Like many people who have played ESO since 2014, I fell in love with the game’s combat. It was Fresh. Different. Interesting. Exciting. Stimulating. Thought Provoking. Most of all, it was fun.
Recently we have seen a sharp increase in complaints on these forums, in Discord servers, in Cyrodill Zone chat, and the new Battlegrounds that something is inherently wrong with PvP survivability. In a nutshell, it is way too easy for players to avoid dying and it is broken how much survivability coordinated groups have.

PvP is now too often everything that ESO’s original combat was not: stale, cookie-cutter, repetitive, and most alarming of all, not fun. Players have to die. There is no way around it. Stagnant fights and combat zones being just a morass of players harmlessly bumping into each other is utterly mind numbing.

I do believe ZOS is genuinely trying to do what they think is best for Elder Scrolls Online. I’ve met them. They are real people who do care.

Since ZOS seems to be open to critiques /feedback after the recent Battlegrounds steam, I am going to offer that feedback. As I was genuinely curious as to what happened to PvP, I have looked at ZOS’s old patch notes and developer comments. Years of updates show a wide chasm has developed between offense/damage and defense/healing due to a change in ZOS’s combat direction in 2016.. Since we have two different trajectories, I will divide my findings into two different posts. This post is about offensive nerfs. This post is about defensive buffs.


The iconic Sorcerer ability used to do more damage and stunned players.

• [3.06] (May 2017): Reduced the damage bonus of this morph’s instant cast proc to 10% from 20%.
• [3.25] (October 2017): This morph no longer stuns the enemy hit.
• [4.25] (October 2018): Increased the damage of the proc from this ability to 20% from 10%.
  Basically ZOS admitted the damage nerf was a mistake, but we still had to live with that mistake for over a year.
• [6.15] (August 2020): Reduced the damage by approximately 21% [!]. Also reduced the damage done by Crystal fragments morph by 1%.
  Some context here. This nerf came about because of ZOS’s balance by standardization. ZOS reduced the cast time of this ability to 800ms, down from 1 second. According to the logic of standardization, one DPS parse on a trial dummy is equivalent to a similar DPS parse on a trial dummy; if an ability can be cast more often, in order to maintain the same DPS, the damage must be reduced.
  
  Except.
  
  In what we may call competitive situations (i.e., when you are fighting a 38K health Dragonkight in PvP with Major Vitality and Major Protection active), nobody is ever going to defeat the DK by spam casting Crystal Fragments. The skill will only be used when it procs, which ZOS’s standardization approach does not take into account, thus the skill is going to do 21% less damage in these competitive situations.
• [6.35] March 2021: Reduced the damage by 2%.

Because we have developer notes, we can see what ZOS’s motivations were in their changes to this ability. There are three themes:

1. A desire for more players to use the unpopular “Crystal Blast” morph. See [1.2.3], [1.6.5], especially [3.2.5] and [5.1.5].
2. PvP complaints [3.0.5], [3.2.5], [8.1.5].
3. Conforming to a standardized formula for all abilities. ZOS began “bringing abilities in line with our standards for specific categories in terms of their cost, damage, ranges, etc.” during the Elsweyr May 2019 update [5.0.5]. See also [6.1.5], [6.3.5].

This is unfortunate. Crystal Blast no longer exists, but we still are playing with the nerfs to Crystal Fragments that were made to incentivize us to choose Crystal Blast. PvP complaints are ego driven and should be taken with a mountain of salt. How is Crystal Fragments standardized to any category when there isn’t any other skill in the game like it?

The end result: When the skill today is compared to the skill at launch, it deals 24% less damage and no longer stuns. Meanwhile, our health pools have become bloated, we all have easy access to powerful defensive buffs and gear, all of us have burst heals, and our DPS buddies are stacking 10 of the same HoTs on us. The offensive potential of this skill is much lower.


Believe it or not, this skill used to cost less than 400 mag/stam (“Lefty Lucy” 9/1/2015 has this skill costing 181 stamina). Having a really cheap offensive skill helped make DK gameplay different from the other classes.
DoTs in general have fallen off a cliff with regards to their PvP effectiveness because of how ZoS standardized them to cost more and do less damage.

• [1.6.5] (March 2015): Increased the damage over time by 15%
• [5.0.5] (May 2019): Adjusted this ability to follow our standardized Damage Over Time ruleset. This will result in roughly the same overall DPS, but with less burst damage
  Standardized rulesets treat all DPS as the same. They aren’t. PvP is centered around burst damage. So the same DPS but less burst damage was a nerf for PvP.
• [5.1.5] (August 2019): Increased cost to 2160 from 1350 [that’s a 60% increase!]. Increased the DoT damage by 26% per tick.
  This was the patch where PvPers complained incessantly about being killed by Damage over Time abilities. All it took was a 26% increase in just one source of damage (which came with a 60% cost increase) to cause an uproar, even though PvPers now had things like on demand snare/root immunity, Swift Jewelry, every class having a burst heal, sets like Pariah’s, etc.
• [5.2.5] (October 2019): This ability now lasts 10 seconds, up from 8 seconds. Increased the cost to 2970 [!] Reduced the damage per tick by 47% [!]
  This was an insane nerf to the ability, just about the time that player health pools began creeping near the 30K mark.
• [8.1.5] (this was the infamous Update 35 from August 2022): Increased the duration to 20 seconds. Reduced the damage per tick by 25%

The tally of ZOS’s updates to Searing Strike come to this:

• Cost <400 to 2970! [!]
• At least 43% damage reduction per tick

Because of ZOS’s standardization, this is the case with all DoTs

• Sunfire costs the same 2970 magicka and deals 53% less damage per tick.
• Cripple costs 2970 magicka and deals 45% less damage per tick
• Swarm costs 2970 magicka and deals 45% less damage per tick

It’s actually worse than that. ZOS also changed the mechanics of how damage over time abilities functioned. The way DoTs used to work was that they would have an initial damaging hit, then immediately begin applying their damage over time component. ZOS didn’t like that because some players diversified their PvE builds and not use what ZOS deems a proper spammable [see “Update 22: Combat Direction”]. Now, the damage over time component doesn’t begin until two seconds after you apply the skill. So now we have to use a proper spammable (less build diversity) and supposedly everything is fine because it parses the same on a target dummy. However, less upfront damage means less burst means less threatening to PvP health bars. PvP nerf.

That’s the reality of DoTs. Cost, damage, efficiency, DPS, all of that has been nerfed.


Classic Dark Flare: 1.1 second cast time, bonus in weapon and spell power to next attack, let’s say 1000 damage for simplicity’s sake.
New Dark Flare: 0.8 second cast time, removed all PvP functionality for bonus damage on next attack, 548 damage.
Yes, Dark Flare only does 55% of the damage it once did (which was never really that good). See the biggest nerfs in [5.0.5] (37%) and [6.3.5] (21%).

Classic Destructive Touch: 28 range, 4050 cost, Stunned/Knockback/Disoriented, DoTs proc weapon enchantments, 1000 damage + 1000 DoT + specific bonus depending on type of staff used
New Destructive Touch: 28 range, 2790 cost, no stun/knockback, DoTs no longer proc weapon enchantments, 830 damage + 493 DoT + status effect
Clench morph: 15 range, retains old features knockback (flame), AoE (lightning), stun (frost) + status effect, but no damage over time
Classic Snipe: 1.1 second cast time, 1000 damage, major defile
New Snipe: .8 second cast time, 640 damage, minor defile, poisoned status

If you had the general impression that the most common feature of ZOS’s updates is damage nerfs, that is because your impression is correct. But it’s not just damage. Abilities have also lost additional functionality that were key parts of their potency (major defile was once a powerful buff, empower now does nothing in PvP, etc.). This does not even include the reduction in light attack damage and other DPS nerfs from the infamous update 35 that were meant to increase accessibility to the game’s more difficult content (but did not).

Your damage is higher because ZOS has primarily increased DPS through the introduction of outside sources, such as powerful gear sets, CP, and the major/minor debuff system, etc., which have added multipliers to PvE damage.
PvPers don’t walk around with all those Trial buffs active ... unless they are in an organized group. You probably see where this is going.

Here's how you can quickly see the difference. Take your Arcanist PvE setup and parse on your trusty Trial dummy. Now go parse against the old school 6 million health dummies that do not provide these buffs. And do so in a PvP setup: Tarnished Nightmare + Death Dealer’s Fete + Rallying Cry, while dropping Beam and using the new Tentacular Dread skill ZOS went through all the trouble giving Arcanists in update 43. You’ll see a huge DPS loss and it will feel like a slog.

Organized group players with all those buffs are essentially running around with the old Emperor level stats fighting against randoms who are being punished with nerfed abilities. This also is relevant for PvE concerns as the same thing is happening there too. A huge reason for the ever-widening gap between the best players (what ZOS likes to call the “ceiling”) and the “casual” players (what ZOS calls the “floor”) is because the “ceiling” has all those compounding percentage bonuses whereas the “floor” does not consistency maintain them.

I am fine with groups organizing themselves. Though the gap between organized and non-organized has widened by a lot. While we can debate how much power ought to come from organization, I am not fine with getting slapped with nerfed abilities that have been justified because some groups organize themselves very effectively.


It is so hard to secure a kill even against mediocre players that many have given up trying. They are content to just run out in Cyrodiil and Battlegrounds as low damage tank/healer hybrids that do neither well, and contribute little beyond hoping to survive long enough for the zerg to come save them. If anyone who knows what they are doing is brought under 50% health, they will always have enough resources to use speed/mobility to gain a temporary reprieve, and then always heal to full in under 2 seconds. They don’t run out of resources, their mobility cannot be denied, and even “assassins” have burst heals. So, they don’t die unless zerged down.

Because our abilities, DoTs, and gameplay options are limited, experienced players have long figured out that highly disruptive proc sets (such as Rush of Agony and Anthelmir's Construct) or highly effective ones (such as Mechanical Acuity) are the best tools to cut through all that survivability and have an offensive impact. One of the most effective ways of PvPing in any format for years now is turtle up on your back bar, taking advantage of the game’s bias toward defense/survivability, and waiting until you have built enough ultimate before finally going on the offensive and unleashing a proc set fueled burst.
Because proc fueled combos can quickly do 30K+ damage, PvP regulars have realized it’s necessary to run around with 30-35K+ health, 25K+ resistances, HoTs, near speed cap, etc., etc., or else we’ll explode. Which, of course, just exacerbates the boring drawn-out stalemates.

What we have here is not a dynamic game of skill composed of different builds and classes creating a variety of counters. PvP has become an arms race between the irresistible force of overloaded proc sets and the unmovable object of multiple defensive layers. It’s the same basic gameplay update after update after update.


Please stop nerfing out damage. It’s not fun. I do not think the ZOS developers understand how frustrating and discouraging it is for folks to have their damaged nerfed. Every RPG ever made has always, always, always come down to combat: if the players cannot defeat the boss, the game cannot progress. When we play a tabletop game like Dungeons & Dragons with a Game-Master, they can fudge the rolls and intervene with deus ex machina to help players overcome an encounter that proves too difficult. AI generated bosses have no such pity and neither do competitive PvPers. This is why communication is so crucial for the devs to get outside their bubble, away from their standardization spreadsheets, and talk to their customers about what our actual experiences are when we log in to play. Insofar as PvP goes, it is disheartening to use our skills, hit somebody, and not have their healthbar move a millimeter. I know it drives me to log off and I’m running around with more than 7K spell damage.

Please do not try to fix this issue via gear sets. It’s not just aesthetics. Dying in less than 1 global cooldown also drives away players from PvP. When the gear is too powerful, it will fuel the arms race described above. When the gear intended to fix a problem is nerfed or taken away (such as with Azureblight), we are left with nothing except the existing problem ZOS never addressed.

Most of all, nerfing player damage has thrown the combat all out of balance because ZOS has at the same time buffed healing, which I will detail here.