Some Data on PVE resource nerfige effect on players

necronomniconb14_ESO

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

From the perspective of a player, without access to subscription statistics, player log data, and other server side data, it is sometimes hard to tell the impact of changes on the player populous. I read the forums, talked with folks in my raid guild, and the opinion was certainly unanimous that people didn't like the sustain changes but to some extent that could be just echo's in an echo chamber or the universal carping about not liking nerfs that you always expect. I was interested therefore to see the actual effect of the changes on scores and runs. I was surprised.

vMA weekly data as a proxy for player performance and engagement
I expected that there would be some drop in vMA weekly scores. Some would be expected even with no major resource nerfs because new content can distract players from their normal activities. Of course, the lure of an open leaderboard after reset and a new trophy at least partially offsets this. Also, vMA runs do not require a group, take relatively little time to do, and few players have all the gear that they need making the 2for1 of weekly runs a regular incentive responded to by many of the same players every week. vMA weekly data therefore seems to me to be the best peice of data about player responses too, and performance under, the new mess of a resource management system. The data completely floored me. It was a bloodbath. 3 of the 4 original classes did not even fill the weekly board on the NA server. NB had only 80, Templar 57, and DK 54 completes. Sorc had all 100 slots filled but dropped about 72k in the cut off score. For reference, I think the last time that the weekly board did not fill was somewhere around a year and a half ago. There have been many events and new content updates since than that did not have any such effects on players doing vMA.

Greater divergence in player performance
While I was genuinely surprised with the magnitude of the effect the changes had on endgame players ability and willingness to do content I was not at all surprised at the magnitude of the divergence in player performance created by the specific nature of the changes. I expected they would have little effect on the top dogs and crush many lesser players and this was certainly the case. In the example of NB's, which I play the most in vMA, the top player lost only 3k from his vMA score whereas, at the bottom of the leaderboard, players who had been at 522k last week apparently rage quit there runs altogether this week. I went from 540k to 480k despite switching some morphs to ones better for vMA (refreshing path and swallow soul) and mainlining expensive pots to the tune of 10k or so. Not only do I think that such massive, systemic resource changes will take much longer for a so-so endgame player to acclimate to but also I think that these changes also complicated the timings of combat making for a magnification of small differences in player performance. In other words, the floor dropped and the ceiling didn't move much. This is counter to the stated goals of ZOS developers but was what I, and others, expected, and explained, in length, on the PTS forum.

Specific problems and thoughts from vMA and other trials
In vMA, most pulls, my strategy was to leave one add clean each pull and full heavy him down. This was much more effective than trying to heavy with several things up. The reason for this is that a full heavy takes a long time and vMA was not designed to have you sit there holding your *** half the time. There are lots of enemy stuns, things that must be blocked, and things you roll dodge. Because only a full heavy returns resources, if any of these things happen, you have to bail, get no resources, and have to try again. This is not really workable. Instead, you just have to contrive these little one add situations where you are unlikely to have your *** holding interrupted. Similarly, it is advisable, on boss fights, to use phases where the boss is incapacitated or little is happening, to hold your ***. Sure, this will feel counter intuitive as you are used to pushing the boss hard when your rotation is unimpeded but believe me, it is best to let the fight take longer, DOT up the boss, and hold left key a while. If you don't believe me try putting it to the boss of arena 7 during that first scream and see how well you do in the time between screams when you run out of juice. As for that final boss fight, good luck with that one, there aren't very nice places to stand there slowly channeling heavies so good luck. You will also likely have some trouble managing stam as odd as that sounds. Also, get ready to drop serious dough on pots. You just can't do anything without them.

In trials that are not vMA there are often stack phases where there is both a lot more support to resources and less stuff to interrupt you *** holding. The biggest problem in these is that when players are rezed after death they are just useless for a while as it will take a long time to get back up to a state of resource management. Well, that is the biggest problem if you are not a healer or tank. Those deaths I had were because a very good tank lost agro do to not having the resources to taunt because those axes in vAA were draining her. Suffice it to say, there seem to be a lot of times when healers can't heal and tanks can't tank.

As for situations with drain resource mechanics like RoM and CoS. Well, I can't play these because I unsubbed but I get a cold shudder when I think about them.

Changes that could minimize the pain while keeping the slower combat less troll builds in PVP idea.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the two driving factors in the changes were to make troll builds in PVP more difficult to make and to slow the average casts per second in combat in order to alleviate server lag. I know ZOS will never admit to wanting to make combat slower paced and less responsive but I do think this was an actual goal and that it was probably part of the longstanding attempt to make Cyridiil playable. This is me crediting the leadership at ZOS with not being completely brain-dead, God I hope that is true. Along the lines that ZOS has chosen to go on there are some changes that could return PVE to being both fun and playable but still get to slower combat and less PVP trolling through resource restriction of average casts per second.

1) Partially charged heavies received a big damage nerf, 30% relative to light attacks (full charged heavies actually got a buff but that is another thread) but do not return any resources despite this being given as the reason for that damage nerf. They need to return a substantial fraction of the full charged resource return. This would both allow those full heavies you had to bail on to be worth something and also give the player the option of going with a medium weave to maintain sustain at the cost of dps. The (lower) average casts per second sought should not change but combat will be a lot less miserable.

2) Rezed players in PVE have to come back with far more resources. Seriously, this sucks donkey balls. It's like, thanks for taking time out from you busy boss killing to pick me up guys, don't mind me while I stand here for a while being useless.

3) Tanks need a better resource management. I don't know an easy way to do this, keep PVE and PVP the same, and also maintain you anti troll PVP goal. Simply, tanks have to block a lot of stuff in PVE and your changes made it so they basically can't keep resources on fights like vAA where there are many things hitting them. Maybe make the attacks from those things count as mini-attacks as far as block cost goes.

Anyhow, combat is like pulling your own teeth out with pliers while holding your *** to make yourself feel better. You should probably fix that. I'm certainly not spending any more money until you do. What data I can now see seems pretty clear to me that I am not alone in my sentiment.

the thing is, when you can go trying to buy/sell (and often coming back empty-handed) and taking sometimes 2 hours (and more) to do what you can do in less than minutes in modern mmorpgs that's a gamebreaker for some people. The combat 'was' the only thing about the game that wasn't monotonous, or even downright miserable and a huge waste of time. Eventually they fixed forced progression -locked content (opened up all of the zones) but zyngamax seems to always break two things once they (finally) get around to fixing one thing. I suspect bethesda does help them out sometimes afterall, since that's their MO IMO. Wanting to take the one and Only fun thing in their game, that is extremely lucky to have anyone even playing it this far after it's string of failures, and destroy it is only going to turn people eventually. They timed it with morrowind knowing that will lessen the amount of people that Immediately leave, so they can affect the perception of the changes and how detrimental they are on the whole. As many people will leave, except a small number perhaps saved by future content releases, they will just leave over a long period of time while kept busy with the nostalgia buzz. months, rather than weeks, but the same amount of people eventually will have left and they can say "see, it wasn't so bad, thos epeople leaving over months were just leaving after enjoying content and will be back once there's more" rather than "gee willickers sorry guys! we dun goofed! combat will never be the same!" I think I may not have the patience to level a warden, fighting is extremely miserable

Flameheart

Pretty good post and actually I and my guild are experiencing the same.

While uber progress guilds rush through vHoF on day one, we are stuck at boss 2 again in vLoM (while having not just a few wipes on boss 1 before) and we could kill Rakkat formerly exactly after completing a full moon circle, while having maybe one wipe on boss 2 in the whole run. We worked 3 months for that with just one raid day per week, 3 hours.

I even agree for the reasons you think Zos did the changes. Telling me something about "fast paced combat" while doing HAs smells like a blatant lie. Their real reasons just lie in not wanting the effort to scale/balance PvP and PvE separately and - most important - to improve overall performance but especially in PvP and you do that by lowering calculation effort and therefore less Information traffic as a consequence, mention the CP changes and their tests about CPfree Cyrodiil campaigns.


They already did similar things in the past like changing 0.5-second-dots to 1-scond/tick-dots but it wasn't enough. 64-bit client wasn't enough and - I am pretty sure - most adcanced server technology was not enough.

Of course they will never admit that.

f047ys3v3n

First post morrowind patch notes dropped today. No combat changes at all. I was hoping that, given they were clearly scrambling to try to rebuild a functional combat system after the disastrous reception of the hold your left button combat system, changes would continue for a few incremental patches and leave us with something at least somewhat fun. This patch suggests that they are content to hemorrhage players for the 3-4 months until the next major update. Pity but not too surprising. This is not the first time they implemented ill conceived changes that resulted in the quitting of huge portions of the players that can complete trials level content.

f047ys3v3n

Data for the last two weeks on the NA server
(week 2 of morrowind)
Sorc 505k
NB 232k
Dk 52 completions, no cut
Templar 53 completions, no cut
Warden 26 completions, no cut

(week 3 of morrowind)
Sorc 509k
NB 306k
Dk 57 completions, no cut
Templar 72 completions, no cut
Warden 25 completions, no cut

I guess folks are just really excited about the new questing content and battlegrounds. Or maybe they don't really enjoy combat. Maybe they are really slow leveling up a warden. I suppose you can read in whatever you want.

Doctordarkspawn

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

From the perspective of a player, without access to subscription statistics, player log data, and other server side data, it is sometimes hard to tell the impact of changes on the player populous. I read the forums, talked with folks in my raid guild, and the opinion was certainly unanimous that people didn't like the sustain changes but to some extent that could be just echo's in an echo chamber or the universal carping about not liking nerfs that you always expect. I was interested therefore to see the actual effect of the changes on scores and runs. I was surprised.

vMA weekly data as a proxy for player performance and engagement
I expected that there would be some drop in vMA weekly scores. Some would be expected even with no major resource nerfs because new content can distract players from their normal activities. Of course, the lure of an open leaderboard after reset and a new trophy at least partially offsets this. Also, vMA runs do not require a group, take relatively little time to do, and few players have all the gear that they need making the 2for1 of weekly runs a regular incentive responded to by many of the same players every week. vMA weekly data therefore seems to me to be the best peice of data about player responses too, and performance under, the new mess of a resource management system. The data completely floored me. It was a bloodbath. 3 of the 4 original classes did not even fill the weekly board on the NA server. NB had only 80, Templar 57, and DK 54 completes. Sorc had all 100 slots filled but dropped about 72k in the cut off score. For reference, I think the last time that the weekly board did not fill was somewhere around a year and a half ago. There have been many events and new content updates since than that did not have any such effects on players doing vMA.

Greater divergence in player performance
While I was genuinely surprised with the magnitude of the effect the changes had on endgame players ability and willingness to do content I was not at all surprised at the magnitude of the divergence in player performance created by the specific nature of the changes. I expected they would have little effect on the top dogs and crush many lesser players and this was certainly the case. In the example of NB's, which I play the most in vMA, the top player lost only 3k from his vMA score whereas, at the bottom of the leaderboard, players who had been at 522k last week apparently rage quit there runs altogether this week. I went from 540k to 480k despite switching some morphs to ones better for vMA (refreshing path and swallow soul) and mainlining expensive pots to the tune of 10k or so. Not only do I think that such massive, systemic resource changes will take much longer for a so-so endgame player to acclimate to but also I think that these changes also complicated the timings of combat making for a magnification of small differences in player performance. In other words, the floor dropped and the ceiling didn't move much. This is counter to the stated goals of ZOS developers but was what I, and others, expected, and explained, in length, on the PTS forum.

Specific problems and thoughts from vMA and other trials
In vMA, most pulls, my strategy was to leave one add clean each pull and full heavy him down. This was much more effective than trying to heavy with several things up. The reason for this is that a full heavy takes a long time and vMA was not designed to have you sit there holding your *** half the time. There are lots of enemy stuns, things that must be blocked, and things you roll dodge. Because only a full heavy returns resources, if any of these things happen, you have to bail, get no resources, and have to try again. This is not really workable. Instead, you just have to contrive these little one add situations where you are unlikely to have your *** holding interrupted. Similarly, it is advisable, on boss fights, to use phases where the boss is incapacitated or little is happening, to hold your ***. Sure, this will feel counter intuitive as you are used to pushing the boss hard when your rotation is unimpeded but believe me, it is best to let the fight take longer, DOT up the boss, and hold left key a while. If you don't believe me try putting it to the boss of arena 7 during that first scream and see how well you do in the time between screams when you run out of juice. As for that final boss fight, good luck with that one, there aren't very nice places to stand there slowly channeling heavies so good luck. You will also likely have some trouble managing stam as odd as that sounds. Also, get ready to drop serious dough on pots. You just can't do anything without them.

In trials that are not vMA there are often stack phases where there is both a lot more support to resources and less stuff to interrupt you *** holding. The biggest problem in these is that when players are rezed after death they are just useless for a while as it will take a long time to get back up to a state of resource management. Well, that is the biggest problem if you are not a healer or tank. Those deaths I had were because a very good tank lost agro do to not having the resources to taunt because those axes in vAA were draining her. Suffice it to say, there seem to be a lot of times when healers can't heal and tanks can't tank.

As for situations with drain resource mechanics like RoM and CoS. Well, I can't play these because I unsubbed but I get a cold shudder when I think about them.

Changes that could minimize the pain while keeping the slower combat less troll builds in PVP idea.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the two driving factors in the changes were to make troll builds in PVP more difficult to make and to slow the average casts per second in combat in order to alleviate server lag. I know ZOS will never admit to wanting to make combat slower paced and less responsive but I do think this was an actual goal and that it was probably part of the longstanding attempt to make Cyridiil playable. This is me crediting the leadership at ZOS with not being completely brain-dead, God I hope that is true. Along the lines that ZOS has chosen to go on there are some changes that could return PVE to being both fun and playable but still get to slower combat and less PVP trolling through resource restriction of average casts per second.

1) Partially charged heavies received a big damage nerf, 30% relative to light attacks (full charged heavies actually got a buff but that is another thread) but do not return any resources despite this being given as the reason for that damage nerf. They need to return a substantial fraction of the full charged resource return. This would both allow those full heavies you had to bail on to be worth something and also give the player the option of going with a medium weave to maintain sustain at the cost of dps. The (lower) average casts per second sought should not change but combat will be a lot less miserable.

2) Rezed players in PVE have to come back with far more resources. Seriously, this sucks donkey balls. It's like, thanks for taking time out from you busy boss killing to pick me up guys, don't mind me while I stand here for a while being useless.

3) Tanks need a better resource management. I don't know an easy way to do this, keep PVE and PVP the same, and also maintain you anti troll PVP goal. Simply, tanks have to block a lot of stuff in PVE and your changes made it so they basically can't keep resources on fights like vAA where there are many things hitting them. Maybe make the attacks from those things count as mini-attacks as far as block cost goes.

Anyhow, combat is like pulling your own teeth out with pliers while holding your *** to make yourself feel better. You should probably fix that. I'm certainly not spending any more money until you do. What data I can now see seems pretty clear to me that I am not alone in my sentiment.

So essentially what your telling me is the patch had the absolute opposite effect of the stated desire all for the sake of PVP?

So essentially what we ***' called?

Just more ammo for the arguement that PVP and PVE cannot be balanced seperately. Balance them seperate or cut one from the game entirely. You cant do it ZOS. Sorry. You lose.

Doctordarkspawn

THEDKEXPERIENCE wrote: »

Gandrhulf_Harbard wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

In other words, the floor dropped and the ceiling didn't move much. This is counter to the stated goals of ZOS developers but was what I, and others, expected, and explained, in length, on the PTS forum.

As you say, they were told this would happen, they were told hundreds and hundreds of times; by high-end raiders, theorycrafters and casuals - everyone told them this would happen.

They ignored it.

The thing that gets me though is if damn near everyone on the PTS and Morrowind Beta forums could see this was going to happen, why couldn't ZOS see it?

The ONLY logical answer is they don't have a clue what they are doing, and they have even less of a clue how what they are doing will actually affect things.

All The Best

I think part of the reason ZOS can't balance around the edges is because the weirdest character combinations come from the least knowledgeable place (Khajit Magic Werewolf baby!) while the most powerful gear combos come from the most knowledgeable players.

Everyone else, the majority of the dataset, has some solid knowledge of character synergies with race and class and uses the gear made popular by the theory crafters 3 months after they have already moved on.

So they balance the middle resulting in the stupid getting completely left in the dust, the middle class getting pushed down a peg and the smartest players thriving even more.

I'd disagree with this. More likely their just targeting for specific audiences and attempting to focus on them exclusively and damn the consequences, then rotating to a different audience. It's...weird, it's why most of the design seems bipolar, or would.

Joy_Division

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

In vMA, most pulls, my strategy was to leave one add clean each pull and full heavy him down. This was much more effective than trying to heavy with several things up. The reason for this is that a full heavy takes a long time and vMA was not designed to have you sit there holding your *** half the time. There are lots of enemy stuns, things that must be blocked, and things you roll dodge. Because only a full heavy returns resources, if any of these things happen, you have to bail, get no resources, and have to try again. This is not really workable. Instead, you just have to contrive these little one add situations where you are unlikely to have your *** holding interrupted. Similarly, it is advisable, on boss fights, to use phases where the boss is incapacitated or little is happening, to hold your ***. Sure, this will feel counter intuitive as you are used to pushing the boss hard when your rotation is unimpeded but believe me, it is best to let the fight take longer, DOT up the boss, and hold left key a while. If you don't believe me try putting it to the boss of arena 7 during that first scream and see how well you do in the time between screams when you run out of juice. As for that final boss fight, good luck with that one, there aren't very nice places to stand there slowly channeling heavies so good luck. You will also likely have some trouble managing stam as odd as that sounds. Also, get ready to drop serious dough on pots. You just can't do anything without them.

In trials that are not vMA there are often stack phases where there is both a lot more support to resources and less stuff to interrupt you *** holding. The biggest problem in these is that when players are rezed after death they are just useless for a while as it will take a long time to get back up to a state of resource management. Well, that is the biggest problem if you are not a healer or tank. Those deaths I had were because a very good tank lost agro do to not having the resources to taunt because those axes in vAA were draining her. Suffice it to say, there seem to be a lot of times when healers can't heal and tanks can't tank.

As for situations with drain resource mechanics like RoM and CoS. Well, I can't play these because I unsubbed but I get a cold shudder when I think about them.

Changes that could minimize the pain while keeping the slower combat less troll builds in PVP idea.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the two driving factors in the changes were to make troll builds in PVP more difficult to make and to slow the average casts per second in combat in order to alleviate server lag. I know ZOS will never admit to wanting to make combat slower paced and less responsive but I do think this was an actual goal and that it was probably part of the longstanding attempt to make Cyridiil playable. This is me crediting the leadership at ZOS with not being completely brain-dead, God I hope that is true. Along the lines that ZOS has chosen to go on there are some changes that could return PVE to being both fun and playable but still get to slower combat and less PVP trolling through resource restriction of average casts per second.

1) Partially charged heavies received a big damage nerf, 30% relative to light attacks (full charged heavies actually got a buff but that is another thread) but do not return any resources despite this being given as the reason for that damage nerf. They need to return a substantial fraction of the full charged resource return. This would both allow those full heavies you had to bail on to be worth something and also give the player the option of going with a medium weave to maintain sustain at the cost of dps. The (lower) average casts per second sought should not change but combat will be a lot less miserable.

2) Rezed players in PVE have to come back with far more resources. Seriously, this sucks donkey balls. It's like, thanks for taking time out from you busy boss killing to pick me up guys, don't mind me while I stand here for a while being useless.

3) Tanks need a better resource management. I don't know an easy way to do this, keep PVE and PVP the same, and also maintain you anti troll PVP goal. Simply, tanks have to block a lot of stuff in PVE and your changes made it so they basically can't keep resources on fights like vAA where there are many things hitting them. Maybe make the attacks from those things count as mini-attacks as far as block cost goes.

Anyhow, combat is like pulling your own teeth out with pliers while holding your *** to make yourself feel better. You should probably fix that. I'm certainly not spending any more money until you do. What data I can now see seems pretty clear to me that I am not alone in my sentiment.

I find the whole "combat burn" and "regen phase" or however ZoS's devs termed the two aspects of combat to be tedious and just means half of combat is boring.

We have really high burst damage and really crappy regen, which favors skilled & experienced players - exactly the opposite of what ZoS intended.

Integral1900

Just my 5 pence...

Completed normal maelstrom arena prior to the change, interesting story, visually fascinating, mechanic heavy gameplay which I personally find really boring and deeply frustrating but then again I started playing games back in the late 1980s so it's no supprise I'm allergic to mechanics, the xp was low and the rewards were no more than vendor trash. Not even worth getting my master Crafter to scrap

Vma was something I had a go at but never got past the second or third round as far as I remember, it's so far beyond my skill level that it's just hilarious, I can't imagine the willpower needed to grind it for gear, especially with the looming threat of the gear level going up... I don't grind for gear anymore because I ran one particular dungeon a hundred and fifty times looking for divines items, and in the end only got it on a belt in the wrong armour type

Ran normal again and seemed a little easier to me, I've always built around heavy attack to sustain as I love the look and the sound of it and with cp changes I've just got a bit tougher and I certainly hit a little bit harder. Still not going to go gear farming, I don't have the time or the patience...

I really like the changes but then again I have no intention of doing vet content. I used to until I realised the only reason was to get better gear and do the same hard content again, and that I can do the same content on normal and just use less meta and more fun builds instead. For me personally most meta builds are just boring, also with dropped sets I either like the look or the rules and never both, and before you give the standard reply of costumes bear in mind that I just don't like the choice of costumes either.

I feel that the emphasis on light and heavy will help, after all most players just play on normal and rely on heavy and light attacks, just pick a normal dungeon group at random if you don't believe me. It's only a minority that do vet. We know this simply because it's easier to get normal dungeons, you can queue for hours and not get a vet dungeon and yet you can dance into a normal one in a matter of minutes. This has helped them, the problem now though is that they will need the tank to be a tank and not just a cp 600 dps who isn't acquainted with the word patience.

ArchMikem

heng14rwb17_ESO wrote: »

Vet Trail is only for top 1% players.

I managed to get into that top 1% when this guild was doing a Vet Hel Ra for fun and I was included with my MagSorc. Somehow, and I highly doubt I was contributing much, lol, we completed the Trial with a timer of 2 hours and a handful of wipes, but at least now one of my characters has Shehai Shatterer. Then again this was just before Update 14. That Guild's GM was saying they were trying to help as many players they could get Titles and such before the Sustain Disaster hit.

Vaoh

Joy_Division wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

In vMA, most pulls, my strategy was to leave one add clean each pull and full heavy him down. This was much more effective than trying to heavy with several things up. The reason for this is that a full heavy takes a long time and vMA was not designed to have you sit there holding your *** half the time. There are lots of enemy stuns, things that must be blocked, and things you roll dodge. Because only a full heavy returns resources, if any of these things happen, you have to bail, get no resources, and have to try again. This is not really workable. Instead, you just have to contrive these little one add situations where you are unlikely to have your *** holding interrupted. Similarly, it is advisable, on boss fights, to use phases where the boss is incapacitated or little is happening, to hold your ***. Sure, this will feel counter intuitive as you are used to pushing the boss hard when your rotation is unimpeded but believe me, it is best to let the fight take longer, DOT up the boss, and hold left key a while. If you don't believe me try putting it to the boss of arena 7 during that first scream and see how well you do in the time between screams when you run out of juice. As for that final boss fight, good luck with that one, there aren't very nice places to stand there slowly channeling heavies so good luck. You will also likely have some trouble managing stam as odd as that sounds. Also, get ready to drop serious dough on pots. You just can't do anything without them.

In trials that are not vMA there are often stack phases where there is both a lot more support to resources and less stuff to interrupt you *** holding. The biggest problem in these is that when players are rezed after death they are just useless for a while as it will take a long time to get back up to a state of resource management. Well, that is the biggest problem if you are not a healer or tank. Those deaths I had were because a very good tank lost agro do to not having the resources to taunt because those axes in vAA were draining her. Suffice it to say, there seem to be a lot of times when healers can't heal and tanks can't tank.

As for situations with drain resource mechanics like RoM and CoS. Well, I can't play these because I unsubbed but I get a cold shudder when I think about them.

Changes that could minimize the pain while keeping the slower combat less troll builds in PVP idea.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the two driving factors in the changes were to make troll builds in PVP more difficult to make and to slow the average casts per second in combat in order to alleviate server lag. I know ZOS will never admit to wanting to make combat slower paced and less responsive but I do think this was an actual goal and that it was probably part of the longstanding attempt to make Cyridiil playable. This is me crediting the leadership at ZOS with not being completely brain-dead, God I hope that is true. Along the lines that ZOS has chosen to go on there are some changes that could return PVE to being both fun and playable but still get to slower combat and less PVP trolling through resource restriction of average casts per second.

1) Partially charged heavies received a big damage nerf, 30% relative to light attacks (full charged heavies actually got a buff but that is another thread) but do not return any resources despite this being given as the reason for that damage nerf. They need to return a substantial fraction of the full charged resource return. This would both allow those full heavies you had to bail on to be worth something and also give the player the option of going with a medium weave to maintain sustain at the cost of dps. The (lower) average casts per second sought should not change but combat will be a lot less miserable.

2) Rezed players in PVE have to come back with far more resources. Seriously, this sucks donkey balls. It's like, thanks for taking time out from you busy boss killing to pick me up guys, don't mind me while I stand here for a while being useless.

3) Tanks need a better resource management. I don't know an easy way to do this, keep PVE and PVP the same, and also maintain you anti troll PVP goal. Simply, tanks have to block a lot of stuff in PVE and your changes made it so they basically can't keep resources on fights like vAA where there are many things hitting them. Maybe make the attacks from those things count as mini-attacks as far as block cost goes.

Anyhow, combat is like pulling your own teeth out with pliers while holding your *** to make yourself feel better. You should probably fix that. I'm certainly not spending any more money until you do. What data I can now see seems pretty clear to me that I am not alone in my sentiment.

I find the whole "combat burn" and "regen phase" or however ZoS's devs termed the two aspects of combat to be tedious and just means half of combat is boring.

We have really high burst damage and really crappy regen, which favors skilled & experienced players - exactly the opposite of what ZoS intended.

LOL.

Not only this, but the new trial vHoF has a ton of resource-draining mechanics.

THE WHOLE TRIAL IS A REGEN PHASE.

No groups besides the absolute, very best will complete this trial in Morrowind (a few groups per platform). The second boss alone will remain unbeaten except for a handful of players.

Ep1kMalware

Vaoh wrote: »

Joy_Division wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

In vMA, most pulls, my strategy was to leave one add clean each pull and full heavy him down. This was much more effective than trying to heavy with several things up. The reason for this is that a full heavy takes a long time and vMA was not designed to have you sit there holding your *** half the time. There are lots of enemy stuns, things that must be blocked, and things you roll dodge. Because only a full heavy returns resources, if any of these things happen, you have to bail, get no resources, and have to try again. This is not really workable. Instead, you just have to contrive these little one add situations where you are unlikely to have your *** holding interrupted. Similarly, it is advisable, on boss fights, to use phases where the boss is incapacitated or little is happening, to hold your ***. Sure, this will feel counter intuitive as you are used to pushing the boss hard when your rotation is unimpeded but believe me, it is best to let the fight take longer, DOT up the boss, and hold left key a while. If you don't believe me try putting it to the boss of arena 7 during that first scream and see how well you do in the time between screams when you run out of juice. As for that final boss fight, good luck with that one, there aren't very nice places to stand there slowly channeling heavies so good luck. You will also likely have some trouble managing stam as odd as that sounds. Also, get ready to drop serious dough on pots. You just can't do anything without them.

In trials that are not vMA there are often stack phases where there is both a lot more support to resources and less stuff to interrupt you *** holding. The biggest problem in these is that when players are rezed after death they are just useless for a while as it will take a long time to get back up to a state of resource management. Well, that is the biggest problem if you are not a healer or tank. Those deaths I had were because a very good tank lost agro do to not having the resources to taunt because those axes in vAA were draining her. Suffice it to say, there seem to be a lot of times when healers can't heal and tanks can't tank.

As for situations with drain resource mechanics like RoM and CoS. Well, I can't play these because I unsubbed but I get a cold shudder when I think about them.

Changes that could minimize the pain while keeping the slower combat less troll builds in PVP idea.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the two driving factors in the changes were to make troll builds in PVP more difficult to make and to slow the average casts per second in combat in order to alleviate server lag. I know ZOS will never admit to wanting to make combat slower paced and less responsive but I do think this was an actual goal and that it was probably part of the longstanding attempt to make Cyridiil playable. This is me crediting the leadership at ZOS with not being completely brain-dead, God I hope that is true. Along the lines that ZOS has chosen to go on there are some changes that could return PVE to being both fun and playable but still get to slower combat and less PVP trolling through resource restriction of average casts per second.

1) Partially charged heavies received a big damage nerf, 30% relative to light attacks (full charged heavies actually got a buff but that is another thread) but do not return any resources despite this being given as the reason for that damage nerf. They need to return a substantial fraction of the full charged resource return. This would both allow those full heavies you had to bail on to be worth something and also give the player the option of going with a medium weave to maintain sustain at the cost of dps. The (lower) average casts per second sought should not change but combat will be a lot less miserable.

2) Rezed players in PVE have to come back with far more resources. Seriously, this sucks donkey balls. It's like, thanks for taking time out from you busy boss killing to pick me up guys, don't mind me while I stand here for a while being useless.

3) Tanks need a better resource management. I don't know an easy way to do this, keep PVE and PVP the same, and also maintain you anti troll PVP goal. Simply, tanks have to block a lot of stuff in PVE and your changes made it so they basically can't keep resources on fights like vAA where there are many things hitting them. Maybe make the attacks from those things count as mini-attacks as far as block cost goes.

Anyhow, combat is like pulling your own teeth out with pliers while holding your *** to make yourself feel better. You should probably fix that. I'm certainly not spending any more money until you do. What data I can now see seems pretty clear to me that I am not alone in my sentiment.

I find the whole "combat burn" and "regen phase" or however ZoS's devs termed the two aspects of combat to be tedious and just means half of combat is boring.

We have really high burst damage and really crappy regen, which favors skilled & experienced players - exactly the opposite of what ZoS intended.

LOL.

Not only this, but the new trial vHoF has a ton of resource-draining mechanics.

THE WHOLE TRIAL IS A REGEN PHASE.

No groups besides the absolute, very best will complete this trial in Morrowind (a few groups per platform). The second boss alone will remain unbeaten except for a handful of players.

^He's not wrong.

Franieck

Doctordarkspawn wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

From the perspective of a player, without access to subscription statistics, player log data, and other server side data, it is sometimes hard to tell the impact of changes on the player populous. I read the forums, talked with folks in my raid guild, and the opinion was certainly unanimous that people didn't like the sustain changes but to some extent that could be just echo's in an echo chamber or the universal carping about not liking nerfs that you always expect. I was interested therefore to see the actual effect of the changes on scores and runs. I was surprised.

vMA weekly data as a proxy for player performance and engagement
I expected that there would be some drop in vMA weekly scores. Some would be expected even with no major resource nerfs because new content can distract players from their normal activities. Of course, the lure of an open leaderboard after reset and a new trophy at least partially offsets this. Also, vMA runs do not require a group, take relatively little time to do, and few players have all the gear that they need making the 2for1 of weekly runs a regular incentive responded to by many of the same players every week. vMA weekly data therefore seems to me to be the best peice of data about player responses too, and performance under, the new mess of a resource management system. The data completely floored me. It was a bloodbath. 3 of the 4 original classes did not even fill the weekly board on the NA server. NB had only 80, Templar 57, and DK 54 completes. Sorc had all 100 slots filled but dropped about 72k in the cut off score. For reference, I think the last time that the weekly board did not fill was somewhere around a year and a half ago. There have been many events and new content updates since than that did not have any such effects on players doing vMA.

Greater divergence in player performance
While I was genuinely surprised with the magnitude of the effect the changes had on endgame players ability and willingness to do content I was not at all surprised at the magnitude of the divergence in player performance created by the specific nature of the changes. I expected they would have little effect on the top dogs and crush many lesser players and this was certainly the case. In the example of NB's, which I play the most in vMA, the top player lost only 3k from his vMA score whereas, at the bottom of the leaderboard, players who had been at 522k last week apparently rage quit there runs altogether this week. I went from 540k to 480k despite switching some morphs to ones better for vMA (refreshing path and swallow soul) and mainlining expensive pots to the tune of 10k or so. Not only do I think that such massive, systemic resource changes will take much longer for a so-so endgame player to acclimate to but also I think that these changes also complicated the timings of combat making for a magnification of small differences in player performance. In other words, the floor dropped and the ceiling didn't move much. This is counter to the stated goals of ZOS developers but was what I, and others, expected, and explained, in length, on the PTS forum.

Specific problems and thoughts from vMA and other trials
In vMA, most pulls, my strategy was to leave one add clean each pull and full heavy him down. This was much more effective than trying to heavy with several things up. The reason for this is that a full heavy takes a long time and vMA was not designed to have you sit there holding your *** half the time. There are lots of enemy stuns, things that must be blocked, and things you roll dodge. Because only a full heavy returns resources, if any of these things happen, you have to bail, get no resources, and have to try again. This is not really workable. Instead, you just have to contrive these little one add situations where you are unlikely to have your *** holding interrupted. Similarly, it is advisable, on boss fights, to use phases where the boss is incapacitated or little is happening, to hold your ***. Sure, this will feel counter intuitive as you are used to pushing the boss hard when your rotation is unimpeded but believe me, it is best to let the fight take longer, DOT up the boss, and hold left key a while. If you don't believe me try putting it to the boss of arena 7 during that first scream and see how well you do in the time between screams when you run out of juice. As for that final boss fight, good luck with that one, there aren't very nice places to stand there slowly channeling heavies so good luck. You will also likely have some trouble managing stam as odd as that sounds. Also, get ready to drop serious dough on pots. You just can't do anything without them.

In trials that are not vMA there are often stack phases where there is both a lot more support to resources and less stuff to interrupt you *** holding. The biggest problem in these is that when players are rezed after death they are just useless for a while as it will take a long time to get back up to a state of resource management. Well, that is the biggest problem if you are not a healer or tank. Those deaths I had were because a very good tank lost agro do to not having the resources to taunt because those axes in vAA were draining her. Suffice it to say, there seem to be a lot of times when healers can't heal and tanks can't tank.

As for situations with drain resource mechanics like RoM and CoS. Well, I can't play these because I unsubbed but I get a cold shudder when I think about them.

Changes that could minimize the pain while keeping the slower combat less troll builds in PVP idea.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that the two driving factors in the changes were to make troll builds in PVP more difficult to make and to slow the average casts per second in combat in order to alleviate server lag. I know ZOS will never admit to wanting to make combat slower paced and less responsive but I do think this was an actual goal and that it was probably part of the longstanding attempt to make Cyridiil playable. This is me crediting the leadership at ZOS with not being completely brain-dead, God I hope that is true. Along the lines that ZOS has chosen to go on there are some changes that could return PVE to being both fun and playable but still get to slower combat and less PVP trolling through resource restriction of average casts per second.

1) Partially charged heavies received a big damage nerf, 30% relative to light attacks (full charged heavies actually got a buff but that is another thread) but do not return any resources despite this being given as the reason for that damage nerf. They need to return a substantial fraction of the full charged resource return. This would both allow those full heavies you had to bail on to be worth something and also give the player the option of going with a medium weave to maintain sustain at the cost of dps. The (lower) average casts per second sought should not change but combat will be a lot less miserable.

2) Rezed players in PVE have to come back with far more resources. Seriously, this sucks donkey balls. It's like, thanks for taking time out from you busy boss killing to pick me up guys, don't mind me while I stand here for a while being useless.

3) Tanks need a better resource management. I don't know an easy way to do this, keep PVE and PVP the same, and also maintain you anti troll PVP goal. Simply, tanks have to block a lot of stuff in PVE and your changes made it so they basically can't keep resources on fights like vAA where there are many things hitting them. Maybe make the attacks from those things count as mini-attacks as far as block cost goes.

Anyhow, combat is like pulling your own teeth out with pliers while holding your *** to make yourself feel better. You should probably fix that. I'm certainly not spending any more money until you do. What data I can now see seems pretty clear to me that I am not alone in my sentiment.

So essentially what your telling me is the patch had the absolute opposite effect of the stated desire all for the sake of PVP?

So essentially what we ***' called?

Just more ammo for the arguement that PVP and PVE cannot be balanced seperately. Balance them seperate or cut one from the game entirely. You cant do it ZOS. Sorry. You lose.

Too bad they won't even listen to this and just continue to do what they are doing until they feel a financial impact (if at all) due to people quitting the game. Then they'll completely revamp the game again. Because inconZOStencies is what they strive for

f047ys3v3n

Two more weeks and still people just say meh to PVE.

(week 4 of morrowind on PCNA server)
Sorc 519k
NB 434k
Dk 73 completions, no cut
Templar 69 completions, no cut
Warden 32 completions, no cut

(week 5 of morrowind on PCNA server)
Sorc 518k
NB 454k
Dk 70 completions, no cut
Templar 64 completions, no cut
Warden 31 completions, no cut

It looks like maybe even the upward trend in completes is now even waning. I really don't think this is mostly a lack of ability to complete the content. Though 3/4th's of folks that were able to do vMA before will not be able to do it now, I don't think anybody that was doing the weekly leaderboard will fall into that camp. Most of the scores on the weekly board were, or were better than, many no-death runs. I was on the bottom half most weeks and suffered only 6 deaths on the first run post update. I think it is folks hating the combat and not bothering with PVE raiding plain and simple.

On a different note, the all time warden board is still at only 80. This is shocking to me as it takes little time to level a toon now and both stam and mag warden should do well in vMA. That is some serious lack of caring about PvE raiding in the community for the board to be just sitting open after 5 weeks.

On an only loosely related note, I found it pretty funny that ZOS rolled back all the changes to HoF. Was nobody able to do it with all the you can't block this or that changes or something? I have basically not raided since morrowind, the order of which I canceled, so I am out of the loop. In any event, I loled reading the natch potes.

MehrunesFlagon

firedrgn wrote: »

Nerfs will hurt the least skilled players the most. No way to nerff us up. The most skilled players will be able to adapt faster.
I think 1vx or 1v2 in PvP will be a dream for skilled players as the nerffs will show least skilled players weakness more.

It will make grouping a must.

Basically that's the reality of it. Makes it very annoying to run with a healer that doesn't use any form of magicka steal.

f047ys3v3n

The failure continues

(week 6 of morrowind on PCNA server)
Sorc 520k
NB 460k
Dk 78 completions, no cut
Templar 72 completions, no cut
Warden 27 completions, no cut

(week 7 of morrowind on PCNA server)
Sorc 524k
NB 480k
Dk 85 completions, no cut
Templar 84 completions, no cut
Warden 30 completions, no cut

At this point I should think that any arguments about the drop in PVE endgame activity being do to the "new" content should be looking a bit ridiculous. Plain and simple, less folks are doing PVE because they hate the way combat now works.

Since the patch notes for Horns of the Reach have dropped I should also mention those. In general, I think the balance changes are actually good. That being said, the big reason that PVE has seen a massive population drop (resource sustain and heavy attack scaling) has not been addressed at all so I don't really think that the other changes will bring folks back. One thing that will have an interesting effect is the re-balance of weapon traits. I am not sure exactly what will land BIS but I am sure that the traits will be closer in power to each other than they were before. This will greatly effect this little metric for PVE activity I have been using in the following ways:

1) A new trait may be BIS leading to a renewed interest in farming vMA by folks who deconed non-sharpened traits.
2) The traits may be close enough that a lot of players who were still looking for sharpened are happy with what they have and stop farming.
3) Different traits (say ninrnhoned vs precise) may be BIS for different activities and folks may need to farm other traits for other activities leading to more farming.
4) Folks who refused to farm at all because odds worse than 1/100 were crazy may be willing to farm vMA leading to more runs.

My guess is you will see less rather than more farming but who really knows. As long as activity is so pathetic though I intend to occasionally keep beating this dead hoarse because it is more fun than playing.

f047ys3v3n

(week 8 of morrowind on PCNA server)
Sorc 533k
NB 481k
Dk 76 completions, no cut
Templar 87 completions, no cut
Warden 33 completions, no cut

(week 9)
I was playing the event and forgot. Hey, I was actually doing something in game.

(week 10 of morrowind on PCNA server)
Sorc 505k
NB 291k
Dk 47 completions, no cut
Templar 62 completions, no cut
Warden 29 completions, no cut

No fixes for the changes that wrought this mess were present in today's PTS patch notes so evidently the only thing ZOS intends to do to address their hemorrhaging PVE player base is to delete my other thread that had broader stats on that and warn me not to post such things. Suffice it to say that I found data from a source they did not want spoken of that indicated significant population loss beyond just the serious PVE'rs who are clearly not doing as much PVE as they used too.

Danksta

From the perspective of vMA I actually like the changes, but the affect it's had on the already dwindling raiding community is the part I don't like.

f047ys3v3n

I forgot week 11 and 12 because I had some new business equipment to purchase and so had a lot on my mind.

(week 13 of morrowind on PCNA server I believe this was also HotR launch)
Sorc 479k
NB 99 completions, no cut
Dk 38 completions, no cut
Templar 54 completions, no cut
Warden 25 completions, no cut

(week 14)
Sorc 491k
NB 95 completions, no cut
Dk 51 completions, no cut
Templar 60 completions, no cut
Warden 33 completions, no cut

(week 15 of morrowind on PCNA server)
Sorc 507k
NB 315k
Dk 56 completions, no cut
Templar 69 completions, no cut
Warden 31 completions, no cut

Evidently HotR didn't really bring much excitement back to PvE players.

MakoFore

from personal experience- my DPS on all classes dropped at least 5 to 10k . in truth i havent adjusted to the heavy attack , ele drain, etc playstyle, im still conditioned to light attack weaving and havent had time to practise. i did a couple parses was so horrified at my dps- that i didnt go back. i was accostomed to pulling 35-40k now im lucky if i pull 24.
in vMA my best scores on my sorcs where 550k now its around 450k. again i havent had time to practise as i used to. overall i feel everything is way harder- and less fluid- HOWEVER
- i must say - i do find it more enjoyable now. and more satisfying. in the past i would just enchant, and trait and build for damage damage damage, just go ham on enemies and mobs with attacks- nowi have to constantly check my resources- yes its harder- but overall ive found it more gratifying . my first clear was painful after the nerfs but i went back- re-jigged my build, now i have to consider my build and class and cp before i go in there- in the past it was basic.

Zer0oo

The morrowind changes were one of the most idiotic changes for pve they made and they have screwed up a lot of things. Now everyone just spams heavy attacks like crazy and doesn't really any support from the healer except for elem drain. Combat just feels quite boring now.

f047ys3v3n

Last week Clockwork city hit the PTS and we found out that vMA weapons are going to be, for the most part, useless. They are having their special enchant changed to a 1 pc set bonus. You can therefore add a normal enchant to them which would be good (though not really much stronger since many were getting a similar effect using poison on one bar) but they are also removing the 1.5x strength stat bonus that the weapons have that was much more powerful than any enchant you can add so, the net effect, is a big nerf. I expect that most will no longer really be worth having let alone actually spending the time and effort to actually acquire. The bottom line is that they only buff one ability and not in a particularly dramatic fashion. I think in almost every case that buff will prove weaker than even a normal 1pc set stat bonus which buffs all abilities and attacks. For this reason, and because I'm tiring of beating the drum, this will be my last update on this. I'm not sure why anybody would run vMA anymore short of competing for the top spots on the leader-board. Anyhow, here is the data:

I forgot week 16 post morrowind for no particular reason

(week 17)
Sorc 499k
NB 272k
Dk 53 completions, no cut
Templar 56 completions, no cut
Warden 17 completions, no cut

(week 18)
Sorc 494k
NB 286k
Dk 58 completions, no cut
Templar 65 completions, no cut
Warden 14 completions, no cut

Not much in the way of changes to comment on except that for whatever reason Wardens seem to be going extinct. How ironic is it by the way that after so much time with so little raiding content we get 3 updates in a row with endgame PVE stuff only after half of the raiders quit due to a screwed up combat system. Good timing on all that. Here is to hoping for, some changes late in PTS but really not expecting anything good. All I can see in the clockwork patch notes is a few minor balance things aimed at PVP that I think the jury is still out on and a big insulting FU to all those folks who acquired vMA and master weapons. Oh, and the new trial weapons will be good for sorcs but no so much for anybody else so I guess buff for them.