Subclassing Minus Hybridization?

DestroyerPewnack · December 11

I know this will probably never happen, but I wonder what the game would look like if we maintained subclassing, but went back to a world where mag and stam specs scaled with their respective stats, for both skills and gear.

I know it probably won't do much for class identity, but I feel like it would still add more variety. Not sure what the negative consequences of such change would be, but I imagine it would reel in some of the power creep we have, and place more value on recovery stats.

MincMincMinc · December 11

When you move away from hybridization what happens is people will gain damage because they can specialize in a single resource. Especially after zos added in more sources for us to use over the years and then combined them into mag+stam removing the choices for us.

Honestly the game wont be much different, except from a PvP perspective stam would vastly rule over mag because now the previous stam limitations dont exist. Remember something like stamsorc was competitive while only having one skill line. Now it is the combination of the storm+animal+assassination+aedric. Literally the combination of the neglected stam skill lines. Subclassing allows these stam choices to avoid the inefficient weapon skills and passives. Where before you were forced to use them.

You'd probably see mag characters using 2 skill lines from each class to remain coherent.

The power creep we see though is a result of zos adding more options and choices without reducing values to keep stats relatively the same. A prime example is movement speed. The core of the game was designed around a 90% movement speed base where minor(only on stamsorcs) was 10% and major was 30%.........at most back in the day you were at 130% movement speed if you built for it giving up crucial regen. Now adays we have swift, celerity, major, minor, medium armor, hunt, etc......except the values were never diluted to maintain the same threshold of 130% if you built for it. So now we see the AVERAGE player sitting between 150% and 175% movement speed before sprint. When the average before was 90%.

Combining pen and armor was questionable since zos used to have more gear choices that let you skew into one direction. But now adays all armor is the same and you can skew into a direction with the %spell mitigation.

Really the game needs a stat overhaul first and then they need to go through the basic systems like gear enchants, traits, mundus and adjust those to create tension. Then move on to classes and passives. Then gear sets.

BXR_Lonestar · December 11

MincMincMinc wrote: »

When you move away from hybridization what happens is people will gain damage because they can specialize in a single resource. Especially after zos added in more sources for us to use over the years and then combined them into mag+stam removing the choices for us.

Damage will go DOWN, not up, if hybridization is removed and people are forced to spec into stam or mag exclusively.

Damage is high because of crit damage right now, and in order to take advantage of that, you also need high crit chance.

The weapon/trait combo that offers the highest crit change available is dual wield daggers with precise traits (I know this is not necessarily optimal for all builds, but I'm using this example for the sake of discussion and hypothetical). In a world without hybridization, a magic user wouldn't be able to take advantage of the increased crit chance from using dual wield daggers because daggers would not increase their magic damage stat, which is what they need to stack overall to be a more effective mag-specced damage dealer. So mag damage would go down.

In the same breath, stam damage would also go down, but for different reasons. Melee stam specs did the most damage in the game before hybridization, but they also had the downside of having periods where their DPS was zero because the boss/encounter forced you to fight at range. Even with a bow back-barred, your stam DPS in these encounters was often less than mag DPS output because you weren't able to use the full toolkit of your build in order deal damage.

Hybridization not only got rid of a layer of group comp that made the game more interesting, but it also narrowed the meta because there is now no separate meta for stam and mag.

Overall, Hybridization gave us LESS choices, not more.

SneaK · December 11

MincMincMinc wrote: »

When you move away from hybridization what happens is people will gain damage because they can specialize in a single resource. Especially after zos added in more sources for us to use over the years and then combined them into mag+stam removing the choices for us.

Honestly the game wont be much different, except from a PvP perspective stam would vastly rule over mag because now the previous stam limitations dont exist. Remember something like stamsorc was competitive while only having one skill line. Now it is the combination of the storm+animal+assassination+aedric. Literally the combination of the neglected stam skill lines. Subclassing allows these stam choices to avoid the inefficient weapon skills and passives. Where before you were forced to use them.

You'd probably see mag characters using 2 skill lines from each class to remain coherent.

The power creep we see though is a result of zos adding more options and choices without reducing values to keep stats relatively the same. A prime example is movement speed. The core of the game was designed around a 90% movement speed base where minor(only on stamsorcs) was 10% and major was 30%.........at most back in the day you were at 130% movement speed if you built for it giving up crucial regen. Now adays we have swift, celerity, major, minor, medium armor, hunt, etc......except the values were never diluted to maintain the same threshold of 130% if you built for it. So now we see the AVERAGE player sitting between 150% and 175% movement speed before sprint. When the average before was 90%.

Combining pen and armor was questionable since zos used to have more gear choices that let you skew into one direction. But now adays all armor is the same and you can skew into a direction with the %spell mitigation.

Really the game needs a stat overhaul first and then they need to go through the basic systems like gear enchants, traits, mundus and adjust those to create tension. Then move on to classes and passives. Then gear sets.

I don’t think so.. I think it would force people into running other morphs or at least create a trade off. Merciless is magic dmg, Fissure is mag dmg, etc. People would also have to think about how many mag abilities they can sustain on a stam build or if Vigor makes sense on a Mag build (it shouldn’t). It would also be harder to get away with huge health pools and still do damage.

*should clarify, they could add damage yes, but it would come as a tradeoff from something else like sustain, HP, Resists, or even what skills/lines they could run.