Cloak changes in the 10.2.2 notes are insulting

Jaimeh · October 1

What's the point of the adjustment? If you want to stand still, you can just crouch. The drain is still going while you are unmoving (and I'm wondering, with the magicka bar constantly moving like a pendulum when you are still, isn't than an additional calculation burden?), and if you've emptied your pool before standing still, it takes ages to fill up again. And any micro-movement activates the full drain again. It's a nonsensical change from a practical perspective. The main problem players had with the change was with the toggle, yet in the dev comments they sais the toggle feels natural. My question is where are you getting the feedback for this @ZOS_BrianWheeler? The overwhelming majority of NB players strongly object to it. I've been playing for almost a decade and I've never heard anyone ever complain about the actual usage of cloak. What about our feedback?

DrSlaughtr · October 1

Jaimeh wrote: »

What's the point of the adjustment? If you want to stand still, you can just crouch. The drain is still going while you are unmoving (and I'm wondering, with the magicka bar constantly moving like a pendulum when you are still, isn't than an additional calculation burden?), and if you've emptied your pool before standing still, it takes ages to fill up again. And any micro-movement activates the full drain again. It's a nonsensical change from a practical perspective. The main problem players had with the change was with the toggle, yet in the dev comments they sais the toggle feels natural. My question is where are you getting the feedback for this @ZOS_BrianWheeler? The overwhelming majority of NB players strongly object to it. I've been playing for almost a decade and I've never heard anyone ever complain about the actual usage of cloak. What about our feedback?

I have two issues with the toggle.

1. Cloak is unreliable. Every now and then you have to reapply it. If it works through as a toggle, I know have to turn it off and turn it back on. Two buttons rather than one.

2. I still need to hit with 3 seconds to get crit strike. So this might often require me to disable and reenable cloak in the middle of the battlefield, which isn't smart. So I'll probably be getting this benefit less often.

colossalvoids · October 1

The thing I find insulting is their justification notes both times. Ok, I'm used to constant reworks for classes, homogenisation and "making it easier" but notes are never correlate with actual objective reality what bothers me. Just don't baby sit and make the explanation out of thin air and say that the top end players are indeed using the ability way better than we want it to be the case, so we're starting our usual adjustments to see how make the skill "even".

Anyways it doesn't brought any results so far, top is still topping and the bottom is hit with a rock out of a sudden and laying quiet. Maybe completely new player would find it more intuitive or easier to use, there's always a possibility but I'd be more concerned about people who already play the game in this situation.

karthrag_inak · October 1

Khajiit cannot help but wonder if cloak was really the problem that was necessary to address now. Seems like a system was chosen to be worked on that was not the biggest existing issue, and now the replacement is suboptimal and likely to require more work and attention in the future, distracting from and postponing other work that is more pressing now.

Kind of like the pvp update being "let's change battlegrounds and imp city vault keys" instead of "let's attempt to address the pain in Cyrodiil".

In fact, this kind of seems like a theme.

Veinblood1965 · October 1

Just another thing that drives people away from the game, myself included when i goes live. It's he last straw on unwanted combat changes for me to be honest. When businesses slap their customers in the face enough times one day they wake up without customers. There's no need to change something due to the top people learning how to use something to the fullest extent, they will ALWAYS be better than others for various reasons, it's just life.

CameraBeardThePirate · October 1

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

What's the point of the adjustment? If you want to stand still, you can just crouch. The drain is still going while you are unmoving (and I'm wondering, with the magicka bar constantly moving like a pendulum when you are still, isn't than an additional calculation burden?), and if you've emptied your pool before standing still, it takes ages to fill up again. And any micro-movement activates the full drain again. It's a nonsensical change from a practical perspective. The main problem players had with the change was with the toggle, yet in the dev comments they sais the toggle feels natural. My question is where are you getting the feedback for this @ZOS_BrianWheeler? The overwhelming majority of NB players strongly object to it. I've been playing for almost a decade and I've never heard anyone ever complain about the actual usage of cloak. What about our feedback?

I have two issues with the toggle.

1. Cloak is unreliable. Every now and then you have to reapply it. If it works through as a toggle, I know have to turn it off and turn it back on. Two buttons rather than one.

2. I still need to hit with 3 seconds to get crit strike. So this might often require me to disable and reenable cloak in the middle of the battlefield, which isn't smart. So I'll probably be getting this benefit less often.

You do not have to "turn it off and back on". If something breaks your cloak or the ability fails, it turns off the toggle.

You also don't need to turn it off to attack. Any action that breaks cloak will turn the toggle off.

Trejgon · October 1

I found the 10.2.2 patch changes to the cloak very sensible, and the explanation made sense. I saw number of people in these forums claim that after a moment of readjusting handling, toggle is more natural to use. And it makes sense for it to be feeling more natural, sneaking it's a toggle, and invisibility is basically sneaking+.

With these changes the cloak is even more mechanically consistent with basic sneaking, which enhances the identity of of nightblade as master of stealth.

As for the subject of why cloak instead of just crouching: activating crouch does not put you into hidden state with enemies having los on you and even then it takes time to get hidden. Cloak bypasses it by making you invisible much faster and regardless if someone was looking at you or not. Additionally, sneaking have detection radius that needs to be enhances with passives, cp, and sets, which is once again something cloak does not need. So cloak is still more powerful version of sneaking which is why we don't get to have it for free when staying stationary.

There is a number of questionable choices zos has made and is making this year so far, but 10.2.2 cloak changes (and even just u44 rework of cloak on it's own) in my humble opinion ain't it.

DrSlaughtr · October 1

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

What's the point of the adjustment? If you want to stand still, you can just crouch. The drain is still going while you are unmoving (and I'm wondering, with the magicka bar constantly moving like a pendulum when you are still, isn't than an additional calculation burden?), and if you've emptied your pool before standing still, it takes ages to fill up again. And any micro-movement activates the full drain again. It's a nonsensical change from a practical perspective. The main problem players had with the change was with the toggle, yet in the dev comments they sais the toggle feels natural. My question is where are you getting the feedback for this @ZOS_BrianWheeler? The overwhelming majority of NB players strongly object to it. I've been playing for almost a decade and I've never heard anyone ever complain about the actual usage of cloak. What about our feedback?

I have two issues with the toggle.

1. Cloak is unreliable. Every now and then you have to reapply it. If it works through as a toggle, I know have to turn it off and turn it back on. Two buttons rather than one.

2. I still need to hit with 3 seconds to get crit strike. So this might often require me to disable and reenable cloak in the middle of the battlefield, which isn't smart. So I'll probably be getting this benefit less often.

You do not have to "turn it off and back on". If something breaks your cloak or the ability fails, it turns off the toggle.

You also don't need to turn it off to attack. Any action that breaks cloak will turn the toggle off.

I wasn't completely clear. It was late.

Currently, there are times you hit cloak and it immediately breaks when it isn't supposed to. For example, a guard fires a projectile. I have already hit cloak but it lands anyway because of the latency between client and server. Now my cloak is broken and I have to reapply it.

If the toggle doesn't solve this, then it kind of removes the "accessibility" portion of the argument.

The second point has to do with the guaranteed critical strike, which only procs if you attack in a 3 seconds after enabling cloak. Currently this can require just hitting the ability one more time to reset the timer.

With it as a toggle, I'm assuming you have to disable it them reenable it to achieve the same thing, which means potentially leaving invisible in melee range.

Or to could sacrifice a potion to use invisible and then only hit cloak right before attack?

I'm assuming the 3 second requirement is still on the skill on PTS. Let me know if that isn't the case.

Jaimeh · October 1

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

I'm assuming the 3 second requirement is still on the skill on PTS. Let me know if that isn't the case.

It's the next direct dmg attack that critically strikes (which pulls you out of cloak, so you have to retoggle) and then you have 10 sec of increased damage to npcs.

Synapsis123 · October 1

The change to this skill was a side grade in the first patch notes, but has gotten way better in the latest ones. It has the potential to be a bit more broken than live.

Tommy_The_Gun · October 1

Cloak next patch will be far too unreliable to be usable actually.

I kinda confirmed my suspicions that "toggle" cloak will be like that, especially in lag. In PvE, I had all kinds of weird issues on PTS that are non-issue on live server. There were multiple situations when some enemies were just "ignoring" the fact that cloak is on, or just by "staring at me" cloak was turned off. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it was just "I want to fight you" and poof ! On live you can just re-cast cloak, but on PTS, it is janky as heck.

Situations like this will be notorious in IC or Cyrodiil, when some random wolf or mudcrab will detect you & de-cloak you & whole enemy zerg will wipe you. Same stuff will be happening when capturing a resource (fighting PvP "Guards NPCs) & in an event when you are alone & 5 players appear, it will be close to impossible to get away - as again - toggle cloak is very janky. Most PvP NBs will prolly switch to ranged or bombing, as melee will be too risky as cloak will be 50/50 chance if it works or not.

Biggest issue I see is ZOS kinda "indirectly butchered" Shadow Barrier Passive. NBs can no longer proc it with their spammable as it was moved to assasination. Cloak on PTS is now a toggle and It only enables this passive when it is toggled on. If you turn it off, it is not procing it. So vast majority of NB builds lost a way to naturally & fluidly proc this passive. And historically, NBs since day1 always had very high uptime on this passive.

There are all kinds of wired issue that seems to be simply a huge oversight (I hope that they are). For instance, NB's Dark Veil passive is same on PTS as on live and it reads:

Increases the duration of your non-invisibility based Shadow abilities by 2 seconds.

^ The issue is that cloak no longer has duration, so this description has no sense at all. So I would not be surprised if they just quickly converted cloak to a toggle and called it a day, without looking carefully at every single piece of the machinery that is interacting with each other. And Invisbity & stealth in ESO has a lot of things that do interact (like detection skills, potions, NPCs, Guards, Mobs etc).

It just seems like everything that interacts with cloak & invisibility was never made to interact with a "toggle-able" skill & I suspect that cloak itself was also not coded to be a "toggle-able" skill, as it was never meant to be a toggle. I would not be surprised if "under the hood" cloak was still a skill with a duration, but they just changed 3 seconds to 9999999999 seconds and added a line of code that changes the duration to 0.000001 second when you cast it again - giving the impression of a "toggle". I mean PTS cloak kinda behaves like that.

Shadow Barrier should also proc when Cloak is toggled off & count that as "a cast" since it counts activating cloak and it also costs nothing & Dark Veil descriptions needs to be updated.

Synapsis123 · October 1

I'll admit shadow barrier is a bit wonky. It should probably be 15 seconds or something.

Cast_El · October 1

May be ramping cost could have been better

katorga · October 1

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

What's the point of the adjustment? If you want to stand still, you can just crouch. The drain is still going while you are unmoving (and I'm wondering, with the magicka bar constantly moving like a pendulum when you are still, isn't than an additional calculation burden?), and if you've emptied your pool before standing still, it takes ages to fill up again. And any micro-movement activates the full drain again. It's a nonsensical change from a practical perspective. The main problem players had with the change was with the toggle, yet in the dev comments they sais the toggle feels natural. My question is where are you getting the feedback for this @ZOS_BrianWheeler? The overwhelming majority of NB players strongly object to it. I've been playing for almost a decade and I've never heard anyone ever complain about the actual usage of cloak. What about our feedback?

2. I still need to hit with 3 seconds to get crit strike. So this might often require me to disable and reenable cloak in the middle of the battlefield, which isn't smart. So I'll probably be getting this benefit less often.

Woooahh....are you saying that if I toggle on cloak, I have 3 seconds from the start of the toggle to get a crit?

If it is a toggle it needs to work like this...toggle clock on for as long as you want and as soon as you break the toggle with an attack that attack is 100% crit.

Tommy_The_Gun · October 1

katorga wrote: »

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

What's the point of the adjustment? If you want to stand still, you can just crouch. The drain is still going while you are unmoving (and I'm wondering, with the magicka bar constantly moving like a pendulum when you are still, isn't than an additional calculation burden?), and if you've emptied your pool before standing still, it takes ages to fill up again. And any micro-movement activates the full drain again. It's a nonsensical change from a practical perspective. The main problem players had with the change was with the toggle, yet in the dev comments they sais the toggle feels natural. My question is where are you getting the feedback for this @ZOS_BrianWheeler? The overwhelming majority of NB players strongly object to it. I've been playing for almost a decade and I've never heard anyone ever complain about the actual usage of cloak. What about our feedback?

2. I still need to hit with 3 seconds to get crit strike. So this might often require me to disable and reenable cloak in the middle of the battlefield, which isn't smart. So I'll probably be getting this benefit less often.

Woooahh....are you saying that if I toggle on cloak, I have 3 seconds from the start of the toggle to get a crit?

If it is a toggle it needs to work like this...toggle clock on for as long as you want and as soon as you break the toggle with an attack that attack is 100% crit.

It seems like it is always crit on your next attack, as there is no duration

Don't look at the cost / two seconds as you can reduce cost with light armour or glyphs etc.

DrSlaughtr · October 1

katorga wrote: »

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

What's the point of the adjustment? If you want to stand still, you can just crouch. The drain is still going while you are unmoving (and I'm wondering, with the magicka bar constantly moving like a pendulum when you are still, isn't than an additional calculation burden?), and if you've emptied your pool before standing still, it takes ages to fill up again. And any micro-movement activates the full drain again. It's a nonsensical change from a practical perspective. The main problem players had with the change was with the toggle, yet in the dev comments they sais the toggle feels natural. My question is where are you getting the feedback for this @ZOS_BrianWheeler? The overwhelming majority of NB players strongly object to it. I've been playing for almost a decade and I've never heard anyone ever complain about the actual usage of cloak. What about our feedback?

2. I still need to hit with 3 seconds to get crit strike. So this might often require me to disable and reenable cloak in the middle of the battlefield, which isn't smart. So I'll probably be getting this benefit less often.

Woooahh....are you saying that if I toggle on cloak, I have 3 seconds from the start of the toggle to get a crit?

If it is a toggle it needs to work like this...toggle clock on for as long as you want and as soon as you break the toggle with an attack that attack is 100% crit.

Cool dude above confirmed the 3 second timer is gone so that's good

Necrotech_Master · October 1

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

Cloak next patch will be far too unreliable to be usable actually.

I kinda confirmed my suspicions that "toggle" cloak will be like that, especially in lag. In PvE, I had all kinds of weird issues on PTS that are non-issue on live server. There were multiple situations when some enemies were just "ignoring" the fact that cloak is on, or just by "staring at me" cloak was turned off. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it was just "I want to fight you" and poof ! On live you can just re-cast cloak, but on PTS, it is janky as heck.

Situations like this will be notorious in IC or Cyrodiil, when some random wolf or mudcrab will detect you & de-cloak you & whole enemy zerg will wipe you. Same stuff will be happening when capturing a resource (fighting PvP "Guards NPCs) & in an event when you are alone & 5 players appear, it will be close to impossible to get away - as again - toggle cloak is very janky. Most PvP NBs will prolly switch to ranged or bombing, as melee will be too risky as cloak will be 50/50 chance if it works or not.

Biggest issue I see is ZOS kinda "indirectly butchered" Shadow Barrier Passive. NBs can no longer proc it with their spammable as it was moved to assasination. Cloak on PTS is now a toggle and It only enables this passive when it is toggled on. If you turn it off, it is not procing it. So vast majority of NB builds lost a way to naturally & fluidly proc this passive. And historically, NBs since day1 always had very high uptime on this passive.

There are all kinds of wired issue that seems to be simply a huge oversight (I hope that they are). For instance, NB's Dark Veil passive is same on PTS as on live and it reads:

Increases the duration of your non-invisibility based Shadow abilities by 2 seconds.

^ The issue is that cloak no longer has duration, so this description has no sense at all. So I would not be surprised if they just quickly converted cloak to a toggle and called it a day, without looking carefully at every single piece of the machinery that is interacting with each other. And Invisbity & stealth in ESO has a lot of things that do interact (like detection skills, potions, NPCs, Guards, Mobs etc).

It just seems like everything that interacts with cloak & invisibility was never made to interact with a "toggle-able" skill & I suspect that cloak itself was also not coded to be a "toggle-able" skill, as it was never meant to be a toggle. I would not be surprised if "under the hood" cloak was still a skill with a duration, but they just changed 3 seconds to 9999999999 seconds and added a line of code that changes the duration to 0.000001 second when you cast it again - giving the impression of a "toggle". I mean PTS cloak kinda behaves like that.

Shadow Barrier should also proc when Cloak is toggled off & count that as "a cast" since it counts activating cloak and it also costs nothing & Dark Veil descriptions needs to be updated.

that passive (dark veil) says "increases duration of non-invisibility based shadow abilities", as shadow cloak is an invisibility skill it is currently unaffected by that, changing cloak to a toggle its still an invisibility skill and would thus be unaffected by this passive still

so im not sure how that passive is a problem, at least related to cloak

Tommy_The_Gun · October 1

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

What's the point of the adjustment? If you want to stand still, you can just crouch. The drain is still going while you are unmoving (and I'm wondering, with the magicka bar constantly moving like a pendulum when you are still, isn't than an additional calculation burden?), and if you've emptied your pool before standing still, it takes ages to fill up again. And any micro-movement activates the full drain again. It's a nonsensical change from a practical perspective. The main problem players had with the change was with the toggle, yet in the dev comments they sais the toggle feels natural. My question is where are you getting the feedback for this @ZOS_BrianWheeler? The overwhelming majority of NB players strongly object to it. I've been playing for almost a decade and I've never heard anyone ever complain about the actual usage of cloak. What about our feedback?

2. I still need to hit with 3 seconds to get crit strike. So this might often require me to disable and reenable cloak in the middle of the battlefield, which isn't smart. So I'll probably be getting this benefit less often.

Woooahh....are you saying that if I toggle on cloak, I have 3 seconds from the start of the toggle to get a crit?

If it is a toggle it needs to work like this...toggle clock on for as long as you want and as soon as you break the toggle with an attack that attack is 100% crit.

Cool dude above confirmed the 3 second timer is gone so that's good

Unless I was very lucky with the crits, it seems like it is every "next" direct damage you do via skill or LA or HA etc. It seems to even work if you leave cloak and your next attack will be a crit. But again... I might have just been very lucky, but all my attacks were crits. So basically, kinda like it is now on live, but without 3 second requirement.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

that passive (dark veil) says "increases duration of non-invisibility based shadow abilities", as shadow cloak is an invisibility skill it is currently unaffected by that, changing cloak to a toggle its still an invisibility skill and would thus be unaffected by this passive still

so im not sure how that passive is a problem, at least related to cloak

It works exactly like on live, but I just mentioned it as ZOS did not even bothered to change the description. I mean cloak does not have a duration any more, so why even mention it in the passive description ? It will just confuse people. But again, the fact that they did not updated the description gives some insights on how they do stuff lol.

deadpool3431 · October 2

Wasn't skinnycheeks the one that mentioned a toggle for cloak on stream and then it was put in almost immediately?

Necrotech_Master · October 2

Tommy_The_Gun wrote: »

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

katorga wrote: »

DrSlaughtr wrote: »

Jaimeh wrote: »

What's the point of the adjustment? If you want to stand still, you can just crouch. The drain is still going while you are unmoving (and I'm wondering, with the magicka bar constantly moving like a pendulum when you are still, isn't than an additional calculation burden?), and if you've emptied your pool before standing still, it takes ages to fill up again. And any micro-movement activates the full drain again. It's a nonsensical change from a practical perspective. The main problem players had with the change was with the toggle, yet in the dev comments they sais the toggle feels natural. My question is where are you getting the feedback for this @ZOS_BrianWheeler? The overwhelming majority of NB players strongly object to it. I've been playing for almost a decade and I've never heard anyone ever complain about the actual usage of cloak. What about our feedback?

2. I still need to hit with 3 seconds to get crit strike. So this might often require me to disable and reenable cloak in the middle of the battlefield, which isn't smart. So I'll probably be getting this benefit less often.

Woooahh....are you saying that if I toggle on cloak, I have 3 seconds from the start of the toggle to get a crit?

If it is a toggle it needs to work like this...toggle clock on for as long as you want and as soon as you break the toggle with an attack that attack is 100% crit.

Cool dude above confirmed the 3 second timer is gone so that's good

Unless I was very lucky with the crits, it seems like it is every "next" direct damage you do via skill or LA or HA etc. It seems to even work if you leave cloak and your next attack will be a crit. But again... I might have just been very lucky, but all my attacks were crits. So basically, kinda like it is now on live, but without 3 second requirement.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

that passive (dark veil) says "increases duration of non-invisibility based shadow abilities", as shadow cloak is an invisibility skill it is currently unaffected by that, changing cloak to a toggle its still an invisibility skill and would thus be unaffected by this passive still

so im not sure how that passive is a problem, at least related to cloak

It works exactly like on live, but I just mentioned it as ZOS did not even bothered to change the description. I mean cloak does not have a duration any more, so why even mention it in the passive description ? It will just confuse people. But again, the fact that they did not updated the description gives some insights on how they do stuff lol.

i dont really see it as confusing, it just explicitly states duration of non-invisibility skills, while yes cloak wont have a duration any longer, the text in the passive is not confusing at all

technically speaking dark cloak morph does still have a duration, and because its not an invisbility skill, would get buffed by that passive

so while technically there wont be any duration based invisibility skills, i dont think the language on the passive is wrong because its still applying the same

Jaimeh · October 2

deadpool3431 wrote: »

Wasn't skinnycheeks the one that mentioned a toggle for cloak on stream and then it was put in almost immediately?

Whoa, seriously? First time I ever heard of that.