PTS PVP Observation – ESO Update 50

From testing on the Update 50 PTS, werewolf performance in PvP, especially dueling, feels heavily defined by a DPS vs HPS feedback loop.

In a duel scenario, werewolf is operating in what is essentially its ideal environment:

- Constant target access
- Near 100% uptime
- Easy fury/enrage/ultimate sustain to maintain form

This is even more pronounced in U50 because sustaining werewolf form is now significantly smoother, with ultimate generation continuing while transformed and upkeep tied into the ultimate system itself rather than clunky combat conditions. The result is a very stable combat loop where pressure can be maintained almost indefinitely. While offensive sustain is not even a concern. While werewolf excels at burst recovery from counter attacks.

Observation from dueling on PTS:
- As werewolf DPS increases, the opponent is forced into equally high healing per second to survive. This is a different dynamic from other builds which push mild dps pressure and combine with spike dps from ults to finish duels.
- This creates a scaling arms race, higher werewolf pressure directly demands higher defensive output.
- Because the opponent cannot easily disengage, werewolf can fully leverage bleed stacking, light attack pressure, and sustained melee uptime.
-Most likely will get a lot of feels bad man comments and feedback as most players don't want to adjust their play styles or builds to deal with a different threats.

This aligns with the broader U50 design direction of making werewolf more aggressive, fluid, and easier to sustain.

Where the dynamic shifts – Group PvP:

In group PvP, effectiveness noticeably drops, not simply because of a lack of cross-healing or shielding, but because the duel conditions break down:

Loss of uptime: Targets kite, line-of-sight, or get peeled
-Interrupted sustain loop: Even brief disengagement reduces ultimate/Rage generation→ impacts form uptime
-Increased incoming pressure: Multiple attackers overwhelm self-healing
-Disruption: CC, stacking snares and target swapping interrupt bleed stacking and pressure ramp

While Update 50 improves overall fluidity and lowers the burden of maintaining form, it doesn’t fundamentally solve the issue that werewolf is still a single-target, uptime-dependent damage profile.


Final PTS takeaway:
Dueling: Werewolf feels extremely strong—arguably one of its best states ever. The DPS ↔ HPS scaling creates high-pressure, sustained fights where werewolf thrives.

Group PvP: Performance declines as soon as uptime and isolation are lost. The spec struggles to maintain the same pressure without controlled 1v1 conditions.

Bottom line:
On U50 PTS, werewolf excels when it can force a fight on its terms. The further the scenario moves away from a controlled duel, the more its effectiveness drops.


Suggestions:
-Decrease duration of Rampage to 10s, decrease fury cost to 500 to activate.

-Make rampage ult activation not consume a global cooldown to make the shift less clunkily and more seamless. Deactivated the ability to shift out of WW while rampaging, there currently is a 5 second lock out after you activate enrage.

-Increase base ability cost of werewolf abilities. +~20%
-While enraged increase werewolf ability cost by 15%. but keep suspend ult cost when active.

Have pack leader shift heal to AOE when rampaging or/and provided a bonus to the pack in some way drop the health regen.

Make abilities cost Magicka or stamina based off highest stat pool.

Roar should cost should be off-stat.

*Edits changing verbage of Fury and Enrage to match tooltips

New Werewolf is good, I Like it. BUT I do have some concerns.
The model is pretty neat, kinda goofy looking, But it has charm. Wish the arms were a bit bigger, so they don't look like spikey pool noodles.
I know we need a way to discern in PvP which morph of the wolf I am fighting, But I would like to be able to toggle the tattoos. Its already pretty clear that I am fighting a pack leader because He has pet wolves helping and when I am fighting a berserker because he has no pets and Im bleeding alot. Red eyes must stay on berserker though. love glowy red eyes.

Balance wise, I am Quite concerned. NOTE This is through a PvP lens.
Werewolf has ZERO sustain issues. Absolutely none. You dont need to even bother building for sustain AT ALL. This is a sharp contrast from the update 49 werewolf where a huge part of the challenge is resource management. You have to actively build around and think about sustain on werewolf, where as now, with the refresh, Its not even a build consideration. In a PvP encounter, You are rarely, if ever going to stamina check a werewolf, and be able to pressure it out of resources, to a point of failure in order to secure a kill.
This is a massive problem for balance, as this allows werewolf players to just spam skills to no end, removing the need to plan out a skill rotation and pace the skills in order to conserve resources. You can just block cast every skill, apart from the fear, for easy damage mitigation, And if you somehow get low on stamina, Just spam the heal until your stamina is back to full.
Sustain is one of the 3 core pillars that make up a successful build in a PvP environment. It is also the most important. overly inflating sustain to a point where its not even a consideration on a build, strongly influences the other 2 core pillars, damage and survivability. With no worry of sustain, You can constantly keep a steady damage output rolling, And for survivability, well you can block cast and heal with no worry of that ever falling off.

and in the rare situation "Oh I am out of magic for my main heal? Ok ill just roll dodge spam until I get more magic back or my potion is ready."
Did you guys know that the dodge fatigue cap is 20? I did not know there was a dodge fatigue cap of 20. I have now learned that there is a Dodge fatigue cap of 20, and from there dodge does not increase in cost anymore.

Not needing to consider sustain on a werewolf, as I said, inadvertently INFLATES damage output, and survivability.
Survivability on werewolf is easy too. Your primary Spammable is a Huge heal, allowing you to just continually press your offense, while staying safe. You also have access to bloodclaws, which if you hit more than 3 enemies with it, Might as well grant you immortality. The big magic heal on werewolf restores missing stamina alongside its heal, allowing you to keep up your already overly sustainable offense.
You have the ability constantly hold block and block cast your offensive skills for free mitigation and, in rougher scenarios, spam roll dodge with almost no penalty. The only weakness a werewolf has is properly lined up burst combo, which they can still just block anyways. Pressure and DOT builds don't even phase werewolf because of the passive healing that werewolf has, and again, you are not stamina checking a werewolf, because sustain is too plentiful. If sustain was still a bit tricky on werewolf, The whole of werewolf as it sits on the PTS, would be in a Good spot. But its too easy to sustain on werewolf.

My suggestion - All skills on werewolf, apart form the magic heal, gain ramping cost for around 10 seconds. keep the costs as they are with the PTS werewolf, relatively low, or even lower and make the ramping cost 33% like with roll dodge and Streak, PER INDIVIDUAL skill, exclude Claw fury, since that's a channel. Make the werewolf heavy attack remove all stacks of ramping cost, while still restoring the extra stamina, and then BOOM! now you have a more calculated skill rotation with less incentive to spam skills for maximum effect! You could also tack onto that heavy attack weapon and spell damage per fatigue stack removed, to give an ever bigger burst to your damage, because werewolf really does not have any surprise damage for burst, and catching out lacking opponents.
This would also make the rampage mode of werewolf More impactful as well, as you can keep the no cost for skills with that, and it would make the rampage mode much more rewarding to build up to.

And last concern is with the Sniffer mode of werewolf. We cant have sneaky werewolfs, so we get a stealth detect on crouch which makes sense for a werewolf having the ability to sniff out invisible opponents, HOWEVER, Again, Balance. A detect potion every 3 seconds is broken.
Sentry, the set has a 30 second cooldown to allow for some window of counterplay, and a detect potion goes on cooldown for roughly the same amount of time( 45 seconds -11 or so seconds).
Stealth detection is THE hard counter for stealthy playstyles. That's also why there is a cooldown.
For those 10 or so seconds when stealth detection is active, its becomes a game of hide and seek plus ice tag. The stealthy boi is completely at the mercy of the stealth detector, until that timer runs out.
With werewolf, there is NO down time. There is a stamina cost for activating the sniffer mode, but as we discussed, werewolf has no sustain issues, so you can spam this to take away ANY leverage that a stealthy boi might have. You also have the gapclose on werewolf which allows you to jump directly on the stealthy boi when you see him.
Stealth is some builds primary form of damage mitigation. that's why there is a cooldown on the sentry set and with detection potions because stealth detection is a FULL counter to a stealth build. Giving a stealth build those 30 seconds of breathing room gives stealth builds a chance to regain leverage, and re assess a fight before making the decision of weather to either re-engage or dis-engage, based off of the scenario. This leads to the fun fights of hide and seek and freeze tag that make pvp encounters exciting.
Werewolf just does away with this completely. Its a one sided encounter where every time the werewolf wins. That is bad for balance and just not fun.

Solution Add a cooldown of around 30 seconds to the stealth detection portion of the sniffer mode, or heavily reduce the radius of detection.

MSattrtand wrote: »

I'm concerned about this part:

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Class Mastery

• General Feedback and Suggestions [Feedback]: We're aware that certain classes are [...] too far ahead

To me, this reads like: "We're going to nerf Sorcs because their trial dummy parses are too high."

Current Sorc parses are extremely cheesy. They rely on Banner and the status knife, both of which inflate dummy numbers but also buff the rest of the group in real content. In actual fights, you usually won’t run Overload - you’ll use Atro instead, which lowers your personal DPS but increases group DPS. Without Overload, Signet becomes worse, so you'd swap it out and lose even more personal damage. And if you're the only Sorc in the group, you'll be running Mastery, which again lowers your personal DPS while giving the group 3% WPD/SPD.

What does it mean? Sorc is not that OP in actual content, especially since it has no cleave.

Another problem I want to address is the DPS disparity between multi-classed and pure-classed builds. From this week's patch notes:

...its primary goal is to lessen the gap between subclassing and “pure” or “mono-classing.”

Let’s establish a baseline: an Arc/NB/Plar Runeblades build parses 173k on live. This build is unaffected on PTS; it has high single‑target and low cleave. The obvious conclusion: no pure class with strong innate cleave (DK, Cro, beaming Arc) should parse higher. Conversely, no pure class with weak innate cleave (Sorc, NB, Warden, Runeblades Arc) should parse lower. Plar is borderline since its spammable has a decent cleave. All of this assumes parses without excessive cheese.

So, here are my (unpopular) thoughts on each class:

• Sorc - needs a nerf. 206k ST DPS is too high. Even a less cheesy setup hits ~185k, which is still too much.
  
• Warden - very strange case. It parses too high with Signet (cheese), but its sustain is terrible. Without Signet, it’s around 172k, which is ok. Maybe it's a little bit low, considering it was the least popular DD. No idea how to balance it without killing Signet.
  
• DK - needs a nerf. Dummy DPS is inflated by Heat Shock, which also buffs the whole group in content. Even without Heat Shock, it has too high ST-damage whilst having great innate cleave.
  
• Plar - fine as is.
  
• NB - needs a buff. Low cleave and low ST right now.
  
• Cro - needs a buff. It can parse well with double‑bash Goliath and triple Ghostly Embrace stacking, but without this cheese, it's weak.
  
• Arc - beaming Arc is fine. Runeblades Arc is not - it deserves buffs due to low cleave. Easiest fix: give Runeblades some unique synergy with Splattering Disjunction.

Sorry if this kills someone’s fun, but power creep needs to be controlled.

Or conversely you could just raise the floor instead of lowering the ceiling. Personally, I think we need a little power creep in some of the failing classes, not to handicap the successful ones.