It's not even close to a 30% drop in damage. It's not even close to a 30% drop in total power.
I'm going to generalize here. It's more nuanced than this, but in general we can take the higher of weapon and spell damage and combine it with the highest of max stam or magicka divided by 10.5. and call that total power. That combination is generally used to determine the tooltip damage of abilities. The actual formulas are different, but most can be generalized in that way.
You can see the actual damage formulas here.
So if a player has 32k stam and 5000 weapon damage, that's approximately 8k total power.
But it's not the only factor in damage. Penetration, Crit Chance and Crit Damage are all also very important. In general, having a penetration value that completely bypasses an enemy's armor is the most important goal when designing group comps, followed by maxing crit damage, and then crit chance is usually prioritized, but it depends on the values.
Major Savagery/Prophecy increase critical rating by 2629, which results in a 12% increase to crit chance. They are among the most important dps buffs to have. In u46, they are granted passively on both bars by Shadowy Disguise, but in u47 they are being moved to Grim Focus, passively applied to both bars.
While Shadowy Disguise had some damage upside through its 10% damage buff, it was only really good in fights with dead periods like phased fights when one could spare a gcd. In u47, it can be replaced by another dot which, imo, will result in more damage.
So with all that considered, it's actually pretty lateral for pure class nightblades, but they will need to reconsider their builds.
In addition to all of that, there are the damage boosts provided by CP.
If a real theorycrafter wants to step in with a better explanation and detailed calculations, please be my guest! This is very general. I don't do any spreadsheet theorycrafting anymore, unlike 6-11 years ago.
Do you know who is a real theorycrafter? Hyperioxes. And he said that zos was dumb because casual players won't even noticed u47 changes, but the top end -- score pushers and dungeon tri soloers like him -- would resent them. Basically players who use heroism potions.
Whatever the precise case may be, it's NOWHERE close to a 30% drop in damage.
But in which content will this be relevant, and why do you assume it's all casual players playing pure classes? Why do you think casual players don't like subclassing? Casual TES fans probably like subclassing the most.
It is likely a fringe minority that don't want to adapt to subclassing. I don't personally know any players who are avoiding subclassing. By personally know, I mean the hundreds of players I play trials with. I can't recall even seeing level 50 pure classes in random dungeon pugs. I probably have without realizing it, but most players seem to be subclassed.
It's only in these forums where I see any hard objections to it. Not everyone wanted subclassing -- myself included -- but I'm pretty sure most players are already in the process of adapting to it. The trial community certainly has.
It's the same kind of loud minority forum stubbornness we see every major update. We saw the same thing with the introduction of CP. Some people just have a 'pry it from my cold dead hands' mentality it seems.
randconfig wrote: »I sure am so happy to give up all build variety as an Arcanist and be reduced to a press beam AFK bot.ESO_Nightingale wrote: »Hi everyone, not much to report for winter's embrace feedback today considering there were no changes which is a whole seperate issue for this patch.
I wanted to focus on all of the other balance changes i have immediate feedback on.Minor Heroism class passive replacements:
I honestly think this change is ridiculous. This devalues not only heroism pots and scribing skills with minor heroism, but it effectively deletes ultimate generation passives from the game because you wont ever have 100% uptime on minor heroism with how these are currently balanced so you basically still need previously mentioned devalued sources of minor heroism. all around bad changes. I would ask for these to be reverted but i know that that's probably not going to happen.Nightblade:
Grim Focus and its morphs:
I'm pretty okay with this change not gonna lie. having passive weapon and spell damage that persisted wasn't really great for the health of the game. major crit buffs are always good to have passively because sourcing them through potions can feel pretty annoying.Sorcerer:
Lightning Form and its morphs:
I am pretty torn on this. i would be really happy with this change if it wasn't so underbaked. minor force by itself doesn't really feel strong enough compared to losing major resolve. more work needs to be done on these skills. @MashmalloMan had some really great ideas that i'd love to see implemented. make lightning form give major sorcery and brutality, give major savagery and prophecy to crit surge(along with some other kind of auxillary effect like increased concussion damage or something), since that ability wants crits anyway. However, even after that, Boundless Storm is going to need some love if its ever going to be taken over hurricane. it needs a large radius increase and some kind of secondary damage effect like increased concussion proc chance.
Bound Armaments:
ZOS, i do not understand why this ability continues to be neglected over Grim Focus. It's still underpowered. It still costs too much and does too little damage in comparison to grim focus and while making it give major savagery and prophecy is great on paper, all that really does is emphasise that Grim Focus is better in every way. These abilities need more stark contrasts and differences so that there's different reasons to use either one. Bound Armaments really needs the attention that Grim Focus has been getting.Banner Bearer:
I'm glad that passive crux generation was removed with this change because it really heavily inflated the power of not just beam builds but also arcanist base characters which invalidated taking herald of the tome on a non arcanist character. However, with this being said, only generating a crux if you dont have one already is an incredibly redundant effect and makes class mastery+banner useless on arcanist. this needs to be revisited.Item Set Changes:I haven't had time to test any of these changes but most of them sound really solid on paper. as someone who despises highland sentinel, i really like this new philosophy.
ALSO, it needs to be mentioned but Frostbite has been bugged for a while now and it's +4% damage done bonus to chilled enemies is not working properly, severely dampening the power of this set. can we please get this addressed?New Item Sets:
Honestly a lot of these sets are garbage once again. I really like the Idea behind Black Gem Monstrosity and Xanmeer Spellweaver, but Xanmeer Spellweaver is not tuned in a way that makes it remotely good for elementalist builds over other easy options like order's wrath. item sets like this should be tuned incredibly high because they're made for underperforming niche builds. this needs to be buffed significantly.General Thoughts:
Overall i really expected a lot of changes this patch but seeing just nerfs and mostly silly class changes has me feeling a bit deflated. I wasn't expecting winter's embrace changes, but i was expecting significant changes for skill lines like Dark Magic that really need them. The item set changes seem pretty solid though so good job on that i guess. Overall this patch seems like step back which is not at all what any of us wanted after experiencing an awesome patch like Update 46. We should have seen many changes this first week.
While i wasn't expecting any winter's embrace changes, i will still probably make another post explaining what we need out of those tomorrow.
The following passives granting unique forms of Critical Damage and Penetration when meeting their conditions have been converted to grant Major and Minor Force to prevent them from stacking with one another. The total amount of Critical Damage and Penetration granted will be similar but will not stack with additional sources.
- Fated Fortune: Now grants Minor Force for 8 seconds.
- Hemorrhage: Now grants Major Force.
- Piercing Spear: Now grants Minor Force.
- Advanced Species: Now grants Minor Force with an Animal Companions ability slotted.
- Splintered Secrets: Enemies damaged by a Herald of the Tome ability now have Minor Breach applied to them for 5 seconds.
- Dismember: Enemies damaged by a Grave Lord ability now have Minor Breach applied to them for 3 seconds.
[Developer Comment]Over time, Critical Damage and Penetration has become more and more accessible to players, greatly increasing the damage output. We're going through many sources of Critical Damage and Penetration, converting effects over to the Major and Minor system so they still offer powerful bonuses but with a much more controlled ceiling. We've started with class passives in efforts to make it harder to stack their effects with subclassing in mind, while also trying to mitigate the need to gain these effects from other sources.
Class Abilities
- Sorcerer
- Dark Magic
- Crystal Shard
- Crystal Weapon: This morph now applies Minor Breach instead of a unique armor reduction.
- Dark Exchange
- Dark Deal: This morph now grants Minor Force, but no longer grants Minor Berserk.
- Storm Calling
- Lightning Form: This ability and its morphs now no longer grant Minor Force.
[Developer Comment]We heard feedback from players opposing the movement of Minor Force between Sorcerer abilities, and have adjusted Dark Deal to compensate for the powerful Minor Force buff it now grants. We also decided to improve the Crystal Weapon morph, increasing the armor reduced by this ability by 197.4%.