xylena wrote: »

Ratzkifal wrote: »

justifies Vengeance as a permanent gamemode

Considering that performance in Cyrodiil used to be good

What justifies GH as a permanent game mode? Struggling to hit 3 digits of players?

But sure I'd take ESO Classic 1.3 Wabbajack over Vengeance.

Nice try, but, speaking for PC EU, Gray Host is always quite full and well into the 3 digits even at off hours. During prime time even 4 digits are no problem, especially when you also count the people waiting in queue to get in.

So what justifies Gray Host? GH is the original MMO PvP experience. You levelled up by questing, you farmed your gear, you got your skill points, you did the progression. So what now? Now you make your build, set your CP, apply everything you've learned and step into the endgame. For PvP, that's Gray Host (and Blackreach).
If you strip down the game to its bones, you might as well remove all the sets from the game. You cannot use them in Vengeance anyway. If the idea of Vengeance interests someone, the rest of the game doesn't matter anymore. Might as well bring Vengeance to Overland and Trials as well. There are other games that give you loadout based PvP. That's not how PvP in an MMO should be because it invalidates the rest of the MMO's progression system.

See? I can articulate exactly what I like about Gray Host and I can also articulate what I dislike about Vengeance. You keep dodging the question and reply with another question. What is it you like about Vengeance?

Can you please reintroduce fire ballistas and make siege limited and purchasable? It makes defending a keep on an underdog faction harder when the enemy just keeps spawning siege. The whole point of selling 90 gold fire siege was so that newbies can contribute in defense when they have 0 AP. Scattershot is not good, it's too big and hard to aim when placed on the rampart. I'm ok with unlimited pots and siege for a test, but it really shouldn't be an official game feature. I'm hoping the unlimited siege on PTS won't be part of release.

So a couple sort of cosmetic things I wanted to highlight in case they can be improved:

1) I've been moving around with the dire wolves just to see how they react and choose paths etc. It appears about 75% of the time they’re choosing to stack right on top of one another. My instinct is that it's a bit worse than on live, but regardless is there an easy way for you guys to make it so that they more reliably stand on either side of the player, move around more independently etc?




2) When moving forward and light attacking, the werewolf model sort of looks like it's gliding across the ground at times. This is fairly minor and I'm not sure when you'll be in a situation where you are just moving forward and light attacking randomly, but does look kind of goofy. It doesn't really end up looking that way when you're in normal combat changing direction, dodge rolling, weaving other attacks etc. but just in case there's an incremental improvement that's possible from the animation team:
https://youtu.be/XcFmgXVC3DA

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

What is the plan for allowing players with characters on more than 1 faction access to a regular PvP environment if you are removing the only option for non alliance locked cyrodiil outside of vengeance?

This is making me a bit nervous.

Granted, I'm not a huge PvPer (but I'm gonna have to grind this Veterancy to get that shield bash), but having the only two options be "standard, but only on one specific faction so I can't play with friends" and "vengeance, so I can't play with standard rules" is a bit awkward.

Are we really expected to have an account-wide 'primary' faction for PvP and then the other two are for Vengeance only? Didn't ESO decide like 11 years ago that faction-locking you away from your friends was not a good idea?

I've been testing the Class Mastery passives for Sorcerer and here's the results I'm seeing:

Did Class Mastery help in providing a meaningful boost to power for playing as a solo class? No, not really, at least not for Sorc.

Do you feel this system helps in allowing for more player agency in a post subclassing play environment? No, at least not for Sorcerer.

What are the things you like about Class Mastery? There is a real potential for Class Mastery to elevate classes by confining the benefits to base-class builds only, however, being that these are passive benefits the values are seemingly too minor to offset the opportunity cost that Subclassing provides.

What places do you think could use improvement with Class Mastery? The overall values. The passives themselves appear to be well written and class centric, they just fail to deliver enough benefit in the face of subclassing.

Any other general thoughts around Class Mastery? Please see below:

So I tested a base class Sorcerer and applied the different Class Mastery passives and ultimately found that the two best for my Magicka based, damage dealing, Sorcerer were: "Font of Power" and "Calculated Defense"

The reason for those choices were that they represented the strongest enhancement to damage output. "Font of Power" was proc'd (mostly) by Shattering Spines and "Calculated Defense" was proc'd by Crystal Fragments.

For my test I measured results in TTD (time to defeat). Rather than base parse numbers I wanted to focus on time because at the end of the day, in the real world, there is a time factor to combat (whether we're talking about PvE or PvP). My testing was done on the standard target dummy with a value of 3M health.

Taking the same base build, keeping all of the same armor, traits, food, and equipment I made the following subclassing selections: Replaced Dark Magic with Aedric Spear & replaced Daedric Summoning with Herald of the Tome.

Aedric Spear was slotted solely for the Burning Light & Balance Warrior Passives. The Burling Light (mathematically) yields a more consistent value of passive damage than Sorcerer's Static Reverberation with it's low percent chance to proc and lower base output.

Herald of the Tome was slotted as all 4 passives synergize well with Mag Sorc playstyle, assuming at least one skill is slotted. In this example I slotted 2 Herald of the Tome skills: Tentacular Dred & Inspired Scholarship .. To be clear I did NOT slot any morph of Fatecarver as it's already well known to be one of the highest DPS performing skill in current gameplay.

With Tentacular Dred, I was able to access a crowd control mechanic, deal significant damage (for a cc skill), as well as expose the target to 5% increased damage. Inspired Scholarship enhances any Class abilities (Sorcerer or not), this not only enhanced the damage of Tentacular Dred but every other skill as well.

Between the increase in Weapon / Spell damage provided by Balance Warrior and the increased 5% damage exposure Tentacular Dread I was able to deal more damage to the target in less time.

By combining subclassed slotted skills and passive skills I was able to achieve higher results than what I was able to with the base-Sorcerer's Class Mastery passives.

Base Sorcerer (Non Subclassed) with Font of Power & Calculated Defense active. Time to Defeat: 111.65 seconds

Subclassed Sorcerer (Aedric Spear & Herald of the Tome). Time to Defeat: 104.75 seconds.

Subclassing the build resulted in a 6% reduction in time to defeat, with all other things being equal.

There are multiple different ways to build and use the Class Mastery passives, however, from what I'm seeing even with early testing, the Class Mastery passives aren't delivering enough values to make them MORE worthwhile than subclassing.

With subclassing I have access to more flexibility and mechanical variety, whereas, by staying with a base class I'm confined to only those skills which, in the case of Sorcerer, are overly lacking.

I think if you're going to offer Class Mastery Passives the Devs need to look at the areas where each class is weakest and seek to enhance those aspects. Sorcs have access to solid damage mitigation with shields and healing and have too many redundant crowd control skills. What Sorcs don't have is raw, burst, power output so at least some of the passives should seek to increase that area of Sorcs more than they do.

Conservation of Energy: A sustain passive that isn't bad. The sustain numbers on this passive scale pretty well. This one might be the most directly beneficial, however, that's really only if a Sorc is struggling with sustain and doesn't have a solid solution for their sustain. This passive scales well beyond what Wretched will give so the return values themselves are solid. Whether or not that is enough to really convince someone to go pure-Sorc versus the (total) potential of Subclassing is questionable. Storm Calling is probably the number one skill line Sorcs keep when choosing to Subclass and Energy Overload will return more Mag (per cast) than what Conservation will provide per cast. So if a Sorc is leaning on E.O. for the combination of damage + sustain then the prospect of giving up a Subclassed skill line for this passive might not look all that good. Again, that's not to say that this is bad, however, if the passive provided a scaling restoration to your primary pool (either Mag or Stam, not both) and then also provided Minor Evasion, then it might be more attractive.

Font of Power: The values here are too low, IMO, to make this passive MORE appealing than Subclassing. This passive is going to average out around 20% scaling and is probably the most notable Class Mastery Passive Sorc received, however, in testing I was able to achieve more damage output by using Subclassed passives plus skills that dealt more damage and enhanced overall damage. This was due to me being able to get a persistent 6% increase to weapon & spell damage from Balanced Warrior plus the additional 5% damage buff from Tentacular Dread plus the Weapon & Spell increase from Harnessed Quintessence .. that's 11% (Balanced + Tentacular) + a base 284 which is numerically around 6% .. The Subclassed build delivered a 17% increase to weapon and spell damage which had a persistent uptime whereas Font of Power delivers 20% but only procs with Sorc skills so things like Heavy Attack or Crushing Shock (which are two common attacks used by Mag Sorc DPS) won't proc it. So in reality it ended up being more beneficial to run with the Subclassed option that's bringing only 3% less in damage buff but was available more consistently and offers access to more skill / mechanical variety.

Static Reverberation: Another low output. The low percent chance basically sees this being a poor mans execute supplement. IMO this is the 2nd best Class Passive Sorc has after Font of Power because it doesn't really provide a solid proc chance until the targets health is at or below 40% and can be skewed by the games target recognition. In PvE when the game recognizes an adjacent target which has more health this passive doesn't proc on the intended target and in PvP persistent critical burst healing paired with crit HoT makes this passive have an even shorter uptime. .. Static is further held back by the nature of Sorc skills. The passive is built to be able to apply at a max of 0.2s intervals, however, Sorcs don't have any skills that can apply damage at that rate. The proc condition for Static is "when you deal damage", so this passive is essentially paced at 1 per second, and that assuming the Sorc is running Storm or Splash as they're the only two Sorc skills that can keep even that pacing. Compared to numerous other choices for passive damage in the game, this one lags behind. Take DK's Fan The Flames passive, for example; that passive will buff the Burning status effect to scale damage higher than Static Reverberation but also with a much higher uptime than Static and therefore more overall damage than Static, and that's from a base DK passive. Even Templar's Burning Light passive blows this one out of the water in terms of overall passive damage output.

Calculated Defense: Although I (personally) think Static Reverberation is the #2 top passive for Sorc, in testing, Calculated Defense provided more benefit due to the weapon and spell damage buff. This passive can be proc'd by any Sorc ability, however, since Sorcs don't have a reliable spammable it makes proccing this passive a throw off of your rotation because the most commonly used Sorc skills don't synergize with this; often relying on Crystal Frags or Shattered Spines as the main proc. Further, the shield is a moot point. Providing mitigation for only 0.5 second while Crystal Frags takes 0.8 to cast means that the player isn't even getting a cast time's worth of protection. Given that Sorcs have one of the strongest shield skills in the game I feel this is really redundant save for the weapon & spell damage buff, but, given how it has to throw off rotation in order to get that 20 second buff it does knock this down a bit for me.

Sphere of Influence: This is also redundant. A sustain + shield passive. The recovery values are alright, but again, strong sustain options already exist in the game so in order to choose this Class passive it means that a player has to commit to Sorc skills and since these sustain amounts aren't high and above existing strategies that's a lot to ask for. A player would be better off to consider Conservation than Sphere. Further, the shield value is minimal. Sorcs, again, have one of the strongest shield skills in the game, we really don't need a passive that's buffing shields. Given that both the shield and recovery buffs last only for 4 seconds and the most common Sorc shield morph lasts for 6 it's hard to see how this passive isn't covered / eclipsed by Ward.

The combination of the lower values of the Sorc Class Mastery passives paired with the current (non-refreshed) state of base Sorc skills sees these passives falling short, IMO, of delivering enough benefit to outweigh the choice to subclass. If you want us to commit to the Sorc skill lines and the Sorc skills are (broadly) not competitive then the passives need to provide a bigger and better prospect than what we can get through Subclassing and from what I'm seeing they're not. In some cases they fall short of Subclassing and in other instances they're on par (numbers wise), which still sees Subclassing winning out on mechanical variety.

And mind you, I'm not testing with a meta for either PvP or PvE, which means subclassing potential is far higher than my testing scope so if I'm getting stronger results on subclassing with these examples that means slotting BIS skills such as Fatecarver or Flame Lash or Merciless, etc are only going to widen the gap that Class Mastery passives are working to try and reduce.