Do you have a heal or a dmg shield slotted on your hotbar?

DDuke

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

Jaerlach

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Darlgon

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

I play a light armor healer.. so.. guess what.. I have both.. in group versions.

DUH.

DDuke

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Then perhaps a solution could be found by increasing player health pools further in Cyrodiil, thus giving higher reaction times for players and after this making changes to how the RPG aspects are perceived in this MMO?


There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage

Also, the upcoming MMO Black Desert is going to release without any healer class/skills (you get healing from potions only afaik).
Another approach with which I do not agree.

In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

Darlgon

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

DDuke wrote: »

There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage
...
In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

haha.. haha.. haha.. you said Archage did well with a trinity system..

NO. They didnt do much right at all, in PVP, which is why I dropped them.Their version of a trinity in a PVP raid was 11 DPS and a healer, with a close respawn point.

Come to think of it.. why are you running around starting threads to instigate ZoS breaking stuff. They will do enough of that on thier own with 1.6. They dont need your help, your plans will just make it worse.

DDuke

Darlgon wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage
...
In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

haha.. haha.. haha.. you said Archage did well with a trinity system..

NO. They didnt do much right at all, in PVP, which is why I dropped them.Their version of a trinity in a PVP raid was 11 DPS and a healer, with a close respawn point.

Come to think of it.. why are you running around starting threads to instigate ZoS breaking stuff. They will do enough of that on thier own with 1.6. They dont need your help, your plans will just make it worse.

Well, thank you for that constructive feedback.
Obviously all of the games I listed are perfect in every way.

Feel free to bash on the other games on the list as well if that makes you feel better about ESO.

Lord_Kreegan

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

Depending on which of my eight characters you're looking at, yes...

But never on the main hotbar; always on the second. So, if my Templars need to heal, they switch to their non-DPS hotbar. If my DKs need to tank, they switch to their tanking hotbar.

The liability of this is that those particular skills do not level up as fast as the skills on my main hotbar.

I feel like I'm forced to go this route because using up one or more of the slots on my main hotbar for a non-DPS/non-CC skill is a really stupid idea and very definitely GIMPS the character... or to put it another way, five skills on a hotbar is INADEQUATE.

Add in that a lot of the non-DPS ultimate skills are next to useless in most situations and we're forced to play in ways that are non-optimal for the build we hoped to originally achieve (i.e., healer or tank).

Absolutely a flawed design...

Jaerlach

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Then perhaps a solution could be found by increasing player health pools further in Cyrodiil, thus giving higher reaction times for players and after this making changes to how the RPG aspects are perceived in this MMO?


There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage

Also, the upcoming MMO Black Desert is going to release without any healer class/skills (you get healing from potions only afaik).
Another approach with which I do not agree.

In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

I can't testify to the details of games I haven't played, but its hardly the case that PVP builds in any of the games you mentioned mirrored PVE roles. In any case, these roles are only a MMO structure, and certainly have zero to do with actual RPGs. Plenty of games have succeeded without having them so defined and do just fine. Also, the above list of games only includes one game that has survived and thrived (WOW) and that game moved away from what you describe in PVP.

In fact, one of the series that has most flourished without forcing you into RPG archetypes is the Elder Scrolls single player franchises, where you can be any and all of them at once. The flexibility to combine things optimally is a big part of the series, and its one that had to exist in ESO. A lot of people aren't happy ESO has classes at all.

The ability to combine your trees freely is important.

In any case, if you're trying to introduce more role differentiation to ESO, you are unlikely to be successful.

Jaerlach

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

Lord_Kreegan wrote: »

Depending on which of my eight characters you're looking at, yes...

But never on the main hotbar; always on the second. So, if my Templars need to heal, they switch to their non-DPS hotbar. If my DKs need to tank, they switch to their tanking hotbar.

The liability of this is that those particular skills do not level up as fast as the skills on my main hotbar.

I feel like I'm forced to go this route because using up one or more of the slots on my main hotbar for a non-DPS/non-CC skill is a really stupid idea and very definitely GIMPS the character... or to put it another way, five skills on a hotbar is INADEQUATE.

Add in that a lot of the non-DPS ultimate skills are next to useless in most situations and we're forced to play in ways that are non-optimal for the build we hoped to originally achieve (i.e., healer or tank).

Absolutely a flawed design...

This is the wrong way to look at your skill bars since skills have no cooldowns in ESO. Each bar should be aimed at a specific purpose - AOE, healing/defense, single target dps, etc - and every ability should serve a specific purpose towards that goal. If your 5th DPS/CC skill isn't providing something the last 4 aren't already, there's no reason it doesn't make sense to include a class defensive ability like hardened ward or green dragon blood on an offensive bar - in fact, you may need to access those abilities frequently or repeatedly during your offensive combat without swapping.

For example, many DKs run reflective scale on both bars due to its cooldown and the need to use it a lot. Sometimes I also want to do this with burning talons, an ability I want to spam a lot in both destro staff or S/b configuration.

Since there is no penalty for repeating the same dps skill over and over, the 4th or 5th dps skill is rarely worth its slot. Does it provide some kind of CC or utility effect that the others don't? If not, you probably aren't even going to use it.

Anyway, the constraint of 5 skills at a time and 10 skills total is the most important build-balance thing in ESO, since you can unlock nearly everything at the same time, and there are no cooldowns. Being unable to carry answers for every situation is exactly how builds are balanced - you will run into situations you are poorly configured for, or a general configuration will not be optimized to certain scenarios. For example, I don't always run unstable wall of elements on my DK, and I have to manually swap it in in keep defense situations. This means sometimes I am trapped in combat in a keep and can't get WOE, and sometimes I am pushing out of a keep without the skill that I had to replace with WOE, which would be far more effective.

If I could do evertyhign at once, it would be far from balanced.

DDuke

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Then perhaps a solution could be found by increasing player health pools further in Cyrodiil, thus giving higher reaction times for players and after this making changes to how the RPG aspects are perceived in this MMO?


There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage

Also, the upcoming MMO Black Desert is going to release without any healer class/skills (you get healing from potions only afaik).
Another approach with which I do not agree.

In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

I can't testify to the details of games I haven't played, but its hardly the case that PVP builds in any of the games you mentioned mirrored PVE roles. In any case, these roles are only a MMO structure, and certainly have zero to do with actual RPGs. Plenty of games have succeeded without having them so defined and do just fine. Also, the above list of games only includes one game that has survived and thrived (WOW) and that game moved away from what you describe in PVP.

In fact, one of the series that has most flourished without forcing you into RPG archetypes is the Elder Scrolls single player franchises, where you can be any and all of them at once. The flexibility to combine things optimally is a big part of the series, and its one that had to exist in ESO. A lot of people aren't happy ESO has classes at all.

The ability to combine your trees freely is important.

In any case, if you're trying to introduce more role differentiation to ESO, you are unlikely to be successful.

No no, don't get me wrong !

I'm not saying they should make PvE roles specifically work on PvP, or that they worked in PvP on the other games I mentioned.
PvP & PvE builds have always been different entities in pretty much all MMOs I've played.
The difference is, that you're still able to play your archetype in those other MMOs I listed.

E.g.
A rogue focused on stealth, CC & burst dmg
A heavily armoured warrior focused on being the frontline fighter, tanky with high sustained dps
A sorcerer using powerful spells to CC opponent, high sustained dmg & high burst dmg
A ranger, long range & good sustained/burst dmg, mediocre CC
A priest, lightly armoured healer with dmg shields, mediocre sustained dmg, low burst dmg
A paladin, heavily armoured healer
and a billion other diverse playstyles, some focused on healing & some not.

Any list you make that includes WoW, people will say "oh, well only WoW was succesfull out of those games".

Out of the games I listed, only Warhammer Online was shut down.
DaoC was one of the most played MMOs back in the days (still plenty of players playing) & I could add much more games to that list, where pure dps characters are viable: GW, Lineage 2, Aion, TERA etc.
I'd actually be more interested to hear about a MMO where they aren't, since I haven't heard of one.

Also regarding single player Elder Scrolls games, have you played any of them, besides Skyrim?

All Elder Scrolls games before it had classes (the starting skills/attributes of your character), and how you played the game determined how you'd end up.

I have finished all of them without problems, using only weapons (no Restoration magic) & I've also finished Morrowind with a mage character focused on Destruction magic.

At no point did I feel forced to use Restoration magic or dmg shields (I think there was one of those in Alteration).

Jaerlach

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Then perhaps a solution could be found by increasing player health pools further in Cyrodiil, thus giving higher reaction times for players and after this making changes to how the RPG aspects are perceived in this MMO?


There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage

Also, the upcoming MMO Black Desert is going to release without any healer class/skills (you get healing from potions only afaik).
Another approach with which I do not agree.

In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

I can't testify to the details of games I haven't played, but its hardly the case that PVP builds in any of the games you mentioned mirrored PVE roles. In any case, these roles are only a MMO structure, and certainly have zero to do with actual RPGs. Plenty of games have succeeded without having them so defined and do just fine. Also, the above list of games only includes one game that has survived and thrived (WOW) and that game moved away from what you describe in PVP.

In fact, one of the series that has most flourished without forcing you into RPG archetypes is the Elder Scrolls single player franchises, where you can be any and all of them at once. The flexibility to combine things optimally is a big part of the series, and its one that had to exist in ESO. A lot of people aren't happy ESO has classes at all.

The ability to combine your trees freely is important.

In any case, if you're trying to introduce more role differentiation to ESO, you are unlikely to be successful.

No no, don't get me wrong !

I'm not saying they should make PvE roles specifically work on PvP, or that they worked in PvP on the other games I mentioned.
PvP & PvE builds have always been different entities in pretty much all MMOs I've played.
The difference is, that you're still able to play your archetype in those other MMOs I listed.

E.g.
A rogue focused on stealth, CC & burst dmg
A heavily armoured warrior focused on being the frontline fighter, tanky with high sustained dps
A sorcerer using powerful spells to CC opponent, high sustained dmg & high burst dmg
A ranger, long range & good sustained/burst dmg, mediocre CC
A priest, lightly armoured healer with dmg shields, mediocre sustained dmg, low burst dmg
A paladin, heavily armoured healer
and a billion other diverse playstyles, some focused on healing & some not.

Any list you make that includes WoW, people will say "oh, well only WoW was succesfull out of those games".

Out of the games I listed, only Warhammer Online was shut down.
DaoC was one of the most played MMOs back in the days (still plenty of players playing) & I could add much more games to that list, where pure dps characters are viable: GW, Lineage 2, Aion, TERA etc.
I'd actually be more interested to hear about a MMO where they aren't, since I haven't heard of one.

Also regarding single player Elder Scrolls games, have you played any of them, besides Skyrim?

All Elder Scrolls games before it had classes (the starting skills/attributes of your character), and how you played the game determined how you'd end up.

I have finished all of them without problems, using only weapons (no Restoration magic) & I've also finished Morrowind with a mage character focused on Destruction magic.

At no point did I feel forced to use Restoration magic or dmg shields (I think there was one of those in Alteration).

I've completed every elder scrolls game except Arena. Class and class skill selection was meaningless - in fact, it was usually better to choose class skills that you did not use frequently so you could optimize your levelup stat progression (Morrowind and Oblivion), and there was no reason you could not advance a miscellaneous/nonclass skill to 100 and rely on it constantly. In fact, you usually did! Making sure you had misc skills to increase enough to ensure 5/5/5 stat gains (or 5/5/1 sometimes in Oblivion, some people liked to max Luck) was an important strategy to character creation.

Its silly to act like class was a restriction in those games in any way. You were free to - and often it was optimal to - max nonclass skills. I played all of them as a heavy armor, tanky person with restoration, but in most of them I also had perfect stealth ability and substantial destruction/etc abilities. And yes, I am a min-maxer. And you know what? ZERO of those skills were class skills for my custom class, because having skills you could not control affect your levelups was extremely bad.

In addition, you could (and most people did) play as a customized class where you could select what your class skills were. The idea that classes were as defined as they are in WoW, D&D or other RPG media is simply inaccurate.

The thing to keep in mind is that PVP is by definition a min-maxers environment, and it should be no surprise to find that people come back to the same skills that are most effective in common scenarios. ESO has many situationally extremely powerful skills, which means most people run a combation of general use utility abilities, and situational skills for situations they expect to arise most frequently.

DDuke

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Then perhaps a solution could be found by increasing player health pools further in Cyrodiil, thus giving higher reaction times for players and after this making changes to how the RPG aspects are perceived in this MMO?


There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage

Also, the upcoming MMO Black Desert is going to release without any healer class/skills (you get healing from potions only afaik).
Another approach with which I do not agree.

In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

I can't testify to the details of games I haven't played, but its hardly the case that PVP builds in any of the games you mentioned mirrored PVE roles. In any case, these roles are only a MMO structure, and certainly have zero to do with actual RPGs. Plenty of games have succeeded without having them so defined and do just fine. Also, the above list of games only includes one game that has survived and thrived (WOW) and that game moved away from what you describe in PVP.

In fact, one of the series that has most flourished without forcing you into RPG archetypes is the Elder Scrolls single player franchises, where you can be any and all of them at once. The flexibility to combine things optimally is a big part of the series, and its one that had to exist in ESO. A lot of people aren't happy ESO has classes at all.

The ability to combine your trees freely is important.

In any case, if you're trying to introduce more role differentiation to ESO, you are unlikely to be successful.

No no, don't get me wrong !

I'm not saying they should make PvE roles specifically work on PvP, or that they worked in PvP on the other games I mentioned.
PvP & PvE builds have always been different entities in pretty much all MMOs I've played.
The difference is, that you're still able to play your archetype in those other MMOs I listed.

E.g.
A rogue focused on stealth, CC & burst dmg
A heavily armoured warrior focused on being the frontline fighter, tanky with high sustained dps
A sorcerer using powerful spells to CC opponent, high sustained dmg & high burst dmg
A ranger, long range & good sustained/burst dmg, mediocre CC
A priest, lightly armoured healer with dmg shields, mediocre sustained dmg, low burst dmg
A paladin, heavily armoured healer
and a billion other diverse playstyles, some focused on healing & some not.

Any list you make that includes WoW, people will say "oh, well only WoW was succesfull out of those games".

Out of the games I listed, only Warhammer Online was shut down.
DaoC was one of the most played MMOs back in the days (still plenty of players playing) & I could add much more games to that list, where pure dps characters are viable: GW, Lineage 2, Aion, TERA etc.
I'd actually be more interested to hear about a MMO where they aren't, since I haven't heard of one.

Also regarding single player Elder Scrolls games, have you played any of them, besides Skyrim?

All Elder Scrolls games before it had classes (the starting skills/attributes of your character), and how you played the game determined how you'd end up.

I have finished all of them without problems, using only weapons (no Restoration magic) & I've also finished Morrowind with a mage character focused on Destruction magic.

At no point did I feel forced to use Restoration magic or dmg shields (I think there was one of those in Alteration).

I've completed every elder scrolls game except Arena. Class and class skill selection was meaningless - in fact, it was usually better to choose class skills that you did not use frequently so you could optimize your levelup stat progression (Morrowind and Oblivion), and there was no reason you could not advance a miscellaneous/nonclass skill to 100 and rely on it constantly. In fact, you usually did! Making sure you had misc skills to increase enough to ensure 5/5/5 stat gains (or 5/5/1 sometimes in Oblivion, some people liked to max Luck) was an important strategy to character creation.

Its silly to act like class was a restriction in those games in any way. You were free to - and often it was optimal to - max nonclass skills. I played all of them as a heavy armor, tanky person with restoration, but in most of them I also had perfect stealth ability and substantial destruction/etc abilities. And yes, I am a min-maxer. And you know what? ZERO of those skills were class skills for my custom class, because having skills you could not control affect your levelups was extremely bad.

Yes, I did that by visiting trainers for skills before leveling up.
But in combat I never used things that I didn't want to use, nor could those things have made me any more powerful.

A playstyle I liked (stealthy assassin) was supported, just as it should in a RPG.

How do you think Elder Scrolls fans would've reacted, if every enemy would've killed the player that didn't heal & dmg shield himself with magic?

Jaerlach wrote: »

In addition, you could (and most people did) play as a customized class where you could select what your class skills were. The idea that classes were as defined as they are in WoW, D&D or other RPG media is simply inaccurate.

The thing to keep in mind is that PVP is by definition a min-maxers environment, and it should be no surprise to find that people come back to the same skills that are most effective in common scenarios. ESO has many situationally extremely powerful skills, which means most people run a combation of general use utility abilities, and situational skills for situations they expect to arise most frequently.

The classes were fairly defined in previous Elder Scrolls titles, only that you could change direction during the game. You weren't restricted, but you were yet still allowed to perform in 99% of the same archetypes as in other single player RPGs (only thing that comes to mind as missing is a "necromancer" type character).
Playing with the skills provided by the preset classes was always a working strategy (even with +difficulty mods installed) and people who wanted to play a stealthy assassin or a juggernaut with 2H sword weren't left disappointed.

PvE & PvP are both min-maxer environments, I should know, being one myself.

If there are skills that are more effective in common scenarios than others, then wouldn't you agree that there are problems with balance?

I'm fine with situational skills being powerful, they are always a choice for the player and good for diversity (they also create a metagame).

What are not a choice are the dmg shields/heals, and I haven't yet heard a convincing reason why this should be the case when it can be avoided & choice may be returned to the player, and in the process make everyone who did play a heavy armour 2H Warrior, stealthy Assassin or a Destruction focused Mage happy.

Jaerlach

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Then perhaps a solution could be found by increasing player health pools further in Cyrodiil, thus giving higher reaction times for players and after this making changes to how the RPG aspects are perceived in this MMO?


There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage

Also, the upcoming MMO Black Desert is going to release without any healer class/skills (you get healing from potions only afaik).
Another approach with which I do not agree.

In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

I can't testify to the details of games I haven't played, but its hardly the case that PVP builds in any of the games you mentioned mirrored PVE roles. In any case, these roles are only a MMO structure, and certainly have zero to do with actual RPGs. Plenty of games have succeeded without having them so defined and do just fine. Also, the above list of games only includes one game that has survived and thrived (WOW) and that game moved away from what you describe in PVP.

In fact, one of the series that has most flourished without forcing you into RPG archetypes is the Elder Scrolls single player franchises, where you can be any and all of them at once. The flexibility to combine things optimally is a big part of the series, and its one that had to exist in ESO. A lot of people aren't happy ESO has classes at all.

The ability to combine your trees freely is important.

In any case, if you're trying to introduce more role differentiation to ESO, you are unlikely to be successful.

No no, don't get me wrong !

I'm not saying they should make PvE roles specifically work on PvP, or that they worked in PvP on the other games I mentioned.
PvP & PvE builds have always been different entities in pretty much all MMOs I've played.
The difference is, that you're still able to play your archetype in those other MMOs I listed.

E.g.
A rogue focused on stealth, CC & burst dmg
A heavily armoured warrior focused on being the frontline fighter, tanky with high sustained dps
A sorcerer using powerful spells to CC opponent, high sustained dmg & high burst dmg
A ranger, long range & good sustained/burst dmg, mediocre CC
A priest, lightly armoured healer with dmg shields, mediocre sustained dmg, low burst dmg
A paladin, heavily armoured healer
and a billion other diverse playstyles, some focused on healing & some not.

Any list you make that includes WoW, people will say "oh, well only WoW was succesfull out of those games".

Out of the games I listed, only Warhammer Online was shut down.
DaoC was one of the most played MMOs back in the days (still plenty of players playing) & I could add much more games to that list, where pure dps characters are viable: GW, Lineage 2, Aion, TERA etc.
I'd actually be more interested to hear about a MMO where they aren't, since I haven't heard of one.

Also regarding single player Elder Scrolls games, have you played any of them, besides Skyrim?

All Elder Scrolls games before it had classes (the starting skills/attributes of your character), and how you played the game determined how you'd end up.

I have finished all of them without problems, using only weapons (no Restoration magic) & I've also finished Morrowind with a mage character focused on Destruction magic.

At no point did I feel forced to use Restoration magic or dmg shields (I think there was one of those in Alteration).

I've completed every elder scrolls game except Arena. Class and class skill selection was meaningless - in fact, it was usually better to choose class skills that you did not use frequently so you could optimize your levelup stat progression (Morrowind and Oblivion), and there was no reason you could not advance a miscellaneous/nonclass skill to 100 and rely on it constantly. In fact, you usually did! Making sure you had misc skills to increase enough to ensure 5/5/5 stat gains (or 5/5/1 sometimes in Oblivion, some people liked to max Luck) was an important strategy to character creation.

Its silly to act like class was a restriction in those games in any way. You were free to - and often it was optimal to - max nonclass skills. I played all of them as a heavy armor, tanky person with restoration, but in most of them I also had perfect stealth ability and substantial destruction/etc abilities. And yes, I am a min-maxer. And you know what? ZERO of those skills were class skills for my custom class, because having skills you could not control affect your levelups was extremely bad.

Yes, I did that by visiting trainers for skills before leveling up.
But in combat I never used things that I didn't want to use, nor could those things have made me any more powerful.

A playstyle I liked (stealthy assassin) was supported, just as it should in a RPG.

How do you think Elder Scrolls fans would've reacted, if every enemy would've killed the player that didn't heal & dmg shield himself with magic?

Jaerlach wrote: »

In addition, you could (and most people did) play as a customized class where you could select what your class skills were. The idea that classes were as defined as they are in WoW, D&D or other RPG media is simply inaccurate.

The thing to keep in mind is that PVP is by definition a min-maxers environment, and it should be no surprise to find that people come back to the same skills that are most effective in common scenarios. ESO has many situationally extremely powerful skills, which means most people run a combation of general use utility abilities, and situational skills for situations they expect to arise most frequently.

The classes were fairly defined in previous Elder Scrolls titles, only that you could change direction during the game.
Playing with the skills provided by the preset classes was always a working strategy (even with +difficulty mods installed) and people who wanted to play a stealthy assassin or a juggernaut with 2H sword weren't left disappointed.

PvE & PvP are both min-maxer environments, I should know, being one myself.

If there are skills that are more effective in common scenarios than others, then wouldn't you agree that there are problems with balance?

I'm fine with situational skills being powerful, they are always a choice for the player and good for diversity (they also create a metagame).

What are not a choice are the dmg shields/heals, and I haven't yet heard a convincing reason why this should be the case when it can be avoided & choice may be returned to the player, and in the process make everyone who did play a heavy armour 2H Warrior, stealthy Assassin or a Destruction focused Mage happy.

Those abilities are built into what people are doing. 2h has Rally which is an enormous heal. 1h/S has Shielded Assault which is a damage shield. Many nightblades use siphoning skills which are technically heals. There's also critical surge, though its pretty bad in PVP.

You would have been better off asking how many people had restoration staff skills on their bars if your problem is actually with build diversity. Many builds are getting these heal and shields for free as parts of other abilities, and they are giving those builds the very sustain they need withou resorting to Healing Ward.

If your problem is that every sorc runs Hardened Ward and every DK runs green dragon blood and most run Igneous Shield, that's a separate discussion about separate skills. Survivability tools are built into all classes and most weapon trees and there's nothing wrong with that. This extra value is exactly how they justify their place on extremely limited hotbars.

DDuke

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Then perhaps a solution could be found by increasing player health pools further in Cyrodiil, thus giving higher reaction times for players and after this making changes to how the RPG aspects are perceived in this MMO?


There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage

Also, the upcoming MMO Black Desert is going to release without any healer class/skills (you get healing from potions only afaik).
Another approach with which I do not agree.

In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

I can't testify to the details of games I haven't played, but its hardly the case that PVP builds in any of the games you mentioned mirrored PVE roles. In any case, these roles are only a MMO structure, and certainly have zero to do with actual RPGs. Plenty of games have succeeded without having them so defined and do just fine. Also, the above list of games only includes one game that has survived and thrived (WOW) and that game moved away from what you describe in PVP.

In fact, one of the series that has most flourished without forcing you into RPG archetypes is the Elder Scrolls single player franchises, where you can be any and all of them at once. The flexibility to combine things optimally is a big part of the series, and its one that had to exist in ESO. A lot of people aren't happy ESO has classes at all.

The ability to combine your trees freely is important.

In any case, if you're trying to introduce more role differentiation to ESO, you are unlikely to be successful.

No no, don't get me wrong !

I'm not saying they should make PvE roles specifically work on PvP, or that they worked in PvP on the other games I mentioned.
PvP & PvE builds have always been different entities in pretty much all MMOs I've played.
The difference is, that you're still able to play your archetype in those other MMOs I listed.

E.g.
A rogue focused on stealth, CC & burst dmg
A heavily armoured warrior focused on being the frontline fighter, tanky with high sustained dps
A sorcerer using powerful spells to CC opponent, high sustained dmg & high burst dmg
A ranger, long range & good sustained/burst dmg, mediocre CC
A priest, lightly armoured healer with dmg shields, mediocre sustained dmg, low burst dmg
A paladin, heavily armoured healer
and a billion other diverse playstyles, some focused on healing & some not.

Any list you make that includes WoW, people will say "oh, well only WoW was succesfull out of those games".

Out of the games I listed, only Warhammer Online was shut down.
DaoC was one of the most played MMOs back in the days (still plenty of players playing) & I could add much more games to that list, where pure dps characters are viable: GW, Lineage 2, Aion, TERA etc.
I'd actually be more interested to hear about a MMO where they aren't, since I haven't heard of one.

Also regarding single player Elder Scrolls games, have you played any of them, besides Skyrim?

All Elder Scrolls games before it had classes (the starting skills/attributes of your character), and how you played the game determined how you'd end up.

I have finished all of them without problems, using only weapons (no Restoration magic) & I've also finished Morrowind with a mage character focused on Destruction magic.

At no point did I feel forced to use Restoration magic or dmg shields (I think there was one of those in Alteration).

I've completed every elder scrolls game except Arena. Class and class skill selection was meaningless - in fact, it was usually better to choose class skills that you did not use frequently so you could optimize your levelup stat progression (Morrowind and Oblivion), and there was no reason you could not advance a miscellaneous/nonclass skill to 100 and rely on it constantly. In fact, you usually did! Making sure you had misc skills to increase enough to ensure 5/5/5 stat gains (or 5/5/1 sometimes in Oblivion, some people liked to max Luck) was an important strategy to character creation.

Its silly to act like class was a restriction in those games in any way. You were free to - and often it was optimal to - max nonclass skills. I played all of them as a heavy armor, tanky person with restoration, but in most of them I also had perfect stealth ability and substantial destruction/etc abilities. And yes, I am a min-maxer. And you know what? ZERO of those skills were class skills for my custom class, because having skills you could not control affect your levelups was extremely bad.

Yes, I did that by visiting trainers for skills before leveling up.
But in combat I never used things that I didn't want to use, nor could those things have made me any more powerful.

A playstyle I liked (stealthy assassin) was supported, just as it should in a RPG.

How do you think Elder Scrolls fans would've reacted, if every enemy would've killed the player that didn't heal & dmg shield himself with magic?

Jaerlach wrote: »

In addition, you could (and most people did) play as a customized class where you could select what your class skills were. The idea that classes were as defined as they are in WoW, D&D or other RPG media is simply inaccurate.

The thing to keep in mind is that PVP is by definition a min-maxers environment, and it should be no surprise to find that people come back to the same skills that are most effective in common scenarios. ESO has many situationally extremely powerful skills, which means most people run a combation of general use utility abilities, and situational skills for situations they expect to arise most frequently.

The classes were fairly defined in previous Elder Scrolls titles, only that you could change direction during the game.
Playing with the skills provided by the preset classes was always a working strategy (even with +difficulty mods installed) and people who wanted to play a stealthy assassin or a juggernaut with 2H sword weren't left disappointed.

PvE & PvP are both min-maxer environments, I should know, being one myself.

If there are skills that are more effective in common scenarios than others, then wouldn't you agree that there are problems with balance?

I'm fine with situational skills being powerful, they are always a choice for the player and good for diversity (they also create a metagame).

What are not a choice are the dmg shields/heals, and I haven't yet heard a convincing reason why this should be the case when it can be avoided & choice may be returned to the player, and in the process make everyone who did play a heavy armour 2H Warrior, stealthy Assassin or a Destruction focused Mage happy.

Those abilities are built into what people are doing. 2h has Rally which is an enormous heal. 1h/S has Shielded Assault which is a damage shield. Many nightblades use siphoning skills which are technically heals. There's also critical surge, though its pretty bad in PVP.

You would have been better off asking how many people had restoration staff skills on their bars if your problem is actually with build diversity. Many builds are getting these heal and shields for free as parts of other abilities, and they are giving those builds the very sustain they need withou resorting to Healing Ward.

If your problem is that every sorc runs Hardened Ward and every DK runs green dragon blood and most run Igneous Shield, that's a separate discussion about separate skills. Survivability tools are built into all classes and most weapon trees and there's nothing wrong with that. This extra value is exactly how they justify their place on extremely limited hotbars.

What you've said is true, and bothers me greatly. That they have decided to take this route is the exact reason for my criticism.

Next patch, stamina builds are also getting a stamina based heal, which makes absolutely no sense from lore/RPG perspective.
I would venture a guess that most players with stamina builds don't play their characters to become healers either, but to be assassins/archers/warriors etc.

Instead of this, they could work on making them less of a requirement and provide different tools for survival for different archetypes, perhaps increase player health in Cyrodiil to increase time to kill (since this is a big complaint from people). Anything that creates less "must haves" and more choices & options.

Jaerlach

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Then perhaps a solution could be found by increasing player health pools further in Cyrodiil, thus giving higher reaction times for players and after this making changes to how the RPG aspects are perceived in this MMO?


There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage

Also, the upcoming MMO Black Desert is going to release without any healer class/skills (you get healing from potions only afaik).
Another approach with which I do not agree.

In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

I can't testify to the details of games I haven't played, but its hardly the case that PVP builds in any of the games you mentioned mirrored PVE roles. In any case, these roles are only a MMO structure, and certainly have zero to do with actual RPGs. Plenty of games have succeeded without having them so defined and do just fine. Also, the above list of games only includes one game that has survived and thrived (WOW) and that game moved away from what you describe in PVP.

In fact, one of the series that has most flourished without forcing you into RPG archetypes is the Elder Scrolls single player franchises, where you can be any and all of them at once. The flexibility to combine things optimally is a big part of the series, and its one that had to exist in ESO. A lot of people aren't happy ESO has classes at all.

The ability to combine your trees freely is important.

In any case, if you're trying to introduce more role differentiation to ESO, you are unlikely to be successful.

No no, don't get me wrong !

I'm not saying they should make PvE roles specifically work on PvP, or that they worked in PvP on the other games I mentioned.
PvP & PvE builds have always been different entities in pretty much all MMOs I've played.
The difference is, that you're still able to play your archetype in those other MMOs I listed.

E.g.
A rogue focused on stealth, CC & burst dmg
A heavily armoured warrior focused on being the frontline fighter, tanky with high sustained dps
A sorcerer using powerful spells to CC opponent, high sustained dmg & high burst dmg
A ranger, long range & good sustained/burst dmg, mediocre CC
A priest, lightly armoured healer with dmg shields, mediocre sustained dmg, low burst dmg
A paladin, heavily armoured healer
and a billion other diverse playstyles, some focused on healing & some not.

Any list you make that includes WoW, people will say "oh, well only WoW was succesfull out of those games".

Out of the games I listed, only Warhammer Online was shut down.
DaoC was one of the most played MMOs back in the days (still plenty of players playing) & I could add much more games to that list, where pure dps characters are viable: GW, Lineage 2, Aion, TERA etc.
I'd actually be more interested to hear about a MMO where they aren't, since I haven't heard of one.

Also regarding single player Elder Scrolls games, have you played any of them, besides Skyrim?

All Elder Scrolls games before it had classes (the starting skills/attributes of your character), and how you played the game determined how you'd end up.

I have finished all of them without problems, using only weapons (no Restoration magic) & I've also finished Morrowind with a mage character focused on Destruction magic.

At no point did I feel forced to use Restoration magic or dmg shields (I think there was one of those in Alteration).

I've completed every elder scrolls game except Arena. Class and class skill selection was meaningless - in fact, it was usually better to choose class skills that you did not use frequently so you could optimize your levelup stat progression (Morrowind and Oblivion), and there was no reason you could not advance a miscellaneous/nonclass skill to 100 and rely on it constantly. In fact, you usually did! Making sure you had misc skills to increase enough to ensure 5/5/5 stat gains (or 5/5/1 sometimes in Oblivion, some people liked to max Luck) was an important strategy to character creation.

Its silly to act like class was a restriction in those games in any way. You were free to - and often it was optimal to - max nonclass skills. I played all of them as a heavy armor, tanky person with restoration, but in most of them I also had perfect stealth ability and substantial destruction/etc abilities. And yes, I am a min-maxer. And you know what? ZERO of those skills were class skills for my custom class, because having skills you could not control affect your levelups was extremely bad.

Yes, I did that by visiting trainers for skills before leveling up.
But in combat I never used things that I didn't want to use, nor could those things have made me any more powerful.

A playstyle I liked (stealthy assassin) was supported, just as it should in a RPG.

How do you think Elder Scrolls fans would've reacted, if every enemy would've killed the player that didn't heal & dmg shield himself with magic?

Jaerlach wrote: »

In addition, you could (and most people did) play as a customized class where you could select what your class skills were. The idea that classes were as defined as they are in WoW, D&D or other RPG media is simply inaccurate.

The thing to keep in mind is that PVP is by definition a min-maxers environment, and it should be no surprise to find that people come back to the same skills that are most effective in common scenarios. ESO has many situationally extremely powerful skills, which means most people run a combation of general use utility abilities, and situational skills for situations they expect to arise most frequently.

The classes were fairly defined in previous Elder Scrolls titles, only that you could change direction during the game.
Playing with the skills provided by the preset classes was always a working strategy (even with +difficulty mods installed) and people who wanted to play a stealthy assassin or a juggernaut with 2H sword weren't left disappointed.

PvE & PvP are both min-maxer environments, I should know, being one myself.

If there are skills that are more effective in common scenarios than others, then wouldn't you agree that there are problems with balance?

I'm fine with situational skills being powerful, they are always a choice for the player and good for diversity (they also create a metagame).

What are not a choice are the dmg shields/heals, and I haven't yet heard a convincing reason why this should be the case when it can be avoided & choice may be returned to the player, and in the process make everyone who did play a heavy armour 2H Warrior, stealthy Assassin or a Destruction focused Mage happy.

Those abilities are built into what people are doing. 2h has Rally which is an enormous heal. 1h/S has Shielded Assault which is a damage shield. Many nightblades use siphoning skills which are technically heals. There's also critical surge, though its pretty bad in PVP.

You would have been better off asking how many people had restoration staff skills on their bars if your problem is actually with build diversity. Many builds are getting these heal and shields for free as parts of other abilities, and they are giving those builds the very sustain they need withou resorting to Healing Ward.

If your problem is that every sorc runs Hardened Ward and every DK runs green dragon blood and most run Igneous Shield, that's a separate discussion about separate skills. Survivability tools are built into all classes and most weapon trees and there's nothing wrong with that. This extra value is exactly how they justify their place on extremely limited hotbars.

What you've said is true, and bothers me greatly. That they have decided to take this route is the exact reason for my criticism.

Next patch, stamina builds are also getting a stamina based heal, which makes absolutely no sense from lore/RPG perspective.
I would venture a guess that most players with stamina builds don't play their characters to become healers either, but to be assassins/archers/warriors etc.

Instead of this, they could work on making them less of a requirement and provide different tools for survival for different archetypes, perhaps increase player health in Cyrodiil to increase time to kill (since this is a big complaint from people). Anything that creates less "must haves" and more choices & options.

OK, like what? Name something you think these characters should do to enhance their survivability without restoring their health or getting a damage shield. They're easy to tune, easy to understand, and straightforward/reliable. What exactly do you want to replace it?

DDuke

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Jaerlach wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

ToRelax wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?

I don't think ZOS needs to make "pure DPS" more viable in PvP.
In PvP, you always need to balance offense and defense right for your playstyle. A "pure DPS" build is naturally very limited.

Yes, but you can have defense outside the "healer" playstyle, or atleast you should in a diverse RPG, and bear in mind that diversity would benefit everyone, when you'd have to adapt to different situations than someone countering your offense with heals/dmg shields.
This would make the gameplay more interesting, wouldn't you agree?

The presence of heals and shields has more to do with the variable nature of PVP and the quantity of players involved.

Being a pure DPS means you';re dependent on other players for sustainability, and while that might be situationally possible (it certainly is in PVE, where the healer can focus on keeping others alive), in PVP you're simply able to be targetted by too many other players, those players are intelligent, and its too easy to interrupt the healer if you are completely depedent on them.

True, but should this be the case in 1v1 situations as well, that you must use dmg shield/heal to have an equal chance?

Also, if I'm not mistaken there is only one healing skill which can be interrupted (Templar ultimate), would you like to clarify on that?

Jaerlach wrote: »

That's why tanky builds of all kinds are most prevelent in Cyrodiil. It would be great to be a glass-cannon dps build and blow people up, but as soon as people notice, they will just blow you up. The pvp environment is too big and chaotic to create static roles like healer and DPS and have it succeed. It's not a problem with the system - it just encourages well-rounded, diverse characters who can cope with more than one situation. Anything extreme (extreme dps, extreme tanky with no dps, extreme heals with no dps) is pretty bad.

There's nothing ZOS can do to change that - its the inevitable result of the fact that there are so many people.

Why do you think there is nothing ZOS can do to change that?

To me it sounds like a big balance issue, given that 95% of players (according to the poll) could be classified as "healers" by RPG standards.

And why do you think it is a bad thing, if someone specialized in a certain role? It is after all their character, and there'd be plenty of people still playing hybrid builds.
They would, of course, have to make sure that people wouldn't be building "one shot" characters (Champion System is addressing this by limiting self buffs to one Major & one Minor), or any other unbalanced builds.

If these healers dealt no damage, then there'd be DPS builds supported by those healers (would encourage more teamplay as well) and Tanks being the first ones to charge in with their heavy armour.

Alternatively, you could keep things as they are, but provide alternate defensive skills more suited to DPS/Tank style characters.

Personally, I don't believe true diversity can be achieved in PvP as long as these problems persist.

Just some thoughts

Thanks for your feedback.

I wasn't talking about strict interruptability, so much as that there are a variety of ways to prevent someone from healing another person reliably, eg hard and soft cc lockdown and forcing them to spend resources on themselves instead of others.

Again, the standard 'rpg' breakdown reflects a PVE environment. This game has those roles in its PVE environment.

Go look at any large-scale PVP game and you won't find those roles to the same degree, and even when you find more damage-focused or tank-focused roles (eg AD Carry in League of Legends), the game mechanics are designed to support their existance (League heavily controls character mobility and features more displacement CC and mobility skills that can be used for escape, ESO only has Bolt Escape in this vein).

Your typecasting just doesn't apply at all, whatsoever, to a PVP game. Further, few PVP games allow for 30 vs 30 combat. In that situation, its just far too likely for you to take a lot of incidental damage from random AOEs etc.

Nerfing the damage of tanky and healing characters in ESO wouldn't accomplish what you want, because the person who didn't build those would still explode by accident all the time, and be almost impossible to keep alive.

You're trying to apply constructs from one genre to an entirely different genre. PVP is an entirely different game than PVE, and while there are some isolated things that are probably unbalanced in ESO (in fact, there's a lot of them), that tankiness is far more valuable in PVP than it is in PVP is inevitable, and its the inevitable consequence of the fact that your opponents are intelligent.

PVE works like it does because of mob AI and taunts. You can't taunt players. They will always turn around and 3 shot the pure dps build. I have never played a game that had both PVP and PVE elements where survivability stats weren't much more valuable in the PVP environment than the PVE one. You can avoid red circles and mob aggro in PVE. You can never do it in PVP due to opponent intelligence.

Put another way, everyone builds tanky in order to slow death in PVP down to human reaction times. If everyone built a lot more damage and less survivability, fights would be roughly similar, except reaction times would be down under a second for blocking, rolling out of damage, and breaking free from CC. Even as it is you need good reflexes to do these things, but in a world where everyone is squishier, most players, especially newer ones, will die before they have a chance to react.

In any case, this really only applies to melee dps. We already have glass-cannon stealth archers in this game, and they do exactly what they are supposed to - long ranged, high damage, and explode the minute someone touches them.

Melee dps can never do that, because of the incidental damage and number of players. Only stealth bow works this way because it can reliably burst at someone, and even that introduces all the elements of minimal response time I just brought up and most people who aren't doing it hate that it is present.

PVP is a game of resource management. The person who manages their resources (health, stam and magicka, especially stamina) worse than the other loses and dies. You don't attack player health in ESO, you attack their resource pools, especially their stam (via roll dodge and break free). Glass cannon characters can't play this game because their reaction time to use their resources is so minimal.

Then perhaps a solution could be found by increasing player health pools further in Cyrodiil, thus giving higher reaction times for players and after this making changes to how the RPG aspects are perceived in this MMO?


There are plenty of MMOs which have (or had) large scale PvP, which did perfectly fine with the healer, tank or DPS system

E.g.
DaoC
WoW (vanilla/TBC mostly, later became BG/Arena focused)
Warhammer Online
EQ

or recently: Archeage

Also, the upcoming MMO Black Desert is going to release without any healer class/skills (you get healing from potions only afaik).
Another approach with which I do not agree.

In fact, I haven't yet seen another MMO which didn't have this iconic gameplay, but perhaps you can educate me

I can't testify to the details of games I haven't played, but its hardly the case that PVP builds in any of the games you mentioned mirrored PVE roles. In any case, these roles are only a MMO structure, and certainly have zero to do with actual RPGs. Plenty of games have succeeded without having them so defined and do just fine. Also, the above list of games only includes one game that has survived and thrived (WOW) and that game moved away from what you describe in PVP.

In fact, one of the series that has most flourished without forcing you into RPG archetypes is the Elder Scrolls single player franchises, where you can be any and all of them at once. The flexibility to combine things optimally is a big part of the series, and its one that had to exist in ESO. A lot of people aren't happy ESO has classes at all.

The ability to combine your trees freely is important.

In any case, if you're trying to introduce more role differentiation to ESO, you are unlikely to be successful.

No no, don't get me wrong !

I'm not saying they should make PvE roles specifically work on PvP, or that they worked in PvP on the other games I mentioned.
PvP & PvE builds have always been different entities in pretty much all MMOs I've played.
The difference is, that you're still able to play your archetype in those other MMOs I listed.

E.g.
A rogue focused on stealth, CC & burst dmg
A heavily armoured warrior focused on being the frontline fighter, tanky with high sustained dps
A sorcerer using powerful spells to CC opponent, high sustained dmg & high burst dmg
A ranger, long range & good sustained/burst dmg, mediocre CC
A priest, lightly armoured healer with dmg shields, mediocre sustained dmg, low burst dmg
A paladin, heavily armoured healer
and a billion other diverse playstyles, some focused on healing & some not.

Any list you make that includes WoW, people will say "oh, well only WoW was succesfull out of those games".

Out of the games I listed, only Warhammer Online was shut down.
DaoC was one of the most played MMOs back in the days (still plenty of players playing) & I could add much more games to that list, where pure dps characters are viable: GW, Lineage 2, Aion, TERA etc.
I'd actually be more interested to hear about a MMO where they aren't, since I haven't heard of one.

Also regarding single player Elder Scrolls games, have you played any of them, besides Skyrim?

All Elder Scrolls games before it had classes (the starting skills/attributes of your character), and how you played the game determined how you'd end up.

I have finished all of them without problems, using only weapons (no Restoration magic) & I've also finished Morrowind with a mage character focused on Destruction magic.

At no point did I feel forced to use Restoration magic or dmg shields (I think there was one of those in Alteration).

I've completed every elder scrolls game except Arena. Class and class skill selection was meaningless - in fact, it was usually better to choose class skills that you did not use frequently so you could optimize your levelup stat progression (Morrowind and Oblivion), and there was no reason you could not advance a miscellaneous/nonclass skill to 100 and rely on it constantly. In fact, you usually did! Making sure you had misc skills to increase enough to ensure 5/5/5 stat gains (or 5/5/1 sometimes in Oblivion, some people liked to max Luck) was an important strategy to character creation.

Its silly to act like class was a restriction in those games in any way. You were free to - and often it was optimal to - max nonclass skills. I played all of them as a heavy armor, tanky person with restoration, but in most of them I also had perfect stealth ability and substantial destruction/etc abilities. And yes, I am a min-maxer. And you know what? ZERO of those skills were class skills for my custom class, because having skills you could not control affect your levelups was extremely bad.

Yes, I did that by visiting trainers for skills before leveling up.
But in combat I never used things that I didn't want to use, nor could those things have made me any more powerful.

A playstyle I liked (stealthy assassin) was supported, just as it should in a RPG.

How do you think Elder Scrolls fans would've reacted, if every enemy would've killed the player that didn't heal & dmg shield himself with magic?

Jaerlach wrote: »

In addition, you could (and most people did) play as a customized class where you could select what your class skills were. The idea that classes were as defined as they are in WoW, D&D or other RPG media is simply inaccurate.

The thing to keep in mind is that PVP is by definition a min-maxers environment, and it should be no surprise to find that people come back to the same skills that are most effective in common scenarios. ESO has many situationally extremely powerful skills, which means most people run a combation of general use utility abilities, and situational skills for situations they expect to arise most frequently.

The classes were fairly defined in previous Elder Scrolls titles, only that you could change direction during the game.
Playing with the skills provided by the preset classes was always a working strategy (even with +difficulty mods installed) and people who wanted to play a stealthy assassin or a juggernaut with 2H sword weren't left disappointed.

PvE & PvP are both min-maxer environments, I should know, being one myself.

If there are skills that are more effective in common scenarios than others, then wouldn't you agree that there are problems with balance?

I'm fine with situational skills being powerful, they are always a choice for the player and good for diversity (they also create a metagame).

What are not a choice are the dmg shields/heals, and I haven't yet heard a convincing reason why this should be the case when it can be avoided & choice may be returned to the player, and in the process make everyone who did play a heavy armour 2H Warrior, stealthy Assassin or a Destruction focused Mage happy.

Those abilities are built into what people are doing. 2h has Rally which is an enormous heal. 1h/S has Shielded Assault which is a damage shield. Many nightblades use siphoning skills which are technically heals. There's also critical surge, though its pretty bad in PVP.

You would have been better off asking how many people had restoration staff skills on their bars if your problem is actually with build diversity. Many builds are getting these heal and shields for free as parts of other abilities, and they are giving those builds the very sustain they need withou resorting to Healing Ward.

If your problem is that every sorc runs Hardened Ward and every DK runs green dragon blood and most run Igneous Shield, that's a separate discussion about separate skills. Survivability tools are built into all classes and most weapon trees and there's nothing wrong with that. This extra value is exactly how they justify their place on extremely limited hotbars.

What you've said is true, and bothers me greatly. That they have decided to take this route is the exact reason for my criticism.

Next patch, stamina builds are also getting a stamina based heal, which makes absolutely no sense from lore/RPG perspective.
I would venture a guess that most players with stamina builds don't play their characters to become healers either, but to be assassins/archers/warriors etc.

Instead of this, they could work on making them less of a requirement and provide different tools for survival for different archetypes, perhaps increase player health in Cyrodiil to increase time to kill (since this is a big complaint from people). Anything that creates less "must haves" and more choices & options.

OK, like what? Name something you think these characters should do to enhance their survivability without restoring their health or getting a damage shield. They're easy to tune, easy to understand, and straightforward/reliable. What exactly do you want to replace it?

For instance, they could make dark cloak/shadowy disguise work as intended and not break from everything. Next, they could make skills that synergize well with stealth
E.g. "Shadow Leap - teleport behind target, deal X unblockable damage and stun the opponent, only works while stealthed" (just an example, would probably be op lol).
Anything that gives stealth (which is a way of avoiding damage) more use than escaping.

Stealth mechanics could also be changed, and players could be allowed to stealth anytime they're not in opponent's stealth detection radius (getting hit would reset the "going into stealth" eye), especially with the new flare skill coming. This would provide opportunities to flesh out the armour types more, giving light/heavy armour somewhat slower restealthing & medium armour could stay the same or be faster than it currently is (with passives ofc).

Then you could also give heavy armour a skill (or a passive) that increases melee dmg done & melee critical strike chance by X, stacking up to 30~ & lasting 3-4 seconds.
This would make heavy armour dmg dealers viable (and very strong in PvP if you're getting hit by multiple opponents), without giving them the initial burst of medium armour.
It wouldn't work with dmg shield because it requires you to take dmg & if you spent time healing yourself you'd lose the bonus.
This wouldn't increase survivability by itself, but it'd encourage people to play a no heals/dmg shield focused build.

Also, there could be a stamina based ability that allows you to block 80% of physical damage and magical effects for 4-5 seconds (this would include healing and damage shields, so they'd be only 20% strength during that period).

To combat the ensuing block casting complaints, a "block breaker" ability could be created (deals increased damage and breaks blocking for X seconds if it hits a blocking opponent), or block could be made 180 degrees only.

Next, you could make something like "Ice Block", which would freeze you & make you immune to dmg for X seconds (but no magicka regen during the freeze), or you could make spells that get empowered based on how much health you have left.

I could probably come up with more stuff, but those are just out the top of my head. I'm sure developers who make games for living could easily come up with better stuff

Da Sandman

I have a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

I call it the oh f button

Cody

I have a heal slotted on my hotbar(s)

DDuke wrote: »

95 votes later, pure DPS specs constitute less than 5% of voters.

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?


Thanks again for voting, it's good to have some numbers (with a margin of error of course) on the preferred playstyles of players instead of just basing everything on personal experience.

i honestly should have been part of that 5%. leeching strikes is a heal... but it's only 2% per strike healed, nowhere near enough to keep me healed in a fight. im about to respec to siphoning attacks.

I dont even use funnel health very much to be honest. everyone keeps up their blocks all dang day,(man i hate block casting) funnel health heals based off of the damage you do; if you cause little-no damage, you recieve little- no healing. and again, due to the fact everyone likes to perma block everyone, its hard to do enough damage to get a noticable heal from strife/funnel health

I think pure DPS specs need work, but its going to be hard to improve on that with all the ridiculous perma blocking and damage shield stacking that everyone seems to do.

I think DoTs should get thru blocks and damage shields, esspecially(and at least) bleed attacks. with a bleed attack, you are bleeding out... how the heck is a damage shield supposed to stop you from bleeding out? How does blocking stop you from bleeding out?

That's just my take on it

Darkonflare15

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

Cody wrote: »

DDuke wrote: »

95 votes later, pure DPS specs constitute less than 5% of voters.

Extra question, anyone can answer (I might make a poll about this later): would you agree that ZOS needs to do more to make these builds more viable in PvP, and if so, how do you think they could accomplish this?


Thanks again for voting, it's good to have some numbers (with a margin of error of course) on the preferred playstyles of players instead of just basing everything on personal experience.

i honestly should have been part of that 5%. leeching strikes is a heal... but it's only 2% per strike healed, nowhere near enough to keep me healed in a fight. im about to respec to siphoning attacks.

I dont even use funnel health very much to be honest. everyone keeps up their blocks all dang day,(man i hate block casting) funnel health heals based off of the damage you do; if you cause little'no damage, you recieve little to know healing.

I think pure DPS specs need work, but its going to be hard to improve on that with all the ridiculous perma blocking and damage shield stacking that everyone seems to do.

I think DoTs should get thru blocks and damage shields, esspecially(and at least) bleed attacks. with a bleed attack, you are bleeding out... how the heck is a damage shield supposed to stop you from bleeding out? How does blocking stop you from bleeding out?

That's just my take on it

I hate how bleed damage does not effect damage shields and blocking. There really should be better ways to deal with block instead just wait on them to lose stamina.

Kartalin

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

On my resto (secondary) bar in pvp I use Sap Essence, Healing Ward, and Rapid Regen.

DezIsDead

I have a heal and a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

I have a shield bar lol. Healing aura, harness magicka, hardened ward, immovable, streak. Literally an entire bar. Then again I run around as a sorc with 2.7k health and for some reason like to streak int the middle of groups

Stalwart385

I have a heal slotted on my hotbar(s)

GDB FTW

dermottib14_ESO

I have a dmg shield slotted on my hotbar(s)

DMG shield only.....I AINT GOT TIME TO BLEED

Sleep

Bar 1: Critical Suege
Bar 2: Rally, Brawler
Do they count as heal and damage shield?