Very interesting changes, can't wait to test them all in pvp. Just want to say thank you for the quick response!

warm_blanket wrote: »

Strife now grants a unique damage bonus that increases your damage done by 1% for every 10% Health you have, while it is active.

• We’ve also seen pushback on the cost increases, which we are still evaluating further adjustments to. We’re very cautious to reintroduce the skill to the same degree of power it was in the Summerset era.

From the comment, it sounds like you guys will recall how you handled your own attempt to up nb damage by putting a global 10% damage buff on concealed weapon.

As a refresher:

U35 Concealed Weapon
“This morph now also increases your Damage Done by 7-10% for 5 seconds after leaving sneak or invisibility, or Major Expedition Ends while in combat.”

U38 Concealed Weapon
“This morph now grants its damage done bonus for 10 seconds if Major Expedition was active while it was cast, rather than for 5 seconds when Major Expedition ends or was refreshed…”

U39 Concealed Weapon
“This morph now grants Major Berserk for 7-10 seconds based on rank, rather than a unique 7-10% damage done when meeting its conditions.”

U41 Concealed Weapon
“This morph now deals 10% increased damage at all times and deals an additional 10% damage for 15 seconds after leaving Stealth or Invisibility, rather than granting Major Berserk.”

You eventually worked your way into removing it because that attempt forced every nb into slotting concealed weapon. Why are we starting this cycle again? You're now forcing every nb to slot strife because that's where the big passive damage buff lives, just like with concealed weapon a few years ago.

Making siphoning stronger is cool, but the buff on the spammable cannot affect all damage dealt. It needs to be limited to the spammable, exactly the same as CW. You've already done all the hard work to learn this lesson yourselves, so use the knowledge lol.

If you are looking to add a % damage buff to nb's kit, you can slap it on the dark veil passive in shadow, which is an otherwise useless passive living in a nearly irrelevant skill line. Shadow wizards need some love too.

Cw is a melee spammable and the damage bonus wasn't as restricted as the one on strife. Keep in mind you need to stay topped up for the damage bonus to be meaningful, so if you are pressured hard it won't be as useful.

Aetheric Lancer set getting the buff it deserves that i hope finally makes it an easy to use set (though will have to check what happens when you are moving around slightly)
A 10% general damage buff to strife that should go really well with soulcleaver

And some really meaningful changes to dk that should release its stranglehold on the meta even as is. And while i dont want the pve side to be affected by the changes, would it be possible to reduce the missing resources restored on all core of flame morphs to 10% with battle spirit active rather than 12%? Its my opinion that the actual problem with DK is their ability to effortlessly perma block by using core of flame and while this nerf would definitely help curb that somehow, it would be good to make sure its not an option easily achievable.

That being said, at least with the nerf to whip now the subclassed builds we try to make work wont be an objective downgrade compared to playing a pure dk.

And lastly, if possible, please consider at least reducing the heal on conservation of energy by half with battle spirit active. Its the single outlier that hasnt been touched and imo is in a bit too strong state to be allowed to stay currently.

Still, thank you for these amazing changes devs.

BardokRedSnow wrote: »

BetweenMidgets wrote: »

DKs still have a knockback on their snare removal. Would appreciate the team to look at that, as well.

These forums really wont stop until nothing fun is left and we're back to subclass meta. And record low logins.

Yea. People refuse to adapt to new things and find new builds. So instead all the bad players just want to nerf everything so they still can play their build from 8 years back.

When a 16k HP NB goes 0-21 in BG and whisper you that you suck and hope sorcs get nerfed etc. Is the same ppl who are on this forums shouting for nerfs.

Thanks for listening and reacting to the player feedback. One can always discuss numbers but it's clear that you are taking action on pain points with strong focus on PvE vs. PvP impacts – well done ZOS.

Firstmep wrote: »

Cw is a melee spammable and the damage bonus wasn't as restricted as the one on strife. Keep in mind you need to stay topped up for the damage bonus to be meaningful, so if you are pressured hard it won't be as useful.

Unfortunately that isn't going to be a sufficient drawback in pvp (let alone pve) because

1) Players stop going offensive to defend themselves when excessively pressured, so offensive damage loss isn't important.
2) It is a ranged spammable, which makes pressure easier to avoid in the first place.

Would like to hear what their rationale for this change is WRT their history of CW changes. CW also didn't have a decent set (soul cleaver) juicing it further either.

It doesn't sound like these changes are part of a big plan, so from a player perspective it looks like they are about to waste their nightblade dev time rediscovering the same mistake, and I'd rather that didn't happen.

the folks in this thread calling for Sorc nerfs are crazy. If you even play the game, DKs and WWs delete everything in PvP, and somehow good sorc players are the ONLY ones able to remotely fight back against the two. If you take away conservation of energy, then Sorcs wont have any legs to stand on. That means DKs and WWs are back to deleting everything, good luck getting a counter to them.

Making WWs the best on Sorc was also a bad idea, because now people are instead blaming Sorc for its current power level, instead of addressing real combat issues.

Lets ask the combat devs a question, if you nerf Signet, and then the wws and dks are still overperforming, maybe its because of your combat philosophy still not exactly getting the memo? You're not fixing anything with these changes, only exacerbating that you yourselves have no idea what the in the daedrat you are doing.

Why don't you also go back to the drawing board about stuns. Every pvp match is filled with the same bs, warden charm, dk stun, and ww stun locks make this stuff straight up unplayable.

I am gonna switch to being unserious now because I am so over this circus of terrible balance, you should just delete PvP from the game at this point since you clearly can't manage it /s

EDIT: People might take this as me saying to nerf DKs and WWs, but no, I was trying to imply that this stuff is meaningless right now since the refreshes will just end up changing how these nerfs and buffs are going to work. All these changes are meaningless if you don't bring other classes up to the same level as DKs and WWs. If the meta will be this unbearable for the next 6th months the state of balance in this game will be so awful, the logins will become shorter and you'll lose players. Buff the other classes up, make WW good on other classes besides just Sorc, and give us some sort of bridge for everything to meet in the middle.

Faltasë wrote: »

the folks in this thread calling for Sorc nerfs are crazy. If you even play the game, DKs and WWs delete everything in PvP, and somehow good sorc players are the ONLY ones able to remotely fight back against the two. If you take away conservation of energy, then Sorcs wont have any legs to stand on. That means DKs and WWs are back to deleting everything, good luck getting a counter to them.

Making WWs the best on Sorc was also a bad idea, because now people are instead blaming Sorc for its current power level, instead of addressing real combat issues.

Lets ask the combat devs a question, if you nerf Signet, and then the wws and dks are still overperforming, maybe its because of your combat philosophy still not exactly getting the memo? You're not fixing anything with these changes, only exacerbating that you yourselves have no idea what the in the daedrat you are doing.

Why don't you also go back to the drawing board about stuns. Every pvp match is filled with the same bs, warden charm, dk stun, and ww stun locks make this stuff straight up unplayable.

I am gonna switch to being unserious now because I am so over this circus of terrible balance, you should just delete PvP from the game at this point since you clearly can't manage it /s

I mean it depends. In bgs sorcs are extremely powerful, my stamsorc with conservation and font of power sitting pretty with 35k stam and 7k wpd close 40% crit, with multiple proc sets and still over 36k hp.
The damage with the procs is very respectable and conservations constant healing adds a lot of survivability.

No word from the combat team regarding Rallying momentum and other skills that will put ppl out of stealth - sad. So again: this will make PvE thief players very unhappy for PvP reasons so in the case the team still fears Nightblades or gankers just do those stupid changes with battlespirit active if you really need them in PvP. ZOS forbid the ganker to buff up and not be seen from a mile away - why not say outright that all in dmg playstlyes that sacrifice survivability for potential burst have no place in your game and then delete the nightblade class as with this philosophy it was clearly a mistake to have made it in the first place.

Sorc OP since I play the game making werewolf way stronger than intended but ZOS forbid to nerf its beloved child of Magnus... Instead every other classes werewolves shalt suffer for overperforming sorcwolves - I can definitively see how this is killing variety in the furry playstyle as everyone and their furry granny will play werewolves only with sorc class masteries to circumvent sustain nerfs. Magfurries being unalived by these changes could be saved by giving werewolf skills the arcanist treatment with skills costing the higher resource as with the heightened stamcost that is planned those builds would go straight to the garbage bin.

Ive been reading about DK before the changes that it shalt feel like your flame needs fuel and you gotta be careful with sustain - how cometh thats the exact opposite to what the rework brought us? Now you nerf a sustain you warned us before the rework the DK wouldnt have - this is so nonsensical and away from your own class fantasy, maybe uncle Sheo can explain to me how in the name of ZOS this fits together...

Endgame PvE player here. Seeing the Pummeling Goliath changes is very disappointing I really hope these changes will not go through to live servers.

I personally have been enjoying the double-bash rotation a lot. I've been playing this game for almost 7 years now and I can genuinely say the current patch is the most fun I've had in ESO in all that time, partly also because of how enjoyable I find the double bash necro rotation. It's been such a breath of fresh air after spending so long beaming on arcanist.

Double bash weaving is a bit more complex than other rotations but not as tricky as it might initially seem. Pummeling Goliath is a strong ultimate that comes with some significant downsides and I would strongly argue against the proposed changes. Having a double-bash rotation adds interesting variety to the gameplay options. I would also like to point out that just looking at logs and how this class is performing will show very biased results for these reasons:

- Goliath is normally played by players who are already good at the game. If you had these players play other classes, they will likely perform just as well, or at least very close to it
- Many endgame players choose not to play other classes because they are either less interesting, or perform slightly worse, so the stats in logs are very skewed towards Goliaths. This is a very important thing to take note of when looking at logs. In the past I've seen Templar DDs copy healer setups from top-performing logs, because they thought it was good for Templar DPS. While the truth was that high-end groups just didn't play templar as it was slightly worse than other classes and a scorepush group's healer in a support setup (Roaring Opportunist + Jorvuld's) did more damage than average templar damage dealer
- Nightblades and Sorcerers for single target fights in PvE perform just as well as Necromancers with Goliath, if not better in many cases. Goliath strength is AoE and immobile fights
- Non-goliath Necromancer still performs very well, just a few k DPS behind Goliath, the issue is, as I mentioned above, many top-players just don't play non-goliath enough to showcase the strength. Here's an example run we did with an endgame group on Bahsei HM (1 min 17 s fight), which is one of few fights where you don't want to interrupt the boss. So we decided to stop using Goliath, to avoid interrupting Bahsei's channel. This is single target DPS on the boss:
#1 is non-goliath
#2 is goliath
#3 is non-goliath

As you can see player #1 is even higher DPS (Gopher) than the Goliath player (me), simply because he's a more experienced player and does the rotation well.

Pummeling Goliath ult has some significant downsides, which is:
- Stamina Drain is very high and players are usually forced into stamina recovery food. Even with it, it's often hard to sustain
- The ult is expensive and ult generation stops in Goliath transformation which lasts for 20 seconds. This means players can't benefit from sets like Pillager, Cryptcannon, and Minor + Major Heroism buffs during that time. In order to get the best out of Goliath, the group needs to coordinate around Goliath timers, which is tricky. Without this coordination, Goliath does not perform as well. For this reason as well, ults like meteor, you might be able to get 2-3 meteors off, which comes close in performance
- The high health gain makes some Health% mechanics very difficult or even impossible. Such as vSE HM Yaseyla's ice tombs or vOC HM curses on second boss. This makes the ultimate not viable for some fights.
- Bash cannot be queued up and this means the time before a bash goes through is tied to ping. This hurts players with high ping. Generally bash cooldown is about 333 ms, but players with higher ping will need to wait longer. This makes 2 bashes per GCD impossible for players who are playing around 200 ping or more

tl;dr: If you want to nerf Goliath damage, I think that's reasonable, but do not remove the double-bash rotation as it is what makes necromancers so fun to play and many endgame players agree with this. Goliath is not performing much higher than other ults, it's just that the logs do not reflect this fact well, because top players only play Goliath.

People who do not enjoy double-bashing can still play meteor Necro or other classes and perform very well. Let us keep double-bash for those who enjoy it. If you want to make the rotation more enjoyable, fix the issue with bash cooldown being tied to ping so that players with high ping can have an easier time double-bashing.

The DK changes will have to see how the numbers land, but the nerf sizes (imo) are on the wrong things (bigger nerf to Core of Flame, smaller nerf to Whip, but that's just me).

Templar changes look decent, Aetheric a much needed QoL improvement and the damage removed from the loss of minor sorcery has somewhat been regained. Maybe some small buffs to Rune's resource (mag/stam) return from Restoring light to give plar a bit more sustain to bring it closer to DK/Sorc.

NB changes are kinda strange, the issue with swallow soul in the past was that it was instant (i.e. the damage landed when the button was pressed and before the animation played, giving it very little counterplay that made it feel very oppressive to fight against, which was subsequently over-adjusted by giving it an extremely slow projectile). This morph could get it's old damage back and be fine because the projectile speed allows for counter play now.

Necro seems to be PvE changes, so I'll leave those for PvE players to comment on.

Warden could probably use more, but I understand wanting to be cautious since the refresh is being worked on and it was nice to be informed of that being the reason for the lack of more changes. It would be nice to see some updates on where that is at though and some of the proposed ideas/themes/synergies the team is close to locking in for Warden so that maybe we can give some ideas or considerations for the team to discuss (maybe with the refresh update coming soon?).

The one thing missing is an adjustment to the Conservation of Energy Sorcerer mastery. This mastery is particularly problematic when specifically combined with the following 3 things to essentially make such actions/skills free to cast:
- Health cost abilities (such as Vampire's Blood for Blood) that cost less health than Blood Magic restores.
- Core combat that really should have it's own dedicated modifiers/procs that enforce a build decision to integrate with.
- Overly cheap abilities such as (pre adjustment) WW, or dual wield twin slashes where the costs are extremely low.

This is problematic because by interacting with these abilities/mechanics, Conservation essentially makes them free to cast and grants a decent sized heal on a health stacking build (which we all saw was a problem with elemental susceptibility spam recently and health based heals have been an ongoing issue for years now and not just on Sorcerer).

I mentioned it on another thread in the PTS section, but if ZOS could make it so that this mastery (Conservation of Energy) cannot interact with these things above, that would be the ideal fix for this mastery, but if that can't be done, then toning down the healing at least would be a good temporary adjustment for this patch to give time for the team to fix it properly in U52 (and it would also be nice to know where the teams heads are on this).

Aces-High-82 wrote: »

Good and welcomed changes so far.
There are still some minor things that should be addressed.
Riposte CP: 33% increased damage is a tad too much. This CP esp. enabled some of the unhealthy damage spikes in PvP environments in the first place. 15% would be a reasonable value here.
DK Wings: projectile damage reduction is a nice idea on that skill but 50% is clearly overtuned for an already packed skill. Tweaking it down by half would be welcomed.
Sorcerer: now granting an unnamed penetration buff instead of minor prophecy funnels the class even more into dots in order to proc crit surge reliably on class without a single viable dot. A passive granting 1% crit chance for every 5k of max magicka would at least help justifing to still slot surge in the first place.

That crit change would be nice and a cool thematic lean with the mastery approach for font of power

albertberku wrote: »

38k hp Maarselok Vateshran StamSorc build with Conservation of Energy is as meta as DK currently. Cant even get their hp under 50%, due to extreme HoT. Even if somehow happens, they just roll dodge once and get to full hp. And damage is just getting carried by proc sets, and they have so much damage that you cant stay near for longer. That is if you are not using that same build yourself or a DK or WW. They never run out of ressources similar to DK. And also have better mobility and crowd control due to Streak.

And which Vateshran weapon is this?

madmufffin wrote: »

albertberku wrote: »

38k hp Maarselok Vateshran StamSorc build with Conservation of Energy is as meta as DK currently. Cant even get their hp under 50%, due to extreme HoT. Even if somehow happens, they just roll dodge once and get to full hp. And damage is just getting carried by proc sets, and they have so much damage that you cant stay near for longer. That is if you are not using that same build yourself or a DK or WW. They never run out of ressources similar to DK. And also have better mobility and crowd control due to Streak.

And which Vateshran weapon is this?

Ice staff. Have you dueled a sorc running Vaet Ice Staff and Maarselok? You won't like it. They have enough sustain they can run armor PoTs. High HP, 37k armor or better, extreme DoT pressure. Better hope you have a good cleanse.

That's great news! Thank you so much, ZOS, for taking our feedback to heart!