Last patch was great. Zenimax seams determined to take steps backwards again.

JackDaniell

As more reiterations of this PTS come out all i can say is yuck. An absolute butching of shield changes homegenizing them to function exactly like a burst heal and completley deincentivising max mag stacking. Shields are best off small with lots of resistance vs large shield that gets quickly capped by max hp (what a dumb band aid fix that ruins shields in pve). So this is a MASSIVE change to a MAJORITY of peoples builds who use light arnor. This whole cast time crap was just a distraction to push bad homogenizing changes through that turn a complex game into childs play.

The swift nerf. All i can say is this is purely a learn to play problem. No one who was inexperianced could use swift for anything other then retreat. A good player could really push the 1vX envelope with good timing and prediction with speed and cancels. This however is VERY HARD TO DO. you have to give up allot of stat for swift and running the balance of defence, offence, and sustain doesnt allow your swift build to make mistakes and keep going.

Swift gets hard countered the seccond you fight someone who uses thier brain to cut off your movement. Or is patient and waits for you to loop back around to stun you. Did it never occor to people that a swift player wants you to chase them in circles instead of cutting off his reatreat path? Perhaps if your all running in a PREDICTABLE patern behind him he is leading you in a circle for his benefot no? Seriously for me the swift nerf is a L2P issue.

Ok i shared my strong opinions,
What do you guys think?

Tonturri

ZOS got the nerf itself - access to speed - right. They just didn't realize that it's important to consider WHERE players are getting all their buffs and bonuses. Imo speed did need some looking at, but it wasn't swift that was causing issues. Swift had trade offs (that stamina users could more easily do without while magicka couldn't, but that's a magicka scaling issue, not something to do with swift).

Tbh I'm part thrilled and scared. ZOS seems to be...improving, a little, on how they do nerfs - just slowly. They got the 'what' right, now it's time for them to learn the 'where'. We'll see how it goes.

_Ahala_

Zos has gone overboard with the nerfs this patch... I was expecting Magden to finally get some good buffs after 6 patches of Bone Shattering nerfs... but it looks like I’m gonna need another splint after the changes to bird of prey

Nox_Noir

Swift had perfectly fine tradeoffs. Now its not gonna be completely worthless.
This weeks PTS changes just show once again that ZOS balance team does not understand cause and consequence of their game balance.

It feels like they are killing all the things that used to be fun in this game. It's frankly moving in a direction that I just don't look forward to play anymore.

Peekachu99

Power ceiling was simply too high in PVE to the point where three NB/Sorc and one tank were ideal for clearing Vet HM four mans. PVP was no better with 100% speed buff, passive dodging stamblades or DKs with infinite sustain and massive shields. I played each one of these classes and their variants and I know how broken they were. I have vids of my magsorc in Battlegrounds with 30+ kills—and I am NOT a good magsorc: Endless Fury, shields, Sloads. No one spec should compromise a certain area of the game too much. I’m glad they finally introduced some checks and balances into PVE and PVP. I stepped away for the last month and a half after feeling that there was nothing to be done to right the ship...yet here we are.

“Balancing” often involves taking away the things that we love, though which are simply not good for the game. It’s tough love. It’s not about pushing the power ceiling every further beyond the ridiculous heights it already attained.

Edit: Also LOL about Switft being any kind of niche. You can dominate BGs with a swift build currently; I run one on my Stamden and it’s toxic af. It’s even worse in more open areas like IC and Cyrodiil and offers tremendous utility in PVE too.

mojomood

JackDaniell wrote: »

As more reiterations of this PTS come out all i can say is yuck. An absolute butching of shield changes homegenizing them to function exactly like a burst heal and completley deincentivising max mag stacking. Shields are best off small with lots of resistance vs large shield that gets quickly capped by max hp (what a dumb band aid fix that ruins shields in pve). So this is a MASSIVE change to a MAJORITY of peoples builds who use light arnor. This whole cast time crap was just a distraction to push bad homogenizing changes through that turn a complex game into childs play.

The swift nerf. All i can say is this is purely a learn to play problem. No one who was inexperianced could use swift for anything other then retreat. A good player could really push the 1vX envelope with good timing and prediction with speed and cancels. This however is VERY HARD TO DO. you have to give up allot of stat for swift and running the balance of defence, offence, and sustain doesnt allow your swift build to make mistakes and keep going.

Swift gets hard countered the seccond you fight someone who uses thier brain to cut off your movement. Or is patient and waits for you to loop back around to stun you. Did it never occor to people that a swift player wants you to chase them in circles instead of cutting off his reatreat path? Perhaps if your all running in a PREDICTABLE patern behind him he is leading you in a circle for his benefot no? Seriously for me the swift nerf is a L2P issue.

Ok i shared my strong opinions,
What do you guys think?

Maybe to a degree, but the real issue with swift is that the game is not designed to handle it. The hitboxes and the average good ping time is not designed to handle it, much less any significant lag. That's why you can see skills strike at the right time on screen, but miss. To the server, that target had already moved out of range. Since ZOS is not going to spend the money to fix that, nerfing speed is the only option left. Stam sorcs will still have speed but every class won't. So I would say it's could be L2P...Learn 2 Program

BrightOblivion

Peekachu99 wrote: »

Power ceiling was simply too high in PVE to the point where three NB/Sorc and one tank were ideal for clearing Vet HM four mans. PVP was no better with 100% speed buff, passive dodging stamblades or DKs with infinite sustain and massive shields. I played each one of these classes and their variants and I know how broken they were. I have vids of my magsorc in Battlegrounds with 30+ kills—and I am NOT a good magsorc: Endless Fury, shields, Sloads. No one spec should compromise a certain area of the game too much. I’m glad they finally introduced some checks and balances into PVE and PVP. I stepped away for the last month and a half after feeling that there was nothing to be done to right the ship...yet here we are.

“Balancing” often involves taking away the things that we love, though which are simply not good for the game. It’s tough love. It’s not about pushing the power ceiling every further beyond the ridiculous heights it already attained.

Edit: Also LOL about Switft being any kind of niche. You can dominate BGs with a swift build currently; I run one on my Stamden and it’s toxic af. It’s even worse in more open areas like IC and Cyrodiil and offers tremendous utility in PVE too.

Sniping kills with Endless Fury doesn't indicate the class is good, though. I mean, yeah, it makes the kill counter look pretty and is kind of fire and forget, but that's really all it does. Frankly, if I had the option, I would trade both Endless Fury/Mage's Wrath *and* the Implosion passive for a nightblade style execute any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Also, *any* light armor class can use the Light Armor shield and *anyone* can use Sload's so your argument that those make PvP magsorc broken seems incredibly flawed.

Dottzgaming

Peekachu99 wrote: »

Also LOL about Switft being any kind of niche. You can dominate BGs with a swift build currently; I run one on my Stamden and it’s toxic af. It’s even worse in more open areas like IC and Cyrodiil and offers tremendous utility in PVE too.

+1 to the bolded.

For me personally, Wolfhunter was probably my least favorite pvp patch in recent memory, primarily because of Swift, and i honestly dont feel it's a L2P issue.

Swift, at least in my opinion, was over performing in the current state of the game. It reached a point where builds who didnt utilize swift just simply had no chance to keep up with those who did (unless they ran really high maj expedition uptime), especially when combined with the snare/root break immunity that forward momentum (and other skills) especially provided.

A player who uses 0 swift vs someone who uses it simply couldnt pin them down, especially slower moving magicka units. You said "Swift gets hard countered the seccond you fight someone who uses thier brain to cut off your movement. Or is patient and waits for you to loop back around to stun you", but that's just it, a good player using Swift wont have their movements cut off because theyll properly run and use LoS to prevent that (of course if youre against a massive zerg that becomes more challenging), and when it comes to just "coming back and stunning", the superior movement speed gives a swifty player as many fight resets as theyd like (if i put them on the back foot, they just CC break and run away unable to be snared when combined with FM, then come back when theyre recovered) while making it impossible to escape as a non-swift player if you're put on the back foot. Swift should be beneficial of course and you should absolutely gain a mobility increase, as that's what the trait is literally designed for, but in its current form combined with how easy it is to maintain Major Expedition, it was too much and im glad to see it changed. Was it over nerfed? idk, but that's what PTS testing is for. I dont want them to over nerf it so those who enjoyed the playstyle can use if effectively, but im glad to see its potency toned down.

I also do think that this had a big effect on why it felt so bad to play against:

mojomood wrote: »

the real issue with swift is that the game is not designed to handle it. The hitboxes and the average good ping time is not designed to handle it, much less any significant lag. That's why you can see skills strike at the right time on screen, but miss. To the server, that target had already moved out of range.

Illuvatarr

Takes no skill to run at light speed around in a tower abusing los in armor that makes you basically impervious to damage with healing over time pots instakilling anyone who comes near you with sub assault/dawnbreaker/spin to win. Enjoy your nerf

GreenHere

As I said over in my (apparently misplaced) thread about the Swift problem, I don't think Swift itself is a problem; just that it puts people over the top when stacked with all the other speed buffs that are available. I wish they'd taken a different solution on Swift, because as it stands on the PTS I think it's nearly ruined now.

@Dottzgaming , do you think that capping movement speed in other ways, while leaving Swift as it is on Live is a workable solution?

NinchiTV

agree 100%, these changes are so unsatisfactory i can see myself not playing during murkmire launch and just wait until the patch after.

umagon

I am actually happy that zos is reducing the effectiveness of survival mechanisms that builds with high amounts of damage would have. If players want the survival of a tank then they should have to build like a tank. If they want to be on the high-end spectrum of damage that’s fine but the damage mitigation capabilities should be low. It’s good that zos is ending this era of builds that have extreme amounts of everything in a single build. All it has done is create balancing problems and lowered build diversity. For the longest the game has been nothing but stack everything into one stat and go super saiyan.

bardx86

umagon wrote: »

I am actually happy that zos is reducing the effectiveness of survival mechanisms that builds with high amounts of damage would have. If players want the survival of a tank then they should have to build like a tank. If they want to be on the high-end spectrum of damage that’s fine but the damage mitigation capabilities should be low. It’s good that zos is ending this era of builds that have extreme amounts of everything in a single build. All it has done is create balancing problems and lowered build diversity. For the longest the game has been nothing but stack everything into one stat and go super saiyan.

So they are fixing the heavy armor meta? No? oh ok then.

NBrookus

Last patch was great if you were a highly mobile stamina class spec. You could run heavy for high mitigation, still have tons of damage via sets, and then be at speed cap virtually all the time in combat.

For everyone else, even if you invested in Swift it was like being permasnared while being unable to target Sonic. Sonic can disenage at will and rengage at will, and no one else can except nightblades.

I think the nerfs were heavy handed and they went too far, but IMO the screen door can't hit the *** of the Forward Momentum + speed cap + heavy meta soon enough.

umagon

bardx86 wrote: »

umagon wrote: »

I am actually happy that zos is reducing the effectiveness of survival mechanisms that builds with high amounts of damage would have. If players want the survival of a tank then they should have to build like a tank. If they want to be on the high-end spectrum of damage that’s fine but the damage mitigation capabilities should be low. It’s good that zos is ending this era of builds that have extreme amounts of everything in a single build. All it has done is create balancing problems and lowered build diversity. For the longest the game has been nothing but stack everything into one stat and go super saiyan.

So they are fixing the heavy armor meta? No? oh ok then.

Show me a heavy armor setup that utilizes only heavy sets and has the same damage/healing output as light or medium armor and their sets. People run heavy because they want to survive and not get two shot in pvp that is why it is popular. If heavy ruled in every situation then light armor users would not be complaining about shields. They wouldn’t even use shields they would use heavy armor and have the same amount of damage/healing output. They are complaining because the shields granted them the same protection as heavy armor and its related sets while allowing them to maximize their dps/healing by using light armor.

Neloth290

Im just tired of all the nerfs. Can we just get a patch of just buffs for once. Stamplar sustain change is about the only great change i can think of. I understand some nerfs can be needed but small adjustments please. Stop hitting things hard, small increments please to see how it goes, if further adjustment is needed tweak again slightly. I know its not easy to balance things Zos perhaps its impossible especially with all of us shouting in ur ears all the time about our various issues. Please if you are going to nerf anything nerf nerfs.

killahsin

anything good fun interesting or different in this game is going to be nerfed by zos because of all the crying. I understand the mindset of the PvE changes because ZoS wants the content to be 'harder'., yet in the end risk vs reward is always going to be the determining factor. Players are always going to move towards mitigation of risk regardless of what zenimax does. The fundamental red line is when will this mitigation become just not participating? At some point the entire game given the direction im seeing it go in with regards to constant nerfs is simply going to become a housing simulator even more so then it already is. And there will be zero high level game play. It's really sad.

revonine

They could have just nerfed Swift if they wanted too. But no. Balance changes being handled with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel.

Instead they nerf swift and every source of major expedition (except for rapids because you gotta let that rapids spammer in the big ball keep his job and feel useful).

ManDraKE

JackDaniell wrote: »

Swift gets hard countered the seccond you fight someone who uses thier brain to cut off your movement. Or is patient and waits for you to loop back around to stun you. Did it never occor to people that a swift player wants you to chase them in circles instead of cutting off his reatreat path? Perhaps if your all running in a PREDICTABLE patern behind him he is leading you in a circle for his benefot no? Seriously for me the swift nerf is a L2P issue.

Yes and no. In the proper hands you will get trolled around with swift, there are ways to abuse the movement speed to make the game targeting work like crap and there isn't much you can do. I can dance around you and you won't be able to kill me with a meele build, you will be swinging your swords in the air not understanding why you cant hit me half of the times even when in your screen i'm in front of you. Yes you can stun me, but unless you manage to burst me in a single CC (thing that is not going to happen against a competent player running a good build), you wont kill me.
Just add a bit of LoS to the mix, and have fun for ages.

JackDaniell wrote: »

No one who was inexperianced could use swift for anything other then retreat. A good player could really push the 1vX envelope with good timing and prediction with speed and cancels.

Being experienced doesnt give anyone the right to abuse the fact that the targeting/hitregistration simply doesn't work with high movement speed. I could try to fight this nerf saying that is wrong, because it will really nerf my playstyle by A LOT, but that would make me a hypocrite, i know that movement speed stacking is broken af. But it was fun while it lasted lol

Sadly they choose the route of nerfing uptime instead of nerfing stacking with a dimish return mechanic, i think is was the worst way of dealing with this. The nerf to uptime of major expedition will make 1vX'ing and soloplay way harder

killahsin

ManDraKE wrote: »

Yes and no. In the proper hands you will get trolled around with swift, there are ways to abuse the movement speed to make the game targeting work like crap and there isn't much you can do. I can dance around you and you won't be able to kill me with a meele build, you will be swinging your swords in the air not understanding why you cant hit me half of the times even when in your screen i'm in front of you. Yes you can stun me, but unless you manage to burst me in a single CC (thing that is not going to happen against a competent player running a good build), you wont kill me.
Just add a bit of LoS to the mix, and have fun for ages.

And this wont change regardless of the changes to swift, although it will hide some of it's exposure. This is a thing in all action/shooter online games. And in some cases understanding collision wire frames, hit reg and bounding boxes can even be a thing in the offline world. To be clear I have never been a fan of developers nerfing fun. Instead they should be enabling and adding fun counter mechanics. Instead were left with a team that does what we are seeing here.

ManDraKE

killahsin wrote: »

ManDraKE wrote: »

Yes and no. In the proper hands you will get trolled around with swift, there are ways to abuse the movement speed to make the game targeting work like crap and there isn't much you can do. I can dance around you and you won't be able to kill me with a meele build, you will be swinging your swords in the air not understanding why you cant hit me half of the times even when in your screen i'm in front of you. Yes you can stun me, but unless you manage to burst me in a single CC (thing that is not going to happen against a competent player running a good build), you wont kill me.
Just add a bit of LoS to the mix, and have fun for ages.

And this wont change regardless of the changes to swift, although it will hide some of it's exposure. This is a thing in all action/shooter online games. And in some cases understanding collision wire frames, hit reg and bounding boxes can even be a thing in the offline world.

you are 100% right on that, the problem won't go away, but at least it won't be as annyoing as it is right know lol

Ragnaroek93

I think they should stop nerfing things and actually start buffing stuff. All we get are nerfs, nerfs and nerfs. And they even sell their nerfs as buffs (look at light and medium armor... I'd rather not take the "buffs" to shields, Shuffle and dodgeroll).

IZZEFlameLash

I disagree with you on Swift. It is not just used for retreating. It is actually very effective mitigation tool. Just the sheer speed gained from it makes certain classes like DKs to never really land a single hit because while we are in animation, Swift users can intentionally/unintentionally have moved away from the range already, resulting in no hits with resource consumed. If the game registered hits first or had better targetting, Swift probably didn't need to be nerfed. But as is, it needed reduction.

I do agree on shield and max magicka. It's sad to see diversity go. This is just bad for PvE and PvP.

Aztlan

I like both of the changes. The combination of big magicka pools and huge shields is ridiculous, allowing magicka uses to stack too much damage, defense, and sustain, often at range, without a dedicated healer in the group.

As for swift, it's been a nightmare trying to hit permanently fast, yet tanky 1vXers in melee. When i gap close a guy with Ambush and still have trouble hitting him with a Surprise Attack or two, that's crazy. When I'm a werewolf and lose form because a heavy armor Templar is dancing around me, that's crazy. Good changes all around.

ankeor

With swift addd to other ms bonuses you can have up to 100% damage reduction because at some point you become untargetable.

ezio45

_Ahala_ wrote: »

Zos has gone overboard with the nerfs this patch... I was expecting Magden to finally get some good buffs after 6 patches of Bone Shattering nerfs... but it looks like I’m gonna need another splint after the changes to bird of prey

this is literally the worse patch Ive ever seen come out for eso.... I hate this garbage so much it hurts

Revokus

umagon wrote: »

bardx86 wrote: »

umagon wrote: »

I am actually happy that zos is reducing the effectiveness of survival mechanisms that builds with high amounts of damage would have. If players want the survival of a tank then they should have to build like a tank. If they want to be on the high-end spectrum of damage that’s fine but the damage mitigation capabilities should be low. It’s good that zos is ending this era of builds that have extreme amounts of everything in a single build. All it has done is create balancing problems and lowered build diversity. For the longest the game has been nothing but stack everything into one stat and go super saiyan.

So they are fixing the heavy armor meta? No? oh ok then.

Show me a heavy armor setup that utilizes only heavy sets and has the same damage/healing output as light or medium armor and their sets. People run heavy because they want to survive and not get two shot in pvp that is why it is popular. If heavy ruled in every situation then light armor users would not be complaining about shields. They wouldn’t even use shields they would use heavy armor and have the same amount of damage/healing output. They are complaining because the shields granted them the same protection as heavy armor and its related sets while allowing them to maximize their dps/healing by using light armor.

Look someone not aware of the 7th legion paired with fury ! You can actually dps just as much as a medium build when outnumbered in case you didn't know ! Be a warden or put troll king on ! Take your pick and you get a speedpots/huge dps/tanky character with awesome healing !

umagon

Revokus wrote: »

umagon wrote: »

bardx86 wrote: »

umagon wrote: »

I am actually happy that zos is reducing the effectiveness of survival mechanisms that builds with high amounts of damage would have. If players want the survival of a tank then they should have to build like a tank. If they want to be on the high-end spectrum of damage that’s fine but the damage mitigation capabilities should be low. It’s good that zos is ending this era of builds that have extreme amounts of everything in a single build. All it has done is create balancing problems and lowered build diversity. For the longest the game has been nothing but stack everything into one stat and go super saiyan.

So they are fixing the heavy armor meta? No? oh ok then.

Show me a heavy armor setup that utilizes only heavy sets and has the same damage/healing output as light or medium armor and their sets. People run heavy because they want to survive and not get two shot in pvp that is why it is popular. If heavy ruled in every situation then light armor users would not be complaining about shields. They wouldn’t even use shields they would use heavy armor and have the same amount of damage/healing output. They are complaining because the shields granted them the same protection as heavy armor and its related sets while allowing them to maximize their dps/healing by using light armor.

Look someone not aware of the 7th legion paired with fury ! You can actually dps just as much as a medium build when outnumbered in case you didn't know ! Be a warden or put troll king on ! Take your pick and you get a speedpots/huge dps/tanky character with awesome healing !

Both of those sets are reactive and have been adjusted. That combination does not give players any where near the damage mitigation a full tank has while also having far end dps. And it has a down side of requiring being hit a number of times before reaching the apex of damage output. During that time it gives little in the way of defense.

The setup has good peak damage (when and if it gets there) but it’s damage measured over time would not out preform full med or light dps sets. And by being 5 heavy build is missing light/med passives that increase damage. Troll king is another reactive set, and only effective when under 50% health. So, until that happens it is doing little other than adding 2% healing done. Which when you do the math is not much.

ak_pvp

Agree on shields. It was a band aid fix. They did need something to balance the ease and lack of accessible counters they had when effectively free harness was factored in. (no, shield breaker is not a soft counter. If I use it, it's too strong vs sorcs, but useless vs the other 80% of cyro)

Semi agree on swift. I liked it for other things. Should have been balanced via snares.
However, it was too strong. About 300 effective wp dmg equivalent loss for 30% movement speed. That is heavily in favor of swift.
"Cut off movement" isn't something that is possible either because of snare and root immunity being so strong.

Kalante

Not unless you had a complete cancer build there was no counter to swift and you know it. They just ran away before you could say SONIC.

Gnozo

Illuvatarr wrote: »

Takes no skill to run at light speed around in a tower abusing los in armor that makes you basically impervious to damage with healing over time pots instakilling anyone who comes near you with sub assault/dawnbreaker/spin to win. Enjoy your nerf

Takes no skill to write lfg in zonechat and win just by numbers and your epic snipe spam.

It actually takes skill to kite around, manage your ressources, time sub and dawnbreaker in the right Moment, use terrain or the tower to make smart moves.

But i guess ZOS only wants zergs full of Healbots and snipers. Thats the only thing we will have left in about 1 year.