Heavy attack buffs per tick - should they remain?

Masel

With update 13, the sets that applied their damage buffs and debuffs on every tick of a channelled heavy attack were changed so they only work on the last tick.

Should the changes be reverted to buffing every tick or left how they are on the PTS?

This applies to the following sets (remind me if I forgot something):

Sunderflame: Debuff and Flame damage worked on every tick, but wasn't used much on magicka builds anyway.
Wise mage: Debuff applied on every tick, worse version of infallible aether.
Sergeants mail: strong buff to every tick, was used in PvP, PvE (DD and vMA builds).
Infallible aether: best set for the builds, Debuff and damage buff applied to every tick.

Sets this doesn't concern:

Elegance: still works on every tick.
Undaunted infiltrator: still works on every tick, but doesn't have the indication "fully charged" in its tooltip, so it might be intended this way.
Crushing wall vMA staff enchant: same tooltip as undaunted infiltrator, still works on every tick.


In my opinion this is an unnecessary loss in diversity.

The patch notes say it was a fix, so it was originally intended to work as it is on the PTS. What that says though is that they don't really read the forums, as there were several well received builds that centered around this idea.

On top of that, Aether was a required set for healers in trials and won't be used from now on. It is still to be tested whether the new concussion can make up for it.
Edit: debuff gets applied on every tick, so it is still useful for healers.

Changing this makes another trial set not worth using, so Alkosh, moondancer and vicious ophidian remain as the only viable trial sets for endgame PvE.

Flaminir

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Heavy attack builds were an excellent example of creativity and build diversity... something ZoS 'CLAIM' to be trying to promote, yet the actions would certainly indicate the opposite.

Update 13 has made so many unrequested and unfathomable changes that are making a number of niche builds no longer workable and forcing quite a lot of people further down the cookie cutter route....

This is another example of this.

I've never seen a single complaint about the damage component of these sets procing off each tick of a heavy attack.... so I'd love to know their reasoning behind the nerf and why they took time and effort to nerf something that wasn't broken.

Dracane

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

All this did, is destroying some interesting niche builds and build choice was already limited enough.
I think it should remain as it is, but this probably won't happen. They don't revert nerfs.

Faulgor

Other.

Revert the change, and change the functioniality of Kvatch Gladiator so it works the same way. Would give us a craftable alternative.

Dasovaruilos

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

It is going to be much harder to proc IA now in tougher fights. Not impossible, but with the increased time to fully charge a Heavy coming together with this change, the time it takes to proc it will really get in the way of keeping all those short timed buffs up and still provide support.

RoyJade

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

I have just a question : does that means that once again, channeled HA are just partially buffed by theses sets (as they does then revert on One Tamriel PTS), or did the bonus damage take account of every tick ? With the second option I may be ok with the change, but with the first one I'm clearly not.
And in either case, it broke some good niche set, so still I'm not for this nerf of an interesting and clearly non game-breaking mechanism.

hugocbp wrote: »

It is going to be much harder to proc IA now in tougher fights. Not impossible, but with the increased time to fully charge a Heavy coming together with this change, the time it takes to proc it will really get in the way of keeping all those short timed buffs up and still provide support.

Especially now when concussed have the same effect on single target, so a simple thunder enchant on an infused staff on your back bar will have 100% chance to proc it.

Alcast

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Dracane wrote: »

All this did, is destroying some interesting niche builds and build choice was already limited enough.
I think it should remain as it is, but this probably won't happen. They don't revert nerfs.

Last PTS they reverted the Heavy Attack Shock Damage Bonus change.

Tho you are prolly right, this time it does not look like they want to revert it...

hugocbp wrote: »

It is going to be much harder to proc IA now in tougher fights. Not impossible, but with the increased time to fully charge a Heavy coming together with this change, the time it takes to proc it will really get in the way of keeping all those short timed buffs up and still provide support.

Concussion applies same debuff as Infallible now.

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Alcast wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

All this did, is destroying some interesting niche builds and build choice was already limited enough.
I think it should remain as it is, but this probably won't happen. They don't revert nerfs.

Last PTS they reverted the Heavy Attack Shock Damage Bonus change.

Tho you are prolly right, this time it does not look like they want to revert it...

hugocbp wrote: »

It is going to be much harder to proc IA now in tougher fights. Not impossible, but with the increased time to fully charge a Heavy coming together with this change, the time it takes to proc it will really get in the way of keeping all those short timed buffs up and still provide support.

Concussion applies same debuff as Infallible now.

I guess they reverted that due to the strong response they got. We can try to get them to do it again, maybe they'll listen to the player Base. You can already see that the majority would like it to be reverted.

susmitds

Biased poll.

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

susmitds wrote: »

Biased poll.

There are just as many options to vote against as options to vote for reverting. I didn't know it was forbidden to give your own opinion in the Poll.

Dasovaruilos

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Alcast wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

All this did, is destroying some interesting niche builds and build choice was already limited enough.
I think it should remain as it is, but this probably won't happen. They don't revert nerfs.

Last PTS they reverted the Heavy Attack Shock Damage Bonus change.

Tho you are prolly right, this time it does not look like they want to revert it...

hugocbp wrote: »

It is going to be much harder to proc IA now in tougher fights. Not impossible, but with the increased time to fully charge a Heavy coming together with this change, the time it takes to proc it will really get in the way of keeping all those short timed buffs up and still provide support.

Concussion applies same debuff as Infallible now.

Yes, but can you keep it almost 100% up like IA now? Also, isn't this a loss of DPS considering switching from Flame, that does more damage, to Lightning?

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

hugocbp wrote: »

Alcast wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

All this did, is destroying some interesting niche builds and build choice was already limited enough.
I think it should remain as it is, but this probably won't happen. They don't revert nerfs.

Last PTS they reverted the Heavy Attack Shock Damage Bonus change.

Tho you are prolly right, this time it does not look like they want to revert it...

hugocbp wrote: »

It is going to be much harder to proc IA now in tougher fights. Not impossible, but with the increased time to fully charge a Heavy coming together with this change, the time it takes to proc it will really get in the way of keeping all those short timed buffs up and still provide support.

Concussion applies same debuff as Infallible now.

Yes, but can you keep it almost 100% up like IA now? Also, isn't this a loss of DPS considering switching from Flame, that does more damage, to Lightning?

Thing is that healers might go with charged lightning staff on their back bar with a shock glyph to keep it up, so Infallible aether could be useless now. The minor vulnerability from concussion lasts six seconds. So with two healers with a shock glyph each (84% chance to apply status effect per glyph), a raid might be able to keep this up, but it is a lot harder to coordinate.

Dasovaruilos

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Masel92 wrote: »

hugocbp wrote: »

Alcast wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

All this did, is destroying some interesting niche builds and build choice was already limited enough.
I think it should remain as it is, but this probably won't happen. They don't revert nerfs.

Last PTS they reverted the Heavy Attack Shock Damage Bonus change.

Tho you are prolly right, this time it does not look like they want to revert it...

hugocbp wrote: »

It is going to be much harder to proc IA now in tougher fights. Not impossible, but with the increased time to fully charge a Heavy coming together with this change, the time it takes to proc it will really get in the way of keeping all those short timed buffs up and still provide support.

Concussion applies same debuff as Infallible now.

Yes, but can you keep it almost 100% up like IA now? Also, isn't this a loss of DPS considering switching from Flame, that does more damage, to Lightning?

Thing is that healers might go with charged lightning staff on their back bar with a shock glyph to keep it up, so Infallible aether could be useless now. The minor vulnerability from concussion lasts six seconds. So with two healers with a shock glyph each (84% chance to apply status effect per glyph), a raid might be able to keep this up, but it is a lot harder to coordinate.

Ah, brilliant! That never crossed my mind. Thanks! I'll have to see someone trying that...

Autolycus

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

hugocbp wrote: »

Alcast wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

All this did, is destroying some interesting niche builds and build choice was already limited enough.
I think it should remain as it is, but this probably won't happen. They don't revert nerfs.

Last PTS they reverted the Heavy Attack Shock Damage Bonus change.

Tho you are prolly right, this time it does not look like they want to revert it...

hugocbp wrote: »

It is going to be much harder to proc IA now in tougher fights. Not impossible, but with the increased time to fully charge a Heavy coming together with this change, the time it takes to proc it will really get in the way of keeping all those short timed buffs up and still provide support.

Concussion applies same debuff as Infallible now.

Yes, but can you keep it almost 100% up like IA now? Also, isn't this a loss of DPS considering switching from Flame, that does more damage, to Lightning?

No, it's quite unrealistic to expect high uptime on concussion for everything you touch with a lightning staff. However, for boss fights it's mostly irrelevant. You aren't going to have high up-time by throwing down a lightning blockade at a boss, but then again, doing a fully-charged heavy attack on a boss is so easy it's almost thoughtless. I heal with IA (as do many others) and I was already doing heavy attacks most of the time. The only exception to this was on trash pulls, where I would want to proc the Minor Vulnerability on multiple targets, and would thus do partial heavy attacks to hit more adds quickly.

The key difference for me is that I must now use a lightning staff on trash, or do fully-charged heavies one at a time. Really though, veteran trials with high priority trash targets are the only place where we really care about debuffing.

Dasovaruilos

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Autolycus wrote: »

hugocbp wrote: »

Alcast wrote: »

Dracane wrote: »

All this did, is destroying some interesting niche builds and build choice was already limited enough.
I think it should remain as it is, but this probably won't happen. They don't revert nerfs.

Last PTS they reverted the Heavy Attack Shock Damage Bonus change.

Tho you are prolly right, this time it does not look like they want to revert it...

hugocbp wrote: »

It is going to be much harder to proc IA now in tougher fights. Not impossible, but with the increased time to fully charge a Heavy coming together with this change, the time it takes to proc it will really get in the way of keeping all those short timed buffs up and still provide support.

Concussion applies same debuff as Infallible now.

Yes, but can you keep it almost 100% up like IA now? Also, isn't this a loss of DPS considering switching from Flame, that does more damage, to Lightning?

No, it's quite unrealistic to expect high uptime on concussion for everything you touch with a lightning staff. However, for boss fights it's mostly irrelevant. You aren't going to have high up-time by throwing down a lightning blockade at a boss, but then again, doing a fully-charged heavy attack on a boss is so easy it's almost thoughtless. I heal with IA (as do many others) and I was already doing heavy attacks most of the time. The only exception to this was on trash pulls, where I would want to proc the Minor Vulnerability on multiple targets, and would thus do partial heavy attacks to hit more adds quickly.

The key difference for me is that I must now use a lightning staff on trash, or do fully-charged heavies one at a time. Really though, veteran trials with high priority trash targets are the only place where we really care about debuffing.

I heal with IA as well, but I only heavy attack every 30 or 40 seconds or so. Having to do this every 8 seconds will be very annoying, I believe.

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Interesting is that not all of the sets seem to be nerfed in that way (found a PC NA guy to test infallible aether for me):

Sergeant's mail - buffing last tick only
Wise mage - works on last tick now, worked on first before.
Undaunted infiltrator/unweaver - still buff every tick.
Now comes the weird part - infallible aether still buffs every tick, with damage and debuff, despite it having the same tooltip text as wise mage.
Sunderflame - works on last tick only now, worked on all before.
Maelstrom Enchant - still works on every tick.
So the only set that was viable and nerfed was Sergeant's mail.

OrphanHelgen

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

I'm using heavy attack build, and one of the reason it works, are sunderflame. Its already flame dmg, and are still low ish dps, and the penetration I gain from sunderflame are single target only, not AOE like night mother for example. Spiggan and twice-fanged snake also works in AOE. So sunderflame already not the strongest one, yet still works on some creative builds. This change makes sunderflame completely rip for dps imh. Atleast make the fire dmg to poison.

Also I would like to add, I spend like 150 runs to get the sunderflame dagger sharpend and a sword sharpend. Don't add insane rng, then nerf pls. I feel like *** because of that.

FoolishHuman

Leave the changes. It wasn't intended to work like this anyway.

That was a bug fix, not a "nerf".

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

FoolishHuman wrote: »

That was a bug fix, not a "nerf".

I know, I said so in the OP. Same held for the lightning staff aoe, and they reverted that too.

Birdovic

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

I never really focused on such a build, but in my opinion, one of ESO's greatest features is Build Diversity.
Keeping it as it is on PTS right now adds nothing positive to the game. All it does is limiting possibilities/build options even further, that's why I say revert this change.
I mean, it's not like the affected sets were overperforming in any way or even gamebreaking.

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Further testing revealed that the new destruction staff passive does apply to abilities only and works only while on the respective bar. That means that neither heavy attacks nor set procs get buffed by the new ancient knowledge passive. So overall you lose 10% on heavy attacks (due to slower ticks) and get 8% for ultimates and skills, while set damage remains unchanged.

AoE DoT ticks get buffed only for the time that you're on the lightning bar, and the same holds for the inferno staff.on single target. It might vary depending on the skill and how it is applied.

Not directly related to the poll, but additional information on the topic.

cschwingeb14_ESO

Masel92 wrote: »

FoolishHuman wrote: »

That was a bug fix, not a "nerf".

I know, I said so in the OP. Same held for the lightning staff aoe, and they reverted that too.

They're not going to keep both. Lightning staff with the right sets are doing 20k AE crits every tick for DKs on live. They might have left it alone if lightning wasn't AEing every tick...maybe.

It's a shame about the lightning staff heavy attack builds though. They were very creative

Anhedonie

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Lol build diversity

SanTii.92

So on the pts still works exactly the same as on live, at leat with resto aether. Might be a bug cause the patch notes are pretty clear, let's hope not.

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

SanTii.92 wrote: »

So on the pts still works exactly the same as on live, at leat with resto aether. Might be a bug cause the patch notes are pretty clear, let's hope not.

Yeah exactly, we'll have to wait and see

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

cschwingeb14_ESO wrote: »

Masel92 wrote: »

FoolishHuman wrote: »

That was a bug fix, not a "nerf".

I know, I said so in the OP. Same held for the lightning staff aoe, and they reverted that too.

They're not going to keep both. Lightning staff with the right sets are doing 20k AE crits every tick for DKs on live. They might have left it alone if lightning wasn't AEing every tick...maybe.

It's a shame about the lightning staff heavy attack builds though. They were very creative

You can get a high damage per tick, yeah. But if will not be enough to compete with optimised raidbuilds that focus on single target and include a complex rotation.
To get that amount on heavy attacks only, you need to focus on the heavy attacks alone, and sacrifice damage on everything else. The highest single target dps I got with my build was around 38k on ra kotu in vHRC, so it is not overperforming compared to other builds. And the builds that do that amount of single target dps require you to stick to a rotation just as other builds do.
Plus it includes a huge gear grind. Especially the sharpened vMA lightning staff (which is needed to make the builds somewhat viable in endgame content) is very hard to get, just as difficult as the sharpened inferno.

Vaoh

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Just another bad change imo.

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Update on the changes as of PTS 2.7.2: infallible aether applies the debuff in every tick, but only gives the damage buff on the last tick. Makes sense as the tooltip says fully charged heavies hit harder, but it says enemies you damage with fully charged heavies take minor vulnerability. So on all heavy attack builds, aether will be out of the picture for all DD builds but remain BiS for healers in group content. I'm still disappointed as it basically forces me to go for Burning spellweave as everyone else to keep the damage it does... RiP diversity more and more.

Yuke

Does the fix also apply to msa lightning ticks?

Masel

Revert the changes. The nerf was uncalled for and unnecessary.

Yuke wrote: »

Does the fix also apply to msa lightning ticks?

Yuke wrote: »

Does the fix also apply to msa lightning ticks?

Nope, that stays has a different tooltip, same holds for undaunted infiltrator. I mostly just switched out aether for burning spellweave on the sorc and the dk, puts out similar damage on the heavy attack builds.

Own

Leave the changes. It wasn't intended to work like this anyway.

Bro those ticks are not fully charged heavy attacks... what is this thread even about? keeping a bug?? have you tried arch-mage with this set? who needs lich rn..