1.6 Proposed Buff & Debuff Consolidation Discussion

Glory

I posted this on the Tamriel Foundry Forums, and wanted to encourage discussion as well on this forum.

12/19/14’s Road Ahead talked about a variety of topics, one being a significant change in the way buffs and debuffs work in the game.

Atropos was kind enough to type out the topic:

“A number of changes that we have done are in preparation to get things ready for the Champion system that is coming, we wanted to be sure to support those changes on the ability side. Specifically, we didn’t want players to be stacking lots and lots of the same types of abilities. Part of that involves the removal of soft caps, which allows players to get as much of any resource as they want without having to worry about arbitrary limits, however, we get to the point where if players want to do damage, they stack every single ability that adds to their weapon power. So, we created this “buff and debuff consolidation” for that. For every category of buff in the game, we now have a “minor” and “major” version of it. There are unique effects for major and minor versions of each buff type, and multiple abilities give players the ability to acquire a certain buff type. Each player or an enemy can only have one instance of a major and one instance of a minor buff or debuff applied at the same time.

Q: If there are no more soft-caps, will there still be hard caps?
There will still be a hard-cap on mitigation through Armor and Spell Resistance at 50% effective mitigation, but one of the things we did with the Champion System and the buff system is we re-organized all the balance. We know what that limit of Armor is, so that extends all the way up to the 50% where it will push players who want to hit that limit.

An example of the buff/debuff stuff: Spiked Armor from the Dragonknight gives you the Major Armor and Major Spell Resistance buffs, Immovable from the Heavy Armor tree gives the same effect. Previously players could use both abilities to stack armor, now if you used both abilities it would just extend the duration of the Major Armor buff, but players will still get the unique effects of each ability, like the Damage Return from Spiked Armor and the CC Immunity from Immovable. This encourages players to design their action bars intelligently to get the major buffs they need without overloading their bars with buff abilities.”

I wanted to open a discussion on the subject, as many people are focusing on the ultimate generation and champion point allocations at the moment and I feel that this subject is being neglected. Here are my thoughts about the major points:

• Buffs and debuffs are being consolidated into major and minor debuffs. I’m not sure how they differentiate between the two. I think we’d have to see what they mean to understand what characterizes a skill into the major category or the minor category.
• They don’t want players stacking similar abilities.I really don’t understand this. Isn’t the point of having a limited (10) active skill bar so that I can choose what skills I want to synergize? If I want to stack Bone Shield, Immovable, and Spiked Armor for ridiculous armor values at the cost of using other essential skills, shouldn’t this be my decision to sacrifice one thing for another? This means people can’t choose to stack healing buffs, damage mitigation, evasion chance, attack damage, speed boost, etc.
• Basically making shield tanks, evasion tanks, and other really innovative builds impossible. They later talk about making each skill useful for build diversity, but buff/debuff consolidation makes diversity pointless as buffs overlap so it’s not worth using both.
• Each player/enemy can only be affected by one instance of each a major/minor debuff.This pretty much removes the need for utility. Right now a dungeon group could strategize and use shades+crippling slash+dizzying swing+choking talons for significant damage mitigation. After this change, the tank uses “Major Damage Debuff” and everyone else just swings at the boss.
• Have they considered PvP at all? If a player can only be affected by one of each major debuff at a time instead of 3 similar debuffs used strategically by other players, why not just have one player running one of each debuff and everyone else spamming attack skills.

Unless they mean something entirely different than I interpreted, I am extremely concerned about the way this “buff/debuff consolidation” will have on the game. Everything will become simplistic. Groups will only run one of each and everything else will be cookie cutter builds. I completely understand the need to not let the same skill stack, but homogenizing skills into groups of generic buffs/debuffs seems lazy and I don’t see why they don’t just give everyone 15 skills to all have on the same bar.

I would love to hear others input on this subject. Maybe I’m overreacting, but this change seems to be dumbing down a great system that’s foundation rests on a unique variety of skills.

ThatHappyCat

Personally... I don't like it. It reminds me of GW and GW2: the former had a lot of interesting and diverse ability effects, while the latter "consolidated" them into a few boring "boons" and "conditions". I sort of get where they're coming from: they took away soft caps but still don't want people to stack one stat to make weird, difficult-to-balance builds: but it feels like a very inelegant way to do "fix" things.

But... I'm reserving judgement until I see it in action on PTS.

Sord

Don't worry it will all be fixed in 1.7 haha jk Couldn't resist.

With all the changes to the whole system I am with @ThatHappyCat‌ and will wait to hold my judgement till I see it in action. I am very curious to see how this plays out with builds. I really hope they have more documentation for more transparency on how this and all the new stuff works, please update this website with info.

Glory

ThatHappyCat wrote: »

Personally... I don't like it. It reminds me of GW and GW2: the former had a lot of interesting and diverse ability effects, while the latter "consolidated" them into a few boring "boons" and "conditions". I sort of get where they're coming from: they took away soft caps but still don't want people to stack one stat to make weird, difficult-to-balance builds: but it feels like a very inelegant way to do "fix" things.

But... I'm reserving judgement until I see it in action on PTS.

This is exactly my concerns with this system. If they're consolidating skills, why not just remove all unique class skills and just give everyone the same plain buffs and debuffs?

I do agree we need to see these changes in action, but I really don't want to see all my cool skills become categorized into boring buffs/debuffs that other players have exact copies of.