katorga wrote: »

VinnyGambini wrote: »

It's seriously hard to understand:

"Increase your damage done with status effects by 1% for every 1 Ultimate you have, up to 170%. Both the current and maximum damage done is halved against Players. While you have 170 or more Ultimate, your Light and Heavy Attacks apply a random status effect, up to once every 4 seconds. Applies Minor Timidity to you, consuming 1 Ultimate every 1.5 seconds while in combat."

"Increase your damage done with status effects by 1% for every 1 Ultimate you have, up to 170%. Both the current and maximum damage done is quartered against Players. While you have 170 or more Ultimate, your Light and Heavy Attacks apply a random status effect, up to once every 4 seconds. Applies Minor Timidity to you, consuming 1 Ultimate every 1.5 seconds while in combat."

Why can't ZOS see this?

Seriously @ZOS_Kevin @ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_JessicaFolsom what stops you from this easy fix?

50% battlespirit quarters it.

Crushing shock builds work just fine without shattered paths. Monomyth works equally well. The big benefit of shattered is the extra status effect from LA, imo, for crushing builds. There are a LOT of ways to do it. Shattered is just FOMO.

Using Ele Sus instead of Crushing I think would be Shattered Paths only, but I have not used that variation.

Using ele sus rather than crushing shock is mostly a meme. I did the same a few months back when they first introduced it into pts but moved on to crushing shock with charged ls like most of the people new to signet will eventually do as well. Its a particularly mag heavy playstyle but thats not even close to being an issue in todays meta where ardent not only offers infinite sustain but also makes your burning proc more likely and hit harder.

I honestly dont think the new mythic is as overpowered as people think but imo its definitely strong. I think one thing that they can do for both pve and pvp if they think its an issue is blocking the use of an ult with the mythic equipped same way as cryptcannon. It would curb some of the inflated non practical parses people are doing with overload and it would also stop the mythic from being used in ww form, and i guess its already stopped from being good with guardian so warden isnt honestly losing much.

I still think the warden nerf for signet was a kneejerk reaction btw, we know now that guardian wasnt the problem yet the mythic still has a clause againt it in pts that will probably go live for no reason whatsoever.

Pelican wrote: »

Dear ZOS Combat Balance team… As mentioned earlier, this will be my only post. I will only respond if a staff member responds.

Thank you so much for your repeated input,



I can always count on you to talk about werewolf and only werewolf in a plethora of issues. I sure hope they would choose you for such a task as you mentioned, I’m sure you and Redacted have everyone’s best interest in mind.

How selfish people can be.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Hello everyone!

Similar to Nightblade, we’ve seen some feedback that the Sorcerer Class Mastery kit feels underpowered and not competitive with other classes. We’d like to better understand why some of you are feeling this way. In PTS Week 1, Sorcerers were actually doing the most damage out of all classes by quite a large margin; we did reduce the strength to account for that and later reverted some of the nerfs. Now, it’s worth noting that there is a bug with Sphere of Influence where it’s only applying its damage shield to one player instead of two, and it also doesn’t currently work with Daedric Refuge (this should be fixed in the next PTS patch).

Hey Gina, first off, I want to say these summaries have been awesome, loving the ability to better understand where the team stands on things.

To start with, I want to try and give some simple (and spoilered in-depth) explanations that can hopefully help answer this bolded question the team has (and hopefully this can help with the teams refresh of Sorcerer which I'm assuming is already at the starting stages).

• The lack of cleave (or area) damage.
  As @MashmalloMan pointed out in their comment above:

  No Cleave = Sorc, NB, and WW are single target archetypes, they do not have strong cleave. I found an Arcanist parse that can do 155k with 120k as aoe, so 77%. Sorc can do 180k with 30k as aoe using the Overload + Signet cheese, so only 17% aoe. NB and WW is probably just as, if not worse, you need to be comfortable with these playstyles excelling on a dummy, you can't just nerf them down to the same level as other classes and expect it to be fair. There have been meta's where NB/Sorc were the highest DPS, but because they provided no cleave or additional support, they were never used in trial comps.

  
  Why would I bring a Sorcerer that can parse 180k DPS to the main target, but only 30k per additional target (for a total of 180 + 30*5 = 180 + 150 = 330k total DPS across 6 targets, when I can bring an Arcanist that does 155k on the main target, but 120k to additional targets for 155 + 120*5 = 155 + 600 = 755k total DPS across 6 targets.
  
  Note: that this math for 6 targets was chosen specifically because that is the target cap of fatecarver.
  
  That arcanist DPS despite having 25k (~14%) less DPS on the main target, deals 425k (130%) MORE DPS across the entire encounter. This is especially relevant with the dungeons team designing encounters that require focusing a lot of enemies at the same time to ensure the group can complete said content and even though not optimal, the very few instances where that area damage is not required, the damage difference is not large enough to warrant completely changing my build/class for more single target oriented content.
• The outdated design and function of many of Sorcerer class skills that leads to absurd numbers changes just to make them "competitive".
  As has been pointed out in other threads, Sorcerer skills for the most part have very equivalent numerical tooltips to those of other classes, but due to varying issues, the abilities don't perform as well as other class equivalents:
  
  The problem with this is that because Sorcerers lack a lot of buff/debuff/secondary effect access or unique ways to synergize/buff their own abilities, it creates a situation where Sorcerer players need to find unique ways/synergies to bring them up, many of which create for some amazing click bait youtube content (such as the now infamous 220k dummy parse from week 1 of this PTS cycle), but since many of these crazy dummy parses include buffs that other classes don't use on the trial dummies (but will get during real content) the other classes appear behind on the trial dummy, but in actual content they pull significantly ahead of sorcerer once they also get these unique buffs (such as banner), or sorcerer can no longer rely on costly, but very strong abilities that cannot be sustained in real content that requires spending magicka/stamina on doing mechanics (travelling knife with status effect chance + signet) or can no longer use selfish ultimates since the loss to group DPS severely outweighs the selfish gain (such as overload for parsing but atro being required in content).
  
  The trial dummies hide a lot of these aspects since the trial dummies over inflate Sorcerers DPS by providing all of these buffs/debuffs/sustain that other classes already have inherently in their kits, so Sorcerer disproportionally benefits from parsing on the trial dummy compared to the other classes as was pointed out by @pluvioisaplanet above.
  
  This renders using the trial dummy parses as an extremely biased and unreliable metric to balance the classes because the classes access to different buffs, debuff and secondary effects/bonuses are not equal and the trial dummy is disproportionally benefitting some classes more than others due to how strong all of the named buffs/debuffs add up to and the selected buffs/debuffs provided, thus over-inflating their numbers beyond what these classes can realistically achieve in actual content.
• The outdated design philosophy the team had regarding Sorcerer where "it needs to lean on other classes to provide support to realise it's potential" that is not applied to other classes.
  The rise of power recently (past few years) of status effects, secondary effects, bonus procs, bonus effects and other extra components as well as the variety of these that other classes get on their abilities for free yet for some reason sorc is barred from having or is limited to extremely over-redundant ones has gotten well beyond out of control and hides a lot of reasons many Sorcerer abilities seem to lack so much power despite having near equal tooltips.
  
  Examples:
  1.pre-DK refresh with engulfing flame (mag fire breath) had equivalent DPS values to lightning splash, but because DK had multiple unique percent bonuses to flame damage: in the passives, on the skill itself and from various sets, the tooltip in practice actually outperformed lightning flood by a significant amount.
  2. take Necromancers Boneyard that is much closer to Lightning Splash since it has a self-activatable synergy, but it comes with a debuff (minor vulnerability for +5% damage taken) and synergizes with the class corpse mechanic to increase its DPS by 30%, AND it's damage type (frost) has many more percent bonuses from other sources (winter's embrace, frostbite set, frost staff, etc.) that shock damage does not have.
  3. Wardens Winter's revenge, looks similar on paper, with it's 30% from using frost staff bringing it up to the stronger flood morph of splash, but winter's revenge also gets an additional 15% from the piercing cold passive (compared to Sorcerers +5% from energized) and it has a unique status effect passive Glacial Presence that ties in with the abilities increased chilled proc chance that currently doesn't exist for shock damage and the concussed status effect.
  
  This issue creates a very problematic situation for Sorcerer where the tooltips themselves need to be increased to insane values just to be viable, but then that causes builds that focus on buffing those inflated values even further to stack exponentially and "over-buff" the ability beyond what was intended (see hardened ward changes in U41 as a perfect example of this since because the ability lacked the mechanical aspects of block healing, it needed an insane shield value + an over the top heal value just to make it viable, that it caused a situation where building specifically for it over-inflated those numerical increased beyond what was intended).
• General clumsiness and inconsistencies of many of Sorcerers abilities.
  There are a lot of these following issues scattered across all of Sorcerers abilities (even the good ones).

  • Cast times - these just feel very slow and clunky to use, are overly punishing when interrupted and are extremely susceptible to positional desyncs and line of sight in PvP where the target moves behind line of sight on their screen during the cast time, as such the game just cancels the ability entirely, or worse, casts it (paying it's cost) but displays a "dodge" above the target, or even worse still, being on the receiving end of this where you run behind line of sight but the enemies ability still casts itself on you because you were not behind line of sight on their screen and the servers just randomly decides who's client to believe. Channeled abilities, while similarly frustrating, at the very least still do something even if interrupted, so don't feel as bad to use and channeled abilities seem to have much better target tracking than cast time abilities, especially in highly mobile encounters such as PvP.
  • Cast animations/delays - there's a lot of these on Sorcerer abilities, such as Mages Fury, Lightning Splash and Bolt Escape, where these abilities are listed as "Instant" on the tooltip, yet when casting them, it's possible to cancel the casts if you "animation cancel, which on other abilities just cancels the animation, but for these it seems to cancel the effect of the ability itself while still draining the cost (and applying any associated downsides such as ramping costs).
  • Anti-synergies within the kit - A prime example is Critical Surge, the Sorcerer class's "Heal over time" ability that requires dealing critical damage and is supposed to synergize with Sorcerers shields so that the shields act as a barrier for surge to heal back up under, yet it wasn't until U47 that Sorcerer received Major Prophecy/Savagery in it's class kit to make use of this ability and on top of this, outside of the bound armaments morph specifically (that also happens to be the source of crit chance) Sorcerer lacks a lot of the ways of dealing damage that is supposed to naturally synergize with this style of healing over time, since the pets (which are Sorcerers "sticky DoTs" cannot proc surge and only armaments has multiple hits per cast. This also ties in with the Static Reverb Class mastery, that wants Sorcerers to hit the target as many times as possible within each GCD to get the most out of it, yet the only way this happens is with bound armaments (which cannot be spammed every second) or non-class abilities such as the dual wield weapon line flurry ability as such, makes this class mastery completely counter-intuitive for a sorcerer that wants to use class abilities (let alone the pets that nerf it even further) or use a weapon that's not Dual Wield (i.e. wants to play a mage).
  • A special shout out to Sphere of influence, and while I appreciate the direct response here noting it was a bug and will (hopefully) be fixed before it goes live, the fact that this class mastery did not work with any class ability at all was mind boggling.
  • Another conflict is the focus on damage shields as Sorcerers "Healing", similar to Arcanist, yet the Sorcerer does not have any class passives that engage with this mechanic at all beyond the generic increases to maximum magicka (of which other classes have better/more consistent passives that do this). Another thing that needs addressing here is shields not scaling based on maximum stamina, thus forcing stamina based sorcerers to not engage with the classes defensive mechanics at all. The DK refresh with allowed Super heated ward to scale off the maximum attribute (be that health, mag or stam) showed it's possible for "stamina wards" even if they still cost mag to cast.
  • Redundant abilities/effects - there's far too many redundant morphs, secondary effects and passives within the Sorcerer class kit. Endless Fury, Energy Overload, Capacitor, Dark Exchange morphs, Unholy knowledge, Persistence, Rebate and Power Stone are all morphs/abilities who's sole effect (or secondary effect's) power budget is devoted entirely sustain. That's 4 active ability morphs and 5 passives devoted entirely towards sustain (this doesn't count the passives that increase max stats since those contribute to other aspects as well). 5 out of a total of 12 passives (or 42%) of passives devoted entirely to sustain only shows there's something amiss here. Not only is that far too much which shows that Sorcerer abilities clearly cost too much to use, but it also detracts from the ability to use those passives for other aspects a build requires such as DPS, group support, tanking, healing, etc. which also severely limits variety in design space that can be explored with the class.
  • Mages Fury is very clunky in PvP, it can be dodged, despite being an AoE sticky debuff proc, it has a hidden cast time within it's animation that, especially under high ping, can cause the ability to not cast if weaving, it has zero execute scaling and finally it has the single lowest threshold with which it becomes usable of any execute in the game. Anyone under 20% health in PvP is already dead, it's just a matter of picking which instance of damage lands the killing blow. What really killed off this ability though was the reduction of it's duration to 2 seconds down from 4 seconds. This completely killed any potential it had to combo with another ability to create the burst combo, which completely kills it as an ability because that combo potential was how it was supposed to execute targets by design. 4 seconds was fine, even if the ability itself was still weak, it was usable as part of a burst combo that cast the execute part upfront to backload the damage so it stacked with the rest of the burst so that it would burst a target down, with the downsides of this combo being that if the burst failed to reach that extremely low 20% threshold the proc never activated and on top of that, the initial cast was essentially a wasted GCD that gave the target a free GCD to prepare for the incoming burst that would try to proc the mages fury execute proc.
• Generic passives are leading the class to be the "non-class" class of ESO:
  The current design/state of the vast majority of Sorcerer's active abilities incentivize using as few Sorcerer abilities as possible while making the most out of specific interactions between systems, gear sets, and non-class abilities to min-max those generically accessible interactions as much as possible because the vast majority of sorcerer active abilities aren't worth the bar slot.
  
  It was mentioned on another thread, but it's entirely possible to remove 80-85% of Sorcerers active abilities/morphs from the game and there would be almost zero recourse, because that's how few active abilities are actually viable in their current design.

  Note: It would be closer to 95% of Sorcerers active abilities if pet sorc players weren't so attached to their pets and we looked exclusively at the power of abilities, not their themes/role play/playstyle aspects.

  This ties in with the anti-synergy point above, where the class passives want Sorcerers to use more Sorcerer abilities to gain better benefits from the passives.
  Example: (Expert mage 108 weapon/spell damage per Sorcerer ability slotted), yet it's more effective for players to simply ignore that passive and leave it as a passive that grants less weapon damage than a single 2-4 piece weapon damage line from a gear set and slot/use non-class or sub-classed abilities in those bar slots, than it would be to slot the extra Sorcerer active abilities to get more out of that passive.
  
  This issue is also why external systems such as Scribing, Sub-classing, non-class abilities and gear sets as well as secondary "classes" such as Werewolf gain a disproportionate benefit when used by the Sorcerer class (especially the stamina sorcerer playstyle that really only utilizes 3-4 of sorcerers active abilities (and only 1-2 of sorcerers active abilities in a post sub-classing world) compared to other classes that want to utilize much more of their classes abilities or only gain real benefit from their class passives when actually using their classes abilities.
• Pet vs Non-pet builds
  This has been a big complaint among Sorcerer players, since it is 2 completely different playstyles that each have their own requirements and gaps that need addressing.
  This used to be alleviated/tolerated way back when Overload had it's third bar, since that allowed the additional bar space required for pets taking up a slot on every bar, but also made up for the fact that Sorcerers non-pet abilities did not have many (if any) bonus or secondary effects, or buffs/debuffs since there was room on the build thanks to that third skill bar to slot non-class abilities to fill those gaps while still using mostly Sorcerer abilities (including the pets).
  
  This issue has never been addressed since the removal of Overloads 3rd bar, and has only served to compound the pet v non-pet friction, and also compound the issues above where Sorcerer abilities don't have secondary effects or access to as many buffs/debuffs as other classes have access to and as such require unbalanced numbers adjustments just to make them comparable to other classes.
  
  There are a lot of complaints about the pets themselves:
  - terrible AI.
  - clunky controls.
  - all of their DPS locked behind Daedric Prey that just isn't worth slotting (even on a sub-classed pet only build).
  - terribly outdated stats (20k health when the minimum health in PvP to not get 1 shot is now 35-40k (and probably 50k+ now with blocking thanks to the absurd power that the new signet mythic brought to the game).
  - requiring double barring (severely limiting bar space for flexibility in exploring build options).
  - the 2 global cooldown required to re-summon them when they inevitably get killed (and if that gets interrupted it's essentially an 8 second lock out from using that ability at all).
  - the worthless active component of twilight tormentor that's not even worth using at it's strongest point (the early stages of an encounter).
• Class sets being very clunky or downright conflicting with the lines themes they are supposed to represent.
  Monolith of Storms issues were not it's lack of damage. The issues with this set are how it tries to deliver that damage. The set itself was designed around being slotted on the front bar and the use of an ability that would be cast very frequently (i.e. a spammable like whip or a channeled ability like fatecarver), with the 5th DoT tick condition allowing for the tick of a DoT ability such as hurricane or lightning splash to maintain the monoliths if the spammable cannot be cast, yet of the active abilities within the Storm Calling skill line, nothing in that line is a spammable ability nor a channeled ability like fatecaver

  - fury is an execute and only below 20% (the lowest execute threshold in the entire game)
  - streak has a ramping cost that is unsustainable and is a teleport so spawns the monoliths in random spots
  - lightning splash and lightning form are damage over time abilities that are better suited to the back bar
  - surge doesn't deal any damage at all
  - overload is an ultimate that is not viable for actual content due to varying reasons.

  
  The set also wants the encounter to be as static as possible with as little movement as possible, to allow all the monoliths to be grouped up for maximum possible damage, yet the line itself wants the player to be highly mobile (with bolt escape being a teleport, lightning form giving movement speed, etc.).
  The set also does nothing while zero or 1 monolith are active, since it requires 2 or more monoliths being active to actually do anything (so it has a 4 second delay before it does anything).
  This is why Monolith of Storms feels weak despite looking fine or even too strong when using it to parse on a trial dummy such as in week 1 of the PTS (since the dummy is a stationary target with no mechanics that would cause the set to fall off).
  
  Beacon of Oblivion's issues are more in the design of the set. This set was supposed to represent the Summoning line, yet it actively punishes you for using that lines abilities. I get that at the time ZOS was trying to bring non-pet sorcerers up to par, but this was the 1 set that I (as a non-pet sorc main) was expecting to be for pet builds, yet it was not and on top of this, actively punishes using the pets. The bonuses of the set itself are fine, but they don't fit the theme of the line this set is supposed to represent and feel more like they would fit (with some adjustments) as a set for the dark magic line that would be used as an intermediary support set for all 3 lines no matter what playstyle the sorc is.
  
  Ironic that the lightning mage line class set summons things, yet the summoning line set punishes you for having summons active.

I know there's a lot to unpack here and I likely missed many other points as well. I'll be honest, I don't expect these to be addressed entirely by the class masteries alone, since the vast majority of these issues are inherent within the design of the class and it's abilities themselves and require the dedicated rework that only the class refresh brings.

I want to conclude, that the baseline tooltip numbers of Sorcerers abilities, class sets like monolith, etc. are already fine as they are and that is why we saw such a dramatic rise in week 1 of this PTS and such a fall in week 3 and a better middle ground in week 4.
The numbers of Sorcerers abilities are already "there" and don't need buffing (or nerfing). What needs addressing with the Sorcerer refresh is all the extras surrounding those abilities that other classes have been granted over the past 8+ years:
- the synergies between abilities, passives and across skill lines within the class itself
- removing all of the conflicts within the class (i.e. the crit surge and static reverb examples above)
- allowing Sorcerers to stand on their own as a class with usable, free flowing, and synergistic active class abilities
- reducing the extreme redundancy (such as over abundant sustain) within the class to allow better variety to be supported by actual passives and synergies
- the lack of cleave, such that Sorcerer can be more than just a single target dummy parse cheesing youtube click bait class


@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Kevin @ZOS_Gilliam @ZOS_NickG @ZOS_JessicaFolsom I also want to add in here (since I don't know where else to add it, even though it's not specifically about balance), but if the refresh team working on the VFX and SFX could look to implement the lightning theme to be much closer to the "Storm Projection" vision from the Infinite Archive, that would be amazing. That vision feels so much more like what a lightning mage is supposed to be instead of many of the current Lightning abilities Sorcerer has that just feels more like reskinned fireballs (overload, shock damage wield soul, lightning staff clench/reach, etc.). The VFX and SFX design of this particular IA vision is perfect for the lightning theme, fast paced and exciting and feels powerful (visually), but not being overbearingly flashy to the point it's distracting or disruptive.

Once again, thanks for taking the time to engage with our feedback, hopefully this long read helps the current issues behind the sorcerer class and why we saw such wild swings and vastly different feelings of "overpowered" vs "underpowered" when numbers are being adjusted for the class.