Gh0stDaddy wrote: »

These are such a great idea and much needed. However there I believe that there is still work to be done.

First, I'm not sure that 2 lines are strong enough to compete with subclassing. I think 3 would be more fair and realistic.

Second, I think that only having 5 choices is way too limiting for both pve and pvp. In theory, I think that there should be something like 2 tank choices, 2 healer choices, several dps choices and some that might be useful for pvp. 5 is just to restrictive, 7 I think is the bare minimum, but 10 would be better. For example, the Sorcerer's Conservation of Energy only provides self recovery and the Nightblade's Share the Spoils only does others. These are just too restrictive because they are trying to do too much. If I'm a Sorcerer and I want group recovery I have no choices. If I'm a Nightblade and I want self recovery I have no choices.

Also, some of the support choices need to be reconsidered as they have redundant buffs or insubstantial support choices. For example, Dragonknight's Lead From the Front includes Major Protection as a buff. This is now an easily accessible group buff as it's on Hearth and Home and should already be present. It would be nice to get a group buff that is not in the kit.

Nightblade:

Above and Beyond:

This line needs to include a size amount of ignoring enemies critical resistance. As any crit increase will be countered by impen and overpowered Rallying Cry (please see my forum post).

Dragonknight:

Booming Voice:

This isn't a great choice as after using your ultimate is the time that you need recovery least. Please rework this to provide something more useful.

Definitely agree booming voice could use a complete rework perhaps extend duration of ultimates by x per 10-15 points of ultimate spent?

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Vaqual wrote: »

BattleAxe wrote: »

Vaqual wrote: »

BattleAxe wrote: »

dhoward5b14_ESO wrote: »

I really dislike Inexorable Descent being a double-down of Landslide because it can drop off fast and take too long to rebuild stacks. I currently use DK and like it (Zen and Heat Shock buff), but if this and Landslide stack time remains unchanged, I will just quit doing DK. With the damage done buff being removed from whip, my current subcass build is nerfed too much to keep.

In trash especially the double down of Landslide is bad. Other class masteries can get roughly 10% damage done within a few seconds of starting the fight.

Agreed stacks fall off to quickly if the would just make the stacks 5 seconds before falling off I think would solve most issues. I’m not as concerned personally with how long it takes to build up but it could be slightly faster 50 seconds (30s with shatter spike mantle). Perhaps 30 seconds standard then 15 seconds while using mantle.

The thing with landslide is, that it provides partial value along the way. It's not like it does nothing below 10 stacks. They gave DK this modifier with the expectation that it might not be possible to always maintain full stacks, for balance and counterplay. It doesn't really need to ramp faster, DKs damage is already excellent in the current state.

Providing partial value is all well and good but when stacks fall off after 2-3 seconds and then you gotta rebuild stacks makes the buff the passive gives negligible. When you compare other classes essentially starting a fight whether PvP or PvE at full strength

That was what I meant. DK has already the means to compete with other classes, despite their maxed out built-in modifiers. The landslide mechanic is as it stands currently more like the cherry on top, rewarding consistent engagements.

It is an annoying mechanic with unavoidable downtime. IMO, that feels quite bad and is anti-player.

Bumping it up to five-second decay is superior quality of life.

Honestly, that could even be part of that Mastery to further reward pureclassing DK.

As a pure dk enthusiast, one that's been enjoying the hell out of it and tested the masteries on the pts and dueled, I think this is more than fine, especially if wildfire embers goes unchanged for pyrebrand. Landslide in pvp with earthspike mantle has a very fast five second buildup, and a very easy means of maintaining the max stacks via the dots, which will be re-applied in your rotation. You'll be constantly doing damage, the falloff is minimal, the buildup in most fights is quick.

If people are complaining about this for pve then idk but free 10 percent damage and heals for absolutely nothing is more than adequate for DK especially when considering the other damage boosting masteries. Any time I check cmx, landslide with earthspike mantle was pretty much always max stacks for the majority of fights.

It was mainly through a PvE lens, yes.

With mechanics and the proliferation of mandatory boss immunity phases, you can unavoidably lose all of your stacks very quickly and quite often, which then take comparative ages to build back up. It just feels bad and makes one hate immunity phases even more than they do already. They also decay very quickly between trash packs unless you are like intentionally speedrunning the content.

Class Mastery points could be based on how many subclasses the character has. If you subclass just one skill line, you get just 1 point.

I'll start by saying that I love the idea of the Class Masteries and I'm personally looking forward to using pure classes again.

Did Class Mastery help in providing a meaningful boost to power for playing as a solo class?
I've mostly tested the Warden Class Mastery thus far myself and I do think that their damage increasing passives are pretty good for PvE damage dealers. Their support passives could maybe be buffed/ altered a little bit to make them more viable, however.

What places do you think could use improvement with Class Mastery?

Tundra's Maw
I think it would be nice if the duration of Major Brittle would be extended a tiny bit, since the uptime is inconsistent at the moment. For reference, I did 5 parses on a Trial Dummy with the exact same build and my Major Brittle uptimes were 99%, 90%, 81%, 72% and 66%.

Bountiful Harvest
From what I've seen thus far, I think this passive is a bit underwhelming. Since Nature's Gift has a one second cooldown and requires actually healing an ally with a Green Balance ability, I believe you won't really be able to consistently grant your allies Major Heroism with Bountiful Harvest.

Any other general thoughts around Class Mastery?
I really like that Class Mastery allows us to further customize our characters. It may just be a way to bridge the gap between pure classes and subclassed builds right now, but I definitely hope Class Mastery stays when all of the classes have been refreshed. Personally, I'd even love to see more passives for each role in the future.

Would it have been so bad to just make all the class mastery buffs simple Weapon/Spell Power buffs based on how underperforming the class is on live?

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

hoangdz wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

React wrote: »

xylena wrote: »

Pyrebrand shouldn't interact with Wildfire Embers. Procs aren't supposed to proc procs.

Pyreband & wildfire embers on the PTS are doing absurd DPS numbers. Between those two things + burning, which are essentially all "free" sources of damage which require no thoughtful input from you, they're sometimes netting a combined 4-5k DPS.

It's cool to see a playstyle avenue for dot DK via that mastery passive, but I really hate that we're embracing the "my light attacks cause you to take 5k DPS" mindset. It feels cheap and lazy compared to having passives boost the actual dot abilities of DK themselves. It's problematic in the same way that sets like relequen are problematic. Not to mention completely oppressive to fight against.

Would rather see the passive reworked to boost your dot abilities in some way. Flat % modifiers to dot damage, or perhaps scaling interactions when using multiple DK dots (shatterspike, embers/claw, burning talons, breath). Like perhaps having one of these DK dots active on your opponent will cause the next applied dot to deal x% more damage for it's duration. Just something that requires more thought than the fire and forget damage that is pyre/wildfire.

xylena wrote: »

Conservation of Energy makes Blood for Blood full resource positive on all 3 pools. You spam it and all 3 resource pools go up. This maybe shouldn't proc on skills that cost health.

I feel like if we're embracing the "classes can have access to infinite sustain" idea that DK now has, the mag/stam sustain isn't the main issue with conservation (even though it is nearly all the sustain you need as far as duels on the PTS go). The bigger issue I'm seeing is how much this heals now. It is #1 healing on CMX every single fight, and rewards you for stacking health which is a huge problem in PVP. For example, here is the healing in a duel on a 40k HP sorc build (which is very easy to achieve these days without giving up much).



Seems some sort of cooldown or reduction in effectiveness to the healing portion of conservation of energy is needed. I am all for buffing the pure classes to DK level, but this is like effortlessly-unkillable levels of healing (assuming you're not fighting an 8k dps pyre DK or a 10k dps WW).

4.7k heals from Blood Magic? Mine heal me for 1.6k in pvp at over 35k HP. The heal barely feels servicable to me. But as always, seems some builds can break anything that exists.

That Blood Magic screenshot was mine, taken in a duel. Trust me, it could get worse with the healing lol.

My suggestion for Conservation is to proc Blood Magic off Sorc abilities only, similar to Font of Power. This would greatly reduce Blood Magic's potency as it can no longer proc off Vigor, Healing Soul, etc.

I def see that when Sorc gets its rework. Rn Heart of Flame provides better sustain and healing.

No, it doesn't. Conservation of Energy is the BEST sustain and healing passive in the game

TX12001rwb17_ESO wrote: »

Would it have been so bad to just make all the class mastery buffs simple Weapon/Spell Power buffs based on how underperforming the class is on live?

Unfortunately this wouldn't work since not all classes are behind due to raw numbers.

Lets take a look at sorcerer for example:
- It's tooltips are already very good for most of it's abilities
- it has a lot of sustain already
- decent healing
- It can also technically be built to tank with the right build
So why is it behind on live compared to the refreshed classes and sub-classing?
- It's abilities are very clunky to use (unlisted/long cast times, animation delays, bugs, etc.)
- It lacks cleave within it's kit
- Many abilities/passives are doubling down on things that aren't needed
- Many abilities are not synergistic with each other/how the class functions
- It lacks buff/debuff access (still no breach debuff and only stamsorc has major prophecy/savagery)
- It lacks a lot of the secondary effects on skills that other classes skills have that enhance their skills well beyond what their tooltips show.

On top of this, U41 showed us why just simply buffing the numbers won't work. ZOS did this for sorc during that patch and the class was very strong, but the numbers increases required to make up for the issues above were just too much, so the class had to be nerfed again because it was too strong in certain aspects/content.

Another example of this is necromancers:
- It's tooltips are technically equal to equivalent abilities from other classes
- It technically has a lot of buffs/debuffs in it's kit
- It has a lot of unique interactions
- It has cleave
- It has secondary effects
So why is Necro so far behind? It comes down to:
- clunky abilities due to awkward cast times, slow projectile speeds
- abilities that are not designed with mobility in mind
- thematic self debuffs that aren't needed to balance the class anymore

These 2 classes aren't suffering from things that a simple numbers buff can fix. They need refreshes because the numbers buffs required are just not feasible for a balanced game (even if everything was OP, these would have to be even more so to keep up).

This is also why things like dummy parsing (or spreadsheet balancing) should not be the only way to determine if a class is up to par or not and why this method of balancing that has been used (by players and ZOS alike) to call for or determine what (if any) changes need to be made over the past 6+ years has completely messed up so much. Sorcerer on the trial dummies looks like one of the most OP classes in the game, but since it lacks cleave, it lacks group support/utility, it lacks many buffs/debuffs, once those things become required (like in actual content), sorcerer just vanishes entirely because it has none of those things that help in actual content, things that Arcanist, DK and Plar have plenty of, hence why they are the main classes brought in as DPS classes for actual content while Sorcerer is not despite sorcerer parsing equally or higher than those classes on the trial dummy.

I tested as pure sorc in imperial city against world bosses. Using perfected null arca and oakfather which is a PvP set. Well my impression is it did make me comparable to subclassing. Just activating a sorc ability with 30k magika put my spell power from 6300 to 7100 for 12 seconds or whatever it is. Seems really strong to me taking down world bosses.

To be fair I usually play no cp and that wasn’t an option so unsure. But 800 extra spell damage is nice

I've been testing the Class Mastery passives for Sorcerer and here's the results I'm seeing:

Did Class Mastery help in providing a meaningful boost to power for playing as a solo class? No, not really, at least not for Sorc.

Do you feel this system helps in allowing for more player agency in a post subclassing play environment? No, at least not for Sorcerer.

What are the things you like about Class Mastery? There is a real potential for Class Mastery to elevate classes by confining the benefits to base-class builds only, however, being that these are passive benefits the values are seemingly too minor to offset the opportunity cost that Subclassing provides.

What places do you think could use improvement with Class Mastery? The overall values. The passives themselves appear to be well written and class centric, they just fail to deliver enough benefit in the face of subclassing.

Any other general thoughts around Class Mastery? Please see below:

So I tested a base class Sorcerer and applied the different Class Mastery passives and ultimately found that the two best for my Magicka based, damage dealing, Sorcerer were: "Font of Power" and "Calculated Defense"

The reason for those choices were that they represented the strongest enhancement to damage output. "Font of Power" was proc'd (mostly) by Shattering Spines and "Calculated Defense" was proc'd by Crystal Fragments.

For my test I measured results in TTD (time to defeat). Rather than base parse numbers I wanted to focus on time because at the end of the day, in the real world, there is a time factor to combat (whether we're talking about PvE or PvP). My testing was done on the standard target dummy with a value of 3M health.

Taking the same base build, keeping all of the same armor, traits, food, and equipment I made the following subclassing selections: Replaced Dark Magic with Aedric Spear & replaced Daedric Summoning with Herald of the Tome.

Aedric Spear was slotted solely for the Burning Light & Balance Warrior Passives. The Burling Light (mathematically) yields a more consistent value of passive damage than Sorcerer's Static Reverberation with it's low percent chance to proc and lower base output.

Herald of the Tome was slotted as all 4 passives synergize well with Mag Sorc playstyle, assuming at least one skill is slotted. In this example I slotted 2 Herald of the Tome skills: Tentacular Dred & Inspired Scholarship .. To be clear I did NOT slot any morph of Fatecarver as it's already well known to be one of the highest DPS performing skill in current gameplay.

With Tentacular Dred, I was able to access a crowd control mechanic, deal significant damage (for a cc skill), as well as expose the target to 5% increased damage. Inspired Scholarship enhances any Class abilities (Sorcerer or not), this not only enhanced the damage of Tentacular Dred but every other skill as well.

Between the increase in Weapon / Spell damage provided by Balance Warrior and the increased 5% damage exposure Tentacular Dread I was able to deal more damage to the target in less time.

By combining subclassed slotted skills and passive skills I was able to achieve higher results than what I was able to with the base-Sorcerer's Class Mastery passives.

Base Sorcerer (Non Subclassed) with Font of Power & Calculated Defense active. Time to Defeat: 111.65 seconds

Subclassed Sorcerer (Aedric Spear & Herald of the Tome). Time to Defeat: 104.75 seconds.

Subclassing the build resulted in a 6% reduction in time to defeat, with all other things being equal.

There are multiple different ways to build and use the Class Mastery passives, however, from what I'm seeing even with early testing, the Class Mastery passives aren't delivering enough values to make them MORE worthwhile than subclassing.

With subclassing I have access to more flexibility and mechanical variety, whereas, by staying with a base class I'm confined to only those skills which, in the case of Sorcerer, are overly lacking.

I think if you're going to offer Class Mastery Passives the Devs need to look at the areas where each class is weakest and seek to enhance those aspects. Sorcs have access to solid damage mitigation with shields and healing and have too many redundant crowd control skills. What Sorcs don't have is raw, burst, power output so at least some of the passives should seek to increase that area of Sorcs more than they do.

Conservation of Energy: A sustain passive that isn't bad. The sustain numbers on this passive scale pretty well. This one might be the most directly beneficial, however, that's really only if a Sorc is struggling with sustain and doesn't have a solid solution for their sustain. This passive scales well beyond what Wretched will give so the return values themselves are solid. Whether or not that is enough to really convince someone to go pure-Sorc versus the (total) potential of Subclassing is questionable. Storm Calling is probably the number one skill line Sorcs keep when choosing to Subclass and Energy Overload will return more Mag (per cast) than what Conservation will provide per cast. So if a Sorc is leaning on E.O. for the combination of damage + sustain then the prospect of giving up a Subclassed skill line for this passive might not look all that good. Again, that's not to say that this is bad, however, if the passive provided a scaling restoration to your primary pool (either Mag or Stam, not both) and then also provided Minor Evasion, then it might be more attractive.

Font of Power: The values here are too low, IMO, to make this passive MORE appealing than Subclassing. This passive is going to average out around 20% scaling and is probably the most notable Class Mastery Passive Sorc received, however, in testing I was able to achieve more damage output by using Subclassed passives plus skills that dealt more damage and enhanced overall damage. This was due to me being able to get a persistent 6% increase to weapon & spell damage from Balanced Warrior plus the additional 5% damage buff from Tentacular Dread plus the Weapon & Spell increase from Harnessed Quintessence .. that's 11% (Balanced + Tentacular) + a base 284 which is numerically around 6% .. The Subclassed build delivered a 17% increase to weapon and spell damage which had a persistent uptime whereas Font of Power delivers 20% but only procs with Sorc skills so things like Heavy Attack or Crushing Shock (which are two common attacks used by Mag Sorc DPS) won't proc it. So in reality it ended up being more beneficial to run with the Subclassed option that's bringing only 3% less in damage buff but was available more consistently and offers access to more skill / mechanical variety.

Static Reverberation: Another low output. The low percent chance basically sees this being a poor mans execute supplement. IMO this is the 2nd best Class Passive Sorc has after Font of Power because it doesn't really provide a solid proc chance until the targets health is at or below 40% and can be skewed by the games target recognition. In PvE when the game recognizes an adjacent target which has more health this passive doesn't proc on the intended target and in PvP persistent critical burst healing paired with crit HoT makes this passive have an even shorter uptime. .. Static is further held back by the nature of Sorc skills. The passive is built to be able to apply at a max of 0.2s intervals, however, Sorcs don't have any skills that can apply damage at that rate. The proc condition for Static is "when you deal damage", so this passive is essentially paced at 1 per second, and that assuming the Sorc is running Storm or Splash as they're the only two Sorc skills that can keep even that pacing. Compared to numerous other choices for passive damage in the game, this one lags behind. Take DK's Fan The Flames passive, for example; that passive will buff the Burning status effect to scale damage higher than Static Reverberation but also with a much higher uptime than Static and therefore more overall damage than Static, and that's from a base DK passive. Even Templar's Burning Light passive blows this one out of the water in terms of overall passive damage output.

Calculated Defense: Although I (personally) think Static Reverberation is the #2 top passive for Sorc, in testing, Calculated Defense provided more benefit due to the weapon and spell damage buff. This passive can be proc'd by any Sorc ability, however, since Sorcs don't have a reliable spammable it makes proccing this passive a throw off of your rotation because the most commonly used Sorc skills don't synergize with this; often relying on Crystal Frags or Shattered Spines as the main proc. Further, the shield is a moot point. Providing mitigation for only 0.5 second while Crystal Frags takes 0.8 to cast means that the player isn't even getting a cast time's worth of protection. Given that Sorcs have one of the strongest shield skills in the game I feel this is really redundant save for the weapon & spell damage buff, but, given how it has to throw off rotation in order to get that 20 second buff it does knock this down a bit for me.

Sphere of Influence: This is also redundant. A sustain + shield passive. The recovery values are alright, but again, strong sustain options already exist in the game so in order to choose this Class passive it means that a player has to commit to Sorc skills and since these sustain amounts aren't high and above existing strategies that's a lot to ask for. A player would be better off to consider Conservation than Sphere. Further, the shield value is minimal. Sorcs, again, have one of the strongest shield skills in the game, we really don't need a passive that's buffing shields. Given that both the shield and recovery buffs last only for 4 seconds and the most common Sorc shield morph lasts for 6 it's hard to see how this passive isn't covered / eclipsed by Ward.

The combination of the lower values of the Sorc Class Mastery passives paired with the current (non-refreshed) state of base Sorc skills sees these passives falling short, IMO, of delivering enough benefit to outweigh the choice to subclass. If you want us to commit to the Sorc skill lines and the Sorc skills are (broadly) not competitive then the passives need to provide a bigger and better prospect than what we can get through Subclassing and from what I'm seeing they're not. In some cases they fall short of Subclassing and in other instances they're on par (numbers wise), which still sees Subclassing winning out on mechanical variety.

And mind you, I'm not testing with a meta for either PvP or PvE, which means subclassing potential is far higher than my testing scope so if I'm getting stronger results on subclassing with these examples that means slotting BIS skills such as Fatecarver or Flame Lash or Merciless, etc are only going to widen the gap that Class Mastery passives are working to try and reduce.

So Skinny Cheeks just posted a video and basically, everything is too low and needs to have some buffs and changes.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vnEMhIw_Jk8

Waillyam23 wrote: »

But Sublassing only one skill line is a huge loss now compared to Sublassing two skill lines and no Subclassing at all.

It was a horrendous mistake to not limit subclassing to one skill line in the first place. That ship has sailed so Subclassing needs to become niche and cede the meta back to pure classes.

Now there are too many degenerate interactions from "subclass line X + mastery passive Y" to allow any subclass build at all to access Class Mastery. Look at that WW thread and how much trouble there is just from WW interacting with Sorc Mastery.

If it wasn't for the fact that herald of the tome is way too strong, it would be interesting if class mastery was per skill line after the first, so you could take one subclass line and 1 mastery, or 2 mastery and no subclass line.

My initial impression was that the class masteries are too weak, then I doubted a bit when some started saying they are broken, but I am also back to thinking they are not enough. There was a wow effect for a few day, yet when considering everything and leaving aside unintended interactions, none of the masteries are good enough to seriously compete with subclassing at least as far as pvp is concerned.

And it seems I am far from alone in my thinking.

Vaqual wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

My initial impression was that the class masteries are too weak, then I doubted a bit when some started saying they are broken, but I am also back to thinking they are not enough. There was a wow effect for a few day, yet when considering everything and leaving aside unintended interactions, none of the masteries are good enough to seriously compete with subclassing at least as far as pvp is concerned.

And it seems I am far from alone in my thinking.

The problem is that some are extremely strong for some forms of content, while others are absolutely outclassed niche picks. They didn't even achieve a reasonable balance within the masteries.

That isn't shocking after the class sets, some are ridiculously strong and require zero engagement with class skills or lines (pyrebrand lmao) and others are outclassed niche picks.

Dracane wrote: »

My initial impression was that the class masteries are too weak, then I doubted a bit when some started saying they are broken, but I am also back to thinking they are not enough. There was a wow effect for a few day, yet when considering everything and leaving aside unintended interactions, none of the masteries are good enough to seriously compete with subclassing at least as far as pvp is concerned.

And it seems I am far from alone in my thinking.

You're not wrong. I didn't test every class, I figured there were enough mains to cover them all .. but when I looked at Sorc I saw the same thing you are.

People sometimes forget that there's an opportunity cost for choices we make in game. It's one thing to say X or Y Class Mastery passive is "good", in a vacuum .. but when one looks at those passives versus Subclassing that's where things fall short. There's no Class Mastery passive that I'm seeing that's going to present a sweeter opportunity than being able to slot a Merciless Resolve or Fatecarver or Shalks or Surprise Attack.

These Mastery passives, from what I understand, are supposed to be a partial class enhancement to hold us over whilst the Devs work on the class refreshes; then seeing the Mastery passives adjusted as each class is re-worked for balance.

These current Mastery passives aren't delivering the type of power or flexibility that Subclassing does, full stop.

It doesn't matter whether it's PvE or PvP, Subclassing just delivers too much and if the only restrictions Subclassed builds have are these weak passives it's going to be a hard sell convincing people to stick with a pure base class build versus subbing.

I don't doubt some people are seeing an increase in power by using the Class Mastery passives now than the power they were seeing before, BUT, that doesn't mean that the power they were outputting before the Mastery passives was anywhere near on par with the potential of what's out there; either for PvP or PvE.