other good self heals so it will make us very squishy in PVE and reduces dps if you cant stay on target.

Also my dps will decrease significantly if Flawless Dawnbreaker doesnt affect Crushing Shock anymore, but I have my doubts about this change. The tooltip states that it passively increases weapon attacks with 13%. Crushing Shock is still a weapon attack but now it scales of spell dmg instead of weapon dmg.

Hopefully sorcs will still be able to do decent dps but I doubt that will be the case. My question is what will be the best roll for a sorc? Best tanks=DK, best healer=Temp, best dps=NB/DK. Sorcs will be able to dps or heal but not as good as other classes, I hope this will be balanced instead of ruined.

Sord · December 2014

Ok I updated it with general info about weapon damage and put it in bold next to the class power line on the OP. Some of the world power lines I am not sure and so if someone knows for sure please post that and I will update the OP with that info. Thanks. Remember this all changes in 1.6

Need Help w/ Skill Lists &amp; Crit

Need Help w/ Skill Lists & Crit