[Suggestion] Thoughts on DK and balance changes (pvp focused)

krathos

So we got the nerf bat pretty hard there. That's ok. I think most of the changes were in good spirit but were a bit too overzealous. I want to offer some suggestions that are still in the spirit of the changes made but maybe not so detrimental to the class and strive to provide a more unique play style compared to the other classes - something I feel like we are losing this patch otherwise.

The current nerfs to DK on pts:

Dragonknight

• Ardent Flame
  • Inferno: Reduced the cost of this ability and its morphs by approximately 33%.
  • Lava Whip: Reduced the cost of this ability and its morphs by approximately 10%.
• Earthen Heart
  • Battle Roar: This passive ability now restores an equal amount of Health, Magicka, and Stamina when you use an Ultimate ability, and the amounts are now based on your character level instead of your Max Resource(s).
    Developer Comments:
    This will be a buff for each particular resource if your maximum is below 26,000, and a reduction if it is above. This will generally result in a buff to overall resources restored, but a reduction to the specific resource you are stacking.
  • Helping Hands: This passive ability now restores Stamina based on your character level instead of your Max Stamina.
    Developer Comments:
    This will be a buff if your Maximum Stamina is below 19,800 and a reduction if it is above.
  • Igneous Shield (Obsidian Shield morph): The Major Mending buff granted by this morph is now tied to your own damage shield. If the damage shield is removed, the Major Mending bonus will also be removed.
    Developer Comment:
    Major Mending is an extremely potent buff category for healing. The ease at which you are able to maintain it creates a system where only extreme damage can kill you because your health bar rapidly swings from near-empty to full. Adjusting the uptime on Igneous Shield’s Major Mending means you will need to think more tactically about when to use your healing abilities while also giving enemies counterplay towards stopping them.
  • Obsidian Shard (Stonefist morph): Fixed an issue where the friendly heal from this morph could be dodged.

Not to forget indirect nerfs to overall sustain and stuff like blocking which DK relies on heavily.

Proposed changes:

Ardent Flame:

• World in Ruin - this passive will now increase the damage of your physical area of effect abilities by 6% in addition to your poison and flame.
• Flame Lash (Lava Whip Morph) - Power Lash (the proc off flame lash) now provides minor heroism. Granting you 1 ultimate every 1.5 seconds for 9 seconds. This ability will continue to provide a heal over time.

Reasoning:

Dragonknight's took a severe hit to their tankiness and healing capabilities in pvp. Due to this they should be compensated as the other classes are with damage bonuses. Sorc recieves flat damage bonuses while NB receives bonuses to crit and crit damage. Even templar gets a weapon damage buff and buff to crit damage/blocking targets. I'm aware DK gets minor brutality but the other classes also get combat related minor buffs. There are very few AoE poison abilities and only one from the dragonknight's own class line which offers very little up front damage (the only damage buffed by this passive) is noxious breath. Giving minor heroism will help magicka dk with both sustain and damage in a very minor way. This is the same buff and duration given to heroic slash.

Earthen Heart:

• Fragmented Shield (Obsidian Shield Morph) - This ability now grants Minor Mending for 6 seconds.
• Earthen Strike(formerly Stone Giant) - This ability now costs stamina and scales of stamina and weapon damage. When casted your fist turns to stone as you quickly strike the enemy dealing physical damage. This ability no longer knocks the enemy down or deals bonus damage to knocked down enemies. This ability's base damage has been increased to compensate. This ability causes minor fracture and minor breach to the enemy when hit and grants you minor resolve and minor ward for 10 seconds. This ability now has a 5m range down from 28m.

Reasoning:

No, I didn't miss changes to reverting battle roar/helping hands. I'm actually somewhat OK with those changes if we can get some of the above changes. I feel like the changes on PTS have gutted DK of its uniqueness and we need to either regain that uniqueness or grow in other ways that allow us to have more build diversity. We can't have our identity as the class to hunker down and take damage taken away without compensating it in more universal ways such as damage and utility. I also think the minor mending change to fragmented is a good compromise since i'm pretty sure that ability is the least used ability in the game right now. Igneous can keep the changes made to it then.

Draconic Power:

• Reflective Plate (Reflective Scale Morph): This ability now grants you 2 ultimate for every physical or poison ability reflected. It no longer grants minor ward... maybe it will also cost stamina - discuss.
• Elder Dragon: This passive ability now grants 5% health, magicka, and stamina recovery for each draconic power ability slotted instead of just health recovery.

Reasoning:

For a class that is designed around ultimates... who just had their ultimate synergies nerfed... DK has a surprisingly small number of options for generating it. That was my motivation behind the change to wings and power lash. NB gets ultimate from pots and both sorc and templar have ulti cost reduction built into their skill trees. These changes aren't huge but they will allow the dragonknight to make use of its potential in using ultimate abilities.

Overall I'm ok with the sustain and healing nerfs to my DK if they can help reinvigorate the class by providing it some tools to compensate for such a huge loss as well as to help diversify play styles. The changes above wouldn't really affect PvE very much nor would any of it come close to being overpowered especially compared to some of the toolkits available to other classes.

BillNye_Eso

Yeah we are gonna need either more ult Regen now since they decides to *** battleroar or give us Regen to compensate, and with frag shield giving minor mending would be good since igneous is useless now

Asgari

Id rather see frag shield have its size increase and the dmg it does increased. No need for igneous now imo and id much rather just have more dmg at this point.

Id also like some passive regen to mag and stam since they reduced our battle roar and helping hands.

Every other class gets a cost reduction or a regen passive, dk does not.

Dragath

Lava Whip:
i want to keep my flame lash heal proc. if set up correct, its a very nice heal and feels quite rewarding.

Fragmented Shield:
i don't think we need two morphs that give a healing buff. since the pts version of igneous is quite useless, we could just change that one. either a 3 second major mending or a 6 second minor mending.

Elder Dragon:
i do like that idea, but to make it less clunky overall, we could just make a 5%/10% version of your suggestions without the requirement of slotting or have it active if one ability is slotted.
Basically a worse version of refreshing shadows.

what i personally would like to see, is a cost reduction on our magicka spells that cost 4k+ magicka.

krathos

@Dragath sorry i wasn't more clear. The idea for Power Lash is that it would provide both the heal and the minor heroism.

The PTS change to igneous is still useful for PvE which is why I opted to just change fragmented shield since nobody even uses that morph for anything now. Having a choice between a smaller but reliable buff vs a larger but unreliable would be a good decision to have players make.

I like your suggestion for Elder Dragon being 5/10% while a draconic power ability is active.

D0ntevenL1ft

Love the reflective plate change since this actually gives us something in return instead of just nerfing us right to the ground.

In addition i think the battle roar and helping hands flat numbers need to be increased to something reasonable, as well as leaving igneous the way it was. The CP nerfs alone hurt DK's then ZOS for some reason decided to kick us while we were down.

We have no built in regen passives like other classes because we rely on these abilities; if you're going to take them then give us a 15% stam/magicka regen passive or increase max stat passives similar to other classes.

Kilandros

mDK feels like garbage in Battlegrounds. I don't know what to do

Durham

Should see the poor Stam DK while magicka took a beating the Stam DK got castrated...

LorDrek

Nedd change igneous weapons back to execute, reduce cost standart, give stam dk poison standart, change cauterize poisons of oblivion, give volatile armor physical dmg,

usmcjdking

Everything but Elder Dragon looks good to me.

NBrookus

I really don't agree with giving stam DKs the best wings morph, or for that matter any wings morph. They can sprint, roll dodge, cast rapids and use the S&B reflect. Mag DK is the one that needs the mitigation. I do like the idea of trading the ward for ult generation though... but should generate ult for all things reflected, especially since it reflects so few things anymore. To make the other morph more used, perhaps it should return the extra damage as oblivion damage.

Stone Giant isn't used much in PvP but it IS a useful and unique ability as it gives DKs a class ranged interrupt + CC. It definitely suits the class style. Why turn it into a melee stam skill? Stam already has 3 melee weapon lines to choose stam skills from. The healing morph is so underused perhaps mag and stam get one of each and the unicorn DK healers get something else.

I would like to see a cost reduction across the board for DK class skills since our primary source of sustain was just massively nerfed on top of the other non-class nerfs. Some things like Wings should remain pretty expensive, but if dots and buffs were cheaper it would help pvp sustain while not really impacting the DK dps rotations in end game pve. This would be better than changing Elder Dragon, because 10% extra stam regen is still zero when you are blocking.

Ocelot9x

I absolutely love the changes you suggested,maybe lower the ultimate gains from wings and leave them magicka. Stonefist stamina seems really cool and @NBrookus no mdk use it in PvP (there's no room in your skillar and it's not worth slotting) so why not? Also the minor mending seems great,I'd prefer that over the inexistent major we get ATM (like 1sec uptime,wow). Sadly we won't get any of this; they clearly wanted to destroy Stam dks for no reason,it's already the most boring stamina classes across the board.

BuggeX

you, i like you, elder Dragon Change sems a bit to stong thought considering mDK.
usally in avava i have all 6 abilitys sloted. 2-3% increesed res sems ok for me.

i dont like the Change to Stone Gigant thought, its a strong magicka burst skills, would be *** if i lose my burst, considering i lose my dmg allready as i Need to trade dmg for sustain. Stone Gigant is also a needed skill for the heavy hitting molten arament builds.
stealth, ha, and Stone Gigant is usally a instand kill

Durham

NBrookus wrote: »

I really don't agree with giving stam DKs the best wings morph, or for that matter any wings morph. They can sprint, roll dodge, cast rapids and use the S&B reflect. Mag DK is the one that needs the mitigation. I do like the idea of trading the ward for ult generation though... but should generate ult for all things reflected, especially since it reflects so few things anymore. To make the other morph more used, perhaps it should return the extra damage as oblivion damage.

Stone Giant isn't used much in PvP but it IS a useful and unique ability as it gives DKs a class ranged interrupt + CC. It definitely suits the class style. Why turn it into a melee stam skill? Stam already has 3 melee weapon lines to choose stam skills from. The healing morph is so underused perhaps mag and stam get one of each and the unicorn DK healers get something else.

I would like to see a cost reduction across the board for DK class skills since our primary source of sustain was just massively nerfed on top of the other non-class nerfs. Some things like Wings should remain pretty expensive, but if dots and buffs were cheaper it would help pvp sustain while not really impacting the DK dps rotations in end game pve. This would be better than changing Elder Dragon, because 10% extra stam regen is still zero when you are blocking.

-I agree with what your saying ....
-The only problem is sprinting and roll dodging we now have 3 classes that top us in that style of play now...
- the blocking change on top of the resource nerfs really hurts the magicka and stam DK imo....
- Stam DK and Magicka DK still do great DPS in PVE.. so they could care less about our plight in pvp....
Stam DK received 3 major nerfs on top of 6 universal nerfs.... 9 total nerfs

Joy_Division

Not bad idea.

Personally, this is that I would do.

Dragonknights

This class has been completely redone and reverted back to what it was during the 1.5 version of the game.

Reasoning

Because it was actually fun to play

Dragath

Joy_Division wrote: »

Not bad idea.

Personally, this is that I would do.

Dragonknights

This class has been completely redone and reverted back to what it was during the 1.5 version of the game.

Reasoning

Because it was actually fun to play

the uniqueness of classes has definitely suffered quite a bit over time, but i don't think that is going to change.
ZOS is just following in the footsteps of some of the big mmos and what they are doing.
i don't like it, but ZOS seems to think if other big mmos do it, it has to be right.

But since that is way OT, here is another idea:
What about an Effect that gives you Magicka/Stamina back either on the amount of damage recieved or the actual cost of the attack that was used?
Something like:
While a Draconic Power Ability is active, you gain X% Damage recieved back as Magicka/Stamina. (Hardcap included)
or
While a Draconic Power Ability is active, you gain X% of the Spell cost that hit you back as either Magicka or Stamina depending on the Skill.

MaxwellC

@krathos
Interesting but I feel instead of giving the ulti regen to lava whip just make it so when we use an ultimate we receive 20-30 ultimate over 15 seconds.
Battle roar changes will need to be reversed and helping hands + they should reduce all earthen heart skills by 1500-2k.
If we lose major mending well I also believe that certain classes should not have major defile built into their weapon abilities.

I do feel that helping hands could use a change where based on your max resource the 5% will be applied or you could make fragmented shield return magicka at the cost of stamina or something like that (I'll have to crunch the numbers to determine if that is OP as it seems like it).

World in ruin changes I feel would be a good change but then again I do want them to change Flames of Oblivion back into an AoE and they can make cauterize a single target DoT ability since the name cauterize would fit that description.

Edit: Thinking about changing cauterize and man that's a fantastic Idea imo. Cauterize and Flames of Oblivion would equally be use-able for both PvE and PvP (duels) since you have your single target that also applies a DoT or you can have an AoE that helps you burn through adds quickly or apply constant pressure on an enemy aka what a DK was meant to do in the very first place *cough* @Wrobel *cough* where's my stand my ground at?

Qbiken

You forgot to mention the nerfs that actually meant something: Helping hands and battle roar. The others nerfs/changes are irrelevant.

krathos

@Qbiken I addressed them in my reasoning. Zenimax has their heart set on nerfing direct sustain mechanics so my suggestions are more to restore the lost balance and start reintroducing a lot of the uniqueness the class has lost over the years.

Quantum_V

@ZOS_GinaBruno Plz read this.

LonePirate

Joy_Division wrote: »

Because it was actually fun to play

Playing a DK now is like playing the game on hard mode. Questing, dolmens and normal mode dungeons can still be fun. However, vet dungeons, trials, vMA and PVP can be challenging even for DKs who know their class well, let alone for a newly minted Level 50 player marching to CP160 and beyond. For them, the most common "f" word used is "frustrating" instead of "fun."

GloryPTS

LonePirate wrote: »

For them, the most common "f" word used is "frustrating" instead of "fun."

That's not the most common "f" word used by DKs nowadays


I have gotten to the point where I don't even know what feedback is considered reasonable anymore. I would love to recommend a better gap closer or that thing that gives ult when you reflect via wings (although that one outright sounds too strong), but so often we have seen our feedback been met with the response "that doesn't align with our concept of DK." Can someone at ZOS please define the concept of DK for us in this meta, and then build the class to actually be able to do that?

E.G. If you don't want DK to be able to easily maneuver (as has been said before) but instead want us to "stand our ground," build the class to be able to stand its ground and stop removing everything that allows for this please. Please.

TheStealthDude

@krathos

Some interesting changes here with some good thought put into them. I do disagree with some and would make some changes, however.

World in Ruin: Don't think this buff is necessary or thematic for the class.

Flame Lash: I would actually put the heroism on the other morph. I feel like Flame Lash is already the stronger morph, and this way the morphs become a choice between burst damage/heal and sustain/DPS.

Fragmented Shield: I would prefer this to be a stronger shield and buff the damage a bit. I just don't think giving us AND Templars minor mending is a good idea. Perhaps scale this morph off of Max Stamina instead of Health?

Earthen Strike: I am pretty fundamentally opposed to this one. First, it's way too powerful in my opinion, with all the buffs/debuffs it gives. Second, it's a bit redundant since we already have a stamina skill that gives major Fracture and access to minor ward. Third (and most important in my mind), this change now creates a skill for which neither morph may be desirable over the base skill. This would seem to be the only such skill like that in the game, leading me to believe that this is not something the Devs will want to do. I think we need to keep healing morph as well, as it actually might be useful for DK healers now that it's finally being fixed.

Reflective Plate: I like this helping our ultimate gain, but should keep the ward and stay magicka. As stated by others, stamina already has other mitigation options that magicka lacks.

Elder Dragon: I would agree that we need some passive regen. This is a good amount.

krathos

@TheStealthDude templars and DK both have major mending right now. Why would them both having minor mending be so wrong since major mending is effectively being removed from both. Also earthen heart line is focused around rocks and physical stuff. I think adding physical damage is just fine since the poison aoe buff is pretty much useless. Earthen strike would give minors of those buffs and debuffs so they work along side majors. Giving the molten whip heroism would be a pve buff. Right now molten is the go to choice for pve and flame lash for pvp... it's fine that way. TBH it could be just put on the base ability and both morphs. Heroic slash does minor heroism, snare, and minor maim all in one for comparison so even putting it on the base ability for all attacks wouldn't even be OP for magdk.

krathos

@GloryPTS the wings ulti return is not OP when you consider warden is getting MAJOR heroism for reflecting magic projectiles.

NBrookus

GloryPTS wrote: »

LonePirate wrote: »

For them, the most common "f" word used is "frustrating" instead of "fun."

That's not the most common "f" word used by DKs nowadays


I have gotten to the point where I don't even know what feedback is considered reasonable anymore. I would love to recommend a better gap closer or that thing that gives ult when you reflect via wings (although that one outright sounds too strong), but so often we have seen our feedback been met with the response "that doesn't align with our concept of DK." Can someone at ZOS please define the concept of DK for us in this meta, and then build the class to actually be able to do that?

E.G. If you don't want DK to be able to easily maneuver (as has been said before) but instead want us to "stand our ground," build the class to be able to stand its ground and stop removing everything that allows for this please. Please.

Amen.

I would very much like to see @Wrobel define the class for us. The definitions we have been working with just don't apply to the state of the class with these nerfs in place. There's no more stand your ground. If we are supposed to be inferior shield stacking sorcs with no mobility and no burst... why? What's the point of being a DK anymore?

TheStealthDude

krathos wrote: »

@TheStealthDude templars and DK both have major mending right now. Why would them both having minor mending be so wrong since major mending is effectively being removed from both. Also earthen heart line is focused around rocks and physical stuff. I think adding physical damage is just fine since the poison aoe buff is pretty much useless. Earthen strike would give minors of those buffs and debuffs so they work along side majors. Giving the molten whip heroism would be a pve buff. Right now molten is the go to choice for pve and flame lash for pvp... it's fine that way. TBH it could be just put on the base ability and both morphs. Heroic slash does minor heroism, snare, and minor maim all in one for comparison so even putting it on the base ability for all attacks wouldn't even be OP for magdk.

Heroic Slash gets all that utility because it's in a utility skill line. It doesn't have the same benefits that DPS weapon skill trees have. I agree that we need a way to generate ultimate faster, since that is supposed to be our method of sustain. I am just not sure giving us full-blown minor heroism on Flame Lash is balanced. The ability is already really good.

As for Fragmented shield getting minor mending, I am just not a fan. I would rather have a stronger shield (either higher % or based off of max stamina) than to have a healing passive on both morphs. It's just doesn't seem like a meaningful choice that way. And I would rather keep Major Mending in its current state than also lose it completely like Templars. At least now, it's still useful for DK Healers and Health builds.

For Earthen Strike, sorry misread it. I still stand by my conclusion that it creates a skill that may not have a desire able morph and that it provides way too much utility. I definitely don't like that idea.

Drishtan

@ZOS_GinaBruno Please Read these changes!!!

I like most of your ideas we need some sustain and ult gen.

Elder dragon-10% All regen great
Flame lash-Add Minor Heroism
Reflective plate add the ult gen, keep it magic, and add 2 secs to duration if ur not going to reduce the cost.
The other changes I dont really like.

I would however like to see ALL OUR SKILL COSTS REVIEWED!!!!! We have the highest Skill Costs in the game!!!! PLEASE REVIEW THIS!!

Kilandros

Minor Heroism on Flame Lash is a great idea.

And YES make Elder Dragon useful.

ALSO - FLAMES OF OBLIVION AOE AND CAUTERIZE AOE HOT

Drishtan

Battle Roar-A Nerf is ok but the max stat cap should be 35k not 28k.

Earthen Heart- Nerf ok but the max stam should be 30k not 19k.

Drishtan

Another Idea I had is if we had a combustion passive that works like sorc implosion for us to have an execute. Have it work off of flame damage.