Overload PTS Feedback

Pdoherty4637_ESO

TLDR: read the bold text

Overload, in my opinion is not worth slotting in its current state. There are several easily fixable problems that the ultimate has, and since the dev team has clearly been looking at the skill this patch I would like to provide some feedback from myself and several other sorcerers who are experiencing the same issues.

Disclaimer: This is from a mostly PVP perspective and I do not have any information on damage parses using overload and resource return viability in DPS rotations

1. GCD: The ultimate is on the GCD or at least appears to be and it requires time to exit and enter the ultimate. This is a problem because if its intended to be used as a burst tool in pvp, the time it takes to enter the ultimate is more than enough for an enemy to heal out of execute range, activate a reflect/absorb ability etc.... This means that you need to already have the ultimate active when attempting a burst combo which is counter-intuitive. A player should be able to animation cancel a skill into an OL light/heavy attack without a large time gap in between. long story short: the time between pressing the button for the ultimate and being able to activate a light/heavy attack needs to be shorter for it to be useful in pvp burst combo

2. Visibility: the animation for "being in overload" is lightning around your character's hands. The animation for having power surge active is...... lightning around you character's hands. The animation for Boundless storm is..... lightning around you entire character. My point being that without an addon helping you, its rather difficult to tell whether or not you are in overload (especially if using a lightning staff), and in fast paced combat, that's not a mistake you want to make, given ultimate generation is turned off while active. A clear indication of whether or not overload is active would be a welcome quality of life change.

3. Targeting: This one is simple. Overload light attacks can fire without a target in line of sight. there is no reason for this and can cause light attacks to be wasted and fired at nothing or used on an unintended target. People may say this is a L2P issue or that regular staff/weapon light attacks function this way, but overload light attacks have a cost and wasting them seems inconvenient when there is no reason to have it function this way just because weapon light attacks do.

4. Heavy attack usage: The heavy attack damage is very strong, but it is channeled so you cannot use other skills or defend yourself while it is active and it requires you to be fairly close to the targets being hit (even with power overload) and since you are slowed while channeling enemies can easily out-range the heavy attack. I personally use destructive clench, and so am generally fairly close to my target, but many magicka sorcerers are long range casters and actively avoid being close to their target which makes half the overload skill much less desirable for that playstyle. Making the overload heavy attack function similarly to the lightning staff heavy attack would make the heavy attack useful for long range casters and give a strong tool for sorcerer against reflect and absorb skills. (the interaction with roll dodge may be too strong if this were the case, however, and would need to be looked at)

5. Light attack weaving effectiveness: Light attack weaving does not feel rewarding. light attacks had their damage severely reduced, and now do roughly double the damage of a normal light attack. They can be dodged, reflected, absorbed, mitigated by block, and just outright miss the target (see issue #3) while active no ultimate is generated, and each light attack costs 22 ultimate (I believe, I didn't double check this on pts) So you do not net more damage using overload over meteor, atronach, soul assault, or dawnbreaker and the ultimate is sustain damage, not burst. Even though the animations were tightened up in murkmire, weaving OL light attacks still seems clunky and animation cancelling doesn't quite work as it should. Overload only seems useful against magicka characters that don't have reflects or absorbs and run low stamina pools. All told, overload light attack weaving feels awkward, doesn't provide more overall damage than other ultimates, doesn't provide burst damage, is heavily countered by roll dodge, cloak, and reflect/absorb, and needs either a damage buff/cost decrease/ulti-regen enabled/other buff to be be worth slotting/using

6. 3rd Bar: Losing the 3rd bar hit stamina sorcerers and pet sorcerers/healers very hard and they were not compensated for the loss. Both playstyles still suffer from lack of bar space. This could be fixed either by buffing certain sorcerer passives and adjusting the pet system to allow for 1 bar pets, or restoring the overload 3rd bar to one of the morphs.

7. Overload on Stamina: Stamina sorcerers in general do not have any good options for a class ultimate outside of certain situations (negate) but after the 3rd bar removal overload has no place on a stamina sorcerer's bar except for niche build that weaves light attacks into another offensive ultimate such as dawnbreaker, but the users of those builds admit the combo is awkward and difficult to execute properly, and requires not having any defensive ultimate.

Inig0

This ultimate is equally clunky and equally a dps loss in pve like it is in pvp. I watched someone duel a mag sorc that was using this ult and every time they used it nothing happened to push the fight in there favor. The damage difference between a normal light attack and an overload light attack not good enough to warrant it being an ult at all.

While the ult itself looks to be "ok" dps based on tooltip it misses out on the highest damaging source in all dps parses -- light attacks. While it true that it takes place of light attacks so youre not missing any GCDs and it does do more damage than light attacks so your dps will go up a bit it still is very minimal and the difference between a light attack and a overload light attack isnt large enough to warrant it being your ult of choice. Especially when you could have instead used another ultimate which would have resulted in a great dps increase after the use.

They should make the ult have an upfront cost and be given a duration. So that it can proc things like master architect. Something like a 64 ult cost with 15-20 duration to do damage ALONG side your light attacks would be great.

One suggestion that i saw was to make a morph that gave the third bar slot and make it a toggle and the other one would be more like a duration like i just described both would serve as one) utility bar which sorcs felt an identity to and two) a decent sustain single target damage ult for sorc.

It seems they are done with the whole third bar thing though. They could really make this ult awesome and cool they just need to make it more effective and comparable to other ults.

ccfeeling

Can ZOS consider new Overload Transformation ?

Something likes Werewolf magical version ~

Pdoherty4637_ESO

I like the idea of a duration of buffed damage to light/heavy attacks could just function as adds X lightning damage to light and heavy attacks. Maybe even add duration based on ultimate value at time of activation. If they tightened up the animations and removed the activation of the ult from the GCD that would fix most of its issues, but then again so would a multitude of other adjustments, bottom line, it just needs to be looked at in general.

Dracane

I was about to write a post about all the problems that Overload has. Since you came first, I give it to you.
I wish to add 2 major issues I have Overload.

Its heavy attacks do not function like other heavy attacks, which is confusing. They don't deal bonus damage against off balance targets and do not stun them. While the 2nd part is ignorable, it would be great if it was more like other heavy attacks and deal bonus damage against off balance enemies.

Another issue is the apparent minimum range of overload light attacks. It seems impossible to use against moving targets in melee range. The attacks just won't connect and fly off.
Which leads me to the clunkiness of Overload attacks. They are slow and appear to have the same long global cooldown that they had before Overload became this way. Weaving with it feels bad and it often bugs out and just eats the cast of the spell you are trying to weave in entirely.

That is mostly the pvp aspect.
In pve I find it impossible to sustain. Removing ALL ultimate gain in Overload is too much. At least allow banish the wicked and combat frenzy to restore ultimate. Even when used from 500 ultimate points, overload runs out fast. Which is why I think nobody really likes to use it. You generate no ultimate when using it and end up with nothing left. Overload demands full dedication and forbids the use of other ultmiates, as you need every single point.

Pdoherty4637_ESO

Been testing different ultimates for sorcerer in battlegrounds and I have to say there really is no ultimate that really works well and scales properly with mag sorcerer. Atronach is limited because it is stationary, costs too much for what it does in pvp, and is only worth using if you land it directly on top of your opponent. Dawnbreaker is good except it is physical damage and scales off of physical penetration so even in no-cp this is a significant damage loss over a magicka based ultimate. Except against potatoes, Meteor is a waste, gets blocked, does 2k damage and the enemy immediately rolls out of the aoe. Soul Assault is decent, but only if used in combo with curse and fury, and since the snare was removed, it can be completely negated by LoS very quickly. Negate is situational and is reliant on allies to take advantage of it, and really doesn't feel fun to use. When every other class has a clear choice for offensive ultimates (incap strike, leap, permaforst, crescent sweep) its time for Sorcs to have a viable class option. Overload is lightning damage and boosts spell/weapon damage for slotting and makes the most sense for a macgiaka sorcerer ranged ultimate #makeoverloadgreatagain