Hi friends,

Seems like there's a lot of people annoyed by the upcoming cyro test. I won't tell them that they shouldn't feel this way, because I think they have good reasons to be annoyed.

But in this case, I think the cup is half full as well as half empty.

I for one am looking forward to the upcoming, no-proc cyrodil test and here are 2 big reasons why:


Of course this is true in live as well, but to a much lesser extent. Because sets like malacath and eternal vigor are deactivated, there will now be real trade offs between heavy vs. medium/light, tankiness vs. damage vs. sustain, etc.

During the cyro test, if you meet someone exceptionally tanky, you know they had to invest significant portion of their build budget into being tanky. You will know that if you are wearing a sustain + damage set, and your opponent is wearing a tank + damage set, then they can out trade burst but you can out sustain the fight, etc. Being able to read your opponents and countering them quickly and efficiently will become more important during this test. And to me, this is going to be a big plus. Combat will be easier to read and understand, and you will be rewarded for doing so, much more than now.

Currently, a great deal of incoming damage is from proc sets, most of which violate fundamental rules of the game's combat system.

By far the most egregious thing that damaging proc-sets do to the game's core combat system is bypassing the all-mighty global cooldown ("GCD") around which every action in this game is balanced around.

The game was designed to have certain limitations on the total impact that a SINGLE action consuming 1 GCD will have, defensively and offensively. When this is preserved, class-imbalances notwithstanding, ESO's combat is mostly fair and very engaging. For the most part, ZOS has done all of its balancing around this idea--efficiently trading GCDs with your opponents. For example, trading block for enemy DB is an efficient trade. Trading block for enemy light attack is not. But add Syvarra's Scales and all of a sudden, every light attack becomes a mini-DB. This fundamentally breaks the game's OWN rules about how combat is supposed to play out and how players are supposed to make decisions.

In short: light attacks were never meant to proc huge AOE burst + follow-up dot abilities, gap-closers were not balanced around the possibility to triggering big AOE dots, the splitting trap ability from the Soul skillline was never meant to trigger a 14k tooltip dot in an 8m radius, crushing shock was never designed to explode for 4k aoe ice damage, Rending Slashes were never meant to function as a burst spammable, etc. (And yes, everything said so far also applies to healing proc sets such as Chokethorn and Earthgore).

Removing these rulebreakers will restore the integrity of ESO's global cooldowns, and this will have a HUGE impact on how pvp feels. And I for one think it will feel a lot better. It will feel better when you win and it will feel better when you lose.

So, in conclusion, yes I understand the downsides to this test. Your gold and time are at stake, people who CBA to swap and gold new gear sets for a test are out of luck in Cyrodil. All true and I sympathize. However, for those of us who are willing to invest the time to participate in the test, I think there is a lot to look forward to here.

Hope to see some of you out there during the test.