vMA Merciless Resolve Bug(s)

clv

Hello friends, here to offset this otherwise great (aesthetically) patch are clunkiness and bugs on a previously highly functional, not-buggy ability.

There was a post about the Magicka morph of Grim Focus and the bugs that came with the changes. These have, despite being posted multiple times during PTS, been ignored completely.



In vMA particularly, there seems to be some very eccentric interactions between the add wave spawns, and the "improved" mechanics of Merciless.
From the patch notes:

"Grim Focus: The stacks you build towards the bow proc for this ability and its morphs will now remain if you recast the ability early, or if the ability expires. The partial stacks are removed if you exit combat."

"Exit combat" seems to mean "When more adds spawn". I consistently had my stacks reset to 0 during the entire run. Not only is this incredibly annoying, but also hefty amounts of damage and time lost throughout the trial.

It also seems that if a target dies before both your light attack and the subsequent stack delay ticks down, you will not receive a stack of Merciless. The only times I could consistently get more than one proc per cast were on bosses.

I get that we're all hyped about outfits and cool cosmetics and the super cool off balance nerf, but I think that the blatant ignorance of how badly ZoS managed to mess up Merciless Resolve despite so much feedback should be noted. I don't think making an ability so clunky and bugged out to the point of near ineffectiveness is a smart way to bring down power creep but what do I know?

LiquidPony

clv wrote: »

Hello friends, here to offset this otherwise great (aesthetically) patch are clunkiness and bugs on a previously highly functional, not-buggy ability.

There was a post about the Magicka morph of Grim Focus and the bugs that came with the changes. These have, despite being posted multiple times during PTS, been ignored completely.



In vMA particularly, there seems to be some very eccentric interactions between the add wave spawns, and the "improved" mechanics of Merciless.
From the patch notes:

"Grim Focus: The stacks you build towards the bow proc for this ability and its morphs will now remain if you recast the ability early, or if the ability expires. The partial stacks are removed if you exit combat."

"Exit combat" seems to mean "When more adds spawn". I consistently had my stacks reset to 0 during the entire run. Not only is this incredibly annoying, but also hefty amounts of damage and time lost throughout the trial.

It also seems that if a target dies before both your light attack and the subsequent stack delay ticks down, you will not receive a stack of Merciless. The only times I could consistently get more than one proc per cast were on bosses.

I get that we're all hyped about outfits and cool cosmetics and the super cool off balance nerf, but I think that the blatant ignorance of how badly ZoS managed to mess up Merciless Resolve despite so much feedback should be noted. I don't think making an ability so clunky and bugged out to the point of near ineffectiveness is a smart way to bring down power creep but what do I know?

Well they were too busy "making off-balance more useful to everyone" (by nerfing it into the ground) to be bothered with fixing a bunch of Grim Focus bugs that were posted numerous times on the PTS forums.

GG ZOS lol.

Marabornwingrion

Fix this ASAP!
@ZOS_GinaBruno
@ZOS_JessicaFolsom
@Wrobel

asneakybanana

As soon as I saw the change I thought it was going to be *** like this. All they need to do is make it so that when the buff is down and you are out of combat the stacks go away but as long as the buff is up the stacks do not go away when you exit combat.

Gal

clv wrote: »

Hello friends, here to offset this otherwise great (aesthetically) patch are clunkiness and bugs on a previously highly functional, not-buggy ability.

There was a post about the Magicka morph of Grim Focus and the bugs that came with the changes. These have, despite being posted multiple times during PTS, been ignored completely.



In vMA particularly, there seems to be some very eccentric interactions between the add wave spawns, and the "improved" mechanics of Merciless.
From the patch notes:

"Grim Focus: The stacks you build towards the bow proc for this ability and its morphs will now remain if you recast the ability early, or if the ability expires. The partial stacks are removed if you exit combat."

"Exit combat" seems to mean "When more adds spawn". I consistently had my stacks reset to 0 during the entire run. Not only is this incredibly annoying, but also hefty amounts of damage and time lost throughout the trial.

It also seems that if a target dies before both your light attack and the subsequent stack delay ticks down, you will not receive a stack of Merciless. The only times I could consistently get more than one proc per cast were on bosses.

I get that we're all hyped about outfits and cool cosmetics and the super cool off balance nerf, but I think that the blatant ignorance of how badly ZoS managed to mess up Merciless Resolve despite so much feedback should be noted. I don't think making an ability so clunky and bugged out to the point of near ineffectiveness is a smart way to bring down power creep but what do I know?

Clearly Zos was too busy breaking the xp gains in IC to worry about refining a vital combat mechanics #raisethefloorlowertheceiling

Audens

Bump
Wts QA testers

Arvs

Please fix. Thanks.

Sasyk

This is something that definitely needs to be addressed and corrected as soon as possible.

f047ys3v3n

clv wrote: »

Hello friends, here to offset this otherwise great (aesthetically) patch are clunkiness and bugs on a previously highly functional, not-buggy ability.

There was a post about the Magicka morph of Grim Focus and the bugs that came with the changes. These have, despite being posted multiple times during PTS, been ignored completely.



In vMA particularly, there seems to be some very eccentric interactions between the add wave spawns, and the "improved" mechanics of Merciless.
From the patch notes:

"Grim Focus: The stacks you build towards the bow proc for this ability and its morphs will now remain if you recast the ability early, or if the ability expires. The partial stacks are removed if you exit combat."

"Exit combat" seems to mean "When more adds spawn". I consistently had my stacks reset to 0 during the entire run. Not only is this incredibly annoying, but also hefty amounts of damage and time lost throughout the trial.

It also seems that if a target dies before both your light attack and the subsequent stack delay ticks down, you will not receive a stack of Merciless. The only times I could consistently get more than one proc per cast were on bosses.

I get that we're all hyped about outfits and cool cosmetics and the super cool off balance nerf, but I think that the blatant ignorance of how badly ZoS managed to mess up Merciless Resolve despite so much feedback should be noted. I don't think making an ability so clunky and bugged out to the point of near ineffectiveness is a smart way to bring down power creep but what do I know?

This sort of thing is not new. I have noticed for some time that my longer duration DOT's are effected in this way by the waves in vMA. I had tried some things with veil for particular pulls in vMA that were less than successful because you could not get much utility out of the very short resulting duration. I recall other ground DOT's such as wall and path also despawning themselves with lots of duration left. It's stupid but it is honestly not on my short list of things I want fixed. When we get medium attacks that give no resources and do nerfed damage so that they are all loss, prevalent unaddressed CE use, chains of CC's with no immunity applied, and load screens in cyr fixed maybe then we go after their stupid despawn on all your stuff between mobs fixed. It is funny that another ability they were trying to buff got nerfed though. They must have been real worried about folks in cyr storing up charges to have a great opener (though they still would have only a few seconds to do this unless they ran about the country side recasting the thing before it expired every few seconds).

clv

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

clv wrote: »

Hello friends, here to offset this otherwise great (aesthetically) patch are clunkiness and bugs on a previously highly functional, not-buggy ability.

There was a post about the Magicka morph of Grim Focus and the bugs that came with the changes. These have, despite being posted multiple times during PTS, been ignored completely.



In vMA particularly, there seems to be some very eccentric interactions between the add wave spawns, and the "improved" mechanics of Merciless.
From the patch notes:

"Grim Focus: The stacks you build towards the bow proc for this ability and its morphs will now remain if you recast the ability early, or if the ability expires. The partial stacks are removed if you exit combat."

"Exit combat" seems to mean "When more adds spawn". I consistently had my stacks reset to 0 during the entire run. Not only is this incredibly annoying, but also hefty amounts of damage and time lost throughout the trial.

It also seems that if a target dies before both your light attack and the subsequent stack delay ticks down, you will not receive a stack of Merciless. The only times I could consistently get more than one proc per cast were on bosses.

I get that we're all hyped about outfits and cool cosmetics and the super cool off balance nerf, but I think that the blatant ignorance of how badly ZoS managed to mess up Merciless Resolve despite so much feedback should be noted. I don't think making an ability so clunky and bugged out to the point of near ineffectiveness is a smart way to bring down power creep but what do I know?

This sort of thing is not new. I have noticed for some time that my longer duration DOT's are effected in this way by the waves in vMA. I had tried some things with veil for particular pulls in vMA that were less than successful because you could not get much utility out of the very short resulting duration. I recall other ground DOT's such as wall and path also despawning themselves with lots of duration left. It's stupid but it is honestly not on my short list of things I want fixed. When we get medium attacks that give no resources and do nerfed damage so that they are all loss, prevalent unaddressed CE use, chains of CC's with no immunity applied, and load screens in cyr fixed maybe then we go after their stupid despawn on all your stuff between mobs fixed. It is funny that another ability they were trying to buff got nerfed though. They must have been real worried about folks in cyr storing up charges to have a great opener (though they still would have only a few seconds to do this unless they ran about the country side recasting the thing before it expired every few seconds).

Clunk up a core part of magblade dps, and not fix it because "there are better things to do"? This whataboutism is the reason many players are content with just letting it slide, and the reason the game is such a cyclical mess of fix one thing, break more.

A simple change could be to keep stacks while the buff is up, as sneaky said, or just revert the changes.

Supernatural

https://youtube.com/watch?v=elEBGR9d4Ko

https://youtube.com/watch?v=w-2SPZ6C34Q

Rest in pepperoni

ecru

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

clv wrote: »

Hello friends, here to offset this otherwise great (aesthetically) patch are clunkiness and bugs on a previously highly functional, not-buggy ability.

There was a post about the Magicka morph of Grim Focus and the bugs that came with the changes. These have, despite being posted multiple times during PTS, been ignored completely.



In vMA particularly, there seems to be some very eccentric interactions between the add wave spawns, and the "improved" mechanics of Merciless.
From the patch notes:

"Grim Focus: The stacks you build towards the bow proc for this ability and its morphs will now remain if you recast the ability early, or if the ability expires. The partial stacks are removed if you exit combat."

"Exit combat" seems to mean "When more adds spawn". I consistently had my stacks reset to 0 during the entire run. Not only is this incredibly annoying, but also hefty amounts of damage and time lost throughout the trial.

It also seems that if a target dies before both your light attack and the subsequent stack delay ticks down, you will not receive a stack of Merciless. The only times I could consistently get more than one proc per cast were on bosses.

I get that we're all hyped about outfits and cool cosmetics and the super cool off balance nerf, but I think that the blatant ignorance of how badly ZoS managed to mess up Merciless Resolve despite so much feedback should be noted. I don't think making an ability so clunky and bugged out to the point of near ineffectiveness is a smart way to bring down power creep but what do I know?

This sort of thing is not new. I have noticed for some time that my longer duration DOT's are effected in this way by the waves in vMA. I had tried some things with veil for particular pulls in vMA that were less than successful because you could not get much utility out of the very short resulting duration. I recall other ground DOT's such as wall and path also despawning themselves with lots of duration left. It's stupid but it is honestly not on my short list of things I want fixed. When we get medium attacks that give no resources and do nerfed damage so that they are all loss, prevalent unaddressed CE use, chains of CC's with no immunity applied, and load screens in cyr fixed maybe then we go after their stupid despawn on all your stuff between mobs fixed. It is funny that another ability they were trying to buff got nerfed though. They must have been real worried about folks in cyr storing up charges to have a great opener (though they still would have only a few seconds to do this unless they ran about the country side recasting the thing before it expired every few seconds).

Huh? This sort of thing might not be new, but these are very basic combat mechanics we're talking about here. Tooltip says that on your 5th light attack you get a proc, and you use your 5th and... uh... where's the proc like there used to be? Oh, it comes by the time I'm using my 6th light attack? And I somehow have an extra stack of Merciless Resolve? That makes sense, lol.

Before the patch, it was already possible to clip that light attack and recast Merciless Resolve before you got your proc if you were very fast. I know I did it all the time, and that's another basic thing that really shouldn't be possible. If I see my 5th light attack go off, and I hit Merciless Resolve after, I should cast Assassin's Will every single time. That hasn't been the case for awhile now.

This doesn't even begin to address the animation issues with Twisting path, Funnel Health, Impale, and Crippling Grasp. How many times has everyone in this thread tried to weave a light attack after these abilities, saw the light attack animation, but did not light attack due to the broken animations of these abilities interfering? No other class has these kinds of issues from what I can tell (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), just nightblade. On every other class if you hit an ability and hit light attack, you actually light attack regardless of how soon you hit that light attack. Nightblade is the very inconsistent, very broken exception here, and it absolutely should be a top priority to have all of these abilities fixed so the class works like every other class in the game does.

code65536

@ZOS_Wrobel

Ramber

It sounds like its working as intended and you just dont like it. It was supposed to slow it down.

Oreyn_Bearclaw

I havent taken it through VMA, but I will say that it feels funny the way it is working. My most common complaint is that when i have 4 procs stacked, I used to be able to simply weave the bow proc and it would fire, as the weave was my fifth LA. That is the only way I know of to consistently get three procs per cast of merciless. Now when I do that, about 50/50 I just seem to recast merciless and have to cast again for the bow proc. On the other side of things, sometimes after I cast the bow, I already seem to have 1-2 weaves accumulated for the next one. Sounds great, but sure does mess with the timing.

I like that the design is supposed to be less forgiving, and I will say that on a dummy parse I am getting the same or perhaps one more bow proc on average, but i also think that if anything I am ultimately casting the skill more, not less. I just feels off (not very scientific I know).

I am starting to think that in typical ZOS fashion, they saw a legitimate problem that Grim Focus acted as a skill barrier to NB for a lot of people, but in an effort to simplify it, they F'ed it up.

As to the VMA thing, if each round is temporarily bringing you out of combat enough to reset your procs, that's a big issue.

I think I am on sneaky's side for a fix on this one. I think you could even increase the duration of the skill a few seconds if trying to make it noob friendly. Make it so that as long as the skill is recast before it runs out, you dont lose your stacks (irregardless of your combat status). If you let the skill fall off, you lose your stacks. If you are worried about gankers, make it so casting grim focus with a bow proc already queued up will break stealth.

code65536

Ramber wrote: »

It sounds like its working as intended and you just dont like it. It was supposed to slow it down.

LOL, no. In places like vMA where you are always flitting in and out of combat, the removal-on-combat end makes the skill virtually useless. This isn't slowing it down (and nowhere did the devs indicate that they intended that), this is a matter of in-game usage that they most likely overlooked and failed to take into consideration.

Rugosus

The delay between light attack #5 and the Assassin's Will proc is long enough to cast another light attack+skill. You aren't exactly being rewarded for being proficient at light weaving when you have to essentially do 6 light attacks to get a proc that only costs 5. The immediate reward of Assassin's Will after 5 light attacks is what made the skill so satisfying, but having to wait for the duration of another skill+light attack just feels clunky and unnatural.

code65536

What I don't get is why a substantial change to one of the key mechanics of a class was made mid-PTS instead of before the start of the PTS cycle where major changes belong. This whole thing seems half-baked at best.

asneakybanana

Bump