Upcoming Racial Balance Changes for Update 21

jlb1705

Khydan wrote: »

Can someone please translate this for me? Who got nerfed and who got buffed? How is my boy Breton doing?

My Breton magplar is feeling the love - losing a little bit of magicka resistance for a decent amount of sustain.

casparian

Big thanks to Gilliam and Gina for working hard to get us this info so quickly!

Two main questions:

1. Why is there no race that both gets a stamina/weapon damage bonus and gets a bonus when using a class ability (a la High Elf)? This just reinforces the old, bad stereotype that class abilities are for magicka builds and weapon abilities are for stamina builds. Big oversight IMO.
2. Wasn't this supposed to introduce more racial diversity in individual roles? Isn't there just no reason to run anything but Altmer for mag DPS anymore (whereas before Dunmer and Altmer both had points in favor)? What am I missing here?

That said, racial diversity in PVP is looking a lot better than it used to be. That's nice to see.

CyberSkooma

Please show cats some love before they go live.... Why did you even give them health recovery... useless stat.

JobooAGS

MartiniDaniels wrote: »

grannas211 wrote: »

Aliyavana wrote: »

The only racial that matters for bosmer is being bis for cuteness

The passives look very good as well

What's good in there? redguards got exactly the same stamina and recovery, but on top of that 8% stamina cost decrease.
Bosmers will be bow-rolling rofling jokers now, nothing more.

With these regen modifiers for pve stambalde (7 med (.28) .15 nb passive .15 cp .1 relentless .2 potion) a bosmer's 258 regen becomes 485 regen. Redguard gets only 380 from adrenline rush while still having the same stam modifiers, having poison resists, and movement speed bonuses

In a pvp perspective, we will assume nb with vampire, 5 medium, and 13% from cp. This will give you the same numbers. You can also add stealth detection too and movement speed is more prominent

Seems like passive regen is better than active regen.

Blairy087

While these all seem rather nice.. what about the 12k crowns i spent on race changes 2 weeks ago? I now have tospend another 12k on race changes. 1 race change token is a kick in the teeth really. I dont mind th e changes everything looks alot more balanced. I just wasted all those crowns and now I have to buy more what i dont like 😑😑

Brutusmax1mus

Excited about a bow roll dodge on my bosmer.

CyberSkooma

Blairy087 wrote: »

While these all seem rather nice.. what about the 12k crowns i spent on race changes 2 weeks ago? I now have tospend another 12k on race changes. 1 race change token is a kick in the teeth really. I dont mind th e changes everything looks alot more balanced. I just wasted all those crowns and now I have to buy more what i dont like 😑😑

Super bad move on your part. They've said in the past that race changes are coming.

Cundu_Ertur

weedgenius wrote: »

Khajiit
Stealthy: Reduce detection radius by 3m and Increase damage from Stealth by 10% → Lunar Blessings: Increases your Max Health, Magicka, and Stamina by 750.

Overall some very interesting and pleasant stuff but this one is bizarre. Just... what? I think removing the Khajiit stealth bonus is lame enough, but the replacement passive is just "If you play a Khajiit you get 750 extra in your stats." I dunno, just strikes me as off.

Also bummed about Dunmer losing the passive bonus to flame damage. That was a really fun racial bonus that seemed to fit well, although I understand your reasoning based on the problem that was outlined.

Read on with the Khajiit, they get a 5m reduction to their detection radius in the next passive. So they end up with better stealth than they had before (by 2m). However, they do lose the 10% bonus to damage from stealth. Pity the Bosmer who lose stealth and damage from stealth to get a better detection range (which is useless outside of Cyrodil) and a replication of a Bow skill tree passive.


Bosmer effectively have one fewer racial passive than every other race.

radiostar

Imperial is a paid race that got nerf-booted worse than the free races. Rather sucky, Z.

Imagie

These are very bad changes for the Dunmer, their focus lore-wise was always destruction magic and its fitting to put them above the Altmer in that respect. Reconsider these changes, especially with their fire specialty.

LaurenIsAwkward

I'm glad my magic cats are gonna finally be viable, so excited.

Recremen

While I can't speak to the actual impact yet (will require thorough testing), I can definitely get behind the motivation for these changes from a gameplay perspective, and love the direction you've gone in reducing the delta by going with flat bonuses.

From a lore perspective, however, I'm still completely bewildered that racial bonuses, as a concept, have even survived in the TES universe for this long. It's a fairly ridiculous notion that all these tool-using cultures somehow have an inherent race-wide advantage over each other, especially when we see that their environments confer no selective pressure for such. Farmers and mages seem equally capable of attracting mates in all the societies we've seen, which leads one to wonder how such alleged racial differences could even survive within the species.

It's nice that many of the races are getting less shoehorned into magicka vs. stamina, as that closer reflects what we'd expect in reality (the ability to diversify within the race), but it still seems off that these haven't been transformed into something like a background passive to reflect a character's upbringing, over the nebulous and unrealistic racial passive angle. I think you had the right of it when you started describing half the races as some variation of "known for their adaptability".

Tempestwrath

Not sure I'm really digging some of these changes. Specifically, look at this:

Orcs get 500 stamina and health, as well as 258 weapon damage.

Dark Elves get 1250 stamina and magicka, 600 health, and 258 weapon damage.


Orcs do get a stamina/health sustain passive, but it feels a little lopsided because no matter how you slice it, a dark elf will always hit harder and take more damage than an Orc in melee, and the Dark Elf has the option of being a mage just as easily if they want. It'd feel a whole lot better if the Orc passives offered Orcs at least a flat 1000 health and stamina.

This is just the first example of some of the random weird disparities that feel very first-pass.

Deloth_Vyrr

@ZOS_Gilliam

While I am super excited with changes that will create for variation amongst races, the changes to Dark Elves (specifically when compared against High Elves) don't actually help race diversity at all, but rather eliminate it.

As far as Magicka DPS is concerned right now on live, Altmer and Dunmer are more or less neck in neck. Depending on class/build one can edge out the other but they are a good example of different but equal.

With the proposed changes, that parity is gone and Altmer becomes the de facto choice with Dunmer lagging far behind.

Currently in live Dark Elves get 9% extra magicka, with High Elves having 10%. So only a 1% difference.
1250 max magicka vs 2000 however is a staggering difference, and the extra stamina and health do not do anything to make up for it.

The Dunmer design here seems to be aimed at building a hybrid, as its stats are split between stam and magicka (and a bit of health even). Meaning its not going to excel at anything. Hybrid stam/mag builds just aren't viable, they don't work. A player has to dedicate to one or the other... but doing so will mean choosing Dunmer wastes half the benefit of these passives, and gets less overall.

I ask you please re-visit the Dunmer passives without trying to pigeonhole them into a hybrid, jack of all trades. All this will do is make them an inferior race for any one role.

LiquidPony

Orc looks interesting. Redguard still looks meta for stam DPS in PvE but Orc might be a close second.

Unflinching is basically guaranteed 100% uptime on +95 stam/health per second. And +258 weapon damage is really strong, with Major/Minor Brutality that's effectively 335 weapon damage, which is the equivalent of ~3520 max stam in a damage calculation.

Panchaea

I have to agree with Audens on this. What's the point of playing a Dunmer if this goes through? They may be a jack of trades race in lore, but that does not translate into an MMO which does not encourage hybrid builds. Now there's no reason to choose Dunmer for DPS unless you want a pittance of 600 health and an immunity that is only truly helpful in Asylum Sanctorium.

Using the words "diverse" or "unique" is useless, because these changes effectively don't do anything but further pigeonhole races into specific play styles while making some race choices blatantly inferior to others (i.e. Dunmer and Altmer). Lore should not have an effect on race choice when there are plenty of examples of gameplay segregating from established lore or in universe semantics (Dragonknights with Akaviri techniques running around, and soon Necromancers). Hell, even in Skyrim your race did not matter thanks to enchanted equipment and the perk system.

You cannot purport to promote a unique play style when every facet of PVE/PVP content is near-homogenous (CP spreads, gear, skills and skill rotation). Narrowing race choices only makes the game more boring as you start seeing more of the same thing, rather than support a system that allows players to play the race they prefer. Gameplay balance will never be achieved when we have an arbitrary system that nudges us into playing what should essentially be a personal and aesthetic choice.

Why not keep the non-combat passives and expand on the racial quirk in a way that doesn't define the meta, and create a birthsign or subclass system that allows us to specialise without limiting our choices? There is literally no justification or use of lore to lock races into certain play styles when we play in a virtual world where every race has their own mages/thieves/warriors/etc, or where gameplay has proven to take priority over lore when logical adjustments should be made.

Malacthulhu

The argonian bonus for drinking a potion should be a % return on health/magic/stam instead of a flat value, (even if it had something to gain as a flat value that would be op) otherwise as the game progresses you will just have to buff it again or ignore it. The rest of the bonuses are a huge buff, should be interesting.

WrathOfInnos

These look pretty cool. Thanks for posting them.

We'll have to do some testing on PTS to see how everything looks, possibly some minor adjustments will be needed, but at first glance they look relatively balanced.

Darthbell

I really like the changes. This really opens up choice and variety. This does bring a lot more balance to our choices. Well done!

LurgidBean

Cundu_Ertur wrote: »

Read on with the Khajiit, they get a 5m reduction to their detection radius in the next passive. So they end up with better stealth than they had before (by 2m). However, they do lose the 10% bonus to damage from stealth. Pity the Bosmer who lose stealth and damage from stealth to get a better detection range (which is useless outside of Cyrodil) and a replication of a Bow skill tree passive.


Bosmer effectively have one fewer racial passive than every other race.

As a new player from Summerset this bums me out for my Bosmer main on both the NA/EU servers because I don't pvp.

Also, I haven't done the math, but as a casual player I felt having access to an "easy mode race/class" aka Argonian Templar with the race bonuses for increased healing done/received plus class bonus for healing was nice. I felt like the daily reward potions with the potions passive also encouraged this choice for new/inexperienced/lazy players. I hope it is still viable for this purpose.

Zer0oo

overall they look quite nice. I am positively surprised.

James-Wayne

This is going to be a expensive and painful patch....

Lord_Eomer

LLawlietW wrote: »

Why was redguard buffed? how does that make sense when they are already considered the best race for stamina dps. and then the second best option khajiit gets nerfed. i just dont understand how that is supposed to make sense at all. now khajiit has more health recovery than stam... but yea lets buff adrenaline rush

6% cost reductions only applied to weapon skill lime not class skills so i think there is nothing wrong with new change.

code65536

The tradeoff between Breton and Dunmer is meaningful--Breton has better sustain, Dunmer has better damage.

But why would someone pick either of those when they could have both sustain and damage with an Altmer? Okay, Breton does have more sustain than Altmer (which is more than what could be said about Dunmer, who is deficient in both sustain and damage), but losing all that spell damage (just a bit shy of the 5p bonus of Julianos) is quite the tradeoff, and I'm not convinced that tradeoff is one that would make sense for most players.

It'll be Altmer-or-bust with these changes.

PS: Keep in mind that extra spell damage means more efficient resource usage. I.e., you get more damage per resource spent and thus fewer resources are needed to kill a particular target. So damage, in that sense, provides a sort of indirect sustain.

Corpier

Halke wrote: »

FakeFox wrote: »

Once again percentage scaling gets replaced with fixed stats, dumbing down builds even further. Most of these changes are straight up 30% nerfs for any reasonable build. So where are the "this is a buff if you run under 20k of your primary resource" developer comments?

Can you even run under 20k of your primary resource? Naked I am still over 20k with a split HP/Mag attribute loadout >.>

Make no mistake it is a nerf, but not as much of one as you think. Try doing a skill respect and removing the racial passive you have now, then adding 2k or so for the new one to see what it would be with the changes. Due to how racial passive %s enter the equation, its going to be close to a 1-2k stam or mag loss for most.

NyassaV

jlb1705 wrote: »

Minno wrote: »

jlb1705 wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Only one I'm worried about is the Redguard. Given how hard that race is pushed as "The Choice for StamDPS," buffing Adrenaline Rush feels like a mistake.

Is it not balanced by this part though?:

Exhilaration: 9% Stamina Recovery → Martial Training: Reduces the cost of your Weapon abilities by 8%.

This line is definitely a nerf - not just the difference between 9% and 8%, but the difference between passive recovery and cost reduction to only weapon skills. It sounds like the cost reduction wouldn't apply to things like Surprise Attack, Killer's Blade, Relentless Focus, Razor Caltrops, Resolving Vigor, Rearming Trap, etc.

You forget weapon abilities could also include ultimates.

Ultimate abilities consume ultimate and not stamina, therefore the Redguard passives didn't affect them either before or after these changes.

But they will afterwards since it doesn't say anything about stamina

Cundu_Ertur

Brutusmax1mus wrote: »

Excited about a bow roll dodge on my bosmer.

It's customary to include a [/sarc] tag to make it clear for people who aren't paying attention.

metabLast3r

@ZOS_Gilliam

Uhh, no ice damage passive bonus for nords? At least make them viable in some manner for ice damage. Sigh. The world is crumbling around me. Send help.

ccmedaddy

I like the overall direction. Nord and Breton seem like very attractive options for PvP next patch.

RIP my Dunmer toons though...

Alpheu5

Malacthulhu wrote: »

The argonian bonus for drinking a potion should be a % return on health/magic/stam instead of a flat value, (even if it had something to gain as a flat value that would be op) otherwise as the game progresses you will just have to buff it again or ignore it. The rest of the bonuses are a huge buff, should be interesting.

It was a percentage before and it was absolute garbage.