Malevolent Offering feedback and proposed change

Nox_Noir

I know everyones time is precious so I'll start off with a tl;dr plus my proposed change to it and add the detailed feedback below that for those who wanna read it.

Malevolent Offering TL;DR: Interesting idea but it's impractical, and adds nothing new.
Nightblade has more than enough healing over time options already from it's class abilities and resto staff that are all more attractive than MO, what it direly lacks is group utility and synergies.
Instead, please change the skill into a Support ability that makes NB desirable as a healer or tank in a unique way.
I propose something like a ground AOE that doesn't heal but instead restores a small amount of resources to allies and/or perhaps a synergy option. Friendly ground AOE's are great because they are a nice way to interact with teammates and encourage groups to consider positioning. Interactive resource restore mechanics are fun, encourage team play and communication and we could really use more of those in general.

Example of proposed change:

Malevolent Offering:
[cost = 5000 health, radius = 5m, range = 28m, duration = 10 seconds]
- Sacrifice your essence to create a restorative pool of blood(?) in the target area
- Allies standing in the pool regenerate [100?] magicka or stamina per second

Note: it's very important that this isn't Minor/Major Endurance/Intellect tho as those are already readily available e.g. from potions or class abilities, it needs to be a unique buff that stacks with those to be useful!

Healthy Offering:
- new effect: Allies within the pool can activate the purify synergy (cleansing harmful effects etc)

Shrewd Offering:
- cost reduced

Detailed Feedback to the skill:
First of I'm glad agony got a rework and that you're considering helping NB as a healing class!
I just think the skill we got instead is really not what it needed and not very useful in any way either.
It seems like such a wasted opportunity to make NB great as a support class.
Below I will try to explain my thoughts by reviewing the different aspects of this new skill:

Health cost
While this seems to be what most people criticise about it, I think this is a pretty cool risk/reward mechanic and adds a unique element. However, it makes the skill far from "free", as in many situations I would choose to spend magicka to shield up before casting it to protect myself, or spend magicka to heal myself after, thereby completely defying the argument of a "free" cast, and even requiring me to waste an additional global cooldown.
So I would say that having it cost health is actually much more punishing than having it have a high magicka cost, which would be totally fine and pose a really interesting challenge if the reward for it was more appropriate.
The real problems with this skill is that the payoff for this massive risk of casting it isn't worth it at all.

A manually targeted single target HoT?
This is the worst aspect of this ability. I suppose the same goes for wardens natures grasp, but that's a topic of it's own. Manually targeting the right player at the right time in the heat of battle, even in a 4man group, is almost impossible.
It feels really clunky and awkward to try and heal players like this and it doesn't work very well.
And what I get for it is just one single person getting healed for a very short duration, so what could this even be good for?
It can't be used as a main heal for my group, it being single target, the tricky targeting mechanics and short duration make this impossible. Prepping someone with it for big incoming damage could be another thing, but again with the constraints the skill has I can only choose one or two people, and it the big health loss it causes me is a pretty silly thing to do just before a dangerous situation.
In terms of using it as a self heal, a big HoT like this on oneself is certainly nice for some solo content like vMA maybe, but again the big up front health cost makes this very problematic. It takes about 2 seconds for it to outheal the damage it caused so after that i have 6s of useful healing left until I have to recast. Apparently I have to try and find a safe moment to cast it, well, this is much harder than it sounds. In a lot of content there really isn't a single safe moment for several minutes. So it's really not so useful for this either. Frankly, this kind of heal isn't very useful for anything that I could think of.

How about the morphs?
One morph reduces the cost, the other grants minor mending.
The cost reduction morph: - it still costs almost 6k health on my char so that's barely an improvement, and it doesn't make the heal itself any more useful anyway. Even if it costed only 2k health, the heal would still have limited application.
The minor mending morph: - nice to have I guess, but NB really already has a sufficient healing output, if I wanted to just get more healing there are so many other sources where I could get that from like item sets or the ritual mundus. Not very exciting, doesn't add anything fun or unique either.

Do we even need another HoT?
Quite simply: No.
There are so many healing over time abilities in the NB's toolkit already, add resto staff abilities and we have anything we need to compete with the healing of a Templar, except maybe a burst heal.
"Regeneration" from resto abilities does almost everything this skill does much better. It targets automatically without me having to waste time fidgeting with targeting allies, it heals 2 allies, magicka cost is easier to manage than health cost, it has more than twice the duration, saving me from having to recast it as much and giving me more time for other things. The only thing "Malevolent Offerings" does better than "Regeneration" is that it ticks about twice as strong, but this alone is really not worth all the drawbacks that it has, and the HPS from regeneration is already good enough, plus we have additional HoT options in the NB toolkit like "funnel health" that are all much easier to use if we really need more.
If anything in terms of pure old healing, Nightblade could use a Burst heal like "Breath of Life" or "Fungal Growth", however this would just homogenize it with Templar and Warden instead of giving it something Unique that would make Nightblade healer stand out in its very own way. Just another healing ability doesn't add anything useful or fun to the Nightblade.

What the Nightblade desperately needs is group utility!
This is where support roles become fun! Being able to buff group members, or restore their resources, not just keep them alive.
This is where we really feel like we're contributing to the fight and where DD's and Tanks notice we're actually there.
Healers don't just wanna stand behind spamming healing abilities like monkeys and watch the DD's have all the fun.
Healers wanna contribute through support, by interacting with teammates through buffs and sustain help and debuff enemies.
Nightblade brings almost nothing to the table in terms of utility.
I would love if Malevolent Offering could be changed to not be a heal at all and instead be a tool to restore resources to group mates or give them other useful buffs that they can't already easily obtain from other sources.
Thanks for reading this far and I hope the devs read at least some of it too and consider my thoughts, I think they reflect a lot of what has already been said somewhere else in the PTS forum, theres a lot of potential with this skill rework please dont waste it by making it a boring old heal.

Avran_Sylt

Mmmm. If you want to do group synergy,utility. Perhaps look at the Cripple skill? That skill itself seems like it would be ripe to add a synergy to, or even change.

You could do something like conjuring sapping vines in an area that do the same effect, and has a synergy associated with it. This way it could be a Tanking/Healing skill.

Xvorg

I've been thinking about "wrong agony" since some days and I found that those sets that proc on dmg could have certain use. Problem is that I'm pretty sure ZoS will nerf them after the first patch.

For example, the combo Almalexia + Desert rose seems quite strong for both, magicka recovery and healing. Other idea I came out with is stam healer using 7th legion and something like hide of the werewolf (this option could get a 5-5-2 set up). In any case and I said above, it won't last more than 1 patch

Shadzilla

https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/374513/new-nightblade-skill-replacing-agony-backstab-quote-from-wrobel-included#latest