ZOS answer to everything in PvP is sets since the birth of Vicious Death. I'll check back in during Vengeance 3, but staying away otherwise... Cyrodiil is a disaster.

randconfig wrote: »

Unlike all other classes, Arcanist can not use Subclassing or Weapon skills effectively without the Crux generation from Banner Bearer. If I want to subclass Grave Lord to use Flaming Skull or subclass Ardent Flame to use Lava Whip, I can't because 1/3 of my class passives simply won't work, and any crux consumption ability will be ineffective as Banner or Tome-Bearer's Inspiration will only generate a single crux and nothing more until after 30 seconds and it expires. Passives proccing a single time over 30 seconds means you have no passives.

"bUt YoU cAn StIlL sCrIbE aBiLiTiEs ThAt GeNeRaTe CrUx",
yeah but that restricts me to only use those scribed abilities. The reason Banner Bearer worked was that it was passive Crux generation, meaning I was able to use any ability spammable I wanted, including Subclassing and Weapon skill lines.

Passive crux generation sucks, I agree,
so why not let any direct damage ability generate a crux, or let Tome-Bearer's Inspiration generate a crux anytime you use a damaging ability, or literally make any change to ease these restrictions?

Until you ease these restrictions on the Arcanist class, that no other class has to deal with, then PLEASE do not remove our only method of working around them (i.e. using the class mastery script with Banner Bearer).

@ZOS_Amy @ZOS_Kevin

Arcanist is overpowered and if you think that it didn't deserve a nerf you just don't want your accessibility class nerfed

I've said it before and I'll repeat it: it would help *a lot* if you moved to a longer-term engagement cycle. Currently we have PTS which pops 6 weeks before an update goes live and that's the first chance anyone gets to see the changes. Mostly it kind of muddles through, occasionally it's a disaster (nerfmire, vamp rework).

Why not extend the cycle so that as well as PTS we get a preview of the changes you're *thinking about* for the patch after the one that's on PTS. That would give the community much more of a chance to do the kind of gross error check that has happened here. The one time you did do that (trialling changes to heavy attacks) it worked out OK and resulted in avoiding a disaster if those awful changes had made it to PTS. Unfortunately that's the only experience we've had to date, but if last patch people had been able to see subclassing in action on PTS but also had the proposal of "and we know this isn't well balanced yet, we need to see it on PTS but here's what we think we'll need to do - move sorc passives around, change arcanist class script, hammer another nail into the coffin of pure nightblades - you could have had all this feedback 12 weeks ago and adjusted, and what we'd be experiencing on PTS would have had the benefit of all that player experience - and we'd be looking ahead to a preview of what will be coming to PTS in the next cycle and providing early feedback on that. You must have seen through the start-of-year previews that the player base can get excited not just about what's coming in the next patch but what's coming quite a bit further out as well, so use that - give us more exposure to the further-out changes, let it grow our enthusiasm and also take the valuable feedback you'll get from that early exposure.

You have a really dedicated player base contributing feedback on these forums and via PTS, and it seems to me you could wring a lot more value out of it than you are doing. It's a tough time for game studios at the moment as we can all see in the news. Everyone here wants ESO to succeed for many, many more years to come but we can only enable that to the extent that you give us the opportunity to influence the long-term appeal and balance of the game in a positive way.