Class mastery literally proved the game will never be balanced. That's all it did. And it's why I will just fire siege.

ItsNotLiving wrote: »

The implication that subclassed builds lost all of their power is just false the dps output of these builds didn’t get hurt in anyway people just prefer to play the classes they’ve been playing for 10 years as opposed to whatever 3 skill lines provide the most damage.

Now what is power to you?

-Raw DPS?
-Surviveability while doing damage?
-How much you can buff your group?

First lock in on what “power” means to you, and then take a step back and view it on a general scale.

My Templar using Living Death does less damage than a Templar using Restoring Light, survives worse than a Templar using Restoring Light, and buffs the group worse than a Templar using Restoring Light… now swap out the skill line Living Death for…

Bone Tyrant
Winter’s Embrace
Green Balance
Draconic Power
Dark Magic
Daedric Summoning
Shadow
Siphoning
Soldier of Apocrypha
Curative Runeforms

How about if you were to have two of these skill lines with only one of your Templar ones?…

tomofhyrule wrote: »

This is a disingenuous argument. Subclassing destroyed that argument, and trying to claim that it didn't is blatantly wrong. I don't understand how anyone can claim that it was physically impossible for any player to have preferred their three original Class lines in a roleplay scenario. In fact, the idea that "you can drop a weak line for a strong one" is exactly why people were so mad about Subclassing in the first place, and why it was so imbalanced.

A lot of this argument really sounds like "I don't like that people who wanted to stick with what they liked and were punished for it by being super weak are now getting strong." Subclassing isn't losing any power with the addition of Mastery. It's just not ridiculously OP anymore.

Class Mastery exists because Subclassing ruined balance, not the other way around. Both the Refreshes and Masteries were added in direct response to Subclassing (yes, there's a source) as a way to 1) make every Class viable in every role, 2) make every Class feel cohesive with a unique identity, and 3) address outliers.

What balance existed before Subclassing?

A lot of what you wrote comes off as AI dreaming or pure nostalgia hallucination which is impossible to reply to, and it’s a shame because I would love to have a conversation with you, but you can’t talk about the topic without putting words in my mouth and getting emotional.

The reality is this, options were much more narrow before Subclassing, as players have been able to bring in their characters after changing out a skill line or two, allowing them into content that they have been gatekept for almost 2 years from, due entirely to UNBALANCED skill lines that became available for everyone… but let me remind you, the point of this thread is to discuss the effect that Class Mastery has had on the game, and whether it should be addressed further.

ItsNotLiving wrote: »

The implication that subclassed builds lost all of their power is just false the dps output of these builds didn’t get hurt in anyway people just prefer to play the classes they’ve been playing for 10 years as opposed to whatever 3 skill lines provide the most damage.

Absolutely! Nothing has diminished build diversity more than Subclass. Nothing has driven more people from our Guilds to outright quit this game than Subclass. It's a broken cherry picking system that single handedly destroyed our characters. We have endured over a year of nothing but the Beam and Assassination, while our main characters remain sidelined and completely inadequate. It has ruined any semblance of balance we had and thrown everything into complete chaos. But dont worry, the refresh that we only needed because of Subclass is only years away.

Radiate77 wrote: »

tomofhyrule wrote: »

This is a disingenuous argument. Subclassing destroyed that argument, and trying to claim that it didn't is blatantly wrong. I don't understand how anyone can claim that it was physically impossible for any player to have preferred their three original Class lines in a roleplay scenario. In fact, the idea that "you can drop a weak line for a strong one" is exactly why people were so mad about Subclassing in the first place, and why it was so imbalanced.

A lot of this argument really sounds like "I don't like that people who wanted to stick with what they liked and were punished for it by being super weak are now getting strong." Subclassing isn't losing any power with the addition of Mastery. It's just not ridiculously OP anymore.

Class Mastery exists because Subclassing ruined balance, not the other way around. Both the Refreshes and Masteries were added in direct response to Subclassing (yes, there's a source) as a way to 1) make every Class viable in every role, 2) make every Class feel cohesive with a unique identity, and 3) address outliers.

What balance existed before Subclassing?

A lot of what you wrote comes off as AI dreaming or pure nostalgia hallucination which is impossible to reply to, and it’s a shame because I would love to have a conversation with you, but you can’t talk about the topic without putting words in my mouth and getting emotional.

The reality is this, options were much more narrow before Subclassing, as players have been able to bring in their characters after changing out a skill line or two, allowing them into content that they have been gatekept for almost 2 years from, due entirely to UNBALANCED skill lines that became available for everyone… but let me remind you, the point of this thread is to discuss the effect that Class Mastery has had on the game, and whether it should be addressed further.

...

Ok. If you thought everything I'm writing was AI hallucination, then it's not worth having that argument at all. All I read from your arguments is that you hate the fact that I can now bring my character to endgame content and play the way I want to play and without having to betray my personal lore, but sure - let's assume you're arguing in good faith and want to talk about Mastery.

Let's simplify things then and take Classes out of the picture. Let's use sets as an analogy. There are 500+ or so sets in the game right now, and I'm sure we can all agree that not all of them are meta, nor are all of them even meant to be meta. I'll pick three sets to talk about: Hide of Morihaus, Ansuul, and Tide-Born Wildstalker.

Hide of Morihaus is an RP set. It's heavy armor, so either you're a tank or are giving up your jewelry slots for it, and the bonuses are Max Health, Armor, and Max Stam. The 5-piece allows you to do damage and knockdown by roll dodging through an enemy. I can see exceptionally few times when this would be useful in any content whatsoever, and anywhere where it could even be considered not a total meme, it's still outclassed by so many other sets. But if you're RPing a minotaur character in overland, it's a wonderful set to choose.
(incidentally, as soon as ZOS deigns to give me a new Class - which now it looks like will never happen - that's absolutely the set I'm putting my next character in for exactly that reason.)

But now let's look at Tide-Born and Ansuul. Both are designed to give Crit Chance, Pen, and increased damage against monsters. The big difference is that Tide-Born is completely passive - it offers 15% flat with no conditions. Ansuul is only 7%, but it includes a minigame where if you interrupt someone you can end up with 21% damage for 30s. Both are good in endgame. But which is the better option?

Now why am I talking about these? Well, literally nobody is mad about Morihaus being an RP set. Nobody's reasonably going to whine that they're being gatekept because that's what they have on. If you're building an RP character, you obviously are not going to be set up for endgame. The other two sets are useable in endgame content. But again, one is just "let me put it on and get a boost," while the other is "I get a better boost, but I need to play a certain way." You as a player have a choice: do you want to take the easy path that does well, or the path that you need to play in a certain way to get a more powerful effect?

This concept can therefore be applied to the Class lines now. If your idea is "I'm going to take three lines because this is what my RP is!" well, that's kinda like wearing a set strictly for RP reasons - it's not going to be the best option at all, but you're just using that for RP. But if you want to be in endgame, then you have the choice of sticking with your parent class lines or Subclassing for specific skills or passives. In essence, in one case you can just take all of the easy skills and do well, or in the other case you have to play to your Class's specific strengths to have that power behind it. Again, you have a choice: do you want to choose the powerful skill lines, or stick to your base and get all the power from that?

Subclassing released, however, by throwing that choice out the window. The "versatility vs. power" choice only works if the more versatile option is not as powerful. But Subclassing as it dropped in U46 flipped that on its head, making the Subclassed build so much stronger than pureclass. In essence, that was if Ansuul gave a bonus of 5% and 10% after an interrupt, but Tide-Born gave a 30% without doing anything - in which world then would anyone take anything other than Tide-Born, considering that's easier and significantly stronger?

Mastery therefore is the thing that makes for the "power vs. versatility" choice. With Mastery, you do need to choose if you want the power of a pureclass, or the flexibility of a Subclass. Notice though that RP builds are not in this equation - because they were never in the equation to begin with. As I noted, the addition of mastery did not nerf anything at all. If you did well before Mastery, you will also do well after it... but people who choose not to Subclass are finally getting something.

I think the class mastery system was a good addition, but it needs some adjustments PvP wise. PvE wise, every class benefited to the point where most if not all classes can reach 190-200k+ DPS. Honestly imo that damage is way over inflated considering only 2 years ago, the DPS ceiling was only between 120-130k when using cheese sets like highland sentinel.

PvP wise, it's a mixed bag. Only DK, Sorc, and Warden benefited from the class mastery system. You could argue that Necro did too, but it really only gained massive survivability instead of any damage. NB, Templar, and Arcanist have laughably bad passives. NB is especially terrible because the only damage they get is 5% crit damage, an unnamed minor vulnerability debuff that has a very strict activation condition and only lasts for 5 seconds, and 1000 weapon damage with 10% damage reduction on an unclear scaled execute system (really, when do I gain the full benefit? 50%? 30%? 10%? Against any target with full hp or is super tanky, this passive is incredibly useless).

But when it comes to PvE, once you start heading into roleplay builds, you have to toss out the expectation of being "viable". So far no PvE content has been balanced around subclassing or class mastery passives, so unless you have a very terrible roleplay build, you can still expect to do good damage, tank, or heal in all forms of PvE content since that roleplay build will still be at the level PvE content was balanced around 2-3 years ago. Not every build needs to have a minimum of 150k DPS, or have infinite sustain so they can perma block, or be an ult gen machine that can out heal everything in the game with no effort.

Subclassing diminished my enjoyment of my characters and ESO significantly. Class Identity has made a comeback with the Mastery passives and I'm back to logging in daily again. What's more, now I actually appreciate the creativity subclassing allows.. and I like that it comes with a sacrifice, so it may or may not be worth it depending on your build idea. Giving a DK access to streak is just a little bit insane.. I think it's a good thing that a DK must make the decision to give up some passive power in order to use Streak. Likewise with Warden and Merciless Resolve, and many other options. These skill lines weren't intended to be used together, and doing so should come with a sacrifice.

CatalinaWineMixer2 wrote: »

Radiate77 wrote: »

CatalinaWineMixer2 wrote: »

ItsNotLiving wrote: »

The implication that subclassed builds lost all of their power is just false the dps output of these builds didn’t get hurt in anyway people just prefer to play the classes they’ve been playing for 10 years as opposed to whatever 3 skill lines provide the most damage.

Absolutely! Nothing has diminished build diversity more than Subclass. Nothing has driven more people from our Guilds to outright quit this game than Subclass. It's a broken cherry picking system that single handedly destroyed our characters. We have endured over a year of nothing but the Beam and Assassination, while our main characters remain sidelined and completely inadequate. It has ruined any semblance of balance we had and thrown everything into complete chaos. But dont worry, the refresh that we only needed because of Subclass is only years away.

I see you post this in every thread, even ones that have nothing to do with Subclassing, have you ever thought for a second, that whatever “friends” you had who left the game, did so because they got tired of doing the same gameplay loop for a decade, and didn’t want to play regurgitated, ugly content like Year of the Worm?

You say we had a year of Assassination and Beam but before it, we had two WHOLE years of Beam with no Assassination. Matter of fact, Nightblade was the least played Damage Dealer class in all of high-end PvE, not that they were far behind every other option excluding Arcanist which made up more than 80% of the pick rate.

I didn't have to ask them anything. They came to me and said their characters were ruined, emptied out their craft bags and un installed the game. Most of them are playing Black Desert so their Classes cant be destroyed. And its still happening. The ones who didn't outright quit haven't logged in months and in some cases a year.

Yeah I just don’t believe that, sorry. 🤷

With Subclassing we went from…
Herald of the Tome
Soldier of Apocrypha
Curative Runeforms

To…
Herald of the Tome
Ardent Flame
Assassination
Stormcalling
Aedric Spear
Animal Companions
Grave Lord

^ Any combination of the above three skill lines possible on any character, where before the system came out, you had one option for optimal DPS in content.

Was it perfect? No.
That’s why we’re having these reworks.

They should have happened BEFORE Subclassing released, that said, Class Mastery is overkill and feels entirely like a punishment.