Too many nerfs patch after patch

Minno

Subversus wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

Kilandros wrote: »

CyrusArya wrote: »

Xvorg wrote: »

Anyone remembers why they took away softcaps?

Cus soft caps are lame and resulted in homogenous game play. They limit builds and play styles.

If I wanna build 5000 damage at the cost of sustain I should be allowed to do so, instead of being artificially capped.

Softcaps actually granted the most build diversity this game ever had because builds would utilize both stamina and magicka abilities. A lot of people like to forget (or just weren't here pre 1.6) but pretty much every build relied heavily on magicka and stamina instead of just solely one resource. The biggest diversity restriction back then wasn't softcaps--it was that there weren't any stamina-based class morphs.

I can agree, though i was a terrible dual weld magplar trying to use mostly DW skills and all my stats were split back then .

I was a dual wield khajiit "stamblade" using mostly mag abilities... later deleted and rerolled to high elf cause it wasn't working out hahahaha (and high elves are hawt!)

only high elves think high elves are sexy!
And this is coming from a breton whose ancestors were *** by them. lol

usmcjdking

Derra wrote: »

Xvorg wrote: »

Derra wrote: »

For me part of this showed when i learned that their current design goal was to adapt the other classes to the warden design philosophy of 1 tank/heal/DD classtree.

Funny thing, what's the DD skill tree in a NB? Siph? No, that's the healing tree. Shadow? No, that's the Tank tree. Assa? Only one dmg skill besides ulti and a buff that procs. And a gap closer.

ZoS has no clue... we know each class and how they work, saddle they are too busy hearing pod cast of thei own ideas instead of paying attention to us.

Take a look at sorc.

Best dps abilities come from daedric summoning or stormcalling.
Tanking abilities come from? Deadric summoning.
Heals? Daedric summoning.

ERP blue eyes of love cosmetics? Deadric summoning.

Next patch - "Removed Dark Magic and Storm Calling from Sorcerer skills. Renamed Sorcerer class to Deadric Summoner."

ViciousBunnii

redspecter23 wrote: »

I have to agree. A new patch should be filled with exciting new features, content and tweaks. As it is now, I dread new updates because the only thing on my mind is wondering what nerfs I'll have to deal with. I get that some nerfs are necessary for balance but this is just getting out of hand. Don't make your players hate new updates. That's not good business.

This is exactly how I feel every update.

People say to 'git gud', but how am I suppose to do that when I try so hard to learn things, think I'm finally getting somewhere, where I understand something or am finally learning how to play my class, then an update happens and I feel like I am back at square one? When Homestead came out, I felt that I finally started to progress, then Morrowind came out and I felt like a newbie once again. I actually took a 2-3 month break because I felt so discouraged. It's bad enough that I can't figure out how to 'git gud' in PvP, but I shouldn't feel like this with PvE.

Bottom line; updates are very discouraging for me. I don't want to feel like a newbie every time Zos changes something. I feel more lost and confused each time.

WrathOfInnos

Soft caps were awful. Every build was about as effective as hybrids are currently. Being able to invest more heavily into certain areas without diminishing return was like an ESO build Renaissance.

I would like to see hybrid builds become viable, but not by getting all non-hybrids nerfed to that level with artificial ceilings. Going back to soft caps would be the biggest nerf to player power this game has ever seen, and more would leave from that change than did with the last several rounds of nerf patches combined.

Koolio

Every new PTS has me rushing to play some build that's getting nerfed. It sucks.

Fiords Orc Stam Sorc I miss you . And the 5mill Ap it took just to get the pieces I need. Luckily that's only 2 weeks of pvp for me.

dodgehopper_ESO

I still dream of a day this game goes to a Skills-only system... like Skyrim. That way if they ruin my 'class' I can just go play something else on my main character. It will then be eminently obvious when they ruin a skill by the way people start gravitating away from a skill or toward a skill. The unfortunate thing though is that in the examples you cited @Joy_Division the reality is that I don't think the Developers have actually gotten the point of those skills or many others. Dk's Flame Cloak has become some kind of hovery healing orb... what? Solar Barrage went from being a clunky pbaoe to a melee based cast time piece of crap... what? Eclipse is... what? Crystal Frags is... what? Honestly the changes are so violent its disturbing. The loss of Blinding Flashes fundamentally changed the way I played my character. I've had friends quit the game over the change of the meaning of Weapon Damage (for those not in the know, Weapon damage use to be the damage level of your Weapons like Restoration, Destruction, Two hander, etc). These kinds of sweeping changes caused some Race/Class combos to be nullified and rather than shell out $20 for that change I have known people to quit, particularly for players who are one-character types. I personally think constantly changing the gear hamster wheel on MMO's is a big part of the problem.

Someone in one of my guilds had a great idea for Set Gear. Instead of set gear giving you a passive ability to summon or proc why not have it give you a means to unlock the ABILITY/SKill to summon a daedroth, a spider, etc. Make the game more about player skill and less about the garbage you can stack on your character. I'm not interested in this constant retooling of the rules system to ruin old set combos so that the new ones or new classes are better. I'm tired of seeing one class be 'the best class' in the game because of a rules or gear change. Its toxic. /rant

HoloYoitsu

The problem with removing the soft/hard cap system was that it makes the game exponentially harder to "balance". With the caps in place, those caps defined an overarching framework that diminished the effects of imbalance elsewhere. Balancing was mostly a matter of skill/passive adjustments and tweaks to the caps.

With caps gone and CP in place, suddenly micro managing every single possible gear/skill loadout becomes the new balancing paradigm. This means constantly changing gear sets and skills/passives as well as base game mechanics multiple times as new things get added on top of existing ones. It's way less efficient and more likely to give rise to unintended oversights (remember infinite dodge rolling?).

I feel that the lack of build diversity now compared to pre CP is partly due to this, but also other causes - such as the constant whining by dps players about not being able to solo kill tanks or chase down mobile builds. Just think how many times defensive mechanics and skills have been nerfed or deleted in this game.

Mihael

Communication between devs and players that are actually trying to make this game achieve it's true potential. Would go a long way to get this game back on its tracks

dodgehopper_ESO

HoloYoitsu wrote: »

The problem with removing the soft/hard cap system was that it makes the game exponentially harder to "balance". With the caps in place, those caps defined an overarching framework that diminished the effects of imbalance elsewhere. Balancing was mostly a matter of skill/passive adjustments and tweaks to the caps.

With caps gone and CP in place, suddenly micro managing every single possible gear/skill loadout becomes the new balancing paradigm. This means constantly changing gear sets and skills/passives as well as base game mechanics multiple times as new things get added on top of existing ones. It's way less efficient and more likely to give rise to unintended oversights (remember infinite dodge rolling?).

I feel that the lack of build diversity now compared to pre CP is partly due to this, but also other causes - such as the constant whining by dps players about not being able to solo kill tanks or chase down mobile builds. Just think how many times defensive mechanics and skills have been nerfed or deleted in this game.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Agreed. I Concur.

MehrunesFlagon

aeowulf wrote: »

I am looknig forward to when ZOS hit all classes with the big ol balance hammer and separate the tank, healing and dps roles into the three skill trees. it is going to make balancing so much easier, and will hopefull stop a lot of people complaining.

That is going to completely ruin the game.Do you want every dps to be like warden?

Derra

MehrunesFlagon wrote: »

aeowulf wrote: »

I am looknig forward to when ZOS hit all classes with the big ol balance hammer and separate the tank, healing and dps roles into the three skill trees. it is going to make balancing so much easier, and will hopefull stop a lot of people complaining.

That is going to completely ruin the game.Do you want every dps to be like warden?

It´s only going to ruin the game for people that like to use their brain when creating a build.

Waffennacht

If only nerfs kept things playable.

They nerf stuff completely out of contention

Who uses balance?
Who uses black rose?

The only sets or abilities that get continued use are those that simply have no substitution, (what do you replace vigor with on a Stam sorc or Warden? - exactly, nothing)

It's not that they usually bring things in line, they for the most part, completely gut them.

Ragnarock41

MehrunesFlagon wrote: »

aeowulf wrote: »

I am looknig forward to when ZOS hit all classes with the big ol balance hammer and separate the tank, healing and dps roles into the three skill trees. it is going to make balancing so much easier, and will hopefull stop a lot of people complaining.

That is going to completely ruin the game.Do you want every dps to be like warden?

From a PvP point of view, yeah I would really like my Dk to be like a warden.
I do believe Dk needs a partial rework because most of the skills don't even work anymore.

Waffennacht wrote: »

If only nerfs kept things playable.

They nerf stuff completely out of contention

Who uses balance?
Who uses black rose?

The only sets or abilities that get continued use are those that simply have no substitution, (what do you replace vigor with on a Stam sorc or Warden? - exactly, nothing)

It's not that they usually bring things in line, they for the most part, completely gut them.

my full gold impen black rose setup is waiting in the bank since morrowind. RIP that set was so fun for solo PvP.

Insanepirate01

Very well said OP and totally agree. They're homogenizing the classes. Eventually we'll all end up playing the Same cookie cutter builds across classes, just with different animations and flavours, which is almost the case now. The unique elements of each class is dying out with every patch. I can't even look forward to new content anymore because I dread the "class balance" that may come with it.

f047ys3v3n

Joy_Division wrote: »

I understand even the most diligent and dedicated are going to struggle trying to balance so many systems at once (CP, no CP, PvE, PvP, etc. And people are not going to be happy no matter what because many issues are irreconcilable. Tis a thankless job.

ZOS choosing to try to balance so many systems at once is what makes it a thankless job. It is not intrinsically so, bad choices make it so. If you choose to make "all" (not all really but they say so) things work the same in PVP as PVE you have chosen and impossible balancing task and it will be thankless. They have chosen this and then followed that poor choice with many other poor ones as well as many poorly executed correct ones. They are neither diligent, nor dedicated, nor competent in the area of balance once they get those attributes we can talk about the difficulties inherent.

Joy_Division wrote: »

Also I think Zenimax does a good job at making the single-player experience in the new zones interesting and engaging.

Bingo, great single player game. Great quests, lore, and atmosphere.

Joy_Division wrote: »

That being said, please Zenimax, stop nerfing class skills and taking away their distinctiveness. It takes away much of the anticipation for your updates.

Yea, the changes have been wrecking the fun of every update for me.

I also agree that the net effect of many of them has been to homogenize classes and play style in general. I do not think that this was the intention though and I am not even sure they are smart enough to know that it is what has happened. I think it is mostly just a product of not enough not smart people (Wrobel) spending not much time, and having not much understanding, looking for quick fixes to perceived problems that may or may not even be problems. A few examples of this I can think of offhand are:

Choosing to do stam as a think of it's own but with only a few stam morphs of class abilities. This means:
1) All class stam abilities have only one morph and are therefore played one way.
2) The corresponding magica builds now also only have one morph and can therefore be played only that way.
3) Stam toons are mostly weapon, pvp, and guild abilities and therefore differ little from class to class.
4) Stam, whose abilities cost less but whose resource pool is also used for blocking and dodging will never be able to be properly cost balanced in an environment of resource scarcity (you know, now, post morrowind) because those blocks and dodges have little value in PVE but much in PVP.

To make stam compelling and interesting there needed to be a robust set of stam class abilities with more than one stam morph. Also, magica could automatically be the resource for dodging and blocking for toons where stam was the highest resource pool. Alternately, Stam could be for just blocking, sprinting, and roll dodgeing and all weapon and class abilities could come from one "power" pool (that would be the easy mode). Zos chose to do the whole stam thing the hard way and made some choices along the way that both greatly limited play variety and also made things impossible to balance. These problems were easy to foresee. Most of us foresaw them.

Choosing to keep the same basically the same PVP PVE scaling was a similarly obvious balance nightmare. In PVE you fight giant monsters with huge heath, who are immune to whole classes of effects (reflects, stuns, and any CC's,) do not crit you, and importantly, do no heal. In PVP players are not immune to any thing, have little health, heal like crazy, and crit you. Tell me how you price and scale a skill like Crippling grasp? Should it be expensive since it is both a primary dps skill and a substantial CC? If so how does this work for PVE where it is now overpriced as it is just a moderate DOT and so a reason NB dps is less than sorc. Should this be a high damage DOT since it is only a single target DOT? If so, what about in PVE where it is also a big time CC? So we see that crippling grasp does not do enough damage in PVE for a single target DOT and may actually be too low a cost in PVP where it is a great CC combined with nice damage and a major expedition buff. Other examples of unscalable core class skills I can think of off hand are:
Puncturing sweeps (too much cost and not enough damage in PVE because of PVP heal concerns making Templar a weak DPS)
Sap essence (near worthless heals and damage now in PVE because VD was an overpowered gear set so nerf everything people were using to bomb with it.)
Blazing shield (Worthless shield in PVE now because people could make tank bomb builds with it in PVP)
Breath of life (Damn this skill costs a fortune in PVE to the point you basically can't use it. It was not on my bar when I did VMA on my Templar. this all because multi Templar small groups in PVP were getting good play off each-others breaths.)


I could go on with the examples of all of this but the bottom line is that the only solution is a different balancing crew and some pretty systemic changes to reverse old decisions that set out an impossible task. ZOS seems happy with Wrobel though. They are even willing to trot him out to bless us with his ignorance on podcasts. Anyhow, I wen't casual and now get to enjoy what the game does well as well as the fun I have with my little fire Wrobel tirades on the forums. I also get to play a lot more other games and don't get so bent out of shape when the morons destroy my hard earned vMA weapons out of their boundless bungling. New BIS gear that is not even new gear but rather just different old gear, a whole new rotation, switching from mag to stam and back again across 4 different classes. I don't have to care about any of it now.