PTS Patch Notes v3.1.0

Oompuh

Saturn wrote: »

• The Lover: Now grants 2752 Physical and Spell Penetration instead of granting Spell Resistance.

There seems to be something wrong with this mundus stone, since a friend and I both picked it up, but while I get 2752, he gets 4059.

Pictures to prove:

Divines?

Hymzir

Hmm... Interesting changes... Not sure what to make of this, except that this will change everything once again. At least you didn't target nerf Templars this time. So I guess that's something to be positive about. But overall, it's a mixed bag. There are lot of good changes there, few really bad ones and a lot that are difficult to predict as to which way they will go.

I, myself, am on the verge of calling it quits on this game, and in many ways this update was the one to decide whether I go or stay. In all honesty, am not sure what to make of this all. In any case, I wont be participating much in this round of PTS, since am gonna travel soon abroad and be away for a moth or so. When I come back, this thing will be on live and I guess I'll see then what's what and whether I stop all together, become an occasional player, or continue playing more or less actively.

But even so, there were few eye brow rising things in the notes that I do want to comment on, so here goes...

Mundus Stones
Developer Comments: Mundus Stone values and bonuses have been re-tuned with a focus on improving overall diversity. Almost all Mundus Stones were buffed, with the exception of The Thief which was slightly nerfed due to it overshadowing all other choices. The Lady was upgraded to grant both Spell and Physical Resistance, and The Lover was completely redesigned to grant Spell and Physical Penetration to counteract The Lady and provide greater flexibility in stat choices.

We’ve also standardized Mundus Stone values against other systems that grant similar bonuses, such as enchantments or Item Sets, so you can customize the stats you care about in each system without needing to worry about weighing the exact values against each other. Mundus Stones are now equivalent to 1.85x of an Item Set bonus.

Weapon Traits
Developer Comments: Similar to how Mundus Stones were changed, Weapon Trait values have also been rebalanced with a focus on improving overall diversity. Almost all Weapon Traits were buffed, with the exception of Sharpened and Defending which were nerfed due to them over-performing. They should still remain one of the strongest options for increasing your damage or survivability, but now the power difference between them and other traits is no longer so massive.

Prosperous was completely re-designed to grant a new combat function and will be an interesting choice for builds seeking to maximize resource recovery gains. Pairing the Divines trait with a recovery Mundus Stone will grant more recovery for that particular stat, but Prosperous will grant more recovery overall.

So these are the really big changes this patch then... In general, I suppose, this is a good move. But it does make one wonder about how it will all play out. Thief was way better than the rest, and many were utterly useless so on that ground, it's a necessary thing to change. However, this plan will make Divine trait even better than it already is, and even more of a must have type thing.

With the changes to Sharpened and Precise traits, I am left wondering would the smart move be to keep using lots of divine pieces and pick the Lover mundus for penetration and then run around with Precise weapon to make up for the loss in crit rating.

I'm not gonna crunch the numbers, do not have time for it, nor the inclination really. Besides I'm sure that there are others much better at it, and much more keen on running them, and they will do the math by the time this thing hits live and I'm back from my trip. But juggling the numbers quickly in my head, one does start to wonder will this really change anything since you are also boosting gear bonuses for crits, and doing so by a fairly hefty degree... So perhaps it's possible to get roughly similar numbers by juggling CP around a bit, still having divine the top choice for gear, and just moving the meta to Lover and Precise instead of Thief and Sharpened. I mean with 7 legendary divine pieces you'd get what... 4196 penetration. And if you have crit bonuses in your current gear... Well those got turned up by 55% each. My current gear has three crit bonues, so I just got over 1.5 new gear set bonuses worth to my crit rating. And with each gear crit bonus being worth about 3 percent or so, that means I got 4.5% more of crit chance from those bonuses. Couple that with a Precise weapon and you are pretty close to the number you had with Thief mundus and Sharpened weapon.

If that ends up being the case, then I predict a lot of people who forked out outrageous amounts of gold for sharpened weapons, or spent countless hours grinding them while deconning or vendor trashing precise version of those weapons, are not gonna be all that happy.

But that's the thing - with every patch you change everything. ZOS simply does not do tweaking. Let's take sharpened as an example - back when you guys last did weapon trait re-balancing, we told you that sharpened was miles better than anything else. But you defended your design saying that sharpened was better at dealing damage, but was equal to Nirnhoned and Precise since those also boosted healing and so on... The community did what you obviously did not - we crunched the numbers and told you that you were wrong. Sharpened was better in almost every scenario and situation. And not by a bit, but by a wide wide wide margin. You didn't listen then and here we are now, over a year later you are finally doing something about the issue. And instead of tweaking the numbers, you are slashing sharpened to half of what it was! That is not tweaking an over performing trait, that is a drastic nerf to the ground.

Not saying that sharpened doesn't deserve it, but it just amuses me, that you were so sure that it wasn't that much over performing when compared to the other traits back then. And that it fostered build variety and player choice. But the math was telling a totally different story. It was Sharpened or go home. We told you to buff the other traits but you didn't listen back then. And now, after time has proven that you were indeed wrong as we told you repeatedly, and you are buffing nirn and precise and burning sharpened to the ground. Math matters in game design you know... And math is hard, so please listen to the experts when they crunch the numbers and tell you what's what this time around, okay? And if they say the nerf is too much, and that no one will use sharpened from now one, listen to them and reduce the nerf.

As for this idea...

[/list]
[*]The Prosperous Armor Trait has been re-designed to give it a combat function. It now grants 11 Health, Magicka, and Stamina Recovery as a gold-quality item, instead of gold gain.
[/list]

You are basically turning a bad trait to an utterly worthless one... Good grief. No one likes Prosperous because of what it does. People hate it because it is bad, not because the concept itself is garbage. If it increased drop chances for rare loot, you can bet your butt on it that people would be using it a lot more. If it increased gold yield from mobs by 12% per piece at legendary, people would be gold plating their prosperous junk. But it doesn't - math proves that it is, in most situations, a bad thing to wear, and that sturdy is better since it saves on repair costs. Only when farming high gold dropping mobs is prosperous a good investment. And with that, it actually has a legitimate purpose. It's just something people do not want from their dropped DPS or tanking or Healing sets. Prosperous is best for crafted gear just Like Training. It's something you do occasionally and intentionally. It's not the kinda trait you take with you to PVP or Trials.

Tweaking the numbers in such a way that it would drop more gold would actually be a really good idea, and would make mob farming for gold a much better way to earn money, and a meaningful alternative to running around in speed gear and farming nodes for mats to sell.

With this change, this trait becomes utterly useless. With 7 gold pieces you'd get 77 stamina, health and magicka recovery. Big whooping deal. Nobody cares about health recovery anyways, except dedicated health recovery builds. And they are not going to be using Prosperous gear. As for the rest of us... Well, nobody is going to pick 77 stamina and Magicka recovery over the meaningful reduction to crit damage you get with Impenetrable, or the large gains to base stats through Infused and thus bigger shield and stuff, nor over the huge boosts you can get with the better than ever Divine pieces.

In short - this change makes prosperous even worse than it was, and that is a remarkable feat of game design on itself. I wouldn't have thought it was possible to make Prosperous worse than it was. My hat's off to you. Well done.

At the very least you have to keep the old gold bonus along with the new marginal rec gain. That way it will still have it's old niche use, and won' be a total waste for those who happen to get a monster piece in Prosperous. Not something you are going to hold onto once a better one presents itself, or comes up for sale on the golden vendor. But in the meanwhile it will at least do something for your build.

The thing is, that there will always be best is slot. And that is Divine for most - with Imp being a reasonable alternative in PVP. Infused is a good all a rounder second place, and even best for some builds. The rest have their niche and special build uses. Prosperous is never going to be equal to those. And if it will, then it will just bump one of the other into the garbage category. As long as there are several traits focusing on the same aspect of game play, there will be best and garbage traits. Only by influencing different things all together, will you be able to have several equally useful traits in the game.

Prosperous should be aimed at non combat actions. Maybe increase node yield when harvesting, or increase rate of blue items when pick pocketing stuff. Or it could continue doing what it does, but do it at a level where it is actually useful!

I predict, that 9 moths from now, in what ever patch we will be testing on PTS then, Prosperous is going to be redesigned once more to do something utterly different since no one is using it's current incarnation. You guys need to stop redesigning stuff that is under performing and learn to actually tweak stuff. If something is under performing, boost it by 20% and see if that will make a change. If something is over performing, reduce it by 20% and see if that will fix things.

So in short - Please learn the meaning of TWEAKING! It's not the same as redesigning from scratch and hoping the new idea will work.

Item Sets

As for the item set changes, and more importantly the proc set changes... Seems fine mostly. There are some odd ones in there for sure, and do wonder how some of them will play out. But I'm not a heavy proc set users, so don't really care, and a cursory read of the suggested changes does point toward there being less proc-tard insta ganker builds running about when this thing goes live. And that's a good thing.

But all of that is a mixed bag, and not something that sways me one way or another as far as keeping playing this game goes. Well except maybe that Prosperous bit. Since I did just invest in a full set of Prosperous gear for looting gold and all. Cost me almost 3.5k gold... Damn that sucks. (Not really, no - just hoped that there was an alternative to pick pocketing and stealing, or node harvesting as far as gold making goes. Still got my Speedy Gonzales suit for zooming about like the Flash while harvesting nodes, and I suppose I can keep being a petty criminal and stealing everything that isn't nailed down. But the option for grinding for gold was nice to have)

However, the things that really irk me about this patch are these things:

Three New Motifs
The Hlaalu, Redoran, and Telvanni Motifs are now available in Vvardenfell! These three styles and their associated style items can be found by stealing from citizens of Vvardenfell - picking their pockets, stealing from their safe boxes, and looting Thieves Troves left behind by fellow members of the Thieves Guild.

We are now well over 50 with these styles. And that's like 40 or so that come in separate chapters and require huge amounts of grind to collect. Boring repetitive unrewarding waste of my life. I said to hell with this nonsense couple of dozen motif's back and stopped caring about them, so let's just add these to the list of *** I wont give a flying *** about. The only reason I started to collect them again was due to master writs being dependent on knowing this crap. But the drop rates for master writs are themselves abysmally low, utterly RNG based and very unfair. One dude crafts a ton and gets a two voucher writ while another does one writ on a lark and gets a 300 voucher writ as a reward. Yay what fun. So I stopped caring about motifs once more. And stopped doing writs since it is soul crushingly disappointing.

And not like motifs have any real use, since there still is no transmog (the news that it is under plans is good, but way too late. Way too late.) and most crafted gear is junk. And due to horrid, vomit inducing Monster Set Designs you are forced to wear costumes anyway, so even if you have a crafted set it's not gonna show on your character.

But the real kicker with these is that there is no non illegal way for gathering them. I'm so sick and tired that I need to go stealing and murdering people left and right just to find furniture plans or to make any kind of decent amount of gold for my time spent playing. And now these things will require more theft and murder. Oh joy.

And about them master writs and doing crafting writs for them, and thus gathering motifs to up your chances for them to drop... Well...

Updates for Rolis Hlaalu, the Master Writ Merchant
Rolis Hlaalu's inventory has been updated! His gold furnishing plans have been replaced with new stock, so there is now a new gold quality furnishing plan for each profession available. The previously available recipes are being retired for the time being, though they may show up again at some point in the future in his selection or elsewhere.

I am still missing most of the stuff on sale by that dude at this moment, since my luck with Master Writs has been so bad that I quit doing them. Was thinking of restarting and trying to get at least a few of them, but now I learn that I wont have the time since they will be pulled off the shop and become privileged things known by the lucky ones. And the rest of us will just have to suck it up.

So... That makes me think, how about just saying *** it all, and go do something else with my time. Since I refuse to waste my time praying to the RNGesus to be kind to me at least once in my life. - A fun fact... None of the weapons used by any of my characters (obviously all are sharpened - duh... Except the few defending ones I use to tank up) are something I actually found while playing. All of them I've had to buy from guild stores. Since I've had zero luck with a decent weapon dropping. I did get a sharpened Bone pirate Bow - too bad I have no character that has a use for it... Oh... Wait, I didn't have to buy Nimriian's Shortblade of Soulshine, since that comes as a named drop from a delve boss. But I did have to buy the other Sharpened Soulshine sword from a guild store, despite having spent close to 100 hours trying to farm one.

But hte point here is that - Not all of us have been lucky enough to get the previous bunch, and removing them from the MAster Writ Merchant means that we will most likely never have tehm. And the one's with good fortune with vouchers, who are sitting on large stacks of unused ones can make a killing selling these once they are pulled from the store.

That means I will never have them, and If I will not have this patch, I will not bother getting the next patch either and thus ultimately will decide not to bother with trying to collect furnishing recipes and thus will lose my main reason for playing.

And speaking of de-motivating grinds...

New Furnishings
A number of new recipes and furnishings have been added to the game, obtainable by participating in various activity throughout the world. These include, but are not limited to, harvesting certain types of nodes or in certain areas, participating in Justice and defeating enemies in the new Horns of the Reach dungeons, Coldharbour, and Ayleid Ruins.

I'm a housing guy. I like setting up home in all the games I play that allow it. I am mostly happy with homestead and am dreaming of what kind of home system will be in Elder Scrolls 6. With the one if Fallout 4 and the system in ESO - the future looks promising as far as virtual home building goes.

But it is a despicable grind in ESO. One that I am having really dark thoughts about. Really dark. Like physically hurting the people who designed it dark. The kind that makes me feel very uncomfortable for having such thoughts. And making me think that I really should be using my time in playing something more rewarding and less depressing. The amount of grind that is required by the system is inhumane.

And with Morrowind things took a turn to even darker territories. I too, like many others, were blown away by the new furnishing models brought on by Morrowind and they were a key factor for me in deciding to get the bloody expansion. But the drop rates for the stuff is abysmal. It is so hard to get them that I have kissed goodbye to my plans on having a Morrowind style furnished home.

And then there are the Dwemer things that require atrocious amounts of dwemer frames. Each which requires ten fairly rare themselves. A simple dwemer bucket requires 60 frigging rare drops from dwemer type mobs to make. That is nuts. So you can guess what happened to my idea on having a dwemer type house set up... Yeah, that's gone too. Will not bother with that crap.

And now you are introducing more of the same? I really hope not. Sounds like Ayleid ruins will offer Ayleid furnishing stuff which is cool - especially since one of my hopes was to be able to set up an Ayleid style home at some point. But if the grind is equal to getting Morrowidn style furnishing plans, and if they require similar amounts of rare drops that Dwemer stuff does... Well *** it is my answer. Will not do it, will not care, will not play. End of discussion.

See, there was this one thing in the notes that seemed to be going to the other direction. The right direction. The direction this game should be going as a whole. I'm talking about this bit here:

• The Tel Var Jewelry Lockbox Merchants now sell rings and necklaces directly with no intervening box.
  • These items are always Champion 160, with Legendary (Gold) quality.
  • Their cost remains the same: 100,000 Tel Var stones apiece.
  • As a result of these changes, these vendors (Tumande, Kharzolga, and Hears-the-Stone) are now known as Tel Var Jewelry Merchants.

If I understood correctly this change, this is the type of change that is desperately needed more in this game. Removal of a layer of RNG. This is the type of stuff you need to add more into the game. With every expansion you introduce, you should take old stuff that used to be RNG based and just put it up on sale for gold, or AP or Telvar. Just have some dude somewhere selling stuff you used to have to grind for.

At the rate you are going, new players will give up after a week or so, when they realize that they are so far behind in grinding for crap that why even bother starting up.

Let's say a new player wants to become a master crafter. Cool... First get your skills to 50, then learn the traits for gear and find recipes for furniture and provision. Which will take forever. And then go grind for all the bloody different motifs which will take another eternity. All the while doing craft writs in hope of getting master writs, which you may very well not get at all, and then learn that some of the staff is no longer available at all. There's just way too much of crap on the to do list to even bother starting it.

So just start placing old stuff on sale from NPCs and the problem goes away. People who grinded for it will whine a bit and then go farm the new stuff. People who tried to grind for it and were not blessed by RNGesus will sigh a relief. Fork over the gold and then go try their luck with the new stuff. And new players will see clear, precise goal posts for getting all that cool stuff. And no one has to suffer due to bad luck with RNG.

Well - that is what I had to say about these changes. I do have few smaller remarks, but they are not really that important. So I'll just throw them here at the end. Feel free to skip tehm if you've had enough of my rambling at this point.

General

• Certain Servants in Hew’s Bane were carrying items associated with Addicts. They’ve kicked the habit, and no longer carry these items.

So.... Where are people supposed to be farming their skooma bubblers in the future then? I suppose those who managed to farm them are happy and the rest are just so screwed.

Crafting Writs

• Unified the behavior of crafting Writ delivery sites in Vivec City. These sites are now consistently used for rank one Writs instead of a mix of rank one and maximum rank Writs.
• Fixed an issue that caused the crafting certification quests to appear earlier than intended. They now appear at level 6 in all cases.

Please let us start being able to turn our writs in back in any zone, or at least the zone where we picked them up in the first place. Going to Craglorn for all max level writs is stupid and inconvenient. Most of these drop of points are left unused since people level past them pretty quickly. And Belkarth is over crowded anyway. I want to drop my stuff of at Sentinel - the place were my primary abode is. I don't want to drag my ass all the way to Belkarth just to drop off some crap.

Weapon

• Two Handed
  • Reverse Slash: Fixed an issue where this ability and its morphs would grant slightly less than a 300% damage bonus against a target at 1% Health.

Really... I don't really think anyone noticed there being an issue there... But hey, one less bug and all that so... Yay, I suppose?

[*]Destruction Staff

• Added new icons for each of the elemental variants of Destructive Touch, Wall of Elements, and Impulse.
• Fixed an issue where Lightning Staff heavy attacks were not commanding your pets to attack that target.
• Wall of Elements: Fixed an issue where this ability and its morphs were not displaying correct tooltip information in their tooltip headers.

And nothing done about destro ulti... Long live the destro zergs of Cyrodiil!

mvffins

Very upset about the changes to the Dumar and Altmer crafting books since this destroys the flavor of the Elder Scrolls. Its bad enough that there is little use of the term Bosmer.

My point is WoW calls them Elves, ESO should call them Mer. I want to play elder scrolls not warcraft.

MacMurroughTheFirst

SanTii.92 wrote: »

Yuke wrote: »

And even then could we not panic day one of testing. There is a month ahead of pts, provide feedback.

so much this.

I wanted to wait until later to see the patch notes but I've been getting so many snarky and cynical twitter notifications from the more popular youtubers and streamers in the community that I had to find out what was wrong.

But so far, this looks like a very valid attempt at making changes and could probably use more actual gameplay, testing and feedback. So I can't figure out why more of the comments aren't starting with "well, I tested this myself on PTS and...."

ARIES SERPICO

Astrid_V wrote: »

Sharpened trait nerfed by nearly a half, still no token system, what about all these people who farmed like crazy their sharpened weapons ZOS? Why are you spit on your players once again? I'm done.

Bye Felicia!

LordSlif

ARIES SERPICO wrote: »

Astrid_V wrote: »

Sharpened trait nerfed by nearly a half, still no token system, what about all these people who farmed like crazy their sharpened weapons ZOS? Why are you spit on your players once again? I'm done.

Bye Felicia!

It was a good move

Bobby_V_Rockit

vecny

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Welcome to The Elder Scrolls Online v3.1.0 and the Horns of the Reach DLC Game Pack!

This update comes in two parts–the DLC Game Pack and the base game patch. The base game patch will be available to everyone who owns The Elder Scrolls Online and the DLC Game Pack will automatically download with it, allowing you instant access to the new content when you purchase it or activate an ESO Plus membership.

Anyone who owns ESO and has an active ESO Plus membership will also automatically have access to the Horns of the Reach DLC Game Pack. If your ESO Plus membership ends or lapses, you will no longer have access to the DLC Game Pack content and areas, but you will still have any items you earned while you had access.

In this update, you’ll be able to explore and conquer two all-new 4 player dungeons – Bloodroot Forge and Falkreath Hold. These dungeons offer new item sets, Monster Masks, achievements and unique rewards!

How will it be from DLC for those who do not have eso +? Will it be good to buy?

vecny

How will it be from DLC for those who do not have ace +? Will it be good to buy?

ArchMikem

Domihaus (Monster)
(1) Max Stamina
(1) Max Magicka
(2) When you deal damage, you have a 15% chance to create either a ring of fire or a ring of molten earth around you for 10 seconds, which deals 1,000 Flame Damage or 1,000 Physical Damage every 1 second. Standing within the ring grants you 200 Spell Damage or 200 Weapon Damage. This effect can occur once every 15 seconds.

ZoS, no matter how hard you try, Hybrid builds will never be a thing until you make drastic changes to the game mechanics itself. No one's going to use this Set, even if it has potential it's squandered by making it something that gives to both Magic and Stamina, they don't want to play Russian Roulette with that 2pc Proc.

BigES

Joy_Division wrote: »

BigES wrote: »

You're nerfing sharpened?

Let me get this straight. People are already upset with RNG, and PLEADING for a token system for loot. Your game is on the brink of failure. You're losing streamers. You're losing players. One of the few things that's keeping people around at this point is their time invested. Destiny 2 is about to come out.

Then you nerf a BiS trait (sharpened) by 50%? A trait that's been BiS for several, several, several patches now. A trait that was VERY EARLY ON recognized as a bit overpowered (thanks to @Asayre ) by nearly 4 times comparatively.

Then you let everyone farm their gear, and just nerf it over a year later?

This is not a threat, and I really don't care if its perceived as dramatic, but if you nerf sharpened by 50% I'm quitting your game and giving you zero dollars lol. I'm not going to refarm all my gear for BiS in a game where min/maxing is a major aspect of the game.

What a selfish attitude derived from ignorance - you have no idea how these changes will play out.

Yes. How dare I suggest that twisting the magnitude of traits (relative to each other) wildly from one direction to another after over a year of implementation is unreasonable. These changes are great for balance and build variety! We'll all just start over, and farm a variety of....

Sorry. That's all the Kool-Aid I could swallow.

Ignorance? Doesn't take rocket science (actually just a very basic Excel sheet) to understand that a 50% nerf is game changing when compared to traits that were already relatively similar in fully (de)buffed trials and also relatively close when it came to shielded targets in PvP.

Tone down sharpened? Fine. But 50%? What a joke.

JarlUlfric

ArchMikem wrote: »

Domihaus (Monster)
(1) Max Stamina
(1) Max Magicka
(2) When you deal damage, you have a 15% chance to create either a ring of fire or a ring of molten earth around you for 10 seconds, which deals 1,000 Flame Damage or 1,000 Physical Damage every 1 second. Standing within the ring grants you 200 Spell Damage or 200 Weapon Damage. This effect can occur once every 15 seconds.

ZoS, no matter how hard you try, Hybrid builds will never be a thing until you make drastic changes to the game mechanics itself. No one's going to use this Set, even if it has potential it's squandered by making it something that gives to both Magic and Stamina, they don't want to play Russian Roulette with that 2pc Proc.

It's not a hybrid build, it's based off of your max damage. So it does Either/or

SanTii.92

ArchMikem wrote: »

Domihaus (Monster)
(1) Max Stamina
(1) Max Magicka
(2) When you deal damage, you have a 15% chance to create either a ring of fire or a ring of molten earth around you for 10 seconds, which deals 1,000 Flame Damage or 1,000 Physical Damage every 1 second. Standing within the ring grants you 200 Spell Damage or 200 Weapon Damage. This effect can occur once every 15 seconds.

ZoS, no matter how hard you try, Hybrid builds will never be a thing until you make drastic changes to the game mechanics itself. No one's going to use this Set, even if it has potential it's squandered by making it something that gives to both Magic and Stamina, they don't want to play Russian Roulette with that 2pc Proc.

This isn't hybrid. Set procs are based on your highest attribute. So fire if max mag and physical if max stam.

Bobby_V_Rockit

[delete]

LadyLethalla

Just a few tiny things that are still an ongoing issue...

Celestial style still does not have any icons - so my character that's using a Celestial Julianos on the main bar looks like she has no weapon equipped.

The Alchemy writ that (currently) does not ask for nirnroot asks instead for Cloud Mist - but I believe it actually requires Lorkhan's Tears...?

Can you please STOP the damn merchant and banker from teleporting! So annoying when you're trying to interact with them and they're suddenly behind you.


Overall I'm cautiously optimistic about the changes... happy for the nerf to Sharpened EXCEPT for the characters that I bothered to farm them for or spent a crapton of gold to acquire. -______-
NOT quite so happy about iLambris though...

Vapirko

Why is no one bringing up the issue that the damage proc sets are still a huge issue, and theyre adding more of them?

stthompub17_ESO

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Winter’s Embrace

Crystallized Shield: Updated this ability and its morphs’ tooltips to indicate the maximum damage they can absorb from a single projectile.

On this note, Crystallized Shield expires ALL of its shields if the threshold of one shield is exceeded, rather than just carrying over to the next shield (or just dealing excess damage to the caster), which seems like a bug. This is especially bad because it means you only get one activation of magicka return or reflect, depending on morph.

Fonzman517

This patch makes me and many others want to quit the game. ZOS your game is slowly dying and will die if you continue down this road of balancing. You nerf cp, BiS gear and then what's next get rid of CP and make everyone the same. This is why a lot of your top players and raiding guilds have been quitting the game. You try to make people happy in PvP but fail then make everything crappy for PvE content. If you would fix some of the bugs in PvP you wouldn't have so much "unbalanced builds" that you have to "balance."

GIJhen

I would like to see a group finder for trials, for those who just want to grind gear this would be really nice

BigES

Overall, I am very disappointed with the changes to proc sets as well. I appreciate that you tackled sets individually, but after all the great nerf/adjustment suggestions by community members, this is the direction we went? Gimmicky volcanoes, spores, and more cluttered, laggy nonsense?

Yes they needed a nerf, but why not use one of the much better suggestions given by community members?

1) global cooldown, or
2) directly reduce their damage (make viper hit for 1.5k to 2k less), or
3) apply percent chances to sets like Viper, etc.

Of all the well reasoned solutions, you went with make it a cleansable DoT? Templars are going to laugh that stuff off.

Visually cues aren't the primary problem. I know it's coming already. But sets like Selene's and Veledeth are not avoidable when you are getting Incap/Selene's bursted in the middle of a stun. How does this even solve that issue? And how do these changes solve the issue of these sets over-performing in the resources vs. damage trade-off that is supposed to be happening when you get free damage directly from your armor?

LadyLethalla

General

In an effort to reduce the visual effect noise in group combat situations, we’ve hidden most visual effects from persistent damaging area of effect abilities cast by your allies. Area of effect abilities that have a synergy, healing, or defensive component that can benefit you will still be visible, and area of effect abilities cast by enemies will also still be visible.


So... here's hoping that this change will mean less lag and fewer disconnects in Trials...?

Tevalaur

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

General

• In an effort to reduce the visual effect noise in group combat situations, we’ve hidden most visual effects from persistent damaging area of effect abilities cast by your allies. Area of effect abilities that have a synergy, healing, or defensive component that can benefit you will still be visible, and area of effect abilities cast by enemies will also still be visible.
  • Affected player abilities include the following:
    • Ash Cloud and its morphs
    • Path of Darkness and the Twisting Path morph
    • Volatile Familiar Special Ability
    • Hurricane
    • Rune Focus and its morphs
    • Impaling Shards and its morphs
    • Volley and its morphs
    • Wall of Elements and its morphs
    • Elemental Storm and its morphs
    • Caltrops and its morphs
  • Affected Item Set abilities include the following:
    • Bahraha’s Curse
    • Essence Thief
    • Grothdarr
    • Hand of Mephala
    • Ilambris
    • Infernal Guardian
    • Leeching Plate
    • Nerien’eth
    • Sellistrix
    • Sheer Venom
    • Storm Knight’s Plate
    • Thunderbug’s Carapace
    • Tremorscale
    • Velidreth
    • Winterborn
    
    Developer Comments:
    Having less visual effects on your screen improves both visual clarity and performance, which makes it easier to respond to the more important visuals that come from enemy attacks.

@ZOS_GinaBruno
This raises a concern over how allies will know a good area to draw enemies into so that they sustain Damage over Time effects. While the visual lag reduction sounds promising, I fear a loss to group DPS when players don't see where these DoT skills are occurring.

FrancisCrawford

PlagueSD wrote: »

Astrid_V wrote: »

Sharpened trait nerfed by nearly a half, still no token system, what about all these people who farmed like crazy their sharpened weapons ZOS? Why are you spit on your players once again? I'm done.

Can I have your stuff???

No you can't, because it was all Bind-on-Pickup.

Saturn

Tavore1138 wrote: »

Vicious Death still not punished like all the other proc sets - the original and worst of them gets a free pass along with proxy det. Guess ZOS supports bombing?

@Tavore1138
It doesn't work like it used to, I mean notice how no one is making mag nightblade 1 man vs. zerg videos anymore, and with the nerf to prox det a while back, as well as other things that made the magblade bomb builds work. It has its moments where it shines, but overall is not as devastating as other proc sets, and never saw the kind of usage that viper did. These changes ensure that there is more than one way to run an efficient stam pvp setup that doesn't only involve viper and impregnable.

Also, I'm fairly sure viper has always been the mother of all proc sets, considering it was included with SO when upper craglorn was added in 2014, whereas vicious death came later when they added more pvp sets in 2016 alongside the Thieves' Guild DLC.

Saturn

LadyLethalla wrote: »

General

In an effort to reduce the visual effect noise in group combat situations, we’ve hidden most visual effects from persistent damaging area of effect abilities cast by your allies. Area of effect abilities that have a synergy, healing, or defensive component that can benefit you will still be visible, and area of effect abilities cast by enemies will also still be visible.


So... here's hoping that this change will mean less lag and fewer disconnects in Trials...?

Those have to do with the servers moreso than anything else. Funny how today when the PTS was updated the servers actually had a fit (maybe from all the downloads), but people were crashing and teleporting a lot. Though it could also have been a bug with their most recent patch, since it's hard to tell with these guys, as they always mix it up a lot, obviously to keep their players ready for anything ;p

What the changes might help prevent are things such as situations where everyone is dropping everything, i.e. ultimates, ground dots, etc. and everybody has single-digit frames for a little while, as well as improving general trial / pvp performance.

Mysteri0n

Still havent address the biggest issue with housing we need more slots, our guild hall the chatteu looks empty but is maxed out @ZOS_GinaBruno any plans for uping the house slots or to add storage like mankins to display armor etc

CromulentForumID

BigES wrote: »

This is not a threat, and I really don't care if its perceived as dramatic, but if you nerf sharpened by 50% I'm quitting your game and giving you zero dollars lol. I'm not going to refarm all my gear for BiS in a game where min/maxing is a major aspect of the game.

Maybe it's a major aspect for you, but it isn't for a lot of players. I don't think I'm going out on a limb and saying the majority of players aren't interested in min/max or getting everything BiS. Do they want some good sets? Sure. Do they want to farm the same content 200 times to get that ideal weapon or armor piece? Probably not.

In all of the MMOs I have played, the "hardcore" audience inevitably fails to realize that the way they play and enjoy the game is not the only way to do so. The way they play isn't wrong, of course - it's just not the way everyone plays. It's not even the "best" way.

I do feel bad for all of those players who spent a ton of time farming content for a sharpened weapon. However, that weapon wasn't necessary to play most of the content. So, some looking into the mirror has to come with the anger about this change.

It's an MMO, and it changes a lot - which is why I'm fine with "decent." Your favorite "whatever" can change at any time.

FrancisCrawford

LadyLethalla wrote: »

Can you please STOP the damn merchant and banker from teleporting! So annoying when you're trying to interact with them and they're suddenly behind you.

Amen!!!!!!!!

Nemesis7884

the reduction to sharpened is kinda annoying tbh, you basically have to recalculate all chars now and spriggans will become even more sought after and dominant so i don't like that at all

by the way: how many bleed abilities are there? Only the ones from the weapon skill lines? That set seems like an interesting idea but way underpowered

MurderMostFoul

My second thought on these potes:

Tremorscale needs to be added to the list of toned down procs. The utter cheese that oozes from that set is the envy of all nacho platters.