PTS Patch Notes v3.0.2

VoidBiscuit

I've given up on giving feedback. A lot of the changes ZOS made are just upsetting, and the fact they don't listen moreso.
I was excited about Morrowind, was.
I've successfully recontacted steam regarding my Morrowind Digital Collectors Edition.
I may reconsider if they completely reverse all changes (except CP).
It's fine adjusting things, but not like this.

mandricus

so, in the end, this thread is all about "Zos, with class changes may be you balanced PvP, but you are completely screwing PvE."

InvitationNotFound

Awesome, ZOS went full *** again?

What I don't get is why with every PTS people are still believing any sort of feedback matters. You are their whole QA process, it's all about getting rid of a few minor bugs and marketing in this case. It never was about real feedback.

quadraxis666 wrote: »

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Sorry, I had to quote this awesome "text"

Alcast wrote: »

@ZOS_RichLambert Werewolf skills cost adjustment? Pretty please tyvm

hey kid, did you just ask for some werewolf skill nerfs?

Feanor

Seminolegirl1992 wrote: »

Takis1979 wrote: »

New skill: diplomacy

You enter the dungeon and talk the monster to death

I plan on trying this. Will report on results.

Maybe we get Axii from the Witcher 3 and thus can convince the bosses, adds and other players to kill themselves.

AuT6GHad

waitwhat wrote: »

AuT6GHad wrote: »

I like the changes of the Spear Shards! It finally makes this Templar ability unique again.

The buff of the NB Strikes seems to be a step in the right duration. Lets see if you can finally sustain for over 30 seconds.

The changes of the instant frags hurt, but since they are really strong it seems reasonable.

Please buff the Battle Roar passive!

I still miss return of the old cost reduction values in the armor passives. It would allow to run a rotation without spamming 90% Heavy Attacks.

@AuT6GHad

It IS NOT A BUFF TO NIGHTBLADE SUSTAIN. It a nerf compared to our present situation on live, and frankly, it is worse than previous iterations, at the 20 second delay in regaining resources means we cannot weave light attacks into our rotations to regain stamina as effectively, nor can we maintain as much uptime for Relentless Focus, among many other things.

Please do not fall into the trap of calling later patch note iterations buffs. They are nerfs when compared to live.

Yeah, its definitely a nerf compared to our present situation, but with 3.0.2 it seems to be a step in the right direction.
I would love to see the Strikes finally be as good as they are right now.

brewsky_jsbub17_ESO

Do you guys realize that you have upset every single person who plays this game multiple times by constantly nerfing and nerfing their favourite characters into the ground? Okay I get your point of trying to balance but I want to let you know that every time you nerf something that it "too OP" you take something from a whole whack of players that makes this game sooo fun for them. You done it to me multiple times as I have 8 characters. With this whole heavy attack meta you seem to be pushing on us you are going to KILL the heart pounding adrenaline junkie driving feel we have been getting from the very start. You are going to lose the most players you have ever lost with this patch if you do not bring cost reduction back. Smarten or else we will leave you. Sincerely, every person who has been playing from launch. We're taken enough BS.

Prive

waitwhat wrote: »

DPShiro wrote: »

Prive wrote: »

Juhasow wrote: »

Prive wrote: »

[quote=

Sorcerer

• Dark Magic
  • Crystal Fragments (Crystal Shard morph): Reduced the damage bonus of this morph’s instant-cast proc to 10% from 20%.
    Developer Comments:
    Sorcerer’s sustained damage in PvE and burst damage in PvP is currently too high, so reducing the damage bonus from Crystal Fragments brings them down slightly in both areas without being too punishing to the overall damage kit.

If you would play your own game, you would know that there will be 0 sorcs running crystal frags in PVE

Still every sorc will run it in PvE. Now it can hit even for 50k so You're saying everyone will unslot it because it'll hit max ~45k ?... Also crystal is skill from dark magic and provides 3% spell crit buff to whole group for 20 seconds from passive.

Nobody will run it anymore, because people are using heavy attacks in PVE now. And on a HA sorc build, frags does not longer find its way to a sorcs front or back bar. This is not because of the 10% nerf, but simply because the meta is changing.

This^

^Not this.

Frags will still be a viable tool for bursting down adds. Those who aren't already running it certainly won't add it, but those who use it regularly probably won't use it less than they do now, even in rotations.

The frag nerf is a red herring. It isn't actually supposed to do anything. It's only here because sorcs didn't get any class-specific nerfs (which even the Warden got), and the outcry was enough to prompt a minor nerf to a skill unpopular with its victims in PvP.

This nerf does not impact sorc DoT/cleave rotations in a meaningful way, even if you have to HA more to get sustain.

Also, in case anyone reading this didn't hear, the whole Lightning Staff HA thing isn't going to happen per these latest patch notes.

Ok, as you wish about frags, we will see

bout those HA tho.. sorc will still use a HA build if the changes to sustain will remain untouched. Ye, the splash dmg got a nerf. So what. Did you even try it on the PTS before you wrote that?

templesus

mandricus wrote: »

so, in the end, this thread is all about "Zos, with class changes may be you balanced PvP, but you are completely screwing PvE."

Balancing PvP? Have you ever fought another player a day in your life? These changes are ruining PvP. The nerfing of healing because many PvErs are crying for other classes being viable for endgame healing has utterly destroyed Templar for PvP.

Gomumon

templesus wrote: »

mandricus wrote: »

so, in the end, this thread is all about "Zos, with class changes may be you balanced PvP, but you are completely screwing PvE."

Balancing PvP? Have you ever fought another player a day in your life? These changes are ruining PvP. The nerfing of healing because many PvErs are crying for other classes being viable for endgame healing has utterly destroyed Templar for PvP.

It's both. Their answer on the last ESO Live was a bit disingenuous. While I agree that SKILLS and mechanics shouldn't be different in PVE/PVP so players can learn in one and then not be completely useless in the other, they ignored the fact that they could have completely separate STATS for PVE and PVP, that way they can tweak each accordingly without screwing up the other.

For example, if they feel like a Templar is doing a disproportionate amount of healing in PVE, they can scale whatever stats they need to adjust that, without it ruining it's viability in PVP. Likewise, if they feel something is too bursty in PVP, they can edit the PVP damage stats without making the DPS drop significantly in PVE.

@ZOS_GinaBruno The biggest problem with ESO is that there are not enough stats. While DCUO had it's own problems, one of the things it did brilliantly was give separate stats to PVE gear than PVP gear. ESO could do this easily, as it already has a plethora of sets largely ignored by the community. It would be the perfect chance to repurpose a lot of trash sets, traits, and boons.

deleted008293

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

General

• Fixed an issue where visual effects would occasionally not display, or would take a long time to display.
• Fixed an issue where the highest resolution versions of environment textures would take a long time to load in.

I've been waiting years for this! And it seems its finally working! Thanks a lot for this!

Weps

Gomumon wrote: »

It's both. Their answer on the last ESO Live was a bit disingenuous. While I agree that SKILLS and mechanics shouldn't be different in PVE/PVP so players can learn in one and then not be completely useless in the other, they ignored the fact that they could have completely separate STATS for PVE and PVP, that way they can tweak each accordingly without screwing up the other.

It's even a simpler task than that. They have Battle Spirit, they can stuff everything in there.
No crit on proc sets? They could've put it there. No more major mending 100% uptime? They could have put it in there.

But I know this would basically destroy the already horrible PvP servers performance due to excessive computing.

templesus wrote: »

Balancing PvP? Have you ever fought another player a day in your life? These changes are ruining PvP. The nerfing of healing because many PvErs are crying for other classes being viable for endgame healing has utterly destroyed Templar for PvP.

Major mending is a tough loss and should be reverted or changed to let templars gain it for at least 30-50% of the time.
Repentance also is a bad change although it has been exploited a lot by highly coordinated groups.
But that's a L2P issue by the vast majority of the community.

The rest of the changes are not destroying PvP healing, are just making it more tactical and more challenging which is good tbh

mandricus

Another thing i don't really understand is why they keep nerfing useful and distinctive class skills, while at the same time they are wasting efforts trying slightly modifications to useless skills that nobody will use anyway.
I mean, think at Healing Ritual. Do they really understand what the problem with this skill is?
Sure, if they do a raw "select * from skillbars where class=templars" they will found someone that is using that skill. All noobs use it. I still remember when I started with my Templar Healer, whitout having a clue about how to heal in this game, having that skill slotted, thinking it was a good skill. Until some healer of the Guild i joined explained me why it is absolute crap.
A different query, like "Select * from skillbars where class=templar", but selecting only people that are part of any guild that has at least 20+ members that succesfully completed at least 1 vet trial... well, that would give the developers a very different picture.
That query would show exactly which skills are used and which are not by the player base (player base = people that know at least the basic mechanics of the game because someone told them how the game works, what to do, and why).
Having that picture, they could start looking at which skill are not used.
And then they could modify things, NOT BY NERFING SKILLS THAT ARE USED, but trying instead to MAKE INTERESTING AGAIN the ones that are not actually used.
*THAT* would be a more interesting approach, I think.
Unfortunately looks like they are going the easy way (nerf skills that are widely used, hoping that the players will pick something else).
The result of such process is not to create a more interesting game... actually they get the exact opposite result: they will have a more boring game, because all the skills will be crap and it will not make any real difference if you use one skill or another.. they all will be crap anyway.

E.g: Force Siphon. It was worth having until this skill provided a different buff that would stack with elemental drain.
Now it's absolutely pointless, as you can have the same effect (providing magika sustain to your group), with the same buff, with a shorter cast animation using elemental drain (while having a debuff at the same time).
At the moment, it is just a wasted slot in the restoration staff skill line. And yet it's still there after months, untouched. Just another wasted slot.

The_Lex

#NotMyPatchNotes

Merlin13KAGL

Weps wrote: »

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

Endlessly, eh? I count an one every 10 seconds (which works out to be what his regen probably allows. Some of these are out of combat. None of those get interrupted. All of these are against PuGs (his title, not mine.)

First seconds of the fight, he Streaks into a close encounter and then he proceeds to do 2 Dark Deals.
Then 4 seconds passes and he does 2 other Dark Deals.

I count 4 Dark Deals every 8 seconds, after a Streak.

Of course during a battle where he's outnumbered he doesn't spam it like a noob, he's one of the top players in the game not a 250CP who joined when Homestead was release ffs.

In 1vs1 or even 1vs2 fight a stamsorc can Dark Deal 5 times in 9 seconds.
That's 15k stamina, it's like adding 3k recovery.
Plus 8k health multiplied per 5 times, plus the 8% HP from every cast thanks to the passives.

How can you say this is not OP?

Currently, a StamDK with a 38k max pool has to spend 10% more magicka to receive 5k less stamina and no health back from Igneous Shield spam casting.
Nightblades can gain a lot of stamina and Magicka with Siphoning Attacks but that requires them to be active, to expose themselves, it's highly rewarding because of the risk.
Templars' way to restore stamina is free but once again, Repentance it's highly rewarding because you need to actually kill stuff to refresh yourself.

Dark Deal? It's not risky nor it restores just one pool.
Why is it SO REWARDING? Because of the "cast time"?

With about an 800 recovery, which is about where most non-primary stats will sit, you're going to be able to DD once every 8 seconds. (Cost of the cast / time to recover that amount). The streak still had non-combat regen, as he streaked towards the fight, not into it. The next DD's were able to happen because he started at full stats, so 5 times in 9 seconds may happen, but it's only gonna happen once (and that assumes a 15k pool). (Combat logs shows a total of 16 in-combat casts over 127 second, which oddly is one every 8 seconds, averaged out.)

Also, for the record, there is no 8% bonus from the cast. Blood Magic, just like repentance, has a requirement - it has to damage a target, which DD does not do. You're also forgetting Battle Spirit cuts healing in half.

And regarding healing vs DK's? How many passives/skills provide heals of some kind, vs sorc's skill line. Surge has to crit, blood magic has to hit, leaving DD as the only consistent class heal available.

Bash, interrupt, drain magicka/stamina poisons. There are counters available.

Kinnahz

WE'RE ALL DOOMED!! THE END IS NIGH!!

Nelson_Rebel

Dk's are dead now in anything other than a tank for endgame content.

PvP to probably as the warden does better AoE's with ice and will more effectively be able to stand their ground with all the snare effects and pet healing every time they activate and expire

Weps

Merlin13KAGL wrote: »

With about an 800 recovery, which is about where most non-primary stats will sit, you're going to be able to DD once every 8 seconds. (Cost of the cast / time to recover that amount). The streak still had non-combat regen, as he streaked towards the fight, not into it. The next DD's were able to happen because he started at full stats, so 5 times in 9 seconds may happen, but it's only gonna happen once (and that assumes a 15k pool). (Combat logs shows a total of 16 in-combat casts over 127 second, which oddly is one every 8 seconds, averaged out.)

Also, for the record, there is no 8% bonus from the cast. Blood Magic, just like repentance, has a requirement - it has to damage a target, which DD does not do. You're also forgetting Battle Spirit cuts healing in half.

And regarding healing vs DK's? How many passives/skills provide heals of some kind, vs sorc's skill line. Surge has to crit, blood magic has to hit, leaving DD as the only consistent class heal available.

Bash, interrupt, drain magicka/stamina poisons. There are counters available.

Fast forward the video please, you'll notice at least a couple more instances where he spams it 3 times, than does a couple of combos and then he does it again twice in a row.
Of course if you just look at the whole battle he may have used it 16 times in 127 seconds...that's because in the remaining 111 seconds he's dealing a *** ton of damage. Again, compaired to how other classes utilities work for resource management this is overperforming at the very least.

I'm sorry about the misinformation I gave regarding Blood Magic.
My bad, I didn't remember it correctly as Sorcs are not my main class.
Still, a stamsorc can regain 4% of his max health while rooting you.
While negating you. And, since I don't use the skill, does Defensive Rune proc Blood Magic?

But yes, the healing is cut in half. That means 4k healing. 4. k. No other class utility gives you that amount of resources and health back while using your off-pool. No longer at least. Is this even a conversation?

Oh yes, Dk healing are great. Too bad DKs passives are clearly intended to facilitate a DK being healed, not healing himself since DragonBlood will never ever EVER bring you back at full health, and Vigor is an HoT.
Plus, it's not a great idea bringing DKs up since the class got hit pretty hard while Sorcs haven't been touched.

Surge has to crit, right. And you gain 2.5k health back everytime you crit ( close to 60% on good setups ) while doing damage.
So, again, it looks like a discount offer, you cast one and gain 2. Meanwhile a Dk has to cast either Igneous Shield, a Draconic Power ability and another healing ability just to heal. Same thing right? What about rooting and healing yourself. Can you imagine that on a Dk? Great! Because Sorcs have this. And yes, they use roots too.

Bash, interrupt. Again, you're against a player who's active and reactive. Not against a boss, a mob, a scripted mechanic. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, sometimes you interrupt when the sorc has already gained them sometime you are as out of resources as your opponent and you can't just bash and do nothing and sometimes the sorc will just streak away and spam D/D two times and regain the upperhand.
It's preposterous seeing always this kind of tone in sorc players' replies, as if they're the only players knowing how to handle the game when the vast majority of them have never consistely played another class. Like Ever.

I will try to forget you even suggest the idea of using cost increase poisons because if the only way to stop a stamsorc is using a broken, dirty, undesired by most players trick, then there is something wrong with the class balance.
You don't hear people saying "you need cost increase poisons to stop a nightblade/templar/Dk", do you? You can simply stop them by using counters you have in your class skills...in your weapons skills tree...even in your racial skills tree.
But with a sorc? Bash or interrupt if it's possible otherwise go on and use a broken dynamic.

templesus

Weps wrote: »

Gomumon wrote: »

It's both. Their answer on the last ESO Live was a bit disingenuous. While I agree that SKILLS and mechanics shouldn't be different in PVE/PVP so players can learn in one and then not be completely useless in the other, they ignored the fact that they could have completely separate STATS for PVE and PVP, that way they can tweak each accordingly without screwing up the other.

It's even a simpler task than that. They have Battle Spirit, they can stuff everything in there.
No crit on proc sets? They could've put it there. No more major mending 100% uptime? They could have put it in there.

But I know this would basically destroy the already horrible PvP servers performance due to excessive computing.

templesus wrote: »

Balancing PvP? Have you ever fought another player a day in your life? These changes are ruining PvP. The nerfing of healing because many PvErs are crying for other classes being viable for endgame healing has utterly destroyed Templar for PvP.

Major mending is a tough loss and should be reverted or changed to let templars gain it for at least 30-50% of the time.
Repentance also is a bad change although it has been exploited a lot by highly coordinated groups.
But that's a L2P issue by the vast majority of the community.

The rest of the changes are not destroying PvP healing, are just making it more tactical and more challenging which is good tbh

Lol I'm a stamplar. Can't get more tactical then dodge roll rally vigor, which as of this patch will use up a third of my stamina. On top of that I lost major mending and my only way of sustaining stam which has been nerfed two patches in a row to the point its not even worth slotting. Why? Because of PvE. Plain and simple.

victorhrpereira

quadraxis666 wrote: »

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One image is better than one thousand words lol

Durham

I agree with the vigor cost increase by itself... but with the stacking nerfs in this patch I don't agree.... currently VIGOR is pretty expensive now it's not a 30% increase its more like 50% because of 3 stacking nerfs...

DisgracefulMind

Weps wrote: »

Gomumon wrote: »

It's both. Their answer on the last ESO Live was a bit disingenuous. While I agree that SKILLS and mechanics shouldn't be different in PVE/PVP so players can learn in one and then not be completely useless in the other, they ignored the fact that they could have completely separate STATS for PVE and PVP, that way they can tweak each accordingly without screwing up the other.

It's even a simpler task than that. They have Battle Spirit, they can stuff everything in there.
No crit on proc sets? They could've put it there. No more major mending 100% uptime? They could have put it in there.

But I know this would basically destroy the already horrible PvP servers performance due to excessive computing.

templesus wrote: »

Balancing PvP? Have you ever fought another player a day in your life? These changes are ruining PvP. The nerfing of healing because many PvErs are crying for other classes being viable for endgame healing has utterly destroyed Templar for PvP.

Major mending is a tough loss and should be reverted or changed to let templars gain it for at least 30-50% of the time.
Repentance also is a bad change although it has been exploited a lot by highly coordinated groups.
But that's a L2P issue by the vast majority of the community.

The rest of the changes are not destroying PvP healing, are just making it more tactical and more challenging which is good tbh

How does one exploit Repentance, wat?

The change is awful and needs to be reverted. It's not a "free cast" like Gina seems to think it is. You spend resources to get this "FREE CAST" off of a corpse.

Weps

templesus wrote: »

Lol I'm a stamplar. Can't get more tactical then dodge roll rally vigor, which as of this patch will use up a third of my stamina. On top of that I lost major mending and my only way of sustaining stam which has been nerfed two patches in a row to the point its not even worth slotting. Why? Because of PvE. Plain and simple.

Oh. I thought you were a magplar.
Than it sucks, I feel sorry for you.

DisgracefulMind wrote: »

How does one exploit Repentance, wat?

The change is awful and needs to be reverted. It's not a "free cast" like Gina seems to think it is. You spend resources to get this "FREE CAST" off of a corpse.

Well, I didn't express myself correctly.
Let's put it this way, coordinated groups that are farming resources in PvP take advantage of this once they've killed noobs and lower levels to let their tanks keep permablocking.
Maybe exploiting is not the right word, that's why I also added that this annoying dynamic was more a L2P issue rather than a real exploit.

I also said that it's a bad change, maybe it should be slightly reviewed but it shouldn't go live like this.

Lore_lai

Of all the things I would have thought of that smaller groups can be "accused" of when "farming" - Repentance "abusing and exploiting" would have literally been the last thing.
Amazing...the things people would come up with these days...

Kerioko

Possible ability to get major protection while blocking:

Patch notes: Fixed an issue where your Stamina Recovery would not pause when holding Sprint and not moving. Stamina is still only drained while you are moving.

New gear set:
Coward’s Gear
2 - Maximum Health
3 - Stamina Recovery
4 - Stamina Recovery
5 - While Sprinting you gain Major Expedition and Major Protection, increasing your Movement Speed and reducing your damage taken by 30%.

Question: If you are holding the sprint key while not moving, are you still considered sprinting? According to the patch notes, you are.

If that is the case, does that mean the above gear set will give you major protection whenever you press the sprint key (even while standing still).

Since blocking also stops stamina recovery, wouldn't tanks be able to also press the sprint key whenever they press block to achieve both block damage resistance and major protection without losing any more stamina then they would while blocking.

I saw another post doing the math that would allow a DK tank to still perma block (8/8 sturdy, blocking enchants, defensive stance, DK regen passives, and SnB ult). Couple that with a tank running something like coward/black rose/engine guardian (or bloodspawn) and you have perma blocking tanks who are taking even less damage then currently on live!

ofSunhold

Lore_lai wrote: »

Of all the things I would have thought of that smaller groups can be "accused" of when "farming" - Repentance "abusing and exploiting" would have literally been the last thing.
Amazing...the things people would come up with these days...

Templars doing templar things! When will this madness end?!

xynode

following my recent video about how you "COULD" sustain with a stamina dk with good damage and solid sustain at the same time will all current pts changes in place. Here is the live PTS variation of the video showing how a 6mil skele is NO problem. While magicka cry for elemental drain for sustain on a 3mil even now. Hopefully this raises some hope for you stam DK players out there. DK is NOT dead:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNLWiZCMUXU

Enjoy.

itscompton

xynode wrote: »

following my recent video about how you "COULD" sustain with a stamina dk with good damage and solid sustain at the same time will all current pts changes in place. Here is the live PTS variation of the video showing how a 6mil skele is NO problem. While magicka cry for elemental drain for sustain on a 3mil even now. Hopefully this raises some hope for you stam DK players out there. DK is NOT dead:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNLWiZCMUXU

Enjoy.

Not to be a jerk but not many people play the game to fight training dummies. Considering all the cost increases to base defensive/healing capabilities for stamina + the cost increase of abilities after being heavy attacked by an enemy, a pure offensive rotation on a training dummy is a poor demonstration of what sustain will actually be like in challenging environments such as Vet Dungeons, Trials or PvP.
A video of a smooth run through VMA with no sustain issues would go much further to validate your opinion.

Joy_Division

ofSunhold wrote: »

Lore_lai wrote: »

Of all the things I would have thought of that smaller groups can be "accused" of when "farming" - Repentance "abusing and exploiting" would have literally been the last thing.
Amazing...the things people would come up with these days...

Templars doing templar things! When will this madness end?!

The Morrowind expansion.

ofSunhold

Joy_Division wrote: »

ofSunhold wrote: »

Lore_lai wrote: »

Of all the things I would have thought of that smaller groups can be "accused" of when "farming" - Repentance "abusing and exploiting" would have literally been the last thing.
Amazing...the things people would come up with these days...

Templars doing templar things! When will this madness end?!

The Morrowind expansion.

Yeah.

RIP Repentance

Draqone

itscompton wrote: »

A video of a smooth run through VMA with no sustain issues would go much further to validate your opinion.

@itscompton but like, the whole point of this patch is to introduce some sustain issues so that players can't all out DPS. If we see a VMA run with no sustain issues it means ZOS failed to reach the point they planned.

Obviously, how much is "some sustain issues" is another question, and we all disagree on what is a reasonable sustain nerf.