Detailed Explanation of Block Cost Changes

ZOS_Wrobel

First, thanks to everyone for all your feedback on block. We appreciate the time you've spent testing everything out, and we'd like to take some time to explain some of our most recent changes.

Live vs PTS Block Costs
In general, we feel that if you decide to hold block against all attacks, it should require a significant investment. To help explain this, let’s start with a mathematical peek at how low you can get block costs on Live versus what's currently on the PTS. In this exercise, we're using a fully-optimized character wearing 7 pieces of gold-quality heavy armor, 3 purple jewelry with block cost reduction, and the full 25% block cost reduction through the Champion System. The first 2 examples assume you are getting hit every half second, while the 3rd example is representative of a boss fight where you are getting hit once a second. As bosses usually hit less frequently, this is intended as a worst case scenario.

While reviewing these examples, please keep the following points in mind:

• Fortress, Bracing, and Defensive stance bonuses are additive
• Block cost has a cooldown of 0.5 seconds - No matter how many monsters are attacking, you can block every single attack and will only be charged every half second.
• To calculate Constitution’s stamina return relative to block costs, we need to figure out how much stamina is being returned every half second. Constitution gives 346 stamina every 4 seconds, which equates to 43 every half second. We can then subtract that 43 from the amount each block is charging you since you are being charged that block cost every half second.

Live
Base Block Cost: 2160
25% Champion Cost Reduction: 2160 * .75 = 1620
3x purple block cost enchantments: 1620 – 191x3 = 1620 – 573 = 1047
Fortress, Bracing, and Defensive Stance: 1047 * 0.42 = 440
Constitution: 440 – 43 = 397

PTS
Base Block Cost: 2160
25% Champion Cost Reduction: 2160 * .75 = 1620
3x purple block cost enchantments: 1620 – 191x3 = 1620 – 573 = 1047
Fortress and Defensive Stance: 1047 * .56 = 587
Sturdy x1: 587 * .96 = 563
Constitution: 563 – 163 = 400

PTS – Boss Fight
Base Block Cost: 2160
25% Champion Cost Reduction: 2160 * .75 = 1620
3x purple block cost enchantments: 1620 – 191x3 = 1620 – 573 = 1047
Fortress and Defensive Stance: 1047 * .56 = 587
Constitution 1 second: 587 – 326 = 261

Assuming the worst case scenario where you get hit exactly every half second, you only need 1 piece of Sturdy gear equipped to keep the current block costs. This means you now have the option to wear 8 pieces of Sturdy to get even lower costs. We’re not trying to force Sturdy on tanks, but more to give an option for players who block a lot and need more stamina recovery. Tanks who are getting hit every second on average will actually be able to block more with the upcoming changes in Dark Brotherhood, and that’s without having any Sturdy items equipped. Also note that you’ll have additional magicka with the updated Constitution passive to help you use more utility abilities while tanking:

DB Constitution value = 1305
Live Constitution value = 346
1305 – 346 = 959 / 2 seconds = 480 additional magicka every 2 seconds

Champion System
We recently moved the block cost reduction from the Steed tree to the Shadow tree. This change was made to give more options in customizing your defenses, and help reduce the amount of time spent blocking. When spending Warrior points, you don’t need to invest in block cost; you can now consider increased healing taken, stronger damage shields, or more damage reduction. Let’s dive into how this will affect the stats of a character with 501 Champion Points who is trying to maximize their block time and damage resistance:

Live - Warrior
100 Block Expertise – 25% Block Cost Reduction.
33 Hardy – 11.5% Reduced Poison, Disease, and Physical Damage.
34 Elemental Defender – 11.8% Reduced Flame, Frost, Shock, and Magic Damage.
Unique unlocks the PTS build does not have (Invigorating Bash, Phase, Shield Expert)

Live - Thief
100 Warlord – 16% Cost Reduction Stamina abilities
67 Magician – 12.6% Cost Reduction Magicka abilities
Unique unlocks the PTS build does not have (Mara’s Gift, War Mount)

PTS - Warrior
83 Hardy – 21.9% Reduced Poison, Disease, and Physical Damage reduction.
84 Elemental Defender – 22.1% Reduced Flame, Frost, Shock, and Magic Damage.
Unique unlocks the Live build does not have (Critical Leech, Unchained)

PTS - Thief
100 Block Expertise – 25% Block Cost Reduction.
67 Warlord - 12.6% Cost Reduction Stamina abilities.
Unique unlocks the Live build does not have (Fortune Seeker, Merchant Favored, Treasure Hunter)

The average ability cost is 2700 resources. That’s going to be reduced to 2268 when maxing out the Magician Champion star, or 2365 with lesser investment. If you cast an ability every 2 seconds, you will end up with more magicka after the Dark Brotherhood changes because Constitution is giving more magicka. The difference in only putting 67 points in Magician is 2365 – 2268 = 97 magicka (480 every 2 seconds from Constitution – 97 every 2 seconds nets you 383 magicka every 2 seconds). Even if you put no points in Magician, you still end up with more magicka because of the Constitution buff. Magician gives 2700 – 2268 = 432 magicka (480 every 2 seconds from Constitution – 432 magicka from Magician = 48 magicka every 2 seconds). Overall, you have more magicka and more defense if you choose to put Warrior Champion Points into Hardy and Elemental Defender. Putting 83 points into these stars instead of 34 nets an additional 10% damage reduction.

Two of the most influential passives for tanks are Shield Expert and Unchained. The resource cost reduction from Unchained is great if you miss blocking a stun attack, or if you get feared/disoriented. The Champion passive Shield Expert gives about 1290 armor and spell resistance all the time. However, this is a great passive that is currently in a tree that is PvP and medium armor focused. To help remedy this, we’re looking into swapping Shield Expert with Resilient so the passive to reduce critical hit damage and the unlock to heal on critical hits are together. This also makes a key tanking unlock more accessible for players with lower Champion Points, requiring 30 Champion Points instead of 75.

Wrap Up
As with all pieces of the ESO balance puzzle, changes to tanking affect players of different types of content, ability loadouts, item sets, and armor weights. With Dark Brotherhood, we’re offering more ways to customize your Tanky character by allowing lower block costs than ever before and providing more flexibility when customizing your defenses. If you don’t want to take advantage of these options, your block cost should remain similar to what it was before the changes. If you still have concerns with tanking after trying out the changes, please leave a detailed reply about your character and the type of content you’re playing.

We'll also be making the following changes before Dark Brotherhood goes live:

• Fixing an issue where Sturdy is rounding fractions down
• Fixing an issue where Sturdy is multiplicative with itself instead of additive
• A more accessible Shield Expert Champion unlock

zerosingularity

Thank you for taking the time to make this post. With it we can now see the actual calculation for block costs as they will be with study, rather than how they currently are.

It is good that you also plan to move shield expert to a tree that will make more sense for tanking. I get that this assumes 7 Heavy pieces, but for people in 5/1/1, the decrease in Constitution return may not balance out, but I guess that is where Sturdy comes in then, correct?

My only concern now is this:

Did you consider the desire for tanks to want to swap to DPS for certain encounters, thus making the green trees more difficult to manage? For a DPS, block cost reduction CPs are not useful, where skill cost reductions are. An ideal solution to this would be allowing us to save CP distributions, and to be able to swap between them for free (after paying a gold cost to MAKE the load-out). This is similar to how we make DPS gears (which is costly) and just swap them out for free when needed. If something like this was implemented, it would go a long way towards making a play how you want scenario. Obviously to change a setup that is saved you gotta pay gold, just like remaking a gear. How does this sound?

Edit:

Also I spotted a typo with Sturdy in your post, where you have 1x sturdy = 8% instead of 4% reduction. Your math is done with a 4% reduction like you were stating, it's just a mere typo. Pointing it out in-case it confuses anyone.

Any chance we can have the tanking items looked at for a balance pass? Some are amazing but others are fantastically useless.

code65536

Call this perspective selfish if you want, but I don't want to have to spend 3K gold every time I swap my character between tank and DPS, which I can do for free right now with just a gear and food change.

Now, why would I want to do this? It might have something to do with tanks not being needed in many situations. Trials, for example, require just 1 or 2 tanks in a group of 12, solo content--whether it be questing or doing vMA--is not something suitable for a tank build, and there are many bits of group content where a tank isn't needed or wanted (e.g., Planar Inhibitor). With the help of an addon that lets me swap my gear with just one click, I personally change between tanking and DPS quite often--sometimes multiple times a day.

And this is something that a number of other tanks do--as tanks are useful only in group play, it makes no sense to remain a tank outside of group play. If you can convince whoever is in charge of CP costs to reduce CP respec costs permanently to zero, then I might not take as much issue with this (or price it more reasonably based on the number of points being changed--e.g., 5g per point, so that it's 2505g for a full respec, comparable to the current 3000g, but only a few hundred gold for the kind of reallocation that we must now frequently do).

ZOS_GinaBruno

zerosingularity wrote: »

Also I spotted a typo with Sturdy in your post, where you have 1x sturdy = 8% instead of 4% reduction. Your math is done with a 4% reduction like you were stating, it's just a mere typo. Pointing it out in-case it confuses anyone.

Whoops, thanks! I'll make this edit for Eric so it's clear for everyone reading starting now.

WalkingLegacy

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

zerosingularity wrote: »

Also I spotted a typo with Sturdy in your post, where you have 1x sturdy = 8% instead of 4% reduction. Your math is done with a 4% reduction like you were stating, it's just a mere typo. Pointing it out in-case it confuses anyone.

Whoops, thanks! I'll make this edit for Eric so it's clear for everyone reading starting now.

Can you fix his three purple rings comment too? Pretty sure he meant three purple jewelry, IE two rings and a necklace.

zerosingularity

WalkingLegacy wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

zerosingularity wrote: »

Also I spotted a typo with Sturdy in your post, where you have 1x sturdy = 8% instead of 4% reduction. Your math is done with a 4% reduction like you were stating, it's just a mere typo. Pointing it out in-case it confuses anyone.

Whoops, thanks! I'll make this edit for Eric so it's clear for everyone reading starting now.

Can you fix his three purple rings comment too? Pretty sure he meant three purple jewelry, IE two rings and a necklace.

Lol I didn't even see that!

Teridaxus

Okay swapping shield expert sounds good.

Need some sleep to think about the math first.

VaxtinTheWolf

I read the 3 rings thing but it didn't resister in my mind that it was something off.

I don't have anything to say really due to my lack of experience but I understand a bit more with this fairly well done pose he made for us. My style of play is not a block focused tank on my Nightblade since I am constantly mashing sap essence and other stuff in the middle of combat, so I need the reduction and such. I can see that if you build for and play as a Block focused tank, then in that perspective, this can work out pretty well.

Anyway, I guess I just "have to accept" the upcoming changes then since i'm not and dont plan to focus blocking on my current tank, but I did really like the setup I was going for on Live.

One other thing is that I have 3 nightblades, one for each role. I have focused characters, but many other people may only have something like 4 characters, one for each class and have various setups for doing Heal/Tank/DPS on that one character. I think this will be annoying them quite a bit more than myself.

Kwivur

Or we can up the CP cap to 601 and be done with this.

TankHealz2015

Thank you very much for this!

Epona222

I think the issue is more that people like to be able to do more than 1 role - I know from experience that running a pure tank build through ESO quests solo is one of the most boring gaming experiences I have ever had, so people want to be able to have some flexibility without paying 3k to respec CP every time their friends need a tank for a dungeon run. Which is one thing I thought was on offer with this game, the ability to be flexible.

I mean I don't play a tank these days, so it doesn't directly affect my character builds, but I can see where people are coming from with their complaints.

lolo_01b16_ESO

Wrobel wrote: »

Block cost has a cooldown of 0.5 seconds - No matter how many monsters are attacking, you can block every single attack and will only be charged every half second.

A perfect example of very valuable information that we not get from the game. Did anyone know this and has this always been the case? I remember that skills like dark shades where used against tanks in the past with the intention to get 4 attacks / sec so you drain his stamina faser than it regenerates.

Also if I take your math example stamina management on pts will still be noticable harder than on live thanks to 3.4% less cost reduction from cp and 10.8% higher stamina costs for all skills on pts. I'm not complaining about this change, I'll be able to manage my stamina with ~15% higher skill costs than on live, I just don't like the fact that you pretend it would be equal, by just ignoring some changes in your calculations.

caperon

Blablabla Tanking nerfed again... Blablabla

Praeficere

The issue is - Tanks don't need to be tankier, they need to be useful. So moving the Block Cost reduction over is pointless. This benefits no one and hurts characters that do anything other than PvE Tanking. You won't be able to DD, Heal or PvP on the same character, which is my key concern.

Liofa

So ... No change in base block cost ? Because there is a line in the Patch Notes 2.4.0 :

''Core mechanics (sprint, dodge, block, CC break) will now be slightly more expensive.''

Can you clearify this as well ?

DKsUnite

Epona222 wrote: »

I think the issue is more that people like to be able to do more than 1 role - I know from experience that running a pure tank build through ESO quests solo is one of the most boring gaming experiences I have ever had, so people want to be able to have some flexibility without paying 3k to respec CP every time their friends need a tank for a dungeon run. Which is one thing I thought was on offer with this game, the ability to be flexible.

I mean I don't play a tank these days, so it doesn't directly affect my character builds, but I can see where people are coming from with their complaints.

even a non optimized player can fly through solo quests. They havent required a dps set up since they nerfed the difficulty of VR zones back in patch like 1.1 or something

Tormy

Sounds like a good move to me after reviewing this tbh. tanks become tankier with the CP tree change but for pvp you may need to respec (only 3k) or alternatively with characters only needing to be level 50 to get the full cp effect,you could easily have a dedicated tank and a dedicated dps character, that is if you prefer to never respec. Just my 2 cents

mosawer123

Wrobel wrote: »

1305 – 346 = 959 / 2 seconds = 480 additional magicka every 2 seconds

I think you mean every 1 second

Reorx_Holybeard

Thanks for the info! Don't have too much time right now to analyze it in detail but a few things to point out or ask. Note that this is mainly coming from the perspective of a stamina DK tank who uses a lot of Magicka abilities and likes to be able to switch out to a DPS role if needed.

• Do your cost analysis include the global +10% increase in abilities? If I lose 67 points in Magician my magicka abilities are 25% more expensive (for example, Igneous goes from ~3200 on live to ~4100 on PTS).
• Losing Magicka/Warlord as a Tank is not a huge deal due to the buff to Constitution as you noted, but more so when I wish to switch to a DPS role. Medium armor means no Constitution and all stamina abilities are 15% more expensive and magicka 25% more. Unfortunately I'm not (yet) rich enough to redo CPs each time I switch roles which is fairly often in some dungeons.
• The 2700 average ability cost seems a little low, especially for a hybrid type build. A lot of my stamina abilities are cheap but as a stamina tank that uses a lot of magic abilities my main concern are those. The Magicka abilities I use as a tank (Ingeous Shields, Choking Talons, Cinder Storm) are all > 3000 magicka on live and are >4000 magicka on PTS without Magician. I believe this means a large net loss in the ability to cast Magicka abilities on PTS (I generall cast more Magicka abilities than stamina as a DK tank), especially when combined with the global +10% ability cost. I'll work out the details when I have time later for comparison with yout calculations.

Armitas

Thank you for doing this, addressing our concerns and in such a detailed manner that had to have taken at least an hour out of your day which is likely already into overtime. Thank you very much.

Epona222

DKsUnite wrote: »

Epona222 wrote: »

I think the issue is more that people like to be able to do more than 1 role - I know from experience that running a pure tank build through ESO quests solo is one of the most boring gaming experiences I have ever had, so people want to be able to have some flexibility without paying 3k to respec CP every time their friends need a tank for a dungeon run. Which is one thing I thought was on offer with this game, the ability to be flexible.

I mean I don't play a tank these days, so it doesn't directly affect my character builds, but I can see where people are coming from with their complaints.

even a non optimized player can fly through solo quests. They havent required a dps set up since they nerfed the difficulty of VR zones back in patch like 1.1 or something

I didn't say it was difficult, I said it was boring. There's a difference.

Dan_Fazzyub17_ESO

Liofa wrote: »

So ... No change in base block cost ? Because there is a line in the Patch Notes 2.4.0 :

''Core mechanics (sprint, dodge, block, CC break) will now be slightly more expensive.''

Can you clearify this as well ?

THIS.

Lucius_Aelius

Okay, well if it really works out that way and we're not going to be taking a hit to block cost then I may have overreacted to hearing about this change, I'm not on PTS so I was just going on what information I had which people generally agreed wasn't good, I'm at least hopeful now that it's not going to be so bad a change but I'll have to wait and see for myself when it goes live.

Oompuh

Liofa wrote: »

So ... No change in base block cost ? Because there is a line in the Patch Notes 2.4.0 :

''Core mechanics (sprint, dodge, block, CC break) will now be slightly more expensive.''

Can you clearify this as well ?

^^^^^^
Your math doesn't show any block cost increase for the base, why?

Also, thank you for that information on .5 second base cooldown, i was not aware of that

AegisWolf

Thanks for the post, extraordinarily enlightening.

NewBlacksmurf

It's becoming clear that this game isn't going stick to a play as you want (within reason) the changes are making use have to be role specific always and the requirement of CP is furthermore an example of such for healers and tanks.

Personofsecrets

Reorx_Holybeard wrote: »

Thanks for the info! Don't have too much time right now to analyze it in detail but a few things to point out or ask. Note that this is mainly coming from the perspective of a stamina DK tank who uses a lot of Magicka abilities and likes to be able to switch out to a DPS role if needed.

• Do your cost analysis include the global +10% increase in abilities? If I lose 67 points in Magician my magicka abilities are 25% more expensive (for example, Igneous goes from ~3200 on live to ~4100 on PTS).
• Losing Magicka/Warlord as a Tank is not a huge deal due to the buff to Constitution as you noted, but more so when I wish to switch to a DPS role. Medium armor means no Constitution and all stamina abilities are 15% more expensive and magicka 25% more. Unfortunately I'm not (yet) rich enough to redo CPs each time I switch roles which is fairly often in some dungeons.
• The 2700 average ability cost seems a little low, especially for a hybrid type build. A lot of my stamina abilities are cheap but as a stamina tank that uses a lot of magic abilities my main concern are those. The Magicka abilities I use as a tank (Ingeous Shields, Choking Talons, Cinder Storm) are all > 3000 magicka on live and are >4000 magicka on PTS without Magician. I believe this means a large net loss in the ability to cast Magicka abilities on PTS (I generall cast more Magicka abilities than stamina as a DK tank), especially when combined with the global +10% ability cost. I'll work out the details when I have time later for comparison with yout calculations.

@Reorx_Holybeard , can you please link the source stating 10% ability increased cost?

Personofsecrets

Liofa wrote: »

So ... No change in base block cost ? Because there is a line in the Patch Notes 2.4.0 :

''Core mechanics (sprint, dodge, block, CC break) will now be slightly more expensive.''

Can you clearify this as well ?

@Liofa , do you, or anyone for that matter, know the additional amount that those mechanics will cost to perform?

NBrookus

Thank you for the detailed breakdown. I will need some time to digest it, as your live tank build-out looks absolutely nothing like mine.

Bowser

Constitution is not block cost reduction, its resource regen. Why is it being included in the cost reduction calculation?

Using those numbers, block cost is going up 33% before you start throwing Sturdy in. (587 / 440 = 1.33 )

TheSpaceWhale

The Shadow Champion passives are just really bad, and putting in there doesn't make any sense thematically for tanks. Swap it with Tumbling in the Tower, and then swap War Mount & Shield Expert.