Additional Context on U23 Combat Changes

ArenGesus

brandoncoffmannub18_ESO wrote: »

ArenGesus wrote: »

brandoncoffmannub18_ESO wrote: »

Different teams, Different skill set

Presumably you're responding to the comment above yours, in which case this is such a stupid answer. Nobody here cares what the teams are who do different things. The point stands that zos can choose to spend its resources in different ways and the way that they are currently doing so is not to resolve long-standing issues that severely detract from the game for a huge number of players. If they're different teams, great - change the size and makeup of those teams.

That being said, it will never happen so it's not worth discussing.

But using the correct forums and discussions will get you to the right people rather than posting on a forum rather than them writing it off because it's not their problem or job.

I'm pretty sure you're right - except that currently it isn't anybody's job to deal with the aforementioned issues so there is no right place to raise them. That's why I said it's not worth discussing.

robpr

I was fearing I lost damage on my (still irrevelant in score runs) mDK and after few parses was confirming it. Then I changed morph of Blockade to Unstable and slotted new Soul Trap and my damage went back to previous levels.
You need to test people. There are too much skills that look nerfed in first place but combined with others that changed it evens each out or even buffs them in some cases.

The only concern is healing strength. I wanna see springs in action with all those Rituals, Rings and Vigors if they are on the level with old spring stacking.

rei91

Olauron wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler
If your concern is too much DPS of some players you should take in mind that you can't combat it with nerfs. Those players will adapt. Others will be hit by collateral damage much harder. If your concern is too much DPS of some players then you should implement a hard cap of damage from one character to one enemy in one second (or in half a second). All extra damage should be treated as overdamage and ignored. That way you can choose a fixed number, limit DPS to it and balance all dungeons and trials with this number in mind.

I have doubts they realise that this patch will hit casual 10-30k dps players most (which I believe is majority of this game), not the 60+k ones they're trying to nerf. 60+k ones will shrug it off and adapt in weeks and then do top damage again like no patch ever happened.
Now low/average dps players will suffer most. And some of them will put away their money. Like me - what point in sub or dlc dungeons/trials where I'll be struggling? I better finish story content and be done with the game.

Expert

In the office of Zenimax, their brains are diarrhea always pooping out terrible ideas with no control to hold it in.

Malada

A friend of mine pointed something else out to me regarding this latest round of WW Nerfs and recommended I give the patch notes another pass...

So I've tried WW before and my experience is it's the first thing to get shot down in PvP. In fact most of the time during prime time my WW's get locked down right after I morph. It doesn't take much.

You Devs do realize by making them weaker, that is, reducing their ability to contribute damage, making their bread and butter skills more expensive/less powerful is probably going to start phasing them out in PvP right?

This update adds some cool new features, sure. Love em. Some upgrades we needed, yep. However it does not put out some of the major problems with this game, raging thru the servers like an interstate forest fire.

I mean, even if a patch contains changes whose result could appear as being something positive, what 'good' does it actually do... That's why I get angry coming here, seeing what amounts to all this noise and comments of things that -you Devs- don't like however what good has any of it actually done? We can come back here next year, same bad place, same bad channel... will you then be able to show us what has actually been fixed? Adding new features is great however I can add a new widget onto a sinking ship and the ship is still gonna sink.

Mishaofi1983

So far-so good

Aixy

@ArenGesus @brandoncoffmannub18_ESO

We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them

They can't fix this game..... five years later and we are talking about orbs......is so sad.-

aquiella

rei91 wrote: »

Olauron wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler
If your concern is too much DPS of some players you should take in mind that you can't combat it with nerfs. Those players will adapt. Others will be hit by collateral damage much harder. If your concern is too much DPS of some players then you should implement a hard cap of damage from one character to one enemy in one second (or in half a second). All extra damage should be treated as overdamage and ignored. That way you can choose a fixed number, limit DPS to it and balance all dungeons and trials with this number in mind.

I have doubts they realise that this patch will hit casual 10-30k dps players most (which I believe is majority of this game), not the 60+k ones they're trying to nerf. 60+k ones will shrug it off and adapt in weeks and then do top damage again like no patch ever happened.
Now low/average dps players will suffer most. And some of them will put away their money. Like me - what point in sub or dlc dungeons/trials where I'll be struggling? I better finish story content and be done with the game.

So only those that have the VMA weapons will not suffer in DPS loss.

Jodynn

aquiella wrote: »

rei91 wrote: »

Olauron wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler
If your concern is too much DPS of some players you should take in mind that you can't combat it with nerfs. Those players will adapt. Others will be hit by collateral damage much harder. If your concern is too much DPS of some players then you should implement a hard cap of damage from one character to one enemy in one second (or in half a second). All extra damage should be treated as overdamage and ignored. That way you can choose a fixed number, limit DPS to it and balance all dungeons and trials with this number in mind.

I have doubts they realise that this patch will hit casual 10-30k dps players most (which I believe is majority of this game), not the 60+k ones they're trying to nerf. 60+k ones will shrug it off and adapt in weeks and then do top damage again like no patch ever happened.
Now low/average dps players will suffer most. And some of them will put away their money. Like me - what point in sub or dlc dungeons/trials where I'll be struggling? I better finish story content and be done with the game.

So only those that have the VMA weapons will not suffer in DPS loss.

vMA weapons buff those who can obtain them, it's practical and fair because they put in the work to obtain them; once you learn the mechanics it's not so bad, but you have to put some time into crafting your build based on knowledge of what works best and there are several help resources in game and out.

rei91 wrote: »

I have doubts they realise that this patch will hit casual 10-30k dps players most (which I believe is majority of this game), not the 60+k ones they're trying to nerf. 60+k ones will shrug it off and adapt in weeks and then do top damage again like no patch ever happened.
Now low/average dps players will suffer most. And some of them will put away their money. Like me - what point in sub or dlc dungeons/trials where I'll be struggling? I better finish story content and be done with the game.

Those who are end game doing these 60+k parses as you say are hit, our style must change and many like myself play both PvP and PvE and balancing both can be tricky, as one thing can be a buff for one, the other can be a nerf.

You can't speak for someone who isn't in your experience, nor can you use something opinionated such as one will suffer more than the other, instead of targeting them make your argument more clear, concise, and give reasons as to why and what pieces will be hitting you, otherwise a blanket explanation will just be looked at and then overlooked because the devil is in the details.

Girl_Number8

So you're revamping things with nerfs and buffs to certain classes, so it is Year of the Stam but not the game's Performance?

Which is the most unbalanced thing in the whole game. Wouldn't it be better to focus on fixing that before anything else, that way people could actually play the content?

My stam toons are happy but this is not close to balanced. Please don't nerf things again when the zergilings die en masse and start crying.

Malada

Girl_Number8 wrote: »

So you're revamping things with nerfs and buffs to certain classes, so it is Year of the Stam but not the game's Performance?

Which is the most unbalanced thing in the whole game. Wouldn't it be better to focus on fixing that before anything else, that way people could actually play the content?

My stam toons are happy but this is not close to balanced. Please don't nerf things again when the zergilings die en masse and start crying.

Yep. I always thought of things like Vigor as being a handicap for Stam Blades who cannot reliable use Magicka heals.

This is exactly the errant line of thinking I was referring to also.

Jodynn

Stam is hitting harder than mag, maybe you could argue range for mag but some melee mag classes such as magDK I find this unfair and unjustified.

RedTalon

I'm not even going to bother testing, given the patch notes more or less read has if someone did the whole thing with pvp in mind not pve or both

mrrwfranklinub17_ESO

Instead of continually "Nerfing" things, how about fixing what is broken?

xeNNNNN

rei91 wrote: »

Olauron wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler
If your concern is too much DPS of some players you should take in mind that you can't combat it with nerfs. Those players will adapt. Others will be hit by collateral damage much harder. If your concern is too much DPS of some players then you should implement a hard cap of damage from one character to one enemy in one second (or in half a second). All extra damage should be treated as overdamage and ignored. That way you can choose a fixed number, limit DPS to it and balance all dungeons and trials with this number in mind.

I have doubts they realise that this patch will hit casual 10-30k dps players most (which I believe is majority of this game), not the 60+k ones they're trying to nerf. 60+k ones will shrug it off and adapt in weeks and then do top damage again like no patch ever happened.
Now low/average dps players will suffer most. And some of them will put away their money. Like me - what point in sub or dlc dungeons/trials where I'll be struggling? I better finish story content and be done with the game.

Yep and its not just individual DPS either, the healing changes will make lower tier players (this is not an insult) panic a bit during raids too. Mostly because they have no safety net anymore meaning the learn curve is going to be much worse in certain raids for them. I really dont like it. Its going to turn a lot of people off from raids. A lot.

As you said not the higher end players but those who are currently struggling with trials already.

Durham

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

@ZOS_BrianWheeler thanks for the update, anything on Cyro performance and content you can share?

Specifically the 3 major issues in pvp:
1. Combat bug - you keep allowing (good) then removing (bad) ability changing which worsens the frustration
2. Crashing coming near to keeps with high number of player characters due to player loading and view distance.
3. Desyncing on player locations during combat due to knockbacks and stuns.

OMG the most important clearly without a doubt !!!! PERFORMANCE LAAAAG

merevie

I keep reading that these balances are for pvp. Um. No?!

Pvp community is not happy. The guy worked on pvp yes. Was that for our benefit? -go read the pvp posts from the last 18 months!

Imagine a bunch of starving wolves, running in frozen/slow motion, wanting to turn apart the sparkly money gobbling evil rabbit that is the nerfmire team. THAT is we feel. Listen to the rage in zone chats every few minutes against the state of pvp.

Yes, the purpose of changes is to get ungrouped/small man players killed so much quicker by pet ball groups-a millisecond to die instead of the split second currently. (Of course we don't know we're dead until we have reloaded the game for the 5th time, heard from our friends about the way we were hovering in the air, or that actually yeah, our ult didn't go off after 10 clicks...)

Pet ball groups stream. Streaming is free advertising. Nothing like a swish 24 man team running over 1:1 on a bridge to increase sales.

As for being ashamed of fellow players with legit concerns about major game changes... just wow.

Ramber

Can we be shown where these changes were requested? what part of the forums were "listened to"? cause is spend more time there.

StShoot

code65536 wrote: »

And the point of coordinated group content on a MMO--trials specifically--is role specialization. Yes, you can have DDs run defensive sets and slot more self-healing while also nerfing the incoming damage. But then what does that do to the role of the healer?

This isn't a "consistency" balance. This is a "let's re-imagine the existence of certain roles" balance. Either you are not being straight with us and calling it just a "consistency" pass, or you don't realize just how radical these changes are. And I'm not sure which of those two is worse.

Somedays ago i read an article about MMOs that work without the holy trinity (dd/heal/tank) i bet zos read this and was salty that they are not mentioned xD

Back to the topic, some of the changes are beyond understanding, the clearrate of dlc vet raids was allready realy low (not even to mention the HM) the changes to healing, and dps will only make it worse.

Also some of the ability nerfs/changes are just unbelievable, classes that allready had a hard time to sustain got more expensive ability.

Also (a little mag dk bias here xD) pls compare Burning embers+ passives to the new entropy+ passives, there is no reason to use burning embers in the nextpatch, entropy heals every 2 seconds(more reliable) deals more dmg overall, and the passives you get are actual decent passives

MrWabi

Ashtaris wrote: »

leepalmer95 wrote: »

Ashtaris wrote: »

leepalmer95 wrote: »

code65536 wrote: »

So for those classes without Cleansing Ritual...

Vigor?

And again, forcing players into either PVP or PVE (Undaunted) to get skills or monster helms where we have no desire whatsoever to participate.

Buy it

You can't just "Buy It". At least one of your characters has to have leveled the Alliance skill line to purchase the assault or support skills, and even then, I never leveled one character beyond what it took just to get Vigor or Caltrops. So will that allow us to purchase the alliance skills that we desire, or will we have to be at the max level to do so? If the latter, then ZOS can KMA

its sad when people want the stuff given to them for they actually dont have to go do it.. half the issue now

TooWeak2Live

@ZOS_RichLambert

Putting a PVPer in charge of global combat balance in a game primarily played for PVE was utterly devoid of common sense. It's especially lame when not only have you not fixed the game breaking bugs in Cyrodiil, but actually made several of them worse, and introduced more. Fix it now before you gut your player base. As it stands, I will be canceling my ESO+ sub along with many other people.

You may wither at the derision some people have directed at you over these things, but after 5 years of not addressing the sheer brokenness, you've earned it.

OnThaLoose

Dreyloch wrote: »

With all respect Mr. Wheeler,

Isn't it about time (after 5 years of this balance crap) to roll up your sleeves along with the rest of the Dev team and just figure out a way to separate PvE and PvP skills? Make the skills work differently/or have different tooltips depending on what content your doing? I mean, isn't it frustrating patch after patch, forum post after post by us, and the headaches for EVERYONE to keep trying to balance both styles of play at the same time?

Each patch brings new problems. Each patch brings new turmoil over every little change that effects both styles of play. I can't see why your Dev team can't understand this is a futile battle. Maybe something can be revamped with the CP system to bring this change to life? Either you spec your toon for PvP or PvE. Maybe needing to do a little of both so that we can finally have a patch where most everyone is happy? If you really honestly read our feedback, and you truly love what you do and want to give us the best experience possible. Then it's time. Please find a way to make this happen. I think I speak for all when I say this is really getting old.

This. This right here. I've been saying it for years. It happens in every game, pvp balance takes precedence, yet more people play pve. Just doesn't seem logical..

A simple solution would be to separate the two. I'm willing to bet that almost no body would complain about separating the balancing of the two.

@ZOS_BrianWheeler

generalmyrick

ZOS_BrianWheeler wrote: »

Heyo gang!

We wanted to quickly provide some additional context for many of the combat changes in this update so that everyone has a better idea of our goals.

In Update 23 our main focus was to ensure there was an ultimate point of reference for abilities to properly match up against one another in their respective categories. This provides us with a solid baseline, where all abilities fit within a set of standards/power levels and allows future balancing passes to be much easier and timely.

We're aware that some content has been designed around old functionality of abilities that existed beyond our standards and might need some sort of compromise in regards to how you engage with it and/or how we balance it. This is something we will be watching closely, however we are not averse to the idea that players might need to adjust their current builds such as running more defensive Ultimates rather than offensive ones, or running more survival enhancing sets, rather than pure damage or buff oriented ones. Please also remember that we've introduced some new abilities to help offset the loss of things such as Healing Springs stacking, with abilities like Ring of Preservation, or the large increase to Cleansing Ritual.

As always, we will be monitoring feedback about all the balance changes during this PTS cycle, however we wanted to let everyone know that in a future PTS patch, the synergy from Orbs will not cause the Orb to vanish and can be activated multiple times by anyone not on synergy cool down.

"chicks dig the longball"

Have you heard a DD chat??? those cats are like fighter pilot arrogant with nice layer of sneering villain for flash and style! they don't wanna wear defensive sets! they wanna fire missiles and fly by the tower!

:-)

Zedrian

@ZOS_BrianWheeler , this post is much appreciated and at least we get to understand the direction you and your team are leading to. I personally don’t agree with your vision for class balance, and standards are often confused with making everything the same neutral tone. Classes need to preserve their identity and tactical uses in order to keep a “Game” interesting, and avoid being the same as the other...

However, for players, and speaking for (some) PvE players (but still many) struggling to progress in extremely buggy and laggy trials (and worse on console), these changes are seen as an insult to this community. They are tired of changing and adapting builds every month. These major changes are in my opinion too frequent and prevent progression. I imagine PvP also have their dose of frustration. But I don’t experience PvP anymore because trying to curb bugs and lags in PvE with tactics is extremely time consuming.

We were working to clear vCR+3 and without lags, desyncs, crashes, and other bugs we would be working the exécute phase... but imagine Relequen doing an invisible cone attack that bumps players and at the same time you have the fire mechanic on the group exploding... one of so many bugs and these bugs and lags are the biggest source of frustration and prevents us from progressing.

We don’t need frequent balance changes that radically change gameplay, gears, etc, because the current content on console is too hard with the current state of in game performance. This is not an excuse but a reality for too many players. I moved for the weekend onto a slower connection 10mbps from my usual 600/300mbps fiber connection, and I realized that for a large population this game is unplayable... Killing dragons in Elsweyr or doing DLC dungeons was fine without much lags, but the moment I stepped into vMOL I had 5 seconds long freezes! Trials are broken. All of them.

Among my in game community, many have quit the game or put the game on pause until it gets fixed (in 6 months). This is bad business as these players have spent hundreds if not thousands of Euros on this game over 4 years. While they are away from the game, they won’t spend a cent on this game. Meanwhile you are hard at work on adding frustrating class changes to healers and tanks first.

The balance should be separated between PvE and PvP. I understand that some things are too powerful in a context of players vs players. But in PvE, having too much DPS in vCR+3 is not your ticket to success... learning mechanics are key to success... but the mechanics are so punitive that one lag can cause a wipe. We feel the progression trial community are left out and PvP players are the only concern. But when Camelot unchained or other RvR/PvP centric mmos will come out, what are you going to do with a game that suffers from performance issues and players leaving to try new PvP games?

Fix your code, performance, and servers first

karekiz

brandoncoffmannub18_ESO wrote: »

You can't speak for someone who isn't in your experience, nor can you use something opinionated such as one will suffer more than the other, instead of targeting them make your argument more clear, concise, and give reasons as to why and what pieces will be hitting you, otherwise a blanket explanation will just be looked at and then overlooked because the devil is in the details.

Blanket changing skills around for the sake of decreasing top end damage is one of the worst design decisions one can make. The DPS gap in this game is truly massive.

You may hate it. Nerf light attack damage instead. In no certain world should the term "light attack" be anywhere in the first 10 most Damaging abilities a player can deal. I don't play "X" class to do massive awesome left clicks. I play it to shoot lightning, summon undead, or use a stab people. Not to look and say "Man I didn't left click my mouse well enough that time."

Its the most idiotic mechanic this game has.

Malada

Pirate Skeleton:
Reduced the duration of the proc from this set to 10 seconds from 12 seconds.
Increased the cooldown to 20 seconds from 15 seconds.
The Minor Defile is now Major Defile

This is good. Personally, I never ran Pirate Skeleton and never would run it (esp after it failed to save me from getting killed by a mubcrab) in the first place. I've killed literal tons of people who thought Pirate Skeleton was going to save them.

This change however is good, you kept the defining characteristic of the set and made some adjustments to make it less of a catch all. One thing however, I do think that 20 seconds is a little long don't you? Maybe reconsider that cause there are other proc sets in the game that are around 10 or 15. I think that's alot, however, I understand it. The Major Defile idea was gold and people can build for these changes without losing too much.

More of this, nice, easy going, slowww changes w/ community feedback produces results we both can live with. And to those who hate this change, I understand however you know they could have done worse, huh much worse.

Malada

Protective: Reduced this item trait to 1190 Physical and Spell Resistance at CP160 Legendary quality from 1844, to ensure its strength is similar to other jewelry traits.

This however ^ is not good. Even with this at 1844 I still die in Cyrodil PvP using Brass Forge too. The strength in this set was clothies could hit 20k mitigation in CP campaigns and were not getting destroyed as fast as before in non-CP campaigns. It was really bad, I mean the lag is SO BAD even now STILL we have very little time to react.

I think this is a very bad change. If I have 3 Jewelry pieces, those need to equal Major Protection which is 5k and some change. Ok, that makes sense. Think about it ok, we have to transmute jewelry to use these traits the reward of which helps certain builds alot. Now I really think this is going to put all of my builds under water and force me to start wearing either heavy armor or going the tanking route which is illogical for someone who is playing a DPS character.

To be as positive about this as possible, look at it this way: If I put an armor resistant glyph on my jewelry, well that's easy right? And inexpensive. Ok so if I want to change the trait, this is expensive and can be expensive even if I craft that piece myself. If I want to shore up armor a little I use a glyph. If I want to actually improve the build I use the trait. If it's 3x jewelry pieces, due to the expense of using transmute stones and everything else it should equal Major Ward. Does anyone understand this? It is a mistake to compare a jewelry trait to a glyph extension. Traits were meant to be more powerful, more meaningful.

Anyways, no one listened before, doubt you'll listen now. I think not only are your balancing changes in bad taste your balancing policy is itself not taking into account that some things need to be powerful, even if a streamer friend of yours disagrees because it makes him look bad. I'm sorry however I did not buy this game, put so much time, effort and money into it NOT to be properly represented. Also, if you say this will take time then why not wait until you know for certain why you're making each change? I'm sure sales will do fine in the meantime. Tell the streamers to take a back seat for awhile and listen to the community more.

You cannot claim to be protecting new players as much as you do by cutting out their ability to help themselves.

"Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should."

Vlad9425

Do your buffs, do your nerfs but please stop stripping classes of their identity. The reason many people have played this game for many years is because we got to know the classes and learned them while we played and learned to appreciate how the classes performed. With each update my class feels less and less fun to play because of the constant changes you keep making which are mostly nerfs and not even good ones at that.

Shantu

robpr wrote: »

I was fearing I lost damage on my (still irrevelant in score runs) mDK and after few parses was confirming it. Then I changed morph of Blockade to Unstable and slotted new Soul Trap and my damage went back to previous levels.
You need to test people. There are too much skills that look nerfed in first place but combined with others that changed it evens each out or even buffs them in some cases.

Doesn't this kind of beg the question of why all the changes in the first place?

These changes are made for developers...NOT players. And we are forced to adjust to the nonsensical collateral damage.

Relic_Bearer

Decided to cancel my sub after reading patch notes. To be frank, changing this many skills while completely ignoring snakeblood passive shows how out of touch the Devs are with this game. It has been a dead passive for years, despite being a great opportunity to act as a counter-play to poisons. It really sums up the Dev's solution to balance issues. Blanket nerfs instead of creative solutions to introduce more viable tactics and skills. I've been quiet about the changes in this game for years, just accepting that you gutted my sustain, gutted my favorite classes, and gutted my favorite playstyles. I accepted when we had to pay for chapters because I get it, it's a business and it has to make money. I did this because I enjoyed this game and wanted to support this company. Now though, I'd rather accept the hint and take a hike.
TLDR: Rework Snakeblood because it shows how out of touch you are to ignore it while claiming to want an extensive combat skills rework. BYE FELECIA!