Siphoning Strikes & Morphs still underperfoming

actosh

@ZOS_RichLambert @Wrobel @ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_JessicaFolsom

Hey @all,
like title states Siphoning is still underperforming and not worth slotting in most cases. If ZOS wants to make it useable again and give nightblades something usefull for ressource management the skill has to be tweaked a bit more. Following options would come to mind. Some of you may remember the Skill "Haste" that we once had. There could be a way to add it to SA to give NB´s the playstyle that ZOS mentioned (fast, ect pp).

How they are on PTS right now.

Leeching Strikes:
Imbue your weapons with soul-stealing power, causing your light & heavy attacks to heal you for 1524 Health and restore 198 Stamina for 20 seconds.
When the effect ends, you restore an additional 2415Stamina.

Siphoning Attacks:
Imbue your weapons with soul-stealing power, causing your light & heavy attacks to heal you for 1524 Health and restore 198Magicka for 20 seconds.
When the effect ends, you restore an additional Magicka.

Change it to the following with a reworked "Haste" added to it.

Leeching Strikes:
Imbue your weapons with soul-stealing power, causing your light attacks to heal you for 1524 Health and restore 300 Stamina for 20 seconds. Your Heavy Attacks heal your for 3048Health and resore 600 Stamina. When the effect ends, you restore an additional 4415Stamina, if u recast it before it ends, you are awarded ressources based on the time it was up. Your Heavy attacks will be executet 40% faster.

Siphoning Attacks:
Imbue your weapons with soul-stealing power, causing your light attacks to heal you for 1524 Health and restore 300 Magicka for 20 seconds. Your Heavy Attacks heal your for 3048Health and resore 600 Mackiga. When the effect ends, you restore an additional 4415Mackiga, if u recast it before it ends, you are awarded ressources based on the time it was up. Your Heavy attacks will be executet 40% faster.

With these changes you can achieve a more active playstyle on nightblades, and with the comeback of haste inside SA(make HA faster) you give them a incentive to do so and still keep something unique to their class.
The ressource return should work like Rally. With the values i mentioned above u would get 220Stam for each second it has been up, so u wont be punished for recasting it like it is right now.
Also the values on the pts are at the moment absolutely discouraging. With the suggestet values and behavior of the skill you keep it interesting and help nb´s maybe to close the gap a bit. It is also beneficial to all playstyles as Nightblade.

Have a nice day and feel free to have a constructive discussion. Thx

Arrchangell

Yeah i totally agree with u, if they are planning to keep that kinda mechanic, make it like Rally. Right now that tick when it expires, i don't even get it tbh cause i'm used to recasting it before it expires. The amount of resources gained back needs to be higher 200 is worthless, i get that they want to nerf sustain, but this kinda nerf is just destroying the skill. I'm a stamina nb and i don't really have a big choice of skills that i can use, only reason i would use this version of leeching is just cause i literally don't have any other skill that i can replace it with.

Rikumaru

I feel like ZOS are just gonna ignore the Siphoning Strikes complaint. Its a class defining skill which gives back basically half of what minor magicka steal returns, and yet costs resources to cast AND only procs from light attacks / heavy attacks while minor magicka steal procs from all damage sources. Not to mention dark deal, the strongest sustain skill got nerfed BY 0.2 SECONDS, while every other sustain skill has either recieved a significant nerf or has been completely gutted.

People have complained about ganking nightblades and yet whenever nightblades are nerfed, they nerf the skills which help the open world pvp builds which won't be used / effect ganking builds much.

VelociousLegend

SA should return magic AND stam. Every class has some sort of ability that converts magic to stam except for NB if this change stands as is.

Strider_Roshin

Oh I know, the community knows, and ZOS knows. But ZOS's behavior have been very anti-Nightblade, and pro-sorc for quite some time so I wouldn't expect a change to make it viable again.

My advice: just act like the move doesn't exist. Like the majority of the Siphoning skill tree; it's useless.

casparian

Looks like we mere making threads about this at the same time https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/343243/siphoning-strikes-is-still-underperforming-and-clunky


When you factor in the per-second return on weaves as well as average out the final big chunk of resource return as a per-second return (Combat Metrics treats it this way), you can see that this skill's total resources restored over 20 seconds is virtually identical to Templar's Channeled Focus if you do almost everything right: weave light attacks (almost) perfectly, recast Siphoning at (more or less) exactly the right moment, never have an enemy dodge a light attack, and (almost) never heavy attack. Channeled Focus just requires that you have entered the rune sometime within the last 8 seconds (while also being slightly more expensive than Siphoning, unless I missed a change to the cost of Channeled Focus).

For that reason, I think this is still going to be a useful skill in PVE, and I will still run Siphoning in my PVE magblade build. In PVE, I can count on all four of those ideal conditions obtaining often enough that the skill will be worth slotting: I'm pretty confident that in a dungeon or trial, I can weave light attacks (almost) perfectly, recast Siphoning at (more or less) exactly the right moment, never have an enemy dodge a light attack, and (almost) never heavy attack. This will make Siphoning's sustain contribution be slightly less than the Templar's rune, but still effective.

However, at least 3 out of those 4 conditions will almost never be the case in PVP. You are just not going to be able to get one light attack per second to connect with a halfway-competent opponent, and there is no way to reliably ensure that you can wait 20 seconds for the big chunk at the end. That last point is especially important: Siphoning is no longer an efficient sustain tool unless you get the big chunk at the end, but the fact that it isn't an efficient sustain tool during those 20 seconds (because the per-weave return is low and because you can't connect every weave in PVP) makes it all the more difficult for a nightblade to survive long enough for the skill's main sustain contribution to even take effect.

The only way I can think of for this to be a usefull skill in PVP is for it to have some Rally-like effect added in, where you can activate it before the 20 seconds are out for a resource return.

In addition, as has been said for weeks now, this skill or some other Nightblade skill needs to return stamina without costing stamina. Every class had that before 3.0, and every class except Nightblade has it after 3.0.

My preferred solution would be for both of those suggestions (Rally-like return and dual-resource return) to be combined into one: make it so that each morph restores one resource as it currently does on PTS as well as the big chunk at the end, but also so that the skill can be re-activated early (before the 20 seconds are out) to restore the opposite resource. So Siphoning Attacks would restore magicka on every light/heavy attack that connects as well as a bigger chunk of magicka after 20 seconds, but also could be activated before the 20 seconds are out to grant a big chunk of stamina instead of magicka.

This wouldn't affect PVE at all, since PVE nightblades would never have to activate the ability early, but it would make this ability's usage in PVP much more tactical than on live (since you still wouldn't get the huge, virtually free dual-resource return that the ability provides on live, and would have to choose which resource you need more in the particular situation), while giving the nightblade back the dual-resource return capability that every other class has.