I agree with this. Full reworks / overhauls of the class kits would be a massive improvement to balance and general QoL for many classes that don’t have access to many important buffs/ debuffs or have them on weird or non useful skills (breach on boneyard why lmao).

Having each class have a dedicated tree for tanking healing and dps where all or most of the skills / passives contribute to that role is much needed imo.

However the one thing I’ll disagree with is the ability to have all trees of the same type stacked, there is basically zero real reason to multi class if you can’t ditch your dead skill lines other than to replace your bad skills with good skills ig

Great idea, but that means actual work and pretty much unfeasable within the current timeframe. They would have to correctly redistribute and rebalance class passives to account for abilities being rearranged. Keep in mind that a simple audiofix requires at least two weeks of prep, involvement of multiple departments, and several certifications.

For now, just limiting this whole mess to 1 skill line retains a fragment of class identity without completely dismantling the current system. Because once they push this to live, it'll be almost impossible to untangle this mess.

Subclassing on pts is a solution in search of a problem.

Why suddenly one day they decide to change something that was working ok. Maybe not super great but it was usable and with arcanist it even approached pretty good class identity design. Nothing outstanding but it was ok.

Now they just throw it all out of the window to do an experiment on a healthy patient. Will the patient survive? Will the patient die? Who knows.

It wouldn’t be as oppressive of a change if it was just one skill line but ZoS doesn’t listen to anyone who disagrees with them so it’ll go live as is.

CAB_Life wrote: »

I participated in very constructive discussions on @skinnycheeks YT channel (great CC—actually seems to care about the game and its community) and wanted to import that dialogue here. Following the refinement of expansion class lines (not base game), where skills are relatively organized into tank/ healer/ dps focused arrangements, I proposed that we give the same overhaul to the base classes and allow people to pick ONE of each type of line in TOTAL, with the same limitation of only one additional skill line of that type (Tank/ Healer/ DPS) from a class that is not your base class. So a Templar could pick Aedric Spear (Tank), Restoring Light (Healer) and Soldier of Apocrypha (DPS); or Aedric Spear (Tank), Living Death (Healer), Soldier of Apocrypha (DPS). Furthering on this idea of refinement, too, on the Templar skill lines, I don’t know why restoring light has the armor buff when that’s undoubtedly a tank skill. Many of the base skill lines are due a massive overhaul instead of the piecemeal treatment they’ve been getting each update. Regardless, this type of rebalancing would avoid situations where people essentially pick three DPS lines and break the game, or make 110K HP tanks and annoy everyone in PVP.

Now I sympathize with Skinnycheek’s contention that this limits the overall “amount” of build diversity. But do we really need 3000 or whatever combinations simply as a meaningless marketing bulletpoint if it destroys the game balance? Just like ESO has “hundreds of sets”—but few worth wearing at all. Still, I would argue that a power deflation and massive nerfstorm or rebalancing will happen in one way or another because ZOS will have to reign in powercreep somehow. We saw this happen with scribing and almost every horizontal progression system they’ve introduced. This at least keeps the essence of multiclassing alive while also encouraging (once the base game classes have refined skill trees) staying purely within your base class.

In my opinion there's no way to make subclassing work at all, so it's all about mitigating the damage it causes at this point.

The idea that every class needs a tank skill line, a DPS skill line, and a healer skill line is more of a modern ZOS idea. I personally think it's kind of rigid. So in it's current state, a Templar tank for example could find use out of a skill from each of the Templar skill lines. Living Dark can scale off of health, Blazing Shield scales off of health, and so does the Rune. This allows a Templar tank to benefit from passives from each of its skill lines while still using useful skills. Also, if Aedric Spear became the tank skill line, would jabs end up in Dawn's Wrath? I think the original devs had it right to let each skill line have skills that were thematically consistent with the skill line rather than having one skill line for each role.

Another difficulty is that ZOS would have to ensure that no one tank skill line is better than all of the other tank skill lines, because then no one would ever choose the others. This is hard to do while keeping things creative, but also balanced. It also goes back to the rigidity of this approach. When a single skill line has a different skills for different roles, it's easier to make it unique and balanced. So for example, how would you handle a DK skill like Inferno, it can be morphed into Cauterize which is a heal or Flames of Oblivion which is a good damage skill. Would you take away the heal morph, the damage morph? It makes things more boring.

So let's look at Nightblade cause it's a good example for this. Surprise Attack used to be a Shadow skill, but it was swapped to the Assassination skill line and Blur was moved to Shadow to make it so that Shadow was the tank skill line. This was actually a disaster change for subclassing, cause before this, Assassination might be tempting for access to the spectral bow in PvP. It definitely wasn't a no brainer because the skill line didn't have a spammable though. Now that Assassination has Surprise Attack however, Assassination is a ridiculous skill line and it's an easy choice for me if I wanted a damage skill line for PvP.

Stamicka wrote: »

CAB_Life wrote: »

I participated in very constructive discussions on @skinnycheeks YT channel (great CC—actually seems to care about the game and its community) and wanted to import that dialogue here. Following the refinement of expansion class lines (not base game), where skills are relatively organized into tank/ healer/ dps focused arrangements, I proposed that we give the same overhaul to the base classes and allow people to pick ONE of each type of line in TOTAL, with the same limitation of only one additional skill line of that type (Tank/ Healer/ DPS) from a class that is not your base class. So a Templar could pick Aedric Spear (Tank), Restoring Light (Healer) and Soldier of Apocrypha (DPS); or Aedric Spear (Tank), Living Death (Healer), Soldier of Apocrypha (DPS). Furthering on this idea of refinement, too, on the Templar skill lines, I don’t know why restoring light has the armor buff when that’s undoubtedly a tank skill. Many of the base skill lines are due a massive overhaul instead of the piecemeal treatment they’ve been getting each update. Regardless, this type of rebalancing would avoid situations where people essentially pick three DPS lines and break the game, or make 110K HP tanks and annoy everyone in PVP.

Now I sympathize with Skinnycheek’s contention that this limits the overall “amount” of build diversity. But do we really need 3000 or whatever combinations simply as a meaningless marketing bulletpoint if it destroys the game balance? Just like ESO has “hundreds of sets”—but few worth wearing at all. Still, I would argue that a power deflation and massive nerfstorm or rebalancing will happen in one way or another because ZOS will have to reign in powercreep somehow. We saw this happen with scribing and almost every horizontal progression system they’ve introduced. This at least keeps the essence of multiclassing alive while also encouraging (once the base game classes have refined skill trees) staying purely within your base class.

In my opinion there's no way to make subclassing work at all, so it's all about mitigating the damage it causes at this point.

The idea that every class needs a tank skill line, a DPS skill line, and a healer skill line is more of a modern ZOS idea. I personally think it's kind of rigid. So in it's current state, a Templar tank for example could find use out of a skill from each of the Templar skill lines. Living Dark can scale off of health, Blazing Shield scales off of health, and so does the Rune. This allows a Templar tank to benefit from passives from each of its skill lines while still using useful skills. Also, if Aedric Spear became the tank skill line, would jabs end up in Dawn's Wrath? I think the original devs had it right to let each skill line have skills that were thematically consistent with the skill line rather than having one skill line for each role.

Another difficulty is that ZOS would have to ensure that no one tank skill line is better than all of the other tank skill lines, because then no one would ever choose the others. This is hard to do while keeping things creative, but also balanced. It also goes back to the rigidity of this approach. When a single skill line has a different skills for different roles, it's easier to make it unique and balanced. So for example, how would you handle a DK skill like Inferno, it can be morphed into Cauterize which is a heal or Flames of Oblivion which is a good damage skill. Would you take away the heal morph, the damage morph? It makes things more boring.

So let's look at Nightblade cause it's a good example for this. Surprise Attack used to be a Shadow skill, but it was swapped to the Assassination skill line and Blur was moved to Shadow to make it so that Shadow was the tank skill line. This was actually a disaster change for subclassing, cause before this, Assassination might be tempting for access to the spectral bow in PvP. It definitely wasn't a no brainer because the skill line didn't have a spammable though. Now that Assassination has Surprise Attack however, Assassination is a ridiculous skill line and it's an easy choice for me if I wanted a damage skill line for PvP.

Yeah, I honestly prefer the "all roles use all three lines" ideas from the basegame classes over the rigid role/line separation we got for the DLC Classes. I'd hope that - if we get a new Class coming at any point - that it would go back to themed lines instead of rigid class lines. I don't want a skill to exist for a reason like "because we need a skill in the tank line that gives Resolve." And the fact that some morphs will be good heals and other morphs are good damaging skills make both morphs relevant, as opposed to some skills where 99% of players take a given morph because one is clearly better than the other.

My way to make pure classes relevant would be to just add a two-level passive to each Class line. But unlike other passives that activate based on the level, these are only available to be purchased for having multiple of the same Class lines - so a character with Earthen Heart, Draconic Power, and Daedric Summoning would be able to get only the first level of the passives in Earthen Heart and Draconic Power since they have two DK lines. A 'pure' class could therefore get both levels of passives in all three lines.
These passives should just add power into the specific lines, mostly to take care of nerfs that happened because of Subclassing. For example: the Ardent Flame one could bump the resource restore from the Combustion passive back to the pre-nerf state and the like. That way instead of nerfing passives to account for OP combos, you're just moving the power so it's not able to be used with Subclassing.

The thing people are most frustrated with is that pure Classes (which some people do like playing!) are suddenly so far behind where they were, and where the Subclassed builds are. While I get that min-maxing should definitely be more powerful, we should not have a system where the standard "I've been playing this for 11 years" is suddenly D-tier at best.

A simple fix is instead of removing a skill line you get to choose one skill line from any class even a duplicate skill line from the primary class. As this will allow pure classes to be competitive while allowing you to increase that line passives and active skills 2 more lvls. This will also allow you to still choose from another class to create for example a zoo keeper build.

I could be mistaken but, my impression is a portion of the people that are upset about Subclassing feel that way because they are deeply attached to the build they used for years and they don't want it to be nerfed/changed for Subclassing.

Overhauling their class is going to go over with them even worse than the current subclassing changes.

A significant part of the appeal of subclassing is the ability to do crazy combinations. It is far more exciting to be slotting an additional skill lines to do things you actually want to do rather than to be going well the passives from healing line x is better for me than my classes heal line for dpsing/tanking so I'm going to swap.

BasP wrote: »

While this might seem like a reasonable fix in theory, I don’t think it would work very well in practice. Take the Sorcerer, for example - across its three skill lines, it currently has around ten different abilities that damage dealers may use (not counting utility-based skills that also deal damage like Shattering Spines, Rune Cage and Daedric Mines). To cleanly split the Sorcerer's skills into distinct DPS, tank, and healer lines would require a significant overhaul of the class, undoubtedly leading to the removal of a couple of skills/morphs that players currently use. Is that really necessary?

Personally, I’d much rather see underperforming skill lines (like Dark Magic) brought up to par, and overperforming ones (like Herald of the Tome and Assassination) dialed back slightly. That kind of tuning could help close the gap between the different subclass setups, encourage more build diversity, reduce the power creep a little bit, and help pure builds too if done correctly - without forcing every class skill line into a rigid, role-locked framework.

Nerfing skill lines sounds good in theory but in practice it will do the opposite and reduce build diversity. Why? Because it shrinks amount of builds that can clear higher level content efficiently to the few that are still not nerfed.

Most likely to few skill line combinations

However in the multiclassing system you cannot now simply buff the underperforming skill lines as you could do without it because it will just make the original overperformer stronger. Now you have to think very hard and be very clever about the buffing to enable other kinds of archetypes to shine. These archetypes were previously just classes neatly separated logically and visually. Now it is going to be a true balancing mess.

If balancing was hard before, now it is going to become literally quantum physics

It becomes almost impossible to make all lines powerful and viable without creating a god tier multi class that trivialises all content. Unless we restrict lines with crux generation and other such individual archetype quirks and then we go against why it was implemented in the first place.