PTS Update 43 - Feedback Thread for Infinite Archive Updates

tonyaccount · July 10

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

knighting68 wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

Buffing everything else doesn't fix anything. When you buff your "increase to direct damage per stack" by quadrupling its effect, the only correct way to utilize it is to spam Elemental Susceptibility with 4-5 stacks of Focused Efforts because 90%+ of your direct damage comes from status effects. All you have done is made the one viable build even more powerful, and caused power creep. Focused Efforts will still be the centerpoint of any good run.

This "ignore the obvious problem and randomly buff everything else and see what happens" strategy never works because it doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Regarding your other point, you have to get extremely far in the archive to run out of visions. We're talking arc 30+ here, and that is well beyond 99.99% players' grasp. It's a moot point.

Please ZOS do not listen to this guy! It's not personal, but understand that not every player has days to spare dedicated to optimizing every build for all content types every patch. I'm sorry if Focused Efforts feels too over-powered to some, but don't be a buzzkill and try to ruin other players experience. If you don't like it, don't use it. Even if you are lucky 1 in 50 of your IA runs to actually get 3 to 5 focused efforts (I've only ever gotten 5 one time), it doesn't mean much once you are in arc 6+ (solo) and having to deal with seeking spheres, that flame channel from casters, dots, and more. Very few players ever get to arc 6-7 anyways, and it's not like these abilities are affecting any type of content outside of IA. Basically, it's not hurting anyone else other than possibly some players ego for not being #1 on the leader-boards. Some of us just want the game to be fun, and IA gets really hard the farther you go no matter the visions you accumulate.

Lastly, +1 for nerfing seeking spheres slightly next patch or a new verse to help some classes with an area interrupt. Also adding more visions and increasing some of the potency of existing ones is a great idea IMO. In my limited time to play, I really enjoy IA runs.

The reason why I ask Focused Efforts to be nerfed is because it's single-handedly killing all the build diversity and turning the meta into a lottery machine where your run depends on how many FEs you get and if you don't get them, you should reset an otherwise perfectly fine run even if you have zero deaths. I don't understand how can anyone defend this design.

I get that some people don't want to work on their game and update their builds who prefer a luck based format where with enough grind and time investment they can get rewarded, but we have already seen that this design always fails.

People aren't doing Archive a lot anymore after its hot start. They got tired of it. There's no save system and the visions make it a game of luck and FE farming is a huge waste of time. The advanced players understand a run isn't worth continuing if they don't get the right visions(=enough FE). The casual players feel constantly unlucky and don't have the ability to even kill arc 2-3 Gothmau unless they get the right visions and get demoralized. It's a lose-lose system that wastes the players' time with absolutely unnecessary RNG.

It isn't just the "optimizers" who suffer from the broken visions. They just have their time wasted on the constant resetting, but they could still make it to arc 6-9 without FE. They just understand it's not worth it so they reset. A bad player getting bad visions is going to have a miserable game experience where they can't do enough damage to even get to arc 3, and after getting lucky visions once or twice they feel demoralized to play again because they know the only way they can get a decent score is by opening lucky visions. And by the way, after one or two lucky runs they often feel entitled to getting good visions and when it rarely happens and they realize that, they stop doing the content.

The concept of Archive is great, but there's enough randomness in it without the visions. Adding game-breaking levels of pure luck mechanics is going to drain the well empty in no time for nearly everyone, which is largely what has happened. This could easily be fixed and the Archive could become hugely popular with just fixing the visions and adding a save system.

If you want to make it fun for casuals(and everyone in general), every run needs to be worth continuing at least until the first death and every run should have a decent chance to go deep. Currently this is simply not true. Most runs are a waste of time and worth resetting.

again this is why we should have the other visions buffed, then its not about a sheer luck lottery on rolling 1 vision, all (or at least most all) of the visions will have a useful amount of buff

if you nerf FE, you nerf what makes the archive fun, which is being slightly OP

not to mention if you nerfed FE, nobody would bother going past arc 6 as it would just become an enormous slog because of how weak all of the other visions are already

I haven't only been asking for a FE nerf, but also a substantial buff to all the underwhelming visions. I'm not asking for the character power level to be nerfed, I'm asking for consistent playable runs instead of having a vision roulette where your character's power level depends almost purely on luck. Nobody who respects their time at all, wants to spend 2-3h in the beginning of the session resetting the instance after the first 1-2 arcs because they didn't hit the jackpot. But this is the correct strategy if you aspire to go deep.

Personally as someone who has been the best performing solo necromancer in Archive whenever I've been active(I finished 1st in leaderboard the second season, and would have also finished 1st in season 1 but someone took it a few days before the end and I was already done with Archive), the reason why I am not bothering with deep runs anymore is because I can't be arsed to spend hours and hours basically buying low probability lottery tickets to see if it's even worth a try. I'm also bored of the "master build" meta where one build is so much better than any other build that it kills all the creativity.

The FE meta is so bad that as a necromancer you're forced to remove Blastbones(which is the backbone of necromancer damage in any other situation) from your bars after 2 stacks. You literally can't use your best ability because it's so much weaker than Elemental Susceptibility with just 2 FEs.

Also, after a few runs it just gets old and boring to spam the same free spell over and over again. You want to do something else, but you just can't because the difference between the FE build and anything else is day and night. So the end result is that players just lose interest.

Another super cool idea would be to have a version of Archive that doesn't have any visions or verses. Just you and your builds without any help.

Necrotech_Master · July 11

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

knighting68 wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

Buffing everything else doesn't fix anything. When you buff your "increase to direct damage per stack" by quadrupling its effect, the only correct way to utilize it is to spam Elemental Susceptibility with 4-5 stacks of Focused Efforts because 90%+ of your direct damage comes from status effects. All you have done is made the one viable build even more powerful, and caused power creep. Focused Efforts will still be the centerpoint of any good run.

This "ignore the obvious problem and randomly buff everything else and see what happens" strategy never works because it doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Regarding your other point, you have to get extremely far in the archive to run out of visions. We're talking arc 30+ here, and that is well beyond 99.99% players' grasp. It's a moot point.

Please ZOS do not listen to this guy! It's not personal, but understand that not every player has days to spare dedicated to optimizing every build for all content types every patch. I'm sorry if Focused Efforts feels too over-powered to some, but don't be a buzzkill and try to ruin other players experience. If you don't like it, don't use it. Even if you are lucky 1 in 50 of your IA runs to actually get 3 to 5 focused efforts (I've only ever gotten 5 one time), it doesn't mean much once you are in arc 6+ (solo) and having to deal with seeking spheres, that flame channel from casters, dots, and more. Very few players ever get to arc 6-7 anyways, and it's not like these abilities are affecting any type of content outside of IA. Basically, it's not hurting anyone else other than possibly some players ego for not being #1 on the leader-boards. Some of us just want the game to be fun, and IA gets really hard the farther you go no matter the visions you accumulate.

Lastly, +1 for nerfing seeking spheres slightly next patch or a new verse to help some classes with an area interrupt. Also adding more visions and increasing some of the potency of existing ones is a great idea IMO. In my limited time to play, I really enjoy IA runs.

The reason why I ask Focused Efforts to be nerfed is because it's single-handedly killing all the build diversity and turning the meta into a lottery machine where your run depends on how many FEs you get and if you don't get them, you should reset an otherwise perfectly fine run even if you have zero deaths. I don't understand how can anyone defend this design.

I get that some people don't want to work on their game and update their builds who prefer a luck based format where with enough grind and time investment they can get rewarded, but we have already seen that this design always fails.

People aren't doing Archive a lot anymore after its hot start. They got tired of it. There's no save system and the visions make it a game of luck and FE farming is a huge waste of time. The advanced players understand a run isn't worth continuing if they don't get the right visions(=enough FE). The casual players feel constantly unlucky and don't have the ability to even kill arc 2-3 Gothmau unless they get the right visions and get demoralized. It's a lose-lose system that wastes the players' time with absolutely unnecessary RNG.

It isn't just the "optimizers" who suffer from the broken visions. They just have their time wasted on the constant resetting, but they could still make it to arc 6-9 without FE. They just understand it's not worth it so they reset. A bad player getting bad visions is going to have a miserable game experience where they can't do enough damage to even get to arc 3, and after getting lucky visions once or twice they feel demoralized to play again because they know the only way they can get a decent score is by opening lucky visions. And by the way, after one or two lucky runs they often feel entitled to getting good visions and when it rarely happens and they realize that, they stop doing the content.

The concept of Archive is great, but there's enough randomness in it without the visions. Adding game-breaking levels of pure luck mechanics is going to drain the well empty in no time for nearly everyone, which is largely what has happened. This could easily be fixed and the Archive could become hugely popular with just fixing the visions and adding a save system.

If you want to make it fun for casuals(and everyone in general), every run needs to be worth continuing at least until the first death and every run should have a decent chance to go deep. Currently this is simply not true. Most runs are a waste of time and worth resetting.

again this is why we should have the other visions buffed, then its not about a sheer luck lottery on rolling 1 vision, all (or at least most all) of the visions will have a useful amount of buff

if you nerf FE, you nerf what makes the archive fun, which is being slightly OP

not to mention if you nerfed FE, nobody would bother going past arc 6 as it would just become an enormous slog because of how weak all of the other visions are already

I haven't only been asking for a FE nerf, but also a substantial buff to all the underwhelming visions. I'm not asking for the character power level to be nerfed, I'm asking for consistent playable runs instead of having a vision roulette where your character's power level depends almost purely on luck. Nobody who respects their time at all, wants to spend 2-3h in the beginning of the session resetting the instance after the first 1-2 arcs because they didn't hit the jackpot. But this is the correct strategy if you aspire to go deep.

Personally as someone who has been the best performing solo necromancer in Archive whenever I've been active(I finished 1st in leaderboard the second season, and would have also finished 1st in season 1 but someone took it a few days before the end and I was already done with Archive), the reason why I am not bothering with deep runs anymore is because I can't be arsed to spend hours and hours basically buying low probability lottery tickets to see if it's even worth a try. I'm also bored of the "master build" meta where one build is so much better than any other build that it kills all the creativity.

The FE meta is so bad that as a necromancer you're forced to remove Blastbones(which is the backbone of necromancer damage in any other situation) from your bars after 2 stacks. You literally can't use your best ability because it's so much weaker than Elemental Susceptibility with just 2 FEs.

Also, after a few runs it just gets old and boring to spam the same free spell over and over again. You want to do something else, but you just can't because the difference between the FE build and anything else is day and night. So the end result is that players just lose interest.

Another super cool idea would be to have a version of Archive that doesn't have any visions or verses. Just you and your builds without any help.

nerfing FE is nerfing potential character power

buffing the other visions to be compareable to FE would bother give more optimal runs without it being a lottery

if you do get far enough to where you have FE and other visions and FE is still the best option, then i dont see a problem with that, its very very unlikely to happen before arc 10 unless you keep rerolling until you start out with FE, if you feel you need to do that, thats on you, ive never restarted a run before if i had bad visions, but i do end the run early when it starts to feel like a slog, which with bad visions will happen as early as arc 4 or 5 (mostly because 80% of the visions are bad right now)

tonyaccount · July 11

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

knighting68 wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

Buffing everything else doesn't fix anything. When you buff your "increase to direct damage per stack" by quadrupling its effect, the only correct way to utilize it is to spam Elemental Susceptibility with 4-5 stacks of Focused Efforts because 90%+ of your direct damage comes from status effects. All you have done is made the one viable build even more powerful, and caused power creep. Focused Efforts will still be the centerpoint of any good run.

This "ignore the obvious problem and randomly buff everything else and see what happens" strategy never works because it doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Regarding your other point, you have to get extremely far in the archive to run out of visions. We're talking arc 30+ here, and that is well beyond 99.99% players' grasp. It's a moot point.

Please ZOS do not listen to this guy! It's not personal, but understand that not every player has days to spare dedicated to optimizing every build for all content types every patch. I'm sorry if Focused Efforts feels too over-powered to some, but don't be a buzzkill and try to ruin other players experience. If you don't like it, don't use it. Even if you are lucky 1 in 50 of your IA runs to actually get 3 to 5 focused efforts (I've only ever gotten 5 one time), it doesn't mean much once you are in arc 6+ (solo) and having to deal with seeking spheres, that flame channel from casters, dots, and more. Very few players ever get to arc 6-7 anyways, and it's not like these abilities are affecting any type of content outside of IA. Basically, it's not hurting anyone else other than possibly some players ego for not being #1 on the leader-boards. Some of us just want the game to be fun, and IA gets really hard the farther you go no matter the visions you accumulate.

Lastly, +1 for nerfing seeking spheres slightly next patch or a new verse to help some classes with an area interrupt. Also adding more visions and increasing some of the potency of existing ones is a great idea IMO. In my limited time to play, I really enjoy IA runs.

The reason why I ask Focused Efforts to be nerfed is because it's single-handedly killing all the build diversity and turning the meta into a lottery machine where your run depends on how many FEs you get and if you don't get them, you should reset an otherwise perfectly fine run even if you have zero deaths. I don't understand how can anyone defend this design.

I get that some people don't want to work on their game and update their builds who prefer a luck based format where with enough grind and time investment they can get rewarded, but we have already seen that this design always fails.

People aren't doing Archive a lot anymore after its hot start. They got tired of it. There's no save system and the visions make it a game of luck and FE farming is a huge waste of time. The advanced players understand a run isn't worth continuing if they don't get the right visions(=enough FE). The casual players feel constantly unlucky and don't have the ability to even kill arc 2-3 Gothmau unless they get the right visions and get demoralized. It's a lose-lose system that wastes the players' time with absolutely unnecessary RNG.

It isn't just the "optimizers" who suffer from the broken visions. They just have their time wasted on the constant resetting, but they could still make it to arc 6-9 without FE. They just understand it's not worth it so they reset. A bad player getting bad visions is going to have a miserable game experience where they can't do enough damage to even get to arc 3, and after getting lucky visions once or twice they feel demoralized to play again because they know the only way they can get a decent score is by opening lucky visions. And by the way, after one or two lucky runs they often feel entitled to getting good visions and when it rarely happens and they realize that, they stop doing the content.

The concept of Archive is great, but there's enough randomness in it without the visions. Adding game-breaking levels of pure luck mechanics is going to drain the well empty in no time for nearly everyone, which is largely what has happened. This could easily be fixed and the Archive could become hugely popular with just fixing the visions and adding a save system.

If you want to make it fun for casuals(and everyone in general), every run needs to be worth continuing at least until the first death and every run should have a decent chance to go deep. Currently this is simply not true. Most runs are a waste of time and worth resetting.

again this is why we should have the other visions buffed, then its not about a sheer luck lottery on rolling 1 vision, all (or at least most all) of the visions will have a useful amount of buff

if you nerf FE, you nerf what makes the archive fun, which is being slightly OP

not to mention if you nerfed FE, nobody would bother going past arc 6 as it would just become an enormous slog because of how weak all of the other visions are already

I haven't only been asking for a FE nerf, but also a substantial buff to all the underwhelming visions. I'm not asking for the character power level to be nerfed, I'm asking for consistent playable runs instead of having a vision roulette where your character's power level depends almost purely on luck. Nobody who respects their time at all, wants to spend 2-3h in the beginning of the session resetting the instance after the first 1-2 arcs because they didn't hit the jackpot. But this is the correct strategy if you aspire to go deep.

Personally as someone who has been the best performing solo necromancer in Archive whenever I've been active(I finished 1st in leaderboard the second season, and would have also finished 1st in season 1 but someone took it a few days before the end and I was already done with Archive), the reason why I am not bothering with deep runs anymore is because I can't be arsed to spend hours and hours basically buying low probability lottery tickets to see if it's even worth a try. I'm also bored of the "master build" meta where one build is so much better than any other build that it kills all the creativity.

The FE meta is so bad that as a necromancer you're forced to remove Blastbones(which is the backbone of necromancer damage in any other situation) from your bars after 2 stacks. You literally can't use your best ability because it's so much weaker than Elemental Susceptibility with just 2 FEs.

Also, after a few runs it just gets old and boring to spam the same free spell over and over again. You want to do something else, but you just can't because the difference between the FE build and anything else is day and night. So the end result is that players just lose interest.

Another super cool idea would be to have a version of Archive that doesn't have any visions or verses. Just you and your builds without any help.

nerfing FE is nerfing potential character power

buffing the other visions to be compareable to FE would bother give more optimal runs without it being a lottery

if you do get far enough to where you have FE and other visions and FE is still the best option, then i dont see a problem with that, its very very unlikely to happen before arc 10 unless you keep rerolling until you start out with FE, if you feel you need to do that, thats on you, ive never restarted a run before if i had bad visions, but i do end the run early when it starts to feel like a slog, which with bad visions will happen as early as arc 4 or 5 (mostly because 80% of the visions are bad right now)

Which part is so difficult to understand? You nerf FE and you buff other visions to for a more balanced overall experience where your character's power level would remain roughly the same but but you would reach it regularly instead of having to reset runs until you hit the jackpot. I'm not asking for your character's power level to be nerfed, I'm asking one completely game-breaking vision to be nerfed and pretty much everything else to be substantially buffed as compensation.

I have explained why you can't have a system where you just randomly buff buff and buff everything without ever nerfing anything even when there's an offender so obvious that a blind man can see.

Let me explain one more time why buffing the other visions won't fix this problem. You buff your direct damage, crit chance and, more crit damage? Guess what? 90% of your damage comes from status effects that just crit more often and harder, and Chilled and Concussed get buffed from the direct damage buff. You are just buffing the master build. Yes, you buff other builds, but the master build will still be the only viable one for a long game because it gets buffed more. Nothing will change. FE farming will still be the one and only correct strategy for anyone who wants to make a deep run. Noone who is at least half-trying will play any other build, and they are correct about it.

You said you never reset runs because of bad visions, but then continue to explain how you end runs at Arc 4-5 when you have bad visions. It's the same thing - you didn't get enough FEs so you gave up on the run because it wasn't worth continuing. The only difference is here that I recognize the problem and want to get rid of this one-build meta while you suggest extreme power creep while maintaining the status quo, or in other words, the one-build meta.

I have bolded the most important parts because I feel like I have to repeat them in every post. One more time: No amount of buffing other visions will diversify the meta, the status effect spam will remain the only viable option as long as FE isn't nerfed.

Necrotech_Master · July 11

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

knighting68 wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

Araneae6537 wrote: »

I disagree that Focused Efforts should be heavily nerfed. Rather it would be nice if there were additional visions that gave more than a very specific and incrementally small benefit.

Focused Efforts is at least 3 times as powerful the second best visions. Nothing else comes even close, and even the Attuned Enchantments builds need 4-5 stacks of FE in a deep run. AE is also only really good if you have exactly 5 stacks of it and you're running a specific build(Torugg/Heartland). If you aren't running this exact cheese build, 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 Attuned Enchantments. In fact 2 Focused Efforts is better than 5 of anything else, and usually it isn't even close.

We have two options here. Either we keep Focused Efforts as it is and pretend it's fine and keep the one-dimensional status effect meta on where you are locked to one build and your success mostly depends on how lucky you got in the vision lottery(=how many FEs you got), or we nerf the obvious offender and buff all the stinker visions to a useful degree and make other builds viable.

We can either try to make it so that every run can be good even if you don't hit the jackpot, or we can have the current lootbox meta. I have mostly given up on Archive even though I love the concept, because it's a huge waste of time just to get a decent run started.

A deep run even with perfect visions takes hours and hours, and if you have to spend 2h in the beginning of the run just to see if it's worth a try, I find it pretty demoralizing. And by the way, sometimes you spend 2-3h resetting the instance without finding the right visions, and then you have to give up because you don't have the time for the actual run even if you get the right visions the next try.

In its current state the Archive doesn't respect your time. That's why all the good players largely stopped doing it after a few weeks, and by far the biggest reason for that is the poor vision balance.

For the Archive to be interesting and worth the time, every single vision needs to be at least decent and none of them can be gamebreakingly overpowered.

or we just buff the other visions to make them more enticing to grab

3% increase to direct dmg per stack is pitiful, it should be a minimum of like 10-20% per stack

for those players who do get far enough, they do actually run out of vision choices because each one can be stacked only 5x, avatar ones can only be stacked 1x

Buffing everything else doesn't fix anything. When you buff your "increase to direct damage per stack" by quadrupling its effect, the only correct way to utilize it is to spam Elemental Susceptibility with 4-5 stacks of Focused Efforts because 90%+ of your direct damage comes from status effects. All you have done is made the one viable build even more powerful, and caused power creep. Focused Efforts will still be the centerpoint of any good run.

This "ignore the obvious problem and randomly buff everything else and see what happens" strategy never works because it doesn't even begin to address the problem.

Regarding your other point, you have to get extremely far in the archive to run out of visions. We're talking arc 30+ here, and that is well beyond 99.99% players' grasp. It's a moot point.

Please ZOS do not listen to this guy! It's not personal, but understand that not every player has days to spare dedicated to optimizing every build for all content types every patch. I'm sorry if Focused Efforts feels too over-powered to some, but don't be a buzzkill and try to ruin other players experience. If you don't like it, don't use it. Even if you are lucky 1 in 50 of your IA runs to actually get 3 to 5 focused efforts (I've only ever gotten 5 one time), it doesn't mean much once you are in arc 6+ (solo) and having to deal with seeking spheres, that flame channel from casters, dots, and more. Very few players ever get to arc 6-7 anyways, and it's not like these abilities are affecting any type of content outside of IA. Basically, it's not hurting anyone else other than possibly some players ego for not being #1 on the leader-boards. Some of us just want the game to be fun, and IA gets really hard the farther you go no matter the visions you accumulate.

Lastly, +1 for nerfing seeking spheres slightly next patch or a new verse to help some classes with an area interrupt. Also adding more visions and increasing some of the potency of existing ones is a great idea IMO. In my limited time to play, I really enjoy IA runs.

The reason why I ask Focused Efforts to be nerfed is because it's single-handedly killing all the build diversity and turning the meta into a lottery machine where your run depends on how many FEs you get and if you don't get them, you should reset an otherwise perfectly fine run even if you have zero deaths. I don't understand how can anyone defend this design.

I get that some people don't want to work on their game and update their builds who prefer a luck based format where with enough grind and time investment they can get rewarded, but we have already seen that this design always fails.

People aren't doing Archive a lot anymore after its hot start. They got tired of it. There's no save system and the visions make it a game of luck and FE farming is a huge waste of time. The advanced players understand a run isn't worth continuing if they don't get the right visions(=enough FE). The casual players feel constantly unlucky and don't have the ability to even kill arc 2-3 Gothmau unless they get the right visions and get demoralized. It's a lose-lose system that wastes the players' time with absolutely unnecessary RNG.

It isn't just the "optimizers" who suffer from the broken visions. They just have their time wasted on the constant resetting, but they could still make it to arc 6-9 without FE. They just understand it's not worth it so they reset. A bad player getting bad visions is going to have a miserable game experience where they can't do enough damage to even get to arc 3, and after getting lucky visions once or twice they feel demoralized to play again because they know the only way they can get a decent score is by opening lucky visions. And by the way, after one or two lucky runs they often feel entitled to getting good visions and when it rarely happens and they realize that, they stop doing the content.

The concept of Archive is great, but there's enough randomness in it without the visions. Adding game-breaking levels of pure luck mechanics is going to drain the well empty in no time for nearly everyone, which is largely what has happened. This could easily be fixed and the Archive could become hugely popular with just fixing the visions and adding a save system.

If you want to make it fun for casuals(and everyone in general), every run needs to be worth continuing at least until the first death and every run should have a decent chance to go deep. Currently this is simply not true. Most runs are a waste of time and worth resetting.

again this is why we should have the other visions buffed, then its not about a sheer luck lottery on rolling 1 vision, all (or at least most all) of the visions will have a useful amount of buff

if you nerf FE, you nerf what makes the archive fun, which is being slightly OP

not to mention if you nerfed FE, nobody would bother going past arc 6 as it would just become an enormous slog because of how weak all of the other visions are already

I haven't only been asking for a FE nerf, but also a substantial buff to all the underwhelming visions. I'm not asking for the character power level to be nerfed, I'm asking for consistent playable runs instead of having a vision roulette where your character's power level depends almost purely on luck. Nobody who respects their time at all, wants to spend 2-3h in the beginning of the session resetting the instance after the first 1-2 arcs because they didn't hit the jackpot. But this is the correct strategy if you aspire to go deep.

Personally as someone who has been the best performing solo necromancer in Archive whenever I've been active(I finished 1st in leaderboard the second season, and would have also finished 1st in season 1 but someone took it a few days before the end and I was already done with Archive), the reason why I am not bothering with deep runs anymore is because I can't be arsed to spend hours and hours basically buying low probability lottery tickets to see if it's even worth a try. I'm also bored of the "master build" meta where one build is so much better than any other build that it kills all the creativity.

The FE meta is so bad that as a necromancer you're forced to remove Blastbones(which is the backbone of necromancer damage in any other situation) from your bars after 2 stacks. You literally can't use your best ability because it's so much weaker than Elemental Susceptibility with just 2 FEs.

Also, after a few runs it just gets old and boring to spam the same free spell over and over again. You want to do something else, but you just can't because the difference between the FE build and anything else is day and night. So the end result is that players just lose interest.

Another super cool idea would be to have a version of Archive that doesn't have any visions or verses. Just you and your builds without any help.

nerfing FE is nerfing potential character power

buffing the other visions to be compareable to FE would bother give more optimal runs without it being a lottery

if you do get far enough to where you have FE and other visions and FE is still the best option, then i dont see a problem with that, its very very unlikely to happen before arc 10 unless you keep rerolling until you start out with FE, if you feel you need to do that, thats on you, ive never restarted a run before if i had bad visions, but i do end the run early when it starts to feel like a slog, which with bad visions will happen as early as arc 4 or 5 (mostly because 80% of the visions are bad right now)

Which part is so difficult to understand? You nerf FE and you buff other visions to for a more balanced overall experience where your character's power level would remain roughly the same but but you would reach it regularly instead of having to reset runs until you hit the jackpot. I'm not asking for your character's power level to be nerfed, I'm asking one completely game-breaking vision to be nerfed and pretty much everything else to be substantially buffed as compensation.

I have explained why you can't have a system where you just randomly buff buff and buff everything without ever nerfing anything even when there's an offender so obvious that a blind man can see.

Let me explain one more time why buffing the other visions won't fix this problem. You buff your direct damage, crit chance and, more crit damage? Guess what? 90% of your damage comes from status effects that just crit more often and harder, and Chilled and Concussed get buffed from the direct damage buff. You are just buffing the master build. Yes, you buff other builds, but the master build will still be the only viable one for a long game because it gets buffed more. Nothing will change. FE farming will still be the one and only correct strategy for anyone who wants to make a deep run. Noone who is at least half-trying will play any other build, and they are correct about it.

You said you never reset runs because of bad visions, but then continue to explain how you end runs at Arc 4-5 when you have bad visions. It's the same thing - you didn't get enough FEs so you gave up on the run because it wasn't worth continuing. The only difference is here that I recognize the problem and want to get rid of this one-build meta while you suggest extreme power creep while maintaining the status quo, or in other words, the one-build meta.

I have bolded the most important parts because I feel like I have to repeat them in every post. One more time: No amount of buffing other visions will diversify the meta, the status effect spam will remain the only viable option as long as FE isn't nerfed.

i rarely go past arc 4 or 5 anyway because in general it just becomes a slog and not really worth the time (running with a friend i can clear arc 4-5 in like 1.5 hours, which feels like a long time), ive done runs that got up to arc 7,8,9,10 which lasted 6-7 hours which is honestly too long, and to be honest theres really no point, the leaderboard rewards arent good enough to care about

i understand that buffing stuff like crit chance will stack with FE and i dont see a problem with that, in fact it would help people push to higher arcs faster

it is absolutely 100% your choice that you choose to spam ele sus or use whatever is the "meta" build for reaching arc 20+, i dont care about your build choices or the leaderboard

i dont see any problem with FE as it stands, it makes the archive fun
i do see a problem with all of the other visions that feel like wasted picks because they dont do anything significant

i play the archive because its fun, not scorepushing

Araneae6537 · July 11

Okay, I have to agree to nerf FE so long as it is accompanied by buffing other visions. It is okay that not all are equal (although the really useless ones should be amended or removed), but having most mediocre and one or two really great, and only for those who prepared to make the most of it, is not ideal.

MrCray78 · July 12

◾Dont Nerf FE just buff all other vision.

◾Buff the XP vision for giving you +250% XP for One vision.
◾Buff Gold Vision for giving you +300% Gold for One Vision.

◾Changed the leaderboard reward to give :
🔺Top 1 : 500 Transmutation Crystals/100000 Archival Fortunes/10 Avatar Transformation Verse Scrolls/1 of 10 Fragment of a New Exclusive Apocrypha House.
🔺Top 2/3 : 250 Transmutation Crystals/50000 Archival Fortunes/5 Avatar Transformation Verse Scrolls
🔺Top 4->10 : 100 Transmutation Crystals/25000 Archival Fortunes/3 Avatar Transformation Verse Scrolls.
🔺Top 11->100 : 25 Transmutation Crystals/5000 Archival Fortunes/3 Mystery Verse Scrolls(Offensive/Défensive/Utility)

And @ZOS_GinaBruno Can you please Add a achievement with Tho'At Polymorph and Title for finished Arc 10-5-3 at Solo/Duo without using any Mystery Verse and No Death 🐈🐈🐈

Serophous · July 13

Dragonredux wrote: »

Quickened Tinctures needs a buff for it to be worth taking. 1/2 seconds per stack is not worth it compared to other Visions. I suggest 2/4 or even 5/10 because there’s no potion currently besides maybe Immovable that’s warrants such a low reduction currently. In addition, the cost of making/potions if a player decides to spam it, and besides what’s the harm of having a little taste of power.

I don't know about making it that much of a cooldown. Someone would just keep a jewelry set with infused and potion cooldown to be able to just spam a pot whenever with only dealing with the GCD.

Personofsecrets · July 15

@tonyaccount hit's the nail on the head with their commentary.

I do have a few things too add, but first I'll reiterate some of the major issue with Archive.

What a player can do to achieve a far depth within Infinite Archive is incredibly narrow. It comes down to abusing a few Visions and strategies.

Because the Vision pool is so large and because so many of the Visions aren't that good, I look for very specific Visions to have a good run.

I can still achieve a somewhat decent depth with bad Visions, but here in lies the other issue. The viable strategy for achieving that depth is cheesy and incredibly boring to do for hours upon hours.

Here is where I have something to add.

Not only does the pool of lackluster Visions contribute to the tediousness of trying to get a far depth in Archive, but because so many types of Visions are split between Magical or Martial effects, players are pigeonholed even more with regards to the types of builds that they may use which get the most use possible from the diverse Visions that are obtainable.

As it turns out, the status build is perfect for getting bonus from both Magical or Martial enhancing Visions. Not only does Focused Efforts cause this issue, but so does so many different types of Visions being split amongs Magical and Martial. So if someone doesn't want to foccus on status effects, then they sort of suffer for that.

Slow gains in power due to non-ideal Vision pickups also lead to playstyels that rely on setting up dots/hots and baby sitting Mages. For really long runs, the stategy get's even cheesier as it becomes ideal to just sit under the effect of Magma Shell. I only play DK, I love Magma Shell, and even I find this type of playstyle invalid.

Ultimately, I would raise the power level most Visions, get rid of the useless ones, combine the Visions that deal with Magical or Martial effects into single Visions. I would also review cheesy playstyles.

If you are going to have an infinite archive, rather than a finite archive, then I think that you should strongly consider valuing players time be fixing the Vision issue. In order to make the infinite aspect of the archive have prestige, then you should fix the ability of cheesy play styles ot get far.

Infinite Archive is really close to being great. As it is now, I feel like it is just a time sink that isn't that fun and doesn't have that great of a reward for the time it takes to get far. Getting far isn't even really acknwoledged by the game.

Aslo, please add the save function. I know that you can do it. Not having a save function makes disconnects feel awful. They feel just as bad as one that happens on the last boss of a trial trifecta run. It feels really bad. Not only that, but again, if the Archive is to matter from prestige, then why should people who have large amounts of non-interrupted time get an advantage just because of their lifestyle? Let us save, go to work, take care of the kids, and push another hour into the Archive at another time.

StarMightyMaster · July 15

tonyaccount wrote: »

I agree with everyone that says we need a save option. This thing has been in the game for almost a year and it's been by far the most requested thing everywhere I've looked. The time investment for a deep run is too much for most people, and a save option needs to be added sooner than later. We prefer sooner.

Other than that what I find disappointing is that in these threads nobody is bringing up the obvious elephant in the room, which is the vision (im)balance. Most visions are underwhelming, and others are gamebreaking. This creates a situation where the correct strategy if you want to go far, is to clear 1-2 arcs of and if you don't have at least 2 Focused Efforts, you should reset the instance and start over again. It's boring and stupid, but this is what poor balance causes.

Focused Efforts is by a landslide the best vision, and every deep run has 4-5 stacks of it. The only viable endgame strategy regardless of your class is to stack FE and spam Elemental Susceptibility and status effects. This strategy is very boring to play by the way, and feels very similar on every class. Basically you spam a free ranged skill that applies lots of status effects on target(s). It gets old quickly and kills the creativity from the game.

Infinite Archive needs elementary level fixes, not more Marauders and bosses. Here is a short list of vision changes required:

1. Focused Efforts needs to be heavily nerfed. Just buffing other visions isn't a solution here because many of them also buff your status effect damage. Buffing other things would only result in power creep and status effect spam still being the only viable strategy for a deep run, with the only difference being that it's even more powerful than before with all the buffs from other visions.

Focused Efforts is by any objective metric an extremely overperforming vision. Balance cannot exist with one vision being at least 3x as good as anything else. Anyone who is opposed to nerfing it, think about it again. Do you want to have a one-strategy meta or try out a bunch of cool fringe sets that you've always wanted to play with?

3. Attuned Enchantments must not work with Weakening glyph. The vision itself is fine and doesn't need to be nerfed otherwise, you just need to "blacklist" Weakening from it so the spell/weapon damage of bosses/marauders cannot be dropped to 0 with Torug's Pact/Heartland Conqueror build. Currently if you use this set-up and have 5 Attuned Enchantments, almost all bosses become ridiculously easy as they have 0 weapon/spell damage. That means you can take an unblocked heavy attack or 1-shot attack in the face, and it will do 0 damage.

3. The Gold and Exp gain visions need to be removed completely. They are the polar opposite of Focused Efforts. All I have seen is them cause negativity in people because they are completely useless and a waste of vision slots.

4. Most other visions need to be buffed a lot. The reality is that outside of a few gross offenders, most visions are simply lackluster. Either you get lucky and find one of the really good ones or you are dealing with leftovers. A good starting point would be nerfing Focused efforts by about 60% while also doubling the effect of most of these lackluster visions. Of course, looking at each one individually would be even better, but this would be a good quick fix to make the gameplay more diverse.

Additionally, the Dragonknight ability Magma Shell needs to finally be nerfed. All these ridiculous 30+ arc duo runs were made with Magma Shell cheese builds where one or both players in the group were Dragonknights with ultimate gain builds who can maintain nearly 100% Magma Shell uptime. I don't know why this has not been addressed.

If you are going for arc 15 20 25 etc you actually need the damage Focused Efforts give you or ads waves will take a very long time as mobs have 5m 7m 10m hp so you take away all that dps it will take 5 weeks and not 1 week to go super far

))

Yes a lot of the other version need a buff I mean what is 3% AOE damage stacks 5 times 15% it really kinda nothing version are met to make you very powerful when you stack them up so each stack should give a big bonus on top of the first bonus so the more you stacked the better they become. Should be like 5% aoe damage and each stack gives a 50% bonus to the 5% 50% might seem high but again if you one of them people that want to go arc 15 20 25 etc you really do need this damage with 6/8 mobs all having 5m 7m 10m hp per one and just goes up every boss fight

No mag build should be using Elemental Susceptibility other than boss fights with the new Elemental Explosion skill

Side note for Focused Efforts and Elemental Susceptibility if you want people not to use as much or open up other builds up the chance to apply status effects that Focused Efforts gives you as it only at 62% if it were much higher you would not need Elemental Susceptibility you could even use weapon/skill line class spammable etc if they make it 250% per stack to apply status effects

PS. you only need Heartland Conqueror to do that not both

StarMightyMaster · July 15

Any reason why the new Verses and Visions are not in the patch notes from what I understand patch notes are met to have notes of the new stuff that is added to the game

tonyaccount · July 15

StarMightyMaster wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

I agree with everyone that says we need a save option. This thing has been in the game for almost a year and it's been by far the most requested thing everywhere I've looked. The time investment for a deep run is too much for most people, and a save option needs to be added sooner than later. We prefer sooner.

Other than that what I find disappointing is that in these threads nobody is bringing up the obvious elephant in the room, which is the vision (im)balance. Most visions are underwhelming, and others are gamebreaking. This creates a situation where the correct strategy if you want to go far, is to clear 1-2 arcs of and if you don't have at least 2 Focused Efforts, you should reset the instance and start over again. It's boring and stupid, but this is what poor balance causes.

Focused Efforts is by a landslide the best vision, and every deep run has 4-5 stacks of it. The only viable endgame strategy regardless of your class is to stack FE and spam Elemental Susceptibility and status effects. This strategy is very boring to play by the way, and feels very similar on every class. Basically you spam a free ranged skill that applies lots of status effects on target(s). It gets old quickly and kills the creativity from the game.

Infinite Archive needs elementary level fixes, not more Marauders and bosses. Here is a short list of vision changes required:

1. Focused Efforts needs to be heavily nerfed. Just buffing other visions isn't a solution here because many of them also buff your status effect damage. Buffing other things would only result in power creep and status effect spam still being the only viable strategy for a deep run, with the only difference being that it's even more powerful than before with all the buffs from other visions.

Focused Efforts is by any objective metric an extremely overperforming vision. Balance cannot exist with one vision being at least 3x as good as anything else. Anyone who is opposed to nerfing it, think about it again. Do you want to have a one-strategy meta or try out a bunch of cool fringe sets that you've always wanted to play with?

3. Attuned Enchantments must not work with Weakening glyph. The vision itself is fine and doesn't need to be nerfed otherwise, you just need to "blacklist" Weakening from it so the spell/weapon damage of bosses/marauders cannot be dropped to 0 with Torug's Pact/Heartland Conqueror build. Currently if you use this set-up and have 5 Attuned Enchantments, almost all bosses become ridiculously easy as they have 0 weapon/spell damage. That means you can take an unblocked heavy attack or 1-shot attack in the face, and it will do 0 damage.

3. The Gold and Exp gain visions need to be removed completely. They are the polar opposite of Focused Efforts. All I have seen is them cause negativity in people because they are completely useless and a waste of vision slots.

4. Most other visions need to be buffed a lot. The reality is that outside of a few gross offenders, most visions are simply lackluster. Either you get lucky and find one of the really good ones or you are dealing with leftovers. A good starting point would be nerfing Focused efforts by about 60% while also doubling the effect of most of these lackluster visions. Of course, looking at each one individually would be even better, but this would be a good quick fix to make the gameplay more diverse.

Additionally, the Dragonknight ability Magma Shell needs to finally be nerfed. All these ridiculous 30+ arc duo runs were made with Magma Shell cheese builds where one or both players in the group were Dragonknights with ultimate gain builds who can maintain nearly 100% Magma Shell uptime. I don't know why this has not been addressed.

If you are going for arc 15 20 25 etc you actually need the damage Focused Efforts give you or ads waves will take a very long time as mobs have 5m 7m 10m hp so you take away all that dps it will take 5 weeks and not 1 week to go super far ))

Yes a lot of the other version need a buff I mean what is 3% AOE damage stacks 5 times 15% it really kinda nothing version are met to make you very powerful when you stack them up so each stack should give a big bonus on top of the first bonus so the more you stacked the better they become. Should be like 5% aoe damage and each stack gives a 50% bonus to the 5% 50% might seem high but again if you one of them people that want to go arc 15 20 25 etc you really do need this damage with 6/8 mobs all having 5m 7m 10m hp per one and just goes up every boss fight

No mag build should be using Elemental Susceptibility other than boss fights with the new Elemental Explosion skill

Side note for Focused Efforts and Elemental Susceptibility if you want people not to use as much or open up other builds up the chance to apply status effects that Focused Efforts gives you as it only at 62% if it were much higher you would not need Elemental Susceptibility you could even use weapon/skill line class spammable etc if they make it 250% per stack to apply status effects

So far everyone who is contesting my demand to nerf Focused Efforts is indirectly acknowledging that it's extremely overpowered, but they just prefer to word it as "oh but you need it for this". The fact you people can't imagine a decent run in Infinite Archive without a super overpowered Focused Efforts just highlights my point that there is one master build and everything else is outright trash. This is called poor balancing, nothing else. To fix this, at least one big nerf(FE) and a lot of big buffs(everything else) are needed.

I don't know how many times I have to repeat this, but I am not asking for the character power level to be nerfed in Archive. I'm asking it to be distributed more evenly by buffing everything else so more builds will be viable.

Every single build should use Elemental Susceptibility in endgame with FEs, whether mag or stam. Only bad builds will not use it. There are no exceptions to this rule.

You can combine it with other abilities(I use Scythe alongside it), but Elemental Susceptibility applies three status effect and it keeps refreshing them even if you don't spam it, and it also applies Major Breach. An endgame staff is also typically an ice staff, which on top of that applies Minor Brittle and Minor Maim, meaning the target does less damage and receives more. It's also ranged, has a long range and costs no resources. The value is insane.

At this point I've had to repeat these points so many times that we're getting to the territory where people are just feigning stupidity, so this will be my last post in this thread. I have said what I have to say. Hopefully I have convinced at least someone that a balanced, diverse meta with different builds is better than FE farming and having one master build with everything else being unplayable if you want to have a deep run.

One last time: Overpowered Focused Efforts is not needed in any shape or form. It's just the lazy, bad solution that makes most runs unfun and not worth continuing. Nerf Focused Efforts heavily, and substantially buff everything else to compensate so almost every run will have a decent chance of going deep if you play well, and build creativity will flourish.

StarMightyMaster · July 15

tonyaccount wrote: »

StarMightyMaster wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

I agree with everyone that says we need a save option. This thing has been in the game for almost a year and it's been by far the most requested thing everywhere I've looked. The time investment for a deep run is too much for most people, and a save option needs to be added sooner than later. We prefer sooner.

Other than that what I find disappointing is that in these threads nobody is bringing up the obvious elephant in the room, which is the vision (im)balance. Most visions are underwhelming, and others are gamebreaking. This creates a situation where the correct strategy if you want to go far, is to clear 1-2 arcs of and if you don't have at least 2 Focused Efforts, you should reset the instance and start over again. It's boring and stupid, but this is what poor balance causes.

Focused Efforts is by a landslide the best vision, and every deep run has 4-5 stacks of it. The only viable endgame strategy regardless of your class is to stack FE and spam Elemental Susceptibility and status effects. This strategy is very boring to play by the way, and feels very similar on every class. Basically you spam a free ranged skill that applies lots of status effects on target(s). It gets old quickly and kills the creativity from the game.

Infinite Archive needs elementary level fixes, not more Marauders and bosses. Here is a short list of vision changes required:

1. Focused Efforts needs to be heavily nerfed. Just buffing other visions isn't a solution here because many of them also buff your status effect damage. Buffing other things would only result in power creep and status effect spam still being the only viable strategy for a deep run, with the only difference being that it's even more powerful than before with all the buffs from other visions.

Focused Efforts is by any objective metric an extremely overperforming vision. Balance cannot exist with one vision being at least 3x as good as anything else. Anyone who is opposed to nerfing it, think about it again. Do you want to have a one-strategy meta or try out a bunch of cool fringe sets that you've always wanted to play with?

3. Attuned Enchantments must not work with Weakening glyph. The vision itself is fine and doesn't need to be nerfed otherwise, you just need to "blacklist" Weakening from it so the spell/weapon damage of bosses/marauders cannot be dropped to 0 with Torug's Pact/Heartland Conqueror build. Currently if you use this set-up and have 5 Attuned Enchantments, almost all bosses become ridiculously easy as they have 0 weapon/spell damage. That means you can take an unblocked heavy attack or 1-shot attack in the face, and it will do 0 damage.

3. The Gold and Exp gain visions need to be removed completely. They are the polar opposite of Focused Efforts. All I have seen is them cause negativity in people because they are completely useless and a waste of vision slots.

4. Most other visions need to be buffed a lot. The reality is that outside of a few gross offenders, most visions are simply lackluster. Either you get lucky and find one of the really good ones or you are dealing with leftovers. A good starting point would be nerfing Focused efforts by about 60% while also doubling the effect of most of these lackluster visions. Of course, looking at each one individually would be even better, but this would be a good quick fix to make the gameplay more diverse.

Additionally, the Dragonknight ability Magma Shell needs to finally be nerfed. All these ridiculous 30+ arc duo runs were made with Magma Shell cheese builds where one or both players in the group were Dragonknights with ultimate gain builds who can maintain nearly 100% Magma Shell uptime. I don't know why this has not been addressed.

If you are going for arc 15 20 25 etc you actually need the damage Focused Efforts give you or ads waves will take a very long time as mobs have 5m 7m 10m hp so you take away all that dps it will take 5 weeks and not 1 week to go super far ))

Yes a lot of the other version need a buff I mean what is 3% AOE damage stacks 5 times 15% it really kinda nothing version are met to make you very powerful when you stack them up so each stack should give a big bonus on top of the first bonus so the more you stacked the better they become. Should be like 5% aoe damage and each stack gives a 50% bonus to the 5% 50% might seem high but again if you one of them people that want to go arc 15 20 25 etc you really do need this damage with 6/8 mobs all having 5m 7m 10m hp per one and just goes up every boss fight

No mag build should be using Elemental Susceptibility other than boss fights with the new Elemental Explosion skill

Side note for Focused Efforts and Elemental Susceptibility if you want people not to use as much or open up other builds up the chance to apply status effects that Focused Efforts gives you as it only at 62% if it were much higher you would not need Elemental Susceptibility you could even use weapon/skill line class spammable etc if they make it 250% per stack to apply status effects

So far everyone who is contesting my demand to nerf Focused Efforts is indirectly acknowledging that it's extremely overpowered, but they just prefer to word it as "oh but you need it for this". The fact you people can't imagine a decent run in Infinite Archive without a super overpowered Focused Efforts just highlights my point that there is one master build and everything else is outright trash. This is called poor balancing, nothing else. To fix this, at least one big nerf(FE) and a lot of big buffs(everything else) are needed.

I don't know how many times I have to repeat this, but I am not asking for the character power level to be nerfed in Archive. I'm asking it to be distributed more evenly by buffing everything else so more builds will be viable.

Every single build should use Elemental Susceptibility in endgame with FEs, whether mag or stam. Only bad builds will not use it. There are no exceptions to this rule.

You can combine it with other abilities(I use Scythe alongside it), but Elemental Susceptibility applies three status effect and it keeps refreshing them even if you don't spam it, and it also applies Major Breach. An endgame staff is also typically an ice staff, which on top of that applies Minor Brittle and Minor Maim, meaning the target does less damage and receives more. It's also ranged, has a long range and costs no resources. The value is insane.

At this point I've had to repeat these points so many times that we're getting to the territory where people are just feigning stupidity, so this will be my last post in this thread. I have said what I have to say. Hopefully I have convinced at least someone that a balanced, diverse meta with different builds is better than FE farming and having one master build with everything else being unplayable if you want to have a deep run.

One last time: Overpowered Focused Efforts is not needed in any shape or form. It's just the lazy, bad solution that makes most runs unfun and not worth continuing. Nerf Focused Efforts heavily, and substantially buff everything else to compensate so almost every run will have a decent chance of going deep if you play well, and build creativity will flourish.

I am not sure why you think everyone should use single target Elemental Susceptibility when you have Elemental Explosion that also applies three status effects in a 10m aoe and also does Off Balance and also the skill it self at a later round not counting the 3 applied status effect damage it does every cast it also does 75k to 120k AOE I mean you won't run around with Elemental Susceptibility trying to kill everything one by one more power to you

I am with you that many other version need to be buff but you don't need to nerf FE to do that they cam bring the other up to the same lvl

tonyaccount · July 16

StarMightyMaster wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

StarMightyMaster wrote: »

tonyaccount wrote: »

I agree with everyone that says we need a save option. This thing has been in the game for almost a year and it's been by far the most requested thing everywhere I've looked. The time investment for a deep run is too much for most people, and a save option needs to be added sooner than later. We prefer sooner.

Other than that what I find disappointing is that in these threads nobody is bringing up the obvious elephant in the room, which is the vision (im)balance. Most visions are underwhelming, and others are gamebreaking. This creates a situation where the correct strategy if you want to go far, is to clear 1-2 arcs of and if you don't have at least 2 Focused Efforts, you should reset the instance and start over again. It's boring and stupid, but this is what poor balance causes.

Focused Efforts is by a landslide the best vision, and every deep run has 4-5 stacks of it. The only viable endgame strategy regardless of your class is to stack FE and spam Elemental Susceptibility and status effects. This strategy is very boring to play by the way, and feels very similar on every class. Basically you spam a free ranged skill that applies lots of status effects on target(s). It gets old quickly and kills the creativity from the game.

Infinite Archive needs elementary level fixes, not more Marauders and bosses. Here is a short list of vision changes required:

1. Focused Efforts needs to be heavily nerfed. Just buffing other visions isn't a solution here because many of them also buff your status effect damage. Buffing other things would only result in power creep and status effect spam still being the only viable strategy for a deep run, with the only difference being that it's even more powerful than before with all the buffs from other visions.

Focused Efforts is by any objective metric an extremely overperforming vision. Balance cannot exist with one vision being at least 3x as good as anything else. Anyone who is opposed to nerfing it, think about it again. Do you want to have a one-strategy meta or try out a bunch of cool fringe sets that you've always wanted to play with?

3. Attuned Enchantments must not work with Weakening glyph. The vision itself is fine and doesn't need to be nerfed otherwise, you just need to "blacklist" Weakening from it so the spell/weapon damage of bosses/marauders cannot be dropped to 0 with Torug's Pact/Heartland Conqueror build. Currently if you use this set-up and have 5 Attuned Enchantments, almost all bosses become ridiculously easy as they have 0 weapon/spell damage. That means you can take an unblocked heavy attack or 1-shot attack in the face, and it will do 0 damage.

3. The Gold and Exp gain visions need to be removed completely. They are the polar opposite of Focused Efforts. All I have seen is them cause negativity in people because they are completely useless and a waste of vision slots.

4. Most other visions need to be buffed a lot. The reality is that outside of a few gross offenders, most visions are simply lackluster. Either you get lucky and find one of the really good ones or you are dealing with leftovers. A good starting point would be nerfing Focused efforts by about 60% while also doubling the effect of most of these lackluster visions. Of course, looking at each one individually would be even better, but this would be a good quick fix to make the gameplay more diverse.

Additionally, the Dragonknight ability Magma Shell needs to finally be nerfed. All these ridiculous 30+ arc duo runs were made with Magma Shell cheese builds where one or both players in the group were Dragonknights with ultimate gain builds who can maintain nearly 100% Magma Shell uptime. I don't know why this has not been addressed.

If you are going for arc 15 20 25 etc you actually need the damage Focused Efforts give you or ads waves will take a very long time as mobs have 5m 7m 10m hp so you take away all that dps it will take 5 weeks and not 1 week to go super far ))

Yes a lot of the other version need a buff I mean what is 3% AOE damage stacks 5 times 15% it really kinda nothing version are met to make you very powerful when you stack them up so each stack should give a big bonus on top of the first bonus so the more you stacked the better they become. Should be like 5% aoe damage and each stack gives a 50% bonus to the 5% 50% might seem high but again if you one of them people that want to go arc 15 20 25 etc you really do need this damage with 6/8 mobs all having 5m 7m 10m hp per one and just goes up every boss fight

No mag build should be using Elemental Susceptibility other than boss fights with the new Elemental Explosion skill

Side note for Focused Efforts and Elemental Susceptibility if you want people not to use as much or open up other builds up the chance to apply status effects that Focused Efforts gives you as it only at 62% if it were much higher you would not need Elemental Susceptibility you could even use weapon/skill line class spammable etc if they make it 250% per stack to apply status effects

So far everyone who is contesting my demand to nerf Focused Efforts is indirectly acknowledging that it's extremely overpowered, but they just prefer to word it as "oh but you need it for this". The fact you people can't imagine a decent run in Infinite Archive without a super overpowered Focused Efforts just highlights my point that there is one master build and everything else is outright trash. This is called poor balancing, nothing else. To fix this, at least one big nerf(FE) and a lot of big buffs(everything else) are needed.

I don't know how many times I have to repeat this, but I am not asking for the character power level to be nerfed in Archive. I'm asking it to be distributed more evenly by buffing everything else so more builds will be viable.

Every single build should use Elemental Susceptibility in endgame with FEs, whether mag or stam. Only bad builds will not use it. There are no exceptions to this rule.

You can combine it with other abilities(I use Scythe alongside it), but Elemental Susceptibility applies three status effect and it keeps refreshing them even if you don't spam it, and it also applies Major Breach. An endgame staff is also typically an ice staff, which on top of that applies Minor Brittle and Minor Maim, meaning the target does less damage and receives more. It's also ranged, has a long range and costs no resources. The value is insane.

At this point I've had to repeat these points so many times that we're getting to the territory where people are just feigning stupidity, so this will be my last post in this thread. I have said what I have to say. Hopefully I have convinced at least someone that a balanced, diverse meta with different builds is better than FE farming and having one master build with everything else being unplayable if you want to have a deep run.

One last time: Overpowered Focused Efforts is not needed in any shape or form. It's just the lazy, bad solution that makes most runs unfun and not worth continuing. Nerf Focused Efforts heavily, and substantially buff everything else to compensate so almost every run will have a decent chance of going deep if you play well, and build creativity will flourish.

I am not sure why you think everyone should use single target Elemental Susceptibility when you have Elemental Explosion that also applies three status effects in a 10m aoe and also does Off Balance and also the skill it self at a later round not counting the 3 applied status effect damage it does every cast it also does 75k to 120k AOE I mean you won't run around with Elemental Susceptibility trying to kill everything one by one more power to you

I am with you that many other version need to be buff but you don't need to nerf FE to do that they cam bring the other up to the same lvl

I said I wouldn't respond but I guess I try one more time.

Elemental Explosion has 2 seconds channeling time. That's awful because you can't block during this time. It also costs like 4k magicka which is the resource you need for blocking with Ice Staff(which is the way to survive in the late arches). If you cast this ability regularly you pretty much destroy your defences. This isn't a viable strategy.

It also has the problem that it doesn't apply Major Breach which nerfs its effective damage a lot, and it only applies the status effects once. Elemental Susceptibility applies Major Breach for 30sec, you can block-cast it on everything, and it doesn't cost any resources. Also once applied, it continues to re-apply the status effects every 7.5 seconds. That means it actually applies 3 status effect 5(!) times assuming the fight lasts 30sec or longer which is always the case in the late arcs. In other words, in a fight that lasts at least 30 seconds, one cast of EleS is equal to 30 seconds of Major Breech and 15 status effect casts. It's also a great spammable because it costs nothing, you can block most of the time while spamming it to keep your defenses up.

You apply the EleS to each target while block-casting with ice staff, and they continue to take damage for the next 30+ seconds. It's super safe and does a ton of damage. Even if you need to kite during a high arc Marauder, they continue to take damage.

There might be situations where the Explosion is useful, but it's never going to be your bread&butter ability and it will never replace EleS. It would be sheer insanity to try to cast a 2sec channeling spell in the late arcs in the middle of a big trash pack or a marauder hitting you.

By the way I am 100% solo player. In solo the Explosion is simply not viable. It might be useful in duos, but even then it will not replace EleS, it will only complement it.

The irony here is that you are trying to counter what I say by only highlighting the problem I've brought up. To "fix" the broken Focused Efforts strategy, you are offering another Focused Efforts strategy. Can't you really see the elephant in the room? Every single viable build in the archive requires several stacks of Focused Efforts and is built around status effects, and this will continue as long as it doesn't get nerfed.

In the previous posts I have explained so many times why you can't just brainlessly buff everything else to "fix" this problem. This is such a clueless argument to make. What do you think is going to happen when you buff other visions? Your crit chance is higher, your crit damage is higher, your direct damage is higher etc. That means your other builds get a little bit stronger but your Burning, Chilled, Hemorrhaging, Chilled and Concussed now do much more damage, and everyone will predictably continue only playing the FE strategy.

This is called "power creep". The FE master build will still be the only viable build, and playing anything else is just gimping yourself. Can we please, please, please stop offering brainlessly buffing everything else as a solution to this? It will not work.

I don't know why I even bothered, you guys won't even try to counter my arguments, you just repeat "don't nerf FE, buff everything else" without even bothering to read or think why it won't work.

Personofsecrets · July 16

One thing that I'm surprised about is that there is no way to re-roll a bad selection.

Of course, the selection of 3 options for visions is better than 2, but having some number of re-rolls would be nice too. Maybe a re-roll per Arc?

Necrotech_Master · July 16

Personofsecrets wrote: »

One thing that I'm surprised about is that there is no way to re-roll a bad selection.

Of course, the selection of 3 options for visions is better than 2, but having some number of re-rolls would be nice too. Maybe a re-roll per Arc?

yeah they really need to include a reroll/banish mechanic

banish would let you remove from the pool ones that are not useful (+poison effectiveness if you dont use alchemical poison, +gold/+xp gains as they are never useful, pet dmg if you dont use pets, etc)

reroll would also be nice to have as well for those really bad selections

Araneae6537 · July 21

Okay, finally got a chance to check out the PTS!
I like the new quest against Fabled as a way to earn additional fortunes and the transformation verse is fun!

I encountered a new lava arena but not yet ice — it’s nice to introduce new elements while keeping with the Archive’s Apocrypha aesthetic.
I took new verses and visions whenever I had the opportunity, but most didn’t feel as impactful as I’d hoped — Guardian of Pestilence and Mighty Bash, for example, can devastate one’s foes!

Tempest Caller — Is this meant to be summoned right on top of the enemy? The spirit just stood there channeling lighting directly above — maybe the boss received a small zap or two?

Phalanx — I thought this looked really cool when I used it against Tho’at, but it didn’t seem to do hardly anything and one would expect to see a larger effect on the first level especially! Even more frustrating, the phalanx often just stood there and did not engage the enemy, even though I summoned them near to and facing Tho’at. I had this same problem with the verse on a mob level. The phalanx only seemed to engage at all when directly attacked by an enemy and did not contribute much to the fight.

Temporal — I forget the full name, but the overly bright circles always seemed to drop as I was leaving an area without enemies and going to the next fight. Even moving around a lot in a small arena, I didn’t see any of the mobs get affected by these circles. I don’t think I would use this anyway unless the circles appear less like bright flashes when they show up because of my visual sensitivities.

Potions — This one was funny!

The skeletal hand seemed to grab enemies at random — a more dramatic effect and animation would make it more fun. Being able to target it would make it potentially more useful.

Finally, WHERE ARE THE BOOKS? WHERE ARE THE BOOKS? WHERE ARE THE BOOKS?

Why do I not get random books that I have unlocked from IA chests anymore??? I hoped to see signs on the PTS of this being rectified, but not a single book drop there either. Please fix this, and ideally add more, maybe some of those Theories on Apocrypha I’ve been so diligently helping with…

daemondamian · August 13

StarMightyMaster wrote: »

I am not sure why you think everyone should use single target Elemental Susceptibility when you have Elemental Explosion that also applies three status effects in a 10m aoe and also does Off Balance and also the skill it self at a later round not counting the 3 applied status effect damage it does every cast it also does 75k to 120k AOE I mean you won't run around with Elemental Susceptibility trying to kill everything one by one more power to you
....
No mag build should be using Elemental Susceptibility other than boss fights with the new Elemental Explosion skill

If solo how do you avoid getting interrupted while casting Elemental Explosion?

I use Pestilent Trample which according to UESP takes 1.5 sec - .5 sec shorter than EE - but even then I still can't use it all the time whenever I want to because of getting interrupted.

Necrotech_Master · August 13

daemondamian wrote: »

StarMightyMaster wrote: »

I am not sure why you think everyone should use single target Elemental Susceptibility when you have Elemental Explosion that also applies three status effects in a 10m aoe and also does Off Balance and also the skill it self at a later round not counting the 3 applied status effect damage it does every cast it also does 75k to 120k AOE I mean you won't run around with Elemental Susceptibility trying to kill everything one by one more power to you
....
No mag build should be using Elemental Susceptibility other than boss fights with the new Elemental Explosion skill

If solo how do you avoid getting interrupted while casting Elemental Explosion?

I use Pestilent Trample which according to UESP takes 1.5 sec - .5 sec shorter than EE - but even then I still can't use it all the time whenever I want to because of getting interrupted.

they probably mean hitting from range, as theres not really a lot of ranged interrupts

melee enemies though have a lot of cc (knockbacks, staggers, stuns, fears), it also varies greatly depending on the enemy groups your fighting as not all of them have enemies which will interrupt either