What would be worst Nerf in game? (Past and Future)

Tasear

What is worst change you could think of that could happen or has happened?

_Ahala_

Bird of Prey major expedition duration reduced from 10s to 4s to “bring it in line with other speed buffs”

geonsocal

cloak not purging...

years later that one still bugs me...

Banana

Akamai introduction

idk

For me it is not any single change it is what seems to be a lack of direction or vision for the game.

Rob Garret says they are working on figuring out what they want combat to look like in this game so hopefully they give that serious thought and finally develop a vision to work off which should lead to a more consistent direction instead of the scattershot approach Zos has been taking.

valkyrie93

shield cast time

Feric51

I think the operative word in the title is “would.” As in: has not happened yet.

Many of the nerfs listed above have actually happened.

Ertosi

Please don't give the powers that be ideas.

jainiadral

Shoot me for even typing this:

Nerf questing, writ, and kill XP

Tryxus

Has happened: nerfing the Bear's damage by 30%
Could happen: further nerfs to Deep Fissure

kargen27

For me personally it would be remove heal for a percentage of the damage done that Puncturing Sweeps gives back. That is a big part of what lets me solo overland bosses and get up close and personal with evil doers in dungeons and trials when the situation calls for it.

MLGProPlayer

Taking the worst class in the game (magicka warden) and actually nerfing them every patch.

Just typing that sounds insane, but it's reality for us magden players.

Curtdogg47

Snipe! Then people would have to find something new to complain about on the forums!

ezio45

champion point removal

MaxwellC

@Tasear
Worst change for me were the following

#1 Helping hands being nerfed. Literally the changes talked about if your max stam stat was X it would be a buff or nerf; no data or claimed that it somehow over-performed (judging by all the changes to help sustain it's safe to say it wasn't over-performing).

#2 Battle roar being nerfed: Stacking our max stat allowed us to receive more sustain to that stat and again we had a change that stated if your max stat was X it would be a buff or nerf. Clearly again it wasn't over-performing and it at-least allowed us Stam DKs who solely relied on other skills for damage in PvP, to have more damaging capabilities since we'd receive more sustain to our max stat which would be what we'd use to damage our foes.

#3 Molten armaments losing execute and 150% Heavy attack damage. Forgot what the patch notes stated but again the DK relies on Heavy attacks to sustain and the class is slow so to remove that was weird especially when it helped my Mag DK perform better in PvP/PvE. The removal of the execute was the best response I could ever hear from a developer who dealt with combat adjustments. The following is paraphrased but pretty much spot on "DKs should wait for an ally to help execute the enemy". Can't imagine how annoyed I was when I heard that like literally felt like I'm in the room and the teacher asked who can solve 1+1 yet no one could do it.

#4 Flames of Oblivion losing AoE. The only demerit the skill had was back then it drained magicka at like 300-700 a second and if you swamped bars it would be auto removed unless you had it on both bars. If it stayed as it were today i.e always on per cast and one single cost then it would've been a massive help in pressure for PvP and Add clearing for PvE.

#5 DK wings losing reflecting all projectiles within 4 seconds instead of being capped + loss of reflecting meteor and other ultimates (sorcs overload can still be reflected lol). Yeah that one sucked as it was a trump card the class had as all classes should have a few to distinguish themselves from the rest but yeah another wrobalance was at play here.

that's about it lol.

MakeMeUhSamich

Capping magic shields based on max health and gutting sustain.

Oh, wait...

xenowarrior92eb17_ESO

buying crown crates and never get the crates.

Tasear

Ertosi wrote: »

Please don't give the powers that be ideas.

I have good intentions? My idea is show what people hate the most past and present with changes. So they can try to avoid or maybe even change something for better.

generalmyrick

if champion points went away, I'd give the game about 30 minutes play time to see if I liked the chyanges.

Im sure they'd have to replace it with something.

i worked to hard for the champ points.

redspecter23

Morrowind sustain nerf.

You could make an argument that the changes were for the good of the game, which is great in theory, but it unfortunately put a bad mark on what should have been an absolutely epic chapter. Something that should have brought tons of new players to the game. What it did was divide the community and cause it to bleed long time players away. Many took long breaks and some never returned.

I nominate this for the biggest negative change, not for any balancing reasons, but for how it marred the release of Morrowind and drove long term players away.

The shield cast time change likely would have been a close second, but the last minute change to make it far less divisive pushed it further down the list.

Lumenn

Anything that prevents solo playing(either through healing nerf or damage) I already spent years playing EQ with that idiotic mentality that mmo means you must wait on guild members or plan for a group if you want to make ANY progress(esp as a melee character. Solo meant light blues or greens) rather than you all play in the same online world. I would just flat out quit if ESO forced grouping for every little thing and I had to wait or pre plan every single time I wanted to play.

f047ys3v3n

Without question it was the Morrwind sustain nerf(s). These were so bad they caused the folding on more than half of raid guilds. Combat has never been even close to as fun since for anybody and it had a massive effect of floor lowering in dps with actually a small raise to the ceiling. What sustain changes were necessary and positive for PVP could have easily been done through battle leveling without wrecking endgame PVE. This nerf was also surprising because, for the year before it, most of the updates had been good and some of us thought maybe the combat team had gained a modicum of competence. The year and a half since Morrowind has had all net negative changes and demonstrated without a doubt that they do not.

Second behind the sustain nerf is probably the 40% shield cap. Shields now fall into that category of abilities you pretty much have to use do to lack of alternatives and other factors in game design, but you know are nevertheless a terrible deal. The reason given for the change was to make healers feel important but every healer I know hates the change and I do not run any content with healers now that I did not run with healers before. In fact, I deliberately run more content without healers than before because I think all Wrobel ever looks at when he makes a half whit decision is his internal metrics and I want to make it clear how bad he failed. Shields were never a substitute for heals. They were always a thing you hit before bit unavoidable mechanics or after you took a big hit to give a healer time to top you off. Healers are left out of much 4 man content becuase:
1) Dps checks on much DLC hard mode content are very had for most experianced players to reach.
2) Most damage is one shots anyway.
3) Few heal checks exist.
4) Even on content where dps checks are not severe most mechanics are timing rather than health percentage based and so are exponentially easier as dps increases. A lot of content has say a very high (say 2M) health add spawn every 60 seconds. A so-so dps group (20k each) takes 50 seconds to do this leaving only 10 seconds to dps boss. A high dps group (45k each) does it in 22 seconds leaving 38 seconds on the boss and therefore completing the fight in 3.8 times faster though doing just over twice the dps. See, exponentially easier though bad game design. This is even more the case when entire mechanics are skipped which they are in almost every fight with high dps. Bad, bad, bad game design.
Also, healers don't really do much healing post Morrowind since group sustain is job #1 and it takes up most of their casts. I might also add that the shield nerf came at a time when mag already pretty much getting wrecked in PVP and the nerf reduced their primary defense by 1/2 to 2/3rds making them utterly worthless.

You said future. I expect the worst future nerf will be the removal of racial passives altogether next patch. This will probably just amount to a 10% resource nerf, 9-15% resource sustain nerf, and 4-5% damage nerf. Racial passives are wildly unbalanced and have been a big problem since the removal of softcaps in 1.6 but I expect the "fix" to this will come with a massive nerf to everybody running a BIS race.

Sylvermynx

idk wrote: »

For me it is not any single change it is what seems to be a lack of direction or vision for the game.

Rob Garret says they are working on figuring out what they want combat to look like in this game so hopefully they give that serious thought and finally develop a vision to work off which should lead to a more consistent direction instead of the scattershot approach Zos has been taking.

Oy.... shouldn't that have been solidly in place at release? Good lord....

Sheezabeast

I feel like Templar healers became less important in group play when they changed Repentance

Tasear

Sheezabeast wrote: »

I feel like Templar healers became less important in group play when they changed Repentance

Would you be happier if healers had more utility that could have? Maybe something that offers a chance not everyone has but could have if they put effort or you in that direction say for example with champion tree?

Gaggin

Worst that has happened? Non swift speed nerfs. Worst thing that cpuld happen? Another speed nerf.

dazee

The worst nerf that could possibly happen would be to universally nerf every damage ability to do 0-1 damage regardless of how many buffs you stack. I'm sure it would make the people who think the game is too easy happy though!

Tasear

Gaggin wrote: »

Worst that has happened? Non swift speed nerfs. Worst thing that cpuld happen? Another speed nerf.

Not that I disagree, but why do you think so? How has it affected your gameplay experience?

AndyMac

The worst for me was the mDK nerf hammering in 1.6 - other classes I can’t really talk about.

Sheezabeast

Tasear wrote: »

Sheezabeast wrote: »

I feel like Templar healers became less important in group play when they changed Repentance

Would you be happier if healers had more utility that could have? Maybe something that offers a chance not everyone has but could have if they put effort or you in that direction say for example with champion tree?

The idea of a support branch of CP is interesting, like maybe increase resources returned to the group by X %, it would beef up orbs and shards and elemental drain, for example. ZOS would never do this though.

generalmyrick

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

Without question it was the Morrwind sustain nerf(s). These were so bad they caused the folding on more than half of raid guilds. Combat has never been even close to as fun since for anybody and it had a massive effect of floor lowering in dps with actually a small raise to the ceiling. What sustain changes were necessary and positive for PVP could have easily been done through battle leveling without wrecking endgame PVE. This nerf was also surprising because, for the year before it, most of the updates had been good and some of us thought maybe the combat team had gained a modicum of competence. The year and a half since Morrowind has had all net negative changes and demonstrated without a doubt that they do not.

Second behind the sustain nerf is probably the 40% shield cap. Shields now fall into that category of abilities you pretty much have to use do to lack of alternatives and other factors in game design, but you know are nevertheless a terrible deal. The reason given for the change was to make healers feel important but every healer I know hates the change and I do not run any content with healers now that I did not run with healers before. In fact, I deliberately run more content without healers than before because I think all Wrobel ever looks at when he makes a half whit decision is his internal metrics and I want to make it clear how bad he failed. Shields were never a substitute for heals. They were always a thing you hit before bit unavoidable mechanics or after you took a big hit to give a healer time to top you off. Healers are left out of much 4 man content becuase:
1) Dps checks on much DLC hard mode content are very had for most experianced players to reach.
2) Most damage is one shots anyway.
3) Few heal checks exist.
4) Even on content where dps checks are not severe most mechanics are timing rather than health percentage based and so are exponentially easier as dps increases. A lot of content has say a very high (say 2M) health add spawn every 60 seconds. A so-so dps group (20k each) takes 50 seconds to do this leaving only 10 seconds to dps boss. A high dps group (45k each) does it in 22 seconds leaving 38 seconds on the boss and therefore completing the fight in 3.8 times faster though doing just over twice the dps. See, exponentially easier though bad game design. This is even more the case when entire mechanics are skipped which they are in almost every fight with high dps. Bad, bad, bad game design.
Also, healers don't really do much healing post Morrowind since group sustain is job #1 and it takes up most of their casts. I might also add that the shield nerf came at a time when mag already pretty much getting wrecked in PVP and the nerf reduced their primary defense by 1/2 to 2/3rds making them utterly worthless.

You said future. I expect the worst future nerf will be the removal of racial passives altogether next patch. This will probably just amount to a 10% resource nerf, 9-15% resource sustain nerf, and 4-5% damage nerf. Racial passives are wildly unbalanced and have been a big problem since the removal of softcaps in 1.6 but I expect the "fix" to this will come with a massive nerf to everybody running a BIS race.

yikes!

i agree, but i hope they put something that's, at least, fun in the place of all those nerfs!