Remove passives when multi-classing (subclassing)

Nebbles · April 17

Yes it's multi-classing, not subclassing.

While I understand peoples desire for new shiny things and the ability to 'play how you want' and fulfil rp fantasies, I'm also sitting here in disbelief that ZOS is actually considering releasing this in its current form. It's not thought through, it's reactive, it's messy, it's going to create a nightmare of balancing and combat issues for years to come.

I feel completely bewildered that they're willing to totally and utterly destroy any balance in the game with such an untested, ill thought through change, which will have impact on them for months and years as they try and grapple with this nightmare.

But I don't believe they will admit (do they even understand?) how utterly broken this system is and bring it back to the drawing board. So as a bandaid to somewhat temper this ungodly power creep:

- When multi-classing, only allow picking the active skills, disable the passives from the other class.

This will allow people to fulfil flavour fantasies, is still something new and shiny, still useful, still keeps some flavour of class fantasy that a lot of people love, you will minimise the nerfing and gutting of 'pure' classes due to interactions with other class passives, but also goes a long way to prevent the worst interactions of various passives/abilities that will lead to a disaster and unmanageable mess of balance.

If this system is released in it's current form, it will be ESO's version of SWG NGE.

Treeshka · April 17

If no passives what is the point of this system?

I mainly tested healer part of this but what is the point of picking Green Balance tree if there is no Maturation passive comes with it?
Mending passive from Templar's Restoring Light tree, i think passives makes these things identified and meaningful.

AlterBlika · April 17

These lines are useless without passives

LukosCreyden · April 17

Unfortunately, removing passives would make the system roleplay-only.
Passives need to stay, but maybe some skills and passives need to be adjusted to say "buffs necromancer skills" rather than "buffs class skills."

Nebbles · April 17

Yes, passives make the skills 'useful'. But releasing this system, without really taking a step back and coming up with a proper design that tempers power creep (more like power explosion) will have such a huge negative impact. ZOS I don't believe will put the breaks on, so it's coming out.

Disabling passives will satisfy those that want it for rp reasons and don't care about the deeps, while giving ZOS breathing space to rethink how they approach this.

It's just one option. There are others. I just don't want to see it releasing as it currently is. Something needs to change and there isn't much time in this PTR cycle. So some unsatisfactory band-aid is needed. (What's really needed is this to go back to the drawing board. It feels like someone who knows nothing about combat and balance came up with this idea in a workshop and was 'yea do it!').

lPeacekeeperl · April 17

The problem for now - we can stack 3 "dps" skill branch in one character and get "the glassiest cannon".
(or 3 tank, 3 heal, but they are not so concerning)
To be more precise the problem is in multiplicative passives
There is some solution:

All passives should be designed/reworked in a way to interact with own skillbranch not "buff all necromancer dots" or "increase dmg of sorc pets" but be dependent on skill choice: like wardens passive - "+% of crit-dmg for each animal companion skill on bar" or NB "+% crit-rate per assassination skill on bar".

Or get rid of plain dmg% passives in all classes at once, i mean all of "+% to stats", "+% to weapon/spell dmg" and adjust skills accordingly to this loss in potential dps . (i think we still can keep passives like "+% dmg to fire /frost/ poison/ shock" to allow creation of more flavored combinations.

This way we solve tho problems at once
1) equalize importance of different skillbranches, so swapping them is more flavor/convenience choice, rather power-building
2) simplify impact on sets, so they choice will be based more on situation(in most cases), rather on raw performance

madmufffin · April 17

Yes lets just neuter the new system entirely because a huge portion of the community that isn't capable of abusing it is worried about it being abused.

Tandor · April 17

Nebbles wrote: »

Yes it's multi-classing, not subclassing.

Actually, it's neither.

Multi-classing is being able to switch to and fro between classes. FFXIV is such a game.

Subclassing as generally understood is starting as say a warrior and then being able to specialise permanently as either a paladin or berserker, for example. There are many such games.

This is more like pick and mix, where you can be partly one class and partly one or two other classes, all at the same time, and which you can change by respeccing. I don't personally know of any other game that does it.

katorga · April 17

madmufffin wrote: »

Yes lets just neuter the new system entirely because a huge portion of the community that isn't capable of abusing it is worried about it being abused.

Ironically the way subclassing is ending up so imbalanced in favor of just a few base classes, they really should offer class change tokens, and/or make skill points account wide.

BretonMage · April 17

I don't think it's reasonable to expect players to forego an entire line - or two - or passives. However it has been suggested elsewhere that passives from another class could be capped at the first level, eg. 5% extra damage instead of 10%.

LukosCreyden wrote: »

Unfortunately, removing passives would make the system roleplay-only.
Passives need to stay, but maybe some skills and passives need to be adjusted to say "buffs necromancer skills" rather than "buffs class skills."

They already did that with sorc pets, I wonder why other classes didn't get the same treatment?

FoJul · April 17

BretonMage wrote: »

I don't think it's reasonable to expect players to forego an entire line - or two - or passives. However it has been suggested elsewhere that passives from another class could be capped at the first level, eg. 5% extra damage instead of 10%.

LukosCreyden wrote: »

Unfortunately, removing passives would make the system roleplay-only.
Passives need to stay, but maybe some skills and passives need to be adjusted to say "buffs necromancer skills" rather than "buffs class skills."

They already did that with sorc pets, I wonder why other classes didn't get the same treatment?

They will, there is already hints at the necro one getting changed, in fact there is almost an entire page on the PTS patch notes that dedicates adjustments to necro having to many pets, and Sacrficial bones buffing ALL class skill. Which means you can make assassins will get the sacrficial bones buff.

ADarklore · April 17

My thought was, to make the passives ONLY effective on the abilities from the original class. That way people wouldn't be slotting classes JUST for the passives. I mean, if you have to actually USE an ability from the specific class line to get the passive for that ability, it would make people more selective about what they subclass into.

There are a lot of passives that say, "when using class abilities" and it should be changed to, "when using xxx class abilities" with the xxx being the specific class.

This would still open up plenty of potential for subclassing, but also reduce the amount of min/maxing that's going on due to passives.

Rungar · April 18

the game already has two tiers of passives that you gain while levelling. Spread it out to three tiers and only allow access to the tier you have as many class lines and its mostly problem solved.

3 class lines= tier 3 in all lines
2 class lines - tier 2 in those lines and tier 1 in the subclass line
1 class line - tier 1 in each line.

the balancing system is already there. it just needs a slight tweak.